Sharecropping in the Horse Industry 1.0

What follows is an email I wish I could send to what passes for our HR department: 

File under #2021Sharecropping 

Dear HR Person,

I could use some help understanding some new information about my wage.

My department admin advised me this week that my horse's board at Upper Campus has been considered a benefit at $5 per hour worked. As I have never seen this benefit listed on my paystub, and have never heard otherwise, I believed that all Equestrian Department employees – especially those who teach and supervise students – received this benefit at no cost. As a summer camp riding teacher, I saw no indication that my contract did not include a personal horse or that I earned less because my horse was in a school barn. Likewise, when I received housing as a teacher, this benefit appeared as discounted rent added and then subtracted from my paystub. 

In reviewing my most recent time cards, I calculate my horse's board benefit as $500 per month. I recall that is the amount our school charges students for privately-owned horse board and wonder why the school considers an employee benefit at the retail level. 

Additionally, our director may not have conveyed to you that I am responsible for approximately 80 percent of my horse's care, stall cleaning, turnout, hoof care, veterinary care, and I buy about 25 percent of his feed. At barns in and around our valley, $500 buys full board includes stall cleaning, feeding, and feed. In a quick internet search, I found a trainer who includes full board, two training rides, and a weekly lesson for $500. Even without an employee discount, the care my horse currently receives fits more in line with the local industry standard for a barn where owners do some or all their horses' care. Either of these calculations would make my hourly wage at least $17.50. 

As a school employee for four of the last five years, I am currently responsible for ensuring the health and well-being of between 15 and 24 horses, as well as the students I supervise and teach. With more than 50 of experience riding and caring for horses, a university degree that informs my riding instruction, and 25 years of high school classroom teaching experience, I am an asset to our school. Having my horse at the Upper Campus only increases my value to the school. I am a daily set of eyes on the horses and facilities whether I am on the work schedule or not. As I recall, administrators were as grateful for my presence in the early days of the pandemic lockdown as I was to have a place to fully quarantine. 

In short, please help me understand, one, why I receive no discount on my horse's board benefit and, two, why you would pay a less experienced employee more recently hired with fewer responsibilities fully 13 percent more than the school pays me. 

My supervisor's suggestion that I pay horse board elsewhere in the valley so as to receive a wage comparable to my less-experienced co-worker, wonderful and hardworking as she is, seems illogical. If the benefit I forfeit is worth $5 per hour, why would my wage only increase by $2.50?

This next sentence is a joke and not meant for any real email to my bosses, I promise.

Don't get me started on how the state and my unemployment insurance have been subsidizing you for my employment since 2019.

Fox, Trot, Canter, RUN!

This never-got-posted post is about eight months late. Typical. 

A California Gray Fox is my closest neighbor here in the deserted dorm village at the Ojai Valley School. He calls for a mate several times in the night and early morning. I must've done a passable imitation of a suitable lady fox night before last. When I stopped returning his screeches, he came into the courtyard and gazed up at my balcony, okay, really a metal deck in front of my window.

*****

13.July.2020 – Three months have passed since I chatted with that fox. Three fox kits were born and raised in the rocky culvert next to the barn. I've named two of the 50 or so resident lizards, Lefty and Stumpy. They've just molted (is it molting with lizards?) so I think Stumpy will be hard to find as his new tail section was looking more and more normal every week.  Lefty is missing three middle fingers on his left forelimb. Doesn't slow him down a bit.

People are still contracting COVID19 at an alarming rate here in California. Though we thought we had it wrapped up six weeks ago, we didn't and now the Southwest is the epicenter of the global pandemic. That is, the southern and western US states are gaining cases faster than anyone else in the world.

We have a fake-billionaire-reality-TV-host for a president and he appears to be trying to burn the entire country to the ground.

The school where I work is in some serious denial about the coming year. There's a so-called Roadmap to Reopening (lately I dislike the verb to open and loathe the word reopen) that fails to mention asymptomatic spread at all. It seems completely insane to write a set of rules and guidelines that makes no mention of the mode of transmission widely understood to cause 40 percent of the cases. Of course, these must be guidelines since we are asking for tons of money and probably won't make anyone do anything that endangers our chances of getting paid.

All I know is that I would not send my children to a school that pretends that 40 percent of cases in a deadly pandemic simply did not exist.

*****

Because some 70 percent of us will contract this disease eventually, according to the brainy Angela Merkel, and I have congenital risk factors that make survival a fifty-fifty shot at best, I think I must set down some notes for my sister here. She hates writing. Hates it. She's not a fan of tidying up after the dead either and I want to make it as easy as I can, should she have to sort through my crap.

