When I’m driving along the road, I wonder, “Where are they going? What do they do? How is their life?” When someone brushes by you at the market, do you bring something of them home with you?
Fight the Power
Why do I hate compulsory schooling, do you ask?
There are two reasons. First, I’m against coercion on principle. But, more importantly, it makes mornings a living hell as I become a complicit actor in projecting State power–and an awful father.
So what did I teach Number Two Son this morning?
Did I teach him that one of the great joys of life is learning? No.
Did I guide him in disciplining himself? No.
I taught him that the Bigger and Stronger One gets what he wants through fear and force. Perhaps a more useful lesson, considering that power relationships pervade life, but not the lesson I wanted to teach.
I Rise Before the Dawn
The wind shaking rain from the leaves.Â
The heavy breathing of sÅngshÄ« quÇŽn.
The clomp of his owner’s boots.
The broken muffler of the newspaper delivery man.Â
The first travelers of the morning.
Recovery
An unpleasant end to the day,Â
smoothed over with silenceÂ
and the quiet breathing of sleeping children.Â
The morning fog, trees and houses but shadows in the mist.
Stillness outside.Â
And inside?Â
Raucous Saturday morning cartoons.
Age Segregation
From grade schools to senior villages, we now spend much of our lives on separate generational islands. Can we reverse the trend?
“What ‘age segregation’ does to America,” Boston Globe, August 30, 2014
I certainly hope so. This segregation by age is one of the more ridiculously, annoyingly persistent legacies of the Industrial Revolution.
Three things would help:
- Stop approving “Over-55 Only” developments. These are often requested by planning boards because we’re scared about how more houses and thus more children might change our school taxes, but couched in terms that sound reasonable, such as “caring for our older neighbors.” The former argument is silly anyway: we’re having children later in life. When I’m 55, I’ll still have children in school. But I also need a place to live now. Age-restricted developments not only separate older adults from their children and grandchildren, but they constrain the housing supply.
- Let the older children teach the younger. Sort school children by ability rather than age, if they need to be sorted at all. If you have more than one child at home, you may have noticed that kids do this already by themselves. They pretty much still do on playgrounds.
- Play. Stop treating sports and the arts as only for children. Get up off the couch and dance.
Disillusionment
I can clearly remember the moment when I realized that my interests did not align with school’s. I was 13.
I loved school.
I loved it because I saw my friends. I loved it because I was excellent at dodgeball and red rover and running. I loved it because I was learning new things every day.
We moved.
And then I had to make new friends. I did.
And then gym was nothing more than basketball. I didn’t like basketball.
And then I got bored. 8th grade math was just the same as 7th, which had been slightly more than 6th. I asked to be moved to the next class. Sure, just pass this test; it will assess whether or not you know what will be taught this year. Makes sense. I failed the test. I had never heard of some of these things. Guess I’ll learn them this year.
But we didn’t. We never covered that material. And next year I got to the class I wanted the year before, just because.
School was not there to teach me the things I wanted to know. School was there for something else.
What?
The First Day of School
The Night Before
No. 2 Son (6), on tomorrow: “I wish every school day were Saturday, so then we would not have school.”
Supplies bought. Forms completed. Bags packed. Clothes picked out. Lunches packed. And four children sound asleep in bed. Next: fold the laundry, unload the dishwasher, and wash the dishes that accumulated on the counter while the dishwasher was running.
The Morning Of
Children up. Beds made. Breakfast eaten. Teeth brushed. Animals fed and watered. #1 off to 9th grade. #2 off to 7th grade. Table cleared. Soccer played. #3 off to 3rd grade. #4 off to 1st grade (with no objections). Dishes washed. Work started. The laundry remains unfolded.
Later…
I think No. 2 Daughter arrived home from school. She seems to have transformed into an iPod.
No. 1 Son, ten minutes after arriving home with his 3rd grade homework assignment: “All done. I need flash cards.” What for? “Says I need to practice subtraction with flash cards.” OK. Guess we can get some from the store.
Made applesauce this afternoon. The children arrived home from their outing. The applesauce is all gone.
No. 1 Son, a minute after opening the flashcards: “These only go to 12. This is too easy.” And that, my friends, is why we should teach to the abilities of the children and not to their “grade level.”
Fall
Mornings now are quiet.Â
The songbirds have taken their song to another.Â
A lone rooster crows, off in the distance.
The sun slowly rises after I wake.
What I Did On My Summer Vacation, by Will Cox (age 43)
Nothing. I did nothing.
That is to say, nothing much planned.
I visited with a friend. I spent a lot of time with my family. I read two books cover-to-cover. I played with the kids. I slept in a tent. I cooked breakfast over charcoal. I walked six miles over a mountain with Number Two Son and one of my nieces. I ate some good food. I drank some good beer. I teased a bear. I spit whiskey on a roaring fire–that’s fun as all get out, by the way. I laughed. I skipped rocks. I sat by the river and listened.
I would do it again next year.
Consequences
These days when the children are not with me, and I’ve nothing to fill the time after I bring the work day to a close, I reflect on all those wasted years where I let the work rule my life, rather than choosing to rule it. May you recognize what you truly value before it is lost.
In which apathy sets in
Huh? Apparently the school budget was up for approval on Tuesday. I didn’t notice.
