Sweet Potato Art?

It is with some concern that I send my 3rd grade daughter to school tomorrow armed with her well thought out and pretty good submission to the "Sweet Potato Contest". Sweet Potatoes are, of course, this months "farm to table" featured produce of the month. Which is very cool. I mean, it's cool to have a "farm to table featured produce of the month" not that it is sweet potatoes.

It's October so clearly the theme of the fall veggie is ripe for "farming to tabling". That being said, everything around here is a contest. And my daughter really would like to win a contest. And so I am sending my very proud and excited girl to school with a great contest entry - a picture of what is quite obviously, a piece of crap. No, no, don't get me wrong. The picture itself isn't crappy, it is just an illustration, as you can see from it's photo, of a piece of crap with a green onion ring on a leash as it's pet. Cleverly formatted as a "wanted" ad.

What's a Mom to do? The girl is inspired to win the farmer's market gift certificate! The picture you see here is her second draft! I am forced to wonder what an illustration of a sweet potato in a child's hand would look like that differs from this version, and every one I can conceive of is unmistakably shitty.

I wonder if tomorrow the school will receive 300 pieces of poop art and have a moment of panic in which they realize what they have done. Fortunately, they plan to decide on the winner via random drawing at lunch time. Or is that unfortunate? I have this horrible feeling that my daughter's will be chosen at random out of a huge toilet bowl of submissions and held up high for the whole school to see. That it will be one of those movie moments where she bounds up so excited to have won and turns around to see the whole school cracking up in the background as she realizes with horror that she has submitted a piece of crap in leiu of sweet potato. The scene goes fuzzy. You know the one, I'll assume.

I don't even have an example of this from my own childhood - I'm flying blind here. But I can't call the school and say "nooooo!" at this point - too late. I can't tell my daughter not to submit her piece of... art. So I guess that we'll see what tomorrow brings and hope that the theme of competition that is so pervasive at school doesn't inspire a "Captain Underpants" type day and that her artistic dignity is preserved by just not getting hers picked.

Good luck tomorrow, sweet elementary school, this should be good times.

The Made-Up Test

It is with relative infrequency in life that we get a true opportunity at a do-over. To go back, erase what has been done and just give it another go. This didn't seem to be the case at school this week, however. This week, my 1st grader got this ultimate chance at redemption. He got to do a "make over". If you don't know what that is, then you may be just like me. I asked, of course - that's my style. The response was "oh - it's when you miss a test, then you get to do a made-up one".

I suppose he's talking about the beast known as the make-up test but his language has really been pretty insightful for me. Is the need to spend your recess inside doing 3 tests that you missed on a religious holiday a make-over? An opportunity to reinvent yourself into something new and more glamorous? Or is it made-up - an opportunity to create a fiction that surrounds the importance of the activity?

Well, on this very day, I found myself wrestling with this question as I examined the application deadlines for re-admittance to our lovely old school. I viewed that website today wondering if reinventing ourselves into people who don't pay for schooling was a mistake for some of our kids. I wondered if perhaps the best possible thing to do is to ask for a do-over at least for our eldest. I rediscovered in this internal debate a very long held believe - there is no absolute.

OK - getting a little Buddha - Dharma funky on you here but stick with me a moment. I have a second long held theory and that is that there is only one group. So - in whatever situation you're in, there's only one group. You aren't the "only cool kid in the medieval recreation society", take my word for it. You aren't the "only kid in the nerdy group who is actually cool", it's just not likely. You aren't the "only public school kids who aren't sure that they are in the right place" either. There is one group. As diverse as we are as people, I learned when I was "the only cool kid who dated a 15 year old 8th grader" that anyone who meets that description is likely not tipping the coolness scale.

So back to the belief that there is no absolute. This may seem pretty obvious, but we as humans spend a whole lot of time in pursuit of the "right path", the "truth", the "way". We spend a lot of time concerned about having all the ducks in a row. But have you noticed that ducks don't like to line up perfectly. Because they waddle side to side so they really can't be in a perfect line. The expression itself shows us that if all the ducks were to be in a row then they wouldn't be ducks after all. So you get the picture here, right?

