Dancing with the Non-Stars

Ah, so much to catch up on. First and most importantly, Dancing with the Stars.

I was appalled when they announced the cast and Kate Gosselin was among them. She's not a celebrity, she's a train wreck who lets cameras film her train while it's crashing. And you can't get away from her these days. Every other week, she's on the cover of People or Us, "opening up" about her divorce, being on her own, her make-over.  I argue that it's impossible for  her to "open up" in a magazine interview, because she never shuts up.

She'll do anything for a little publicity and attention, even humiliating herself or putting her kids on public display. And we've been indulging her. Now, if this whiney, self-indulgent mom gets hair extensions, it's front page news. Enough with her! Then DWTS, which I love, goes and does it again, handing her an even bigger platform. Don't you see? It's like giving a kid who's throwing a tantrum an ice cream cone as a reward.

DWTS must have run out of C- and D-list unemployed celebrities to cast. I mean, who's next? The octomom? The balloon boy's dad, Richard Heene? How about the trashy tattooed girl who had an affair with Sandra Bullock's husband?

Except.

Now that she's on the show, I love it. I love the montages that show what a pain in the neck she is and how she's already pushed her good-natured partner, Tony, to the brink of quitting. I love how Bruno described her dancing as "Tony pushing a shopping cart around the floor." I love how she can't even bring herself to be sportsmanlike while listening to the judges' critiques. I love how horrible a dancer she is.

So now, I think I might even vote for her, for a while that is. She's the non-celebrity contestant I love to hate.

Go Kate.

Storm fallout

Thanks to a bit of a windstorm on Saturday night, everything has come to a screeching halt in Fairfield county and beyond.  I was oblivious to the fact that trees were topping that night, taking down power lines and houses with them.

But now it's gorgeous and sunny. The streets around us and our school have been clear for a day or two. Some people are still without power and taking showers at the Y but many homes have been restored.

But the schools... the schools have been closed for three days now! (No one knows what to call it exactly, a snow day? Meanwhile, it's 60 degrees.) They say it's because they're concerned about kids walking on power lines. ??? Where, on the playground? The first two days, the explanation was that the busses couldn't get through. Fine. Understandable. Yesterday, word was that one or two schools were still without power. But why not lest the rest of town resume normal life? It's getting a bit excessive.

We've had a ridiculous number of snow days this year, all of which have to be made up at the end of the school year. The kids were supposed to get out on June 18, which has been kicked back to June 23. But at this rate, they're going to be in school until July 4th.

Even QB said to me last night: "It's actually a little bit boring when there's no school."

A Case of the CMT Crazies

My column on Westport.Patch on the irritating standardized testing here in town.

"For any parents whose children are in grades 3 and up, the letters C, M and T ceased to be benign a long time back. CMT stands for Connecticut Mastery Test, a bear of a standardized exam that is being administered this week and next in Westport. Students, teachers and parents dread it all school year.

The CMTs have been around since 1984. Mandated by state law, they're a component of the No Child Left Behind Act and are designed to "set high performance standards for all students" and provide "accountability for the Connecticut educational system."

It covers editing and proofreading, writing, math and science. Until 2004, the test was administered in grades 4, 6 and 8. Now, students take the test beginning in third grade and continuing through eighth.

It's not a quick and painful day, either. The testing lasts seven hours over a two-week period. Seven hours is a lot for an 8-year-old. I'm guessing seven hours to them is about the equivalent of 21 hours in big-people time. Just call the CMTs the Bar Exam of the primary school set.

By the time the big day rolls around in March, the kids have spent much of the year going over the material, doing practice tests, composing non-fiction pieces and fictional stories. They've heard their teachers warn, "You'll need to know this for the CMTs" more times than they care to remember. Our teacher sent a letter home urging us to get our kids to bed early, feed them a healthy breakfast and pack appropriate snacks. (In other words, no doughnuts, please.) I doubt I was this prepared for my college finals.

