I rarely sit in these seats that face other seats. I find the accidental eye contact disrupting. Is it accidental when I zone out as I stare at a stranger, trying to figure out whatever I think I can figure out about a person by staring at her face? Moving on.
Well, I had no choice today. I always leave work early enough to get an emergency exit three-seater. Because being able to escape a disaster through the window is as important as having a personal space buffer between me and my seatmate.
But today, Obama got in my way at Faneuil Hall. I had to walk up into Government Center and back down to Congress. I then tried to cross a street to continue making my way to North Station and got screamed at and possibly almost shot by a jacked up cop, not knowing that the motorcade was about to come through. My B, officer.
Anyway, I'm guessing you don't care about that. Because I got the sense that you aren't big on empathy.
When you sat down across from me, my first thought was that you were pretty. Not gorgeous, so don't let it get to your merely pretty head.
But then a little kid made a rather vocal lap up and down the aisle of the train car with his mom, who was visibly desperate to find a seat so he'd calm down. And then, you, in the words of Kevin McCallister, woof. Not so pretty anymore.
Approaching 48 seconds of this child's noise, you looked at the pair and rolled your eyes. You rolled your eyes aggressively. Which is kind of hilarious, because if you can picture an adult aggressively rolling her eyes, you know it makes her look an awful lot like a petulant child. Irony is my favorite.
I know I sound critical. But they say that the flaws we're most critical about in others are ones we see in ourselves.
I don't know who they are, but they're at least kind of right. Because I used to do the same thing you just did. All the time. Back when I was pretty.
Back when I had a tan. And highlights. And time to put on makeup. And money for makeup. If nothing else because I didn't bother to get the expensive organic sh*t before.
Before I became a mom.
But back to you. As soon as your eyes completed the roll, mine shot directly to your bare ring finger.
Of course, your marital status told me nothing definitive. It's probably equally possible that you're a mom. Maybe not equally. I don't know the statistics.
But I was looking for the only clue I might find. Because I hope you're not a mom.
Us moms do sometimes get frustrated when our kids go ape bonkers. I might not know for sure why, but I like to think it's because we love them so much that we internalize their frustration. Not because the sound just annoys us. But then, we are still human. (Awesome humans. But still human.) And okay, it might be annoying sometimes.
But, that's with our own kids. I'd like to think (or maybe just hope or wish) that moms have it in them to sympathize with other moms when they witness a kid being... well, a kid.
The general public really likes to hate on kids. They're called entitled, spoiled, out of control. All because they're not behaving like adults.
All you uptight biddies are convinced THIS GENERATION is so awful. Guess what? Y'all been thinkin' that for a century's worth of generations. Seriously. Just go read that. All of it. And then shut the eff up about kids just being kids. With a little trust and a lot of good modeling, they'll grow up to be good humans.
Being controlled every minute of the day? That sure as sh*t will not improve the situation. Humans like freedom. It's why we stole this land and waged war on our government in the name of democracy. You can't stop that sh*t.
Now, I'm actually not writing this to be critical. Like I said, I've been there. Irritated by the noise of youth. So, I'm writing to share one thing that motherhood has opened my eyes to.
I'm looking for a better word for selflessness, but I've got nothing. So, SELFLESSNESS.
I used to walk around incredulous at all the interferences in my routine, as though they were intended to annoy me.
The persons walking slowly and getting in MY way on the sidewalk. The person who chose to take the empty seat next to ME. The mom who couldn't stop her kid from giving ME a headache.
But now I know.
The less you focus on yourself, the happier you get. Try it.
XO,
Rachel
PS YOU WEREN'T EVEN IN THE QUIET CAR. COACH BEHIND THE ENGINE, B*TCH.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
6 Reasons I Want to Save My Kid from School.
I hate braggers and humblebraggers as much as you do.
So, I'm starting with a disclaimer that I don't think I'm exceptionally smart. I got lucky with some amount of natural intelligence somewhere. But if I were anywhere close to exceptionally smart, I would have either dominated in school without breaking a sweat, which I did not do, or I would have followed my curiosities outside of school, also which I did not do.
I realize that some people are smart enough to do well in school, learn, and not let it kill their curiosity. Maybe my kid will be smarter than me, but I was not smart enough to learn in a traditional school environment.
