Back to school

Goodbye to August! Farewell to summer! Farewell, children, freedom, time!

All of the children who still go to school are now in school, and I have started teaching at a new school, as well. The start of a new school year is always exciting - new books, new pencils, new paper, new shoes, new teacher, new friends. . .  it a time marked with potential - to form relationships, to reform habits, to discover opportunities to serve and, of course, to learn.

And yet it is also marked with mourning, as we say good-bye to the big kids and the freedom of summer. 

Mrs. Darwin wrote about mourning her college kids' departures on her blog, and her description of finding a quiet place to cry struck a chord. I commented that I had a similar experience as I watched my husband drive away with our fifth child to take him to college. I had to sit down on the front step and catch my breath as the car pulled away and they were no longer waving back at me. I felt walloped in the gut. I needed one more hug. I had made him breakfast and helped go over his checklist, and then we had an hour or so of scurrying around the house and checking up on the to do list before it was time to head out the door. Why didn't we get one more hug in? Why didn't we sit and talk about important and meaningful things instead of loading the dishes and tidying up the kitchen? 

Usually I am the one that takes the kids to move in. This was the first send off I wasn't the parent driving off to the airport. The busyness of those weekends, checking off the lists of stuff, the physical labor of moving bags and boxes and catching flights and renting cars, usually is so exhausting that saying good bye is not so emotional - although I've shed a few tears in those rental cars. 

But seeing this fifth child off hit me hard. He's a part of the "littles." It was a hard year for him, and he had made it through, and we had grown closer in the process, I think.  So I called the boy up for one more goodbye, one more blessing, even though he and his dad weren't even to the highway yet. And good thing - they had driven off without the key to the storage locker where the older brother's hand-me-down futon, fridge, cheap carpet, and other sundries were locked up and waiting. So I got to speed off with the key to hand over and to grab that last hug at the interstate exit where they were waiting. 

I'm sure there's a meme about how saying good-bye doesn't get any easier with practice . . .

This past weekend, I was the one flying off and renting a car to help our oldest daughter move back into her apartment at college. She spent the summer in San Diego, couch surfing and house sitting and working for the rec center.  The moment of saying goodbye was back in June, when I was sad and hurt that she didn't want to spend the summer with us, but totally understanding of the reasons why. When I was 20, I wanted independence, too. In fact, that was the summer I spent in the UP working at a camp for kids with special needs. Bay Cliff Health Camp it was called, and it was a magical, wonderful summer, but that's another story.

I think my daughter relished her summer, too. She went sailing and surfing and to the horse races and made dinners for herself and for her friends and got herself around town. She lived on her own dime and made it. When I arrived on Friday, we went for a walk and got lunch, did some shopping for apartment stuff, and then split up to spend time with our local friends one more time. Saturday morning we ran a fundraiser race together (with a couple of my mom friends along, too) and then drove up to her campus - after a stop at another friend's new house for lunch. Traffic through LA was a slog, so we had time to catch up and talk about the future, etc, before arriving for the move-in, which was much easier this time around, compared to last year, which was her sophomore year, but first year on campus.

This year she has an apartment on campus that she shares with 3 other girls. She stayed there Saturday night, but I drove up to the base, about 35 mins away to stay in the Navy Lodge, because I was too cheap to pay for a Malibu hotel and to worried about sketchy environs to get a more affordable hotel near the highway. (I was questioning that choice after the rental car company gave me a huge truck, the "upgrade" I didn't want, that was not cheap to fill up.) Then Sunday after Mass and brunch we did a little thrifting for kitchen items, but not too much, since the other roommates were still arriving and decorating will happen later.  We had a time for a short walk and sandwiches before I had to make the slog back to the airport.

