Getting Schooled

Last night, I dreamt I was at my daughter’s high school, was in class but didn’t know the schedule and didn’t have the right books. The teacher gave me a zero.

A day later, I brought my son to take an entrance exam for high school. Another mom confided that she had dreamt the night before that she had looked at her watch and it was 15 minutes before the test was supposed to start – her son’s test – and they were nowhere near the testing site.

I know a surprising number of women who are full-time volunteers at their children’s schools.

I know moms who keep track of their children’s high-school assignments, have their own set of their child’s textbooks and do the readings and work themselves, so that they can tutor their children on that day’s lessons at night.

Others, of course – many others – hire tutors.

My son had to take yet another test, the OLSAT, for high school. (He had to take four different standardized tests, all told.) When we got the OLSAT results back, there was no explanation of what they meant, just a number, so I Googled “OLSAT” and discovered it is often used in the application process for gifted and talented programs at public schools. Therefore, a bustling industry of test-prep tutors has sprung up, for kids as young as 3.

Why has K-12 education become such a gauntlet? Why have schools become so much more about measuring, sorting and rejecting kids than about educating kids? Shouldn’t they be about teaching kids, who, by definition, are not completely formed people, who, by definition, have a lot to learn, who, by definition, are works in progress, works that – oh, I don’t know – the schools should be willing to work on? Shouldn’t the focus be on teaching all kids?

What a nightmare.

When Words Don’t Fit

My mother likes to talk when doing a jigsaw puzzle. “I need a piece that is this certain shade of pink on the left with just a little of this blue on the bottom corner and it needs to have two ‘innies’ and one ‘outie,’” she’ll say.

And suddenly I won't be able to think about the puzzle because of the words in the air.

And I'm complaining about doing puzzles with MY mom?
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On the other hand, sometimes, usually when I’ve walked away from the puzzle for a while and come back, I will pick up a piece without thinking about it and snap it into place in a part of the puzzle that I hadn’t even been looking at.

How does that work?

I think it’s a different kind of intelligence we all have, one that doesn’t use words. Because it doesn’t talk to us in our heads, we’re most often not aware that it’s there.  It almost feels like there is a whole other person, a mute person, inside our heads with us.

Have you ever been driving and suddenly realize that you’ve been lost in thought, but you’ve been driving just fine? The mute person’s doing it.

We may all have a nonverbal as well as a verbal intelligence in our heads, but sometimes I try to use the wrong one. Like my mom with a jigsaw puzzle, I try to use verbal thinking when nonverbal would be better. My mom tells me that, when I was little, I couldn’t jump. I’d stand there and think really hard about it, but my feet wouldn’t leave the ground.

You know what? I think that mute part is like a quiet person at a party. Instead of overwhelming her with chatter, I'll try follow her lead sometimes. 

Negatively Charged

Some parents like being authority figures. They like it too much.

These are the parents who boast of their elaborate system of rules and punishments, as if their kid was a recruit in basic training and not a child living in a family.

When their children’s grades start to slip, they take away privileges, come down on the kids with punishments, rather than asking the very simple question, of both child and teacher, “What seems to be the problem? Why is this child struggling?” I have never understood the impulse, when a child starts failing in school, for some parents to act as if their child is doing it on purpose, solely to anger them. Who would do that: fail, publicly, in front of adults and peers, on purpose?

                                   

These are the parents who say, “My house, my rules” or “My way or the highway,” which is a threat to toss a child out of the only home they know, a threat to the very security of their lives. You see a wisp of this when parents of young children say, “OK, bye, I’m leaving you,” when their preschooler doesn’t immediately follow them -- and the child runs after them wailing.

And when their child tries to tell them that they are being too strict, these are the parents who don’t listen, don’t ponder if there’s truth in what their child says, just respond, smugly, “Good, that means I am doing my job.”

I am reminded of the Stanford Prison Experiment where people were randomly divided into “prisoners” and “guards,” and the guards, and even the psychologist himself, got so carried away with their authority over the prisoners that the experiment had to be stopped.

Do parents need to worry about this aspect of human nature in themselves?

I think so.

Dogs Really Are Zen

Lola

I once read, somewhere, the suggestion that you should meditate while walking your dog. The idea is that you just follow your dog around, focusing on what your dog focuses on, to practice mindfulness, of being, as dogs are so good at being, in the here and now.

I have to admit that my dog isn’t good at Zen dog walking, given that she loves to pull, throwing herself against the resistance of collar and leash with a happy relish, as if she were competing in the Iditarod.

