Category: Culture

Blow their minds, Santa Cruz Parents!

Posted on by Suki

I pity my readers who aren’t here in Santa Cruz this Wednesday. It’s not often that you get a chance to take your kids on a free ride through avant garde history.

John Cage and my neighbor, local composer Lou Harrison

The wonderful New Music Works (with whom my choral group, Ariose Singers, performs on a regular basis) is making it really cheap to introduce your family to the outrageous wonderfulness of composer John Cage this Wednesday, what would have been his 100th birthday.

Cage is most infamous for his piece 4’33”, which will be performed on Pacific Garden Mall between 3:34 and (what else?) 4:33 on Wednesday. And earlier at noon, check out a few of Cage’s compositions for percussion orchestra featuring the William Winant Percussion Group (great SF group that often performs with NMW) on Duck Island. It’s all free.

Even in Santa Cruz, it’s possible to live your life believing that everything is what it is and there’s nothing left to discover. It’s events like this that make me know what a great place this is to raise kids. Enjoy, and happy Avant Parenting!

[Read a Santa Cruz Weekly article about this event]

Can we be funny anymore?

Posted on by Suki
Boneless chicken ranch
Larson's Boneless Chicken Ranch was simply the funniest thing we'd seen all year.

My family was sitting around the dinner table talking….what we usually do. Someone made a reference to the Boneless Chicken Ranch, and we all cracked up. My kids, of course, learned about the iconic Gary Larson cartoon through us, and through the fact that I treasure the Far Side books I purchased as a teen.

I can’t remember exactly when I saw it, but I do remember what it was like to see something that funny in my teens and young adult life. First of all, funny things weren’t so easily accessible. We didn’t have the Internet. We didn’t have Youtube. We didn’t have everyone’s aunt sending forwards of forwards of forwards of Jewish haiku.

Funny things were found in a few places. First of all, the funnies, of course. The funnies happened in the newspaper every day, but really, Sunday was the day you lived for if you really cared about them. Then there was TV, most of which really wasn’t funny at all. Rare episodes of Happy Days were mildly memorable; Saturday Night Live had a long run of impossibly funny stuff and then it was yawn-worthy; when we were teens, our PBS station started playing British comedy. But heck, we didn’t even have a VCR. Each week, we pored over the TV Guide, looking for something good to watch.

When we came across something funny, we wanted to share it. Somehow, when my kid said “boneless chicken ranch,” it brought me back to what we used to do: We would see something funny, and it would remind us of someone we knew, and if the person wasn’t someone we’d see in short order, we’d clip it out and mail it to them! It seems astounding now. We’d clip something from the newspaper and put it in an envelope with a stamp. (No wonder the Post Office is in such trouble now.)

So, here’s an example of something really funny: I saw that someone linked to an intriguingly titled piece on Youtube about lip-reading Mitt Romney. I clicked on it. It was pretty darn funny (and refreshingly, I bet Republicans would find it funny, too, because seeing such a stiff guy say all those outrageous things really was worth a giggle whether you’re going to vote for him or not). But aside from being funny, it was not worth clipping out, getting it into an envelope, and sending it. There’s just too much funny stuff out there. I gave it a giggle and moved on. Didn’t even bother to forward it. (Or maybe I did. Can’t remember. These things have become so inconsequential.)

But my point is that this has got to be making a huge change in our culture, and in our kids’ experiences. Everything is so easily accessible. You used to have to work to be entertained. Kids would have to ride their bikes two miles to get to the arcade, or they’d have to wait four months till the hit movie got to their town. But now funny is everywhere, shocking is everywhere, sincere is everywhere. On Facebook on any given day I see all sorts of political drivel that I agree or disagree with. 20 years ago I wasn’t assaulted by 2×3 inch posters when I had conversations with my friends.

Will our kids be very jaded about everything? Or will they be much more engaged? Will they be harder to entertain? Or is the ubiquity of entertainment lowering their standards, so that pretty much anything will entertain them?

It’s possible that we who are parents will never know, but it seems obvious that this change is fundamental. Almost as earth-shaking as the day I opened the Sunday funnies to see the Boneless Chicken Ranch for the first time.

The way we do it

Posted on by Suki

Until recently, pretty much every mention I found of homeschooling in the mainstream press looked nothing like what we do at our house. Or nothing like people I know do at their houses. And definitely not like what the homeschoolers I know do when they’re out of the house, which is in general a significant piece of their time. According to the popular press, we were separatist religious fanatics or hippies raising our children like wolves.

