“Crows mate for life, have one brood a year, and the siblings help raise the crowlets. If a spouse dies, a nephew or niece helps out. During the spring mating season, the families live separately; but during fall and winter, the families all roost together. They begin congregating in the early evenings, pick a staging area, shift areas, and join other families, their numbers increasing logarithmically, hundreds and thousands of them, flying like a blizzard, and says a researcher, great confusion is evident. They somehow converge into a single roost, talking continually on into the night. The noise they make is three-dimensional.”
 — Over at The Last Word on Nothing, Awl Pal Anne Finkbeiner thinks twice about her hatred of crows, which she says look like “flying shreds of a medieval hell.” She ends up warming to them, for reasons of their familial bonding and resilience, quoting a Bukowski poem about their response to shotgun attack by human farmers: “And mourned their dead and elected new leaders/And then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap.” Similarly, I used to strongly dislike the rock band the Black Crowes. I’m more okay with them now.

by Abe Sauer

Last week Wisconsin legislators voted to eliminate collective bargaining for public employees, including teachers. I spoke with one 20-something Wisconsin teacher about the new public service landscape and what it now means to be a teacher. Given how Governor Walker’s uninvited use of teacher Megan Sampson’s story made her a chit to be exploited in the public debate, Kathryn has asked her last name not be used. The answers are unedited.

The Awl: What do you teach?

Kathryn: High School English.

The Awl: How long have you been teaching?

Kathryn: 6 years.

The Awl: How does the loss of union rights make you feel about your profession?

Kathryn: The potential loss of collective bargaining rights is — as an adult professional — both scary and insulting. Like so many of my colleagues, I pay my annual union dues not because I agree with everything the union stands for, but because I appreciate that the teacher’s union can help safeguard some of the working conditions that make it possible for students to get the best education possible. So as a teacher — someone who cares deeply about her students — the potential loss of collective bargaining rights (in conjunction with several of Walker’s larger budget proposals) has me outraged.

As a teacher whose husband works in the private sector, I try to keep an open mind about how “outsiders” perceive the teaching profession. There is some merit, I suppose, to the arguments that teachers deserve cuts because they only work nine months a year, and have pretty appealing benefits for working in a profession that doesn’t “immediately affect public safety and well-being” — something I hear so often. However, as a teacher, I work seven days a week (averaging 10–12 hours a day) to ensure that my students are exposed to relevant, rigorous and engaging lesson plans and substantive qualitative and quantitative feedback. In addition, my summer breaks are always consumed with courses, workshops, trainings and professional development (that I pay for) in order to improve my teaching skills. When I graduate with my masters degree in Education this Spring, I will enroll in another graduate level program to earn another certification in order to remain marketable in a job where contract renewal is rather tenuous. The vast majority of the time, I come home feeling like I have made a positive impact on the lives of young people; this, not the benefits, is why I went into teaching. It’s an indescribable feeling, how much I love my job. I don’t think that I can put it into words; I don’t know many teachers that can. But I wish that more parents and community members would take advantage of my open invitation to visit my classroom. Just as I would never make assumptions about another’s profession, I contend that it is a sign of ignorance for anyone to make judgments about the quality and value of my profession unless they truly have an understanding of the pedagogical and personal skills I utilize every day.

The Awl: Does the loss of collective bargaining rights, or the current opinions on teachers, make you want to not try as hard?

Kathryn: Tough question. For better or worse, I am a perfectionist. I carefully craft each detail of a lesson plan so as to avoid student confusion and maximize engagement upon delivery. I will often agonize over how to offer feedback on student writing in a way that is critical, solution-oriented and encouraging. I can’t see that part of my personality changing. However, if the loss of collective bargaining rights leads to increased class sizes and a decrease in teacher preparation time, then, yes, the quality of my work will suffer. I simply will not have the time — no matter how efficient I become — to offer intensive feedback on student work or conduct research to develop cutting-edge lesson plans. I will feel forced to turn to the textbook teaching that I have always shied away from.

The Awl: Does this change whether or not you would recommend the profession to younger students or even your own children?

