Phthursday Musings: Opening Day, Election Day

Yeah, I know, it’s been a minute since a Phthursday Musings has landed in your virtual lap. And there are other fun things I’m way behind on, like the intended META-VONNEGUT stuff this year. So it goes.

I have been mulling over two things. One of them has to do with Election Day impending in Illinois - there’s a very strange runoff election for Mayor of Chicago being held on Tuesday, along with some other strange things going on - and I have a lot of thoughts but I am going to focus on something particular about that mayoral race which I think is deeply buried in the surrounding politics. The other one has to do with sports generally, but not just sports, but since today is Opening Day in Major League Baseball, it’s a good time for it. And while these two topics aren’t too closely related, I’m going to offer a little bridge between them as well.

So, yeah, that means this edition is extra long, kind of making up for missing a couple of weeks. But feel free to jump to the middle if you’re just here for the indoor soccer and women’s basketball, or to exit at the middle if you’re just here for a little rant about neoliberalism.

Oh, before I get into all that… here’s a photo I took Tuesday at the International Museum of Surgical Sciences, of historic X-ray tubes, apropos of nothing:

Tuesday is Election Day in Illinois. Everywhere in the state except Chicago, school board members are elected and in some places community college board and park board and library board and some other weirder stuff too. And in Chicago, there’s a big weird runoff for Mayor.

Where we live, we have different districts for elementary school board and high school board. The local high school district includes several elementary districts, and then there’s one high school split into two campuses. The high school board seems to be the epicenter of local politics - our village board race is uncontested, the elementary school board race is contested but very cordial, the library board race is the same. But the high school board race is weird.

I’m not an expert on any particular aspect of education, on pedagogy or child psychology or administration or policy or the teaching of any particular subject (though I guess, to be fair to myself, I’d qualify as a relative expert on history education.) But while I’m not an expert, I’m certainly better informed than average. I spent four years as an elected Local School Council representative in Chicago and two years as president of our school PTO here in Brookfield and I definitely have strong opinions about a lot of aspects of education.

What I’ve come to think is that the American school system generally is far too concerned with administration and insufficiently concerned with learning.

When I hear someone talk about running a school district more like a business, I cringe. At the same time, though, I cringe when I hear people talk endlessly about expertise. Both lines of talking are, in different ways, emphasizing the primacy of administration. Now of course the school board’s role is to administer. But the true function of that administration is to facilitate learning. It should always be about learning first. And I think that both general approaches to top-down know-how - run things like a business, or run things like a puzzle only experts can solve - completely miss the point.

The most important person in a child’s education is that child. The next most important people are the child’s parents. The next most important people are the child’s teachers. And any education system worth a damn should be focused on the idea of facilitating learning from the ground floor. Teachers should be empowered. Parents should be empowered. Children should be empowered. Empowerment here doesn’t mean that the child magically knows what all is best for him or her. But it does mean helping children be able to make better decisions. And the same for parents. And the same for teachers.

This is where I get really frustrated with education. Our son goes to a good school in a good district with a good board. But there is no serious attempt made to empower parents. There’s an emphasis today on social and emotional learning - and that’s cool, I totally support that - but as parents, we’ve never gotten anything meaningful from the district explaining how we’re supposed to fit into that.

From my time on an LSC in Chicago, I can tell you it’s even worse there. Individual teachers and occasional principals might not think this way, but in broad strokes, the school system is atrocious at empowering parents. Nevermind that there are committees and programs which are ostensibly designed for such empowerment. When it comes to significant decisions - say, about curriculum - not only are parents not included, they’re not even meaningfully informed. And I am writing this as someone who was elected by parents to serve on an administrative board for the school. The LSC’s charge was so narrowly tailored that I am forced to conclude that it’s been an intentional point over time to direct parental attention away from actual core learning and instead toward… say, the outer rings of the learning target.

This is why I continue to be so horrified by the prospect that Paul Vallas might be elected Mayor of Chicago. He epitomizes the absolute worst of the approach that parents simply are not supposed to be involved in core education. Instead they are supposed to be routed into making “choices” - kind of like how for so long Americans have been routed into making “choices” come election time between just two parties, both of which have historically been terrible at actually representing people. Vallas wouldn’t be able to do a whole lot more damage to Chicago schools - he and his buddy Arne Duncan have done plenty in their time - but his entire approach of being some kind of expert rising above the petty idiot people represents the absolute worst of the Democratic Party, while his campaign’s primary focus being on public safety, with so much dog whistling attached, represents the absolute worst of the Republican Party. And, let’s be blunt, as “experts” go, he’s proven to be an awful one over time.

I met Brandon Johnson years ago, before he was an elected official. I don’t know how good he would be as Mayor of Chicago, which is an incredibly difficult job, especially for the relatively politically unseasoned. But I knew him as an organizer - someone who understood that, yeah, it’s the kids, it’s the parents, it’s the teachers with the most intimate understanding of what’s going on in a classroom, what’s going on with learning. And I adamantly believe that that kind of thinking has been missing from politics broadly for a long time. No less than that legendary community organizer himself, Barack Obama, most thoroughly ushered in top-down expert culture. He even made Arne Duncan his Secretary of Education!

