Category: Culture

“Inside Out,” a tour of modern parenting

Posted on by Suki

One of the benefits of parenting now rather than in previous times is how much more we know about human brains and how they work. Before the 21st century, advice to parents and teachers was pretty much based on inference—”we see that lots of people who have done xyz have had good results, so you should do it, too.”

These days, parents are benefiting from—and in some cases, freaking out because of—a huge influx of hard data about how brains work. So it’s not surprising that Pixar has come out with a movie that’s not only for kids, but for us adults who are worrying about how our parenting is affecting our children’s brains. [Read an interview with the director in which he talks about how his 11-year-old daughter inspired the film.]

The freak-out at the dinner table. We’ve been there!

A movie for kids and adults

“Inside Out” is a truly brilliant film in several respects. The aspect most important to me as an adult is that it’s a kids’ movie that adults can not only enjoy with the kids, but enjoy separately from the kids. As we sat in the theater, I noticed a striking pattern of laughter: The kids were laughing at the funny lines, the goofiness, and the nutty action sequences.

True, the adults were laughing at those, too. But we were also laughing at the adult level inside jokes (did they really sneak a joke about San Francisco “bears” into a mainstream movie?), the pained and loving relationship between the two parents (oh, ouch, I think we’ve had that actual discussion, dear), and the uncomfortable recognition of feelings from our own childhoods.

True to life

Not all films have to be “real” in the sense of sticking to objective realism. However, any good story is “real” within its own context. Whether the characters are fairies or girls attending a new school, their experiences and especially their reaction to those experiences need to seem “real” in context. We have to believe them.

The temptation with kids’ movies is to make things happen just because kids think they’re funny, or because it was time for some action in the plot, or because the animator always wanted to animate a wild mass of curly, red hair. “Inside Out” never feels like it’s veering off-center; this is a movie that knows what it’s about.

Modeling a healthy parenting style

Did the makers of this film really portray a loving, modern family that lets their 11-year-old daughter [gasp!] walk to school in a new city? Well, yes, they did. I wonder if Pete Docter has read Free-Range Kids. 

I appreciated that this film featured neither the sappy parent-as-role-model nor the damaging parent-as-natural-adversary tropes that are common in children’s films. These parents are real. They don’t make decisions only for their daughter—they have needs, too. They don’t try to control their daughter or even to completely understand her. They just love her and do their best, which isn’t always quite good enough.

A healthy theory of mind

Let’s face it: this is a cartoon, and the representation of the brains and how they work is cartoonish. But it’s also beautifully constructed both to reflect the state of modern brain research and also a healthy modern view of how to manage our ideas and emotions. In the movie, each person has a “control room” that is run by the emotions happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. But that’s where the brains’ similarities end. Each character in the film has a control room that works differently, depending on the character’s personality and life experiences.

Some of the funniest moments in the film are when we briefly step into the minds of the minor characters and see their control rooms as a metaphor for how they approach the world. Every character, we are reminded, is a person, and has the same emotions as the next. How those emotions behave and interact is what makes each of us unique.

Two thumbs up

I have to admit that I’m generally loathe to go to popular children’s movies. I am deeply grateful when another parent offers to take my child. And now that my youngest is old enough to go on her own, it takes a lot to get me to spend my dollars and my precious two hours on something that will, at best, bore me, and at worst, offend me.

But this is one film I can heartily recommend to parents like me who are done with stupid kid films. I left the theater feeling like I’d actually received more than I paid for, an unusual result of watching a hit summer movie.

Mom’s efficient control room—calm, cool, and collected!
Her daughter’s control room is rather more chaotic.
Dad’s emotions are remembering a great hockey game before they realize that their daughter is having a crisis.

Aside: Interesting how the filmmakers chose to portray Mom’s emotions as all women, Dad’s emotions as all men, but Daughter’s emotions as mixed male and female. Intentional? Hm…

In praise of adult ed

Posted on by Suki

Every Wednesday evening last spring, I presented myself with a challenge.

A friend encouraged me to take a jazz singing class with her at our local community college. I’d been looking for a new musical outlet, so I agreed.

I nearly walked out the first night.

