big transition

I am in my last days at camp, heading back to the Hudson Valley where I teach future elementary teachers. The rain has been constant this summer, along with the mosquitoes that come with the rain. I am excited to begin thinking about the ways in which my experiences with young people this summer can begin to inform my teaching. I plan to record some of my thinking here, as I continue to move through this pandemic, and explore what it means in my life and in the lives of my students and family. 

Twenty-two things I learned from my friend David Bosnick, who died yesterday.

1. Family comes first. Always.
2. Teaching is truly the best possible profession, and it’s dumb to lose sight of that for a day or even a minute.
3. It’s ok to say things are dumb.
4. Redi-whip is actually kind of delicious, and nothing bad happens when you eat it.
5. Stand up and speak up for what you believe.
6. Walk out of a bad meeting when necessary.
7. Hair can be surprising. David’s often was.
8. Long underwear can be dapper if it’s red, and red looks particularly snazzy under a blue oxford cloth shirt.
9. You can’t be any more sorry than you were the first time you said you were sorry. Apologize and move on.
10. Stay true to your original love story, especially if it's a good one.
11. It’s ok to be romantic.
12. Love your kids deeply and completely, but don’t take them too seriously.
13. Don’t listen to anyone who insists on talking about stuff they don’t know about.
14. Somebody’s got to be the bad guy.
15. Sometimes it’s you.
16. You need a really, really big van. I still don’t know why, but I trust that his was necessary. I can’t ask him now, so I trust.
17. It’s ok to be sarcastic.
18. It’s necessary to be sarcastic when you’re dealing with middle schoolers.
19. One of the most important things a teacher can do for a parent is to tell the truth.
20. Much of what seems ordinary is actually hilarious.
21. No warning. It’s what we knew about death all along, but David’s death has taught me that there truly is no warning, it will not come at a good time, and you will not get a chance to say good bye.
22. When you go, the story of who you were will be taken up by those left behind, so start a good story.

rock work

I've been noticing and thinking about rock walls lately. I found this lovely old stone fence at Bowman Lake State Park last week, along a hiking trail that I was fortunate enough to be hiking by myself. This was one of the best preserved sections of the fence, and many other sections were falling down. I like how it rewards closer inspection. 

I imagine that the work required to build this wall would have been both intellectual and physical. It would have been hard work to haul the rocks around and stack them up, but I don't think it could have been done quickly. It would have required time, observation, and reflection, a careful sussing out of the characteristics of individual rocks. 

Even though we don't typically build rock walls to keep our livestock in anymore, we still need rock structures, and I am seeing them everywhere. I also found this culvert on a different hike at Bowman Lake. This one wasn't constructed quite so carefully, and the rewards of closer inspection are those of introspection about technology and the state of craft and skill. 

I don't know anything about how a structure like this gets built. It looks like it requires machines, probably powered by fossil fuels, and the skills involved are those required to operate the machinery, rather than the careful consideration of a natural material. I also suspect that the wire frame is assembled elsewhere, possibly far enough away to require a very significant investment of more fossil fuels to transport. 


There is also this: a lovely stone wall and a set of steps in my neighborhood. The gentleman who lives here and maintains this wall is not young, but he is hale. I took several walks in the neighborhood and I watched his progress over a week or so. It looked like thoughtful work, and I think the result is lovely. After the wall was finished, I noticed him up on his roof, pointing his rock chimney. 

everybody's got a porch

Just because our porch is done doesn't mean there aren't other porches in the neighborhood that need a little love. We have been working together for the last week or so on our neighbor's porch columns. It's been good to have a project that has a definite end point.

Because we were hired to do the columns and only the columns, we don't have to worry about the floor, or the ceiling, or the railings, or anything else. Just the columns. This makes it much easier to get it done in a timely fashion.

So in between rainstorms, we've been walking over to our neighbor's porch to make it a little better, bit by bit. All the houses in our neighborhood are about the same vintage, so they all have lots of old wood and old paint.

