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This article made me think of a question sunfell made a short while ago... Would it be a good thing to join Facebook? Maybe it would be a good thing. Employers are starting to mine it for future employees, and maybe a whole lot of other things will happen to social networks in the future, near or far.

June 7, 2007

Cyberfamilias
‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

I HAVE reached a curious point in life. Although I feel like the same precocious know-it-all cynic I always was, I suddenly am surrounded by younger precocious know-it-all cynics whose main purpose appears to be to remind me that I’ve lost my edge.

Many of these people are teenagers.

Some of them I gave birth to.

One was in a breech position.

And the other day, as I drove home with one of my tormenters in the passenger seat, she started laughing at the way I pronounced “Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

“Ha ha ha, is that how you think his name sounds?” my daughter said. “Oh, my God. Who told you that?”

It was my college photography professor. Twenty-six years ago.

Rather than draw attention to my age, I tried to trick her into thinking of me as someone cool, as we said 26 years ago. “I hope you don’t think this gives you the right to make fun of me on your Facebook page,” I said.

“My Facebook page?” this person asked incredulously. “My page? Is that what you think Facebook is?”

Suddenly a vague memory from my childhood — the time someone else’s mother left her family, wrote a few young adult novels and ended up in a sad apartment complex on the edge of town — welled up, unbidden.

I needed to banish it, along with all evidence of this humiliating conversation. But how?

I vowed to fight on her turf.
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Poverty Sucks Ass

June 10, 2007
The Class-Consciousness Raiser
By PAUL TOUGH

By the time Ruby Payne sat down for lunch, she had been at it for three hours straight, standing alone behind a lectern on a wide stage in a cavernous convention hall, parked between two American flags, instructing an audience of 1,400 Georgians in the hidden rules of class. No notes, no warm-up act, just Ruby, with her Midwestern-by-way-of-East-Texas drawl and her crisp white shirt, her pinstriped business suit and bright red lipstick and blow-dried blond hair, a wireless microphone hooked around her right ear. She had already explained why rich people don’t eat casseroles, why poor people hang their pictures high up on the wall, why middle-class people pretend to like people they can’t stand. She had gone through the difference between generational poverty and situational poverty and the difference between new money and old money, and she had done a riff on how middle-class people are so self-satisfied that they think everyone wants to be middle class.

For the Glynn County Board of Education, Payne’s visit was a big deal. It was back in 2005 that Marjorie Varnadoe, the board’s director of professional development, called to request a presentation from Payne, and this particular Thursday, two years later, was the earliest available date. Principals had ordered Payne’s books and DVDs by the boxload, mostly her ur-text, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty,” and they made the books required reading for their staffs. All over the county, which is on the coast, down near the Florida border, schools held small workshops on class and education, using Payne’s “Framework” as a guide, and teachers sat down together for informal discussions and lunchroom chats about poverty and wealth. When the big day came, the entire school system was given the day off, and by 8 a.m. almost every single teacher and administrator in the county was packed into the Jekyll Island Conference Center, along with the school board, the Chamber of Commerce and various local dignitaries.
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As the afternoon drew to a close, Payne cut out the jokes and grew serious. “I think the hardest part about teaching is the stories that kids tell you that just pull your heart out,” she said, gripping the sides of the lectern and scanning the audience. “There isn’t a person in here who doesn’t have a student whose stories still haunt you.” Her voice was quiet, and her accent had softened. Every pair of eyes, it seemed, was on her. “What I’ve learned to say to kids is this: ‘You know, I respect you so much that you can handle this situation. I don’t know that I could. But if you don’t want to live that way the rest of your life, then I can give you the tools that will help you do things differently. It’s your choice. I can’t change your situation right now, but I can certainly give you the tools to help you change.’ And I think that’s the gift we bring. It’s a huge gift.”

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I've got to read this book - the first one she wrote - to see what all the hype is about. I guess you could say that, according to Payne, I would be classified as having grown up in a "situational poverty" environment. It was a bitch. Looking back on how long it took for me to figure a whole bunch of stuff out on my own, I would've loved it if someone had come up to me and said to me those last few sentences and then pointed the way. It is something I've contemplated trying to do myself, for others. I've gotten this idea that maybe starting out at Teach for America could be a pretty good thing because I'd been there, and got out. Having access and "training" from my extended family 99% middle-class must've helped in some way but my immediate environs were very powerful as well. Not knowing when I would eat next, or if any of the other basic necessities would be met, it is somewhere I never want to go to again. I never felt comfortable at any of the schools that had a majority of middle-class students, I didn't know the "rules" of engagement, I didn't know how to interact. To this day I still feel an echo of that fear and confusion.

It also freaks me out that I am at a turning point in my life. Maybe that's why I've been dragging my heels on getting this paper done and presented. I'm afraid of the next step because it will involve immersing myself in an entirely unknown environment. And there are times when my learned instincts still try to kick in and override my common sense.

I'd appreciate feedback here. Talk to me people.

Private Education Loan Sharks

June 10, 2007
Private Loans Deepen a Crisis in Student Debt
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON — As the first in her immigrant family to attend college, Lucia DiPoi said she had few clues about financing her college education. So when financial aid and low-interest government loans did not stretch far enough, Ms. DiPoi applied for $49,000 in private loans, too. “How bad could it be?” she recalls thinking.

When Ms. DiPoi graduated from Tufts University in Boston, she found out. With interest, her private loans had reached $65,000 and she owed an additional $19,000 in federal loans. Her monthly tab is $900, with interest rates topping 13 percent on the private loans.

Ms. DiPoi, now 24, quickly gave up her dream to work in an overseas refugee camp. The pay, she said, “would have been enough for me but not for Sallie Mae,” her lender.

The regulations that the federal Education Department proposed this month to crack down on payments by lenders to universities and their officials were designed to end conflicts of interest that could point students to particular lenders.
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This reminds me of the consolidation loan people who snookered me into signing a waiver concerning the six month period before I would need to start paying for my loans... They got to me in the confusion between undergraduate and graduate school. Claiming that "the rates are going to go up!" When the rates on each loan are fixed when the loan is taken out - and all I would have to do is consolidate the low rate loans together and the higher rate loans together. Blech. So now I am waiting for the loan repayment schedule to come in the mail... and I did call them to notify them of my graduating... Bastards. Makes me feel used and abused. If they "misplace" that request for a repayment schedule and then try and claim that I didn't start making my payments on time I'm going to be royally pissed. And I have this bad feeling like I should transfer the consolidation to Sallie Mae so that I at least have the same lender for all my loans, plus I feel like I'm going to get screwed somehow by these people, since they already did already in a way. Bastards! Of course, I did all my homework otherwise, for the most part all I have is federal sub and unsub loans. Only one very small private loan from a local bank for a summer class.

Great, this article has had such a wonderful effect on my cramps... They are now MUCH WORSE than they were before I read this.