The teacher was a venerable local swing band leader who immediately started calling on students to get up and perform. Accompanied by a piano, a series of cute young divas got up and sang polished songs. I started to feel uncomfortable, knowing that I hadn’t gotten up in front of an audience and sang without a book or a guitar to shield me in a very long time.

One of the benefits of community college is that the teachers are often actively working in the field they teach in. In this case, my teacher was a well-known local bandleader.
One of the benefits of community college is that the teachers are often actively working in the field they teach in. In this case, my teacher was a well-known local bandleader.

Then a woman much older than I volunteered. She got up and spoke into the microphone. “For my whole life I was afraid of talking in front of people,” she said by way of introduction. “I’m taking this class so I can get over that.”

I thought, “she’s afraid of talking in front of people and now she’s going to sing jazz into a microphone?”

That’s all I needed. When he asked for the next volunteer, I raised my hand. If a woman 20 years my senior with no vocal training was willing to put herself out there, who was I to pretend I couldn’t do it?

I did it, and then every week following I did it again and again.

There’s a lot of wrangling going on right now about the purpose of community college. The combination of limited funds and the push for “college for everyone” has incited discussion on whether community colleges are for the community as a whole or just for the specific purposes of helping young people on to four-year colleges and giving specific technical degrees.

Personally, I have always loved the “community” aspect of community college, and I think it would be sad to see it go. I have both taught at and been a student at a few different community colleges, and I think they only benefit from mixing the “young divas” with the more, ahem, seasoned members of our community.

My jazz class was a great example. Each student was there for a different purpose—there were a few music majors preparing to apply to four-year universities. There were some lost souls who drifted out of high school and were now drifting into college without a plan. There were adults who just love adult ed and have taken a variety of courses over the years. And there were adults who had specific agendas, such as being more comfortable in front of an audience.

Our teacher didn’t spend much time “teaching”—he didn’t have to. Each student inadvertently brought his or her own wisdom and questions into the mix, and just performing and working together engendered deep learning in everyone. Occasionally our teacher would see an opportunity for a bit of a lecture, but he kept it short and to the point.

People who want to separate the community college from the community are probably unaware of how much learning takes place in a classroom that seems so informal. They are also probably unaware of (or unconcerned with) how important intergenerational learning can be to many of the eighteen-year-olds who end up drifting into community college simply because nothing had gelled for them yet.

I wish those people would attend a class like the one I was in. They would see the teacher energized by working with older adults who shared a passion with him. They would see that same teacher trying to offer confused and unhappy teens a reason to put some structure into their newly unregimented lives. They would see a bunch of people modeling healthy learning behavior for each other: set a task, work on it a bit, fail to perform as well as they’d like, work more, succeed.

At the end of the semester, we all performed songs we’d prepared in a local bar that hosts jazz bands. Though our teacher wasn’t much for direct instruction, it was clear how much we’d all learned.

I don’t know if I’ll take another class soon, but I love knowing that community college is there for me, a member of our community, as well as everyone else who wants to continue their education.

These are people who have died

Posted on by Suki

Perhaps you remember the Jim Carroll song, “People who died.” It was one of those songs that completely blew me away the first time I heard it. Not so much the 2346th time.

However, it’s on my mind today. It’s on my mind because technology has done this weird thing: It won’t let people die.

Nisene
Everything I put on the Internet, including my cat Nisene in the fog, achieves a sort of immortality. I just searched and found Nisene on Google Images! Immortality in all nine lives.

First, there’s my address book. In the past, after a few tries I found spiral bound paper agenda that I really liked, and every year I bought a new one. The one I liked had a small address book section in the back. Each year, I would transfer my important current contact information from one calendar to another.

“Important”: as in people I still like (at least sorta), people who still live near me, people who are alive.

When I was still using paper calendars, of course, I was younger, and more people I knew were alive. But then you keep going and life starts getting in the way. People you know succumb to the horrible diseases they’ve been living with (diabetes, multiple sclerosis), people you know and love die of old age, people you know get killed by terrorists, die of cancer, or…whatever.

The great thing about the paper address book at the back of my calendar is that each year, I culled the people who didn’t belong anymore. And perhaps that was one person per year.