Here I am scraping away, with my trusty sidekick watching out for squirrels, other dogs, neighborhood kids, and other assorted creatures. Contrary to appearances, I am not the main prep person when we have a big painting project. I definitely do put in my time with a scraper, but I don't like to sand, and I am likely to call a surface prepped long before Joe is willing to do so. He's more thorough, and he's the one who did most of the sanding, filling, and more meticulous prep.

I am the painter. I like to paint, and I like to be fussy about it. That's me putting on the primer coat, with the color scheduled to go on tomorrow, assuming the rain looks like it's going to hold off long enough.

Here's a thought: would it be cool to have a Ravelry sort of thing for people who are into DIY on their houses? It wouldn't be for professionals, just for people trying to do a decent job fixing and remodeling their own houses. It could be a place to share pictures, discuss products and techniques, get ideas, solve problems. Would you use it?

back to our roots

It's been a long time since we've blogged, and even longer since I needed a space to pontificate on matters educational. I've begun a doctorate in education, and I get plenty of time and space to read, write, and talk about all my dearest concerns, and many that are less dear. Although this opportunity to be a full-time student has been attractive only because the dreadful economy has made it all but impossible to get hired as a public school teacher, I am grateful. It is a gift to be unemployable at the moment, a boon to be paid to go to school.

But it does mean that we have less money to work with, and also that (for this summer, at least) I have a great deal more free time than I've had in years. So I've been de-cluttering, and we had a mongo garage sale a few weeks back, using the proceeds to fund a few minor home improvement projects. As difficult as it is to call anything on an old house "fixed" or "finished" I am doing just that with our front porch. While I can find imperfections, I can't find any I want to fix.



It is easily my favorite room in our house. We often have dinner out here, and I like to knit out here in the afternoons.

Interior rooms are coming along as well, with fresh paint in the kitchen and a downstairs bathroom. For the first time ever, we hired someone else to do some painting for us last summer, and it was astonishing to see work getting done without doing it ourselves. It turned out not to be such a great deal, though, for a number of reasons, and we're definitely back to doing our own work.

We have no shortage of projects that need doing. Here are two that need attention soon, certainly before I go back to school at the end of August.

adjust

I am working a lot these days, not always for a lot of pay, but still running from one end of my week to the other most of the time. I'm learning a lot, and fast. I'm doing a practicum to learn how to be a literacy specialist, and I'm subbing when I can spare the time from my course work. Yesterday I was startled by something.

I was teaching a lesson to a group of second graders, as part of my practicum. I was asking them to read and then interpret this poem, by J. R. R. Tolkien:

Cat

The fat cat on the mat

may seem to dream

of nice mice that suffice

for him, or cream;

but he free, maybe,

walks in thought

unbowed, proud, where loud

roared and fought

his kin, lean and slim,

or deep in den

in the East feasted on beasts

and tender men.

The giant lion with iron

claws in paw,

and huge ruthless tooth

in gory jaw;

the pard dark-starred,

fleet upon feet,

that oft soft from aloft

leaps on his meat

where woods look in gloom—

far now they be,

fierce and free,

and tamed as he;

but fat cat on the mat

kept as a pet,

he does not forget.

I love this poem, and I wanted to share it, for some very particular reasons. I knew it would be a stretch for them, but I thought that with enough of an introduction, the kids would be able to appreciate the rich language and apprehend at least some of the meaning. I really wanted to offer the kids a window into what real literature sounds like and looks like. They don't see a lot of it; these kids are carefully fed a reading diet in which controlled text figures prominently. That means that they very rarely see a word in a book that hasn't been explicitly taught in a lesson.

Part of my introduction included the word contented. The classroom teacher jumped in right there, and asked the class if they knew what contented meant.

They didn't.

I probably should have guessed right there that the lesson I'd planned just wasn't going to fly. If kids don't know the word contented, how could I expect them to understand suffice, ruthless, and fleet, even with a lot of support, even with a rich introduction?

But I pressed on, reading the poem once, twice, stopping at the tricky words. As I gradually turned the lesson over to the kids, asking them to generate some ideas of their own about what Tolkien was trying to say with all his fancy language, the whole thing just ground to a halt.