And before you tell me I should train her to walk properly on a leash, I have. She knows. She can do a perfect heel, nose at my knee, watching me closely in order to drop to a sit as soon as I stop, but she’ll do it only if she knows I have treats in my pocket.

Lola is smart and sweet-tempered but she lacks that intense desire to please that some dogs have. I tell my husband she’s more psychologically healthy than those needy dogs. He rolls his eyes.

But she does stay, happily, in the present moment, taking obvious pleasure every day in some very ordinary things, which is why I like having her around so much … 

“Look Like You’re Looking for Candy”

Can you spot the iPad?

That’s what my grandmother used to say, when she sent us down to the basement to get her some ingredient from the freezer or the shelves down there.

She simply wanted what she wanted without having to go down herself. And she really didn’t want you to come back empty-handed and say you couldn’t find it.

But she was teaching a valuable life skill.

Neither my teen-aged kids nor my husband can ever find anything.

They’re all smart, but none of them seem to grasp a simple concept: if you’re looking for something, that something might be behind or under something else. You might have to move things around to see.

This morning, my husband was looking for his iPad. He asked us, a bit testily, what we did with it. He “looked” where it might be. He didn’t find it.

Just now, I saw it: on the counter where he said he looked. There was a magazine on top of it. But it was visible.

I have a hiding spot in the kitchen for snacks that everybody loves but which are for the kids’ lunches. I hesitate to call it a hiding spot. I simply put the snacks in a drawer or a cabinet and then put something on top of or in front of them.

Poof! Like magic, they disappear.

Both husband and kids claim they have “torn the kitchen apart,” looking.

My husband says, when he can’t find something, he hesitates to ask me because I will look where he just did and find it. (And I have been known to be snarky about that.)

I would tell them to look like they’re looking for candy, but with those snacks, they are looking for candy.

I Hate To Play Catch

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&Dreamstime Stock Photos

We have neighbors – a father, a mother and a boy of about eight – who play catch. They play catch all the time.

Pull out of the driveway in the morning: oh, there they are, playing catch. Return in the afternoon or evening: oh, they’re playing catch. 7 am on a weekend morning, out there playing freaking catch.

My husband and kids say, “So, why does that irritate you?” I don’t know, but it does.

Maybe it’s jealousy. On the rare occasions when we have set out to play catch, my family is pretty pathetic at it. We underthrow. We overthrow. We miss a catch and end up chasing a rolling ball down the street. We squabble. We complain about the heat or the cold or how the sun’s in our eyes. We wander off. Hell, even our dog won’t fetch more than three or four times in a row before she’s like, “Enough of this shit.”

This family is very good at playing catch, never missing, just back and forth and back and forth, nice and easy, like a metronome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, playing catch is good for developing hand-eye coordination. And sit-ups are good for developing abdominals. Doesn’t mean it’s fun or that you’re going to see me out in the yard doing hour after hour of it.

Maybe I’m a terrible mother. My kids are never going to get in the 10,000 hours, or seven years,of practicing catch, so they won’t become exceptionally good at … oh, I don’t know, playing catch.

Hopefully, we’ll survive.

The Power of Being Faceless

When I saw the “2^nd Skin Full-Body Stretch Jumpsuits” in the supermarket, I knew I had to buy some. I was sure that my husband and kids would want to wear them too, on Halloween, to answer the door.

Wouldn’t it be funny, when a trick-or-treater rang the bell, that the door was opened by a family of these colorful space aliens?

My family said no. They said we’d scare the little kids.

They said this after I put one of the suits on and started following them around the house. Not speaking, I would examine them closely, reach out a single index finger to touch them, smell them. Even though they knew it was me, husband and teenagers would visibly squirm until they couldn’t stand it anymore and then they’d yell, “Stop it! It’s so creepy!”

That was a lot of fun.

I did wear my suit on Halloween. I would stay back from the door and just wave or do a Dr. Spock “Live Long and Prosper” salute. My son, who was dressed as a mad scientist, would tell the kids, “Don’t mind that. It's just one of my experiments: one of my failed experiments.”

When the kids were small, my husband wanted to dress like a gorilla for one of their birthday parties. The suit we rented was very realistic. I thought it would scare the kids. We decided to show our kids the suit – very carefully, “See? Daddy’s going to put on the head now” – and ask what they thought. They regarded their father/gorilla very seriously, reached out their little hands to touch the fur and then shook their heads no when asked if they wanted Daddy to pretend to be a gorilla for their party.

Oh, well. Too bad.