bearing blog

Transcript number 1.

This week my oldest son, now a homeschooled high school junior, needed an "official high school transcript" for the first time.   

(He's applying for PSEO programs next year -- that's "post-secondary enrollment options," i.e., earning college credit and high school credits simultaneously -- and  one local university that's rather selective about its PSEO applicants required it.)

I knew this was coming, and of course I am going to need it for college applications in the fall anyway, so I have been pulling together materials for a while.  

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I feel much more excited and confident about guiding my offspring through the high school years than I ever did about dealing with elementary school or early middle school.    Perhaps it mirrors my own feelings at those ages:  I struggled a lot with fitting in, and with not being able to control my own environment, when I was younger, and don't have many happy memories, but in high school I began to find subjects to delight in (chiefly chemistry and physics, but also French and literature) and what's more significant, people who also liked that sort of thing. It was then that I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.  

Now that I write that, it doesn't seem a particularly unusual story and so it can't possibly be the sole explanation for why I find a lot of elementary school stuff tiresome and boring compared to some of my colleagues who seem to have an endless, envious capacity for crafts and reading aloud and seeing the world as fresh and new all the time.  Perhaps I am the tiresome one!

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The institution whose application we are mailing today, wisely in my opinion, does not wish to see grades issued by a student's parent, so my transcript has no grades.  

To this I say:  Excellent.  

Not only is it a pain to calculate and assign grades to your own child, it's stupid.  Why on earth should a university believe what I have to say about my own child in an application for admission to anything?  Presumably the obvious conflict of interest would be enough to say "you know what?  Just:  no.  We're going to go off the test scores and maybe an essay."  And then there's the question of how meaningful grades can be when there are literally no other students in the class to compare this one to. 

You would think that all the colleges would see the essential worthlessness of grades produced by a homeschooling parent and actively discourage the student from sending any grades issued by a parent.   But I'm here to tell you that, at least as of last fall, several of the colleges which my oldest is thinking of applying for as a freshman not only encourage homeschooled students to submit a transcript with grades, but they require them.  

I will issue those graded transcripts if I have to, but I really would like to include a disclaimer that says, "You know, I essentially made these grades up.  On a rational basis, of course, me being who I am, but a truly rational basis would mean that you and I should both admit that I could give any grade I wanted to this student. And by the way, so could everybody else who chose to go the non-umbrella-school route."  

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So:  this time anyway, no grades.  Don't even send 'em! says the university (good).  But they do want to know what the student's coursework was like, and in particular how challenging it was.  So:  "Home School transcripts should include a narrative of the material a student has covered and a listing of courses they have taken, if appropriate."

So I pulled out all my records for the various subjects that my oldest has worked on for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, and I made lists of the textbooks we used and the material we covered.  I asked H., who has run pretty much all of my kids' English literature and composition, for a course summary, and she provided me a nicely detailed one.  I wrote up a set of end-goals for each area of study (e.g., in Mathematics, one of my oldest's goals is "advance to differential and integral calculus by early in Grade 11 in order to apply them to the study of Physics I").  And then I sorted it all out first by topic and then grade level.

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So, not everyone chooses to do it this way -- lots of homeschoolers have a free-form, holistic, or interdisciplinary philosophy of education, where the boundaries of the different areas are soft or nonexistent, and that is fine -- but I am naturally a put-it-all-into-boxes sort of person, and so from the very beginning I set up my son's high school years with discrete courses and credits in mind.   There would be a chemistry class, and we'd do these chapters from this book.  There would be a civics class, and we'd have three meetings a week for thirty-four weeks.  There would be a Latin class, and we'll work through this syllabus published by an umbrella school.  Physical education?  Each session of the indoor climbing team is thirty hours of instruction, and at 120 hours = 1 credit (the Carnegie unit), that means 1/4 credit each session.

When you start off thinking this way, there is definitely a tendency to get boxed into rigid ideas about the boundaries of disciplines.  On the other hand it is pretty straightforward to add up credits at transcript time.

Another reason I have thought this way from the beginning is because of my co-schooling arrangement.  I set up physics and chemistry for a few high school students to learn in a group, facilitated by me.  Their parents weren't watching me do it (at the time, for example, H. was busy at the moment, teaching language arts to 3 of my other children and 2 of hers).  They trust me but they still need a record of what the students learned; after all, I'm not their "official" teacher; more like a tutor to which they've delegated some of the physics oversight.  So from the very beginning I had a weekly schedule for the whole year, and I kept careful records of what we did and didn't cover.  At the beginning of the year I write a course plan with my objectives; at the end of the year I write a new one where I write how I actually wound up making it all work.  And I do give grades, which is not so hard to do objectively with the kind of coursework I facilitate.  (Whether they are representative or not of what the student would be getting in an institutional school, I don't know.  I hardly ever give anyone an A.  I have a deep suspicion that it would depend on the school.)

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 My son and I went to an informational session last week on campus, where you could ask questions of the full-time PSEO advisors and the program admission staff.  I hung back to ask my question at the end while everyone was filing out -- "What exactly are you looking for in a homeschooler's 'narrative transcript?'"

The staffer explained that the point was so that they could understand the scope of the material the student had covered in his classes, and in particular, whether he demonstrated the ability to do college-level work; it is very important to them that the PSEO students do not overextend themselves.

"So," I suggested, "you would want to see a list of the texts he read in his English classes, that sort of thing?"

"Oh my goodness, no, you would not need to go into that level of detail!" he chuckled.  

I looked at him levelly for a moment.  "Supposing I did go into that level of detail..." I said carefully, "would that be a problem?  I mean, would you all hate me if I sent you, er, a rather detailed transcript?"

He assured me that this would not be a problem either, and I went away hoping that if the transcript was an outlier, that it would not at least be the sort of outlier that the office would laugh at.  Because I wasn't about to delete all that stuff I'd written (although I did cut it down).

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One of the things that feels weird about writing out the transcript is that it feels like my son should be writing it.   I rather don't like stories of helicopter parents (and I have enough friends who are college professors that I have heard such stories).   I have a great distaste for filling out parts of applications for my student.  He should do the application himself!  You don't want your parent filling out an application for you, not for anything.

But:  Transcripts are never made by students for themselves.  They are made by institutions for students.  They are sealed in smooth blank envelopes to be transmitted cleanly and with no signs of tampering from one institution to another.  

 I am not the student's educational institution.  I am a mother, the original alma mater.   This identity feels positively warm and sticky compared to the cool, blank, efficiency of the transcript.  And so there is no way I can produce this document and be wholly comfortable with it.  I know the institution is used to a column of numbers, and that from me the column of numbers is no good, so instead they get a document which I can't help but see as smudged all over with maternity.  And that is something that I have never been comfortable with sending out into the world.  I feel I want to run after the transcript with a corner of my skirt and dab it off, except that to do so would give away the truth.

But still, he can't do this part.  I have to do this part, because I am the school.  So I write the damned thing anyway.

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Deep breath.  I open up the transcript file again and read my own deathless prose from the introduction to the Science section.  I want it to be as much like a column of numbers as a narrative description can be:

The student chose to fulfill the biological sciences requirement with a non-laboratory course in evolutionary biology. Introductory college textbooks on evolutionary biology are supplemented with additional textbooks, videos, and assorted readings covering necessary fundamentals of biology and touching on the historical context and social impact of evolutionary theory.

Physical sciences are taught directly by the parent, who holds a PhD in chemical engineering, in a small group of high school students. Because texts are college-level and syllabi are modeled after AP^Ⓡ courses, we have designated these as honors courses.

I am second-guessing myself already (why did I mention the doctorate?  does it make me sound like the sort of person who insists on being called Doctor all the time?  does it make me sound insecure?  will they look up my thesis?  oh no) but at least I am sure have properly formatted the registered trademark symbol.  

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Here's the thing.  It's ... not about me.  There is a temptation to look over it and think that it is, at least a little bit, about me, or at least about me-and-this-kid's-wonderful-dad.  It's not about me.  It's about our son, this particular young man, this bright and earnest and funny young man, and about demonstrating that we all have good reason to expect he won't fall on his face when he takes his first college classes.

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In any case, it's done.  They certainly will have an idea of the applicant's coursework.    Probably several ideas.   I'm glad I had a chance to do this, my first one, under relatively low stakes.   I might be less detailed next time.

As I have five children, however, I must say that I am already wondering if high school transcripts, like baby-picture albums, get progressively less detailed as one moves through the younger children in the family.  You know the trope:  your first child has a beautifully kept scrapbook, your third has a stack of photos in a manila envelope, and -- did you even take any pictures of that fifth child?

I would bet there was a correlation.  

(Except that I never managed to make any baby albums.)

St. John Bosco and how to *not* punish kids (a repost).

St. John Bosco, like St. "Mother" Teresa or St. "Padre" Pio, is one of those whose names started to sound a little weird when their popular monikers got altered by the application of sainthood.  He's often "Don" Bosco even though his name is John-actually-Saint-John-now, "Don" being the honorific applied typically to diocesan priests in Italy.  I think this is because he, like they, like some others -- Thérèse comes to mind too -- is one of those saints that once you know them, you just sort of make friends with.  The "saint" can feel a little embarrassing between friends.  Or because a straightforward humility, a groundedness, is so much a part of their persona that they succeed in never feeling... I don't know, lofty.  

Here's a repost about Don Bosco for his feast day, Jan. 31.  In which I write about why I take him as my personal role model in his approach to child discipline.

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My personal parenting/discipline ideal has always been to avoid punishing kids.

I get the impression from other people that the idea alarms them, because it sounds a lot like "avoiding discipline;" perhaps it calls to mind the stories of parents who insist their offspring can do no wrong.  You know, the kind who sue the school when their child is suspended for cheating on a test or something like that.

That's not my point.  By punishment, I mean those arbitrary unpleasantnesses inflicted in return for misbehavior:  the spanking, the grounding, the confiscation. Mrk and I aren't what you'd call permissive parents.  We try to be authoritative, if not authoritarian.  We use the term "obedience" with the kids and are clear about what it means and why it's important.   But (this is our ideal, mind you, not always the way we manage to make it work) we try not to get to the point where we need a "punishment" in the first place.  

We try to let them experience the consequences of their actions, insofar as it isn't dangerous.  

• Didn't pack an extra dress like you were supposed to?  Well, I guess you'll be wet and uncomfortable now that you've run through your friend's sprinkler in your clothes.  
• Refused to eat your lunch at lunchtime?  Ooooops, snack time isn't till 3:30, I guess you can have some of these plain almonds I keep in the car for emergencies.
• Shrieked at each other in the car while we were running errands?  After all that, I (honestly) don't feel anymore like taking you out for lunch, so instead we're going home and having tuna sandwiches.

On the occasion when something truly egregious happens -- such as when one of my kids came to me and admitted that a long string of perfect scores on math assignments had been faked -- consequences are meted out rather than merely allowed to happen; but we really try to have it make sense.  In the case of the spurious perfect scores, since I had no way to know whether the child understood the material, the child was assigned double math lessons for as many days as the lessons had been faked, each day doing the regularly scheduled lesson and at the same time re-doing one of the lessons from before.  That plus a long conversation about honesty.  And dangerous misuse of a tool around here is very likely to result in revocation of privileges to use said tool until competency and proper respect for risk is demonstrated; that's just common sense, not a punishment.  

