At first, it was really cool. Kids brought their musical instruments they were studying. Kids brought their artwork. They read poems and stories. Some danced. Some of the preschool set would get up there and do somewhat odd things that weren’t exactly related to the “ARTS”, but they were preschoolers, so we didn’t worry about it. We didn’t expect prodigies. And if they wanted to get up there and talk about firemen for 2 minutes, we’d just applaud and move on to the next act.

After a year or so of this, things began to deteriorate. It started with this one mom. (There’s always that ONE, isn’t there?) She’d been bringing her 3 kids since the beginning, and her youngest was only 3 years old, and he always liked to get up there and dance to Michael Jackson. And again, since he was only 3, we didn’t expect him to do a great job, although he actually had a pretty decent moonwalk going there. And since dance is part of the Arts, we figured he was well within the scope of the program, so no big deal, right? Well… he got so much applause for his routine that his older brother and sister wanted IN. So the 3 kids started doing something called ROCK BAND.

ROCK BAND was this act in which the 3 kids turned on some Hannah Montana song and bopped around the room for a few minutes, sort of lip-syncing and playing air guitar to the music while the 3-year-old danced his dance. For the first couple of ROCK BAND acts, we applauded politely and sort of shrugged. We figured it would eventually stop and the kids would go back to something else. Something that they were actually performing. We figured their mom would tell them: okay, that was fun, but remember, this is supposed to be a program where you show YOUR TALENT. Not just futz around up there.

But, noooooooooooooo….

ROCK BAND began to escalate. Another little boy (about 8 years old maybe) decided he wanted to do something like that too. So at the next opportunity, he got up there, put on a rapper CD, slung a KB Toys plastic guitar around his neck and mumbled along to the music. He called it HIP HOP. Next thing you knew, my kids wanted to do a ROCK BAND. And so did my co-creator’s kids. Everyone wanted to do ROCK BAND or HIP HOP. Because, let’s face it: you sound so much cooler that way, and no one can tell if you mess up.

I looked into the future of Afternoon with the Arts and saw endless hours filled with watching kids lip sync (badly) while playing air guitar and imaginary drums. And I didn’t want any part of it anymore. But, for a while I just kept my mouth shut. Who wants to be the kill-joy mom who brings ROCK BAND to a screeching halt and makes them go back to fumbling out beginner level tunes on the piano?

But then in February we held a special evening show (dubbed Evening with the Arts – we’re SO original, I know!) and invited the dads to come and see. And we invited the adults coming to also perform something if they wanted. And this little boy came with his dad, and the two of them sang a song together, a cappella, in perfect harmony. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard in my life. It was Afternoon with the Arts at its finest hour, you could say.

And after they were done singing, the ROCK BAND jumped up, popped a disc into the player and did their lip-sync air guitar thing. And the kids watching responded (in an almost Pavlovian kind of way) by screaming and cheering like the Beatles had just landed, and I was just disgusted and tired of it all by then. All the work we’d put into making this happen, all so we could watch these kids do NOTHING up there. No thanks.

But the next month, when we sent out the signup notice, that mom put her 3 kids down for ROCK BAND again, and the HIP HOP act went in there too, and I finally emailed my friend as diplomatically as I could and told her I thought ROCK BAND really had to stop. I didn’t mind if the kids wanted to do rock music or hip hop, but if they wanted to do it in the future, they needed to actually PERFORM the song themselves. No more lip sync-ing. No more air guitar. It was just getting ridiculous. I also asked her if she thought I was being too picky, and if she said yes, I was ready to bite my tongue. I mean: who am I to say if it’s ART or not, right?

But my friend agreed. She told me she’d been thinking the exact same thing. But she wanted to wait until the year was done before saying anything. Let’s finish out the year, she said, and then next year, we’ll put some guidelines in writing and start the year fresh. She was moving across the country in a month or two and wouldn’t be here to start the year fresh with me, which made it much easier on her to say “oh, let’s just wait till the new year starts” but she’d just had a baby too, so I didn’t want to press the issue. I was just glad she’d been thinking like me. That I wasn’t being crazy or mean by wanting to stop this weird un-artistic trend that had developed.

