Category: Culture

More than just clouds

Posted on by Suki

The other day the kids and I were driving along the highway marveling at all the types of clouds we were seeing: cirrus, nimbus, cumulus, stratus! It was an unusual parade of meteorology across our usually tranquil October skies.

I think about my childhood in Michigan and I imagine that some California kids might think the weather people are just downright liars. Different-shaped clouds? Clouds with blue sky behind them? In coastal California, we generally get two kinds of clouds: really low, thick clouds that mist all over us (we call it fog and get it largely in the summer) and higher thick clouds that rain all over us (we call that “storms” and we get it largely in the winter). To see isolated clouds here, to see anything that deviates from solid blue sky or a dense layer of grey something, is pretty unusual. And a real storm?

Sunset photo
Someone named Blair took this photo in Michigan. The range of colors and shapes you see in the sunsets there is really stunning

Where I grew up, there wasn’t much nature to be all that thrilled with. The virgin forests found by the French were all gone. You think California got clear-cut? Where I grew up, there wasn’t a tree over a hundred years old anywhere. And what happens when you cut down forests? You get swamps, bogs, slushy, ugly land with puny, stunted trees. We had a few grand oaks that the farmer who owned our land before us planted, and a few grand willows that my dad planted (and regretted when they got into the water pipes), but nothing extraordinary.

We lived far from the big lakes, and the lakes around our house were brownish greenish muddy. When you walked in them with your bare feet, the squidging feeling was really awful, and it took all my inner strength not to scream, “Ewwwww!!!” and run to find a swimming pool. Too bad they hadn’t invented water shoes yet, or if they had, they hadn’t made it to the Midwest.

What else can I do to slam my homeland? Well, then you had the weather. In each season, you had that perfect day: The gorgeous winter day of glistening snowdrifts and sunshine; the gregarious spring day of rain showers and budding flowers; the glorious summer day of warm sun and slight breeze; and the crisp fall day of a tremendous palette of leaves of every color.

I did say day, a singular noun, yes? The rest of the time you had slush, mud, intense heat, bitter cold, stifling humidity or crackling dryness. I might sometimes complain about the fog or rain here, but I know my complaint is silly.

On two occasions, I have been asked to offer a nugget of positive thinking about Michigan to travelers. One time, my husband was being sent on business to Detroit. I told him to check out Greek Town and the fabulous sunsets. He actually called me on his way to Ypsilanti, pulled over at the side of the highway, stunned by the amazing display in front of him. “This is fantastic!” he said to me.

Another time a friend’s girlfriend was going to grad school in Michigan, and he was following her. A fellow Midwestern transplant, he groaned as he told me, and asked me for something, anything, to ease his pain. Well, I said, this fall when the apple harvest is in, go to a cider mill. Get a cup of fresh-squeezed cider and a fresh donut. It’s unbelievable.

Again, my advice was appreciated.

Of course, I was a miserable child in Michigan, and I’m sure that there are many other things to recommend it. However, my childhood home does rather put this place in stark relief. We are so lucky in so many ways, not the least is our beautiful Monterey Bay, the anything-but-peaceful Pacific, the foothills and mountains, the redwoods, poppies, and banana slugs.

We sometimes wonder if our kids know what they’ve got. They probably think we’re really weird. OK, I know they think we’re really weird, especially when my husband and I pause at a stunning view and one of us spouts our well-worn refrain: “We live here!”

It’s nice, however, to have a day like our day of many clouds, when my daughter and I thrilled at seeing so many of the shapes represented. And then we got one loud crash of thunder in this place that seldom gets a lightning storm. It reminded me of the gorgeous clouds and sunsets of Michigan. The amazing, thrilling storms that sent us shrieking for the basement. The taste of apple cider that no cider mill in California can rival. A hot donut just out of the oil.

We’ve got a lot here, but we don’t have it all. And that’s a good thing, a thing to remind myself now that the sun has returned with our solid, blue skies. Somewhere in Michigan right now, someone is pulled over to the side of the road, basking in a natural glory that we Californians can hardly imagine.

So what’s with the marshmallows?

Posted on by Suki

I love reading studies about the brain and how it works, and especially as they pertain to raising kids. Studies like these range all over the map from serious, in-depth, well-designed work by professionals to headline-grabbing, seriously flawed studies by people who think they know what they’re doing. In either case, the results from these studies—which should always be taken with a large grain of salt and a deep, calming breath—can help parents question their parenting. In my view, it’s not about being a perfect parent, but about being a conscious parent. As long as you’re thinking about what you’re doing, you’re probably doing a pretty good job.