It was difficult for us to figure out when our first was very young, but we hit our stride eventually, and he grew out of the normal frustrations of toddlerhood into an earnest child and now a delightful teenager, and that has given us a lot of confidence as we continue to bring him up, him and the four that have followed.  It's true that I yell more than I wish I did, and lose my temper.  It's an ideal I fail to measure up to.  But I still strive for that "no-punishment" ideal.

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I notice, however, that this isn't language I tend to hear from my fellow Catholic parents much.  Indeed, at more than one parish I've seethed while listening to a priest (including in the homily at my daughter's baptism) cheerfully recommend vigorously and frequently spanking small children.  

I think this is an American Catholic phenomenon, borne of being caught between a decadent permissive culture and an army of evangelical Protestants -- in many ways, serious American Catholics are constantly playing "keeping up with the Bob Joneses," and so, for better or for worse, we have been inculturated with what I personally see as a break-the-child's-sinful-will, thou-shalt-honor-us-because-of-the-ten-commandments sort of  attitude toward child discipline.  

The exceptions are the super-crunchy attachment parenting Catholics.  Am I one of those?  Sort of; as a young parent, AP wasn't good enough for me and if you were foolish enough to ask me about it I would talk your ear off about how I was into "CC" parenting, which stands for "continuum concept," which, well, some other time....    

I did have plenty of role models for the way that I felt was right for me to parent my kids, but I lacked Catholic ones.   And that's why I was so excited when I first learned about the educational philosophy of St. John Bosco.  AKA "Don" Bosco (1815-1888) because that's what you call a diocesan priest in Italy.   Here's Wikipedia on him, for some background:

At that time the city of Turin had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. It reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization: numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city, having come from the countryside in search of a better life. In visiting the prisons Don Bosco was disturbed to see so many boys from 12 to 18 years of age. He was determined to find a means to prevent them ending up here. Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry inefficient. He decided it was necessary to try another form of apostolate, and he began to meet the boys where they worked and gathered in shops, offices, market places. They were pavers, stone-cutters, masons, plasterers who came from far away places, he recalled in his brief Memoirs.

The Oratorio was not simply a charitable institution, and its activities were not limited to Sundays. For Don Bosco it became his permanent occupation. He looked for jobs for the unemployed. Some of the boys did not have sleeping quarters and slept under bridges or in bleak public dormitories. Twice he tried to provide lodgings in his house. The first time they stole the blankets; the second they emptied the hay-loft. He did not give up. In May 1847, he gave shelter to a young boy from Valesia, in one of the three rooms he was renting in the slums of Valdocco, where he was living with his mother. He and "Mamma Margherita" began taking in orphans. The boys sheltered by Don Bosco numbered 36 in 1852, 115 in 1854, 470 in 1860 and 600 in 1861, 800 being the maximum some time later....

In 1859, Bosco selected the experienced priest Vittorio Alasonatti, 15 seminarians and one high school boy and formed them into the "Society of St. Francis de Sales." This was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work....In 1871, he founded a group of religious sisters to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. They were called the "Daughters of Mary Help of Christians." In 1874, he founded yet another group, the "Salesian Cooperators." These were mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians, but would not join a religious order.

Bosco's capability to attract numerous boys and adult helpers was connected to his "Preventive System of Education."

Don Bosco explained his "preventive system" in an essay, "The Preventive System in the Education of the Young," which can be found here.  It begins by contrasting his "preventive" system with the "repressive" system.  The "repressive" system, he says, has its place "in the army and in general among adults and the judicious, who ought of themselves to know and remember what the law and its regulations demand."  

The repressive system consists in making the law known to the subjects and afterwards watching to discover the transgressors of these laws, and inflicting, when necessary, the punishment deserved.

According to this system, the words and looks of the superior must always be severe and even threatening, and he must avoid all familiarity with his dependents.   

In order to give weight to his authority the Rector must rarely be found among his subjects and as a rule only when it is a question of punishing or threatening.  

But Don Bosco's system is different:

[The preventive system] consists in making the laws and regulations of an institute known, and then watching carefully so that the pupils may at all times be under the vigilant eye of the rector or the assistants, who like loving fathers can converse with them, take the lead in every movement and in a kindly way give advice and correction;  in other words, this system places the pupils in the impossibility of committing faults.

This system is based entirely on reason and religion, and above all on kindness; therefore it excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement. 

"Excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement" being what I was going for all along, I was so glad to find this.  

The basic idea is that children are closely supervised at all times by leaders who care for them, model good behavior, encourage reception of the sacraments, participate in their games, and converse with them frequently about behavior norms in a way that "appeals to [their] reason" and "generally enlists [their] accord."  Close supervision and "forewarning" means that there is little chance for a child to commit a fault. Don Bosco believes that young people misbehave, initially at least, because of inattention, not malice:

The primary reason for this system is the thoughtlessness of the young, who in one moment forget the rules of discipline and the penalties for their infringement.  Consequently, a child often becomes culpable and deserving of punishment, which he had not even thought about, and which he had quite forgotten when heedlessly committing the fault which he would certainly have avoided, had a friendly voice warned him.

To apply this system Don Bosco lists several principles of education and discipline.

1.  Close supervision by the people entrusted with the children.  "[The Rector] must always be with his pupils whenever they are not engaged in some occupation, unless they are already being properly supervised by others."

2. Moral teachers who actively lead the pupils to and in each new place or activity. "Teachers, craftmasters, and assistants must be of acknowledged morality... As far as possible the assistants ought to precede the boys to the place where they assemble; they should remain with them until others come to take their place, and never leave the pupils unoccupied."

3.  Allow rowdiness and physical activity.  "Let the boys have full liberty to jump, run, and make as much noise as they please.  Gymnastics, music, theatricals, and outings are most efficacious means of obtaining discipline and of benefiting spiritual and bodily health.  Let care be taken however that the games... are not reprehensible.  'Do anything you like,' the great friend of youth, St. Philip [Neri] used to say, 'as long as you do not sin.'"

4.  Encourage and promote, don't force, the sacraments.  "Frequent confession and communion and daily mass are the pillars which must support the edifice of education, from which we propose to banish the use of threats and the cane.  Never force the boys to frequent the sacraments, but encourage them to do so, and give them every opportunity.... [L]et the beauty, grandeur, and holiness of the Catholic religion be dwelt on..."

"Avoid as a plague the opinion that the first communion should be deferred to a late age... When a child can distinguish between Bread and bread, and shows sufficient knowledge, give no further thought to his age... St. Philip Neri counseled weekly and even more frequent communion."

5.  Exclude bad materials and trouble-making people.  "[P]revent bad books, bad companions, or persons who indulge in improper conversations from entering the college.  A good door keeper is a treasure for a house of education."

6.  Brief daily reflections -- a sort of community examen.  "Every evening after night prayers before the boys go to rest, the Rector or someone in his stead shall address them briefly, giving them advice or counsel concerning what is to be done or... avoided.  Let him try to draw some moral reflection from events that have happened during the day... but his words should never take more than two or three minutes."

7.  Love before fear.   "An educator should seek to win the love of his pupils if he wishes to inspire fear in them.  When he succeeds in doing this, the withholding of some token of kindness is a punishment which stimulates emulation, gives courage, and never degrades.... With the young, punishment is whatever is meant as a punishment.... in the case of some boys a reproachful look is more effective than a slap in the face would be."

8. Do not  shame children.  "Except in very rare cases, corrections and punishments should never be given publicly, but always privately and in the absence of companions."

9.  Employ patient reason and religion. "[T]he greatest prudence and patience should be used to bring the pupil to see his fauly, with the aid of reason and religion."

10.  No corporal punishment.  "To strike a boy in any way, to make him kneel in a painful position, to pull his ears, and other similar punishments, must be absolutely avoided, because the law forbids them, and because they greatly irritate the boys and degrade the educator."

 11.  Clear communication of expectations.  "The Rector shall make sure that the disciplinary measures, including rules and punishments, are known to the pupils, so that  no one can make the excuse that he did not know what was commanded or forbidden."

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I think these principles of Salesian education and discipline are sound ones that speak for themselves, principles that seek to form and transform human nature rather than to fight against it, and principles that respect and elevate the dignity of both child and educator.    When I discovered Don Bosco I felt I'd finally found someone who was truly on my side.    

If only I'd known about him when I was having to make post-baptism chitchat with Father Spare-the-Rod!

 

St. John Bosco, like St. "Mother" Teresa or St. "Padre" Pio, is one of those whose names started to sound a little weird when their popular monikers got altered by the application of sainthood.  He's often "Don" Bosco even though his name is John-actually-Saint-John-now, "Don" being the honorific applied typically to diocesan priests in Italy.  I think this is because he, like they, like some others -- Thérèse comes to mind too -- is one of those saints that once you know them, you just sort of make friends with.  The "saint" can feel a little embarrassing between friends.  Or because a straightforward humility, a groundedness, is so much a part of their persona that they succeed in never feeling... I don't know, lofty.  

Here's a repost about Don Bosco for his feast day, Jan. 31.  In which I write about why I take him as my personal role model in his approach to child discipline.

+ + +

My personal parenting/discipline ideal has always been to avoid punishing kids.

I get the impression from other people that the idea alarms them, because it sounds a lot like "avoiding discipline;" perhaps it calls to mind the stories of parents who insist their offspring can do no wrong.  You know, the kind who sue the school when their child is suspended for cheating on a test or something like that.

That's not my point.  By punishment, I mean those arbitrary unpleasantnesses inflicted in return for misbehavior:  the spanking, the grounding, the confiscation. Mrk and I aren't what you'd call permissive parents.  We try to be authoritative, if not authoritarian.  We use the term "obedience" with the kids and are clear about what it means and why it's important.   But (this is our ideal, mind you, not always the way we manage to make it work) we try not to get to the point where we need a "punishment" in the first place.  

We try to let them experience the consequences of their actions, insofar as it isn't dangerous.  

• Didn't pack an extra dress like you were supposed to?  Well, I guess you'll be wet and uncomfortable now that you've run through your friend's sprinkler in your clothes.  
• Refused to eat your lunch at lunchtime?  Ooooops, snack time isn't till 3:30, I guess you can have some of these plain almonds I keep in the car for emergencies.
• Shrieked at each other in the car while we were running errands?  After all that, I (honestly) don't feel anymore like taking you out for lunch, so instead we're going home and having tuna sandwiches.

On the occasion when something truly egregious happens -- such as when one of my kids came to me and admitted that a long string of perfect scores on math assignments had been faked -- consequences are meted out rather than merely allowed to happen; but we really try to have it make sense.  In the case of the spurious perfect scores, since I had no way to know whether the child understood the material, the child was assigned double math lessons for as many days as the lessons had been faked, each day doing the regularly scheduled lesson and at the same time re-doing one of the lessons from before.  That plus a long conversation about honesty.  And dangerous misuse of a tool around here is very likely to result in revocation of privileges to use said tool until competency and proper respect for risk is demonstrated; that's just common sense, not a punishment.  

