#deafeningsilence

The email came on Thursday, with the subject line "ASO Concert Cancelation Reminder" (their spelling, not mine.)

Dear Valued Patron,
This is a reminder that all ASO concerts scheduled for this weekend are canceled. We will continue to update you each week, however up-to-date information can also be found on our website at www.aso.org.
Questions?  Subscribers, call 404.733.4800.  Single Tickets holders, call 404.733.5000.
Thank you for your support of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra!

There is nothing in this email that conveyed *why* the concerts are cancelled; it might have been a problem with the HVAC, or a nasty outbreak of norovirus in the string section.  The fact of the matter is that Woodruff Arts Center leadership has locked the players out for the second time in two years.

The last time, the players took large pay cuts, 10 weeks were cut from the season, and the size of the orchestra was reduced, from 95 to 88.  Now Stanley Romanstein, the President of the ASO, is asking for increasing contributions by the musicians to health insurance costs which will mean further reductions in salary and -- more alarmingly -- the final say on whether or not vacancies in the orchestra will be filled.

So far, the musicians are winning the public relations battle.  On Facebook, the ASO has resorted to deleting and disabling comments.  Bloggers, including Minneapolis blogger Scott Chamberlain, has done a great job of covering events in Atlanta.  In the last few days both both music director Robert Spano and principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles have made strong public statements in support of the musicians and expressing their fear that Atlanta is at risk of losing its world-class symphony orchestra.  Last Thursday, on what should have been opening night, a large protest occurred across from the Arts Center.

Two years ago, the musicians made major concessions.  I thought -- and clearly the players thought --  that with those concessions management would do what they needed to do to address the fiscal issues by increasing revenue.  In 2012 Romanstein told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that "the ASO can't raise more money through donations until it balances its budget. Donors have made it clear, he said: Fix the finances, then talk to us about increasing our support."  This seems to be the playbook.  As long as the orchestra is in the red -- and it is reportedly still running a 2 million dollar deficit -- the onus is on the musicians to make concessions until the orchestra is in the black.

The problem is, by then, I don't know what will be left.

Symphony orchestras need financial support, and Stanley Romanstein et al. should have been working on that for the last two years.  Their failure to do anything of the sort suggests that maybe the symphony and the Arts Center need to think about the quality of leadership at the helm.

I know Romanstein et al. don't care what I think, but there are people in this city who they do care about, and I hope those people are paying attention to what's happening.  This city was outraged with the Atlanta Braves decided to become the Cobb County Braves, and we're supporting the building of a new football stadium for a very wealthy NFL team owner.  Will we let the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra be lost?

This is a defining moment for out city.  I'm hopeful that the people who can do it will do the right thing, and in the end, I think that will have to include new leadership that sees their job as strengthening the symphony, not decimating it.

Congratulating Ourselves for Being Us

All three of our children left the Atlanta Public Schools after 5th grade; Iain is now in 11th grade, so I've been watching the agony that has followed the APS cheating scandal and the angst about redistricting as an Interested and Concerned Citizen, not as a parent of children who were directly impacted.  I've had the same response to more recent news outside of Atlanta about struggles over textbooks and the battles over the Core Curriculum, being grateful that whatever issues my kids' middle and high school might have had, they weren't *those* issues.

But I do care about public schools, and so I was interested to see this graph in the MLPA Newsletter that arrived yesterday in the mail.

The accompanying text identified Morningside Elementary School -- our neighborhood elementary school -- as the highest scoring APS elementary school on the 2014 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), and Inman Middle School as the highest performing middle school (see below for a close up view of the upper left corner of the graph).

Of course, that's only the Y axis part of the story.  The label on the X axis is "Avg. FRL Rate."  FRL is not defined but I am virtually certain it is "Free and Reduced Lunch," the usual measure of socioeconomic status in public school students.  And the stunning thing about this graph is not that our neighborhood elementary and middle schools have higher test scores than other elementary and middle schools in APS, but how strongly correlated CRCT scores are with the percentage of children eligible for free and reduced lunch.  

The newsletter says "Morningside Elementary School (MES) is the highest scoring elementary school in APS and 3rd highest in the state!  Congratulations to our students, teachers, staff and parents for their combined hard work and commitment to our success."  I do not question the hard work and commitment of all of the above (I recall many hours constructing dioramas when our kids were at Morningside, and I am sure families of current students are doing the same), but really -- what this graph shows is that it isn't "hard work and commitment" that really matter but the socioeconomic makeup of the student body.  We are congratulating ourselves for having hardly any poor children in Morningside. 

There's a very famous and often cited study done by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, that looked at how families talk to their young children.  Their book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, was published in 1995.  The researchers made audio recordings of how parents of 42 children interacted with their child from age 10 months through 3 years.  The children were from professional and working class families as well as families on welfare.  What they found was striking.

"The longitudinal data showed that in the everyday interactions at home, the average (rounded) number of words children heard per hour was 2,150 in the professional families, 1,250 in the working-class families, and 620 in the welfare families...By age 3 the children in professional families would have heard more than 30 million words, the children in working class families 20 million, and the children in welfare families 10 million."