The whole weekend felt somewhat surreal. I have now been back to San Diego 5 times since we moved a year ago. That's a lot - an unusual amount because of college moving, college visiting, and the graduation event. My friends were teasing me about when my next quarterly visit was going to be. I've practically socialized more with those friends far away than I have with people we are getting to know here. And perhaps it has prevented me from rooting here. I am still questioning the decisions we made last spring, and while everything is fine, good even, I miss the friendships that took years to develop, sunsets over the ocean with hills silhouetted in lavender, walking on the beach and to the library and Mass. I feel in limbo about investing in life here because I don't want to stay put.  Sometimes I just have to stop thinking.  I know if I read back over this blog, I would find post after post about feeling displaced, about looking forward to the next thing.  I am truly grateful for the opportunities we had to discover new places, and although I complained here about rootlessness - isn't that part of the purpose of journaling, to exorcise the complaints? - I did appreciate what we had at the time. But maybe not enough.  This lack of gratitude, this pining for elsewhere, is a sin, a failing, a fatal flaw, I'll spend my life fighting. 

Even now I am pining for the summer back. For the years back with the children small again. For the days when we took up a whole pew at Mass. Saturdays at the soccer fields. Friday night football. Camping trips. Beach days. Museum days. Birthdays. Reading at bedtime. Wasting time at the playground. Did I appreciate those years enough? Of course not, although I am grateful for being able to relive preschool days with the youngest, and now third grade... 

Ah melancholia.  This has been my little indulgence, now it's back to work. I have lessons to plan, poetry to read, grading, email, etc, etc. And then two more kids at home to enjoy for a short time. 

A last day outing: First the Elizabet Ney castle. She was a German sculptor who immigrated to Texas in the late 1870s. Made her career during busts of famous people and patrons.

Her home is now a museum. It's really a very small castle, but an interesting place to visit.

A life cast of an infant. Why didn't I do this with all our kids?

Last BBQ lunch at Blacks

And now a college student, doing his own laundry!

The third grader and junior off for their first day!

Posing

Feeling sad to say goodbye

Spending time with the older daughter

Apartment style living

Malibu waves and sunshine make it hard to leave

Memoirs and memory

May was a pretty good month for reading for me. Not that I read copious amounts, but what I read was really good. I finished two very different books - Educated by Tara Westover, the bestseller about the girl who went from apparently no education to a Harvard Ph.D., and The River Why by David James Duncan, an odd book about fishing, philosophizing, and finding faith that I had seen recommended on lists of books for my nature writing class but had never encountered. - Saving that for another post...

I was on the library's wait list for Westover's memoir for several months. After finishing it in a few days, I'm not surprised that it is on the bestseller list.  Westover tells a good story and tells it well.  It's thoughtful and heartfelt and fascinating - I kept wanting to find out what crazy thing would happen next in her family.  (I also read Wired for Story this month, which posits that the most important part of writing is tantalizing your audience with the prospect of what's on the next page.)

Westover has a fascinating background, which is familiar to readers of book reviews: her parents are Mormon survivalists who live on a farm in Idaho and run a scrapyard and now an essential oils business. The story begins with an account of her mother becoming a midwife, so she can help other mothers give birth at home. The parents are skeptical of the government, the medical establishment, the educational system. The younger four of the seven children don't have birth certificates and never go to school. The father regularly puts the children in danger by employing them in the scrapyard, where several are injured, including a son who is severely burned, and himself. His recovery from severe burns is the catalyst that enables the family to make millions from essential oils. He doesn't go to the doctor, but instead is healed by the used of salves and balms that his wife makes and administers to him.  She was severely injured herself in one of two bad car accidents caused by the father falling asleep at the wheel while driving at night.

These are the incidents that keep the reader turning pages. There is also the minor drama of Tara's coming of age - she has a beautiful voice and is allowed to take dance and music lessons and participate in musical theater, even though she doesn't go to school. The father suffers a couple mental breakdowns, and she later realizes he suffers from psychiatric disorders. And then there is the major drama of the older brother beating and berating his sisters.  Fear and frustration over these interactions are part of what eventually propel Tara to apply to college and leave home.