Nobody was rude, nobody cried, but nobody had any idea what I was asking them to do, either. No clue. Deer caught in the headlights, all around the room. I shifted gears very quickly, and had them get out a pencil and notice the words that rhyme within the lines, then write sets of those words in their journals. Not what I'd planned, but still valuable. They engaged with the poem independently, reading the words to themselves in order to discover rhymes. They got an opportunity to notice that unbowed and proud rhyme, even though they are spelled differently. Fortunately, they were all well-equipped to be successful with the revised lesson. (Phew!)

I spoke to the classroom teacher about it after the kids went home yesterday, and she assumed (incorrectly) that most of my teaching experience had been with much older kids. We talked a little about how and why kids develop an ability to understand sophisticated language, and she said something that really stunned me.

It's because all these kids do is watch TV and play video games. Even parents who you think are really good parents, you ask the kids what they did over the weekend, and all they'll have to tell you is that they played a new video game or got to a new level.

This changes the way I think about kids, and the way I think about curriculum. If I'm making assumptions about kids and families that are way, way off, that means I have to change the way I think about the work I do with kids.

I really believe that my job as a teacher is to stretch kids out of their comfort zone in a million different ways, but if the comfort zone is miles away from where I think it is... well. I'm going to have to adjust.

But those kids I used to teach, some of whom had amazing oral vocabularies, are still out there. There's one or two in every classroom, a second grader who knows what contented means, and suffice and ruthless as well. A kid who is starving for something more, something not just exactly like what he did yesterday.

What happens to those kids?

full circle

Little has begun school, and I have had my first taste of what it will be to be a teacher again.

The first week was very difficult. Little's not used to getting up early, and even though we spent the last few weeks before school began for him getting him to bed early and up early, he didn't really relish the idea of getting up, getting dressed, and going out into the cold. The first day he was quiet and unsure. Tuesday and Wednesday were awful, if only because he was miserable about separating from me. The word from the teacher and the school social worker was that he was having good days, going with the flow, having fun, making friends, and doing his work. Thursday was better, and Friday was better still.

Dropping off a miserable little boy at school was made more challenging by the fact that I did not get called to sub last week. At all. I can handle some measure of misery as long as I have something to do to get my mind off it. Idleness plus misery is a recipe for a highly pathetic form of insanity, for me at least.

Until Friday afternoon. I'd pretty much given up hope when the call came in, and as I got dressed to teach (!) I realized I needed to make an important decision.

What were the kids going to call me?

At the alternative school where I have done the vast majority of my teaching, I was called by my first name, and I really believe, most of the time, that's the way it should be. Teachers and students on a first name basis indicates a certain level of respect for the students' ideas, a certain regard for their autonomy and their sovereignty as persons.

But that's not going to fly in a public school.

When I student taught in a public school, I had feminist notions around courtesy titles, and I introduced myself as Ms. Deluxe, but it always felt false and forced. It never rolled off my tongue, and because kids never asked me about what Ms. meant, I don't really think it served any purpose.

So I have decided to go by Mrs. Deluxe. It's accurate; the etiquette books say that no matter what her last name, a married woman is entitled to use Mrs. My last name is the one I was born with, which means that as I go out into the world as Mrs. Deluxe, I'm using the exact same name my mother used when she taught, as well as the name my paternal grandmother used when she taught.

Three generations of Mrs. Deluxe, teaching as best they can. May I live up to my namesakes.

adventures

Little and I are winding down our homeschooling time by choosing to do some things we've been putting off. We made a field trip the the Sciencenter a few weeks ago, we visited a great nature area and dog park near our house, and we've been making Christmas cookies. Last week I asked him what else he wanted to make sure we got to do together before he started school.

Take a bus, Mama.

Oh, okay. Great. Where do you want to go on the bus?

No place in particular. I just want to ride the bus.

Okay, but buses go places. We have to choose some sort of destination, just because it's winter and we'll want to get off and get warm at some point.

Ok. Let's take the bus to the mall.

And so began our most recent field trip. The bus. To the mall.

Now, let me tell you something about me. I am not a city girl. I rode a big yellow bus to school every day, and that is the sum total of my experiences with public transit of any kind, and buses in particular.* I don't know how to read a bus schedule. I don't know anything about bus stop etiquette. I don't know where to sit, how to pay, whether I need a token or change or a pass or what. And frankly, I don't see why I need to find out about these things, since I have two perfectly decent cars sitting in my driveway.

