Whatever happened to Row, Row, Row your Boat?

Recently, as I was driving my son to school, we discussed the schedule for the rest of the week & he mentioned their music class would be having a sing-along that day. “You don’t like those much, do you?” I asked. “No.” “Yeah, the songs are so weird!” I said. Then he said, “I can’t imagine what would drive someone to write songs so stupid!” I laughed, OH, how I laughed. My boy for sure. Well, it’s true what he says.

I’ve been to my share of school concerts &, yes, the songs are very stupid. I can’t really describe the genre, except that it is too involved with historical or political or nutritional storytelling to show proper respect to the power of rhyme. Also, & maybe this is just this specific teacher, but there is a LOT in the way of hand motions. If they sing about a wave, they have to move their hands in a wave. If they sing about a bunny, they have to hop. If the bunny eats a carrot, they have to all lean to the same side at the same time, hold up one hand, & pantomime eating a carrot. All things in moderation is not applied here. Given the attention span of your average grade school kid combined with the mathematical reality that the more kids there are who are supposed to do the same thing at one time, the less likely they are to achieve it, plus the sketchy singing skills of most kids these age even when they’re not having to remember to hop, results in a full 2 hours of rather spastic twitchings & flailings reminiscent of drunken hula dancers. It’s distressing to watch.

I still recall, far too vividly, Reid’s first school concert. The cafeteria was overfull, & we ended up standing by the wall about 2/3 of the way back, just under a speaker. Yes, a speaker. The kindergartners trooped up on stage, giggling & being shy. And they began to sing. Hypothetically. Their mouths were moving. Know what I heard? I heard a professional children’s choir, accompanied by several well-played instruments. A. Professional. Children’s. Choir. At high volume.

Call me old fashioned but I would have walked away from that school greatly more satisfied if I’d seen various breathy waifs bleating off key to some ineptly played piano music. They’re kids. With the rare exception of some young prodigies, we’re not there expecting to hear actual good singing. That is not the point. The point is to give the kids some stage time & make them feel their efforts are worth something. If I were a kid who had to spend 3 periods a week learning lame songs, then get up onstage & have my squawky but willing childish voice drowned out by a recording of kids who spend their spare time ironing their audition suits for the new production of Little Orphan Annie, I’d leave there pretty dammed demoralized. Even a little kid can ask, what’s the point? And adults can not only ask what the point is, they can go home & write about it to other parents & to the school.

My son’s school markets itself as “arts rich.” That’s lovely & I like the sound if it. The problem is I’m not sure how impressed I really am with the art portion. I know in one grade, won’t say which one here, another parent witnessed a teacher lining up all the portrait drawings & adding perspective & other small nuances. Gee, no wonder our kids’ drawings were so impressive on open house night! Reid, now a 4^th grader, was eligible to start the band this year. I nixed it. He has taken a few fiddle lessons on his own & practices randomly. The 5^th grade class I saw perform 2 years ago played a violin piece. It had 3 notes. THREE. This after 2 solid years of study. Reid can play 2 scales well, & he learned that in about a month. That would be 15 notes. I know it must be hard to teach violin to kids, but I don’t see how 2 years of showing up to learn 3 notes is ever going to inspire one of those “they gave me a chance when all I had was my crippled mom, half a dog, & slept in a dumpster & now I’m the young Yo-yo Ma” stories.

I’ll tell you something – overall, I have a really hard time judging how good my son’s school is. The problem is my perspective doesn’t allow that level of nuance. There was just one school where I grew up. We had the pedophile lesbian grade school gym teacher, the minister/guidance counselor, the 3^rd grade teacher who made us sing hymns each morning yet beat kids in class, the cliché home-ec teacher married to the shop teacher. On the bus & the playground, you were on your own. Our bus driver was a 300 lb. male farmer version of Helen Keller in worn jeans, a Red Man cap, & a crewcut. His awareness, such as it was, was forward. Utterly. Once you passed his impassive wide back in stretched & faded cotton, you entered Lord of the Flies wrapped in Bluebird yellow. In my son’s classroom, they have magic markers in all the colors of the rainbow. I mean…they must have at least 10 colors in there! And they’re allowed to have water bottles at their desks!!! My god. Once I found out they heated the building in winter, I was sold. So when I fall into conversation with another parent & they ask how I like Adams, I say, I’m not as pleased as I’d like to be, but it’s hard for me to say.  I don’t have anything to compare it to.

