What Is Success?

I’ve written before about the difficulties, peculiarities, and comedies that come about when you have two children with completely different, unusual personalities. Raising my son for four years did little to prepare us for the challenge of raising our daughter, except for the baby equipment we got to reuse!
Unlike our son, our daughter is a person who has trouble following rules. She has an enthusiastic, energetic personality, and when the adult in charge can harness that, it’s like having nuclear power for your classroom. Anything is possible! When you give up on her, you might find her leading a whole room of 3-year-olds in chanting, “Poopy-head!” at the top of their lungs.
So my parenting journey has included a perspective from both sides of the fence. When I talk to my son’s teachers, we are likely to talk about how helpful and friendly he is, how the other kids look up to him, and yes, how he has trouble dealing with changes in plans, criticism, other kids misbehaving, unfairness in relationships and rules… But these problems don’t translate into everyday, nagging problems for teachers, so they usually mention it in the spirit of trying to help him grow.
Then there’s my daughter. When I talk to her teachers, we don’t usually get much time to talk about how helpful she is, how kind and generous when other kids are upset, how she loves to share her ideas and knowledge with others. Of course, a good teacher tries to mention that, but then there’s the other things… My daughter is a difficult person to have at school, in a class, in your house, in our house. And it’s hard not to focus on the difficulties.
I’ve noticed that my husband and I sometimes (or is it often?) expect that something one of our children does is a precursor to a standard piece of bad behavior, and we react negatively even before the bad behavior starts. For example, our son may have been bugging me about using the computer, and yet again he comes into my office, and in anticipation of the question I’ve already answered, I might say, “Stop bugging me about the computer!”
His face will fall, and I will realize that wasn’t at all the reason he was there. “But Mommy,” he’ll say, “I came to tell you that your timer is going off.”
I realize at times like this that I have to remember to enter into each situation with the knowledge of past situations, but with a positive expectation. It’s probably the hardest thing about parenting, and teaching.
I complained to my sister by e-mail at one point that I was frustrated that I heard a teacher telling a “well-behaved” child all the things she’d done wrong that day. It was quite a list — a list, I pointed out, that would have gotten my daughter sent home for the day. But since this was a “good” child, no such action was taken, and the girl was simply given a short lecture.
My sister responded, “I’ve noticed my son’s teacher, who is very gentle and patient, continually gets frustrated by the same boy over and over, and he now occasionally overreacts to situations involving him. I can imagine if they didn’t have the history together, it wouldn’t be that way. It’s just part of having human emotions, unfortunately.”
So how do we, parents, teachers, and caregivers, check our emotions before they take over our intellect? I’m not sure. Every time a teacher is frustrated with my daughter, I sympathize. When they jump on her for doing something that they’ve been letting other kids do without comment, I understand. When they peg my daughter for her actions and don’t notice the other kids who goaded her into it, sometimes I don’t even notice. Some kids are harder to have in a family, not to mention a classroom. But the job description of a parent and an educator has one non-negotiable item: You can’t make kids be who you want them to be. You have to take who you get.
Once when I was visiting a classroom, the teacher exhausted herself just getting one of the kids to get in line and get ready to go to the playground. She rolled her eyes at me and said, “In every class, there’s always one!”
Yes, and that one is just as deserving of love, encouragement, and education as the rest. That one is the one who makes us work, and as I tell my kids, if something is too easy, it’s not worth doing. The jobs you really have to work on are the ones that make you remember what success is.