But Little wanted a bus trip, and I knew my reluctance was just snobbishness, so I did the research, and we did our little trip this week.

We got to the bus stop way too early, and it was a freezing cold day, so we ducked into the nearby gas station for a snack, then stood outside in the cold. He complained, and I refrained from reminding him that he'd chosen this trip, so no whining allowed. I sometimes need to be reminded that just because he's chosen something doesn't mean he has to like it.

But then the bus came, and we giggled the whole way. There was hardly anyone else on the bus, and it was fun to see all the familiar sights of our town through different windows. Visiting the mall by bus somehow offered a different perspective. We didn't have a place to leave our coats. The whole thing was somehow more leisurely, relaxed, perhaps because we knew we could only leave at certain times.

We had lunch, we got a Christmas present for Big, we walked around. We gave the guys at Radio Shack the third degree about cell phone plans. We examined Fossil bags at Macy's. Little played with video cameras. It was great.

And then we caught the bus back home, rang the bell for our stop, and walked home. We strolled happily back up our street, to our house, where our cars sat in the driveway. It was a whole new way of looking at the day. I might even do it again.

*This is not entirely true. In my misspent youth, I actually took a bus from Ithaca, NY to Pocatello, Idaho, and then back again. It took four days and nights of bus travel to get there. I remember sitting with a guy who told me he was a professional football player. I believed him.

ending beginning

Little and I are coming to the end of our homeschooling time together. Just before Thanksgiving, Joe and I decided that the time had come for Little to go to school.

It's good news, really. When Joe first lost his job, we really didn't know what to expect. We knew I needed to start substitute teaching and looking for a permanent teaching position, but we didn't have any idea what Joe would be doing. We thought it was possible that he would be collecting unemployment and homeschooling Little. That was, I admit, not our first choice, but it seemed entirely possible.

Instead, he's found that there are lots of people who would like to have his research expertise and insight on their new projects, which means that he's busy. He still doesn't have a job, and the day when he gets one is probably still a long way off, but he has lots of consulting work. That's the good news. We are both delighted that he's got plenty to do.

But it means that Little is going to public school as of the first of the year, simply because there won't be anyone at home who can pay attention to him, let alone school him. I am of several minds about this. I am delighted that I'm not going to be stuck at home all day, all week anymore. For myself, the news that I can now resume my teaching career and get the hell out of the house is nothing but happy.

But for Little, I wanted something different. I believe he'll be fine in public school. He's reading, he's very socially aware, he genuinely likes people and is looking forward to making new friends. He's excited about the change, and I'm sure this is partly because Big has made such a beautiful transition to public school. As a sixth grader, he's around a bunch of other guys all day, he's learning some cool things from some fabulous teachers, and he's loving it. Not every aspect of every day, but the benefits far outweigh the problems.

However, Little will be starting school for the first time as a first grader. When Big started, he was already well on his way. He has enough of a background in progressive education that he knows to value autonomy and an intellectual challenge. He also has the maturity to suck it up when those features of an excellent education are absent.

Little has no such grounding, and no such maturity. He's going into a system much larger than himself without the tools he needs to negotiate it when things don't go his way. I really wanted for him an early elementary education in which I could count on the adults in his life to be conscious, intelligent, attentive, and flexible. Also one where he got to play a lot and spend lots of time outside.

Certainly there are many families who manage to raise awake, alive, interesting children, even as they send their kids to public school. Perhaps ours is one of them; Joe and I both survived the experience more or less intact.

I admit that my fears of public school for Big have not been borne out in his experience. I have every reason to hope that school will go swimmingly for Little. Perhaps the professionals at my neighborhood elementary school are there because they care about elementary education just as much as I do. We shall see.

curve ball central

What is the etiquette, exactly, of sharing bad news? Does one assume one's friends will want to know, and therefore tell everyone, as quickly as possible? Or does one keep it to oneself, in the interest of keeping everyone's lives as simple as possible? And what about those friends and connections we make only through the internet? Facebook friends, some of whom I haven't seen since I was 19 and don't really ever expect to see again? Blog friends, who live far away but have come to be familiar faces of sorts?

