Living at the Laundromat

And some recent writings

Happy summer everyone! I’m in Austin, Texas at the moment and it’s 103 degrees.

It’s been a long while since I’ve written here which I attribute to having a busy and full professional and personal life. After days full of meaningful work, I get to spend hours each week watching my boys play summer baseball and my God, do I love it?!

They say bad things happen in 3s but at my house, it appears that things break in 7s. From the garage door to the washer AND dryer to the toilet, we are in one of those frustrating patches of “OMG, nothing works around here!”

And so, I have been spending a lot of time at the local laundromat funneling $7 worth of quarters into the big machine that claims to wash 6 loads at once. And this got me thinking: if one machine can wash 6 loads in under 30 minutes and the giant dryer can dry all those clothes in under an hour, why am I not doing *all* my laundry at a laundromat? If I could find a place that didn’t require quarters and had air conditioning and Wifi, this would actually save me a ton of time and get me out of my snack-filled house for a couple hours. I’m now wondering how the cost of a load of laundry done at home (electricity, gas and water) compares to the cost of doing it at the laundromat.

The repairman who came to diagnose the problems with our washer and dryer knew right away that our washing machine was dead. As he put it, “it’s over.” I’m convinced that we broke it by doing loads of laundry that were way too big—we don’t have room for a big washing machine but we’ve spent years pretending that we have a big washing machine. It finally caught up with us. The dryer is salvageable so now I have to decide whether to buy new machine(s), officially move into the laundromat or perhaps a combination of both.

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Recent Writings

I have written a few pieces recently in other outlets. I figured I’d share them here in case you haven’t seen them and want to check them out.

The Biden administration sees the writing on the wall when it comes to parents who are dissatisfied, concerned, and even angry about the state of their children’s education.

The usually perfunctory and dull school board meetings of pre-pandemic times have given way to standing-room-only crowds of parents with a lot to say about prolonged school closures, mask mandates, excessive COVID-19 testing, and “Zoom school” from the kitchen table that revealed students were learning more about privilege, oppression, and gender identity than they were basic math and reading. Some schools even found time for virtual drag queen story hours , in-person drag shows , and the creation of gender support plans to hide children’s new gender identities deliberately from their parents.

For 50 years, Democrats have held a consistent and sizable advantage on education over the GOP. As recently as January 2021, that advantage was a whopping 20 percentage points . But by March of this year, that number had fallen to 5 points. To read the full article, click here.

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The most patriotic people I know are immigrants to the United States. Their appreciation for America is different from mine because they have personally experienced life without the freedom and opportunity that exists here. I have not.

A former teacher colleague of mine from Guatemala used to bemoan the nonstop criticism of America she heard in the teachers’ lounge and in the broader culture. I keenly remember her saying how ungrateful so many of us were. She would explain that the PhD next to her name was her American Dream. She spent years working to get the rest of her family here because she knew it would make their lives better. In many ways, she echoed Barack Obama when he used to say that his story was only possible in America.

Cab drivers tell a similar story. I still opt for a taxi (instead of Uber) when I need a ride from an airport to a hotel. Often the drivers are from West Africa and their commentary about America has affected my own thinking. They invariably tell me that Americans have no idea how good we have it. One driver who was a father of three explained how he felt an obligation to take his own children to visit his village in Africa to be sure they understood how blessed they were to have been born in America. Another driver was exuberant that his daughter was graduating from college and he attributed it to raising her in America. And while they mostly all scoff at the political debates that swirl around them, they use the word love to describe how they feel about this country. To read the full column, click here. At the end, it includes a *really* exciting update about something I’ve been working on for 5 years.

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Schools do not stock Playboy magazine in their libraries, and they have never been accused of “censorship” for not doing so. That line in the sand has never seemed to bother anyone. But when parents and others raise concerns over texts written for children that contain explicit illustrations of sex acts, they are mocked by media pundits and even some school board members as “book banners” and “book burners.” Legitimate criticism of books steeped in race essentialism and gender ideology — even for very young students — are met with accusations of bigotry and hate.

Those who exist in the distorted world of sound bites throw around terms such as “censorship” and “book banning” with little regard for their actual meaning, while parents with legitimate concerns make their way to the podium at public meetings to be heard. The tired and unresolvable debates over literary works and “the canon” continue unabated, but parents are responding to a new and different debate that centers on recently published texts that promote an obvious political and ideological agenda but are justified by school officials in the name of “inclusion” and “lived experience.”

We hear words such as “unsustainable” and “unprecedented” to describe the mental health crisis that plagues our nation’s youth, but as schools understandably clamor for more mental health support in schools, they also exacerbate the problem. Students are bombarded with texts, both assigned and recommended, that paint a painfully bleak and even dystopian picture of the world in which they live. Self-harm, suicide, and now gender ideology are constant themes in the young adult genre that is ubiquitous in middle and high schools. And in the past few years, hyper-ideological content has barreled into elementary schools like a freight train. The edgier the book, the more likely it is to garner awards, appear on lists published by library associations, and become a dark and lonely refuge for children who are susceptible to the pathology that lies within its pages. To read the full piece, click here.

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(Despite my new enthusiasm for the laundromat, all the white baseball pants are still driving me insane, especially when I scrub them by hand, hang them to dry outside and then a massive thunderstorm rolls through just to mess with me.)

Talk soon,

Erika

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