Friday, May 30, 2008 - Posts
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Bonnie Goldstein just posted a great "Hot Document"—the police report filed by the mom in Port St. Lucie, Fla., whose 5-year-old son was "voted out" of his kindergarten class by his teacher and classmates because he was disruptive. I was grateful to read the police report because my reaction to the initial story was, "There's GOT to be more to this." Alas, the only thing the complaint clarified for me was that the teacher meant for the little boy to be dismissed from the class for the day, not forever. But how is a 5-year-old, especially an autistic 5-year-old, supposed to figure that out?
It does seem that the little boy was a distraction to his classmates, and the fact he was "in the process of being diagnosed with autism," as the article says, would explain that. I would hope that, had the voting-off incident not happened, the school and his parents would have worked hard to find the right classroom situation for him, whether special needs or some combination of special needs and time in a "typical" classroom. No child deserves to be humiliated like that. Kindergarten is not a reality show. But more importantly, kindergarten is not a democracy. Sure, let the 5-year-olds vote on what story they read or whether to have cookies or crackers for a snack. But if a child is causing a problem in class, the teacher needs to be a grown-up and deal with it.
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Ellen, that is one gutsy post, and a public service, too. (Maybe Prudie has some suggestions on ways to get the "Clooney it up a little bit'' message out?) No way the big-screen Sex and the City could match last night's Daily Show spoof, in which Jason Jones, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and Aasif Mandvi stir their cosmos with cigars and drink a toast to herpes. And anyone on the lookout for something quieter and sturdier—an anti-SATC, set on the Upper West Side—might like to check out the DVD I saw last weekend, Starting Out in the Evening, a movie so carefully made it feels hand-stitched. Frank Langella completely inhabits the role of Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist with writer's block who feels time is running out. When this know-it-all grad student, Lauren Ambrose, barges into his life, full of plans to make her name by resuscitating his career, you keep thinking you know what's coming—will it be this or will it be that? But then you don't, and it isn't, in a way that restores faith in the kind of writing the lead character demands of himself. (And every writerly kid who says he or she just loves to sit down at the keyboard should see this, too; what a brutal life filling blank pages with fiction is.) The closest it gets to cliché is that it's Lili Taylor (beautifully) playing Leonard's Lili Taylor-like daughter; she fears her most (re)productive years are slipping away as well, while her boyfriend, Adrian Lester, who in my one quibble seems not to have heard of the blogosphere, pours all his energy into starting an online magazine, so his friends will have a place to kick around ideas. Not that we all have the same taste in movies any more than we do in candidates, but I hadn't heard much about this one, and don't know when I've been so floored by a film.
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