So, fast forward to last week. The new year is starting up. Another mom stepped into the place my friend vacated when she moved. This is a good friend, who also agreed that it was time to refocus our little arts program. I didn’t think people would be overly upset about it. So when the call came out from the leader of our little homeschool group to come to the planning meeting, I signed up and went to the meeting without thinking much about what I was going to say about Afternoon with the Arts.

Big mistake.

When it came time to talk about it, and I mentioned that we were going to be limiting the kinds of acts that the kids could do that year, all hell broke loose. The mom with the ROCK BAND kids got upset. I knew she would. She’s a mess and a generally unpleasant person. She’s made it clear on many occasions that no one has it harder than she does, that she doesn’t like her own children, and often chastises people for not helping her enough with whatever she thinks we should be helping her with. We all have spent the past year tiptoeing around her IMPENDING NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Entire families have pulled away from her and her children in an act of self-preservation. I’d already had a couple problems with her in other activities, and I knew she’d take this badly. So, I said to her, Look, I’m not trying to single just your kids out. I’m not trying to mess with you. I’m just trying to bring this thing back to where it was supposed to be.

It didn’t go well at all. The fact that the HIP HOP kid is the son of the leader of the group didn’t help me much at all either. She got just as mad as the ROCK BAND mom. Then everyone started brainstorming OPTIONS for me. Like maybe we’d do a special ROCK BAND night. Or maybe the kids would have to take turns doing ROCK BAND. It all began to spiral out of control, and all their suggestions just added extra work to me, as the planner of the event. And I got mad. I bared my teeth a little. I told them if someone else wanted to do this thing, I’d be happy to pass it off on them. That it took an enormous amount of work to run the program. That we’d had a very specific vision for it way back when we started it and that the vision was getting lost in air guitar.

At that point, someone said, “you know… there are air guitar competitions all over the world… can you really honestly say that air guitar isn’t art?”

I almost cried right there. Picture it, if you can: there I was, the woman who’ s married to a rocket scientist who’s also a thrash metal bass player, a man who once took guitar lessons from John Petrucci, and who once was in a band that opened for Machine Head and Otep, sitting at a table in a Borders bookstore coffee shop listening to a bunch of “good Christian homeschooling mothers” defend the artistic genre of TEEN BOP RAPPER AIR GUITAR.

Somebody just fucking shoot me already.

More heated discussion ensued. I was no longer sure what I was trying to say or do anymore. I only knew I wanted to get the hell out of there. I threw my hands up in the air and said: “Okay!!! I stand corrected! If you think it’s art, then you decide. I leave it up to you as the parents to determine if your child is presenting something artistic.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say, but it was the only thing I could think of to say to MAKE THE CONVERSATION STOP. Then I made a ridiculous show of saying I felt uncomfortable and wanted to leave. And the whole meeting pretty much broke down (which made me feel worse) and I managed to just get out. I was 45 minutes in to an anxiety attack that would last about 16 hours.

I went home, told RegularDad the whole story, lay awake most of the night and wondered what the hell I was going to do.

RegularDad: Ya know what I’ve always wondered? How’d they decide on six million dollars? Like: why not the Four Million Dollar Man, or the Ten Million Dollar Man? Why six?

Me: I dunno. I guess it seemed like a lot of money back then.

RegularDad: Yeah, I guess. And you know what else bugs me?

Me: What?

RegularDad: They rebuilt his legs with bionics. And his arm. And his eye. So he could jump from the top of a ten story building and land without breaking his legs, right? But imagine the spinal compression factor. A jump like that would have compressed his non-bionic spine and just paralyzed him right there. It’d be like: ded-ded-ded-ded-ded-ded-ded-ded-CRUNCH!

Me, laughing: Uh-huh.

RegularDad: And imagine this: he picks up a car with his bionic arm… but the connective tissue in his shoulder isn’t bionic, so wouldn’t the arm just rip right off him and be stuck to the car he just tried to lift?

Me: I guess so. You’d think they’d have budgeted for those kind of issues.

RegularDad: Yeah, but they only had six million dollars, and I guess the money they could have spent on that went to providing the sound effect of when he was looking through his bionic eye, so there you have it.  What a waste. Who needs to listen to THAT all day long? So, again, why not seven million dollars?