I don't want to burden you, but it feels dishonest to pretend everything is just as it was last week.

Joe and I are both, suddenly, looking for jobs. Joe got laid off (downsized? subtracted?) on Monday. I spent all of Tuesday pulling together materials to apply to substitute teach. I expect to be working within two or three weeks. After I get a feel for the schools around here, I'll start looking for a permanent position.

Every option is on the table: we could move far away, Joe might go back to school, or we might stay here so he can do consulting work with the contacts he's made in the last two and a half years working in green chemistry. Maybe we'll move to New Zealand. Or Belize.

My mind is filled with all the possibilities that this opens up for us. I am strangely pleased. I know I may not be quite as pleased when the money runs out and we don't know how we're going to pay the electric bill, let alone the mortgage, but for now, it's all good, and I'm loving my life at this moment.

anticipation

That's a freshly carded batt of exceptionally soft corriedale, lounging on the back of my spinning chair and waiting to be spun on my delightful new spinning wheel. It will wait until after laundry and dishes, and some schooling for the little guy.

Little and I have really shifted gears in the last week. I'm having what I hope will be a minor health crisis, and he has had several minor meltdowns, and all of that is pointing us in the direction of fewer scheduled activities. We're going to be home, and we're only going to go out when there's something we've just thought of that we really want to do.

This means we're opting out of some great organized activities and projects this fall, but it also means we'll have time for the library, the museum, trips to see his grandparents and his papa at work, not to mention time to play at home. We need our daydreaming time, and starting this week, we're going to get it. We're both excited and pleased about this change.

massive tangle

This morning, in what was to be a triumph of technology that hastened the enjoyable process of watching freshly spun skeins of yarn dry outside on a sunny fall day, I put fifteen skeins of handspun yarn in the washer. I wasn't washing them, understand. I just wanted to spin the water out of them after I'd carefully washed and rinsed them by hand in the sink.

Except I also decided to let the washing machine do an extra rinse. Which maybe wasn't so smart. Also I have a front loader, which I understand might have been a particularly bad choice. You know, if one were to choose a washing machine for its ability to spin the water out of handspun yarn.



We have now run this experiment, and there will be no need to run it ever again. Consider this my contribution to yarn science. I have attempted a crazy thing and suffered for it, so you don't have to.

For the curious, there are 12 skeins of yarn there, three of the burgundy, four of the green, and five of the natural white.

I did manage to separate three skeins from the main tangle, but I don't think I'll be knitting with any part of this yarn any time soon. There are sections in these skeins that are like tiny colorful dreadlocks.

the problem of the day

We're having an interesting adjustment to public school. Mostly things are going swimmingly, although there are the expected feelings of being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of students (him) and the bureaucracy required to handle those numbers (me.) Big One is going to have to learn to get very organized, very fast, but we knew that was going to happen. On balance, he's really pleased to be with other kids and to have other adults in his life.

The interesting part is math. Because of his standardized test scores, he placed into an accelerated math track, which means he'll be taking the state exam for ninth graders at the end of eighth grade. All good, great, terrific. The teacher of the accelerated math class does a Problem of the Day: the kids solve a problem at the start of class, then come up to the board and explain how they did it.

Big came home from school on Friday saying, "I totally bombed on the Problem of the Day in math class today. What is an LCM?" We did a quick table session over the weekend, talked about LCM (lowest common multiple), and he gets it. Problem solved. But it happened again on Monday, with GCF (greatest common factor). And I expect it's going to continue to happen, most days. His math journey has not been traditional, and I know there are going to be topics from the fifth grade curriculum that he's never seen.

This is where you might expect me to engage in some hand-wringing and doubt of myself as a teacher and a home school mom, where I might think I've done it all wrong and go the traditional route with Little, where I should recriminate myself and the non-traditional school Big attended.

Indeed, many parents did just that when they pulled their kids from our progressive school and put them in public school. I heard from parents more than once that our math program was weak in computation skills, and that they needed to heavily remediate when their kids went to a more traditional math curriculum.

