Stop Already! Or At Least, Let Them Eat Cake.

I have had children in the school system for 15 years.  In that time, I have watched academic creep. What was for third and fourth graders, is now taught in second, what was first grade is now expected of kindergarten.  What my children do in high school, I remember struggling to master in college or opting to avoid all together.

At the same time, the schools go merrily on discussing how our kids should 1) volunteer 2) get 8 hours of rest 3) exercise 4) read for recreation 5) join at least three clubs or 1 club and do a sport and have a social life that includes at least 5 friends and regular-get-togethers.  They should also feel free to let the teacher know they couldn't finish an assignment if they needed to rest but know ahead of time, they'll probably be penalized for not turning it in on time.  They also are informed that high school is a time to try out new interests, but if you do poorly, know that this will affect college applications and there's no mercy for mess ups.  It's goofy. Apparently, if you are not carpe the hell Diem out of every moment, you're flunking parenting and childhood. 

I protest.  I was a teen. I remember being stupid.  I remember not getting 3/4ths of what I was supposed to do.  I remember listening to the same record over and over again, playing video games until my quarters were all gone and having nothing to do.   I remember being bored.  We have become a society that does not value rest or down time or non online time.  Every moment is caffinated and stimulated and saturated with live stream and twittering and email and wi-fi. 

As the parent, I wrestled with the desire to tell her to blow it off.  Honestly. I wanted her to just relax about it and go to bed.

This was not a case of a girl being irresponsible, this was a girl who had done homework over the weekend to get ahead and now was working on new assignments that arrived this week. She took a 30 minute break but was still working at midnight only to receive email notification that two of the assignments were no longer due the next day even though they'd been assigned as due.  So she lost sleep and time to work that was no longer immediately necessary and had the unfortunate situation of still having work that was due which she had not yet done as it was supposed to take only a few minutes of time.   I know because I got to hear this rant last night when the strung out teen couldn't find a paper she was supposed to correct.  She'd done the work, it had been graded, she'd made two small errors but the paper was missing.

It was physics. 

Rather than allow me to send an email explaining the mishap, she redid the entire thing.  She explained, "Yeah, maybe I lost it but that won't mean I won't be penalized."  I understood she was partially correct, there is a tyranny of policy that sometimes seems to trump common sense and sensibilities. And while I thought her teacher would probably be reasonable, she didn't feel she could take the chance. She also explained she wouldn't be able to sleep knowing it wasn't done.   

Being incompetent in physics, I did the only thing I could do, I brought her cakes and milk. 

It made me wonder how and why there hadn't been push back against this demand to make children master what we did not, to demand they know more than we ever did, sooner than we did.  I know why. Part of it is ego manifested in vicarious pseudo virtue competitive parenting.  You know what I mean, "my kid is an honor student who takes physics and is on the highly selective competitive team of whatever that wins and is better than all those other...blah blah blah."  Part of it is the desire of school systems to win that battle on the district level.  Our children are foreign policy experts, Olympians, multi-jointed multi lingual TED talk worthy thinkers with steve jobsian inventiveness and oratory skills that put the founding fathers to shame.  They can assemble a plane from a bicycle just like MacGyver and have memorized Pi out to the 1,000 number (9).  Next year, we're making them expand it to 2000, but with a calculator and by hand.     

As a society, we keep demanding more without  ever pausing to consider what we might be losing in the process of demanding that kids act as something other than kids.  It started with the death of recess and shortening of lunch, the professionalization of parenting and extra curriculum activities, the banning of sweets and treats and firm denial of the reality that there is always a bell curve in every class.  We've decided as professionals and a people, the definition of success is the highest standard deviation.  In statistics, these numbers are supposed to be thrown out and not applied towards one's generalizations that might come from the data.  The question becomes, when college students have to produce Ph.D. work, what will the doctoral students do?  I don't know about you but I'll cry foul when I can't adequately assist with Kindergarten homework.  The authorities will probably declare me unfit and make me return to preschool at that point though. 

My daughter finished her work. She chatted happily over her snack, buoyed by the little something and the knowledge she'd finished.  She said it was a good thing I'd shown up, or she was prepared to break out a journal and start writing how she hated the world and everyone because it was just so hard.  But the little dessert, that was enough to take the edge off of everything. 

I learned something they don't teach you in any grade.  Midnight snacks and milk even cure the ills of physics and high school. 

To Those Who Came over from Mark Shea...

Welcome.  I think the post he meant to link to was this one. Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock.

 But stay, pull up a chair, introduce yourself.  I'll try to amuse.  And Thanks for coming! --Sherry

Can I See Your Writer's Liscence?

Yes. There's a problem officer.

As followers of this blog know, I have a book I've worked on for five years.  What I can tell you now that I've written the darn thing is I did everything wrong except to keep going until the end.  Writing a book without an outline (which is what I did), is like sitting down in a car and thinking you can drive on the Autobahn because you've played Mario Go-Kart against your kids and sometimes won after falling into the mushroom pit only twice in a five lap race. 

There are subplot dead ends all over the place. The thing needs a hair cut, a styling and a wash and blow dry with a flat iron. It is my beautiful Frankenstein.  It's alive.   It shouldn't hold together but it does, and it is my creation so I love it.   But it's a wet hot mess that needs work work work.  

When I start to pull at things, there is a domino effect. I write this and it means this needs work and this needs to be addressed and you forgot that, such that I wonder, should I even touch this?  People who know nothing about remodeling but try to "do it yourself" discover that the first step to remodeling is to be willing to tear something down or take something away.   I find when I DIY, there are nails sticking out that shouldn't, holes that weren't there before and eventually, I need to call a professional. Who did I think I was kidding and why am I here driving myself crazy?  It reminds me of 8th grade when I ran a race and I'd gone through three laps of the thing. Everyone else had finished and I lay down.  I didn't quit but I sure thought about it for a few minutes while I caught my breath and wondered why I ever started running in the first place.  What was so important?

I read my book and truthfully, I both want to finish and lay down.   I want to tell everyone I wrote it...and I'm not sure I want anyone to read it.  It is the neurosis that plagues every writer.  We know bad writing. We know good writing. We know there are flashes of both in our work.  We also know the most critical thing is to not be afraid of what we've written or what needs to be rewritten.

Most writers do not like rewriting. It means we are redoing.  It's much more fun to create new worlds and new words.  So we stall. I read on the process of editing. I read a secondary source for the next book. I write about editing. I make copies of the book in hard back so I can edit but call that part of "the process" of editing. I talk about editing. I call others to talk about editing. I buy colored post-its for editing and a special pen, then I lose them and the kids play with them until they don't exist. Darn I have to get more BEFORE I can edit.  Maybe I should wait for my editor to make suggestions.

In short I do everything I can think of without editing.  I work on the next book and pretend I'm not making the same errors of rushing in to write it rather than thinking it through, stubbornly believing because I'm more experienced, I'll not make the same errors.  Rather, it is more likely I'll make the same errors but be convinced I'm not in error, like the way I have to get lost to get to my kid's basketball practice court because I got lost the first time and the second because this is the way I came and that looks familiar, such that going the wrong way has become an ingrained part of getting there intuitively.

Right now, I could be editing.  You know what I'm thinking about doing?  Going downstairs to play Mario Go-Kart.  

Officer, "Would you care to sit down in the chair? There's a warrant for your editing and I've been instructed to take you to your computer."  

Hopefully I'll make parole for good behavior.