Category: Culture

How did I get here?

Posted on by Suki

When I was in college, the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime was popular with students. One of my friends, I vaguely remember, set an entire room full of test-taking students into guffaws by calling out, apropos of nothing, “This is not my beautiful pencil!”

But the part of the song that’s relevant today goes like this:

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself: Well… How did I get here?”

Well… How did I get here?

At the time I heard that song, I was young and rebellious. I listened to dark music (I actually didn’t own any Talking Heads because it wasn’t quite depressing enough) and wore rather outlandish clothing. I dyed my hair various shades that could be described as blood red to putrid purple. My friends called me Siouxsie after my online handle (this was the strange time before the Internet, where I would go to a terminal room and log on to Stanford.arpa). We called ourselves “death rockers,” the people now known to the world as “goths.” Our perhaps most unfortunately famous counterparts were the boys at Columbine.

These days, I know plenty of moms, especially homeschoolers, who will tell me, “This is what I always wanted to do with my life.” They always wanted to be moms, and everything else they did was leading up to that time.

One mom told me that from when she was a child, she planned to homeschool her kids!

I have to say that I’m fantastically envious of anyone who can be so certain about anything. I am still not certain about what color I want my hair to be, even, though putrid purple is out of the running these days.

I don’t know if moms like me are in the majority or the minority. It’s sort of the third rail of parenting: the topic we can’t really talk about. Once you have brought these beings into the world and you are responsible for them, it’s not terribly helpful to think of where else you might want to be, what else you might want to be doing. In fact, spending too much time thinking like that can cause serious ruptures in the parent-child continuum we call “family.”

It’s best not to think of it at all.

But since I’m on the subject…

Last I remember I was a still-rebellious, though more naturally-colored-haired adult, striving to be a writer, making money by teaching and doing graphic design. I don’t remember ever signing up for being a stay-at-home homeschooling super-mom. In fact, if someone had shown me a crystal ball into the future, I probably would have smashed the darn thing and gone back to my notebook.

These days, I don’t even bother to carry my writer’s notebook anymore. No time to write. Too many nosy kids wanting to know what I’m writing.

I know other moms like me. We sometimes get to shout a few helpful words to each other across a room full of ebullient kids. Or we end up at the same homeschooling support meeting, sighing as another mom says, her eyes sparkling, “I always wanted to be a homeschooling mom!”

But I wonder how many of us really know how we got here. Whether for us this was due to choice or just circumstance. And now that we’re here, how do we make the most of it? Can we even bear to think, “What if?” Can we dare to think, “Maybe once they’re on their own…” or even, “It’ll be easier when they’re teenagers.”

It’s just enough to get through the day feeling like, perhaps, we’ve done a good enough job for today. Tomorrow is simply too exhausting to think about.

OK, here goes: I did a good enough job, for today. Tomorrow, who knows?

Education for everyone

Posted on by Suki

I noticed a few pieces that came down the education news pipeline in the last few days decrying the state of our college education system. OK, so we apparently have beaten down our K-12 system enough, and we’re going on to bigger fish. Not only are our kids getting a crappy education leading up to their high school diploma, but they’re just carrying the tradition forward.

Well, I beg to look a little bit closer at what we’re talking about.

As has been very well documented, there was a huge change in American higher education post World War II. Before that, few men had gone to college, and even fewer women. But returning vets suddenly got college offered to them, and it was enticing.

On top of the GI Bill that got tons of vets into college who before would have gone into a trade or their fathers’ business, we had feminism. Suddenly women, who had tasted the independent life when they worked during the War, wanted to go to college, too.

The percentage of our population going to college suddenly skyrocketed. As time went on, politicians started talking about how getting a college education was necessary. Fast forward to present day, and the goal is to get all kids to college.

This seems like a really great and noble goal, but it’s terribly misguided. The huge increase in people who are going to college has not been accompanied by a similar change in our culture. Probably the same number — maybe even fewer — of the kids going into college today as 60 years ago actually want to go to college. The rest — most of the new recruits — are simply going because they have to. Where before they had to get a high school diploma to prove that they were ready to go out into the world, now it’s a Bachelor’s degree.

When I was teaching at Cal State Hayward (now Cal State East Bay), I lived in San Francisco. One day a neighbor invited me to a party. Why minor incidents sear their way into our brains whereas we can forget major important events, I can’t explain. But I remember this red-haired, pimply young gentleman I talked to at that party. He told me he was going to San Francisco State. Trying to make small talk (not my forte), I said, “Oh, what are you studying?”

He positively snarled at me in response. “I’m not at school now. I don’t want to talk about school!”

Clearly, I thought, this wouldn’t be one of my preferred students.

But he was representative of a lot of my students. They were at college because they’d been told they’d get a better job. They largely had no idea why they were at college otherwise, and generally had no interest in their classes. Their ambitions, such as they were, were often terribly mismatched to their abilities. They seemed like rats trying to figure out their way through a maze.