But I'm not, because here's the thing: I know that Big is going to catch up, and I know that he has a math background that is excellent in other ways. He understands math. He has had some fabulous opportunities to use math for what it really is: reasoning at its most elemental level. He likes to think things through, he has a need to understand what he's doing, and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

I'm not sure you can have it both ways. Either you emphasize reasoning and concepts, as I have done, or you emphasize quick computation skills and many topics, as most schools have traditionally done. You could theoretically have both, I suppose, but it would take a lot of time, and you would spend your entire elementary career doing math, and you'd miss out on something else equally important. You have to choose.

Little and I have chosen: we did our math and our reading for the day, and we're off to playgroup for some fresh air and running around with friends.

let's talk about depression, shall we?

Let it be known that I am no longer depressed, and that this post should be evidence of that. There is no way I could write about this stuff if I were still in the thick muck of depression.

But let me say this: I was depressed all summer, and probably for many months before that. I have been tired, exhausted, uninterested in everything, self-recriminating, bored, boring, negative, hopeless, overwhelmed.... classic really, now that I can look back at it.

I would occasionally look over what I'd written here, and feel miles away from the person who could have comfortably asserted that she knew anything about kids or knitting or spackling or any of the rest of it. The person who wrote those posts (even sometimes with humor, albeit self-deprecating humor) seemed like another person. A distant cousin, perhaps, one whom I don't get along with and rarely see. And the person who went to school every day to teach other people's kids? She must have been a person from another planet.

I had a long conversation about a month ago with a friend who routinely takes pills to ease his chronic depression, and he recommended that I see a doctor. Since he takes pills for his depression, it made sense to him that I should as well. This did not sit right with me. I'm not against pills to ease mental and emotional pain, but something about it didn't feel right. For me, understand. If you take them and they're important to you, please don't imagine I'm being critical here. I just didn't (and still don't) think it's the right approach for me.

Then I had another conversation with another friend, and she had some great and important insights. I told her that somebody had told me I sounded really depressed, and that maybe some pharmaceuticals could help. She told me about this book she'd read (sorry, I forget what book) that suggested that depression (or any other emotion, probably; I haven't read the book) can and perhaps should be seen as a sort of sign along the road to somewhere.

The sign (depression) could be saying, "AAAHHH! Don't go down this road!" or it could be, "Please don't marry that person, you'll regret it," or any number of other interesting and important messages about one's life and its living. This rang true. She also pointed out that pills, if they blunt the emotion you're feeling, would blur the writing on the sign, and make it really hard to figure out what it says.

So I sat with that for a few days, and just let the question simmer. If my depression was a sign, what was it saying?

And that's when I had to really admit to myself that I am just not happy being home all day. I don't know if there's a way to change things up so that I can be happy with it; I feel like we have really tried a lot of different structures and strategies, but it's not really working for me. I love my kids, and their intellectual development is important to me, but oddly, I don't think they need me. Of course they need me to be their mother. They need me to listen to them, to support their projects and ideas, and they need me on a most basic level to keep the house running so that they can eat and wear semi-decent clothes. But they don't need me to be home with them all the time, particularly not if that choice is making me depressed and unhappy.

I believe that a depressed, resentful mother at home is worse than a full-time working but otherwise happy and emotionally available mother.

It feels strange to admit this, even though everything in me is indicating its truth. I know many readers of this blog stay home with their kids. I am not trying to say anything here about anyone else's experience, only mine.

And I know I'll be home another year at least, but I'm going to take on some outside projects when they present themselves, and I know that home schooling is going to wind down, sooner or later. It is no longer a project with no deadline.

Feeling better now, thank you.

quick update

Big's first day went well. He came home tired but smiling. He found a bunch of kids he already knows, sat with an old friend for lunch, and likes most of his teachers. He's excited to go back today.

And I'm breathing easy. Yesterday with just Little was a completely different sort of day. We're going to have fun this year, and we're both going to learn a lot.

today is the day

Big One's first day of school. He's checking his new watch to make sure he'll get there on time. This day has been coming for some time, in glimmerings and rumblings, and more recently in definite plans and deadlines. He has for some time felt restrained by the tiny circle of his home school colleagues, which primarily consist of me, his brother, the dog and four cats. He wants, fervently wants, to do school with other kids his own age. He wants more direction, less free time, more projects, more work. He truly wants those things.

