As this post demonstrates, when you have dinner with Julian Vasquez Heilig, you dine with a very active and imaginative mind.
There you are thinking of a stiff drink, and he is thinking of the Odyssey! You are blowing off steam about the latest outrage from Washington, and JVH is cogitating.
You are comparing notes on how California and New York are dealing with federal pressure to conform and buckle, and his mighty brain is acting like a filing cabinet.
I am honored that he thinks of me as a mentor. I think of him as one of our bravest and most valuable young scholars. Those of us who hope for a better day for our society, now steeped in a dog-eat-dog culture, place our hopes with Julian and his peers to lead us out of this dark wood.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is excellent!. We need progressive scholars to sustain the legitimacy of our opposition.
This is wonderful. As the proud mom of a dedicated teacher I have seen what a good teacher can do as a mentor to her student’s.
Please, I want to know more about the differences between California’s and New York’s responses. I would so appreciate how you and he understand it.
Jerry Brown hates testing; Cuomo loves testing. California is moving deliberately and with caution. New York is providing a national lesson in what NOT to do, like rushing in to fast implementation of half-baked plans. Imposing ill-considered ideas without regard to the consequences.
So is California experiencing kinder, gentler testing k-12 than New York? What about the difference between PACT and edTPA implementation in the two states? Is PACT kindler and gentler and less destructive than the edTPA? What are the different experiences of teachers and children in classrooms in the two states re the effects of testing? How much of that difference is attributable to the preferences of the two Governors? I have been pondering these questions and appreciate dialogue about them. Thanks
California has better educational leadership than New York. New York’s leaders believe in forcing everyone to do what they are told. They think of the state as one big no-excuses charter school.
Elected officials in CA are in favor of Common Core and privatization. They’re only moving slowly because they want to prevent a backlash, especially a backlash before the midterm elections. So far, there is only sporadic opposition to CC because parents still know little about it.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-Common-Core-in-California/436128033134967
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/04/moms-anti-common-core-stance-gets-her-suspended-from-sons-school-threatened-with-arrest/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html
What was he thinking about the Odyssey?
Alan, he referred to the Odyssey as the source of the term Mentor.
Mentoring, and even mentoring constellations, have been important to me at a couple of crucial points in my life, and I have also experienced the lack of mentoring at other points which resulted in crashes.
But the Odyssey suggests that successful mentoring is a more complex process that one would think. The character Mentor is left in charge of Odysseus’s son and affairs back on Ithaca, but when Athena encourages Telemachus to go abroad to ask about his father before he gives his mother Penelope to one of the suitors so he can assume control of his patrimony, it is Athena herself, the Goddess of Wisdom and Strategy, the guardian of the city of Athens, who takes on the form of Mentor to accompany Telemachos to see Nestor, and then to Sparta itself, to interview Menelaus and, surprisingly, Helen (the putative cause of all the trouble at Troy).
What does this myth mean, that the Mentor of the young man Telemachos, is the goddess of intelligence herself? The myth is a metaphor and works by image rather than analysis. Thus, I would propose that mentorship be seen NOT as a matter of “telling” or “instructing” the younger person, but of “being” and “doing” and encouraging the younger person by EXAMPLE.
I like the concept of mentor better than the phrase “role model,” because a mentor should bring to mind an image and symbol rather than an abstract formula. Thus, I accept Julian’s declaration that Diane is a mentor. Her example of energy and dedication in the cause is unflagging, and her example of in depth research, is likewise an example for a young research professor.
Unfortunately the weaknesses of a mentor can also betray. Julian’s cheap shot at Fox is something that apparently shows a liberalistic bias about news sources. Fox occasionally does better than one might expect, though not as often as conservatives like to think. It too is too often a “soft” news source. In any case, the kind of liberalistic bias which I am imputing to Julian on the basis of his one remark, I also conceive to be Diane’s crucial weakness, and thus her mentorship, perhaps, gives Julian PERMISSION to engage is dismissive words and the sloppy thinking they engender.
I hope I am wrong and will find myself so (I haven’t read his publications yet but now wish to). Yet that he is using the classic poet Homer as a way into looking at what is surely the most crucial social problem of our time, the crisis of prosperity and criminality among low income African American males, suggests that we may be seeing in Julian a major mind of our time.
As a last classical allusion (to Zeus?), I suspect Diane is “thunder” and Linda “lightning.”
Harlan Underhill: thank you for your commentary.
😎
It appears that Julian didn’t get the memo to wear black, eh!
The performance of California’s students on standardized tests is poor.
The performance of California’s poor, minority students is low. The performance of California’s rich, white or Asian children is high. As a state with over 6 million children in public schools (more students than all but 17 states have people, and a poverty level estimated at 23%), it is not shocking that everyone does not do well. This is no different that any other state. California had higher standards than all but NY and MA and spends less per capita. I would say we are holding our own.
The sad part is that we are willing to “dumb down” our California schools in order to join the Common Core. Which, in the long run, hurts both our high and low students.