“Gee, maybe if I do the speech therapist major I’ll get out the other end and find a party with good beer.”

I want to emphasize that this doesn’t describe all of my students. But I think it’s way more representative of the general student body than all of the stand-out students that I could rave about. Many of the kids there just simply didn’t care about education. They would have been happier and more productive doing almost anything else.

And so what I can’t understand is why anyone is wasting their time trying to figure out why our colleges are turning out less and less educated people. Our colleges are turning out exactly the people that we’re asking them to turn out: If we say “everyone must go to college,” then college will be yet another holding pen that bored students must wait in until they get to the other side.

This is what education for everyone looks like. There are alternatives, but apparently we’re not supposed to talk about that…

[See my follow-up to this piece, Alternatives to “college for everyone”.]

Welcome to the hairy potty homeschool. Please be seated and stop arguing with your sister.

Posted on by Suki

I admit I’ve come rather late into the game. I have only just now been introduced to Harry Potter.

Yes, it’s true: Harry Potter has been part of our household for six years, and I have managed to avoid him. My husband read the first two books out loud to our son, then declared it of no further interest. Our son became obsessed, reading Harry Potter — or as he was often called in our house, Harvey Pooter — over and over. The library’s copies took turns living at our house, squirreled away in his bookshelves or under his bed till I sought them out, attempting to avoid yet more late fees.

Finally we bought our son a set, and promptly had to “disappear” them when he became way too obsessed. Since then, we’ve had to disappear them twice.

A boy needs some time to be Potterless, we believe.

But recently, we finished an audiobook in our car and had nothing new to start. Audiobooks are what keep my children from tearing each other apart in the car. It was a deeply scary moment, in which I pondered our being scarred for life after the duel that would ensue.

Then my son suggested, “I’ve got the first Harry Potter on my iPod.”

The sun came out and he plugged in. My daughter and I got introduced to Harry.

So far, we have finished books 1 and 2 and are on the third. So far, I haven’t really prodded my kids for much.

I will, though. This is a homeschooling moment too fertile to give up. Just why is every boy — and many girls — under 15 obsessed with these books? I am already planning how I might start working it into curriculum.

…Which leads me to imagine my children — perhaps all homeschooled children — as adults…

My adult child slinks furtively into an alley, his hands in his pockets. He sees a shadowy figure in a doorway.

“Do you got the stuff?” he asks the figure. He may be a homeschooled dork who hasn’t been allowed to watch TV, but he knows the lingo.

“I got it,” a gruff voice answers from the shadows.

“Is it…” — my son pauses with pregnant longing — “Do you guarantee that it’s not educational?”

“This is good stuff,” the gruff voice answers haughtily. “Not educational. What do you think I’m selling — Sesame Street?”

A hand exits the darkness holding the goods.

A book.

A book with absolutely no educational content. My son drools. His other friends who were homeschooled will be so jealous at this…

OK, back to our regularly scheduled blog.

Here’s my question: Why doesn’t Harry ever confide in adults?

Harry’s got Dumbledore, the most upstanding wizard of his generation. This is a man who sees all, and who understands all, and who forgives all. Note to self: Teach kids about Jesus figures in literature.

Why doesn’t Harry tell him that it’s Snape out to get him? Then everything would be SO easy. Dumbledore would explain why Snape isn’t out to get him, and how he’s planned the whole darn thing, down to Harry getting slime all over his socks.

Or something like that.

It fascinates me that this series has so captivated young modern Californians. Harry is so old-world. So pre-New Age. He never confides in adults. He doesn’t tell people what he’s feeling. If he did, there would be no story. Everything would be worked out so easily. All the happy people would hold hands, hug, and “make it right.”

But our kids are fascinated by these books. Our kids who have been raised to be so emotionally intelligent, to divulge their feelings and listen to the feelings of others. They not only read about Harry’s stiff upper lip and believe it….they eat it up. They love it.

I have no answer to offer here. I personally find Harry frustrating. Sheesh — why didn’t he confide in a trusted adult about the dogs? Oh, if only he’d told the truth when Professor Dumbledore gave him an opening.

But no, Harry never does confide, never does tell the truth when he could just forge on ahead and let his destiny play out. And we love him all the more for it.

There’s a moral here somewhere, but that will have to wait for another homeschool moment. Until then, join me in joking about our hairy potty. At least the kids aren’t fighting in the back seat.

Drought or deluge

Posted on by Suki

I was mentioning to someone that we had exceeded our yearly average rainfall, which was a bright little piece of news amidst floods, landslides, and tsunami.

“The problem is,” she said, “we don’t have average rainfall. It’s either drought or deluge.”

How true that is.

This morning my husband looked out the window and said, “The sky is a funny color. How odd.”

The sky was blue. The sun was out. I went for a walk! Neighbors were out looking like survivors of a, well, deluge. It was hard to believe that two days earlier, I had seen the rain gutters on Soquel Drive spouting up ten feet because of the force of water coming down the hills. One day earlier, my husband had cleaned out a stopped gutter at our house and the resulting deluge blew the hose off the end of the downspout and dug a hole in the dirt six inches deep.