I will say, now that we’re in the 5^th year at this school, I do feel absolutely justified griping about the music program. Because Adams is supposed to an arts rich school. If would be different if they were positioning themselves as a math school, but music is of the arts, yet I don’t see them doing it at all well. Do you know, at the last concert, the teacher went on about how someone had made a donation, allowing them to add another instrument to their studies. And then each kid picked up a tube which they whacked against the other hand to make a tone. In a pattern, you see, with the rest of the notes. And I’m thinking, if they’re going to call this an instrument, why not just collect empty bottles, fill them with varying amounts of water, & make a jug band? Same thing. Each kid would have 1 or 2 notes, & heck, you can get all the materials from your neighbors’ garbage cans on recycling night. Take that, pathetic school budget!

I don’t have any bright ideas here. I suspect that when I go to these concerts, I’m not seeing the full range of kids. I bet that a fair number of kids get more focused training in the form of private lessons. That’s the case with Reid. So the cream has already been skimmed off, leaving the kids who don’t have the time/talent/attention/discipline/opportunity to do more than whack a tube.  But shouldn’t our schools be giving truly worthwhile experiences to all the kids?

My Free-Range Boy

I found a great blog yesterday. One I’ll actually read, because lordy, there are a LOT of blogs out there & I can spare only so many brain cells. It’s called Free Range Kids & you can see it by clicking here. The author is a professional writer – the lucky duck – & she started her blog after getting rather a lot of attention for the subway incident. You see, she let her 9 year old boy ride the subway alone in New York. Then she wrote about it. Need I say that she got some criticisms. Let me mention here that her child is raised in New York & rode the subways all the time with his parents. In the wake of the unexpected furor, she started up her blog to discuss the generally overprotective trend we’re seeing in child raising today.

They built their own clubhouse! This makes Reid nuts.

I had this in mind yesterday as Reid & his no-school-on-veteran’s-day play-date companion careened around the living room, piling up throw rugs, slapping discordant tones out of the piano, shrieking. “Why don’t you go up to the park?” I suggested. “Yeah! Let’s do that!” Reid shouted. “When will you be ready, mom?” “I looked down at the seam I was ironing, part of a sewing project I’ve been hoping to finish sometime in this century. “Just go on without me. I’ll come up in a few minutes.” The other boy made an amazed face & announced he’d never gone anywhere by himself. I stood there thinking about his age, 9. And about his sometimes out of control behavior. And Reid’s familiarity with the neighborhood & his good sense. And what I was doing when I was 9. I put my hand on the other child’s shoulder & described the walk, instructed them both to behave & cross the streets carefully, & sent them off.

The park I speak of is 3 blocks from our house. You walk up the hill, thru a residential neighborhood, & the road dead ends. There is a long set of stairs winding up the hill & at the top is a very sweet little park with a long slide, a bit of a climbing thing, & a tiny pocket of woods on a steep hill. I first let Reid go there by himself this summer. It kind of caught me off guard. He came running in one day & said the kids up the street were going & could he go too? It left me kind of breathy. His first time out without me! Aww… But it’s a safe enough thing. No major traffic at all.

Lenore Skenazy asks in her free range blog, if you don’t let your kids roam, why not? I’ve spent some interesting moments since then asking myself that. Hmm…I think part of it is that I am somewhat haunted for extremely vivid & graphic imaginings of things going wrong. Also, I can’t see this environment thru a kid’s eyes in my own memories. I grew up in the country. I can’t think what there is to do in a house-thick neighborhood. And a big part of it is that I can’t think what Reid would do to pass the time out there. Sure, he asks to hang out on the sidewalk, & I let him. He slaps at the bamboo with a stick, sometimes he looks at bugs or whittles. But there is no kid gang, there is no empty lot. It’s just house, house, house. All nice yards. No roaming dogs. What is there? A sidewalk. Yippy.

I read to Reid a lot & I have a nostalgic fondness for the world that was gone even when I was a kid as seen in The Moffats, & The Great Brain. In one Moffat story, the 6-year-old Rufus spends most of the day going back & forth to the library in quest of his own library card. This takes him several blocks from home on his scooter, barefoot. In another story, Mama has to go to NY for the day, so she stops by school & tell them to tell Rufus & Jane that they should get their own lunch, which sits heating on a coal stove. Jane is excited in one story when it’s her job to clean & fill the oil lamps. Can you imagine? Leaving kids alone in a house with a stove with a fire? With the house lit with oil lamps? A 6-year-old on his own for hours, across town, barefoot?

