The Twinkies

I LOVE shit like this. Some highlights:

Every reader of “The Cat in the Hat” will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? … The mother’s abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make so useless a palliative. The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother’s return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment.

…

Synopsis of “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back” is easy enough. Abandoned again by their feckless mother, those two sad sacks, Sally and me, are consigned to shovelling snow from a recent blizzard. The cat chooses the moment to make his return. Sally urges her brother to bar his entrance. The cat brushes off the brushoff and enters the house, where he is discovered soon afterward in the tub, eating a cake. He is banished from the tub by the boy, but when the water is drained a pink stain is left. The rest of the action concerns the problem of getting rid of the stain. It is first transferred, by the cat, to a series of household items, some plainly off limits to the children, including the mother’s dress, the father’s shoes, and the bed in what is described as “Dad’s bedroom” (no doubt a response to the mother’s extramarital adventures). Unable to erase the stain, the cat reveals, under his hat, various little cats named for the letters of the alphabet.

These semiotic felines do exactly what a deconstructionist would predict: rather than containing the stain, they disseminate it. Everything turns pink. The chain of signification is interminable and, being interminable, indeterminate. The semantic hygiene fetishized by the children is rudely violated; the “system” they imagined is revealed to have no inside and no outside. It is revealed to be, in fact, just another bricolage. The only way to end the spreading stain of semiosis is to unleash what, since it cannot be named, must be termed “that which is not a sign.” This is the Voom, the final agent in the cat’s arsenal. The Voom eradicates the pink queerness of a textuality without boundaries; whiteness is back, though it is now the purity of absence—one wants to say (and, at this point, why not?) of abstinence. The association with nuclear holocaust and its sterilizing fallout, wiping the planet clean of pinkness and pinkos, is impossible to ignore. It is a strange story for teaching people how to read.

I survived the Mommy Wars over breastfeeding, managing to be both a fraud who supplemented and a freak who is nursing toddler twins. There aren’t many areas in life I’ve achieved both fraudhood and freakdom. I survived the working vs. stay-at-home debates utilizing the aggressively nutty choice of trying to start my own business in a totally new field for me. But the educational arms race may do me in.

When I was interviewing to teach at private schools one administrator warned me that parents, upon enrolling their child in that particular school’s kindergarten, sometimes asked if this would increase their child’s chance of getting into Yale. Seriously. I attended a workshop on brain development at my kids’ school because I am the kind of dork who finds child development interesting and several parents asked questions that boiled down to “tell me that spending all this money on tuition will make my kid smarter/more successful/more likely to get into Yale.”

Everyone thinks her kids are gifted. Spend time on parenting boards and almost every single child seems to be ahead of the curve. Women whose kids are well within the bounds of normal developmental milestones get worked into a tizzy because someone else’s kid is counting to ten in three languages by one. Everyone has to be gifted. If your kid isn’t gifted he must be plain old dumb because those appear to be the only choices. You have to have a gifted kid who is super duper smart, so smart he makes you worried in that braggy kind of “whatever am I going to do - junior is playing Mozart again” way or you may as well give up. Not reading Tolstoy at 2? You’re doomed to a life digging ditches in Albania.

How do you determine giftedness at 1.5 anyway? Who smears paste in her hair with the most grace? Who eats, or doesn’t eat, the fingerpaints?

We’re in an educational arms race towards a time when all children are gifted and we are already scurrying about like madwomen trying to grab onto whatever advantage we can scrape up to get our kids into the very bestest colleges no matter what. It’s insane. And you have to consciously fight to not get sucked into it. Flashcards, DVDs, they are out there, taunting you with the possibility that if you just used this product your kid might be counting in Urdu too.

Mine of course, already does. Or maybe it’s Gaelic. It’s hard to tell what with all the fingerpaints in her mouth.

Summary: F put her own coat on without any help this morning. Plus, I whine about former students.

When I was a teacher I often ended up talking to parents about their children in conferences. I remember one where I met with a charming woman to talk about why her child was failing my class. Actually, I knew why he was failing; he didn’t do any homework at all, didn’t make up failed exams, never studied and didn’t do the dumb artsy projects I had to add to the curriculum as per the school to help out struggling students. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help himself. She told what she considered to be a cute anecdote to give me a better “feel” for her child. When he was in kindergarten and it got cold enough to need to put on coats for the first time to go outside and play rather than put on his own coat he stood there with his arms out waiting for the teacher to dress him. He had never put on his own coat at 5 years of age.

I was horrified though I think I managed to hide it.

The Cobb School teaches the toddlers to put on their own coats because, of course, one major goal of Montessori is to help the child develop independence. They lay the coats in front of them and show them how to put their arms into the sleeves and whip it over their heads. This morning I was helping J put on his coat to go to school. When I turned around F had put her own on without any help!

Though I am fairly sure I will horrify J and F’s teachers in many many ways over the years I can cross this one off the list.

I’m a John Taylor Gatto fan. For those of you who don’t read radical educational theorists for fun he is an award winning public school teacher most famous for his work Dumbing Us Down in which he argues that the current model of public schooling is not a failure; it is not designed to turn out free thinking members of a democratic society but rather factory workers who show up on time, do what they are told and don’t question authority. It’s doing that quite well. This set up is, of course, inherently classist because if you can afford it you can BUY your child an education that teaches children to work alone without guidance, to challenge prevailing assumptions, to (gasp) think for themselves. If you can’t, you’re stuck with a public school system that is not all that fond of children who challenge authority.

Home schooling is an option for some. I know that there is a popular conception that home schooled kids are poorly-socialized religious zealots who can spell appoggiatura¹ without batting an eye. However, I’ve had home schooled kids in my classroom and in general they seem mature, self-motivated and respectful without being overawed or intimidated by authority.