If any of my friends from the early days want to remember me they will want to play good music and dance. Though some will remember the Boothbay Playhouse, others will remember studios in Santa Cruz or New York. The common denominator is dancing.

Even on horseback, it is rhythm and movement that made me me.

Pixies and Pandemics

Quickly, this blog no longer lives in Alna, Maine, though my house, and my barn, and most of my stuff are still there.

My horses and I moved back to my natal neighborhood of Ojai, California in 2016, and now I've re-booted the blog because all of us who live in the State have been told to go to our rooms for the good of all. Suddenly, I have plenty of alone time to ponder this old thing.

Ojai Pixies are a thing. So is this motherfucking pandemic. Order the Pixies to be delivered while you're inside waiting for COVID-19 to walk on by.

Down to one horse who lives in the barn here at Ojai Valley School, now closed due to the MFP, I'm happily hunkered in a dorm room living on peanut butter, crackers, kale from the abandoned Garden Club plot, and tamales from Santa Paula's Garden Market – sorry about the FB link. Order those, too, if you possibly can.

Here's the view from my commute:

More later. xoxo
L

The Boot

... and I don't mean, Das Boot.

Today marks the end of my second week at LL Bean's behemoth Return Center, where we "seasonals" learn  the finer points of refunds, exchanges, and dispositions. The latter is not, as you might imagine, a study of outdoorsy people's moods and character qualities. Rather, it describes what the heck you do with all the items from the Bean catalogue people send you when you have an almost No Questions Asked returns policy.

Though I'm still getting up to speed on the various computer--Windows, Ack!--systems and acronyms, known charmingly as Beanspeak, one thing is clear. If public schools fail because we don't do as the corporations do, I'll eat the next gnarly 27 year-old Bean boot that tumbles off the conveyor belt. 

With a dozen people in the newbie section of our class--those of us who have never worked in Returns--we have somewhere between three and five trainers, two will eventually be our supervisors. If public schools reproduce this corporate 12:3 student teacher ratio we would 12 times as many teachers. 

The trainers spend much of their time going over OSHA rules like how to exit the two-story, football field-sized building in an emergency. Sadly, some seem to want us to see OSHA as an onerous overseer rather than a lifesaving entity. In a long and tedious series of PowerPoints, no one mentions the context for these rules. I suggest the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, or say, the Bangladesh factory collapse this spring where over 1,100 people died. In fact, there seems almost an aversion to context.

Although we work in a giant Returns center, made necessary by the company's famous 100 percent guarantee, little mention is made of this anomaly. I wager that the returns center at comparably-sized companies pale in comparison. No one makes even an oblique observation about class or history until we discuss monograms. When a newly-minted high school grad in my class asks why the initial of a customer's last name goes in the middle of a monogram, the answer, instead of a history of monogramming, the trainer starts to give a non-answer like, That's the way it is, when your resident know-it-all pipes up. "It dates back to Greek and Roman times; then it became a mark of aristocracy." The teenager looked interested or at least polite; the trainer, not so much. Making friends every second, right?

The last time I went through this kind of training was in 1984 when, fresh out of NYU, I went to work for British Airways in NYC, as a reservationist. An avuncular, though tough, Welshman led us through three weeks of hard core computer and geography work. It was unsentimental, challenging, and extremely competitive. Ninety seconds of inattention could cost us our jobs. If, by the end of the first week, we didn't know 98 percent of the hundreds of cities BA served, we heard a polite "Cheerio." Good-bye to practically free flights to practically everywhere on earth. Good-bye to excellent union-supported benefits. Good-bye to a living wage in freaking New York City. Partly because we had been screened by an employment agency, and partly because the rewards beckoned, no one washed out. No one.

At the Boot, so far, the OSHA standards and several other skills, require only that we sign ourselves off. Students sign sheets of paper that say we have seen the documentation and can follow company policy, though we need prove that we understand neither the policies nor their origins. We sign not because we are confident that our skills have reached some measurable standard, but rather because we like and respect our "trainers," because we know that they know way, way, way more than we do about how to process the vast number and variety of items from the Bean catalog, and we understand that they too must get credit for providing us with this critical information. Though the real test comes "live" on the floor, we have at least three shots to demonstrate acceptable speed and accuracy.

What is mostly missing from the Bean scene is a sense of humor about the Bean brand. No one seems to find the uber-class-centric nature of the catalog ironic or even interesting. My friend Philip's friend Gail MacColl helped write "Items from our Catalogue" more than 30 years ago. Original copies of this terrific parody now sell for more than 60 dollars. I can't find our family copy and wish it were back in print so I could at least amuse myself.

Maine "Learners"

Here's a link to my op-ed published in our statewide paper, the Maine Sunday Telegram, 23.June.13, about Maine's Department of Education and its profiteering folly.