One of the psychological studies that has been referenced a lot lately was the “marshmallow study” done with the children of Stanford grad students forty years ago. The researchers asked the children to sit in a room with a marshmallow and not to eat it. If they didn’t eat it, they’d get two when the researcher returned. Then the researcher went out of the room and watched while the kids squirmed and fought with their inclination just to eat the darn thing and get it over with.

The cool thing about this study is not the marshmallow. The cool thing is that these kids were the children of Stanford grads, and they agreed to be followed as they grew and made choices in their lives. (As anyone knows, if you want to make sure you can find people, just hire the Stanford Alumni Association to do it. For a period of about twelve years I moved at least once a year, and they always found me!) So this study is what’s called “longitudinal”—it doesn’t just test in a lab environment, but also in the real world.

These kids, one could argue, had everything: educated parents, excellent schools, a higher than average standard of living. But the researchers found that, in fact, not all of them had what they needed, and that thing they didn’t have was self-control.

You can read this piece at EdWeek to get details. It turns out that self-control correlates much more than pretty much anything else with a student’s future success as an adult. IQ, it has been shown, has no relationship to success. (One of my favorite statistics is the percentage of Terman’s “genius” students who won a Nobel Prize: 0%. That’s right, being designated a genius by an IQ test is not a prerequisite to reaching the top of your chosen field.) Even grades in high school are not a great determiner of future success.

I find this study interesting because it clearly aligns with what all of us see about successful people: They are more focused than the rest of us, they set goals, and they don’t give up. They say that the thing that successful people have in common is failure: They were more likely to have failed and persevered through more failure. The rest of us fail and give up.

I have a bit of a beef, however, with the original researchers and with the follow-up detailed in the EdWeek piece: What’s the deal with the marshmallows? As soon as I read about the original study, I saw a flaw in their reasoning. So I decided to question my daughter, who is famously lacking in self-control in some ways, but also completely honest about her intentions and able to think through situations to decide if she even wants to have self-control.

“So if I gave you a marshmallow and told you I’d give you another one if you held off eating that marshmallow for fifteen minutes, what would you do?” I asked her. Now, I realize that asking a kid and actually doing the experiment are different. But I had a hunch I’d get an interesting answer. Here’s what she said.

“Well, I’m not really crazy about marshmallows,” she told me. “They’re OK toasted over a campfire in s’mores. But if it was just a cold marshmallow, I’d probably just eat it right away.”

“Why?”

“Because cold marshmallows aren’t very good,” she explained. “So I wouldn’t want a second one anyway.”

Here’s self-control for you: Since our last camping trip, we’ve had a half-full bag of marshmallows sitting in plain view in the pantry. My daughter, great lover of junk food, goes in there daily and stares—we call it pantry TV or refrigerator TV in our house—trying to find something, anything that has no redeeming nutritional qualities. That bag of marshmallows remains untouched.

Similarly, I know that I can’t keep bad stuff that I love in the house. I recently made a cheesecake and the leftovers made it, small slice by small slice, into my stomach and straight to my hips! But that bag of marshmallows? I have no problem whatsoever letting it sit there. I second my daughter’s opinion: s’mores twice yearly while camping is marshmallow enough for me.

So to all you parents who are fretting about your child’s self-control, I ask you to reconsider this study: Instead of “does my child have general self-control,” ask yourself, “does my child have self-control when it pertains to a specific goal?”

The press tells us that Barack Obama can’t seem to resist a few daily cigarettes. But he made it to the presidency, which most of us would agree is a measure of success. I bet he wouldn’t have eaten that marshmallow, either.

An Ode to the Fair

Posted on by Suki

I was telling my kids about the major memory I have of our yearly county fair. I grew up in a place that was rife with both artists and farmers, and I am guessing that our fair had plenty of worthy stuff to see. But here’s what I remember: Eating cotton candy, which makes me feel sick, then going on rides that turn my stomach around, which make me be sick. Yep, my childhood memories of the fair pretty much all involve throwing up.

So it was that in my adult life, I never thought about fairs. I never noticed, wherever I lived, when one was advertised. Oh, I have fond memories of the Ferris wheel, and when I drove by one I’d feel nostalgic, but that was it.