But the digital lifestyle has changed all this. As my address book has grown, so has my hard drive. I don’t have to worry how many entries are in my address book—technology is far outpacing my addition of people important to my life.

And the result is…dead people.

Until last year, I just couldn’t face culling the deceased from my book. I do wish there were some feature in my address book to mark them “no longer with us” rather than just “delete.” But that’s not the case. In order to stop seeing my deceased loved ones (not to mention people I corresponded with briefly for an article I wrote), I have to delete them.

Deleting dead people is No Fun.

It seems so final. Yes, I should get over that. But it took me years to remove my lovely elderly friend Susie who was the first person more than 50 years older that I’d called a friend.

Susie was an aberration…until she wasn’t. People younger than I, people older than I, but within enough years to be in “my generation,” started to go. And I hesitated to remove them from my address book.

And then there’s social media.

LinkedIn, a service I find very useful as a business person, continues to recommend that I link with a former teacher of my son’s—a wonderful teacher, a truly incredible man—who succumbed to cancer a few years ago. Facebook lists several dead people as my “friends.”

I feel like we’re coming upon a new paradigm for “life.” Before the digital epoch, life was limited by flesh. And perhaps that limitation was extended a bit by paper in large buildings we called libraries. But life was life: You were born, you developed into the person you were going to be, you did stuff, then you died. If the stuff you did was deemed “important,” it might get “immortalized” on paper or film.

But in the digital life, nothing dies. In the European Union, they had to invent a “right to be forgotten.” In the US, we have no such luxury. Everything I do online is being sucked into the grand cyclone we call the Internet. When I step off this moral coil, my digital life won’t go with me.

I imagine my friends, my family, and my “friends” after I go: They join a new online service and they get the suggestion that they “friend” me, a dead person. They will be able to comment on my work, which will still be out there—alive, as it were. People I don’t know will receive suggestions for like-minded people to link to…including me, a dead person.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, hasn’t it been a goal of humans throughout the ages to achieve immortality? And doesn’t the Internet offer some sort of immortality? (Immortality 1.0. Sometime soon the Internet will be Old Hat and we’ll achieve Immortality 2.0. Stay tuned.)

On the other hand, seeing these dead people makes me sad.

“I see dead people.”

Yes, I do, when I search in my address book for “house.” When I go onto LinkedIn to post an article and once again, it suggests dead people who would help me further my career. When Facebook asks me if I want to “share” my latest news…with dead people.

Ponce de Leon would be flabbergasted. Undaunted, we move on into this new stage of human existence. Dead people are dead, but they don’t go away. It’s comforting, in a way, that they never leave us. But it’s depressing, in another way, that we can’t let the dead rest.

Finally, I have started to cull. Every once in a while, I save a backup of my address book, then I delete. The friend, the teacher, the colleague. Delete, delete, delete.

Then I move on with my life. They had a right, I remind myself, to be forgotten.

Book Review: Creative Home Schooling grows up

Posted on by Suki

It was the weighty Bible of gifted homeschoolers. You saw it on every shelf. My copy was so coveted, one of my homeschooling friends apparently walked off with it and it hasn’t been seen on my shelves since.

What was it? An extensively researched book called Creative Homeschooling by Lisa Rivero, published by Great Potential Press (who published my book, From School to Homeschool, ten years later).

The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer and more focused on modern homeschooling.

Creative Homeschooling was exhaustive and a bit exhausting. At least one homeschooling mom I mentioned it to said that just looking at it gave her a headache! But it was a necessary resource when the Web was in its infancy. With the great changes in homeschooling since the first edition in 2002, homeschooling books have become something other than a resource list. At the time the first edition of Creative Homeschooling was released, however, parents were hungry for information.

“I wrote this book because I needed more information,” Rivero writes in her introduction to the new edition. “At the time, little had been published about homeschooling gifted children, and the Internet was not nearly the quick go-to resource it is today. Fewer people knew anyone who homeschooled or thought of it as a ‘normal’ choice.”

When I started homeschooling in 2007, Rivero’s book was already a classic. Although I couldn’t utter the G-word (“gifted“) in my usual homeschooling circles, as soon as I met another gifted homeschooler, we’d talk about Creative Homeschooling.