It was difficult for us to figure out when our first was very young, but we hit our stride eventually, and he grew out of the normal frustrations of toddlerhood into an earnest child and now a delightful teenager, and that has given us a lot of confidence as we continue to bring him up, him and the four that have followed.  It's true that I yell more than I wish I did, and lose my temper.  It's an ideal I fail to measure up to.  But I still strive for that "no-punishment" ideal.

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I notice, however, that this isn't language I tend to hear from my fellow Catholic parents much.  Indeed, at more than one parish I've seethed while listening to a priest (including in the homily at my daughter's baptism) cheerfully recommend vigorously and frequently spanking small children.  

I think this is an American Catholic phenomenon, borne of being caught between a decadent permissive culture and an army of evangelical Protestants -- in many ways, serious American Catholics are constantly playing "keeping up with the Bob Joneses," and so, for better or for worse, we have been inculturated with what I personally see as a break-the-child's-sinful-will, thou-shalt-honor-us-because-of-the-ten-commandments sort of  attitude toward child discipline.  

The exceptions are the super-crunchy attachment parenting Catholics.  Am I one of those?  Sort of; as a young parent, AP wasn't good enough for me and if you were foolish enough to ask me about it I would talk your ear off about how I was into "CC" parenting, which stands for "continuum concept," which, well, some other time....    

I did have plenty of role models for the way that I felt was right for me to parent my kids, but I lacked Catholic ones.   And that's why I was so excited when I first learned about the educational philosophy of St. John Bosco.  AKA "Don" Bosco (1815-1888) because that's what you call a diocesan priest in Italy.   Here's Wikipedia on him, for some background:

At that time the city of Turin had a population of 117,000 inhabitants. It reflected the effects of industrialization and urbanization: numerous poor families lived in the slums of the city, having come from the countryside in search of a better life. In visiting the prisons Don Bosco was disturbed to see so many boys from 12 to 18 years of age. He was determined to find a means to prevent them ending up here. Because of population growth and migration to the city, Bosco found the traditional methods of parish ministry inefficient. He decided it was necessary to try another form of apostolate, and he began to meet the boys where they worked and gathered in shops, offices, market places. They were pavers, stone-cutters, masons, plasterers who came from far away places, he recalled in his brief Memoirs.

The Oratorio was not simply a charitable institution, and its activities were not limited to Sundays. For Don Bosco it became his permanent occupation. He looked for jobs for the unemployed. Some of the boys did not have sleeping quarters and slept under bridges or in bleak public dormitories. Twice he tried to provide lodgings in his house. The first time they stole the blankets; the second they emptied the hay-loft. He did not give up. In May 1847, he gave shelter to a young boy from Valesia, in one of the three rooms he was renting in the slums of Valdocco, where he was living with his mother. He and "Mamma Margherita" began taking in orphans. The boys sheltered by Don Bosco numbered 36 in 1852, 115 in 1854, 470 in 1860 and 600 in 1861, 800 being the maximum some time later....

In 1859, Bosco selected the experienced priest Vittorio Alasonatti, 15 seminarians and one high school boy and formed them into the "Society of St. Francis de Sales." This was the nucleus of the Salesians, the religious order that would carry on his work....In 1871, he founded a group of religious sisters to do for girls what the Salesians were doing for boys. They were called the "Daughters of Mary Help of Christians." In 1874, he founded yet another group, the "Salesian Cooperators." These were mostly lay people who would work for young people like the Daughters and the Salesians, but would not join a religious order.

Bosco's capability to attract numerous boys and adult helpers was connected to his "Preventive System of Education."

Don Bosco explained his "preventive system" in an essay, "The Preventive System in the Education of the Young," which can be found here.  It begins by contrasting his "preventive" system with the "repressive" system.  The "repressive" system, he says, has its place "in the army and in general among adults and the judicious, who ought of themselves to know and remember what the law and its regulations demand."  

The repressive system consists in making the law known to the subjects and afterwards watching to discover the transgressors of these laws, and inflicting, when necessary, the punishment deserved.

According to this system, the words and looks of the superior must always be severe and even threatening, and he must avoid all familiarity with his dependents.   

In order to give weight to his authority the Rector must rarely be found among his subjects and as a rule only when it is a question of punishing or threatening.  

But Don Bosco's system is different:

[The preventive system] consists in making the laws and regulations of an institute known, and then watching carefully so that the pupils may at all times be under the vigilant eye of the rector or the assistants, who like loving fathers can converse with them, take the lead in every movement and in a kindly way give advice and correction;  in other words, this system places the pupils in the impossibility of committing faults.

This system is based entirely on reason and religion, and above all on kindness; therefore it excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement. 

"Excludes all violent punishment, and tries to do without even the slightest chastisement" being what I was going for all along, I was so glad to find this.  

The basic idea is that children are closely supervised at all times by leaders who care for them, model good behavior, encourage reception of the sacraments, participate in their games, and converse with them frequently about behavior norms in a way that "appeals to [their] reason" and "generally enlists [their] accord."  Close supervision and "forewarning" means that there is little chance for a child to commit a fault. Don Bosco believes that young people misbehave, initially at least, because of inattention, not malice:

The primary reason for this system is the thoughtlessness of the young, who in one moment forget the rules of discipline and the penalties for their infringement.  Consequently, a child often becomes culpable and deserving of punishment, which he had not even thought about, and which he had quite forgotten when heedlessly committing the fault which he would certainly have avoided, had a friendly voice warned him.

To apply this system Don Bosco lists several principles of education and discipline.

1.  Close supervision by the people entrusted with the children.  "[The Rector] must always be with his pupils whenever they are not engaged in some occupation, unless they are already being properly supervised by others."

2. Moral teachers who actively lead the pupils to and in each new place or activity. "Teachers, craftmasters, and assistants must be of acknowledged morality... As far as possible the assistants ought to precede the boys to the place where they assemble; they should remain with them until others come to take their place, and never leave the pupils unoccupied."

3.  Allow rowdiness and physical activity.  "Let the boys have full liberty to jump, run, and make as much noise as they please.  Gymnastics, music, theatricals, and outings are most efficacious means of obtaining discipline and of benefiting spiritual and bodily health.  Let care be taken however that the games... are not reprehensible.  'Do anything you like,' the great friend of youth, St. Philip [Neri] used to say, 'as long as you do not sin.'"

4.  Encourage and promote, don't force, the sacraments.  "Frequent confession and communion and daily mass are the pillars which must support the edifice of education, from which we propose to banish the use of threats and the cane.  Never force the boys to frequent the sacraments, but encourage them to do so, and give them every opportunity.... [L]et the beauty, grandeur, and holiness of the Catholic religion be dwelt on..."

"Avoid as a plague the opinion that the first communion should be deferred to a late age... When a child can distinguish between Bread and bread, and shows sufficient knowledge, give no further thought to his age... St. Philip Neri counseled weekly and even more frequent communion."

5.  Exclude bad materials and trouble-making people.  "[P]revent bad books, bad companions, or persons who indulge in improper conversations from entering the college.  A good door keeper is a treasure for a house of education."

6.  Brief daily reflections -- a sort of community examen.  "Every evening after night prayers before the boys go to rest, the Rector or someone in his stead shall address them briefly, giving them advice or counsel concerning what is to be done or... avoided.  Let him try to draw some moral reflection from events that have happened during the day... but his words should never take more than two or three minutes."

7.  Love before fear.   "An educator should seek to win the love of his pupils if he wishes to inspire fear in them.  When he succeeds in doing this, the withholding of some token of kindness is a punishment which stimulates emulation, gives courage, and never degrades.... With the young, punishment is whatever is meant as a punishment.... in the case of some boys a reproachful look is more effective than a slap in the face would be."

8. Do not  shame children.  "Except in very rare cases, corrections and punishments should never be given publicly, but always privately and in the absence of companions."

9.  Employ patient reason and religion. "[T]he greatest prudence and patience should be used to bring the pupil to see his fauly, with the aid of reason and religion."

10.  No corporal punishment.  "To strike a boy in any way, to make him kneel in a painful position, to pull his ears, and other similar punishments, must be absolutely avoided, because the law forbids them, and because they greatly irritate the boys and degrade the educator."

 11.  Clear communication of expectations.  "The Rector shall make sure that the disciplinary measures, including rules and punishments, are known to the pupils, so that  no one can make the excuse that he did not know what was commanded or forbidden."

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I think these principles of Salesian education and discipline are sound ones that speak for themselves, principles that seek to form and transform human nature rather than to fight against it, and principles that respect and elevate the dignity of both child and educator.    When I discovered Don Bosco I felt I'd finally found someone who was truly on my side.    

If only I'd known about him when I was having to make post-baptism chitchat with Father Spare-the-Rod!

Co-schooling lunch: why so fancy?

I got a new Instant Pot electric pressure cooker for Christmas.  The first thing I made in it was frijoles negros, which worked beautifully, last week.  

The second thing I am making in it right now is chicken stock -- I hope -- from two rotisserie chickens which I chilled overnight and picked not-quite-clean of meat in the morning.  

The third thing, I will make in it right after the chicken stock is done:  soup with barley, leeks, and carrots, to which I will return some or all of the chicken meat at the end.

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This soup is for lunch on a co-schooling day, along with a loaf of whole wheat bread from my bread machine and a clementine or two for everyone.  While the pressure cooker I thought I'd stop and write a bit about hot lunches in general for the homeschooling family, and then about hot lunches on co-schooling day.

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If I could poll a hundred homeschooling families and get a detailed answer out of all of them, I think I'd love to ask this question:  How do you manage lunch?  Not because I can't manage it:  After eleven-plus years of trying to feed children in between their lessons and studies, and especially now that I am out of the nothing-but-small-ones years, we have a system that works pretty well.   (More on that below.)  No, I just am curious to hear about the ways that diverse families have solved the problem.  

And it is a problem, in the sense of a series of questions to answer:  

• How long after breakfast do you have lunch?  
• Must you clear off a schoolwork surface to make room for cooking and eating?
• Is lunch to be a dinner-like occasion, with a set table and everyone at their places on time?
• Does everyone eat the same thing?  Do all the kids eat the same thing but the parent has something different?
• Who makes lunch?  Is it the parent?  A particular child?  Do children take turns?  If children make lunch, may they choose the menu?  Do people make their own lunch from what's available?
• Is lunch-making time a time for the parent to teach food preparation to young children?
• Do you insist on a balanced meal or that children eat their vegetables at lunch time?
• How much time can you take for lunch?
• Do you have a rest time or "recess" afterward?
• Do you decide what to make in advance?
• Do you try to use dinner leftovers in your lunch?
• Do you have a regular rotation of lunches-of-the-day?  Or do you often eat the same thing day after day?
• Who cleans up? Will you completely clean up the lunch before going back to the rest of your day, or will dishes wait till later?

Different families:  different lunches.