Testing I Can Get Behind

Cambridge brings back its entrance exam. This is a test, besides my own, I'd be happy to teach to.

Genius

You’ll never eat crabs again: Barry Levinson’s eco-freakout ‘The Bay’ | Grist

Frontline did the documentary so well, Levinson had to tell the story. Though I loathe scary movies, I love Levinson well enough that I might see this one.

Honing an Argument for Jenn-yoo-wine School Reform

Spurred by a recent "public notice" in the Kennebec Journal seeking bids to evaluate Maine teachers and administrators with an eye toward merit schemes, I started to scratch the surface of the ubiquitous "edreform" movement. As I look to accomplish this possibly Sisyphean task, Dear Reader, I recommend anyone interested in sorting out the vested interests read the recent NYer article on Diane Ravitch, her own blog, and a confirmed corporate ed skeptic, the edushyster.

 For the overachievers, here are the New York Review of Books Diane Ravitch pages.

Going to Bat for Poetry and Real Education Earns Me My First Twitter Block: I'm so proud

Dear Internet,

I love you.

Up until this morning I was a social media block virgin.

Well, at least this was the first time I cared whether I had access to a fellow Tweeter's timeline. I follow plenty of people, and am followed back, by many people and organizations whose politics and positions differ from mine, from Karl Rove to Dick Armey's Freedom Works.

A few days ago I fell over an astro-turf, supposedly pro-teacher association that says its primary goal is to increase pay for the superstars of teaching. The hedge fund manager founder of this group chose a sports allusion, thedraft.org as its URL and has minions posting emo education palliatives about the importance of great teachers.

Several things about the group's website, patter, and facebook page raised red flags. First, the logo bears a striking resemblance to the NBA and MLB.

 

Who is the audience for this look, who are they trying to sell on their ideas? What research are they using that says these images mean anything to teachers? I still have no idea, though I'm certain they mean nothing to this teacher. The perverse use of President Obama amongst the celebrities in the top post, a banal, meaningless bit of PR, on the group's website, raised my eyebrows. Is it designed to convince those of us who voted for President Obama that he somehow endorses this campaign? Though he may, there is no official sign that this group is aligned with any part of a White House plan for education.

 

 Then I watched a video of LPE founder Stephen Duneier.

 

Anyone who has followed the Crash of 2008 for more than 90 minutes can understand Duneier's coded language. It emanates from ALEC, Freedom Works, some branches of the Libertarian corner of the political labyrinth, and the Tea Party.

After a 10 minute google, I saw that Duneier is a hedge fund manager who worked for the London Diversified, then Peloton Partners, until the Crash, then jumped on the for-profit education wagon. His career path gives special meaning to LPE's subhead: Changing the Face of Education, One Million at a Time. Guessing that's his million, not teachers'.

So, then I decided to engage whomever was at the helm at LPE's Twitter page while asking other teachers for their takes.

Notice, the LPE tweep immediately suggests I am against "alternative" methods for improving education. I wrote that the profit motive fails the test of "alternative" method and this Twitter spox makes up a word in response, causing me and another teacher to engage in some mild ridicule.

Then last night, coincidentally, I see Chris Hayes on C-SPAN's BookTV discuss his new book, "Twilight of the Elites: America After the Meritocracy." Chris Hayes discussing his book on C-SPAN, where he discusses the etymology of the word "meritocracy" and the effect of our wrongheaded love affair with the concept and suggest the LPE Twitter spox read it.

Happy with the universe for providing me with such beautifully timed arguments, I headed over to Facebook, where I discovered the LPE geniuses had co-opted one of my favorite poets, Taylor Mali, and excerpted his famous poem "What Teachers Make" on their website. This clinched it.


That whomever is choosing material for this site failed to comprehend the profound irony of using Mali's poem supporting rigor in democratic education and the sacrifices teachers of all pay grade as reflecting LPE's "meritocratic" blather, demonstrated straight-up ignorance and avarice. I posted a comment under Mali's image and poem excerpt on LPE's FB page, and tweeted Mali about this use.

Mali thanked me within hours and the LPE minion scrubbed my thoroughly civil comment and blocked me from both FB and Twitter.

Guess I touched a nerve.

Postscript: Guess they need some people who know how Twitter works. I followed LPE with my teacher-y account, rather than my personal one and saw a Tweet go by addressed to me. I responded--thinking they had lifted my block.  Oy.

Disrupt

NEW Public Player With Switcher

This is not all. We public school teachers are not machines to be replaced by the next new thing.

If this is what the country wants, we deserve retraining. If we cannot embrace the creative economy, who can?