After my walk, I happily attacked a few gardening tasks, wallowing in the mud with glee. I went at a patch of grass that had invaded my beautiful patch of bacopa, grass which I attempt to remove every year and always fail. Why do I fail? Because it’s drought or deluge here. If I want plants, I get weeds. The only way to not get weeds is to make it inhospitable to plants altogether. The fussier gardeners amongst us put in inches of gravel where they don’t want plants. The totally laissez-faire amongst us let it all go where it will. Personally, I’m a controlled chaos sort of person. I like my garden to look wild, but only in the way I want it to.

This succeeds, perhaps, a little bit better than my similar approach to parenting.

I finished the grass-removing task and apologized to all the bacopa I had to rip up in the process. Of course, the bacopa will take root again. But the grass’s roots are still in there, and next year, it will return and I’ll try again.

The weather guys say we’re looking at a week without rain. I think we can all live with that. People I know are evacuated from their flooded towns, stuck behind a landslide in their hillside neighborhood, and ready to trade their kids in for tropical fish.

Enough already. The crabapples are blooming; it’s time for spring.

Face that book with a smile

Posted on by Suki

I just finished reading The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. It’s a much more subtle read than the title might imply. He’s not actually saying that my brain has been taken over by Facebook. He’s only implying it.

Or something like that. I’ve been having trouble with my short-term recall these days…

But seriously, I use Facebook for business purposes only. I am completely serious here… sort of: I have been using Facebook to publicize my writing. (Hey, sign up here if you’re on Facebook, too!) And I have found it an amazingly friendly tool for getting notifications from groups I want to hear from, such as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Gifted Homeschoolers Forum.

For a long time, I felt very guilt-free when my son would say, “Facebook again?” upon glancing at my screen and I’d say, “I’m working!”

Then the Midlanders got to me.

No, not the fans of my short-lived duo with a friend who was also born in that far-away land.

I mean all those kids I grew up with. Except “those kids” have turned out to be adults (how did that happen?) who have real lives (all over the place), jobs (even ones that make money), and political affiliations (no comment). They’ve cut their hair. They are obsessed with football. They have opinions.

It started like this: One of my childhood friends that I have actually communicated with a few times since childhood “friended” me. And that was OK. We’ve actually talked on the phone. I know where she’s living, what she’s doing, and her husband’s name. (Though I’ve forgotten that. See aforementioned memory difficulties.)

Then, somehow, her “friends” found me. I remember Suki, they thought. And they “friended” me, too. I didn’t want to be rude. I accepted their friendship.

And that opened a whole new can o’ worms.

Am I using Facebook now for business purposes? Or have I gotten sucked into the new, mind-numbing void of The Shallows?

It’s hard to sum up his main thesis, except to say that he thinks we should all be pretty careful about how much of our brains we dump into the Internet. We think we’re using it as a tool, but it may, in fact, be using us. (Are you out there, Hal?)

I have to admit I’ve had to “hide” some “friends.” If you post numerous times during the day about what you ate, the cute thing your kid said, and the gum you found stuck to the bottom of your shoe, you shouldn’t be surprised to find out that most of your “friends” have “hidden” you. Let’s be serious, here: They tuned you out long ago. Being able to “hide” you on Facebook is just so much easier and more convenient than writing up their grocery shopping list while talking to you on the phone.

“Hiding” friends is the modern equivalent of “uh-huh” and “really?” and “tell me more.”

Occasionally, I must admit, I get caught up in the drama of Facebook. I know that I shouldn’t reply to something a “friend” has posted, but can I resist? Usually, yes. I’m using Facebook for business purposes, you know.

But sometimes you have to wander over to the water cooler.

So I respond to a post and then someone I haven’t spoken to for thirty years snarks back at me and I have a bad night’s sleep.

Well, actually, I don’t usually remember it at bedtime. Go back to short-term memory difficulties, above.

But seriously, although I use Facebook for business purposes only, I get why people have gotten so “into” it. Their “friends” are so much easier to manage than their friends. Their “friends” won’t run into them at the grocery store or at the school play. Those pesky friends do that sort of thing all the time! Their “friends” can be turned off. Those darn friends will insist on seeing you and getting to the bottom of why you’d criticize their political affiliations and their favorite football team in one 5-word post.

See, with “friends,” you can just say, “Oh, I’m sorry — you must have misunderstood.” And by the time they read that, they can’t actually remember what you’re referring to (return to aforementioned short-term memory deficits), and it’s easy to forgive you.

For all you know, they weren’t even mad enough to “hide” you.

Not that you’d ever know. Not like that real friend you sent a snarky e-mail to, and now when she sees you on the school campus she looks right through you like you’re a… like you’re a…

…like she doesn’t “like” you anymore.

OK. Maybe “friends” are better than friends. Bye, everyone. See you all in Facebook, where it’s so much easier to be me.

I mean, “me.”

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