I, however, am not cut out to home school. Some people are. Those people tend to murmur things about how you never know what you can do until you try it but I’m fairly confident I’m self-aware enough to know I’d hate home schooling. I miss the adult workplace. I love seeing the kids but being home all day makes me batty to the point that I am creating vague facsimiles of adult work to keep me sane. The idea of trying to do this for another decade is not a happy one. If the mother is miserable I don’t think home schooling can possibly be a positive experience.

So, once I cast aside the idea of home schooling - if one can be said to cast aside an idea one has never really had - I looked at alternative educational structures. There were three biggies: Sudbury, Waldorf and Montessori.

Sudbury schools are democratic schools. Students initiate their own activities with staff acting as facilitators and students participate in the governance of the school. Having gone to a similar school where I did algebra and read Shakespeare in grade 5 I know that children can, and do, gravitate to interesting, difficult work when given a chance. However, the only Sudbury school near us is just starting out and doesn’t have the resources of the original.

I was originally very attracted to the arts-centered education you find in a Waldorf school. However, the number of organized critics of the methodology gave me pause, particularly when I read their concerns, and there isn’t one within an hour of us anyway. Plus, Anthroposophy leaves me cold as does the fact that many Waldorf schools - including the one “near” me - either neglect to mention or gloss over the itsy bitsy issue that their curriculum is rooted in religion.

So that left Montessori. I went to a Montessori school (I changed schools a lot - I’ve experienced many differing theories of education from the student perspective) and recall rather liking it. I like the multi-age classrooms, the emphasis on self-paced learning and the prepared environment. There are a LOT of Montessori schools around us and the one we picked, The Cobb School, is gorgeous. The physical plant is amazing and the whole school is filled with light and every classroom has direct access to the outdoors. When I went for a visit I was blown away; the kids were happy, engaged and working independently. Two five-year-olds introduced themselves to me, asked if I would like some tea, and proceeded to make me some. I was offered a selection of tea bags, they timed an electric kettle, poured the hot water into a little pot and brought me tray with the teapot, a cup, a doily, a spoon a napkin and a small flower. Did I mention they were five? Did I mention how every space was filled with sunshine? I know I’ve mentioned the help with potty training in the toddler room. The kids aren’t allowed to wear clothing with large graphics or writing, eliminating logos and Dora the Explorer. They ask that when you bring in birthday treats you limit yourself to fruit to support the school’s commitment to good nutrition. Finally, the research seems to indicate that Montessori children do very well later in their schooling compared to students in traditional public schools. ² It’s the perfect blend, at least before we actually start, of my quasi-crunchy ways and obsession with education.

You did note that I read educational theorists for fun, right?

Of course, eventually there is high school. On this front I’m a fan of Leon Botstein, president of my alma mater and a man with a flair for a bow tie. He argues for abolishing high school altogether, believing that “teens are as capable as adults in many respects and that they are certainly capable of learning important and interesting things. High school … demeans the young, wastes their time, traps them in the vacuous world of teen culture, turns them off to learning and isolates them from and makes them hostile toward the very people they are about to become: adults.” ³ Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with how to reconcile my feelings about the general uselessness of high school and my own children’s education for a few years.

Well. You asked. I’m a big bore on education. My mother was a teacher. My step-mother was a teacher. My grandmother was a teacher. “Opinionated” doesn’t even begin to describe me on this topic. I haven’t even branched out into No Child Left Behind (dreadful - just dreadful), teacher certification (if you think this ensures quality teachers you are deluding yourself) or grades (oy!).

¹ That would be the winning word from the 2005 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. It means “in music, an ornamental note of long or short duration that temporarily displaces, and subsequently resolves into, a main note, usually by stepwise motion.” (source) Of course, you knew that. I had to look it up.

² “On several dimensions, children at a public inner city Montessori school had superior outcomes relative to a sample of Montessori applicants who, because of a random lottery, attended other schools. By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized tests of reading and math, engaged in positive interaction on the playground more, and showed advanced social cognition and executive control more. They also showed more concern for fairness and justice. At the end of elementary school, Montessori children wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school.” (source)

³(source) How do I reconcile feeling that high school should be abolished with being a high school teacher? Though I will do my best to pull my own kids out of the conventional schooling system I also try to work within it to effect change. Gatto spent 30 years within the system before he washed his hands of it entirely. Get back to me in 25 years and I’ll let you know whether I am still mostly on the “work within the system” team or whether I have moved entirely to the “abolish the system and start again” team. Right now I think the latter is unrealistic.

I know most people don’t know how to use the subjunctive in English. You use the subjunctive in counterfactual statements (”If I were going to the store…”, NOT “If I was going to the store…”), wishful statements (”If I were a hammer….” NOT “If I was a hammer…”) and conjuctive formulations (”Lest you misuse the subjunctive, read here for more information”).

It’s annoying enough when people misuse the subjunctive in everyday conversation. When the title of a children’s book, however, is “I Wish I Was…” I have to bang my head against the wall. Who was your editor? Who? And from what cut-rate English program did she graduate? I ask because she needs a good slap, her advisor needs a slap or two and the entire program needs a few kicks in the shin. The publishing house should feel some shame too.

Can you tell this is one of my pet peeves? When I am reading one of my novels just because it has no redeeming literary merit does not, in my opinion, exempt it from meeting standard grammar requirements. When the subjunctive gets misused it throws me right out of the story, breaks into my mental flow, and that annoys me.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled mommyblog already in progress wherein my son is trying to balance a red block on his head for reasons that I am sure would make sense if you were one.