I am trying hard not to see this as another failure. I have really struggled this summer, with my feelings of not quite being up to the task of home schooling a middle schooler, and my desire to get back out in the world again. I admitted to myself not long ago that I'm not happy being home all the time, and so I presented Big with an opportunity: if you were to go to school this year, you'd be one of many kids who are new to the school. The local middle school has three feeder elementary schools, so nobody knows everybody. He was delighted to hear it, and jumped in with both feet. He decided, we registered him, he met some teachers and saw the building, and he's never looked back, not for a moment.

(Although last night in the car, he asked me to remind him why he's doing this. I want you to know that I was a mature adult mama, and I did so, with grace, love, and honesty.)



(Also this morning, he admitted he's feeling apprehensive, but also excited. I chose not to tell him that I hardly slept, and that I sobbed as I made his lunch at 6:30 a.m.)

My feelings today are so mixed. I'm incredibly proud of him for choosing public school when so much of his life has been defined by the choice not to go to public school. He was attending my private progressive school when he was three, and he loved it there. He has loved home schooling not quite as much, but he's enjoyed his freedom and his friends, and he knows that learning is supposed to come with a large dose of intellectual freedom and autonomy. He knows these things will be scant or absent in his new setting, but he's choosing it anyway, for reasons of his own.

I'm excited for myself, because I know that although Little is choosing to stay home this year, the time is coming when he too will want to get out there and find out first hand about formal schooling. And people? When he does? I am so outta here. I am going to burn it up getting back out there in the schools, working with other people's kids, because that is the work that reminds me of who I am.

When I'm teaching, I'm exhausted at the end of the day, but I'm satisfied, and I know I've accomplished something small and significant, every day. The work of being an important adult in the lives of children who need another adult is what I'm here for. Working with my own kids just doesn't cut it, and while it's taken me a long time to admit it, I'm there now, and that is going to lead us down a long path into the unknown.

Here we go.


And there he goes.

always have a project

Joe and I have been busting it out with the paintbrushes this weekend. Sometimes it's latex, sometimes it's oil, but we've been pulling this old house in the same direction. I do find it troublesome that oil paints require a whole set of brushes unto themselves, and I also fail to appreciate the freaky-deaky paint thinner spaciness engendered after a few hours of huffing the stuff, but on the up side, latex paint smells like a bed of lavender when you shift gears.

Without further ado:

The fancy cut-outs have oil-based primer, and a finish coat of latex. This is the closest to truly done these decorative elements have ever been, photo to the right notwithstanding. The top rails, which still need a second coat, are new lengths of wood, fitted out and planed and what-not in the wood shop that used to be our garage. Joe has made rumblings about calling the garage his studio. I'm happy to humor him. We certainly aren't going to park our cars in there any time soon.

Another project that has been languishing pitifully for--ahem--years is the repainting of certain shingles that have been in place since we had the roof replaced on this old house shortly after we moved in. Included in the roof job was replacing the shingles that had to be removed when the roof was replaced.

We purchased new shingles and, on the advice of our realtor, painted them before they were installed. It was brilliant advice, and would have worked out perfectly had I been more astute about choosing a color to match the color of the old shingles. I chose badly, and our mismatched greens have been an eyesore ever since. Of course, nobody but me really notices, but trust me, I'm enough of a critic to make up for everyone else's lack of concern.


So there I am, painting a good green over the bad green. If you look closely, you can see that the shingles along the roof line to my left blend in quite well, while the shingles to my right are still the wrong green.

It's all painted now, and I wasn't even too freaked out about being up on the roof. Joe joined me after a while, wiping up my drips (of critical importance when using an oil-based paint) and keeping me company.

could be worse

I've been carding again. I thought for a time that I wanted to trade my drum carder for a very snazzy new/used wheel, but Joe reminded me that I got the carder for some reason that made sense to me at the time, and so I've been trying to figure out what that reason was.


Turns out carding is good fun, which of course I knew.