Then along came the kids, and their schools went to the fair. And then we started homeschooling, and lots of homeschoolers are are big into the fair. I was actually shocked to find out that one of my homeschooling friends whom I’d consider a shoe-in for the fair (she raises, kills, and jerks her own meat, fer gawd’s sake) doesn’t do the fair. It has become such a huge part of our lives.

The very coolest parts of the fair are not the ones I remember (obviously). My kids do get a little smattering of junkfood and stomach-turning rides, but the main reason we go there is to see everyone’s entries. One totally rad mom in our homeschool program puts together a scavenger hunt with all the kids in our program listed. Her version was four pages long! I condensed it to the front and back of one sheet by making the font tiny, but still, it was impossible to find everything on the list.

What did we see? We saw all manner of art, including a gorgeous close-up shot of a bee and some really stunning paintings. We saw sumptuous-looking baked goods that will become stale as people admire them through the week. We saw sewing projects and garden projects. We visited one classmate and the lamb she raised from a newborn.

My kids entered their own work in photography, sewing, baking, Legos, and the perennial favorite, Vegetable Creatures.

We also saw work by kids we’ve met through other avenues. I see them yearly and point them out to the kids: Remember Kaitlyn? Isn’t this gorgeous? Oh, and there’s Tara! And look at the amazing work Simone is doing now that she’s in high school. Though we don’t often see these kids anymore, we do see them yearly at the fair, meeting up with them like old friends at a school reunion.

The parents also get involved (though it occurred to me today that I’d never even considered entering anything). I saw a friend’s knitting, her husband’s plum wine, another friend’s photo. I love to see my friends doing other things besides parenting and striving to make enough money to parent. Art — and winemaking — is necessary for the cultivation of a healthy soul.

I also see grown-ups I know through other avenues — our vet’s goats, a family farm we’ve visited, someone I worked with before I had kids.

It is true that there are many drawbacks to the fair: It’s not cheap to get in (except on education day, which is when we go), and the food prices are a perfect illustration of highway robbery. My kids beg for stupid, expensive junk they won’t want in a week.

But it’s also true that you won’t get a better cross-section of this county at any event outside of the county fair. Everyone’s there, from strawberries cultivated and picked by our seasonal workers, much needed and little appreciated residents, to art by our semi- and professional artists. We’re all there, together, enjoying the agricultural, intellectual, and artistic harvest of the place we call home.

Comin’ back atcha

Posted on by Suki

The first time I was ever quoted in a newspaper, I was misquoted. It was a little thing — the writer simply misquoted a number. But it was humiliating to me — getting that number wrong made me look like I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Fast forward to my life as a journalist. I try to take great care when quoting other people to get it right. If I have any doubt, I shoot them off an e-mail to ask. If what they said wasn’t clear, I ask them if they’d like to clarify so I can use a quote that won’t misrepresent their meaning. But of course, I’m sure I make mistakes. If I annoyed you by how I wrote about you, I’m issuing a blanket apology! I didn’t mean to!

But it’s a good thing to get a little of my own medicine back at me. I was quoted this week in the Santa Cruz Good Times in the article “School’s Out… Forever” by John Malkin. I actually think John did a good job of explaining homeschooling and capturing the Santa Cruz homeschooling community’s vibe. And, as far as I can see, he got my quotes perfect. Right down to the one where my pronoun and antecedent didn’t match. (“You can always go back to school!” my husband just joked to me by IM.)

But it is really interesting to have my words put into someone else’s context, and I think it’s a great reminder for me that when I write about other people, I am taking little bits of them and putting them into something of mine.

The nice thing is, I have a blog, and John nicely linked to it, so I can respond at lightning speed!

I wanted to point out one thing that he didn’t make clear in the article: Lots of homeschoolers are not anti-school. Yes, it’s true that school was painful and boring to me, and I eventually dropped out rather than stick it out as I was expected to.

But I actually think that many schools do a great job for many kids. I’ve been involved with a few too many schools in my time, trying to find a place where my kids would thrive. At each school my kids have attended, and at each school where I know parents or teachers, and at each school I’ve written about, there are parents, teachers, staff, and even students who love their school! Schools, I believe, are not intrinsically the problem. And homeschooling is not necessarily the enemy of schools.