My son stayed in from recess to do 3 made-up tests. The three made-up tests were instead of the 3 real tests that he missed. He took these tests to make himself over - from a guy who missed some tests to a fully achieving guy with all boxes checked. Let's not worry for now about how a 1st grader can miss 3 tests in a single day, that's a strange subject to attack another time. Let's worry instead about whether I plan to re-apply to school next year.

If there is no absolute truth then it sure makes this school decision more difficult. I had the big plan to get my make-over to being a new public school kind of Mom. I've learned that I love that for some of my kids - I am absolutely part of the group that thinks it's great to support the public schools and that my kids are learning a lot both academic and non academic in this environment. I also seem to be the kind of Mom who thinks that there are special kids who with thrive best in a special kind of environment and when you find the perfect fit for them that perhaps you shouldn't give it up. So I belong to two seemingly opposing groups and I must not be the only one.

In my case, I suppose that there is good fortune in having 4 children. I can send some to where they fit and some to the best idealogical solution. Too bad they aren't one and the same and even more too bad that they aren't both free, quite frankly. But holding each of these solutions in my hands, I realize that there is always an opportunity to ask for a do-over, to make-over who you are and to bring your new learnings to make a happier, healthier family.

And that's not made-up.

Resilient Apple

Who among you will fall on the floor in an old style faint if I say that I don't really think that kids are as "resilient" or "adaptable" as we think? Because every person, to a tee that I have spoken with about our big school change (or any other change of ours for that matter) has been sure to inform me of just how resilient kids are. It's a way to placate the worried mom, got it.

Since my son no longer eats turkey bacon, only pork bacon, I beg to differ. I suspect, actually, that children just have a limited emotional vocabulary and even more limited selections for responses to emotional situations. I mean, I'm no child psychologist, (lucky for the children who have been saved from that "therapeutic" experience), but it seems like people get more versatile and controlled in their reactions the older they get, not the younger they are.

Take my baby. That drooly one who helped me to decide on not attending private school when she ate the bill. Remember her? She is one year old now and she has vastly increased her emotional reaction repertoire. Now she sits around, laughs AND cries. Before, see, she only cried and sat there. 33% increase in just a year! Well, she is exceptional of course, but wow!

I remember a time in 6th grade (according to this theory I'd then have 12 different emotional reactions in my arsenal although I bet the growth rate slows at some point). We grew up as K-Mart shoppers, not department store people, but once we went to a department store. I identified the most amazing "winter" coat. It was barely stuffed with Polyester, not quite the thick down numbers that New England winters called for. Anyway, long story short - I remember it well. It cost a very very shocking $110. Really, 30 years ago, that was a lot. It's really kind of a lot now too, right? Well, my Mom very kindly bought me this coat that I was clearly planning to pass away without. She bought it, though, in October, saying that it was "one of your Hanukkah presents". I agreed to this logic because nothing could have been more important than this coat and I knew I was pushing my luck by having it at all. But I forgot the deal. And on the first, most festive night of Hanukkah, when I unwrapped a giant gift that turned out to be the coat, I ran away immediately, with only the coat in question for protection from the elements.

In the 16 minutes that I was gone, my emotions ran the gammit. The one that I didn't quite have in check though, was resiliency. I wasn't quite ready to look at the coat I'd been wearing for 8 weeks, well up with tears and say "thanks".

For my 30th birthday, someone close to me who should have been giving jewelry, procured for me a calphalon omlette pan and an electric can opener. It did take a few moments to register the shock (if you don't know what's wrong with that, you should probably double check your shopping carts) and to translate it to a "thank you" but the next day, maybe even that evening, we continued as normal. I'm not saying that I had perfected adaptability and resiliency but I was on my way.

What I'm saying is this. I suspect that children are emotionally limited, not particularly resilient. I further suspect that they are taken by their every day activities, by the joy of jumproping 20 times or the devastation of being teased for mismatched attire. Perhaps young elementary aged children just live in the moment and transfer all of the great traumas of that moment until later in their lives when they have some capacity to think through that and accept or dismiss it as important to who they were to become. In the moment, though, I still worry that each thing we do that seems to "go pretty well" and has no apparent impact, is being stored in a secret databank waiting for some point of maturity to surface.