Despite the family's suspicion of the government and other public institutions, they don't forbid Tara from going to school. They have a computer and internet, which she uses for finding out about BYU. Her older brother who has also gone to college helps her study for the ACT. None of this causes a large rift in the family. And while Tara attends BYU, she comes home regularly, even as she begins to question the way she was raised.

I would warn about spoilers ahead, but I think all the press about the book has revealed the end of the story.  Tara goes on to do extremely well at Brigham Young University and gets a fellowship to study at Cambridge for a year. A don there encourages her to continue her studies of history, and she eventually attends Harvard as a visiting scholar and earns a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  Although she claims not to have received much if any education at home (and suggests she didn't know what the Holocaust was when she first attended a lecture on it at BYU), she apparently can write and read and think well enough to earn degrees from prestigious universities. She is a prodigy, as are two of her brothers, who also have Ph.D.'s.

While she is away at school, her family has phenomenal success selling essential oils and profiting from her mother's energy healing business. The family home is expanded and help is hired, so people are in and out of the house all the time. For many years, Tara stays connected with her family, but after she accuses her brother of abuse and tries to get his wife and her sister to speak up about the way they were abused by him, too, she is cut off from the family.  Her father, sister, and two brothers no longer talk to her, and her mother won't see her until she reconciles with her father. This causes her great pain, even though she struggled to move away and sees harm in the way she was raised.

After I finished the book, I was curious about the rest of the story, so I went to the trusty internet to find out the name of the family essential oil company and what happened after this book that reveals so many intimate secrets and complex relationships was published.  The family business wasn't familiar to me, although that's not surprising. I found many glowing reviews and interviews with Tara about her story.  Obama and Oprah praised it.

There is also a statement on Goodreads by one of the brothers who Tara appealed to for help writing the book. He claims that the story is Tara's and that her memories don't entirely match his own.  He notes several events he remembers differently, including his brother's burns and his other brother's traumatic accident at a building site.  And Westover does note these discrepancies in the book. She includes not just footnotes but also paragraphs about how certain events - like her brother's burns - are remembered differently by everyone who was there.

There is also a letter from the family's lawyer that claims that Westover exaggerates her lack of schooling. It points out how three of the kids have advanced degrees, and how the other children are successful at what they do, and it connects this success with the family's home school.  It claims she has exaggerated the arguments with her brother. The letter doesn't accuse Westover of libel, and there is no lawsuit, but it does claim that her memory is faulty.

These postscripts add another layer of meaning to the story. On the one hand, the book is fascinating because the characters are unusual and extreme.  Crazy things happen to them. And yet this girl -  and her brothers - manage to have incredible success.  And for a number of years, she wants to come home. She loves the mountain she grew up on and she craves attention and love from her parents.  As I read, I was surprised she would spend any time alone with her abusive brother, and yet she does. She wants her father's love and attention, even as she acknowledges he is mentally ill. She shows up from overseas for family events.  She doesn't want to be alienated from her family, even though she isn't willing to swear she is possessed by demons.

As I read, I also wondered how she managed to do so well in college. Almost no details are given about her mother teaching the children, but some of them are able to read and write well.  This discrepancy either makes Westover's achievements nearly miraculous, or it causes the reader to question whether she is telling the whole story about her education.

But memory is another fascinating theme. In our own family, the kids either don't remember things or remember them quite differently.  They say things about the past that are a conglomeration of different stories or that leave out great big details. Their stories shift as time goes by. My husband remembers me saying things that I swear I never said - perhaps he interpreted something I said as meaning something different from what I intended.  My own siblings and I have different perspectives on things that happened when we were growing up.  Sometimes I wonder if we were at the same place at the same time.

Memory is unreliable.  It seems as if memory has a great deal to do with personality and perspective.  Does the truth of history belong to the person who tells it first and tells it best?  Or is the best option to consult different sources and knit together some relatively reliable account of events based on probabilities and similarities between stories? 

The difficulty of knowing what is actually true vs. what is true for Tara Westover's story is impossible to determine. And perhaps unnecessary, especially if her story is taken just to be an interesting read and a meditation on the way education occurs and its effects on individuals.

