But the coronavirus pandemic and an influx of new school board members have drastically changed the atmosphere for teachers in the district. I visited Rapid City in May and spoke to 25 teachers spread across the district’s three high schools. Uniformly, they said that their work had become far more difficult in the last two years, and that the book ban was yet one more sign that their jobs were becoming untenable. At the school board meeting I attended, on May 17, multiple speakers lamented the “mass exodus” of teachers. There are currently 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680. Eighty-eight of the open positions are for classroom teachers. Parents and students say the district is “disintegrating” and “imploding.” Jill Haugo, a nine-year teacher at Central High School, said she has never seen anything like this. “Teachers are breaking their contracts in the middle of the year and just leaving.”
How all this happened is instructive. In fact, it might be a blueprint for how any school district can be overtaken by the narrow interests of people and groups without a direct stake in the schools. One such person is the president of the Rapid City school board, Kate Thomas.
Dear George Orwell,
Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».
Because I'm writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.
Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ».
“With a menu, you have a physical and digital record that you can compare over time,” explains William Cheung, a fisheries biologist at UBC and one of the study’s authors. Cheung has spent his career studying climate change and its effects on the world’s oceans. He has contributed to several of the landmark reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but along with John-Paul Ng, an undergraduate student at UBC, he wanted to find a different way to both study and communicate those changes.
“Many people, especially in Vancouver, go out to restaurants and enjoy seafood, so we wanted to see whether climate change has affected the seafood that the restaurants serve,” Cheung says.
To Fill a Yellow House explores the problem of “how to be” if you want to be truly yourself, if you are not prepared to divide yourself among what everyone else wants. As the novel follows Kwasi carving out his own freedom – finding communities delineated less by family and neighbourhood, united instead by permitting and “seeing” each other – it points a way to our untying ourselves from those with whom we share a history, to form more meaningful bonds with those whom we share a future.
The novel’s pockets of sentimentality are offset by streaks of viciousness, accurately reflecting how we tend to remember our pasts: happy times bathed in a distorting glow, miserable times diminished and disowned.
“Girls They Write Songs About” is a love story about two friends, but it’s also something thornier — a narrative about the cycles of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment that make up a life.
I recently got rid of my vintage Raleigh cruiser, a dusky brown survivor with numerous patches of rust that, to my mind, made the 1960s bicycle look more distinguished. The finicky gears weren’t the problem. Nor was it the handbrake cable that frequently jutted straight up like an antenna. What wore me down were the slim tires that routinely got banged up on New York City streets, turning the wheels into dead weights riding on thin scalps of rubber.
Thankfully, since upgrading to a used Fuji BMX, with a black frame and much thicker tires, I’ve been spared that recurring scenario. But memories of my Raleigh came rushing back as I read Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, which opens with colorful descriptions of bicycle ads from the turn of the 20th century: Art Nouveau posters that depict the faddish invention soaring through the air, riding through the clouds, and ascending into the reaches of outer space.
The pebbled path leads to an overgrown garden
where roses tumble over each other and daffodils