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I keep it relatively simple in my three at-home days.  This year, the regular rotation is sandwiches on Tuesday, pizza (usually from frozen) on Wednesday, and quesadillas on Friday; all with fruit on the side. 

On Thursdays, when I host, there are twelve to fifteen people here for lunch, and the adults have quite a lot to do.  You would think I would want to go even more simple on those days, but in fact I do not.  Here is why.

Point one:  Scale-up.

It turns out that it is not actually simple or quick to prepare most sandwiches, frozen pizzas, or quesadillas for twelve to fifteen people, nor to let those twelve to fifteen people prepare their own sandwiches.  

• Assembling large numbers of sandwiches is a surprisingly fiddly, messy affair.
• You can really only do a couple of frozen pizzas in your oven at once.  That'll feed maybe five children?
• Quesadillas also have the sandwich problem combined with the heat source problem.

No, what you want to feed people simply and easily in your house is probably a couple of deep pans of something you can cut into pieces, or a vat of something scoopable. 

 

Point two.  The co-schooling kids' time is better spent on schoolwork than on lunch.

On our home days, helping me put lunch together is part of my kids' job.   My "simple" lunches for days at home are chosen in part because I need to be able to bark down the stairs, "Elder Teenager!  Please start the quesadillas while I clean up this mess!"  or to be able to ask, "Younger teenager, can you put the pizzas in the oven at eleven-ten so they're ready when I get home from toddler music class?"

But the co-schooling time is short, and we really need all of the kids to be either productively schooling or productively having recess together most of the day.  I'm not going to have them make their own sandwiches by digging through my fridge looking for the fillings they like best (although sometimes in warmer weather I'll set out a tray of meat and cheese and a basket of buns on the table).  Usually there comes a time in the late morning when the students are working independently, and that gives me time to set out lunch trays.

We do assign a pair of children each day to be "servers." It's the servers' job to keep the water pitchers refilled, to fetch second servings, and to retrieve condiments from the fridge (in between bolting down their own lunches).  This little innovation from a few years ago made it a lot easier for  us parent-teachers to sit down and eat.  Servers also have to clear the table so it's ready for schoolwork.  

 

Point three.  Once you've got comfortable with a dish that really works, it's not always all that hard.

Chicken noodle soup from scratch is, on the surface, a bit complicated.  One must immerse the whole chicken in a big pot of cold water, add a few flavoring vegetables, bring to a boil,  and turn down to a simmer.  One must skim the scum that floats to the surface, then an hour or so later remove the chicken and let it cool.  Diced vegetables go into the pot, and that boils again for thirty to sixty minutes; meanwhile the meat must be picked off the bones, and the broth salted and tasted.  Towards the end, in go the noodles, and you must stir so they don't stick.  Once the noodles are all done, the meat goes back in.  If you are frugal, you'll put the bones to boil again in another pot, because there's another pot of broth left in them.

So yes, many steps, spread out throughout a whole morning.  But if I am in the kitchen anyway -- and I teach my co-school students in my kitchen -- I can make chicken noodle soup practically in my sleep.  I have done it so many times that I know exactly when the pot will come to a boil, when to skim, when the chicken will be done, how long the noodles have to go and when to wander back and stir them.  So a vat of chicken noodle soup is something I can make for a co-school day.  It sounds hard.  But because it's one of the things I know how to make work for me -- I make it work for them.

It can be even easier than that.  A perennial favorite is meatballs (read:  from a bag, frozen), heated all morning in my crockpot in a simple tomato sauce (read:  straight from a can -- even plain crushed tomatoes will do because the meatballs flavor them).  I boil spaghetti -- that's the most complicated part -- and serve with buttered rolls and green beans (frozen, steamed in the microwave).  Another is chili (it all goes in the crockpot in the morning) with tortilla chips and a bowl of cheese to pass around.  Mashed potatoes (made in the morning, kept warm in the crockpot) and a tray of oven-baked chicken legs is another.    I also like to do a pot of coconut rice (thanks, rice cooker) with plain poached chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, and pineapple chunks.  Give them a bottle of soy sauce and those are some happy kids.

H. tends more to casseroles than I do, and usually preps them the night before so they can be popped in the oven.  The three things she makes most often are a ridiculously plain and ridiculously delicious salmon loaf (it's so great, you must try feeding it to your kids),  a sort of cheesy noodle bake made with mostly parmesan, and ... hm, I think number three might be little mini meatloaves.  I hope so, because I love mini meatloaves.

These things are not as hard to get on the table as you might think, at least not once you have the routine down.

 

Point four:  You might want to eat something tasty, too.

Let's be real:  although my children are happy to eat it, I do not want frozen pizza for lunch.  Certainly not every week.  I do like quesadillas and eat them sometimes, but not every week.  

On the other hand, I would be perfectly happy to eat H.'s salmon loaf or meatloaves or cheesy noodle bake every week.  They are yummy.  A bag of steamed vegetables on the side of any of those, and I'm very happy.  (Salmon loaf especially makes me happy.  We make a sort of rémoulade of mayonnaise mixed with homemade hot sauce for it, and it's really nice.)

 Likewise, I could eat chicken noodle soup -- my own homemade chicken noodle soup, that is -- every week for the rest of my life, and I would not tire of it, at least if I had copious amounts of saltine crackers and black pepper.  Or mashed potatoes and chicken, or even the spaghetti and meatballs.  

Co-schooling days are very busy, especially traveling to the other's house in the morning -- what with gathering together all the stuff and piling it in the car, fighting morning rush hour traffic, setting up all the stuff again -- and it's nice to have a good meal to look forward to, shared with a friend.

 

Point five:  It's welcoming.

I can get stressed out by the details of hosting everyone, to be sure.    But in the long term, I want my house to be a place that kids remember fondly being a guest in.  Sometimes I get frustrated when I teach.  Sometimes I get irritated picking up after people.  I'm sure the kids see this all the time.  But I do hope they like sitting around my table with their friends scarfing down my chili.  Maybe they'll remember that as a good time, remember a feeling of being welcomed and fed and among friends once or twice a week (between being hounded for their history homework and quizzed on their Latin grammar).    I have to believe that it makes a real difference to them to sit down to (say) a bowl of hot soup with fresh rolls and a piece of fruit.

 

Point six:  You can always order pizza.

Which sounds like a jokey way to end a post, but in fact, it is actually a real point.  Once, maybe eight years ago, H. and I sat down and worked out about how much it cost per serving to feed the kids a home-cooked lunch.  I am sure the price has gone up significantly since then, partly because food prices have risen significantly, and also since we now have some teenagers.  If I remember right, we figured that we spent about $2 per serving back then.

That turned out to be a very useful thing for us to have calculated, because we realized that it didn't actually cost us significantly more to order Domino's pizza for the kids (at $5.99 for a two-topping medium pizza, the lunch special that has been going for years in this area).

We didn't want to order pizza all the  time; we wanted to have balanced meals that would be good for everyone, as much as possible.  But we'd also been assuming that pizza delivery was kind of a luxury, and so we definitely didn't want to order pizza all the time.

Turns out that it's not.  I think it might even be less expensive relative to home-cooked meals now, because the prices of a delivered pizza have not risen as fast as the prices of groceries.  (Although four teenage boys can put away a lot of pizza, it should be noted -- probably more pizza than salmon loaf.)

Anyway, the point of this is that if your home-cooked meal backfires somehow, or if you wake up in the morning and you just can't stand the idea of cooking, you could order pizza (provided you live somewhere that you can get it).  H. and I have given each other carte blanche to resort to pizza whenever that seems necessary.  I think we're both committed to making a good-faith effort to a lunch that is not pizza, for the sake of balance and variety; but we're not fanatics, and sometimes the pizza is the best thing to happen to the day.

Remember to tip the driver, and then make your peace and get back to your school day.

 

Children, safety, and the sixth commandment.

At home we say that my six-year-old, who will turn seven in January, is in first grade. He is an outgoing and cheerful child who loves to meet people. So I was really looking forward to starting him in religious ed at our parish this year, because that is one of the first "classroom" experiences our kids tend to have. Meanwhile, I looked forward to starting him slowly at home with memory work from the St. Joseph First Communion Catechism, as I have done for all the other kids. I have a little personalized copybook printed just for him, and we take two years to work through memorizing and copying the answers to the questions:

Who made me?

"God made me."

Did God make all things?

"Yes, God made all things."

Why did God make me?

"God made me to show his goodness and to make me happy with Him in Heaven."

It is not just memorizing and copy work, although I find it is a good vehicle for practicing handwriting and for stretching the child's memory. As I introduce each one we talk about it: what it means, why we use some words and not others, sometimes different ways to think about the answers, which of the answers seem easy to grasp and which answers are so difficult that grownups still argue about them when they go to college and other grownups write whole books about what they mean. Six- and seven-year-olds, I find, are proud to be learning about things that are so important and difficult that grownups argue about them.

We add one or two of these per week, and to get through the whole First Communion catechism it takes about two school years, so I start in first grade. By the time second grade rolls around and the parish sends home the packet of things To Be Learned before First Confession and then First Communion, our children have hardly balked at learning the Ten Commandments and the Act of Contrition and the Five Steps To Prepare For Making A Good Confession and the like. I have rolled it right into their copybook and each year it has become part of the memory work.

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But as I have said, I look forward to enrolling our kids in our very good parish religious ed program in part because I like them to have a classroom experience with other kids and a teacher, just that little experience of collegiality and being a school-kid, complete with chairs and desks and chalkboards, evenings in the parish school.

So I was more than a little disappointed when my 6yo arrived for his first day and there weren't any other first graders in his class.

Demographics, the religious ed director told me. The recession. There are only about 15 six-year-olds among all the families registered in the parish, and the others go to the school and so they don't need Wednesday night religious ed. There just were not a lot of kids born in 2009-2010. My ten-year-old daughter in the same parish had 43 First Communicants in her cohort, maybe a dozen of whom were in religious ed classes with her.

The school was willing to devote a first grade teacher to my one little boy, but in the end -- he will turn seven this year -- we decided to send him to second grade, and so everything is accelerated. It is the better option for him under the circumstances, but I wanted for him to get a year older first. I wanted to have time to teach him my way for a little while.

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I was talking with a good friend over coffee the other day. She wanted to pick my brain about sex education for children and teenagers, something that I thought was kind of funny because she seems like the sort of person who would have absolutely no difficulty talking about anything at all with anyone. But as we talked it became clear that she is thinking hard about how to thread the needle between a healthy sex-positivity and anything goes, between encouraging moral behavior and fueling shame (or worse, shaming others), between a culture of chastity and the dark side of what she called "purity culture" (the notion that purity can be lost and afterwards you are permanently worth less; cf. comparing human beings, usually girls, to used wads of chewing gum and the like).

I am not sure I added anything to that idea other than "back to the Theology of the Body for you!" Because that is what authentic and sex-positive Catholicism looks like. But we talked a little bit about our different styles and how she is very assertive ("let's sit down, son, it is time for us to talk about Internet porn") and at least for young children I tend to be watchful about questions and respond to them instead. I don't want to burden them, too early, with things that they might not be ready for, I said. But as they grow older I try to spark the questions when it seems time, mostly via artful curriculum choices. So, for instance, my 10yo daughter and 13yo son are both getting Life Science this year with human reproduction included. I tend to stick to the clinical and academic, and I surround it with the social and moral context to it as we go, as it seems necessary.