Me: I wonder what that would amount to in today’s economy, factoring in inflation? It’d be something like the 97 Trillion Dollar Man! And we’d pay to watch it, too.

RegularDad: Yeah, today the Six Million Dollar Man would be some dude with knee problems and an HMO.

________________________________

This post will only make sense to people over a certain age, I suppose. People who were watching network television in the 1970′s will totally understand this. People who are significantly younger will probably not. It’s only fitting, perhaps, that the Beloit Mindset List has been released for the class of 2014. I’ve always loved these lists. They’re my way at looking at aging while keeping a big smile on my face.

For those who want to know what my post is talking about, and for those who just want to see it again, here ya go:

If I Were in Charge

Waiting in line,
a long thin line
takes time
every day
from our play.
We start
then we stop
while we
straighten our line
missing more time
on the way.

Why can’t we bunch
as we go to our lunch?
Or walk in a group
for our soup?

There’s a rule
in each school
about standing in line,
a stupid straight line.
I resign!

My daughter brought this book to me last night while I was in the midst of a grumpy moment, brought on by an attempt to sit down and write a few lines of poetry myself. Said attempt was foiled by an almost constant stream of interruptions, all of which began with the words, “Hey, Mom…?”

Twenty minutes of this sort of thing, and the poem I was working on had disappeared from my thoughts, and I was struck with the frustrating realization that if I were to put them in school next month, I’d have about seven hours a day to sit in silence and write whatever I damn well pleased.

Then my daughter brought me this book, and I flipped through it, and so many of the poems served as yet another reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing. Sure, there were a few little poems about the specialness of teachers. But really only a couple. Most of them highlighted the many irritations, both big and little, about industrial schooling, like the example above.

And speaking of that poem above…. Let’s just examine that title for a moment: If I Were in Charge.

Notice how the writer uses it to give the child a voice. Notice how that voice understands the condescension inherent in the endless lessons in waiting-in-line. Notice how the voice understands that the best course of action is to simply leave. To resign. And think of how many kids out there that want to say that exact same thing. But never get to.

Um… yep. We’ll keep on homschooling, I guess.

Reasons, I got. Tons of reasons. Tons of obligations that moved posting further into the background of my days. I’m going to tell you all about it real soon. I’d tell you now, but if I tried, I’d end up late for a swim date we have this afternoon.

But I did want to show you all this picture:

because it factors quite a bit into the stories I’ll be telling in the days to come. I’m not trying to make excuses or anything. I’m just saying that we need to talk about this picture.

We’re off to swim now.

Please stand by.

…I am glad you are happy—but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in real life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a Saturday Evening Post story. I think of you and always pleasantly…

 Fitzgerald ends his letter to his daughter with this list of things not to worry about and things to think about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t wory about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

[From William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues for Young People, pp. 86-87]

I read this to the girls today during lunch, having come across Bennett’s book purely by chance at the library last week. It was one of those books I’d heard mentioned frequently in homeschooling circles, but never felt compelled to rush out and purchase. So, when I saw it on the shelves, I grabbed it and brought it home to peruse, and now we read a little from it every lunch hour. And now that I’ve read this letter, I do believe I’ll buy a copy for the house.

I can’t help but remember how my own father never gave me any advice, except with regards to what I should be reading. I’d send him a letter, and he’d write back: “Go out immediately and get yourself a copy of Madame Bovary.” Or he’d send a letter with a postage stamp with Hemmingway on it. “Look at the man on the stamp,” he’d write back. “Read him.” My father lived a life of missed opportunities, estrangement from family, homelessness and addiction. He was the Hemmingway Defense defined, you could say, and a failure as a parent in every possible way.

Except one, I suppose.

Me: Who decided to send an army against Siraj and the Indians of Bengal?

6-year-old: Um… the… um… the…

9-year-old: The traders?

6-year-old: HEY! I WAS GONNA SAY THAT!

Me (quietly): That’s okay… calm down… do you remember the name of the traders?

Silence. Blank stares. My 9-year-old flips her coloring page over to start doodling on the back of it.

Me: The East India Company…. Think for a second how weird that is. What if Wal-Mart got mad because we never shop there and hired an army to attack us?

They both start giggling.