In other news, Big One is going to school this year. He will be attending the local Middle School, which is close enough to walk. After a short period of agony and agonizing, he and I are both delighted with his decision, and excited about things to come. The school has been lovely and accommodating. We've met many of his teachers. It's all gone as well as I could possibly have hoped, and I'm allowing myself to hope that all that will continue.

Little is staying home, but I suspect he may decide that home without a brother is sort of boring, and that may mean, my friends, that I will be back out in the world again, sometime before I'm gray and old.

clearing my head

I have had a sad week. Last Friday, I dropped my older son off at a birthday party. Not just any birthday party: a party that was essentially a mini-reunion of all his friends from our now-defunct progressive school. Big One was especially lucky in friends at our school; not every kid had a large group of kids his own age, and these kids all arrived at the school by age 5 or 6, so when the school closed when they were 9, they'd shared a lot of experiences. Going to school is about seeing friends for many kids, I think, and especially so at a school that nurtures the natural connections kids make with each other through classroom structure and curriculum. These kids were really tight.

I have had many moments in the nearly two years since the school closed, more than I care to admit, of blaming people for its closure. I blame administrators, board members, other teachers, even certain parents, each for playing a part in bringing the whole thing down. Some more than others, of course, but it's been such a big personal disaster for me that there's plenty of blame to go around.

I have had a creeping suspicion from time to time that all that blame pointed away from me must really mean that I blame myself in some fundamental way, but that I'm just not ready to look at that yet.

And then there I was at the party, standing around with the parents and kids I used to see every day, and it all came crashing in. I let in my feelings of shame and guilt, and rather than brush them away this time, I decided to ride them like a wave. It didn't feel good.

I wasn't always the best teacher I could have been. I sometimes blamed others for not taking care of all kinds of things, when it could just have easily been me. I got distracted, over and over, by gossip and politics. I sometimes forgot that my only real work, ever, was with the kids and the parents. I wallowed in anger and misery when I believed our precious school was being squandered by those who didn't really get it, rather than stepping up and trying to educate. Which was, after all, my job.

I stood there looking at these kids, so happy to see each other again, and I wanted to apologize, to them and to their parents, for all that I did and failed to do that contributed to the closing of the school, and I knew immediately that to attempt it wouldn't make any sense to them. Not only would they not have any idea what I was talking about, but it also would have been absurdly self-serving to take what was a joyful occasion for the kids and try to turn it into some kind of confession session for me.

And I wondered what I could do instead, and I thought of posting here. Some of the people who read this blog are former colleagues and parents at the school, and I think most of them won't understand why it's important to me to do this, here. Please know that although many of you have a great deal of faith in me, I am not blameless, and I need to say so, publicly.

I am hoping that this post may be a step toward putting the school and its miserable, ugly demise in the past, because I really need to find out where I'm going next.

busy, busy, busy

Little and I have been doing a lot of this. We're reading the sixth Harry Potter book on the front porch, so that when we go see the movie he'll have a better understanding of it. We've just finished the sixth book, on to the seventh tomorrow morning.
The garden grows, with very little attention from me. In the foreground are dill, cherry tomatoes, and a tiny patch of lettuce that you can't see.
Here we have collards, brussels sprouts, more tomatoes, and I think there's a cucumber plant or two somewhere in there.
Full size tomatoes and basil in this bed. These plants started off slowly in some pots that turned out to be too small, but now they're coming right along.
Here's some real work we started last weekend. Scraping all the fiddly bits on our front porch. When we moved in here, the previous owners had covered these all over with plywood. We were appropriately horrified when we discovered the lovely neglected fancy bits underneath, but we do understand why they did it. If we're still in this house when we're old, we'll probably cover it all up with plywood and forget about it too.
For now, though, it's actually good fun to be out here working on it together. It's our big project for weekends for as long as it takes, probably about the middle of September.
And this is how we'll keep busy when it rains. This Danish cord is going to become the seat for this Danish chair, and five or six more just like it. We got them at a garage sale for very very cheap, and it's a kind of chair we've always admired.
And now it's a project. We're not exactly sure how we're getting from materials to finished chairs. We've never done it before, and we're not sure the directions we've found are going to work. There will be some improvising, I believe.