Today, my pork bacon and chocolate eating guy came home having studied Johnny Appleseed and having had an very cool apple fest at school. He was convinced to bring apple fritters (we literally bought all they had at Starbucks on the way to school) as his contribution to the festivity but was not ever planning to touch one himself. By 3:24pm when the bus rolled up, he was really excited to have brought home a green apple. Why? Because apparantly he loves apples. Green, red and yellow ones - yellow topping the charts. I asked him what happened that changed (since I offer him an apple pretty much every day and am met with a look of total horror). "We walked around and the serving people put them on the plate and then we had to put our favorite on a graph so I had to eat them to figure out what to put on the graph to get a prize". Hmph. Why didn't I think of this graphing n' prizing plan?

This guy isn't resilient or adaptable. This guy is living in the moment and seeking the joy of a prize and the pride in pleasing his teacher and not disrupting the class. He isn't running away over a coat, he wouldn't really think of that as a choice quite yet. He isn't drawing pictures of people with x'd out eyes or anything creepy either. People say "see how well they are doing with the school change - kids are so resilient". But that's not because he's resilient, it's because he's limited in his emotional repertoire.

Who among us can say that we are perfectly resilient. That we can be handed any of the hard knocks that come to the door and just bounce off smiling. Maybe we are all still growing our emotional databanks and the older we get, the more we can deal with from our childhoods. So, I wonder, what are my children storing up from this experience? What arsenal will their future therapists be faced with?

I hope that, when the time comes, they'll have grown to understand as I strive to, that nothing stays the same and without change we'd be, well, a bunch of cavemen.

Vampire Children - aka, Those That Suck

This is one of those chapters that one composes with trepidation. Haven't you ever read something that you then talked with someone else about and you each took something different from it? Well, in order to avert such disastrous consequence, let me share the take-away right up front. Some kids suck. And some schools aren't made to avert that sucking from leaching out and getting on others. So, if you don't like that conclusion you'd best refrain from reading on.

My Gryffindor K-Boy invited a friend from class over the other day. The moment he darkened the door I wondered when the date would end. He didn't even pass the threshold before I knew he was trouble. And seriously, the nicest parents known to man - I'm not commenting on parents here because we all rock, of course. So, for this playdate of trouble I mean there was whining, demanding, destructive behavior. Come on, either you know the type or you have the type and don't want to admit it.

In 6th grade I dated the type. In 6th grade, he was a mean bullying loser with lots and lots of zits. Like gross ones. I later learned that he was like 13 and in the 8th grade. For sure he had a mustache to compliment the generous supply of acne. My parents were thrilled at my good choices and still talk about that budding 'stache to this day. They kindly took us to the movies where we awkwardly held hands or something very 70's middle-school risque (which is WAY different than 2000's middle-school risque incidentally). My parents sat in the back and we sat in the front. Or so I thought. I turned around at one point to find the parental units directly positioned at my posterior. A humiliating 3 rows back. Oh the pain of supervision. Well, that relationship lasted only a moment or two because even back then, I could call "vampire" when I saw one. That kid sucked.

As does a child who now occupies a room with my daughter - a daughter who will eat most things including bacon and brussels but just can't seem to break 45 pounds. Each evening at dinner for the first 5 weeks of school there was a report on the new ways this young person had found to torture my lightweight. Mostly it involved mean variations on name callings related to being petite. But when "puny", "tiny", "miniature" and "baby" gave way to "loser", that's when things went south for this bloodsucker. Not to say that this 9 year old was vying for my respect and admiration, but he really was starting to irritate the family and working on strategies to manage the torture became a mealtime ritual.

It wasn't really torture technically until one fine day we learned that he actually tied my petite princess up in a rope at recess, pulled on the rope and sent her flying.

In case you thought that maybe I'd end this story by learning to like this child, you called it wrong. You see, I learned about this in 6th grade. You must immediately dump the losers. Look for those really pointy teeth that suck blood. Look for a mustache on a supposed 6th grader. Look for namecalling as an early sign. Look for those things then rat them out the moment something bad happens. Rat them way out. By my demure daughter would dream of no such thing. She's not a tattler, even when it's a pre-pimpled vampire child to tattle on (which seems like totally fair game to me). But me, I am a good tattle tale. I'd prefer to beat the child up my self but being the non-violent type I contact the teacher, the principal, the counselor - all of the people that I can think to tattle to. If the teachers thought that I irritated them before, they ain't seen nothin' yet.

