Getting rid of

I was halfway through emptying out the front hall closet when my mother-in-law called.

“What are you up to?”

“I’m going on a cleaning binge! Right now, I’m cleaning out the front closet. I actually don’t think I’ve cleaned it out since we moved here.” (That was going on 14 years ago.)

“Oh, I love getting rid of. When I moved to Florida, I got rid of almost everything, even things I still liked.”

Getting rid of. It’s not something I’m good at. I look at every plastic bag, every piece of string, every cardboard box as something I might need… someday. But inspired by my MinL (as she calls herself), I brought three garbage bags full of stuff to the Goodwill truck today.

I wasn’t alone.

Apparently spring cleaning is a thing of the past. We just got back from staying with cousins up in Tahoe, and she said that she’s looking forward to her winter cleaning.

“I never do spring cleaning,” she said. “I like going through things in the winter when it’s cold.”

It was cold up there, and gorgeous. Beautiful, powdery snow, the stuff that skiers all over come for. The first day, my daughter was dismissive. “This snow is too dry to make good snowballs with,” she said.

Then she got her ski lesson. Good thing we’re not the types to even think about having a place in Tahoe, going up every weekend in winter to ski. If we were, we would’ve been calling the realtor.

Instead, back down the mountain we came. As a transplanted Midwesterner, I’m charmed by California’s version of snow: Powdery, dry stuff that you can brush off your clothes and boots; sunshine during the day that heats you up so much you don’t have to wear a scarf; snow that you can drive to in a day. I grew up with the mucky, icy, freezing cold stuff that started in November and, if we were lucky, left at the end of March. As a teenager I ran every day on icy sidewalks, in slushy gutters, a scarf wrapped around but not touching my face. Within minutes, the scarf would freeze to a perfectly molded face mask that I’d breathe into so the sub-zero air wouldn’t go straight into my lungs and freeze them.

California’s winter, as I said, is much more charming. It’s the sort of winter you can drive out of (with thousands of your newest friends) and be home in time to unload closets, load up the minivan, and drive to the nearest Goodwill truck. They could have made money renting out parking spaces. By the time the Goodwill guy had given me my receipt, four other cars had pulled up into make-your-own parking spaces.

Now perhaps I need to have MinL give my daughter a lesson in getting rid of next time she comes. Before I started on the closet, I announced that I, and only I, would get to make decisions about what gets kept and what gets thrown. Immediately, she grabbed her fort-making kit (that’s staying, she said), her fold-out tent (definitely staying, she said), and a miniature version of a Radio Flyer wagon that we got filled with blocks.

Her eyes lit up, and she immediately did the thing that sent that darn little metal deathtrap into the closet in the first place: she put on foot in it and started to roll.

“Stop!” I commanded. “That thing is Dangerous and it’s Going Away. Don’t even Try to ask for That One!”

She paused, considered the tent, the fort she’d already built, and the singing Happy Birthday bear I’d made her put in her room.

“OK,” she said. “But when we start on my closet, we’re Not Throwing Anything Away.”

Like I said, MinL is going to have to come and talk some sense into her.

Until then, my son’s closet is fair game as long as I do it when he’s not home.

How to fix our schools? First, ask the right question.

A friend forwarded two articles about the state of education in California and all the political wrangling: How do we best improve our schools? How do we get more federal money? What is the effect of teacher’s unions on reforms? What is the effect of charter schools on kids and on neighborhood schools?

I realized that some of my strongly held opinions make me just step away from arguments like this and say, “They’re arguing about the wrong thing.” In both arguments, test scores formed the basis for “proving” that one approach was better than another. But depending on how you read the data, you can use test scores to prove pretty much anything!

Here’s the problem with test scores: It has been proven that one way to predict a school’s test scores with alarming accuracy is to look at the zip codes of the parents. It’s also been proven that a way to predict a particular student’s test scores is to look at what scores the parents would get. Schools have so little effect on test scores that when all these politicians argue about them, their arguments are invalid right from the beginning!

You can look at my own family as an example: two PhD parents. Our high school grades were all over the map – from an excellent student to a poor student. Test scores for all of us? Right at the top. Doesn’t matter how well we did in school, because that’s not what standardized tests are testing.

So then come all the arguments about charters. Their scores are lower, thus they aren’t succeeding. Their scores are higher, thus they are leeching the best students from the public schools. See? The scores can be used to mean anything that people want them to mean, and thus they are meaningless!