A hill, trees, a pond. Right out back?

I can’t imagine. That’s the problem. I would love to let Reid be more free-range, but it’s hard to say when that would happen. Reid has been reading Little Lulu reprints lately. He wants a treehouse. He wants a clubhouse. He laments that there aren’t more kids around. Actually there are kids on our block, 5 in his age range. But like most kids today, they’re all booked up. And when they aren’t doing math club or scouts or swimming, they’re inside watching tv or playing video games. There don’t seem to be any kid gangs anymore of the kind in Little Lulu. This nostalgia can also be seen in the works of Bill Watterson. His Calvin & Hobbes live in a house on a street of houses, with Suzy just down the block, much like our neighborhood. But Calvin’s house apparently adjoins a state park, or that’s my best guess on the frequent wanderings of Calvin & Hobbes into the uninhabited & fertile woods. Calvin’s mom deals with his childish nagging by tossing him outside. While I can certainly identify with her frazzled nerves, the only thing behind our house is the the cranky old man neighbor & his ineptly disciplined hedges.

I’m so often conflicted & frustrated by the over-protection of today’s kids. I want Reid to be safe, but I also want to let him find his own way in the world, I want him to test what I’ve taught him so he can understand why it makes sense, I want him to learn to trust his instincts. He needs to learn to be alert to his world instead of always depending on me. I mean, he should see when a car is coming, or it’s raining outside, I shouldn’t be the one to say every time, watch out, or take an umbrella. But it has become so difficult. Things have gotten really messed up when teaching your child to use their judgment opens you up to criticisms of bad parenting, when good parenting is partially defined as keeping your child under your wing at all times. We’re going to have to come back to some reasonable sense of balance.

By the way…I did wander up the hill yesterday after about 15 minutes. Both boys were absolutely fine. they made it there without getting squished or vandalizing anything, & they hadn’t been captured by insane, homicidal homeless hobos camping in the woods.

The boy is upright & walking, so everything must be fine.

I am just back from 9-year-old son’s yearly physical. And I am displeased. Displeased! GAH!!! Hey! Here’s an idea for how to overhaul the medical system. How about we get to pay what we think it’s worth?

We go to Group Health in Seattle. I suppose it was a radical & wonderful thing when it started but I fear they have become mired in bureaucracy. “They’ve become a machine,” my husband says.

Got there & some woman (she may have been an assistant, she may have been a nurse. I never found out, since she never saw fit to tell me) came out & called Reid to come down the hall, go into a room, & take his shoes off. While she went thru the weight height list I kept waiting for her to introduce herself or MAKE EYE CONTACT, for god’s sake but apparently common courtesies & basic manners aren’t covered in our plan.

She said Reid’s right eye wasn’t seeing well & that I would want to make an appt with optometry. “He saw someone last week,” I said. “Isn’t that on the computer? I thought that was one advantage of being in the same system.” No response. Eventually we saw the doctor. He was nice enough. But what a cursory exam.

I’m thinking about how our understanding of how our bodies & minds work is expanding constantly. And one thing we’ve figured out is that there are MANY factors to health: what we eat, how much we eat, the quality of the air we breath, our daily stress level, how much we exercise, drugs or medicines we take, allergens around us, & that’s just a bit of the list. This would have been an ideal time to ask me about what I feed my child, & does he exercise, is he sleeping well & how much does he sleep, how much tv does he watch? But these things were not discussed. Does he eat a lot of sugar? Didn’t come up. Reid splits his time between my house & his dad’s house, which is surely a factor, but they don’t know about it because they didn’t ask the most basic questions about his living situation. And they made him undress & put on one of those lame robes, which by the way was an adult size so he couldn’t even tie it on reasonably. I expected the doctor to have him stand up & turn around so his skin & posture could be observed. I think this is quite reasonable. What if I’m practicing my tattooing on Reid? What if I’m abusing him by burning little patterns into his skin with match heads? If I were that kind of parent I would surely have threatened him not to mention anything. Or what if he has some kind of weird blot that is skin cancer only I’m too clueless to ask about it?

I don’t expect them to run a cat scan or bloodwork on a child that is to all appearances bright, alert, & healthy. But a few words on what’s currently considered a healthy diet, a quick glance with trained eyes at the skin & posture of a child…these things don’t require any flavor of test, any kind of special equipment, except, of course, an active mind & some semblance of professional interest.