As for local school board races: Don’t tell me what you are going to do. Tell me what we can do together and how you see your role as a facilitator.

If I felt like politics were more like that, maybe I’d be inspired to reengage. As is, even though I see bright spots out there, even though I’m cautiously optimistic that someone like Brandon Johnson could do really good things, I feel like my viewpoint is so far outside what passes for “administration”… I guess I’ll just stay focused on the sorts of things I’ve been focused on, like coaching.

Like baseball.

But, not just baseball.

It’s Opening Day, one of the most wonderful days of the year, and as I type, Dylan Cease is baffling the Astros with his slider, which I am hoping portends good things for the White Sox this season.

Last week, my friend Dolph was in town. We went to high school together and I hadn’t seen him in 15 years. There were a lot of basic facts to be caught up on.

At one point I found myself almost on the verge of apologizing, but caught myself… I was just kind of explaining that what I guess I’m doing is living in a quiet place and coaching youth sports and still seeing concerts for bands which I’ve been listening to for 25 years. And, well, that’s nothing to apologize for. That’s just me being me.

That said, if you’d asked the me of just 10 years ago if I would have expected, in a three week period, to have gone to a minor league hockey game, an indoor soccer game, and a women’s soccer game, interspersed with watching meaningful baseball in March and several men’s and women’s basketball tournament games… almost certainly not. In this same month I’ve been to three concerts, and this week two museums. I’ve been all over the place, but nowhere farther away than Milwaukee. I like this kind of existence. I’m doing a whole lot of different things right here in the little old Midwest.

There’s a certain voice - let’s call it an “intellectual” voice - that never fully goes away that says that a lot of the things people do, that I do, they aren’t important, that there are “better” ways to spend time. I’ll read about hardcore activists or whomever and kind of long for having some quality that I must obviously be missing.

But I have to unify my thinking. And my unified thinking says: Art matters. Culture matters. We’re humans, and whatever exactly humanity is, we are meant to engage in music, in visual arts, in competition. It is in our character, it is in our DNA.

I do happen to think that humans collectively get bogged down in… unproductive endeavors. But this too is somehow part of the human condition. And rather than belittle or chastise, we should accept. Maybe not overchampion. And definitely we should check some of our more extreme impulses - we don’t have to be terrible to one another to compete, say.

We should play. We are meant to play. Not all the time. But it is core to who we are.

And not just us. All higher animals play, especially as children. And it’s documented how young animals learn through play. Why would we be different? Why would we want to be different?

Also apropos of nothing, also from the International Museum of Surgical Sciences… Opthalmic art, in the form of super fancy opera glasses:

All that said: a couple words about this past weekend, the first time my wacky child ever visited Wisconsin!

Sunday, we went to something we had to go all the way to Milwaukee for: an indoor soccer game. Rockford actually had an indoor soccer team for a couple years when I was in junior high or so - the Illinois Thunder (presumably so named to pair with our basketball team, the Rockford Lightning) - and I went to a couple games and they were a lot of fun. But I remembered them being very unlike soccer matches I’ve been to in recent years. And, well, I was right.

Turns out there’s been an indoor soccer team in Milwaukee - the Wave - for decades. There’s not one any closer to Chicago. I thought this kid might find indoor soccer especially interesting, and he did. The game is constantly moving, there are more goals, there’s almost continuously loud music playing, the announcer is acting like a non-stop hype man… it’s as close as I’ve seen to roller derby with a ball involved, and a lot of fun.

The night before, my friend Charlton and I were at Turner Hall to see one of America’s true national treasures, Yo La Tengo. In the dictionary next to the word delightful you will find a picture of Ira and Georgia and James. The second biggest thing ever to come out of Hoboken, and perfectly happy to lean into it:

Turner Hall, the UMW Panther Arena, and Fiserv Forum (where the Bucks play) are all a couple blocks apart kind of on the edge of downtown Milwaukee. I walked around enough there to say: Chicago could learn a few things.

United Center in Chicago is not close to anything. Downtown Chicago is just not a great family destination overall, unless you’re a tourist. You can make a targeted trip to some museum or another but it’s frankly not a good restaurant destination and not super inviting overall.

Milwaukee felt a lot more open, a lot more like there were places to go. Not as many overall places as Chicago but enough. I felt much the same way about Louisville, and - oh shit, I’m gonna say it - Indianapolis. Chicago has all kinds of great stuff, sure, but downtown is such a pain to deal with… honestly, it kind of needs to get over itself. You get out into the neighborhoods, that’s Chicago, that’s where things are real and you can find isolated cool things and it feels walkable. And if you’re thinking, well, Chicago’s a bigger city, that’s just how it’s going to be, then you should take a little jaunt up to Toronto and see a really cool example of what a bigger city can be like.

This isn’t all to rip Chicago! But I’ve read recently though about how some cities like San Francisco are having to reconsider what to do with downtowns now that so many people are remote or hybrid, and Chicago is definitely in that category. The city has a unique need - and opportunity - for some reinvention, and I hope they’ll learn from some smaller neighbors.

Sox win 3-2!

Man, Opening Day is not supposed to be this tense.

Hope this is a sign of good things to come to this season. Who’s up for a game?

Or, hey, who wants to come out this Saturday to see the Red Stars? We’ll be there!