John sprinkled his article with quotes from John Taylor Gatto, a well-known anti-school writer. I have tried to read Gatto’s work. I did make it through one entire book. But I found the arguments so polemical, the bending of history to his point of view so obvious, and the unnecessary skewering of teachers so spiteful that I haven’t read much more.

Unlike the people who made up the term, I actually do believe in the “Big Tent” theory of our country. I believe that we have a framework that allows us to accommodate many different lifestyles and cultural norms, all under the stars and stripes. We have some common goals that we all have to embrace, but past that, we have room for military academies and AFE, prep schools and unschooling, charter schools and neighborhood schools.

So while I really appreciate the Goodtimes’ support of the Santa Cruz homeschooling community, I also feel a bit uncomfortable seeing my words right under this from Gatto: “Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”

Well, no. Some schools may do that, but that doesn’t have to be the essence of a public school. And it’s certainly not true of any school I’ve been involved with.

So… I am smilingly swallowing my own medicine and thanking John for his thoughtful article. I’m glad that the GoodTimes is getting the word out about many of the wonderful homeschooling programs we have. But I just want to remind people, again, that loving one thing does not necessarily imply hating something else. It’s just the best choice for us, right now. Tomorrow? Ask me again when soccer camp’s over and I don’t have a quiet morning to myself to write in my blog!

Digital delights for the family

Posted on by Suki

I’ve been noticing lately not how the digital world has been intruding upon our lives, but rather, how it’s been helping. We recently went on a long trip and I definitely noticed how our lives have been changed by digital devices and media.

Connections

One way that digital devices and media have changed our lives is the manner and frequency of our contact with our family and friends. For many years now, I’ve been taking digital photos, which was probably the first significant change I made. It made quite a difference in how much money it took to send recent photos of the kids to Grandma!

For a long time, I maintained a website, where I uploaded photos and wrote narratives of our lives. More recently, I largely upload my photos to a photo-sharing site, and tell Grandma to choose the ones she wants prints of. Both kids e-mail with her on a regular basis. Because they see my parents more regularly, they are less likely to send e-mail, but it’s great that they can connect with Grandma, who is now in Florida.

I do also use Facebook, though I’m generally uncomfortable using it as a personal information-sharing tool. The reason for this is that because my business is so tied into my personal life, I have ended up with lots of Facebook “friends” who are not friends at all. I’m sure I would love them if our physical lives crossed, of course (I’m not dissing my “friends” or my friends!), but I know the difference between “friends” and friends, and I am more cautious in how I share our intimate details there.

Now that I have a phone that takes video, our video sharing has changed dramatically. I used to send Grandma VHS tapes, then DVDs. Now I send her shorter, single videos of something the kids have done. It’s more immediate, and less work for me. Grandma used to receive long tapes or DVDs on which I’d simply dump a month’s worth of video — I didn’t have time to edit! Now, because I can send things off immediately, I only send the stuff I know she’ll be interested in.

Communication

When my husband and I first bought the house where we live, my younger sister and I were in business together. So she and I inhabited the small bedroom downstairs which is now my daughter’s bedroom, and my husband worked upstairs in the small office that we later remodeled into a large shared office and our son’s bedroom. My sister thought it was funny that my husband and I would call each other on the phone to exchange information or just chat. We also e-mailed from one end of the house to the other.

But better than phones and e-mail have been two digital revolutions that have literally changed our family dynamic. The first was shared digital calendars. Early on, I had to e-mail my husband and ask him to put something on his calendar, such as an event we were going to or a time he had to pick up a child on his way home from work. Then I got a paid service where we could sync our calendars together. This seemed like a complete revolution in our lives. No longer did I have to e-mail him and did he have to put things on his calendar — my calendar would just automatically show up in his. But things got better: These days we use Google Calendar, a free service, which we both can edit and share. So we can now both make changes both to our household calendar and the kids’ “school” calendars. He and I seldom have to waste time talking about the functional aspects of our lives together, which is actually quite wonderful!

The second change was when I bit the bullet and invested in a phone that could get my e-mail. My husband had already done that (he’s in the industry so he’s a much earlier adopter than I am), and now we can assume that at some point during the day, even if I’m out and about or he’s in meetings, our e-mail will actually be read. Though I do have to be careful not to become one of those people who checks her e-mail when she should be having conversations with people (yeah, that’s you, Mom!), this is again a time- and energy-saving device. I call my husband because I actually want to talk to him, not to transmit information that is better transmitted when it’s convenient for him to get it.

