Bits and pieces

 

please enjoy these NH ladyslippers

Some things I've been reading that I'd recommend:

• This Globe piece with very specific stories on how ICE has impacted Massachusetts families made me cry this morning. I appreciate the Globe making it so vivid. We should know this.

• I really enjoyed this piece from Minnesota Public Radio on studying fairy tales: 
  

  With 50 years of fairy tale research, Zipes, 87, said folk stories weave the world together in ways that hold a mirror to society. And they follow a pattern. He said fairy tales are mimetic — mimicking the real world — and not just in the sense that they imitate life.

  “They are mimetic in the sense that they will not go away until the problems that they bring up are not resolved in our society,” said Zipes. “And so there’s a lot you can do with fairy tales to address the problems that the children are having in their homes or in their societies.”

• As Holyoke left receivership (mostly) this week, Michael Jonas has a check on if that whole receivership thing works, anyway. 
  

  While state takeovers did not, overall, lead to clear gains in student achievement, some districts did see improvement, while achievement in others was flat, and some saw a dip in performance. That prompted Schueler to explore whether there might be common features of districts that saw positive outcomes under state receivership.  

  In a new paper, Schueler suggests that state takeovers that provide some role for decision-making at the local level may produce better results.  

• I found Meg Leonard's "Seven Words about Lemons" about being a writer and a mother both beautiful and true:
  

  People love the idea of mothers writing a whole novel in fifteen-minute increments during their lunch breaks, or a whole collection of poems pecked into the notes on their smartphone while they simultaneously rub backs and rock babies and sing lullabies. It’s so sweet. It’s so non-disruptive. No one must be bothered by the woman’s writing this way. No one must do without her care for 24 or 48 or 72 hours. No one must do without a winter coat or a music class, no one has to say no to summer camp. There doesn’t have to be a pause, a choice, a loss, an absence.

• I very much appreciated this reflection "Softening" on motherhood from Hannah Keyser:
  

  Motherhood has made me soft. I cry at the news constantly. Even the most dispassionate headlines hit me like a heavy-handedly scored tearjerker. I cry indiscriminately. It doesn’t matter if the dead babies are Palestinian or Israeli. Or the families being ripped apart on the street by masked men are citizens or permanent residents or undocumented immigrants. I cry for the grown men plucked out of their lives like they don’t matter and shipped off to a nightmare prison for the unsubtle purpose of being stripped of their humanity. Each one of them has a mother, I think, who painstakingly made a person. Not a prototype or a prop but the center of her world once. It’s what we all deserve.