That said, I really was the sh*t in first grade. Not only was I in the BLUE reading group, I was smart enough to realize that we were color coded by intelligence, and the smartest kids were in the blue group. I enjoyed feeling smart, so I did my best on our stapled packets of purple-inked worksheets fresh off the old school roller copier. But sometimes "my best" involved rushing through the last page, because I could only enjoy morning recess if I had already finished all my worksheets for the day. I just couldn't wait to get my boogery hands on the box of scrap paper and free draw until lunch.
When fifth grade rolled around, it was puzzle cubes and Oregon Trail. In math, we got to pick an educational game from the back table if we finished our problems early. And there were only a few of those little plastic bags filled with interlocking pieces of gloriously tricky three-dimensional foam, so I had to act fast. And while the Oregon Trail probably related more to social studies, there was only room for computers in the science classroom. And actually, dysentery and cholera? Oregon Trail really kind of was a science game. Either way, I gave Mrs. Kulis my full attention every day only so that I could crush our daily assignment and move onto the important decisions of whether to forge the river and how many buffalo to shoot.
But around sixth grade, things started to change. We had to learn more stuff and harder stuff, so we couldn't just get our lesson and be left to work at it at our own pace with the promise of more entertaining endeavors awaiting those who finished early.
That's when we find out that, as promised, I'm not all that smart. It would have been smart to learn the only way that was available, and to pursue things I found interesting in my spare time. But I was so stupidly resolved against this kind of learning that I spent all my time finding ways not to do it.
If there's one thing any of us know about education, it's our own experience. And my experience was that control and boredom killed any desire I had to learn. And it was really, really dead by high school. Although I still found ways to get good grades, I was determined not to learn under the boring conditions. So:
1. I played Frogger every day in AP Calculus.
And got a ONE on the AP test at the end of the year. It wasn't like golf. That was the worst possible score. If you leave every answer blank, maybe you could get a zero, but I think your name alone earned you a one. I managed to do well on some other AP tests, but there was no fooling Calculus.
My best friend and I were seated at opposite sides of a table in an isolated corner of the library for the exam. We could have cheated, if either of us knew anything at all, but instead I think we quietly made dinosaur noises at each other to pass the time.
But, before Calculus came Pre-Calculus. Of course. And even though I also had access to primitive digital games on my TI-83 during Pre-Calculus and Honors Physics, they were two of only three classes in high school in which I actually did more work ON assignments than on AVOIDING assignments. (The other was Civics, and I got my BA in Politics, so, you know, go figure.)
And those two classes were the only classes in which I was taught by teachers who were also school volunteers in this program called FIRST. If you don't feel like clicking the link, I'll just add that it's an extracurricular activity in which students at participating high schools build robots and compete with each other.
FIRST was entirely elective and non-compulsory. So, naturally, it was the only venue where I was really eager about learning. So much so, that I was even willing to learn from those two teachers in school. Accordingly, trying to force kids to learn stuff they don't want to learn and will not remember will never make sense to me.
2. I cheated on an Honors English final.
I survived this class on a combination of Spark Notes, a crafty way of working tangents on open ending questions, and begging my friends to tell me everything they remembered about a book on our way into the room to take a test.
So, obviously, at the end of the year, I didn't know sh*t. Ordinarily some strategic last minute cramming would work fine, but this was junior year, which meant I already had Senioritis. Even one full night of studying seemed like too much genuine effort. Fortunately, our teacher played one of those moves where they give you like 10 potential questions for the open-ended section, tell you that six of them will appear, and that you'll get to choose three to answer, or something like that. But, Mrs. Gavin even broke it down into categories, so I was really able to narrow down the number of questions that I had to "study". Pre-writing answers on school paper seemed a lot like studying. And it was really easy to pull them out and append them to my test before handing it in.
I knew it wasn't fair. But, there was plenty of not fair going on. Like, a few days before that transgression, I got wind that the other Civics teacher let his class make posters containing answers to display in the room during their final exam. Since Civics was one of the three classes I actually worked at, and since this enabled our eventual valedictorian to squeak ahead of my GPA by .02 or something, I didn't care too much about fair.
3. I plagiarized a Spanish paper in English, ran it through an online translator, and handed it in.
And was SHOCKED when my teacher figured it out.
No, I wasn't. But, I really felt it was necessary to do something so egregious. I mean, yes, there was that cheating thing I just wrote about. But what I did there was about as close as I ever got to really doing what was asked of me. I just stopped short of the step where you memorize the material in order to regurgitate it the next day. And honestly, short-term memorization was my jam. If I bothered to stay up for two more hours that night, I would have gotten the same grade without breaking the rules.