I called that a "retreat" compared to her style, but she didn't think so. "The other Catholic homeschoolers I run with, it seems like they are afraid to teach their kids about the biology, because it might get them interested in sex." She felt social pressure.

"But what did you mean, specifically," she asked me, "about 'burdening' them too early? Like, what specific knowledge is a burden to a child who is too young for it?"

And that question really gave me pause. I realized I had been saying that for a long time, without ever articulating something specific to myself. I ended up telling her that I remembered a deep sense of revulsion, something not quite shame or fear, but a desire to get away, at the ages of eight-nine-ten if ever one of my parents wanted to speak to me about sex or puberty or any such thing. I have heard it said that this is a natural impulse, possibly self-protective, that many children have; I have also wondered if I felt unusually unsafe in that territory because that was around the time that my own family broke down around me, and there was no context in which it would have been safe to discuss morality or justice or consent. So I don't know, but the memory of that feeling of horror has made me reluctant to impose the feeling on my own kids. I "retreat" (at least in theory -- we shall see if I managed it, I guess) to a clear and age-appropriate explication of biology and a clear and age-appropriate explication of our duty to act justly to other human beings and never to use them as a means to an end, and draw the connections when I get the chance.

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From that conversation I discovered at least one thing that I think can burden a child too young for it, and that is a certain way of looking at the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

My six-year-old, the one thrust a bit too soon into the first-communion-prep program, is supposed to memorize the ten commandments because of the first-confession-prep which precedes it. Memorizing the ten commandments is completely fine with me. I get that the ten commandments can also be used as a handy memory aid when one is examining one's conscience. But I have always been a little bit bothered by the "child's ten commandments" they offered to us to make it easy for the kids.

"God comes first" is fine. "God's name is holy" is fine. "God's day is holy" is fine. All of them are fine until you get to number six, and then the children are offered as an alternative to "Thou shalt not commit adultery,"

"Be pure."

And -- I don't want to teach a six-year-old that this is what the sixth commandment means.

For one thing, it isn't accurate.

For another thing, none of the real ten commandments are about what you should "be" -- they are about what you should "do." Breaking one does not change you from who you are -- a human being, a child of God -- into something else.

For a third thing, "thou shalt not commit adultery" is a call to acting justly towards others, whereas "be pure" sounds like something you do within yourself, without reference to anyone except yourself and God.

I know where this comes from. It comes from the commendable practice of using the ten commandments as a sort of mnemonic for examinations of conscience, or possibly from the way that the Catechism organizes its discussion of the moral life around the structure of the ten commandments. All the possible sins against chastity are gathered together in section six.

And the teachers are trying to come up with a way that they can teach the children to start obeying the sixth commandment right away. They think "Be pure" is a child-sized version of it.

"Be chaste" would be better, I think.

But even better would be to teach the seven-year-olds this: Seven-year-olds cannot violate the sixth commandment.

The sixth commandment is for their sake. It is meant to protect them. But it is not aimed at them.

When they get older, they will need to incorporate it into their own behavior.

But right now, it is not aimed at them.

The St. Joseph First Communion Catechism pointedly reassures its readers that young children do not commit mortal sin. Before going on to explain that grownups do commit grave sins, and sometimes so do even big boys and girls, it says about young children: God protects them in a special way. They learn about both venial and mortal sin now for completeness, and because later they will have to wrestle with both kinds; but for now we reassure them that they cannot endanger their own souls at the age of seven.

I like this formula, and I think we should adopt it for the sixth commandment.

I don't think seven-year-olds need to be burdened with the worry about whether they are "being" pure.

I think seven-year-olds should understand clearly that if they are exposed to unchastity in their families, if someone inapproriately sexualizes them, if they come upon explicit materials or media -- it is because someone else has sinned against them.

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This post turned out way more rambly than I thought it would, but it has been helpful.

I always have taught the meaning of "Thou shalt not commit adultery" to my young children like this: It exists to protect children and families. The sixth commandment means that mothers and fathers should work hard to make a safe home for children. It means, "Do not find another person who is not your husband or wife to be with," because children need to grow up with their mother and their father.

I have always felt confident about teaching that. In part because kids get it: They know that their parents, and other adults, are supposed to take care of them and keep them safe. And also because as they get older, they can come to understand that all of chastity serves justice for children. Chastity exists to put the needs of children above the desires of adults. I want my kids to know my marriage as a mantle of safety wrapped around them, and I want them to remember that mantle when they grow up and know where it came from, and what that means for their own decisions.

 

Will they be safe people for children?

Not "be pure" but "be safe."

"Be safe," in the sense of "be a person who offers safety to others." Especially children, I think I will be more purposeful about rejecting the "be pure" formulation, starting today. Even when we are well-meaning, we take serious risks when we teach simplified versions of the words of Scripture or of sound doctrine. It may be more difficult, but it is always safer to stick with the original.

 

 

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Love is patient, love is kind. Yes, yes, and other stuff.

Sometimes I feel like I still need a basic how-to of the Christian life.  Love is such a difficult concept for me.    I think it's because even though I know better, I constantly slip into the error of mistaking the word as a kind of feeling rather than a kind of act, a choice, or a way of life.  It's a common error, maybe one of the fundamental American social errors.  And I'm kind of embarrassed to fall for an error so common.  Which is itself a problem, I suppose.

Mistaking "love" for a kind of feeling leads some souls to mistake the ephemeral for the lasting, and so endanger themselves.  It leads others to mistake the surface for the substance, and so fail to deepen.  Me, it tends to tempt me to despair.  I have feelings, but not many of the kind that one can mistake for love.  So sometimes, in forgetting, I go a long time wondering if I actually have any in me.

Oh, there are exceptions.  I'm human, and a mother, and I live in the experience of biological attachment -- something that nearly knocked me over with its power, because the sense of wanting to love, of having physical desires that aligned with total self-gift, was so alien to me.   It gave me much food for thought -- can I harness this power? I wrote in 2007, about real love, "Attachment is the natural way that we become disposed to love.   The other way, the supernatural way, is through the sacraments."  Sometimes, if you know something (intellectually) about what love really is,  you wonder how people get so snookered by its substitutes.  One reasonable hypothesis:  We mistake feelings not so much for love itself, but for attachment, love's natural source of power.

I've gone to the writings of St. Thérèse and listened to her explain the merits of "doing little things with great love."  Daily life is a string of such little things, the ordinary duties of marriage and motherhood, citizenship and community; how to swing this "love" thing?  Can I transform my tasks?  Can I transform me?

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 I'll tell you right now, trying to generate feelings of love whilst going about the tasks of the day works imperfectly at best.  It's not a bad exercise:  one considers why this task is here, for example, that the laundry pile is so high because I have many children, for whom I am truly grateful, and try to convert it into being grateful for the laundry itself.  St. Francis embraced Death itself as a beloved sister:  perhaps laundry could be a sort of affable nephew or something?  But I never quite get there, although I can fake it to myself for a while, sometimes even long enough to get it all sorted into baskets.

+ + +

This week I went back to 1 Corinthians 13, always a corrective when one has forgotten what love is.  

I did get sidetracked somewhat by a sudden fascination with a translation problem*, but managed mostly to focus -- as I swear I've done over and over again -- on the attributes.  Love is patient, love is kind, and then some more stuff.  Rejoices in the truth.  There's a list there of what love is not, as well as what love is, but honestly I could stand just to pick a couple of these things -- patience, kindness -- and work on that.  For me, "doing small things" with a love greater than I usually can muster might simply be to do them with patience and kindness.

And neither are things that you have to feel in order to do.

(Yes, even patience.   Certainly we can feel impatience, but we can do, or at least try to do, patience despite it.   Who hasn't snapped at a whining child, "Be patient!"  Why ask for patience if we don't mean a behavior change?  What we really mean is "Stop whining and wait."  Surely we can ask the same of ourselves.)

I foresee a time of muttering to myself, "Love is patient, love is kind," as I go about my day.  Seriously, those two attributes alone are enough effort to keep me occupied, never mind all the others.

+ + +

I do think ahead with some foreboding.  Even if you actually get a handle on the intellectual meaning of "love" as an interior disposition, you still have to reach out to others with something that is sensible, i.e., available to their senses.  "The body, and it alone, is capable of making the invisible visible" -- that is St. John Paul II -- and wherever our vocation has placed us, we have a duty to communicate love.

A love that is known by nature.  By how it seeks to be felt -- sensed.

We have to try to generate those feelings -- in others!  (Feelings that are true -- feelings of being-loved -- that are safe, not dangerous, because we really do love and desire to love the ones who feel them: we know they are worthy, that they are persons, knowing and bearing with them and beholding always an image of all creation and all the Uncreated too.)  We create the space where it is safe to feel love, and then it is our job to fill that space so love can be felt.  Not so easy for those of us who don't "feel" very much, or who don't trust "feelings;" who prefer to take the easy way out, reasoning and thinking about everything instead.  

 I wonder, too if the comparative dearth of "feeling" might not turn out to be a sort of gift, in the end.  I hope, maybe, it makes it easier for me to rejoice in the truth, because the reason I'm naturally suspicious of "feeling" is because "feeling" tends to obscure.  Still, conscious acts of patience and conscious acts of kindness -- or at least, squelching urges to vocalize impatience, to react with unkindness -- cannot hurt, and might spread outward, even if they don't penetrate inwardly as much as I would like.

 

__________

 *Because I can't let it drop.  NAB:  "love is not rude."  But Latin Vulgate:  "non est ambitiosa."  Rude or ambitious?  Quick survey of various English translations reveals a split between the two. The Greek received text is ἀσχημονεῖ, which everybody seems to translate as "acts unbecomingly," so more "rude" than "ambitious."  What did Jerome have in mind, exactly?  A mystery for another day.

Turning a little knowledge into more.

Refugees are people:  men, women, old people, young people, teenagers, children, infants.  

I typed and retyped the introductory sentence for my post and settled on that one, because apparently there's some controversy about that point.  Now I'll move on.

+ + +

Mark and I decide yearly where to send our family's charitable donations.   The summer's news moved me to look this year into helping and welcoming the families who are being directly resettled here after fleeing the violence in Syria.   Of course, there are national and international organizations who could use our money, but I also wondered who, if anyone, was doing that work locally.  

Although Gov. Mark Dayton sharply criticized those state governors who refused to accept people from Syria, I discovered, nobody in Minnesota really expects anyone from Syria to be directly resettled here.  There isn't an established community.  But Minnesota does expect to have welcome an increased number of refugees by the end of 2016.  The largest number, as for the last few years, are from Somalia.  