Here’s how I think we should “fix” our schools:

First, I believe that for one chunk of students, CA public schools are too academic. These students should be given an education appropriate to what they’re planning to do in life. They don’t need to be forced to take all sorts of academic classes that eventually convince them to drop out of school. They need well-equipped shop classes, classes in money management and health, classes in bookkeeping and law clerking, and other sorts of practical classes that will engage them in becoming productive. No wonder they drop out: school has nothing to do with their lives.

On the other hand, the old method of “tracking” students based on their class and race was stupid: students should choose tracks based on their interests and their plans. They should be able to jump tracks anytime they want, just in case they wake up one day and realize that what they really want to do is be an English professor or a rocket scientist. And community colleges should be there, well-funded, to help everyone if the path they chose in high school doesn’t end up working for them or if the jobs in their field dry up.

For students who want to go on to higher education, programs should exist to support their needs also. In that case, high schools should focus the more academic classes on kids who are trying to get into a university and who will need higher level math, higher level research skills, and advanced sciences.

The second major change that I think needs to happen is in the structure of schools. The idea that a school draws kids based on their location rather than based on their interests and needs is outdated. Schools should be based on an area of expertise, and students should be allowed to attend full-time or just by the class. A kid who homeschools should be able to take a math class at the high school, regardless of his age or “grade.” The school should get funding for the classes it offers, and if a class isn’t well attended, it gets cut just like at a college.

As a result of this, everything would need to become more community-based. I’ve heard a persuasive argument that kids’ sports should be taken out of schools and turned over to communities — I think this would become necessary. Kids would join leagues just as they do in sports that are not traditionally supported by high schools. Schools would start to need to serve kids’ needs rather than administrators’ needs.

I’m not totally anti-testing: I think all kids should be tested a couple of times during their education to make sure that problems are caught early and that we are providing all our kids with the tools they really need in modern life. But once schools become more fluid environments, having something like the California high school exit exam would be meaningless. More kids would be able to graduate from high school with meaningful degrees, and they wouldn’t have that dreaded feeling that their lives are set in stone by the age of 18. That reality is one that died in the last century.

All the arguments about improving our schools are meaningless to me until the idea of school gets into the 21st century. Few people think that the old model ever worked, if they really look at it. It’s just what they’re used to, and change scares people. Just look at the health care debate: Before it became a possible reality that change was going to happen, everyone agreed that our health care system was broken. As soon as a bill was being put together, all of a sudden people hugged onto their awful, overpriced, overbureaucratic health plan like it was their beloved baby!

Incremental change is happening in education in places like Santa Cruz County, but we need to identify the right questions before we can create a system that works with our modern culture.

Violent trailers at kids' movies have got to stop!

Yesterday we went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox at the 41st Avenue Theater. The movie was great, probably a bit much for the younger set (in my opinion), but perfect for the kids I went with, aged 7 to 10. The only thing that made me cringe was their use of “cuss” for the obvious word missing in sentences such as,”What the cuss are you doing?” The kids probably didn’t notice, though.

There was something else, however, that made me more than cringe: There were 4 movie previews before the movie started. Two of them were totally appropriate, though I would not be likely to bring my kids to see them — a Chipmunks movie and a movie about the tooth fairy.

The first two trailers, however….

One was for Avatar, rated R. The trailer showed a man’s body growing in a tank, lots of shooting, enormous dinosaur-like monsters jumping at the viewer with their mouths open, a machine gun shooting at the viewer, and a woman crying, all set to scary music and sound effects.

The other trailer was for an upcoming movie called Wolfman. The trailer showed dark, ugly images of a man’s hands distorting, flashed a picture of a man tied up and in agony, and a person being electrocuted, all set to scary music and flashing scary words about how the wolfman is coming to get you.

As the second trailer started, my 7-year-old buried her face in my arm and asked me to tell her when it was over. Sitting next to her were two young boys, preschoolers, watching with placid faces.

Both trailers were approved for “APPROPRIATE” audiences — all cap’s, in large bold type. Both were shown before a 2:15 matinee for a kids movie. What’s going on here?

This has happened now at two out of the last three films we saw in the theater. We are extremely choosy about the films we go to, and we’d hope that theaters would understand that. My kids are not going to see either Avatar or Wolfman. Those short trailers were definitely enough to scare them, considering that they’ve never seen anything like that and unlike the two little boys sitting near us, haven’t been desensitized.