We left with our little sheet of paper placing Reid in his percentiles. As if I care. His next visit is recommended in 3 years. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends every 2 years at this age, but I suppose that isn’t covered on our plan.

Lost boys.

Lately I’ve been doing some volunteering at my son’s school. Every Tuesday I take a group of 7 4th graders out to “find urban nature.” It’s interesting in its own way. However, I always come home feeling like I’ve conveyed very little. An hour out of the school day & they spend 1/4 of it getting to the lunchroom to meet then back to class, 1/4 of it listening to the head of the program attempt to teach by the Socratic method, which really means some kids raise their hands, waving wildly, while most of the rest sit, doodling & bored, & 1/2 the time supposedly listening to me (or one of the other volunteer moms).

My group has 4 girls & 3 boys. I had heard tell that boys were different & boy, howdy, let me tell you it ain’t no lie. When I ask the girls to look at their plants & speculate on what the roots are for, they actually bend their little heads & fasten their eyeballs on the plants. The boys don’t hear me ask the question because they are too busy throwing clumps of wet leaves at each other.

In my little group is a boy who is testing. Me, his teachers, the other kids’ willingness to follow – everything. I liken this boy to a 10-month-old border collie puppy. He’s mostly friendly, plenty smart, with lots of energy, & if you don’t find him something to do, he’ll find ways to entertain himself. Shredding the sofa, for instance. I’ve done 3 of these sessions now & I’ve gotten hip to his ways. As soon as we pass thru the doors, he immediately veers off from the group. Apparently he’s hoping to vanish on the school grounds. Or off them. First I tell the other boys they must stay with the group. This is to avert their quick defection to his camp. I went thru this in week 1. Then I herd  him back with mild pats on the back. This is repeated time & again. He loves pillbugs. Quick as you can think it, he’ll be off from the group & turning over rocks in search of a new “Fred,” which is what he names every pillbug. This must be shut down AT ONCE, or one of the other boys will sense a slackness in the leash & also immediately leave the group to invert rocks. I reached a low point last week when my own son listened to this boy instead of to me. (This caused me to have my first “perils of bad companions” talks with my son after school that day.) I was standing there asking them to listen (the girls were already listening) & they were just riffing on their own boy silliness. On a side note, why can’t boys ever hold still?

Now, with Reid, I can apply all sorts of psychological warfare. I can tell him, for instance, that if he doesn’t behave in a certain way, then I might not use any hot water at all in his next bath. Or that his lunch the next day might consist entirely of dried apricots. Ah, how I do love the screams of protest. You parents out there know exactly what I mean. There is something truly delicious in the immediate capitulation of your small adolescent wannabe when faced with treats withheld, in the begging insistence of your bratty child they they WILL behave, just PLEASE can they have a cookie in their lunch the next day? With this boy, tho, I couldn’t get a handle. Hmm, I thought, what will work on this little beast? He’s rather street smart & as one of the other moms pointed out, he’s just as likely to respond by flipping me the the bird & telling me to fuck off. Charming behavior in a 9 year old, but emasculating for me. So last week, I put my arm around his shoulder & said I REALLY needed him to cooperate with me, that while I’d be leaving in half a hour,  he’s with his teacher for the next 7 months, & if I had to tell her about his attitude, I was betting she could find ways to make his life hard. He got a rather thoughtful look in his eyes & mostly behaved the rest of the session.

And this week, as with every week since the nature program started, I’ve spent a bit of time pondering this kid & his situation. He seems quite smart, seems bored, & lord knows he’s mentally alert. Comes up with all sorts of clever things. And he’s not an evil kid. Any of you who have been around kids know what I mean; there are kids out there who seem to be creatures from the dark side from the get go. But this boy is somewhat charming & not particularly bad, he’s just floating around in any random direction because there is no compass in his world. I have asked around & found out he lives down the street with his mom & some other quantity of younger kids. He had to have a neighbor bring him to open house night. He might have a learning disability or he might qualify for the advanced learning program, but both those things require some parent involvement which doesn’t seem there for him. It’s like watching a slow moving train wreck. He could go far. He could go too far. It’s like he’s in the woods, ambling back & forth between the path to an interesting & fulfilling life, & the path to juvie. Further on the woods will thicken & it’ll be harder for him to find the other path. It’s such a waste, you know. That’s what I think when I see kids like this. About all I could to do was call the local chapter of Big Brothers & get an application. I’ll see if his teacher can pass it on during the parent/teacher conferences upcoming at Thanksgiving break. I can’t think of anything else.