Befitting the seriousness of it all, the kids are appropriately reverential. Big signs are out in school entryways and on classroom doors announcing: "Quiet, Please. CMT Testing in Progress." The poor kindergarteners can be seen tiptoeing down the hallway, shushed by their teachers. When a friend of mine asked her child why his PE class was canceled on a testing day, he answered, "It's illegal to change the time of the test, Mom!" There are serious consequences if students so much as whisper to each other during an exam period. Yes, the kids are most definitely quaking in their snow boots.

While this amount of test-taking pressure might be appropriate for an eighth-grader, it can be detrimental to a younger child. If they aren't able to perform under the gun, it can affect how they view themselves and their abilities. For some of the youngest test-takers, they may have only been reading fluently for a year or two. And now they've got to compose a creative, grammatical, coherent piece of fiction under a time deadline. It's a lot to expect.

My third-grader came home on Day 2, deflated that he hadn't finished writing his fiction piece by the end of the test. He might be a quick thinker, but his pencil is slow, and it just can't keep up with the speed of his thoughts. "I'm a bad writer," he announced that afternoon, as he has many times this year. Until the CMT prep and timed test-taking began this year, he thought just the opposite.

Naturally, we parents are worked up, as well. Some schools have been less forthright than others at explaining what the process is for and why. "This thing is anxiety-ridden for moms," a friend of mine said, "especially for new Connecticut residents, because I don't know what the heck it's for. What's it testing and why?" Does the score stay in our child's record, parents want to know. If a child performs poorly, are there implications?

Adding fuel to the fire are the parents who take it much more seriously than most. The same friend, already uneasy about the process, overheard someone saying, "We're feeling okay about the CMTs. We've been prepping our child at home for three-and-a-half months."

Hold on. Were we supposed to be doing CMT drills at home since late 2009? I, along with my friend, must have missed that e-mail.

As much as the CMT is about the individual students, it's very much a report card for our teachers, schools, and for our district. Yes, standardized tests have a place in the world. Sometimes we need a quantitative way to measure our teachers' and schools' competency. But I wish these youngest kids didn't have to be thrust into the world of rankings and percentiles and good writer/bad writer quite yet.

The CMTs provide the data that establishes that Westport has a stellar school system. And our property values, of course, are very much determined by school district rankings. So it's not all that far-fetched to conclude that the value of what is for most people their single biggest asset rides on how the students did on their math tests today. But hey, kids, no pressure.

And then there's the whole teaching-the-test business. Non-CMT curriculum goes by the wayside when March looms. It's hard not to wonder if the kids might be doing more interesting, creative work if there wasn't so much focus on fill-in-the-bubble tests. Essentially, the CMT isn't so much a test about individual students as it is an assessment of how well the teachers have prepared them to take the test.

The whole matter makes me nostalgic for the days not that long ago when my son's class spent a week investigating pill bugs. Just because it was fun."

Our Entitlement Problem

I'm probably not winning myself many friends around town with this recent column in Westport Patch. But, oh well.

I wasn't going to write about the serious attitude problem we have around town, but when my neighbor nearly ran over my foot and didn't bother to slow down -- much less apologize -- I decided to throw caution to the winds, and air my grievances. Hey, I've got a column... isn't that what they're for??

"There was a woman at the ice rink the other day who blew my mind. She was livid over the fact that she couldn't park exactly where she wanted to.

It all began when she first parked her Mercedes SUV in the fire lane, right in front of the pavilion. When the rink owner asked her to move, she answered, "No, I don't think so. Everyone else parks here."

She had a point. Until recently, a lot of parents didpark their cars in the circle while dropping off our kids. But since the ambulance has been called to the rink twice this season, they've gotten more serious about enforcing the fire lane rule.

Reluctantly, she moved her car to the far parking lot and then marched inside the pavilion to argue about the matter for the next 20 minutes. She was certain, you see, that some rink employees might be parking in the near lot and paying customers like herself should not be asked to walk the extra minute or two to deliver her children for lessons.

"I guarantee you that pick-up truck," she sniffed, "does not belong to one of the mothers." She promised to return later to watch the employees and stage a surveillance op to watch exactly where the rink staffers parked.