Household matters

At my husband’s prodding I started using Evernote. This is the most amazing service if you have a web-capable cellphone. You create “notes” on your computer that magically appear on your phone, and vice versa. Why is that magic,  you ask?

Well, let’s see: I’m in a bookstore and I’m trying to remember that book I wanted that the library doesn’t have. Oh, I wish I had my book list with me… Hey, I do! Or I’m out and about and I need to record some information, and I just stick it into Evernote so it’s waiting for me on my computer when I get home. You can even e-mail things into your Evernote account. My most recent adaptation of it is that I have transferred all the recipes I have stored on my computer into Evernote. I can stick my phone into the clear plastic cookbook holder we have so it’s protected, and use it in the kitchen. Last night, I wanted to make a family favorite, spaetzle. The recipe I use is in The Joy of Cooking, which is way up on a high shelf in the kitchen because we don’t use it very often. This time, I got it down, and instead of using it to cook with, I took the time to input the few ingredients and their measures into a note. Now I’ve got it for future use and won’t need to keep that cookbook anywhere accessible.

I also keep tons of homeschooling information on there, such as the list of books upcoming for our book club, so I always have it with me. And I have theoretically set it up to keep information I need for my writing, though I haven’t used it for that purpose much yet.

Green living

I wrote some time ago about how we had bought a Nook (Barnes & Noble’s version of a book reader like the Kindle) as part of our family effort to use less stuff. We canceled our newspaper subscription and now I read the newspaper every morning digitally (and we still pay for it, which is important to me, given that I am part of a changing industry and I would still like to be paid!). This has been moderately successful. I have to say, I really hate the device itself: its touch screen doesn’t register my touches (for some reason, my fingers don’t seem conductive enough on touch screens and only really good ones work for me!), and the buttons you click to page through are actually quite hard to press for someone with tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. However, here’s where the phone and the digital revolution come in: Though I’m not terribly happy with the Nook’s physical self, it comes with a Nook account. And now there is Android software for my phone. So even better than reading the newspaper on the Nook itself is having reading material with me wherever I go. Old books are free or very cheap, so I bought a cheap collection of everything the Bronte sisters ever wrote. That’ll keep me going for a while. I can also read the newspaper. And I don’t have to consume any paper to do these things. When before I might have bought a cheap paperback that wouldn’t survive through multiple readings, now I have a digital copy of the book that cost so little I don’t mind if I don’t read it again. And since the Nook also has an app for the iPhone, my son can read books on his iPod as well. Nifty! (And I still buy hardcover books if I want them on my shelves forever.)

Another innovation of the digital world is e-statements. We have pretty much stopped receiving paper statements from our various accounts, and this has been almost a seamless experience. With one exception, our e-statements and e-bills have successful come to our e-mail or Billpay system, and in many cases we pay with no paper, no postage, and no gasoline involved. Again, bad thing for the postal service, great thing for the earth. My husband has the job of filing what we need to keep, and once every few months the shredder would go for hours. These days, we hardly ever fill the shredder bin. I get e-statements with all those superfluous pages that they have to put in for legal reasons, and I can simply ignore them.

Homeschooling/Entertainment:

We love books on tape. We get every one the library has. We anxiously await more. The very best thing that has happened to audiobooks is e-audiobooks. No more changing CDs. No more wishing a book on tape could be played in our car. Either my phone or my son’s iPod gets plugged directly into our car’s audio system (it’s not a new car so we had to buy adapters for this, but it does work). And here’s the biggest plus: Both of my kids are literally pacified by words. If there are words coming in, somehow it almost always derails their fighting instincts. We have calm, fun, instructive car rides. Sometimes they beg to sit in the car a little bit longer when we get into the garage! And if we arrive early for something? We’re set.

Too much in touch?

So yes, I think there are drawbacks to this digital world. I have, a couple of times, found myself scanning my e-mail when I shouldn’t have been. I missed something important that was said or I spaced out when I was supposed to be engaged with other people. But I’m working hard to resist the temptation, especially because it so annoys me when other people do it. But I have to say that the digitally inspired changes in our lives lately have largely been positive. Unlike in the past, when installing new software or adopting a new system was a nail-biter, given how much could go wrong, these days I find that I can know within a short time whether someone’s new app is a life-changing innovation or just another thing vying for my attention. As long as I resist the temptations (Scrabble on the subway in NYC sure was fun), the benefits have been great.

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