Kathryn: My parents were both teachers. They supported my own interest in teaching, but were also mindful of informing me about the disadvantages to the profession. I knew from an early age that teaching would mean burning the midnight oil after my own kids had gone to bed in order to tend to the needs of the kids I saw at work; I knew that there would be parents who would blame me for their child’s failure; I knew about teacher strikes and union negotiations; I knew that some days I would come home crying because I was unable to offer a child the kind of support he/she needed to feel successful in my classroom; and I knew that other days I would come home crying because I was able to make a major breakthrough with a student. Despite all of these disadvantages, I still feel incredibly blessed to be an educator; I hope that feeling will be strong enough to endure the tough times ahead. My parents, on the other hand, are not quite as sure. My mom, especially, has been encouraging me to take my skills, passion, and degrees elsewhere. And I have to admit — sometimes this sounds appealing, to be able to work only 40 hours a week (albeit 12 months a year); to not have to cater to the individual needs of 130 human beings every day; to eliminate the seemingly endless piles of paperwork… not too shabby. And among the large numbers of teachers who are taking early retirement in order to preserve some of their pension and insurance benefits, I know of an equally large number of young teachers — incredibly good young teachers — who are also weighing their professional options. So my answer to your question is a bit of a double-edged sword: I would only ever encourage someone to pursue a career in education if they really had the passion and desire to be a positive influence in the academic progress of children; however, I would also feel compelled to protect and safeguard that rare spark in these potential teachers from the financial and emotional struggles they will face in the profession. My greatest fear is that Walker’s bill may fill Wisconsin’s classrooms with mediocre, untrained teachers who don’t have the heart (or the training) to support our state’s most precious commodity: its children.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com.

Want to know which natural disasters are targeting you, right now? Here’s a collection of resources.

I don’t know if it’s the lingering effects of the Daylight Saving Time changeover, or the lousy weather, or the continual crushing awareness that life is an empty series of gestures made on the way to the grave, but I am having a rough go of it this afternoon. So thank God for this, at least. So long as you don’t remind yourself that this is the happiest this baby is ever going to be, it’s kind of soothing. [Via]

“Owsley Stanley, an icon of Bay Area counterculture in the 1960s and a longtime associate of the Grateful Dead, died Sunday in a car accident in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia…. Known as ‘Bear,’ Mr. Stanley came to prominence as the first to manufacture LSD in quantity.” And also: “Mr. Stanley lived on an all-meat and dairy diet. He believed vegetables were toxic and blamed a heart attack several years ago on the broccoli his mother made him eat as a child.” Stanley was 76.

In a strange coincidence of timing, considering the horrible news and footage coming out of Japan over the past three days, an international team of scientists working in south Spain believe they have pinpointed the location of the city of Atlantis. This is a major big deal in archeology. Plato wrote about Atlantis in 360 B.C. It was said to have been an engineering marvel located near the “Pillars of Hercules” (as the Straits of Gibralter were called back then), that it was built around an island temple to Poseidon which was surrounded by concentric rings of water and land, like a bulls-eye, and that it was “swallowed up by the sea and vanished” over a single day and night thousands of years earlier. People have been telling stories, and writing songs, and making movies and TV shows about it since — and searching for evidence to prove that it did in fact, ever exist.

Over the past few years, as explained in an hour-long documentary called Finding Atlantis that aired last night on the National Geographic channel, a group of scientists led by Richard Freund of the University of Hartford have been studying satellite imagery and deep ground radar maps of a patch of coastal mud-flats in Dona Ana Park, just outside the Spanish city of Cadiz. Freund believes that Atlantis is, in fact, another name for the biblical city of Tarshish (also known as “Tartessos”), which was thought to have been destroyed by a tsunami in the third millenium B.C.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX3w_PlGReU

Satellite imagery sure is helping archeologists a lot. Remember last year, the same stuff helped buttress claims — as detailed in David Grann’s excellent book The Lost City of Z — that a complex civilization once existed in the Amazon: The legendary city of El Dorado, perhaps.

Interestingly, though, Freund found his most compelling evidence about Atlantis 150 miles inland from where he believes the city was located. In central Spain, in the ancient ruins of a number of smaller “ritual cities” that have been excavated by archeologists. The ruins have structures that look like they were modeled after the temple of Poseidon that Plato described. And they are marked with symbols in the shape of the bulls-eye. Freund believes that these ritual cities were built by Atlanteans who survived the tsunami and wanted to memorialize their great lost city.