If you are interested in joining me to complain about these sorts of trailers being shown at kids’ movies, you can visit Cinelux Theaters’ website contact page at http://www.cineluxtheatres.com/contact.asp. I have already called (no, they don’t answer their customer service phone number!) and left a message. If they get back to me (unlikely), I’ll let you know what they have to say.

You can also complain to your congressman. Mine, Sam Farr, has a contact link on his website. The government allows the movie industry to be self-regulating, but if they continue to market violence to kids, that should change.

Mr. Know-it-all

Before we had kids, my husband used to have a standard joke that he needed to get a business card that said “Mr. Know-it-all.” He has one of those encyclopedic brains, and he reads voraciously. So even though we don’t watch TV or listen to most popular music, if I say, “who is that person on the front of the Enquirer?” he’ll be able to answer. He knows the meaning to most any word we can find, though I have occasionally stumped him (and let me tell you, it’s thrilling when I do!).

Our son has inherited that particular characteristic from his father, but there is one big difference: His father was an only child, and he probably learned the various ways to offer corrections to people’s misinformation from other neighborhood kids and on the playground. You learn good and quick not to answer a kid’s boast with, “Well, actually, that’s not exactly true.” He learned that there are lots of situations in which correcting people is not polite, not socially acceptable, and a bad way to keep friends.

Our son, however, has a little sister. And like all little sisters, she says things that are fantasy, wish-fulfillment, or just plain not true. And unlike kids at school, his sister isn’t going anywhere. Perhaps he has largely figured out not to constantly correct his friends, but he sees no particular downside to correcting his sister… often.

I remember when I learned about autism. I was at college, and I read something about it, and how it manifests itself on a spectrum. I remember looking around myself and thinking, hm, I bet some of my friends are on that spectrum!

It’s fascinating how certain characteristics tend to bunch together. I went to Stanford, and so all my peers there had been very, very good students. But I am sure that for many of us, that came at a cost: learning social cues was more difficult. Kids who have books to love depend less on friends. And perhaps it’s a chicken and egg thing: kids who are predisposed toward using their brains more than their bodies are more likely to end up socially awkward. Or is it that kids who are socially awkward gravitate toward using their brains in a different way?

I knew people who’d gone to MIT, a place where the “nerdy” kids (mostly boys) were even more concentrated than at Stanford. And social skills were even less in evidence there.

Of course, you get those Tiger Woods characters: smart (he went to Stanford), personable (just look at that smile), and athletic. But they are clearly outliers when you look at the general trends among humans. Most of us are better in one realm of human existence than in others. And the more we apply ourselves in that direction, the less we have to give in other directions.

[*Tiger Woods actually came into my mind randomly, but I now remember that a friend suggested the other day that in order to get more hits on my Examiner stories, which pay by the click, I should write about Tiger Woods. Because I don’t watch TV, I am only vaguely aware of what’s been going on. But here it is, my almost gratuitous mention of Tiger Woods!]

So my husband and I have been experimenting with ways to get our son to stop critiquing every little statement his sister makes. So far, we haven’t come up with much. It’s gotten to the point that we can hear it coming, so we try to stop him and ask him to think about what he’s going to say. But he [honestly, I think] doesn’t think that what he’s saying is a criticism. It just hurts him to hear people saying things that aren’t true.

I know how he feels. I learned very early about not being a know-it-all at school. But I remember the feeling of sitting there listening to people saying things that were wrong and feeling this sort of discomfort verging on pain. I loved knowing things! Doesn’t everyone love knowing things? Don’t they want to know that they are wrong and fix it?

But I also know how my daughter feels. When she was little, I read that studies of kids find that first children are more likely to have imaginary friends — kids who have older siblings get teased out of that luxury. As soon as our daughter’s imagination started to blossom, I started to remind our son that he once had imaginary friends who lived in an imaginary world (an island near Japan, if you want to know), and we let him have that time.

Our son’s teacher said something to him recently that I think might be an appropriate metaphor. He said something like, “Don’t use your intelligence as a mallet.” You can’t — no matter how tempting it seems — bang knowledge into people’s heads. The most gracious people figure out other ways of doing it.

And if nothing else fails, at least you can look at yourself with humor. I’m thinking that perhaps I need to get my son Mr. Know-it-all cards. Then when his sister says something the is incorrect, he can hand her a card and offer her his services… when she’s ready to receive them!

Happy Chanukah!

When my husband and I were talking about having a baby, one of the things he said that was important to him was raising our kids Jewish.

I said, “That’s fine with me, but what does that mean to you?”

Eleven years later, we’re still working on the answer to that question.