Positive interactions

The school year is underway! This week we have multiple information sessions and meet the teacher events to attend. I also have several other social events - meeting friends of a friend, having company for the long weekend, squeezing a couple last minute swim dates in our pool before it gets too cold.  I've signed up for some new committees, and I've been tossing out an idea for a high school youth group that will supplement the confirmation class with social events with a purpose to all the Catholic high school parents I run into.  Still sounding out other families who might be interested in getting together for something like this, but wanting something more for my older kids' faith formation.

What a contrast to this time last year! I was feeling sick to my stomach regretting the decision we'd made to rent this house with all the dangers - the pool, the busy street, the widely spaced banisters on the upstairs hallway. . .  And I was regretting public school, although even the Catholic schools have issues with friends, social media abuse, and also alcohol and cliques... But I do like the teachers and administrators at the public high school. And I have met some really nice potential new friends - or at least acquaintances that are good people who are also sending their high schoolers to the public school, too.

The one child in Catholic school is the least happy about back to school days.  I almost pulled her out this spring.  But at the end of the school year, I sat in the all school Mass and felt grateful to be participating in the faith as a community, and paid the tuition deposit that day.  I am still unsure of the decision and occasionally contemplate home schooling her for a year or two, especially since my favorite teacher at the school pulled her kids out to home school them this year. Not a sign of a healthy school, right? Plus the fifth graders all just got ipads, which are already a distraction and malfunctioning. But inertia is difficult to overcome. And I was not the best teacher the last time I homeschooled. I looked forward too much to the time after lunch when my "teaching" was done for the day.

I was halfway hoping we would be moving next summer, but the whisper is that my husband will receive follow on orders.  I am happy for my high schooler. The kids love it here; they love their freedom and the ability to walk to playgrounds and to free movies on the base and to hang out with friends without recruiting a mom to drive. My emotions are mixed, and going back to the Midwest for a time with the extended family always amplifies these uncertainties. But we don't really have a choice or control over the matter right now. In five years we might have more say in where we go, if my husband doesn't think the next promotion will happen. Still a long way away, but becoming more real.

Over the weekend, I was talking to my mom on the phone and sirens started blaring. Emergency vehicles and police careened onto our street and stopped a few doors down. My nosy ten year old went out to see what she could see, but dinner was almost ready, and I was afraid it was a domestic dispute because of the number of police cars.

It turns out the emergency vehicles were tending a 51 year man, apparently supposed to be in great shape, who had just died of a heart attack.  They didn't make it in time to save him.  He had a high school aged son in boy scouts with my sons and a middle school daughter, but he was alone at the time and found by a real estate agent coming over to list his house for sale. I suspect the police were there in full force because his wife had worked for the police department here, part of a small cadre of officers. I didn't know them, but it is the kind of news that unsettles you, makes you realize the temporality of things. We also saw a bad accident on our road trip. There was the girl who was hit while riding her bike in front of our house. I received word that my track coaches' wife was killed by a car while she was riding her bike.  We can't live in fear of death, but it is coming.

I just finished Thornton Wilder's Bridge Over San Luis Rey, which is about the same idea - why do apparently good people- and some bad - die for no reason?  Wilder saves their stories and memorializes them. Quotes coming. Just not right now because it is time for bed.

Can you see the flecks of gold in the sand? 

Unknown flower at the park; photo taken by my child

Orchid show

Sand castle show

Education options

My least favorite part of moving: deciding what to do next for the kids' education.

I would say picking schools, but sometimes I opted out by home schooling. 

So I've been spending hours scouring the internet to study the choices available to us in San Diego.  The city has more charter schools and private schools and options for education than anywhere else we have lived, which reminds me to be grateful for not having a lot of options.  I don't like the smorgasbord. It leaves my anxious that I may have missed something that is the BEST thing.  What if the kids would really have been happier somewhere else? 