This gap in exposure to language results in differences in acquisition of vocabulary that become apparent before age 2.  

(data from Figure 2 in the book, redrawn here.)

According to Hart and Risley,

"We could see in the professional families the American dream:  parents adding to and handing on to their children the advantages their families had given to them.  We saw the daily efforts of these parents to transmit an educationally advantaged culture to their children through the display of enriched language; through the amount of talking they did and how informative they were; and through the frequency of gentle guidance, affirmative interactions, and responsiveness to their children's talk."

By age 3, the poor children in the study were behind on many measures, and preschool was not enough to make up the difference.  

"We saw poverty of experience being transmitted across generations.  The welfare children, like the other children after the first 3 years of experience at home, had become like their parents.  We wondered that we could have thought their accomplishments at 3 would be other than similar to those of their parents.  We could see too why a few hours of intensive intervention at age 4 had had so little impact on the magnitude of the differences in cumulative experience that resulted from those first 3 years."

Most of the students who attend Atlanta Public Schools are poor, and many of them start school with these kinds of disadvantages.  I don't believe that parental involvement or the quality of teachers or school leadership accounts for the differences in test scores among students at these schools.  All the pressure that Beverly Hall and her team put on principles and teachers couldn't change the experience of APS students before they started school; nothing the schools could do could fully compensate for this, so many schools resorted to cheating.

So, fine, congratulations to Morningside Elementary School and Inman Middle School for their vertical distance above the diagonal line.  That's all I'm willing to grant them; the rest is just demographics.

A Dog at Home

It's Saturday morning and it's quiet.  Iain isn't up yet and Tom has headed off to Lake Allatoona for the day.  I just got back from walking the dog.  it's a lot easier than it used to be.  Leonard has gone from being so agitated on a leash that we were afraid he would be injured to being the kind of dog that strolls on a leash and does lots of sniffing but not a lot of tugging.  He still sometimes gets agitated when he sees people and other dogs -- especially people who are running -- but this doesn't seem to be aggression.  He actually does fine around most dogs -- he has uneventfully been introduced to several of the dogs on the street -- and is fine with strangers walking up and petting him, even when I tell them to move slowly and they don't.  But he really does get worked up when he sees people running or children playing.

The dramatic transformation of Leonard from terrified and agitated to mostly calm started with using the harness instead of the collar (thank you for that advice, Dr. Fiorillo), and I'm sure the fluoxetine has also helped (that's generic for Prozac, and thank you for that too, Dr. Fiorillo).  And it's been a couple of months now, and I'm sure that the passage of time has also helped.  He's mostly settled down and is acting like a pretty normal dog, except for really not wanting to go into the back yard.  He's still on exercise restriction because of the heartworm treatment, so we haven't pushed that, but once he's not we'll have to figure out how to get him back there enough that he'll get used to it.  He is wonderful at retrieving a ball, and we haven't been doing that either, because of the exercise restriction.  So that's something left to work on.

But why the excitement when he sees people running, or children in the church parking lot playing baseball?  He no longer is afraid of airplanes overhead or bags of yard waste; this, along with his aversion to going into the back yard, is pretty much all that is left in the category of Leonard's inexplicable behaviors.  We did get a DNA test on him to try to ascertain his non-Labrador retriever ancestry.  According to Mars Veterinary's Wisdom Panel, he's a Labrador retriever-Australian shepherd mix.  (This figure makes it looks like he might be a purebreed Lab, or equally likely to be a Tibetan mastiff-Lab mix, but I don't think that's right, and it's not how Mars Veterinary interpreted it.)

I don't know much about Australian shepherds, but what I have learned since we got this result is that they are herding dogs (that's the "shepherd" part), and so his watchfulness may not be nervousness but just his nature.  And maybe that's why when he sees people running, especially children, he really wants to go after them.  They are loose, and they need to be herded up.  

Last night when I was walking him we saw a large possum crossing the street.  He really wanted to go after it.  I didn't let him, as I didn't think it would likely end well for either Leonard or the possum, but you never know.

The Beltline Illuminated

We had planned and prepared for this lantern parade.  The first time we went, two years ago, we had no idea what we were doing, but we had a great time.  Last year we had a better idea what was going on.  We made better lanterns, and were astonished by the increase in the size of the crowd; it had been only a few thousand people a year before, but last year it was estimated that ten thousand people showed up.  We'd heard that there were Concerns about inadequate arrangements for a crowd that turned out to be that size, with only a couple of port-a-potties and two police officers there.  This year -- like us -- they were going to Be Prepared.

In August, Iain and I went to one of Chantelle Rytter's lantern-making classes.  We started with a large paper folding lantern, attached it to a bamboo pole, and decorated it with shapes cut from tissue paper and glued on with Elmer's glue thinned with water.  Add a battery-powered light and we had lanterns.  But we saw the materials there to make the large illuminated hats that we had seen at the parade last year, and Iain got what was needed to make one.