Recently, however, I’ve seen a few pinpoints of light out there in the dismal mainstream world. Two of them come from Quinn Cummings, who is apparently famous as a child actor (since I ignore popular culture her name was meaningless to me!). Her message, however, was the one I’d been hoping to see in the popular press: Homeschoolers are choosing a valid form of education that is different from school, but most of us are neither separatist religious fanatics nor hippies raising our children like wolves.

Cummings has put out a book, which I haven’t read, and in the process of publicizing it she has made us rather invisible homeschoolers more visible. In the Wall Street Journal, she not only presents her own reason for homeschooling but also gives people a sense of what is a much more important thing in homeschooling: the hybrid ways of learning that most of our kids are involved in. On the Diane Rehm Show, she necessarily had to stay more personal, but she pushed back nice and hard against the really yawn-inducing questions (as far as homeschoolers are concerned) of socialization and how well former homeschoolers integrate with other kids.

Today EdWeek, an education industry publication, published “Hybrid Homeschools Gaining Traction,” a story about homeschooling that is much more familiar to me and the other homeschoolers I know. Though Cummings mentioned “outschooling” as an option in homeschooling, she still answered questions like “how can you teach your daughter math when you are math-phobic?” with traditional homeschooling solutions—in that case, her husband does the teaching.

Of course, sharing the responsibilities of homeschooling happens all the time in homeschools, and it’s a great part of why one of our local homeschooling programs is called Alternative Family Education. Homeschoolers are all about making learning a family affair.

But the reality for most of the families I know is that what we call “home”schooling would be better called—as people I know do—”custom schooling” or “a la carte schooling” or “cooperative learning.” The EdWeek article hits this nail right on the head, and also the article’s very existence is noteworthy: The only “related story” they could find on EdWeek was published in 2008! If that’s not proof that the education establishment has been ignoring a tidal wave, I don’t know what is.

This is not the sort of tidal wave that is going to gather everything into it and destroy everything else in its path. This is the sort of slow-moving wave that is already changing education, though most of the people in the educational establishment are “blissfully” ignorant.

I use the quotes because they only think they’re blissful. They have been ignoring us and it’s been serving them just fine, or so they think. We are educated parents, people who often went to public schools ourselves. We are people who support the concept of education for everyone. But we are people who know that it’s being done all wrong. And we have found that we can’t vote at the ballot box—Republicans and Democrats are largely unified in their ignorance over what public education should be.

So we’ve taken the vote to the streets. We are leaving schools—both public and private—and looking for something else. We’re looking for an educational world in which, when a teacher doesn’t mesh with a particular learner, you simply find a different teacher. We are looking for an educational world in which a kid who studies algebra at the age of 9 is just as comfortable as a kid who’s not ready for algebra till 16. We’re looking for an educational world in which knitting, map-making, and storytelling are as respectable to study as math and science.

And—EdWeek readers will be surprised to hear this—we have found that world. It’s homeschooling, and whatever we don’t find out there for our kids we are busy creating. It’s a tidal wave because there is no way that our experiences are not going to create fundamental change in education. The blissful establishment has been put on notice by one of their own publications that people are starting to notice what we’re doing.

Outschooling, custom schooling, a la carte schooling, unschooling, cooperative learning, family education, life learning… Whatever you call it, that’s what we’re doing.

Our kids are learning, they’re doing great on standardized tests (though we don’t really care about that), and best of all, they’re doing great at life, which is what we care about most of all.

A boy at 13

Posted on by Suki

The big news in our town recently was that a thirteen-year-old boy was shot and killed in his neighborhood. Police say the boy had gang ties, though his mother and a counselor who worked with him said he’d been turning his life around. My son is thirteen. It’s hard to look at lives like his next to lives like my son’s and make sense of it.

It sounds like the adults in his life were trying to do the right thing. But when I read the headline, with its emphasis on gangs and police, it made me think of how little sense our systems make when you compare them to what we know about brain development. I was blown away some months ago when I read the book Inspiring Middle School Minds by Judy Willis. Willis has the impressive creds of being a pediatric neurologist who changed careers to be a middle school teacher. Not only does she get kids’ brains, she gets kids.

What I learned from Willis and from other people studying and writing about brain development is that we have it all wrong when it comes to how we’re dealing with teenagers. Somewhere along the way, someone suggested that if we get harsher with them, if we push them harder, lock them up, treat them tougher, somehow this will fix the problems that teenagers cause.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Willis talks about how teens learn everything through the emotional centers of their brains. When they are experiencing pleasure, they learn. When they are experiencing negative emotions, they turn off. So when their gang friends tell them how cool they are, how grown up and tough, they feel great. They learn exactly what their gang friends want them to learn. When the police and the juvenile justice system slam them down and lecture them, lock them up and treat them as if they should view life just like a 30-year-old does, they shut off. They literally don’t learn.