Our options: 

1. Public school in the neighborhood where we decide to live (which will be based on the schools).
2. Private school if we can work the tuition numbers to a favorable level.
3. Charter school if I can figure out which school provides what advantages. Some are 3-4 day a week programs that incorporate home learning.
4. All kids at one of these three, or kids at different options.
5. And lastly, home schooling. My fifth grader is asking for this, but because he wants a short school day and snacks.

Factors in making the choice: 

• Location is partially a concern - where we school depends on where we can find housing, but we have the luxury of looking for housing after we look at schools, and some schools have the option to go across school boundaries.
• Price
• Integration - how quickly can our kids fit in? Is this a school with other transfer students or a lot of cliques that have been around since preK?
• Faith life is a consideration even if we don't pick a Catholic school. Someplace that won't hurt their faith life is crucial if we pick a public school
• Size: Will integration be easier at a large school, small school, a school with lots of military kids?  We have tended to think small is better, but after some difficulty with one child/teacher combo, I realize that at least one of my kids may do better with more options for teachers.  Midsize would be ideal. Not finding many high schools under 1800 in San Diego.
• Academic achievement - I want a high-performing school, but not one that is too competitive or too conscious of college admissions over all else. 

The challenge is figuring all this out over the internet, although next week I'll be making a trip to visit some options.  Because too many choices sometimes results in inertia, my lack of decision making becomes a deciding factor - some of the charter schools are enrolled by lotteries, which I have already missed. Simply by doing nothing I have eliminated those as a possibility for next year. Ironically, my third son came home yesterday interested in one of these because one of his teachers had shown him a video about this High Tech High.  It's a horrible name for a school, so I hadn't even really considered it, and it appears to be operated on a corporate model. It also is a very progressive and technologically minded place, two things I usually shy from.

But it would probably be a great place for him, because he loves projects. And despite the bad name, I do find the video and website appealing.  Project based learning is actually what I wanted to do with home schooling. And I am not opposed to using technology. The type of technology I don't like in the classroom is the type that in nonessential to the subject. I am STRONGLY opposed to the idea of giving all the kids at a school a laptop or an ipad and then claiming to have a technologically advanced school. Where is the study that shows that kids are learning to write better papers or solve math problems better because they have access to an ipad? Are these tools accelerating learning or deepening learning or simply providing another tool that creates extra irritating busy work?  I don't think my third grader has learned her math facts any faster or is retaining them better than her older brothers who used flash cards even though she is drilling on the computer every day.  If anything I think the computer drills impede her retention because she just presses the next button.  

And at the high school level - are these devices simply another way for kids to become distracted in class? They know the technology better than the teachers.  And the teachers are distracted by trying to figure out how to use these things instead of focusing on their students and involving them in the subject.

When can technology be a good thing?
-- In a computer programming class. Learn to build apps and use audio-visual programs to communicate ideas. Find good videos on history and science or whatever subject. But go deeper. Do Prezi and Powerpoint presentations create connections between ideas or just look flashy? 

--Use ipads to do research - but teach kids to find the journals and resources on databases - not the easy open Google search and the latest Huffington Post article on this subject.  Students can't even understand the academic sources if they haven't first TALKED about these things in class, instead of using gimmicky apps and "educational" games

--Use online classrooms when school has to be cancelled or to show films or to remind kids about assignments or provide a discussion format.  But show the films communally if possible. Letting students watch on individual screens is isolating, not creating community and sharing ideas. 

The action of writing and the action of turning pages and looking at a book and perhaps reading random pages are benefits that writing online and reading ebooks don't have. Ebook sales are slowing tremendously.  Etexts have no resale value.  Kids might spend time exploring a physical text book that they wouldn't spend with an etext. They might read photo captions or study a map or look at the next chapter.  I used to read dictionary pages when I was looking up a word.  Do kids do that with ebooks? Now when you look up a word online, you only see that word. But I guess you get synonyms and antonyms.