My husband, like many American Jews, was raised in a largely secular environment, amongst many other Jews. His family has a long, proud tradition of involvement in the labor unions, which to them was a commitment that was born of religious conviction. Though they weren’t religious, their Jewish cultural tradition taught tikkun olam (repairing the world) as a primary goal in one’s life. Another important thing that kids were taught was tzedakah (charity or justice).  It was not enough to live a good life — you are required to help others live a good life, too.

My family was Catholic, and through most of my childhood we attended mass regularly and celebrated all the holidays. But by the time I reached high school, my parents’ involvement in the religion had waned, and none of their children went on to practice Catholicism in their adulthood. For me, it would make no sense to say that I wanted to raise my kids “Catholic,” since that term denotes an actual religious practice rather than a cultural heritage.

So I had no problem adopting a Jewish heritage for my kids, though it did involve a learning curve for both me and my husband. Aside from studying to be a bar mitzvah, my husband really had no religious training at all. But his Jewish identity was solid: he grew up in heavily Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and he had a huge family network in the area.

At the time we had our first child, we knew a few non-religious Jews in the area, none of them with kids our kids’ age. So the first thing we did was enroll our son in a Jewish preschool, which served as a training ground in Judaism for both him and for his parents. We learned the basics of the holidays and the prayers, and we met other local Jewish families, almost all of them “mixed” marriages.

So my situation isn’t unusual — in fact, it’s a fact of life for many mothers of Jewish kids. The interesting thing is how it ties into mothering: I would have had no problem mothering my children as my mother had mothered me, but at first, inserting a religious custom that my husband had barely practiced in his childhood felt forced. After a while, the traditions we were trying to practice made a bit more sense and we started to make them our own, with our own personal flair.

Last year I wrote an article for Growing Up in Santa Cruz (republished in Examiner.com) about local families who don’t celebrate Christmas. I really related to Alisun Thompson, who said: “We were aware when the kids hit school age of the conflicting sides of not celebrating the dominant holiday.”

We non-Jews who are mothering Jewish children have to come up with a whole bag of tricks that we weren’t prepared for. And adopting a minor holiday of little importance (Chanukah) has been part of how we’ve been able to make this transition. On the one hand, Jewish kids are set from the beginning to be comfortable not being in the “in” group. By definition, unless you live in a very Jewish neighborhood, being Jewish means you’re not “in”: you don’t sing the songs, have the tree in your living room, or open the presents on Christmas morning.

On the other hand, Jewish kids growing up with cousins who celebrate Christmas (whether or not their parents identify themselves as “Christian”) have a bigger thing to overcome: what is the tradition of your family? How do you recreate the special excitement that kids feel during December?

In Judaism, what are called the High Holidays  — Yom Kippur (day of atonement) and Rosh Hashanah (new year) — are the really big holidays. They happen in the autumn, when the biggest excitement in most American families is back to school and falling leaves. The second most important holiday is Passover, in the spring, coinciding more or less with Easter. Even Purim (a celebration that involves dressing up and making a lot of noise) and Sukkot (the harvest festival) are probably more important, on a religious scale, than Chanukah.

But amongst many American Jews, and I would guess, even more in families that are blending with the Christian heritage of one parent, Chanukah allows us to share in the excitement of December (though Chanukah occasionally happens in the end of November, since it’s on a lunar calendar). We pump up Chanukah not for any religious reason but because we feel a need to offer our kids something to counter the big excitement their cousins are feeling.

If I were religious, or if my husband were religious, I might find this objectionable. But since we’re not, we’ve just decided that we need to present them with another opportunity to celebrate the beginning of the winter months. I’m a pretty logical person and so what appeals to me about Christmas and Chanukah is pretty much the same thing: when the days are shorter and it’s dark before we get dinner on the table, lights, candles, shiny things, special food, and presents bring a bit more cheer into the house.

I get this from my Catholic dad: I pretty much like any excuse for decorating the house and eating good food! So yes, in the scheme of things Chanukah is a pretty minor Jewish holiday. But in our house, we use it as a reason to celebrate the pagan origins of a winter solstice holiday — the celebration of light, warmth, and good food — as well as the parts of the Jewish religion that speak to us: teaching our kids about tikkun olam and tzedakah.

So even if you’re not Jewish and aren’t raising Jewish children, happy Chanukah! For that matter, happy Diwali and happy Solstice and happy anything that celebrates the beauty we can bring into our lives during the coldest and, in California, wettest months.

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