But now a word of advice. If you get an assignment in Honors Spanish 5 to research some guy of Spanish significance and then write a few paragraphs about him in Spanish, just invest the three hours it takes to do this. Sure, it's much quicker to copy and paste some crap straight from the internet into Babblefish, then copy and paste that result directly into Word, type your name, and click print. But, your teacher will figure it out. And, making this statement is pretty darn risky. Not every teacher is as forgiving as Mrs. Fallon was.
Now, without psychoanalyzing my moral development, let's just say there was a time when I would've considered this scandalous beyond belief. And nothing changed in my home life over this time, so there aren't too many variables at work here. I can think of only one: more time spent in school.
4. I played about half the notes in "Instrumental Music" (code for band).
Probably a bit more than half. Unless we were marching, in which case, probably a bit less.
In elementary school, I loved nothing more than weekly music class. But it quickly became the same few songs and games over and over. The thrill of musical chairs just doesn't deepen your understanding of what music is.
Still clinging to a fading interest, I signed up to play the flute in fifth grade, which was the one and only chance you got to sign up to play an instrument in school. Violin and piano were not options. I'm not really trying to pretend I have some undiscovered talent for strings. But, I didn't enjoy practicing the flute, so I didn't do it, and I got left in the dust sometime around Mary Had a Little Lamb. I kept playing (or not playing) through high school, which was kind of worthwhile in a limited sense. But, it left me with a fundamental hatred for restrictions on when and what kids can learn based on the availability of a teacher. I think people would be surprised at what happens if you give a kid some resources and tools, and support their curiosity with trust and time. I can't say that I would have learned to play the violin or piano on my own much better than I ever learned to play the flute from Mr. Williams. But I can say that I would have learned something probably more worthwhile.
5. I succumbed to starvation and hypothermia in Chemistry.
Third period was inevitably tough. Right smack in between when I ate breakfast and lunch period. We weren't allowed to eat in classrooms or hallways, so if you couldn't stomach a big enough breakfast to last your 4+ hours, you were screwed. I was screwed.
Then there was the fact that they intentionally kept the science labs freezing cold, for some inhumane reason. If only I had realized before it was too late, I would have stuck with afternoon science classes, which gave the sun some time to warm up that side of the building.
There was probably no class I learned less in than Chemistry. Sure, I didn't usually want to pay attention. But even when I did want to, like the day before a test, I couldn't. Physical discomfort is really effing distracting.
We all know why they don't let you eat in classrooms. I know it sounds radical, but I think removing barriers to learning should be a school's most basic focus.
6. I sold out my friend for candy.
All this, and I never realized why I was so averse to doing schoolwork. I never reflected on it, never thought twice about it. If I had, I probably wouldn't have started filling out college applications for my friend Chris, who didn't want to go to college. Either way, I didn't get very far. When I begged him for his social security number, he just looked at me and said, College isn't for everyone.
College might not have been for Chris, but art was. And I'd bet he'd have been able to make a career with that talent if his high school guidance counselor had supported him taking a road he was comfortable with rather than undermining any confidence he had by bribing a little jerk named Rachel with candy to fill out college applications for him. I'm sorry, Chris.
I love candy.It's just that I had no idea that school was backwards. I thought I was backwards. I thought school was the only way to learn.
I started this by saying I don't think I'm particularly smart, but I also don't think I'm particularly dumb. And still, I thought school was the only way to learn.
The idea of pursuing interests and indulging my natural curiosity outside of school was literally inconceivable to me. I know this because I did not conceive of it. Even though it was an extension of school, my participation in FIRST should have been a clue, for sure. But seriously, I was up to my eyeballs working on avoiding doing schoolwork, which was probably harder than doing the schoolwork would have been.
Conventional school dominated 12 years of my life, and although I think I've recovered from it well, I don't want my kid to have to recover from 12 years. That's way too much of a waste of time. So I want Fin to go to a school based on the Sudbury Valley Model. Don't pretend you don't wish you went there.
So, I'm starting with a disclaimer that I don't think I'm exceptionally smart. I got lucky with some amount of natural intelligence somewhere. But if I were anywhere close to exceptionally smart, I would have either dominated in school without breaking a sweat, which I did not do, or I would have followed my curiosities outside of school, also which I did not do.