It’s not easy being green

Trying to be good is hard. Take, for instance, my dinner preparation this evening. In our house we cook, as opposed to heating up and/or mixing together. That means I buy individual ingredients, chop them up, and cook them with a variety of herbs and spices in a variety of ways.
I’m telling you this just in case you weren’t sure what cooking is. I was pretty sure that everyone agreed on the definition till I started having various babysitters “cook” for my children. Hm.
Anyway, I had decided to be “good,” as defined by Dr. Greene, and buy organic potatoes. To tell you the truth, the potatoes I buy are usually organic, but through much of the year I don’t have to buy because we grow more potatoes than four families can eat on my parents’ farm. Those are what I call “semi-organic,” because my chemist dad is not above saying to my mom, “I’m darn tired of those critters chewing on our root crops and I’m gonna go out and dose ’em once and fer all.”
Or something like that.
So our gardens are “usually” organic, but occasionally not.
So, in reference to potatoes, the ones that I buy are usually organic, and usually come in a bag and are those fancy fingerling potatoes, because I like them so much. But this being spring, and new red potatoes being in the store, I just had to buy them today because ours aren’t in yet, and I made myself cross the aisle and get the organic ones.
The price looked OK. I actually didn’t go and compare. Sometimes I do, but if the price for organic seems within reasonable standards, I don’t bother. Sometimes, just to throw you off course, the organics will be cheaper. Really, it does happen. Sometimes the price for organic will be so breathtaking, I’ll have to stop and ponder: are these gold-plated organic potatoes? ‘Cause sometimes, I have to wonder whether they price them way up there just to see if anyone is really watching.
But here’s where being good is hard: they stamp each and every one of those little organic new red potatoes with a bright red “organic” sticker. Do they do this at your grocery store? Does it drive you crazy as it does me? When they first started doing this at the grocery store of my choice, they used little red “organic” stickers that were stuck on with non-water-soluble glue. Now, I am simply the daughter of chemists and not a chemist myself, but I’m guessing that non-water-soluble glue is probably not itself organic. The day after I had to CUT the darn “organic” stickers off the vegetables, I marched into the grocery store and filled out a comment card. Darn it, it totally grosses me out that you use non-water-soluble glue on those stickers! Do you realize that I had to CUT the darn things off my vegetables?
Time bubbles along and the labels are now stuck on with somewhat water-soluble glue. This means that I sat at the sink, warm water running, trying to get each and every red (which dye did they use?) sticker off my darn new potatoes so I could cook my darn healthy Indian curry with new potatoes and chard (organically grown in our garden, most of the time, chewed up by earwigs but still recognizable as very lovely, tender chard).
Is it too much to ask that they make the stickers so they come off easily? I just paid, probably, a premium for these lovely new potatoes, and I’d really like not having to waste a gallon of water and a half an hour of my time getting the stickers off.
Sheesh. It really isn’t easy being green.
But the curry was lovely indeed.

Socialization and the Homeschooled Child

Homeschooling parents will tell you that the comment they get most often from well-meaning adults is that their homeschooled kids might not get proper socialization while being homeschooled. Usually the well-meaning adult has an example or two to give as proof of the deleterious effect of homeschooling on the social skills of children.
Homeschooling parents get angry about it, joke about it, brush it off, but still it keeps coming back and back.
I’ll tell you my own experience: being in school five days a week had an awful effect on my daughter’s social skills. She started kindergarten generally happy. She left kindergarten in a different state entirely.
She went to a school where the word “bad” was never spoken by adults and never tolerated from children. Not a single adult or child referred to her as “bad” in her entire three months there. Yet by the end of her short kindergarten career, my daughter was drawing self-portraits with the word BAD scrawled at the bottom. She would say things like, “Mommy and Daddy are good, Brother is pretty good, and I am bad.” She had nightmares and said that everyone hated her.
How did that happen?
A structured kindergarten environment was the very worst social experience for her. Her small, quiet, orderly program was the worst sort of place I could have chosen, but I didn’t know that then. My daughter stuck out as different. She had a lot of trouble following some of the rules, and because the rules were so strictly enforced, she was often called on for not following rules. The other children noticed. She started to be made a scapegoat in the classroom.
When I was a freshman in college I wrote a paper about George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in the novel 1984. Orwell posited a world in which the government controlled people’s minds by using a language that made bad things sound good. To a certain extent, this is just what advertising does. But really, there’s no way people can change fundamental ideas. You might use the word “ungood” for “bad,” but it doesn’t cancel out the concept of bad. You replace a set of sounds with a new set of sounds, but you can’t change the concept.
Every child, whether or not they’ve been called “bad,” (my daughter hasn’t been, to my knowledge) can tell you who the “bad” kid is in their school classroom. Even if they don’t use the word “bad,” they know who it is. In my daughter’s case, when she was very young she wanted a word that expressed a revulsion at something, not just “bad” but really, really gross and awful. The word she invented was “gox.” Food she didn’t like was gox. Clothing she wouldn’t wear was gox. She has stopped using the word, but the concept remains.
So for my daughter, the most socially healthy thing I ever did for her as far as schooling goes was to take her out of school. Now she sees her school friends a lot less often. And yes, they still, in their limited times together, notice that she is different. They notice that when they sit in circle, sometimes she sits in circle, but other times she lies down in the middle of the circle, pulls up a chair outside of the circle, or turns her back on the circle and ignores it completely. They notice that if they do something she doesn’t like, she’s likely to react in a stronger way than other kids. But she doesn’t have to be with them all the time. She doesn’t need their constant approval. Twice a week she gets to play and have fun, to share her interests and passions, and the rest of the time she can relax. She no longer finds herself playing the “bad” kid so often, and so she is happier. Her self-portraits now have gone back to having the word “love” or “I love you” on them. She’s back to being herself.
I realize that there are some people who homeschool because they want to keep their children away from society, but in reality homeschooling families are anything but homogeneous. If you spend time with a bunch of homeschooled kids, you’ll find that they are as ungeneralizable as any group of people. Yes, as younger children they are probably harder to corral into a unified activity — this isn’t something they practice on a daily basis. But the most compelling argument against homeschooled kids not being socialized well is right there in front of you in every mainstream school in this country: when, in the rest of your life, are you going to have to march around in a group of people all your same age, have a set place in line, do what you’re told, and learn a set group of facts that will be tested by filling in bubbles? These are not social skills any of us need in our daily lives. And certainly we don’t need to be forced into situations where we constantly feel bad about ourselves. For now, as long as she needs it, I’ll take my happy little girl feeling good, and drawing her lovely, loving pictures.