I knew this, of course, because I live in South Minneapolis, which is home to one of the largest communities of Somali people outside Somalia itself.  The greatest concentration, as well as the most visible cluster of businesses owned by and catering to Somali immigrants, is the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood a bit north of us.   But many Somali people live in our neighborhood as well.  Yesterday evening, a Tuesday, I was at the YMCA a mile from our house, running around the track that circles the second level of the gym; the gym was crowded, half by badminton players and half by basketball pick-up games, and the basketball side was (I estimate) 90 percent Somali.  Mostly young men and teenage boys, but a few little girls in brightly colored hijabs darted in and out, and there were a couple of teenage girls, too, practicing free throws.  Much of the signage in the YMCA is printed in English, Spanish, and Somali, and you'll see this in other places too, like on bank machines and sometimes shop windows.  In the winter, when everyone else at the bus stop seem to disappear under fluffy parkas, the distinctive skirts and hijab of Somali women still stand out above and below the winter coats, orange and green and turquoise and purple against the snow and the gray pavement.

+ + +

We will probably make a donation this year to one or more of the local organizations that work with refugees.  (See below* for a list.)  In the meantime I realized how very little I know about the community of refugees that already lives all around me.  I decided to change that.  

I picked up a book published in 2012 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, part of the People of Minnesota series: Somalis in Minnesota by Ahmed Ismail Yusuf.  It's less than 70 pages long and well footnoted.  The book describes the history of the nation of Somalia, how the fighting started and how its refugee crisis began.  It tells how Somalis began to be resettled in the United States in the early 1990s, almost all in the San Diego area, where there was already a small community of ethnic Somalis that had settled there from Ethiopia earlier.  But at the time, job prospects in the area were poor.  

Minnesota, at the time, had relatively low unemployment.   So when the owners of a single poultry plant in Marshall, MN wanted to expand operations from two shifts to three, they advertised in other states, hoping to draw workers with a starting rate of $6.95/hour (forty percent higher than the federal minimum wage at the time) plus benefits.  A few young men drove to Minnesota to check it out, an event which Yusuf places neatly in the context of the Somali nomadic tradition, in which a few members of a large group would travel ahead to scout out a new, high-quality living site that would support the community.  Those young men were hired immediately; they passed the news to the rest of the community in San Diego; more followed; and that became the cradle of the Minnesota Somali-American community.  Once that community had become established, additional refugees from Somalia began to be settled directly in Minnesota.

Yusuf goes on to describe some of the challenges that this first generation of Somali-Americans has had as it integrates into the wider communities of the local public school system, the Twin Cities, and the state of Minnesota.  Some of these early difficulties, I remember from the local news (kids fighting at Roosevelt High, some taxicab drivers -- Yusuf calls them "ignorant" -- who wouldn't transport dogs or alcohol from the airport) but that publicity had mostly faded away by the time the situations had been resolved.  These conflicts, Yusuf frames optimistically, pointing out that similar conflicts have marked the arrival of many other communities of immigrants who are now well accepted in American society.  He argues that the rapid growth of Somali-American businesses and the emergence of political and social leaders in the first generation is evidence that Somalis are doing relatively well, considering that they have been here less than 25 years and face significant cultural and language barriers.

 The most serious problem at this time is one that Yusuf treats at some length, and that is the active targeting of Somali boys and young men by paramilitary and terrorist organizations overseas.  Not long after I began reading the book, a 20-year-old Somali man injured 10 people in a mass stabbing at a St. Cloud mall before being shot by an off-duty police officer.   (As I write this, the nature of the attacker's connection to overseas terrorist organizations has not yet been clearly established.)  St. Cloud is 65 miles northwest of here, a much smaller city; earlier this year, a local and widely-read free newspaper proclaimed it "the worst place in Minnesota to be Somali."  But dozens of Minneapolis parents have lost sons,  some only teenagers, directly to recruitment from an al-Qaeda affiliate organization  in the Horn of Africa.  One became the first American citizen to commit murder-suicide by bomb in Somalia.  The FBI counterterrorism investigation in Minnesota is large and ongoing, and the topic casts a dark shadow.

Still, Yusuf's book is optimistic and informative, and it left me wanting to know more still.

+ + +

The next thing I wondered was whether I could learn any of the Somali language.  Signs everywhere around here bear phrases of Somali  -- some repeat the information on public signage, others are the names of shops and restaurants, still others appear in advertisements.  Qoraxey is the name of a home health care agency.  Dayax is the name of a grocery store.  I couldn't find any online tutorials; neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone nor Pimsleur offer courses in Somali.  The only textbook I found was kind of expensive, more than I wanted to spend for a brief introduction, so I started with a slim phrasebook and dictionary by Awde, Axmed, and Orwin.

I started at the pronunciation section.  Somali has used a Roman alphabet since it was imposed in 1972, which makes it a bit easier on English speakers, but there are some phonemes not found in English.

Got all that?  

I did find a helpful video online called "Somali Pronunciation:  Just The Tricky Ones."  The narrator, who has a British accent, demonstrates how to pronounce the graphemes x, c, kh, r, q, dh,  and d/t.  I only find c and dh hard, though; the r is just a trill, the kh is the familiar ending of loch and ach! , x is just a throaty h  and q just a really-far-back-in-your-throat k.  There's a glottal stop too.  Nothing complicated.  I think I can get the dh with a little practice.  The c will take a lot.

(It also left me wondering why the Somali spelling reformers decided to go with the c instead of something else.)

+ + +

I've been driving around and noticing signs and looking them up in the dictionary.  The Dayax grocery store is named "Moon."  The Qoraxey home health care agency appears to be named something like "sun" or "sunrise"  (qurax).  The Gargar clinic's name means "help," I think -- at least, that's what the dictionary says gargaar means.  Clearly I have a lot to learn.

Somali isn't Indo-European -- it is a Cushitic language, which means that it is in the same language family (Afro-Asiatic) as Arabic and ancient Egyptian but on a branch between them.  The grammar, therefore, is something entirely foreign to me, but maybe not so foreign as (say) a Sino-Tibetan language would be.  But there are words that leap out at me when I go through the dictionary:  aadami means human (hello, Adam!), roodhi is bread (must be a cognate of India's roti).  Colonialism and technology has left the language with many Western loanwords:  capsicum (sweet) peppers are berberooni, which has to be from the Italian peperoni; a physician is a dhakhtar or dhakhtarad; cheese is farmaajo; oven is foorno.

The other day, while I was running around the lake, I practiced the consonants, pronouncing the Somali word for "beautiful" over and over:  quruxsan, quruxsan, quruxsan.  A soft "k" in the back of the throat, the vowel of "put" twice with a trilled "r" between, then a throaty "hhh-san."

I haven't even started to look at how to put together a sentence, or assign the right endings to nouns and verbs, or differentiate between masculine and feminine nouns (except to delight in the trivia that a masculine singular noun often has a feminine plural, and vice versa).  I have to start with words and spellings and pronunciations, and then move on to a little grammar.  I know many people would start with "Hello" and "My name is" and "Thank you," but I'm a visual learner and an analytical one; I'm going to try to get an idea of the way sentences are put together first, and how words can vary; and I'm going to remember these things better if I think of the words as things that are spelled and seen rather than spoken and heard.  I know, it's not natural-language-learning, but I know myself -- when I hear words in English I see them inside my head, behind my eyes -- and I need the spelled-out words to be the hooks on which I can hang and remember spoken ones.

So this is my tiny side auto-didact project  for the fall.  I can already tell that I am going to need another book, probably the textbook that I'm now going to be willing to invest in, because the Awde book's grammar section emphasizes the importance of nouns' gender while its dictionary section does not list the gender of the nouns (!).  As soon as I can find a Somali-language newspaper in a rack of free publications at the front of a coffee house, I will be snatching one up.  And I'll visit the library around the corner, which boasts a small section of Somali-language children's books.

I'm a long way from even saying "hello," but I hope to crawl a little farther along.

_______

*Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis serves refugees through their Reception and Placement program, to which donors can designate donations.  The Minnesota Council of Churches provides refugee services as well. ECHO Minnesota provides multilingual broadcast programming and communication.  I'm particularly interested in finding out more about the International Institute of Minnesota, which I noticed when I lived near it in graduate school and looked into when I was considering taking Spanish classes myself; they provide immediate resettlement help but also offer job training and ongoing language education.

First day of school.

Starting with the photo that makes me look like a fantastic homeschooler.

Yesterday I:

• baked raisin bran muffins
• went over to-do lists
• made my bed and put away laundry
• taught a calculus lesson to the 16yo -- really a precalculus review, just graphs and slopes and intercepts
• taught an algebra lesson to the 12yo -- simplifying numerical expressions and evaluating variable expressions
• met the three middle kids to assign Bible reading, find out who was the saint of the day, and introduce the 6yo to his catechism copybook
• went through a math lesson with the 6yo -- comparing two-digit numbers and reviewing how to tell time by the hour
• phonics sheet with the 6yo -- sorting words with "ou" pronounced as in "cousin" from words with "ou" pronounced as in "mouth"
• had 6yo read to me the first few pages of Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea by Cynthia Rylant
• cut up 6 apples out of each of which the toddler had taken 1 bite
• ate leftover lentil vegetable soup and cheese sandwich on sourdough bread, while children ate their favorite brand of frozen pizza and cut-up apples
• messed with FB while the children cleaned up lunch

• put vegetarian taco soup contents into crockpot
• cooked, for the freezer, two chili-pots' worth of ground turkey, onion, and spices
• rested, flung onto made bed, for a little while, while children played video games
• hoisted the toddler on my back in the carrier and walked to the library to find books about geckos
• brought home books about sharks, sea otters, and T. rex instead because gecko books were not located where the library said they would be
• welcomed the 6yo's biweekly playdate, who arrived dressed in a superhero costume with padded muscles
• called 6yos down to read to them from the introduction to Story of the World Vol. 1.  Playdate child said "I'm kind of tired of having people read to me."  I said "Your mother said it would be good if I read history to the two of you while you were here, so you have to."  Read as animatedly as I possibly could, and managed to keep their attention.
• called 10yo back to her math 50,000 times
• showed 10- and 12-yos how to check their own work in the mechanics practice book
• made a salad for my 16yo who had to leave for climbing team tryouts before Mark got home for dinner, and let him get his own soup
• set up dinner for the rest of us buffet-style

  

• had dinner together
• nursed toddler
• took everybody to the Y.  Ran at medium-to-high intensity for 20 minutes.  The hip is getting better.
• picked up 16yo from the climbing gym on the way home
• drank a glass of red wine while messing with Facebook and reading bits out of a French novel
• went downstairs and ate almost all the Goldfish crackers left over from the toddler's bedtime snack
• collapsed into bed.

What, I have to do it again today?

Writing your own charter.

Saturday morning I took a walk from Lyndale Farmstead Park, where I left the car, a mile and a half to the Lake Harriet bandstand.  I'm taking a break from running, because of my hip, and wore no athletic gear; just a tank dress and sandals. The late-summer sun beckoned me to the lake.  From the lakeside restaurant Bread & Pickle I bought ice water for $3 in a reusable stainless steel water bottle.  The cold bottle sweated big drops of water.  I took it to a table and rested my hip there for a while before walking back.