Here's where this becomes about being a public school. It's not that this never could have happened at the haven that we attended previously - it's feasible, there was never a ton of supervision at recess. It's not that the teachers were too busy to act quickly - the counselor and the teacher moved with great alacrity and there have been 3 full torture free days. It's that the admission standards are low - they just let anyone in, nice or not. And there just isn't time to teach about being nice because of all of the testing and stickering and color coding. So you start with a base of numerous, highly varied children and you add that they never have time to learn that mildly critical life skill that I term "niceness", and - POOF - a Gryffindor winds up coming home with rope burns. And that sucks.

So we as a family have learned a few things. First, no one will stand up for you other than you (and your Mom, same diff). Second, some schools aren't made to teach values, they are built to teach skills and maybe dealing with this kind of torture is a skill of sorts, who knows. Third, stay away - stay far far away - from the vampire kids, they really suck.

The Sorting Hat

I am the Mom of a Kindergarten boy. No, not the chocolatey bacon boy (who, incidentally, has given up bacon but adopted sugar coated cereal as of this weekend). I have never considered this particular K-boy among the most socially perceptive of K-kids but perhaps this new schooling environment brings out the best in him.

I learned about his newfound perceptive genius when I was fully informed, in alpha order, of all of the "red" kids names. Don't panic if you have one of them because I can't recall the names (well, I can but I won't call them out here - how rude!). A red kid is characterized, according to my guy, by "really bad all the time behaving". There is a second list of kids who are "orange". These are the kids who get yellows mostly with an occasional splash of red. The lists continue and creates an exotic color palate including turqoise, pea-green and sunshine yellow. I am actually sort of proud of my cute little budding artist for his knowledge of color mixing but I suspect I should note something other than his artistic prowess.

My kids have recently gotten into Harry Potter. We actually have a witch hat and they love to take turns pretending they are Professor McGonnagle (or sometimes I get to be Professor McMOMaggle). The good Professor places the hat on each child and sorts them into their houses based on their inner qualities. Like the evil ones go to the evil house and the good ones go to the good house and the ones that are kind of boring and neutral go to the, well, yellow house. My kids love this scene and enjoy acting it out, among other broom-flying and potion brewing portions of Harry's first year at Hogwarts. Please don't ask what the white substance sprinkled with floating flowers is when you visit the playhouse in the backyard, OK? You don't want to know, of that I'm sure.

I'm sure that I don't need to make this any more plain because only seriously brilliant people who live their lives in the "green" are reading this right now but... what? If I am to understand, the system of reward and punishment in Kindergarten is so explicit that only 4 weeks into school my newly minted 5 year old has classified each child by their spot on the color spectrum? So it would seem - as plain as a house assignment. In the 3rd grade at least my #12's shameful yellow (so procured for doodling) today was anonymous...

So let's be fair for a second here. At my pretty private school everyone knew who the bad kids were and who the good kids were, right? Like my own K-boy could, well, no - couldn't actually name kids by behavioral hue but I bet the parents could come pretty close. And that is because we all spent a lot of time in our lives resisting the perhaps Darwinian urge to categorize angels and demons as such. Somehow the urge to categorize is indeed irresistible. Whether it is sorting wizards into houses, sorting kids into paint palates, putting students into reading and math groups, selecting a performance rating for a subordinate. Somehow organizing the people around us into small groups helps us humans to get a grip on how we plan to and subsequently manage them.

Is this so wrong? I know where my K-boy stands, he is happy and learning, he is practicing his powers of observation, he is in the best of the reading groups (although apparently he is behind in handwriting... leave that for another day). Slicing and dicing the kids at this early age may be be a useful tool for teachers and administrators who are well equipped to make plans and manage classrooms. My K-boy, however, with his new friends the Crayolas, is just learning for the first time what exactly to do with that knowledge. He is working at making good choices - staying away from the Slytherins (burnt orange) and trying hard to find some fellow Gryffindors (grass green). I sure hope that the Slytherins get to redeem themselves and I hope that my K-boy doesn't miss the chance to hang with some Hufflepuffs (sunshine yellow) along the way.