Me: And who led the army of the East India Company?

9-year-old: Um…(flips her coloring picture back over to read the caption at the bottom)…Robert Clive.

Me: And after the battle, Mir Jafar became the new nawab of Bengal. But what happened when he didn’t do what the people of the East India Company wanted him to do?

9-year-old: They sent another army and attacked him.

Me: That’s right. And then what laws did the people of Bengal start to follow?

6-year-old: Ummm…. No hitting?

More giggles all around.

Me, trying not to laugh too much: No… not that kind of laws. Bengal wasn’t exactly a “no-hitting” city.

6-year-old, all excited, because this time she’s surely GOT THE ANSWER: No pinching?!?

Thus ends our history lesson for the day.

The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and the Rise of Schooling? by Peter Gray.

It’s a bit long, and employs some psychological jargon that takes some wading through, but it’s still an interesting read. Basically, Gray says that the increase in amounts of modern industrial schooling correlate to an increase in anxiety and depression in children. And it’s not just about the school day; the control of children’s after-school hours also contribute. Here’s a quote:

In school, children learn quickly that their own choices of activities and their own judgments of competence don’t count; what matters are the teachers’ choices and judgments. Teachers are not entirely predictable. You may study hard and still get a poor grade, because you didn’t figure out just exactly what the teacher wanted you to study or guess correctly what questions he or she would ask. The goal in class, in the minds of the great majority of students, is not competence but good grades. Given a choice between really learning a subject and getting an A, the great majority of students would, without hesitation, pick the latter….

School is also a place where children have little choice about with whom they can associate. They are herded into spaces filled with other children that they did not choose, and they must spend a good portion of each school day in those spaces. In free play, children who feel harassed or bullied can leave the situation and find another group that is more compatible; but in school they cannot. Whether the bullies are other students or teachers (which is all too common), the child usually has no choice but to face those persons day after day. The results are sometimes disastrous.

When I was a kid, I went to school, and then I went home and did my own thing for hours on end. We were poor, so I had no after school activities like dance classes or soccer practices. I just went home and played. Or read. I didn’t even have homework until I was in the fourth grade.  We lived in a large apartment complex that was surrounded by patches of forest. All the kids in the neighborhood would roam the woods together, or we’d split off into smaller groups and play other games.  On summer nights, there’d be at least two dozen of us still outside way after dark, playing large games of hide and seek, or jumping rope or doing not-so-smart things like setting wasp nests on fire. And then running for it. And yeah, sometimes there’d be fights. But we all survived. When I went into therapy as a young adult, all my running around, unsupervised, late into those summer nights, was not the reason.

When I was older, our financial situation improved somewhat, and for a few years, I had a horse to ride. My mom would drop me off at the stable and I’d saddle up and ride the trails alone for hours on end. I also worked in the stables part time, and at the age of 13 was expected to be able to handle that kind of work. If I couldn’t get a ride to the barn, I’d roam the woods near our house. Alone. As a young teenager. Or I’d play by the creek with my sister. For hours and hours. My mother never came with us. She didn’t look out the window nervously to see if she could still see us. She didn’t say to us: don’t go too far. And I never once considered her inattention to my outside play neglectful.

But that was 30 years ago. Today, kids don’t live like that. They’re rarely left alone, especially outside. All of their after-school hours are filled with sports practices, clubs and other activities, and that, along with their homework is all they have time for. I never see children running around in this neighborhood (except for that pack of middle-school boys who roam the streets on summer evenings and make suggestive comments to second graders eating ice pops, that is), and I don’t let my kids roam around either (because of said pack of middle-school boys). It’s just not done anymore.

We homeschool, so I am able to provide a significant amount of free play time for my kids. But what I’m learning this year is that that’s not good enough. Here’s another quote from Gray’s article, that really drives this point home to me:

By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives. We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders.

I’m learning that my kids need more unstructured time. What I need to learn now is how to take that next step. How to stop HOVERING. I can say: yeah, I let the kids play and I don’t structure the time or the game. But those hours are still technically supervised by me. I know where the kids are. I can get to them quickly if need be. And I know my 9-year-old wants more autonomy than that. What I don’t know, is how to let go and give it to her.