There was a 5K going on at the lake, a walk-and-run, and bluegrass-tinged rock music wafted from the bandstand.  August in Minneapolis can be brutally humid, but it usually looks beautiful, with lots of sunny days and blue skies.  There's something about August here that makes me wistful:  the cool weather will be here soon, and fall is sometimes cut short, with the snow arriving before the trees have even lost their leaves.  

It's hot now, but.  You know that the bitter cold is coming.  

I don't like to hide from the heat in August, at least not in the daytime, at least not all day.  I want to stand in the sun and soak it up, like a house of adobe, and radiate it inwardly all winter long.

+ + + 

As I wandered back with my empty metal bottle swinging by its lid-loop from my finger, I was passed by a woman and a tween boy walking quickly, a mother and son.  She was dressed in sunglasses and running clothes, he in the ten-year-old-boy uniform of basketball shorts and a graphic tee and well-worn-in sneakers, and they were chatting easily.  It sounded as if she were explaining something, and he was nodding with real interest.  They walked faster than me and soon disappeared ahead, one parent, one child, being together, here at the lake.

I find I don't spend a lot of one-on-one time with any of my children.  It's the kind of thing that you have to deliberately create, in a family of five children at home (practicing that terminology; it will feel soon enough before one of them has aged out).   I do try to create it:  take one with me to the grocery store, take another on a trip all by himself to buy shoes, drive my daughter to camp. A biteback effect of safety regulation on family life:  no one younger than twelve is legally allowed to ride in the front seat with me, and who knows how many would-be conversations were thereby squelched before they came to be.

Maybe the mother and son on the walking path are like me, stealing time away from a large family on a Saturday afternoon.  Or maybe the boy is the one child at home.  I considered what it could have been like, me homeschooling a smaller family, one where I felt that I had enough time to get around to everybody.  Things would be different for sure.  I have a few homeschooling friends with one or two kids, or maybe just one or two left at home after the others have grown and gone, and it always seems as if they get to go very deep and run very far, and all together, not so much sending the middle-schooler with another family to see plays, not so much dropping the teenager off to go with the group to the museum exhibit that frowns on toddlers.  

+ + +

Of course, I'll have a chance to find some of that out eventually, when the ones who are little now become big and there aren't more coming up behind them.  We'll see if I do all the things I imagine I would do.

+ + +

Comparing yourself, inside and out, to what you can see of other people, that's a losing game.  I know this.  I also know that I wouldn't have it another way:  the large family is exhiliarating and challenging (in a good way) and I'm so glad I have every one of the children, and am grateful that we were gifted with them, and aware of those who long for many children and haven't seen that longing become reality.  

The most important thing to remember -- I don't know why it seems so hard sometimes -- is that whatever you are, whatever your family is, you too have strengths that others don't have.  It's not a kind of "I'm better than they, so there" mentality, it's more -- let's restore some balance to our vision.  Instead of constantly seeing "They can do things I can't -- she has advantages I don't -- he accomplishes what I don't -- they can give their kids something I can't --"  see that you too have your specialties.  

There's something to the Incredibles message "When everybody's super, then no one is."  But there is another side of this,  entirely true: the differences among us mean we can excel in different things, for real, not in a wishful way.  We can be our own self better than anyone else.  

Sometimes the things in which we are uniquely gifted are not things that are widely celebrated, and that's too bad, but we can work to appreciate those things in our own quiet way, when we see them in ourselves and in others.

+ + +

Last week I was talking to a friend of mine, a homeschooling parent of four, a part-time working professional musician herself married to a music professor.  They're in almost the opposite academic position from Mark and me -- we are both engineers, one PhD between us, and Mark working full time.  She fretted about finding good science teachers for her bright science student (who, by the way, is also a gifted musician himself -- none of those in our family!) while I commiserated in an analogous sort of way because I'm nearly hopeless in the arts and am not a gifted English or writing teacher.  Both of our families have solved this problem by outsourcing the relevant subjects to someone better qualified, one way or another.  It's a common thing for homeschooling families to do, urban ones anyway.

"Think of it this way," I said, "it's not that your kids are unusually handicapped in a subject you aren't expert in.  You've had at least a high school education in everything, college classes in some of it, and you get to have the teacher's manual.  Lots of public schools put first-year teachers into classes that they've never taught before and don't have particular expertise in.  You meet the minimum standards in every subject, and you far exceed them in others.  And you can find tutors where necessary."

The notion of being Adequate not seeming to be comforting, I went on ---

"If you have to compare your family's achievement to a school, then think of your family as a super-exclusive, super-specialized magnet school, or charter school.   You run an arts magnet school.  I run a STEM academy.  And where we both are only so-so in the other sorts of things, we do make up for it with, you know, small class size and a lot of personalized attention.  

"Also an extremely flexible schedule."

+ + +

We all have to be who we are.  It's tempting to see that as only limiting.  There have certainly been times in human history where the limiting aspect was emphasized even more than it is now, where people were chastised for dreaming too much of things that were closed to them for purely arbitrary reasons -- or for reasons that were thought incorrectly to be rational but really weren't.  It turns out that we do well to eliminate the arbitrary limitations, but we can swing too far the other way in insisting that anyone can do and be anything or everything, and excel in it.  The main problem with that is that inevitable difficulties are sometimes cast as "not working hard enough," "not wanting it bad enough," "not believing in yourself enough."  There are certain realities that are not arbitrary, and except for the extraordinarily gifted and/or extraordinarily privileged, wanting is not enough to overcome them.

Buried within the truth that we all must be who we are, though, is that it isn't just a limitation but also an encouragement, an identity.  If I must be who I am, then no one else can be it for me.  I have unique gifts and I should exploit them, use them to every advantage.  If they are the sort of thing that is not recognized as a strength, or even if they are the sort of thing that some call out as a liability, then I still have options:  go where these qualities are rarer and valuable, or, well, surprise people.

+ + +

One precondition is logically necessary, and it cannot be taken for granted:  the philosophical conviction that every human person has equal value, whatever his or her circumstances.  It's a sad truth that not everyone agrees with that, and even fewer behave in accord with it.  Some people see the good in everyone except themselves;  such a reflex has a useful side, in that it maintains humility, but it has a dark side too, one that misses opportunities for gratitude and tempts to despair and apathy, and risks swallowing others in its wake.   You have to practice finding it in yourself too, as an exercise in truth-seeking if nothing else.

Anyway, once you have this conviction, the conclusion boils down to:  whoever you are, you have strengths.  They aren't the same as mine.  You can exploit them to your advantage, to your family's advantage.  Go forth and win at your own game.

 

Catchup post: a good son, a Chicago getaway, my IT band, and something to read.

On account of the two weeks since I last wrote a post, I'm going to do a catch-up roundup.  Here we go:

+ + +

In mid-July I wrote about sending my oldest off to World Youth Day.   He spent  twelve days there, and returned safely.

I didn't make it a secret that I wished I could have gone along (even if I didn't have small children to care for, the chaperone spots filled up rather quickly).  "Text me and send me pics," I asked, "not because I'm trying to be a super helicoptery parent, but because I want to see the things."  And... he did!  I didn't expect him to send me so much, but he sent me pictures every day that he had access to wifi.

 

 

 

 

 

He told me about the deafening, constantly circling military helicopters, the grapefruit-flavored Oshee brand soda (so ubiquitous he was sure that Oshee was sponsoring the event), the crush of the crowd waiting for the Popemobile to pass by, the poutine he bought from a stand.  He told me about the huge arena for English-speaking pilgrims, and how a few rogue groups of young people impulsively ran in circles around the arena with their big national flags, an unauthorized parade of nations, to pass the time while waiting for the start of catechesis.  He told me that Filipino Cardinal Tagle gave a great talk and that NY Cardinal Dolan gave him a pat on the back while he was venerating the relics at the stadium.  He told me about the food in the pilgrim package ("This stuff had the same dimensions and texture as bird food blocks.  Tasted awful") and how a couple people in his group got heatstroke.  He told me about how their group hashtag became #InDmitriWeTrust, Dmitri being their local escort employed by the tour service they had contracted with.  He told me that when they got tired of singing hymns they walked along singing "Hotel California."

 

 

 

And he told me about the ambient noise of a million people sleeping in the field, of his surprise to find that the daily routine never got repetitive but was different every day, about how the park was sometimes loud and sometimes peaceful, about how the exuberant atmosphere almost changed instantly when Mass began.

I don't know if I've been able to express to him how appreciative I was and am that he took me along, so to speak.  I was moved.

He asked to go out to a barbecue restaurant for his sixteenth birthday, just a few days after coming back, and we gladly obliged.

 

+ + +

I went to Chicago for a couple of days, the day after my son got back from Poland.  

The occasion:  my youngest child, at 2.5 years old, is now night weaned and sleeping all the way through the night.  And I am not pregnant.  So I took the opportunity to spend two nights in a row away from my entire family... for the first time in sixteen years.

I'm a little sheepish even writing that.  Doesn't it seem like I should have managed to get away once in all that time?  But, you know, we set up our family to work a certain way, and I haven't needed to for any reason, and there's nearly always been a nursling around.  I've been away from home, yeah, but I've generally had a baby to tote with me. 

So when I realized this was possible, a few months ago, I texted my good friend from high school, the one I used to hang out at the mall with when we were twelve, and asked what she thought of a Chicago getaway (Chicago is close to midway between where I live and where she lives), and -- bless her, may she live long and prosper -- she did not say "maybe" or "I'll check and see what's on my calendar" but immediately said YES and figured she would work out the details later, which she did.  She reserved a hotel room, I bought a plane ticket, and off we went!

I know.  It is not that big of a deal to buy a plane ticket and spend two days away from home.  But it felt like a big deal.  

Here's the thing.  I could have done stuff like this at times over the past sixteen years if I had made it a priority.  Generally I'm pretty good at giving myself the things I need, rather than letting the needs of the family always take precedence over mind.  And the things I need, on a daily basis, to keep myself fed, are a steady diet of little things, which I've made space for by insisting on a few hours to myself every Saturday.  Breakfast out by myself, a quiet coffee shop in which to knock out a few items on my to-do list in peace, time to shop for my own clothes or get my hair cut, a visit to a local museum, Mass on my own, a run around the lake.  All that keeps me satisfied enough that I haven't felt the need to ask more of my family.

So it suddenly got to the point where it wasn't really asking too much to be gone for two whole days, and I took it.

It wasn't a complicated itinerary.  We stayed at the Drake and had access to the executive lounge for the free fancy breakfast (thank you, friend's husband's Hilton points) with a view of the lake.  We went out for nachos and margaritas close to our hotel the first night.  The next day we walked up and down Michigan Avenue (she bought candy for her daughter; I bought a hat for myself) and spent 3 hours in the Art Institute.

 Then we got gratuitously dressed up, and had dinner and drinks in the historic hotel restaurant.  And the next morning she dropped me off at the airport, where I killed time happily browsing through bookstores and finding a tasty box lunch to take on the plane (sixteen years of only traveling with kids can make solo airport time not suck at all), and I flew back home and took the train back to our 'hood.