This is the first year since I became a property owner that I’ve not paid attention to the various shenanigans that attend the school budget process in New York. I think this means that my attempt to ignore those things whose outcome I have little probability of affecting is working. Maybe next year I’ll add Federal surveillance policy to that list.
http://www.arlingtonschools.org/pages/arlington_schools/Board_of_Education/2014-2015_Budget_Development
The school board had already decided to close the Arthur S. May Elementary School building instead of altering it for ADA compliance. In my opinion, this is a grave error — location is the only thing that matters in real estate. The location of the Arlington Middle School next to a major highway and a dilapidated K-Mart is part of the urban removal tragedy of Poughkeepsie, though there are a handful of homes nearby.
The district may be able to find someone to rent Arthur S. May; it’s got a great location.
What this does mean, however, is that I’m still really glad that I have four children and so can calculate my property tax as tuition per child.
(Tuition will be $2750 for the coming school year.)
Cul de sac
I have to say that I was way ahead of the prediction curve on this, partly through desire and partly because it’s pretty fucking obvious just from looking at commute times that the ever-expanding suburb is an evolutionary dead-end. It will become a city or the people will move out. The people moving out is happening faster.
I’d been remarking on this verbally since at least 2001, but wrote it down in 2006. Meanwhile, I listened to my wife’s heart’s desire and bought this house instead.*
However, one must note that a finer analysis of the data needs to be done to see if there’s a comparable shuffle along the suburban-exurban-rural gradient toward locally urban areas, not just the larger cities. I suspect there is.
So, you ask, where do I recommend anyone buy in Dutchess County? Well, first I recommend you buy *my* house, but if you’re not that kind of buyer, look at the following, depending on where you work.
- Beacon, city of
- Poughkeepsie, city of
- Pawling, village of
- Rhinebeck/Rhinecliff, villages of
- Millbrook, village of
- Millerton, village of
There are other rather compact villages, but they don’t offer the amenities of those. You’ll have to travel a bit to find some items, or have them shipped to you. But if you don’t mind, try in no particular order
- Amenia
- Dover Plains
- Tivoli
- Red Hook
- Staatsburg
- Hyde Park
Unfortunately, new housing stock is still being built in wide-open green spaces, and turnover in the smaller villages is slight. Best bets are Beacon and Poughkeepsie. Not only are there more properties for sale in those cities, but the prices there are lower due to racial and wealth discrimination, and “concerns” about the school systems.
Math Hatred: A Systemic Problem
If you put a kid who’s teaching himself to read so he can play his favorite games, who can do simple sums, and who can count well past 200, in full-day Kindergarten, and he comes home saying he hates math and reading, you’ve done something tragically wrong.
If you take a kid who’s been proficient in math since before Kindergarten, and whose favorite subject was math until this year, and now he says he hates it, you’ve done something tragically wrong.
If you take a kid who loves math as much as she loves reading, who tells you she can’t wait for 4th grade so she can learn division, and who now thinks she’s bad at math, even though she scores high on tests, you’ve done something tragically wrong.
If you take a kid who loved math and science as much as she loves reading, but who left 4th grade thinking that she’s bad at math and science and is about to enter high school still thinking that — even though she’s grasping concepts faster than every one else in her class and is pulling up the school averages on standardized tests — then you’re still doing something horribly, tragically wrong.
Sorry. Procedures.
I’m reading an excellent book right now that’s discussing how we surrender our judgment to detailed rules and procedures: The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America, by Philip K. Howard.
These problems plague any large organization, not just government.
An example from today: One of the applications I support needs to increase storage by 26 GB (spread across 8 filesystems on 3 hosts). (IBM doubled the size of some software.)
The Company funds increases of up to 10% of the existing filesystem from the operations budget, but requires a special project and dedicated budget line for anything over that. The needed increase is greater than 10% of the size of the existing filesystems.
So, I could increase the 3 TB filesystem by 307 GB, but not the 3 GB filesystem by 3 GB?
Kinda funny what happens when people don’t understand percentages, isn’t it?
Against Full-Day Kindergarten
The Common Core State Standards website asks,
Q: Why do we need educational standards?
A: We need standards to ensure that all students, no matter where they live, are prepared for success in postsecondary education and the workforce.
Let’s assume for a moment that that is the goal of primary and secondary education. (Let’s also ignore the missing hyphen between post and secondary.) Will full-day Kindergarten help in achieving this goal?
No.
Why not?
Because extreme differences in academic ability collapse by the fourth grade. All of us, including children, learn at different rates. In general, those differences disappear on average by the time we are about ten years old, or fourth grade. I understand the difficulty of scientific experiments on humans, but we do what we can; and what we can do shows that there’s no evidence that learning a subject earlier makes a difference.
So, what exactly is the point of full-day Kindergarten?
You Missed a Spot
In housework, as in any field primarily concerned with the reduction of chaos, the work itself is not noticed; only the failures are.
Take a few moments today to thank your spouse, your domestic help, your secretary, your department of public works, your firefighter, your sysadmin for keeping chaos at bay.
Things I Love About Working from Home
- the sounds of children playing
- making breakfast
- sunlight on the deck
- the Great Blue Heron and friends
- the smell of dinner cooking
- watching her at work
- hugs
- the sound of someone coming home
Great Scientists
A friend of mine posted a Carl Sagan quote that reminded me of something.
Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
A few years back we saw Fourth of July fireworks from the causeway across Lake Carmel. I think the Big Sister and the Little Sister were four and two, respectively. We had a conversation that went something like this.
Big Sister: Why don’t the sounds match the fireworks?
Me: Why do you think?
Big Sister: I think the light is faster than the sound.
That’s my girl!
Public Embarrassment
This needs a picture.
The corner grocery has placed anti-theft devices around the pregnancy tests.
Has the embarrassment of purchasing a pregnancy test caused an increase in thefts?