Of course, the fact that my youngest is only six contributes to my inability to just let them go play. Maybe when they’re a couple years older, this won’t seem so hard. Six seems a bit young to be allowed to wander the neighborhood unattended. The best I can do right now is to take them to the park with their friends and let them get a little far away from me in a group.

Peter Gray promotes an unschooling approach to educating children. I’m not sure I can totally get on board with that. I still believe that a classical education is a good idea. My goal is to educate the kids, and still have a ton of hours of free, unstructured play time. We get our work done in three hours or less, and there is no homework. When we’re done, we’re done. But I’ve still loaded them up with lots of structured activities. Too many, I think. And I do that for the same reason I’ve always done that: because I want to make sure I’m providing enough socialization time. It’s ridiculous, I know. But I still get stuck in that trap.

This summer, we’ll be doing a lot less. And I’m really looking forward to it. Maybe I’ll work up the courage to just let them go play.

Maybe.

Trouble is: when you have a cold in the middle of a blizzard, you still have to go out and shovel snow. RegularDad did most of it. But I still had to go out there quite a few times and clear him a spot so that he could get off the street. And it took its toll on me, that little bit I shoveled. The last time I went out there, I could just tell.

So, I guess I didn’t rest as much as I should have. And now I’ve got this horrible dry cough – the kind that makes your head hurt when you really get going – and a nice little bout of laryngitis. Not a big deal, really. Just one more glitch in my February. But it could be worse, of course. I mean – it’s not like the entire country was leveled by an earthquake or anything.

But it’s quite a challenge, let me tell you, to learn that the proper treatment for laryngitis is to STOP TALKING as much as possible, when you live in a household where you have to repeat the same simple instructions (things like: put your shoes on) a half dozen times before both kids actually have their shoes on. And that’s just the shoe thing. You can only imagine how much talking I have to do when it’s time to do things like math. Or ask for help cleaning up the living room.

I’ve never been more aware of how much time I spend TALKING.

I’m considering making a bunch of signs to carry around with me. I can just wave them in front of the kids until they do what’s printed on them.

It might actually work better. Because Lord knows they never seem to hear me when I’m talking on a regular day around here. Unless the word “candy” falls out of my mouth, that is.

Besides, I think we could still count these days as school days. All that sign reading could count as “reading lessons” and “community skills” as they attempt to actually do whatever’s written on the signs. Things like: “get ailing mother another pillow.”

This is also becoming an interesting exercise in letting the little things go. Like tonight for instance. Tonight after I tucked them in, I came into my office to write a little while, and I could hear the two of them whispering every once in a while. Usually I’d call out to them to stop whispering. But tonight, I let the majority of it just go. Oh… after a half hour or so, I finally gave one call-out to them, but for me, that’s pretty good.

So, who knows? Maybe this is a good thing. We’ll see how well it goes. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I’m off to find a very large glass of orange juice to sip on.

(sigh)

There is a song by Alan Jackson that came close, and we danced to it at our wedding, but it wasn’t a well-known song and never got any air time, so it didn’t really work the way having-a-song was supposed to work. We’d never be out driving somewhere and OUR SONG would come on the radio and it would have meaning. We’ve never really been that soppy, to be honest. We prefer to laugh hysterically at things, rather than gaze dreamily into each other’s eyes.

So, no, we never had a song. But we do have a movie. And here’s a clip from it:

Every year, on Valentine’s Day, we cook up a few pounds of Snow Crab Legs, melt a mess of butter, and watch When Harry Met Sally.

And we laugh all night long.

It’s not just the movie that defines us, it’s the fact that RegularDad really balked at watching it all those years ago when we were still in college. It had just come out on video and we were in my college apartment and I was all: hey, wanna watch this movie with me? It’s really awesome. And he was all: Nah… it looks kinda dumb. (Like a chick-flick, he was thinking, but didn’t want to say it, is my guess.)

I had to really talk him into watching it. And of course, he finally gave in, and ended up laughing his ass off all afternoon, because let’s face it, it’s an incredibly funny film.

What a defining moment that was for us. From that point on, he totally trusted me when I said: Dude, you gotta watch this movie.

So, that’s what we’re up to tonight. Hope you’re doing something just as fun. Just as defining.