quick notes...

Until yesterday, this was a hellish week and another one, there seem to have been a lot lately, that I'm glad is over.

However, Houston was pretty brilliant, besides Houston which itself is the most boring town, kind of sprawled over area codes of wasted land so that California land-use looks almost reasonable in comparison, even the suburban sprawl that is the northern and western suburbs of Chicago look almost sane in contrast - though not really. Houston just rolls on and on into nothingness. But Texas itself is beautiful and an hour outside of Houston once to Galveston, things get prettier along the coast.

But I have to say, Minute Maid Park is an excellent place to watch some baseball after getting over the fact it's the Astros you're watching, and Arnab's wedding was out of this world beautiful.

And that was the whole point, right?

At school, the kids had their U.S. Regents Test, and it went marginally better than I was hoping, though I still had the worst passing rate I've ever had with a group of kids - it was at 70%, I was expecting more like 60 and usually get somewhere in the mid 80s, so I've mixed feelings about that - but the test itself is a pretty stupid idea created by people who believe these kind of things tell us something about individual students when really it only gives us an image of various schools in the most broad and unhelpful manner. In the end, all it does is punish individual students however and should really be scrapped.

In New York, education is completely politicized and ineffective, as well, education is seen only in discussions about schools, all the myriad problems that have a much larger effect on schooling are shunted off as being part of a larger, non-political series of issues that are in fact heavily political and simply spotlight how uncomfortable most Americans are about discussions of the impact of race and income on achievement, and this allows the huge corporately owened political system to get away with huge crimes against the health of the state as Jonathan Kozol and some of the other smarter people have pointed out time and time again.

Anyway, there were all kinds of adventures with City College that had to be dealt with as well and I'm sure there'll be more.

Otherwise, the Mermaid Parade is in a couple hours and Lewis is coming in for a brief visit, so I best be off.

Oh the Mermaid Parade!