On top of that, every single piece of scientific evidence about the development of the human brain points to decision-making as the very last piece that settles into the puzzle. The average person’s decision-making capability is in place by the age of 25—this means that some people take longer than that to attain their full capacity to make rational decisions. So what does that say about how we deal with teens? Our entire approach is just dead wrong. We can’t treat them more like adults—we need to treat them more like children.

My son has never had to deal with the juvenile justice system, but like all kids, he has done wrong things. When he makes a mistake, we tell him. But at the same time, he almost always hears loving words, accepting words, and he always gets a hug, a shoulder squeezed, a smile. And our son doesn’t have to make life-changing decisions yet. Hopefully, he’ll trust us enough to consult us, just as we did our parents, well into his 20’s when making important decisions.

But many 13-year-old boys are put into situations where they have to resist the pull of gang life, which makes them feel validated and important, and where they have to make life-or-death decisions on a daily basis. I know there’s no way to solve this problem for everyone—life is, at its core, not fair. But there is a way for us to make more rational decisions about how to deal with teens in our social systems. When I read about the juvenile justice system, about the way the police and social workers deal with teens, about how families deal with their difficult teens, I wish over and over that we would trust more in what our scientists are telling us.

Teens are still kids. Yes, it’s true that we shouldn’t treat them like babies. But no, we shouldn’t expect them to have the capabilities of adults. They don’t, and no matter how we treat them like adults, they won’t. They’re still kids, and they need love, support, and encouragement from adults who care about them.

I’m so sorry that a family lost their 13-year-old boy. I hope it reminds all of us to hug our teens, love them, and remember that they can’t be anything more than their biology lets them be.

All children are gifts

Posted on by Suki

Children are a gift. They’re the most special kind of gift. They’re not the gift certificate type of gift, where you get to go shopping for something you want. They’re not a birthday gift, where you get it because the giver thinks you’re special. They’re not the sort of gift well-meaning mothers-in-law give when they notice that your tablecloths are all really shabby.

Children are the sort of gift we can’t ask for. Children are gifts that come to us in good times and bad. They come to us whole or damaged. They come to us perfect or deformed. They come to us with the complexity of their biological parents’ genes twisted together. They come to us with the epigenetic memory of our forefathers etched into the fibers of their being. They come to us full of promise and full of mystery. They come to us as wholly imperfect beings. They come to us with brains hungry for learning.

Children are never what we expect them to be. Perhaps they have his nose and your hair, or her way of talking but your way of hugging. But the rest is going to be a mystery. How did she develop that passion? How did he develop that fear? Where did that stubborn will come from? I am perfectly sure I never screamed like that as a child. I can’t believe I was ever this smart.

Children can fulfill our expectations for good and for bad. We expect that they’ll do well in school like we did, and they do. We expect that they’ll not make it through the family reunion without a tantrum, and they don’t. We expect that they’ll like spicy Thai food like we do, and they do. We expect that they won’t like any unusual food, and they don’t.

Children are always the children we need. When childless friends remark how our lives have changed, we agree, and we notice how incomplete our pre-parenting lives seem. When we desperately need someone to love us unquestioningly, they are there. When we need a friend, an ally, someone who really looks us in the eye, there they are. When we need someone to remind us we are all human and make mistakes, they are happy to oblige. When we need someone to challenge us, they are always willing to be the challenge we need.

You can quit a job, stop seeing a friend, even divorce your spouse. But the challenge your child offers you is the hardest to back away from. They are the toughest coach you ever had, who makes you keep going when you’re sure you have nothing left. They are the hardest exam you’ll ever take, because the consequences of failure are so vast, you know that you can’t fail.

Your child is a gift you can’t sum up in words. That twisted DNA. That history of shared laughter, breath, home, learning, sustenance. Those emotions deeper and more violent than any others. What your child gives you is more than language can handle.

Your child changes daily, and you do as well. Your relationship twines upward, each twist new in its own way. When your child goes her separate way, you are still standing on the foundation you built together. You can see your own parents down there, feel the strange mystery of grandparents you loved or didn’t know, hear the distant sounds of places your DNA has been, feel the twining of shared lives that defies genetic inheritance.

And you know, from being a parent, that your child will never truly be away from you. Your shared experiences are part of the ground you stand on. The space between phone calls, the years you don’t see each other, or the unthinkable time when a child passes on before his parents—parents are never alone.

Having had a child, you have a child within you still.

All children are gifts, the sort of gift we can’t ask for.

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