+ + +

I think my hip pain is getting better.  After a frustrating few days of attempting to exercise carefully, and then hobbling around with pain for hours afterward, I settled on the following regimen:

• Assume, arguendo, that I have bursitis.
• Take sodium naproxen faithfully every twelve hours to reduce inflammation.
• Stop running.  Switch to swimming and the occasional walk of no more than a couple of miles.   Get full rest days after exercise.
• Stretch the IT band whenever I think about it.
• If it's not better in two months, go see the sports med doctor.

I'm kind of bummed that I'm missing the best time of the year to go running outside (well, if you're like me and don't get bitten by mosquitoes much, and like to get up early), but I'm already seeing some improvement.  So maybe I self-diagnosed correctly after all.  One piece of evidence:  Taking the naproxen makes the pain go completely away for at least eight hours, which makes me think that all the pain is coming from inflammation and that I haven't actually torn or sprained anything.

A nice thing about IT band stretches, relative to other kinds of therapeutic stretches, is that they are very easy to work into your daily life.  There are standing IT stretches, sitting IT stretches (I'm doing one now while I type!), and lying-down IT stretches that you can do in bed.  So wherever you are, if you think of doing one, you can do one without interrupting your activity much.  You don't need to take off a shoe or go find a towel or a yoga block or clear a space on the floor. 

+ + +

That takes care of three old things.  Now here's one new thing.  I've recently discovered the webcomic (graphic serial?) Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a Swedish-Finnish artist who writes in English and paints in digital.  

I encountered SSSS by accident via a link to a piece of her art, a language tree from the comic, reproduced below (link to full size at her site):

I'm a sucker for linguistics, and this really drew me into the SSSS world.  Post-apocalyptic literature is fun enough on its own, of course, but this comic is especially fun if you are interested in languages, because linguistic and cultural differences between the characters drives a fair amount of the plot.  

I would classify this as a near-future post-apocalyptic novel of the Zombie Plague type, although it isn't exactly zombies.  The general background is that a worldwide plague has shrunk the size of the "known world" of the comic to Iceland and scattered parts of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.  (That's why the language family page only includes two families).  Fantastic elements (e.g., some characters are mages) draw heavily on Nordic and Finnic mythology and traditional culture.  

The world is well built and intricate.  The art is beautiful:  spare in its color scheme, eerie, and (though digital) resembles brushed watercolor.  People and animals have wonderfully expressive faces.  There's plenty of action scenes with monsters to chop up and buildings going boom, but the real drama is psychological and interpersonal so far.  Another fun aspect of the website:  the well-populated fan forums and comment sections, which include people from all over the world, sometimes offering fanfic and fan poetry, and helpfully translating text that appears in the background art for the benefit of non-Nordic, non-Finns.  

Catching up on the nearly six hundred pages already posted was a weekend's leisure reading, and now I have to settle down and resign myself to reading updates just one day at a time.  

Cats are extremely important, so if you are particularly fond of kitties, there are many drawings of them to enjoy.

To start reading SSSS from the beginning, go here.

Presenting as imperfect.

I'm so glad that Anne at Preventing Grace gave me this kind shout out in her piece If I Work Hard Enough I Win the other day:

... I am about to turn in all my school reports. And I have made a detailed book list for the fall. And two friends were chatting away about bullet journaling (which turns out not to be at all what I imagined). And then Bearing Blog wrote about how she divvies up her time and keeps her mental health always in view. (Oh how I love Bearing Blog and her calm, rational way of thinking.) And it reminded me that, when I’m in the thick of a school year, I do get into an ugly, constraining loop of not being able to stop working.

In fact, sometimes when I am on holiday I am not able to stop working. And sometimes, when it’s a nice, pretty day outside, I am not able to stop working. Last year I spent most of our sunny weeks away cleaning, picking up, and neglecting the stack of books I had brought to read....

So, obviously, as per usual, of course, necessarily, as I vow every year, I don’t want to do this again. I want to find The Perfect Organizational System that will remove entirely the existential gaping maw of failure. Because, of course, if I just do all the work, I won’t fail. Right. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s me just working hard enough and not forgetting anything that is the difference between life and death.

I was going to leave a comment at Anne's blog along the lines of "You really should say, 'Bearing Blog wrote about how she TRIES to keep her mental health always in view,'" but then I remembered my own advice to myself in the linked blog post, the one where I resolved to blog before I get any work done or do anything else.  Well, there was more to it than that, but  anyway, I should blog before I write the key to the chemistry test, and if I leave the comment at her blog first, my thought will be spent.

(One of my problems is that my mental health is always in view.  I am forever craning my neck to see over and around it.)

+ + +

At any rate, today I want to share a post from the excellent physics blog, Gravity and Levity.

Momentary digression.   I first started blogging in 2005, not quite a year after I finished my Ph.D. in chemical engineering.  It was probably right about the time that I was deciding to hang up the idea of switching to technical editing and developing a free-lance network.  And I hadn't yet gotten to  the place where I would accept that I wasn't ever going to get around to cutting and polishing the three publishable pieces of my thesis and shopping them to the appropriate journals, a place of acceptance that I wouldn't finally reach until my academic adviser passed away about two years later.

At the time, I thought that I might do quite a lot of science blogging, in between the recipes and the self-help, commentary on news articles and the like, and so I read some science blogs.  But as time went on, I got bored with all but a few.  It turns out that I don't have time to write commentary on all the Science News that passes by the world's eyes day after day, shining for a moment, inspiring a burst of chatter, then passing back into oblivion.  

It also turns out that a steady diet of Science News is extremely irritating -- maybe not to everybody with research training and a grasp of mathematics and statistics, but at least to me.  Oh my.  I don't even want to go there right now, lest I lose the whole point of my post, but Science Journalism is bad.  It's not all bad, but so much of it is very bad.  And Science Facebook is also very bad.  Painful, even.   Ok, I don't want to get into this, but just so I can be a little less vague, the features that bug me the most are 

• Identifying non-science (e.g., engineering, technology, and nature-education) as "science"
• The disturbing lack of a word other than "science" for fields in which reproducible experimentation is impossible, meaning that those fields' findings acquire an undeserved aura of certainty and universality that should be reserved for physical law
• Identifying the policy opinions of a person who is employed as a scientist as "science"
• Appeals to authority -- the logical-fallacy form, that is
• Ascribing magical certainty to anything called "science"
• Statistics deployed for any reason by people who do not understand them
• The entire system of publish-or-perish and peer review, which discourages negative results and which relentlessly pressures working scientists to get "good" results, thereby undermining the scientific method

There's also the problem of specialization.  I only studied in depth one little tiny area in materials science and engineering.  I can't comment with a post-graduate level of expertise on anything else, except for the general skills that one develops along the way (mostly math and procedure).  

Anyway, the gist of that is that I don't read many science blogs anymore.  I do read some scientists' blogs, though, because people who write generally and well and bring their perspective as a complete nerd to whatever interests them are the people I like to hang out with, virtually speaking.

Ahem.

+ + +

So, back to Brian's recent post at Gravity and Levity, Toward a Culture of Tolerating Ignorance.   He begins with some words about impostor syndrome, and then dives into the practical advice, which I'll quote at length.

There is one practice that I have found very helpful in my pursuit of a scientific career, and which I think is worth mentioning.  It’s what I call fostering a “culture of tolerating ignorance.”

Let me explain.

As a young (or even old) scientist, you continually feel embarrassed by the huge weight of things you don’t know or don’t understand.  Taking place all around you, among your colleagues, superiors, and even your students, are conversations about technical topics and ideas that you don’t understand or never learned.  And you will likely feel ashamed of your lack of knowledge.  You will experience some element of feeling like a fraud, like someone who hasn’t studied hard enough or learned quickly enough.  You will compare yourself, internally, to the sharpest minds around you, and you will wonder how you were allowed to have the same profession as them.

These kinds of feelings can kill you, and you need to find a way of dealing with them.

I have found that the best strategy is to free yourself to openly admit your ignorance.  Embrace the idea that all of us are awash in embarrassing levels of ignorance, and the quickest way to improve the situation is to admit your ignorance and find someone to teach you.

In particular, when some discussion is going on about a topic that you don’t understand, you should feel free to just admit that you don’t understand and ask someone to explain it to you.

If you find yourself on the other side of the conversation, and someone makes such an admission and request, there are only two acceptable responses:

1. Admit that you, also, don’t understand it very well.
2. Explain the topic as best as you can.

Most commonly, your response will be some combination of 1 and 2.  You will be able to explain some parts of the idea, and you will have to admit that there are other parts that you don’t understand well enough to explain.  But between the two of you (or, even better, a larger group) you will quickly start filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge.

A culture where these kinds of discussions can take place is a truly wonderful thing to be a part of.  In such an environment you feel accepted and enthusiastic, and you feel yourself learning and improving very quickly.  It is also common for creative or insightful ideas to be generated in these kinds of discussions.  To me, a culture of tolerating ignorance is almost essential for enjoying my job as a scientist.

The enemies of this kind of ideal culture are shame and scorn.  The absolute worst way to respond to someone’s profession (or demonstration) of ignorance is to act incredulous that the person doesn’t know the idea already, and to assert that the question is obvious, trivial, and should have been learned a long time ago.  (And, of course, someone who responds this way almost never goes on to give a useful explanation.)  An environment where people respond this way is completely toxic to scientific work, and it is, sadly, very common.  My suggestion if you find yourself in such an environment to avoid the people who produce it, and to instead seek out the company of people with whom you can maintain enthusiastic and non-scornful conversations.

+ + +

Of course, I have two general responses to Brian's post, which you should really go read in its entirety (if only so you can follow the embedded links -- they are also very good -- and read some of the comments).

The first response is the almost obligatory, "I wish I had read and assimilated this before I started graduate school."

 High school, even.   I emerged into adulthood with a defensive habit of pretending I knew things instead of asking dumb questions or even shutting up and listening, because I feared scorn.  Even though I only had this habit in some contexts, not others, it didn't serve me well in the long term.  (Being able to bullshit very well can be a lucrative skill, but I don't possess that kind, at least not in person.  Maybe Anne's praise is evidence that I can do it in writing a little bit.) 

The second response is that one does not have to be working in academia to put this advice into practice.  Almost any collaborative community in which you find yourself is one in which people have varying levels of knowledge of the subjects at hand.  You can use it at work, in your volunteer groups, in your teams, and in your family.   

Ask questions.  Honor questioning.  The higher your position, the greater your responsibility.  Answer questions.   Eliminate scorn.   

(The hardest part?  Resisting the temptation to conversationally scorn for their ignorance people who are not present, including public figures in the news.  And yet, if you wish to send the message "You are valued, unconditionally, and it is no crime to be ignorant," to impressionable and vunerable people around you, you must demonstrate to them that your tone will be the same even when the vulnerable people are out of the room.)

+ + +

There are so many things I didn't have figured out when I was starting out, things I realize now that I wish I could have known then.   It was true about my brief time in academia, and it's true about my longer life making a home and raising children.   But that's the nature of living in time:  you get wiser as you go, and logically that means you must have started out pretty green.  Embracing that logic really does relieve a lot of stress.  

But that, too, is the sort of thing you get better at with practice.