She had dozens of reasons why she shouldn't be asked to park farther away. She had a baby and it was inconvenient for her. She was a customer who was paying for lessons. She was a Westport resident who pays her taxes – a lot of them – and therefore deserved a parking spot in a town lot more than someone who works at the facility. (She mentioned her sizable property tax bill on three occasions. Translation: I own a big house. I have a lot of money. I should get to do what I want.) Next year, she threatened, she would not be enrolling her kids in group lessons where she'd have competition for the best parking.

It was astounding, appalling and unfortunately, not all that surprising. I've seen other instances of this me-first mindset all over town. And most often, it manifests itself on the road.

To start, just this week, my neighbor almost ran over my foot while I was at the corner bus stop waving goodbye to my kids in the morning. Unwilling to wait until the bus routine was over, she drove up behind me just two feet away, barely slowed at the corner, and continued on her merry way. Maybe she was oblivious to our near run-in. Maybe she just didn't care.

Then there are the people in the parking lots. At school every morning during drop-off, there's a minivan that parks in the middle of the lot, blocking in three cars. The parent gets out of his car and walks his child in, which takes at least 5 minutes. He doesn't seem to care that he's in a drop-off zone, blocking the dozens of other parents who need to do exactly the same thing. He could follow the rules and park in an actual spot like everyone else. But that would inconvenience him, so he inconveniences other people instead.

I live on a street that's privately-owned. But because we're between Compo and Imperial, dozens of people cut through every day, despite the no trespassing signs signs, gates and speed humps. Not only are they technically trespassing, they speed, too. More than one driver, when we've pointed out that they're not supposed to be on our street have answered, "I don't care." And I believe them.

Then there are the people who blatantly run red lights, who ignore cyclists and cut them off at corners, who drive too fast under the Compo/Bridge street underpass.

What's this all about? Part of it, I think is that we're all in our own little world. We're thinking about making the train, or what we have on our calendar that day or what time our kids need to get to basketball practice. Part of it is the anonymity and false sense of invincibility of being in a car, distanced from other people. If we lean on the horn when someone pauses a moment at a green light, most likely, no one will know it was us.

And among some, there's also a sense of entitlement. Like the woman at the ice rink, some people seem to subscribe to the theory that he who pays the most property tax should get the best parking spot. People pay a lot to live in Westport, and they think they deserve some perks because of it. Unfortunately, that system breaks down if everyone feels entitled to park in the middle of the school lot during drop-off or abandon their SUVs in fire lanes.

To the me-first people: if an ambulance can't get to your hurt child because people feel entitled to park in the fire lane, will it really matter how much you paid for your house?" 

http://westport.patch.com/articles/our-entitlement-program

YEA!

Gail won last night! Er, I mean, Katherine Bigelow and Hurt Locker won. (Sorry 'bout that, Kate.) I'm sure Bigelow was somewhat essential to the movie's success, but Gail's media-buying strategy was clearly what put it over the top. Go Gail!

On another note, does Tina Fey have a stylist, and if so, did she study at the Jersey Shore School of Design? I'm a huge fan of Fey's creative work, but I can't understand why she looks so horrible at every awards show. At the Globes, she wore a God-awful snake-print black and white disaster. On top of it, the dress couldn't have been a worse length for her. Last night, her gown appeared to be see-through. Are we looking at her black string bikini here?  No one needs to see that.

http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/dfJNodyRVOx/82nd+Annual+Academy+Awards+Arrivals/mT1hCfP3aaO/Tina+Fey

Some people put her on their best dressed list which just doesn't compute for me. Maybe because her bar was set so low before. Here's Fey at the Globes:

http://justjared.buzznet.com/photo-gallery/2409333/tina-fey-golden-globes-2010-06/

Bleh. I can't imagine it's that hard to dress for the Oscars appropriately. When in doubt, Tina, wear something classic. Think Kate Winslet, or even Jodie Foster in Armani. No leopard print, no snakeskin. Start with some solid colors and once you get that down, we'll move on to something a bit more advanced. We know you can do it, Tina.

Vicarious Thrills

My best friend is at the Academy Awards right now. How exciting is that? She worked on The Hurt Locker. And by "worked on," I mean she's essentially the reason it will win for best picture.

;-)

So keep an eye out for Gail. She's pretty with long brown hair and I'm guessing she's wearing a fancy black dress. Shouldn't be too hard to find.