I’m sure other scientists will come forward to say Freund is full of shit. But I found the National Geographic show pretty convincing. It airs again Tuesday at 8, if you want to watch.

Lastly, as noted and displayed above, there have been many songs written about Atlantis over the years. I think the video for this next one probably gives us the most accurate vision of what life there was really like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB57CuT4smM

“A Manhattan mom is suing a $19,000-a-year preschool, claiming it jeopardized her daughter’s chances of getting into an elite private school because she had to slum with younger kids. Court papers filed by Nicole Imprescia suggest the York Avenue Preschool may have doomed 4-year-old Lucia’s chances of getting into an Ivy League college.”

Dear friends in San Francisco, won’t you save this date? You are cordially invited to drinks. Details:

Thursday, March 17th.
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
At the Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market Street, San Francisco, with your hosts Susie Cagle and Jackson West.

That’s right, folks, it’s that time again! The ides of March are upon us, and it’s TIME TO GO MAD! Don’t have any idea what I’m talking about? Well, that makes sense as I’ve currently not given you much, if any, context with which to understand what I’m saying. Wait, but you know what, readers of The Awl are so sports savvy*, I’m sure you guys caught my “mad March” reference up there as an allusion to our (now) annual tradition: The Official 2011 Awl March Madness Bracket Tournament Challenge Sponsored By The Awl!

The details are as follows:

1. Go to our official bracket page at Yahoo! (ESPN’s system is way too confusing and it was annoying to deal with last year) and sign up for an account if you don’t have an one already.
1b. Try to remember your Yahoo! account login and/or password.
1c. Click the password recovery link, but realize that you can’t remember what your alternate email address from 2003 was.
1d. Give up, take a deep breath, and just make a brand new Yahoo! account.
1e. Oh, Yahoo! ids work with Flickr now? That’s cool!

2. Fill out a bracket. You can find some pro tips here. NOTE: ONLY ONE BRACKET PER USER. Please don’t try to circumvent this rule, it will be annoying for us to police and embarrassing for you that you even tried to do that. If you want to name your bracket the same as your commenter name, that could be helpful for identification, but I’m sure you have some clever name picked out for your bracket that involves punnery. Oh, you and your wordplay!

3. Sit back and ENJOY THE TOURNEY — that’s short for tournament, but as if I had to tell you that, you crazy sports fan, you. Will Alex beat Choire this year? Where will young upstarts Adam Frucci, Edith Zimmerman and Carrie Frye land? Which users will complain to me that this bracket challenge system is annoying and they don’t get how it works! The suspense is killing me! Is it killing you? RIP me. I’m dead!

4. So get this, let’s say you win the whole bracket contest (Congratulations! You’ve won!), you win an actual awl, the very object that will never exist in the logo of this website. So that’s pretty fun for you! March is turning out better than you thought!

* Websites with poetry sections are often known to cater to the most savvy and fanatical sports fans.

Also: Contest void where prohibited by law etc., etc. disclaimer, disclaimer, you can imagine what sort of terms and conditions would need to be here.

by Joshua Heller

I flew to Austin by way of the most conservative flight route in all of western North America: Orange County to Salt Lake City. The in-flight magazine exalted the merits of Utah. An article about Munich referred to the city’s “complicated past,” a really terrific euphemism. While waiting for a gate in Austin for thirty minutes. I checked my phone. In two hours, I’d gotten 25 e-mails from publicists wanting me to see their films. They’re form letters that all look the same: Bold and centered 18-point font announcing the name of the movie. Two sentences in italicized 16-point font briefly explaining the film. A six paragraph press release, followed by information where to watch the film in Austin. None of these messages take into account that the receiver might be a human being. That’s why I was happy when Kyle Smith reached out to me.

He was the only filmmaker to send me a direct e-mail asking me to watch his film. (He had seen my tweet about free-style walking on Alvarado and Sunset. We call it “Echo Park-our.” LOL?)

We met at a cafe, and he gave me a copy of his SXSW submission, Turkey Bowl. Also he told me that the room he’d booked for his cast had an extra space for the first night I arrived.