A Study in Contrasts

A few weeks ago my son’s private school had their big spring performance. The other night my daughter’s public homeschool program put on their yearly play.
It was a study in contrasts.
I know a lot of people who have moved from public school to private. In fact, I know of families at my son’s private school who have come both from a public program he was in and the public program my daughter is in. I’ve known a few families who have moved from private to public, usually under duress. But there are few of us who straddle this divide concurrently.
As someone who is interested in compare and contrast, I enjoy seeing two side-by-side examples like this. On the one hand, it’s all about similarities: the teachers worked REALLY hard. The students pushed themselves to the limit. The parents pitched in a lot. The families came out in droves to support their kids. Everyone was appreciative.
Then the contrasts, which were few but potent. It goes without saying that families at private schools generally have more money, but the picture is a lot more complicated than that simplification. First of all, private schools like my son’s try very hard to give as many scholarships as they can, so the student body is more economically diverse than you might expect. Second, those of us who choose a private school not because it’s “what one does” but because we feel that it’s truly the best place for our children often feel every dollar that goes into that school. Not long ago I had a conversation with a private school mom who had just lost her job. She and her family were trying to figure out any way to make ends meet, but taking their kids out of their school was not one of the options.
That’s the long digression to once again remind you, in case you’d forgotten, that private school families are not all wealthy and don’t all choose the school without deep thought about what they’re doing.
But let’s not pussyfoot around here: the private school has more money. My son’s performance was — it’s hard to describe it another way — lavish. Yes, the costumes were largely donated and made by families, but the families clearly have more means, and possibly more time, than public school families. (As I wrote before, having less means and definitely less time, I was thrilled to find out that my son’s costume would consist of a black shirt and black pants. Phew.) My son’s performance had high quality sound, the kids had the attention of dedicated music and dance teachers, and the teachers had the full support of the school and the parents for whatever they thought would be really excellent to do this year. It was thrilling and wonderful to attend this performance.
My daughter’s public homeschool program attempted something they’d never done before: the middle school kids wrote the play with one of the teachers, and then the teachers, kids, and parents put the whole thing together in very little time and with very little money. The sets were painted by kids on scrap cardboard. The costumes were pulled together by each family, with whatever they had or could find or make. The most professional part of it was a take on “Paint it Black” recorded by one of the dads who’s studying in the music program at UCSC. But even then, I luckily logged in three hours before the performance and found a frantic note from one of the teachers saying that the MP3 hadn’t been burned to CD, and did anyone know how to do that? Luckily, I did.
Contrast: lavish, quality, thrilling. Cardboard, seat-of-the-pants, last-minute.
Compare: wonderful!
In both cases, the kids had a full, thrilling, and educational experience. It was just very different. During one of the rehearsals for my daughter’s play, I was taking pictures of the kids rehearsing and I thought, wow, they pulled the set together from cast-off junk. During the performance? No one cared or even noticed! Although it wasn’t Shakespeare, and shouldn’t have been, the performance was real. It was written, created, and performed by kids who are really learning to do it all in their homeschools. Each of them in a different environment, learning different things, coming together to create a unified vision. Really Cool.
I didn’t get much involved with my son’s performance — I’ve been getting involved in different things at his school. But again, it was a thrilling, meaningful experience for them as well. Yes, everything in his performance was sleeker, more expensive, with more time to make sure everything went off smoothly. But for kids, experience is experience. I’m not sure that poverty or riches are the key here. I think the key is passion, and both schools have enough of that. Not to say that I wouldn’t like my daughter’s public program to have enough money to fix the plumbing, but to say that as they say, “It’s all good,” if you make it so.