But now it’s 2015. People get their homeschooling information from the Web. Why a new version of this venerable homeschooling book?

Rivero says that the first thing she did in the revision process was to realize that her book was no longer valuable as an up-to-date resource list. In fact, even if she updated the list, it would go out of date quickly. The Web is the right place for resource lists. So what is left?

The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer, more focused on the “why” and “how” of homeschooling. Paper listings go out of date immediately, but great advice is timeless.

“Present generation [homeschool] families have quickly learned that homeschooling a gifted child is not about finding the perfect approach or even the perfect resource; they know that the only way to make homeschooling work is to inform themselves as much as possible, and then to always make decisions based on their individual families,” Rivero says. “There is no book that can make those day-to-day decisions for them.”

Rivero’s book focuses on the keyword in its title: creativity. Homeschooling is not about following a formula, and learning is not about attaining a set body of knowledge. Modern education is all about creativity and flexibility; homeschoolers are well-situated in a world where being a lifelong learner is key to success (monetary or otherwise).

“Many of my college students can do a Google search in a heartbeat but are lost or anxious when it comes to organizing their own thoughts during an hour of solitude,” Rivero says. “Time is homeschooling’s greatest gift.”

Rivero gives away her point of view in many ways, not the least of which is starting her “Nuts & Bolts” section with thoughts on creativity. She focuses on creativity throughout, even when discussing such mundane topics as the loss of income in a household.

“Some homeschool parents give up a job to stay home with their children,” Rivero writes. “Often more stressful than the loss of income is the loss of intellectual and creative outlets.”

Rivero
Author Lisa Rivero

The book’s emphasis is on “gifted” children, but the definition of that word has widened and Rivero’s advice is applicable to any child who is an asynchronous learner. Refreshingly, although Rivero’s book is aimed at families who value academics, she doesn’t push achievement-oriented learning. Rivero doesn’t jump on any bandwagons. Her material is based on research, such as questioning the validity of learning preferences, a bit of a sacred cow amongst homeschoolers at the moment.

The updated edition incorporates much of the cutting edge psychological and neurological research that has happened in the years since its first writing. Rivero includes information gleaned from research, such as Carol Dweck’s Mindset, takes on the right brain/left brain fallacy, argues for considering the problem of applying labels to children, and takes on the damage that overly high expectations can have on developing minds.

The new Creative Homeschooling isn’t the resource Bible it once was. It’s now a lean and focused look at the value and challenge of homeschooling bright children. The fact that it’s only being offered as an e-book is perhaps its most telling feature. This book is not a romantic look at homeschooling past, but rather a guide into homeschooling’s future.

Creative Homeschooling
by Lisa Rivero
Great Potential Press, 2014
Buy at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble

Impractical shoes

Posted on by Suki

I found myself standing on one side of a sea of a chai latte river, wondering how I’d gotten myself into this pickle.

I knew I shouldn’t have packed the impractical shoes.

The first pair of really impractical shoes I remember owning was when I was in high school. Every girl was buying Candies boots. They were—if I remember correctly—cowboy-styled shoes with an early-80s update. Mine were blond leather with wood-grain heels.

The heels were very, very high.

Manolo Blahnik
If I could, would I wear ridiculously high-heeled shoes? Oh, yeah, I admit that I’d be happy to do it if I thought it wouldn’t cripple me for life!

Of course, the heels were high enough on a typical girl, but at that point my feet had finally reached a size 5, the smallest of women’s sizes. Before that, I’d shopped in the kids’ department. So 4-inch heels on my feet were not comparable to 4-inch heels on average women’s feet.

Average women were standing on the balls of their feet. I was nearly en pointe.

The first day I wore those boots to school, I stubbornly refused to learn the obvious lesson: I was not cut out to wear impractical shoes. I wore them again, even though I could hardly walk and was in major pain by the end of the day.

Finally, my track coach decided it for me. He announced at our first practice of the spring that all team members were forbidden to wear high heels because of the risk of damage to the tendons in the foot.

That decided it. I went to flats. Soon after I discovered punk and adopted black boots as my shoe of choice, and impractical shoes were in my past.