So I went to check-in and then to go see him. A bus sponsored by an internet start-up, one that I don’t remember but to which I am now indebted, gave me a free ride to the convention center. It was slightly freer than the $1 airport bus. I registered and walked to the pedicab, carrying two heavy backpacks and three SXSW tote bags. The rickshaw operator delivered me four blocks away from the hotel because he didn’t want to ride up a hill.

The director was inside the hotel room with cast, and his sisters. His entire family came to town for the premiere of his directorial debut. Turkey Bowl is a 63-minute comedy about old friends playing football, shot in real time.

Kyle seemed nervous about his screening, which was less than twelve hours away. He wanted to be in bed early. He and his cast and his sisters left the room. I stayed to shower.

After, I took a walk down Congress towards the madness of Sixth Street, looking for an ATM. At the Apple store, an employee was clearing the barricades that had been used to corral nerds into the store.

The line had been around the block at noon. Who flies to Austin to wait in line for hours to buy a piece of technology that’s not much different than the thing they’re already lugging around? To be fair, the wait was only fifteen minutes now.

A pedicab told us he’d give us a free ride to a famous BBQ parlor — if we “tweeted at” his sponsoring start-up. Fine. But the restaurant had closed when we got there.

We went and got a burger and then I went to The Driskill, because I remembered it was fun last year. The actor Kevin Pollak was there. It was crowded and stuffy, so I left. Then someone texted me that they were at the bar. I went back inside. The bar was still crowded and stuffy. Then my friends texted again to say they’d left. So I left too.

Then came the film festival’s opening party, at Buffalo Billiards. Someone in line asked me if The Awl was based in North Hollywood. I was embarrassed that I’d registered with my parents’ address on my badge. At the party there were sliders and miniature corn dogs. Why had I paid for food earlier? Instead I had a free 16-ounce Miller Lite.

The cast and crew of Turkey Bowl were celebrating their first time at a film festival. Morgan Beck plays the nerdy loudmouth in the film. In real-life he’s the writer’s assistant on a show on premium cable. He pointed out that Monk was playing without commercials on televisions above the bar. I said that I’d heard Tony Shalhoub was deejaying. Beck disagreed when I said “unemployment is the greatest thing ever.” I disagreed when he said “Justin Bieber is pretty good.”

Troy Buchanan, from the film, said his character is a less confident version of himself. In real life, Troy works at an Apple store in Florida and said he was happy he didn’t have to work today. He wasn’t a fan of being yelled at by creeps while clearing barricades to corral nerds. Brian Wessel is Turkey Bowl’s editor. He went to AFI with Kyle. Now he cuts a reality TV show.

We walked to The Jackalope because I remembered from last year that it was the only glimmer of punk rock salvation on Sixth Street. Plus I saw on Foursquare that my friends friends were drinking there. I drank my first Lone Star in over a year.

When we got back to the hotel, Kyle was already asleep. I slept in the same bed. I observed the heterosexual male custom of sleeping on top of the sheets so we wouldn’t accidentally touch in the middle of the night.

Kyle woke up at 7 a.m. to meet his dad. His father is a physician for a Division 1 football team. Before big games they go for runs. He got back back at 9 a.m. He ran seven miles while I slept for another two hours.

The cast got to the screening two hours early. I stayed back to eat a waffle that looked like the state of Texas. I gave a dollar to a homeless man because he said “hey brother, can you spare some change.” I didn’t know homeless guys still said that.

I got to the Alamo Ritz for the premiere. The cast and crew mostly wore blazers and jeans: business casual. They stood among film critics wearing promotional t-shirts and cargo shorts: film critic formal. The comedian Doug Benson was in line behind me, talking about his boycott of 3D movies.

We walked into the movie hall. It also serves beer. Silent films that didn’t fit the screen were projected in place of the terrible pop culture quizzes that are typically shown before commercial films. A filmmaker/government contractor sat next to me. He said that if Congress doesn’t approve the budget, government employees including the armed forces will be forced to report to work for free.

A SXSW volunteer/cinephile from Abilene sat on the other side of me. She began laughing from the movie’s first joke. Before the film hit the third act, the girl from Abilene tore her audience award ballot. She gave the movie a 5. The crowd cheered at the end. The film went really well. After, the line for the men’s room was much longer than the women’s. Too many people wearing cargo shorts.

Joshua Heller has a fake startup called Logjammr.