New York, CSM column on China, etc

I’ve been in New York since I flew in here from Toronto on Sunday evening. Monday, I suddenly remembered I needed to write not one but two columns for The Christian Science Monitor, about China. I got them both with my editors in Boston by 11 a.m. Tuesday. The first, China hums with change, is in Thursday’s paper. The second will be in the June 17 edition.
It was really exciting reconnecting with some of the experiences I had in China last month, as I wrote about them.
On the other hand, trying to focus on that aspect of my work, after just coming away from the conference in Canada on the Rwandan genocide and other atrocities, and while continuing to be consumed with Iraq, the US torture issue, Palestine, etc etc., all left me feeling a little drained.
I’ve had some good meetings here this week.

One was with Andrea Bartolli, a professor at Columbia and an activist with Sant’ Egidio, which has to be my absolutely favorite Catholic social-action organization. Andrea was a little involved in helping the peace process in Mozambique in 1992, so he is one of the relatively few people with whom I can share my enthusiasm in matters Mozambican…. We decided we should really do some work together to publicize the effectiveness of the “Mozambican way of peacemaking” some more.
Another was with Jonathan Edelstein, a.k.a. The Head Heeb. Jonathan is another person who shares some of my enthusiasms–especially regarding the Middle East, and Africa. If you go to his blog at that link there, you’ll find (1) that he and I both use the same MT template for our blogs, and (2) that he follows some really interesting topics with great intelligence and erudition.
I hadn’t met him before. It was fun to sit and talk together for an hour.
While I’ve been here, I’ve been staying with my daughter Leila. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches a fifth-grade class at the Carter Woodson Elementary School in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The kids there come from a very challenging social environment, but she seems to have done a lot to help them get into learning mode since she started there, last November.
She did tell us a really outrageous story about what happened with the (state-government-mandated) testing in the school this year. First of all, the standardized tests they gave out on test-day turned out to mistakenly include many questions that had already been released and given to the kids as “practice” tests… So they had to schedule a whole additional day of testing.
The second time around, the question sheet given to the kids had multiple choices a,b,c, and d for the odd-numbered questions, and then e,f,g, and h for the even-numbered ones. But on the answer sheet all the “bubbles” that the kids had to fill in were simply lettered a,b,c, and d. When that was discovered, the teachersb were told to tell the kids to circle the right answers on the question sheet, instead; and then, all the tests had to be hand-graded rather than running the filled-in “bubble” sheets through a machine…
Leila said many of the results that came in seemed chaotic to the teachers. We speculated a little on how much money the private companies that supposedly provide a comnpetent testing service to the school system, for mucho moola, made on the whole fiasco…
Poor kids. Poor teachers.
Still, it’s been fabulous getting up early and running round the Outer Loop of Prospect Park, which I’ve done twice so far. By the time I’ve run from the house here to the park, done the whole loop, and run back, it’s well over 3.5 miles. Just the right distance to restore a feeling of sanity to a really screwed-up world.