I realize that some people are smart enough to do well in school, learn, and not let it kill their curiosity. Maybe my kid will be smarter than me, but I was not smart enough to learn in a traditional school environment.
That said, I really was the sh*t in first grade. Not only was I in the BLUE reading group, I was smart enough to realize that we were color coded by intelligence, and the smartest kids were in the blue group. I enjoyed feeling smart, so I did my best on our stapled packets of purple-inked worksheets fresh off the old school roller copier. But sometimes "my best" involved rushing through the last page, because I could only enjoy morning recess if I had already finished all my worksheets for the day. I just couldn't wait to get my boogery hands on the box of scrap paper and free draw until lunch.
When fifth grade rolled around, it was puzzle cubes and Oregon Trail. In math, we got to pick an educational game from the back table if we finished our problems early. And there were only a few of those little plastic bags filled with interlocking pieces of gloriously tricky three-dimensional foam, so I had to act fast. And while the Oregon Trail probably related more to social studies, there was only room for computers in the science classroom. And actually, dysentery and cholera? Oregon Trail really kind of was a science game. Either way, I gave Mrs. Kulis my full attention every day only so that I could crush our daily assignment and move onto the important decisions of whether to forge the river and how many buffalo to shoot.
But around sixth grade, things started to change. We had to learn more stuff and harder stuff, so we couldn't just get our lesson and be left to work at it at our own pace with the promise of more entertaining endeavors awaiting those who finished early.
That's when we find out that, as promised, I'm not all that smart. It would have been smart to learn the only way that was available, and to pursue things I found interesting in my spare time. But I was so stupidly resolved against this kind of learning that I spent all my time finding ways not to do it.
If there's one thing any of us know about education, it's our own experience. And my experience was that control and boredom killed any desire I had to learn. And it was really, really dead by high school. Although I still found ways to get good grades, I was determined not to learn under the boring conditions. So:
1. I played Frogger every day in AP Calculus.
And got a ONE on the AP test at the end of the year. It wasn't like golf. That was the worst possible score. If you leave every answer blank, maybe you could get a zero, but I think your name alone earned you a one. I managed to do well on some other AP tests, but there was no fooling Calculus.
My best friend and I were seated at opposite sides of a table in an isolated corner of the library for the exam. We could have cheated, if either of us knew anything at all, but instead I think we quietly made dinosaur noises at each other to pass the time.
But, before Calculus came Pre-Calculus. Of course. And even though I also had access to primitive digital games on my TI-83 during Pre-Calculus and Honors Physics, they were two of only three classes in high school in which I actually did more work ON assignments than on AVOIDING assignments. (The other was Civics, and I got my BA in Politics, so, you know, go figure.)
And those two classes were the only classes in which I was taught by teachers who were also school volunteers in this program called FIRST. If you don't feel like clicking the link, I'll just add that it's an extracurricular activity in which students at participating high schools build robots and compete with each other.
FIRST was entirely elective and non-compulsory. So, naturally, it was the only venue where I was really eager about learning. So much so, that I was even willing to learn from those two teachers in school. Accordingly, trying to force kids to learn stuff they don't want to learn and will not remember will never make sense to me.
2. I cheated on an Honors English final.
I survived this class on a combination of Spark Notes, a crafty way of working tangents on open ending questions, and begging my friends to tell me everything they remembered about a book on our way into the room to take a test.
So, obviously, at the end of the year, I didn't know sh*t. Ordinarily some strategic last minute cramming would work fine, but this was junior year, which meant I already had Senioritis. Even one full night of studying seemed like too much genuine effort. Fortunately, our teacher played one of those moves where they give you like 10 potential questions for the open-ended section, tell you that six of them will appear, and that you'll get to choose three to answer, or something like that. But, Mrs. Gavin even broke it down into categories, so I was really able to narrow down the number of questions that I had to "study". Pre-writing answers on school paper seemed a lot like studying. And it was really easy to pull them out and append them to my test before handing it in.
I knew it wasn't fair. But, there was plenty of not fair going on. Like, a few days before that transgression, I got wind that the other Civics teacher let his class make posters containing answers to display in the room during their final exam. Since Civics was one of the three classes I actually worked at, and since this enabled our eventual valedictorian to squeak ahead of my GPA by .02 or something, I didn't care too much about fair.