People used to live more in small communities. And in that situation, people knew each other, & they weren’t hesitant to enforce the local rules & mores. That dynamic can be bad, such as when a small town hates gays or blacks, but there were definite benefits, too. Used to be, a kid who was kind of on his own might have relatives or a mentor to go to. But in the case of this boy & many kids like him, you don’t even know your neighbors. And if your parents are not even really there, you are on your own.

It’s worth understanding that the space between good parenting & child abuse is a vast field with lots of hidey holes. As long as a kid doesn’t come to school with an eyeball hanging out or fingers missing, he’s considered fine. Teachers might see clear signs of bad parenting, but unless it’s extremely obvious, they can’t do much at all. In previous times, various community busybodies or relatives might have stepped into this legal gap, but these avenues are now for the most part closed.

It’s a sad thing.

My kid & Mendel’s peas.

It is summer. No school. The boy, when not at some camp or another, lays like a wasted victorian maiden on the floor of my attic office, moaning about his impending death from boredom. I have decided to deal with this by working thru a list of diverting & educational projects, things I might not have time for in the school year. The most recent was teaching him a bit about evolution. We started out with a brief talk about genes, & once he got the hang of that, I was able to easily slide into the idea that creatures can change over generations, because they inherit different traits. There are lots of good illustrations of evolutionary trees online, along with the fun kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species breakdown, which has some different subcategories since I learned it.

I had this on my list anyway, but I developed a new sense of urgency during tuck-in time one recent night when he asked me if evolution was real. Sure, I said. He said he wondered because a boy he’d played with the week before, a visiting grandson of the neighbors’, told him scientists had discovered that evolution wasn’t true. I stood there with that blank gaze parents get when they’re forced to suddenly dive into a subject which is the ideological equivalent of the bottomless & murky waters of Chichen Itza, & emerge with a simple explanation using words of no more than 3 syllables, that can be spoken in 3 minutes or less, to get it all in before their little butterfly brains flit lightly off to something else.

I have no problem explaining evolution & debunking organized religion. My sticking point was that I needed to find a way to encourage Reid in critical thinking, yet get the point across to him that he should still respect our very religious neighbors, who are quite old, decent enough neighbors, & to their credit, have never tried to proselytize to us. Perhaps the horns on the car tipped them off that we’d be a bad risk. Or maybe it was the goat idol statue on the porch. Or all those tribal masks in the living room. Hard to say. But to get back to the point, It was a one of those genuinely challenging parent moments for me. Reid really enjoyed playing with their grandson, whom I found to be polite, well behaved, & neither a bully nor a weenie. What path thru this rocky territory could I find that would get the message across to him that I expect him to offer some respect to our neighbors despite the fact that they’re teaching their grandson to get a jump on cognitive dissonance by turning off select portions of his brain? (BTW, love the part where “scientists” discovered it wasn’t true. The irony is laughable to the point of tears. This is like the devil quoting scripture for his own use.)

Our neighbors have an interesting story. They seem quite the standard older couple. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last year. They are retired & putter about the yard. Virgil is one of those old guys who just must keep on, & he finds more to do around that house than you’d think possible. Hard labor stuff, too. This week he started tearing off the side of the front steps. He says it sags & he’ll have to lift that corner of the house. They look just like any old couple that would get flustered at changes, be confused at new things. But in fact they’ve traveled to China a great many times as part of their missionary work, & they house Asian students in their house now that their kids are grown. They’ve hosted 24 students & have 2 now, both from Korea. They are nice people, & good neighbors, & all that int’l travel has broadened their minds so that they are devout but non-judgmental. They understand first hand that people choose different paths.

As for my curious boy, I ended up explaining that when someone wants to be a leader & gain power from followers, there are 3 good ways: fear- I’ll kill your family if you don’t help me; greed- you’ll get money/fame/success if you help me; & the most powerful…belief – I have the secret & I’ll share if with you if you help me. I told him that some people are taught to just accept what they are told, but that often they start thinking on their own as they grow up. And lastly, that there are all kinds of christians. Some froth & damn you to hell, as if they had the power, & some truly seek selflessness & help the homeless, the needy, the weak. He should enjoy playing with the grandson the next time he visits. And remember that I will always welcome his questions, & he should ever be cautious of those who say they know all the answers.