I'd been out of town for the week but got back mid-afternoon on Saturday.  Iain had spent the day working on his illuminated hat, which was almost done by the time I got home.  We'd invited our neighbors Carolina and Pawel to go with us to the parade, and we all went to Caramba for dinner.   Then Tom dropped us off near the start, where the crowd was huge.

This really large fish was in the parade last year, I think.  (Check my photos from last year.)  It hadn't been an angler fish last year.

This year, Iain was one of the people wearing a large illuminated hat.  I requested a group photo, and the illuminated-hat people dutifully posed. 

The Crewe of the Grateful Gluttons was there in force, with the giant illuminated puppets.

Once again my pictures on the trail didn't come out very well, but you can get a feel for how many people were there and the wonderful lanterns from these pictures while we were waiting for dark and for the parade to start.

Once the crowd started to move it still took a long time for us to get on to the trail; it takes a long time for that many people to move onto a 10-foot-wide path.  The route was congested with spectators and sometimes the parade just stopped moving altogether.  Iain and I were all trying to stay together with Pawel and Carolina and we mostly did.  So many people on a warm and humid night -- people everywhere.  Thousands of spectators, thousands of people walking.  By the time we got to Virginia Avenue, there still were lanterns coming heading toward us on the trail as far as we could see.

I've seen estimates of 15,000 and 20,000 people at the event -- I would believe twenty thousand.  There were people in the parade and along the route, watching from lawns and balconies and windows and rooftops, from trailside and from bridges.  And there were definitely more people walking than in years past.

Last year, at the start of parade, we did see an Atlanta Police Department officer on a bicycle, and a port-a-potty on Irwin Road.  This year, there may have been more of both, but we didn't see any at all.  Fortunately we didn't need either one.  I'm not sure how big a crowd they planned on this year.  

Next year?  I'm sure it will be even bigger, and we'll be there.

Under Construction on Wessyngton Road

We've been watching with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding the construction going on nearby.  First, they took out all the trees in the backyard.  They did this because the house they are building extends to completely fill what had been the backyard.

This picture (above) was taken last weekend, when they were framing in the basement.  Given that this is what the house looked like on Monday morning when I went to work, imagine my surprise when I came home from a short trip Wednesday afternoon to this:

One floor a day had been added to the house.  This was Thursday:

This has generated a lot of discussion among those of us who live at this end of the street.  We are no longer commenting on how quickly this happened (and it was very quick) but now the conversation is about how astonished we are that a house of this size is being put on a 50 foot wide lot on our street.  

Just to be completely clear, the word that is being used most frequently is "monstrosity."  Our neighbor Scott had the best characterization, that it was a Dunwoody mansion turned sideways.  We will have a clear view from our backyard of second story windows on the other side of Kathy and Steve's house.

Sometime before too long (probably not long at all, given the speed at which this is being built) the construction will be done and we will no longer have construction noise scaring the dogs, debris in the street flattening our tires, trucks blocking the street while people stand around looking at blueprints, and mud tracked from the construction site into the street.  

(In spite of the above "Notice to Comply," I don't think they ever did clean it up but it did eventually rain.  Too bad for the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.)

At some point we may stop being horrified by this behemoth of a house.  Maybe the exterior finishing will be so fabulous that we won't mind that it is at least 4 times as large as the adjacent houses.  Maybe they will plant some trees in front of it and in 30 years it won't be so visible.  Maybe the builder is planning on putting an invisibility cloak over the back three-quarters of the house and we won't even be able to see it.  Or maybe we'll just get used to it.

The thing I am really worried about is what kind of neighbors will end up living in a house like this.  It is not that I think that people who want 6000+  square foot houses are by definition bad neighbors; perhaps they need that much space for their extremely extensive toy soldier collection, or the 23 members of their extended family who live with them.  What troubles me is the thought that our future neighbors would probably prefer to be surrounded by other 6000+ square foot houses, not by the houses that are here, and that they will see the current residents of the street as recalcitrant people who need to get out as soon as possible so the street can be filled with giant houses like theirs, houses that don't have backyards and that are occupied by people like them, as opposed to those of us who actually live here.

I would be very happy to be wrong about this, I really would.  This is a great neighborhood.  There are families with children, there are retired people, and there are young single people, and even some students.  Kids ride their bikes in the street.  People walk their kids to school, chat in the street while walking the dogs, pick up each other's mail when someone's out of town, and really do help each other out when help is needed.  (I don't write about the best examples of helping out, because some things are private -- you'll just have to take my word for it.)  We'd love to have another good neighbor on the street, even if we weren't crazy about their house before we got to know them.  But just like no one asked us to approve the design of the house, we don't get to weigh in on who buys it, either.  So we'll have to take what we get, but we're hoping for the best.

In other news, the orange sign at the duplex has been replaced with a yellow sign, indicating that the tree removal plan has been approved by the city.  Another really big house to follow, I expect.  Stay tuned.