Two Thousand Posts: Taking Stock

This turned out to be a busy weekend. I realized this is the 2000th post on the Ed Notes blog which began in August 2006, about 40 months ago. That averages to about 50 posts a month. Over twelve a week. I was going to do a "taking stock" piece for this special occasion, but I just had so much to say that I ended up saying nothing. Basically, I stayed away from the ed/pol stuff for the entire long weekend.

Maybe it was the aftermath of the 23 people we had for Thanksgiving, the group ranging in age from age 1 to 91 with just about every decade represented: teens, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty and sixty somethings. My dad, who will be 92 in January, held the upper limit. He had the company of my wife's aunt who is also 91. Our niece's 2 year old and our cousin's 3 year old were chasing each other around the house, with the 1 year old crawling along trying to keep up. The two 18 year old cats were OK with it for a while before deciding to take a powder – just a bit of hissing and hiding under the bed. (Some pics of the gang in action.)

Friday was cleanup and going to the gym day.

Saturday was an early morning Bikram yoga class. There's nothing like spending an hour and a half in a hundred and five degrees to get your brain to turn to mush. But I had wake up as I had a noon meeting at my house with a playwright (who is in my acting class) and his director friend to discuss making a film of one of his plays, with my video pal Mark and I doing the cinematography. We watched a tape of the play which was performed in Manhattan and it looks like an exciting project.

Saturday night Mark and I taped a performance of "The Odd Couple" at the Bayswater Jewish Center in Rockaway, with Mark's business partner Stuie playing Felix. I had been offered the opportunity to play one of the card players a few months ago but time constraints made it impossible to consider. Before the play we went to eat at "Lucky Boy" on Rockaway Turnpike. The place looks like a shabby diner from the outside, but what great food.

Sunday morning was my acting class and I spent some serious time trying to memorize my monologue from "Talk Radio" but my brain is not well equipped to hold onto so much information. This is one big rant and I really get worked up. So be careful if you run into me, as I may start practicing. Or I could just attend a charter school hearing and let it all fly.

After class, it was over to a friend's house for the weekly NY Jets game self-flagellation (soothed by piles of chips and dips). But lo and behold, the JETS WON! Then there were two more football games to watch, with the Baltimore/Pittsburgh game going to overtime, followed by Mike Francese's "Miked Up" which didn't end until past midnight.

Then I woke up to see the front page of the NY Times and Jenifer Median's story on charter schools sharing space with public schools and it was back to reality. Or maybe the weekend was reality. She has been working on the story for weeks and contacted me about getting people to talk to her. I know there was some reluctance. I already wrote up some comments for my 2001st post, which I will put up next.

Postscript:
I really do want to do a taking stock article, since the Ed Notes blog is an extension of the Ed Notes newsletter, which has been around since 1996. I believe that this body of work constitutes some kind of history of the UFT and education in NYC, plus the national trends over that time. It could be a book, but then one must pretty much drop everything to get such a project done and I have too much schpilkus, the original Jewish version of Attention Deficit Disorder, to sit down long enough to do it.