Eat the Pretty Food!

My older sister is much better about organic and natural than I am. I have to admit, when I’m faced with paying a huge amount of money for organic milk vs. being able to afford a cool new piece of jewelry? Hm. Gotta think long and hard about that one.
Anyway, she sent me a link to Dr. Greene’s website. Isn’t it just darn cute that his name is Green? Reminds me of Herb Caen in the good old days.* Herb Caen loved “name phreaks” — people whose names have an amusing correlation with their line of work. Dr. Bonebrake comes to mind. (If you don’t drive regularly through Soquel on Soquel Dr., you might not know what I’m talking about!)
I went to Dr. Greene’s website and found this article about artificial dyes. Let’s talk about reality for a minute. The reality is that the prototype for our prepared foods came about in the fifties and early sixties, times of heady excitement in the land of the American consumer. Dishwasher? Gotta have it! Two car garage? Gimme one! Pink cookies? Totally cool. (The linguist in me reminds me to tell you that amazing as it may seem, people didn’t say “totally” all that much in the sixties.)
But my point is, we started to get a little carried away in that time after World War II, before Vietnam, when we thought that “progress” was progress. We thought that every generation would go further than the last. It was the time that spawned Star Trek. I read an article one time about Gene Roddenberry, the man who invented Star Trek, back when I was a sort of Trekkie. I never went to one of those get-togethers where people wear Klingon suits and talk Klingon to each other (in fact, the Klingons were never my favorite intelligent race, to tell you the truth), but I completely bought into the world view of The Next Generation, when everything was possible, before Warp Drive was found to harm the universe irreparably! I loved that world in which the ideal could exist.
Back to reality. Reality is that reality not only exists: it rules our existence. Here we are in reality, and no matter what we do, here we are. We’re in Oakland and the murder rate is through the roof. Or we’re in India and the pile of garbage outside our town is higher than any building we have. Or we’re in Santa Cruz, and we drive our fossil fuel-burning cars to get to the Earth Day Festival. It’s all weird and a little bit difficult to sort out.
*I am wondering now whether I define as “the good old days” those days before I had children? Hm. Better talk this out with a therapist before I go any further with this blog entry.
So back to artificial dyes. This might connect with my blog entry about the bottle of shampoo that I’m still using. Why is it that we have artificial food dyes at all? I mean, really, do we need our cookies to be pink? And if we really do, can’t we use beet juice? People have been eating beets for longer than we’ve been using telephones or writing down words, and we’re all still fine, right? But instead, we have red dye number whatever, and we happily pop those babies right in our mouths as if it has never occurred to us that perhaps, we really don’t need pink cookies at all.
I’m thinking about pink cookies because that’s about the most egregious use of artificial dyes that occurs to me right now. You know what I’m talking about: those pink cookies in Safeway that you never buy (right?) but that seem to turn up on tables full of goodies at school events or parties.
Why do we have them? Clearly, if we have learned anything in the last fifty years since we started this whole mess, we have learned that you shouldn’t just throw chemicals willy-nilly into our bodies without, perhaps, pausing first to consider whether they’re ones that our bodies are capable of handling.
Dr. Greene says that artificial food dyes should just simply be done away with. I have to say: I can’t think of a single argument against that. I am skilled at argumentation — I once taught it to college students and I practice it daily with my family. I can take any side you’d like in almost any argument, but I’m having trouble finding anything to say about pink cookies except…they should simply not exist.
Unless they’re made with beet juice. I’m all for beets. Go to the farmer’s market, get yourself some chioggia beets. And then tell me that pink cookies are better. Just try it. Try to say it with a straight face, and then apply for an Oscar. I dare you. I do.

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