3. I plagiarized a Spanish paper in English, ran it through an online translator, and handed it in.
And was SHOCKED when my teacher figured it out.
No, I wasn't. But, I really felt it was necessary to do something so egregious. I mean, yes, there was that cheating thing I just wrote about. But what I did there was about as close as I ever got to really doing what was asked of me. I just stopped short of the step where you memorize the material in order to regurgitate it the next day. And honestly, short-term memorization was my jam. If I bothered to stay up for two more hours that night, I would have gotten the same grade without breaking the rules.
But now a word of advice. If you get an assignment in Honors Spanish 5 to research some guy of Spanish significance and then write a few paragraphs about him in Spanish, just invest the three hours it takes to do this. Sure, it's much quicker to copy and paste some crap straight from the internet into Babblefish, then copy and paste that result directly into Word, type your name, and click print. But, your teacher will figure it out. And, making this statement is pretty darn risky. Not every teacher is as forgiving as Mrs. Fallon was.
Now, without psychoanalyzing my moral development, let's just say there was a time when I would've considered this scandalous beyond belief. And nothing changed in my home life over this time, so there aren't too many variables at work here. I can think of only one: more time spent in school.
4. I played about half the notes in "Instrumental Music" (code for band).
Probably a bit more than half. Unless we were marching, in which case, probably a bit less.
In elementary school, I loved nothing more than weekly music class. But it quickly became the same few songs and games over and over. The thrill of musical chairs just doesn't deepen your understanding of what music is.
Still clinging to a fading interest, I signed up to play the flute in fifth grade, which was the one and only chance you got to sign up to play an instrument in school. Violin and piano were not options. I'm not really trying to pretend I have some undiscovered talent for strings. But, I didn't enjoy practicing the flute, so I didn't do it, and I got left in the dust sometime around Mary Had a Little Lamb. I kept playing (or not playing) through high school, which was kind of worthwhile in a limited sense. But, it left me with a fundamental hatred for restrictions on when and what kids can learn based on the availability of a teacher. I think people would be surprised at what happens if you give a kid some resources and tools, and support their curiosity with trust and time. I can't say that I would have learned to play the violin or piano on my own much better than I ever learned to play the flute from Mr. Williams. But I can say that I would have learned something probably more worthwhile.
5. I succumbed to starvation and hypothermia in Chemistry.
Third period was inevitably tough. Right smack in between when I ate breakfast and lunch period. We weren't allowed to eat in classrooms or hallways, so if you couldn't stomach a big enough breakfast to last your 4+ hours, you were screwed. I was screwed.
Then there was the fact that they intentionally kept the science labs freezing cold, for some inhumane reason. If only I had realized before it was too late, I would have stuck with afternoon science classes, which gave the sun some time to warm up that side of the building.
There was probably no class I learned less in than Chemistry. Sure, I didn't usually want to pay attention. But even when I did want to, like the day before a test, I couldn't. Physical discomfort is really effing distracting.
We all know why they don't let you eat in classrooms. I know it sounds radical, but I think removing barriers to learning should be a school's most basic focus.
6. I sold out my friend for candy.
All this, and I never realized why I was so averse to doing schoolwork. I never reflected on it, never thought twice about it. If I had, I probably wouldn't have started filling out college applications for my friend Chris, who didn't want to go to college. Either way, I didn't get very far. When I begged him for his social security number, he just looked at me and said, College isn't for everyone.
College might not have been for Chris, but art was. And I'd bet he'd have been able to make a career with that talent if his high school guidance counselor had supported him taking a road he was comfortable with rather than undermining any confidence he had by bribing a little jerk named Rachel with candy to fill out college applications for him. I'm sorry, Chris.
I started this by saying I don't think I'm particularly smart, but I also don't think I'm particularly dumb. And still, I thought school was the only way to learn.
The idea of pursuing interests and indulging my natural curiosity outside of school was literally inconceivable to me. I know this because I did not conceive of it. Even though it was an extension of school, my participation in FIRST should have been a clue, for sure. But seriously, I was up to my eyeballs working on avoiding doing schoolwork, which was probably harder than doing the schoolwork would have been.
Conventional school dominated 12 years of my life, and although I think I've recovered from it well, I don't want my kid to have to recover from 12 years. That's way too much of a waste of time. So I want Fin to go to a school based on the Sudbury Valley Model. Don't pretend you don't wish you went there.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)