Like many women who have had babies, my feet have gone through some changes. They’re hardly longer—by length I should be wearing a size 5 and a half at this point—but they are wider and more picky than ever. After a lecture from another man who’d never donned impractical shoes—this time a podiatrist—I resorted to ordering EEE-width shoes on the Internet rather than letting my local shoe seller talk me into their cute, much too narrow latest styles.

But before the podiatrist, and well before the river of chai latte, was my final purchase of impractical shoes. It was at my local shoe seller that I got talked into them. They are cute. The heels are modest, probably an inch and a half, and I have to admit, they make my legs look great. Even though my joints forced me to give up running years ago, those heels did their job and made all the right convex and concave formations appear on my legs. And given how “low” the heels were, I could even walk in them. Even better, my shoe seller explained, they were made by a company that also made sneakers, and the sole was made to be more comfortable and better for the feet.

More comfortable and better for the feet, certainly, than shoes designed by Manolo Blahnik, but torture for my poor stunted, spread out dogs. I bought the shoes, wore them a couple of times, then put them high up in the closet.

Along comes my mystery weekend—so mysterious I didn’t yet know that it would involve a river of chai latte flowing down Van Ness Avenue. For my birthday my husband announced he was taking me away—somewhere—and we would do…something. He said, “bring mostly casual clothes, but one nice outfit.”

Now, men, any woman can tell you, are not all alike. However, there are some truths that apply to most straight men, and one of them is that they don’t understand how delicate the task of donning the right clothing for the right occasion is. Men generally have three levels of clothing: scruffy/play, nice/work, and wedding/funeral. Men’s clothing is designed with this trinity in mind. Men who enjoy dressing well might own khakis for casual, trousers and a button up shirts for work, and a nice suit for other occasions, happy and somber.

My own husband falls a little to the left of that scale. He works in an industry where common work attire seldom rises above a somewhat clean t-shirt, so he has few occasions to worry about whether his dress is suitable for the occasion.

For me, however, what I choose to wear is tied into what I’m doing, who I’m seeing, where I might be going, and what mood I’m in. Certainly, when I had little kids I ended up in jeans and t-shirts almost exclusively, but now that they’re older I spend a bit more time figuring out what “feels” right to wear before I get dressed.

Packing for my mystery chai latte adventure, therefore, sent me into a bit of a tizzy. And in the midst of that tizzy, what did I do but pack those darn impractical shoes. I packed them even after I took them down off the high shelf, stepped into them, and said out loud, “Who am I kidding? I’ll never wear these again.”

And into the suitcase they went.

The mystery weekend turned out to be a lovely, child-free couple of days spent in San Francisco. The nice clothing was for an event at Davies Symphony Hall. And as I dressed for it, I realized I needed to give those impractical shoes another spin. I was not yet thoroughly convinced that I couldn’t wear them.

So there we were, walking down Van Ness Avenue, almost to Davies, when the river appeared before us. It flowed down a side street, turned the corner, and spilled onto Van Ness. It was a gorgeous milky brown, the color of my favorite drink. And thank goodness, it didn’t smell of what it was actually composed of.

It did, however, pose a problem. How to get over to Davies across the flowing river of muck? We ended up having to walk, along with other symphony goers, down the middle of Van Ness, the cars creeping by us in the far left lane, we in the middle, the chai river hogging most of the right.

Perhaps these shoes really do have a sole designed like a sneaker, but let’s be serious here, high heels are not made for comfort. They’re made because they form all those nice convex and concave contours in any woman’s leg. Those of us who think we’re too skinny see flesh pop and curve. Those of us who think we have to much flesh enjoy the definition of our muscles.

The river dwindled to a creek then a stream, and my husband—wearing his sneakers even to the symphony because he’s no fool—could certainly have jumped it. But in my impractical shoes, I had to wait until I could step daintily over the sewage and onto the sidewalk. Because of my uncomfortable shoes, I had to walk even longer than I would have.

I swore that when I got home, I’d send them to the Goodwill. But when I got home, there was their nice, comfy box waiting for them. I put the shoes back in the box and left it on the floor of my closet.

I’ll give them away to someone who will appreciate them, I thought.

There they sat, until one day I sighed, picked up the box, and placed back on that high shelf.

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