I'm a pessimist about technology. At the recent high school accreditation meeting, 9 out of 10 parents were actually against giving the students ipads next year. The one parent for them was touting the amazing nanotechnology and neurobiology information available online. But woah, friend! -- these are high school kids! They don't have the basics of general biology down yet.  The other example from the accreditors was the digital frog dissection. Again, I'm sorry. This is a game my fourth grader played. I want my 10th grader to touch real guts.  I wouldn't want to be operated on by a surgeon who learned to dissect on an app.

So that's my lament.  I am weary of looking at school websites that all appear similar and just want to make a decision and stop thinking about it. And I am tired of hearing how great technology is in the classroom. But I am afraid to home school again.  There are a lot of good things going on in schools. And my kids thrive on the competition - the high schoolers all three were on their school's Knowledge Bowl team that just won the county meet.  They learned  a lot of their facts from the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader my mother-in-law sent them. They also learned a lot from the volumes they used to read.

And now we have to rip them out of this environment where they've thrived and start all over again.  The 10 year old is not happy about it. Nor is the 17 year old. Nor is the 41 year old. Just when we've started to settle in.  I remind myself that we are going to meet more wonderful people in San Diego, just as we did here, and in Guam, and Mississippi, and Virginia, and Illinois, Indiana, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia the first time.  There are good people all over. And beautiful places and wonderful schools. We'll find one. 

How to make regular school more like home school

Our elementary school is undergoing a credentialing review and just issued a survey for parents to complete.  I spent some time crafting this response to the last question, "What can our school do to improve its academic excellence?" so I thought I would share it here, partially so I remember what to look for the next time we look at schools:

"I am always a fan of encouraging more reading and writing from students.  Language arts seems relegated to workbook pages - perhaps each quarter students should be required to read a classic or challenging for their ability book and do a project/write about it.  Also, I thought outdoor school and CIMI were great programs for the middle schoolers - maybe the school could host a science day with experiment stations or do something local like going to the beach to study tide pools or going to hills to study local plants and animals for the younger kids to get them engaged in learning about and studying their local ecosystems.  A last recommendation for middle schoolers would be to have either a career day or career "chats" with parents/business people/scientists/engineers/local artists/writers/lawyers/government employees/ etc, so that the students can get interested in a variety of career options/see how their studies will help them in the future/motivate them to work hard in high school and look for opportunities to be volunteers, interns, or entrepreneurs themselves as teenagers."

That last bit is because as my senior applies to colleges, I'm realizing how little he knows about what kinds of jobs are out there, and I'm seeing how much colleges value a little real world experience - a summer job, a project selling something or providing a service (lawn mowing), regular and consistent volunteer commitments.  And those things have value in themselves for teaching teenagers about responsibility and managing money. (It's been a good experience to have our teenagers pay for many of their activities and stuff out of their lawn mowing/job money.  We pay for school related expenses; they pay for fun.  Unfortunately their lawn mowing money dried up here, and our second son didn't find a job this summer, but he didn't try very hard in between his mission trip, family vacation and football practice.  So his fun has mostly been free stuff - beach day, playing his guitar or cards with friends, or having a friend over for a movie here instead of going to the theater, when he has time after schoolwork, football and family stuff.)

Really, I think school would be better if it were more like home school - groups of students small enough that individual preferences, strengths, and weaknesses can be addressed, opportunities to do lots of hands-on and experiential learning like going to museums and concerts and battlefields and oceanfronts.

The advantage of school over home school is the concentration that students and teachers apply at school - my kids seem to have fewer distractions at school than at home. They also seem to do better with a solid routine and spelled-out expectations that I had a hard time providing at home. My kids also work harder when they are participating in programs like Academic Challenge Bowl and essay contests and just in-class competition in general.  My nagging them at home was not an encouragement to do well.

This credential is from the Catholic schools association. I was happy to commend our school for its Catholic identity which shines because of weekly mass, three times a day or more daily prayer (morning, noon, and before they leave for the day, plus sometimes additional prayers in the classrooms), art and statues in the classrooms and building that celebrate Catholic saints and wisdom, and celebration of holy days and Catholic traditions. Religion class and opportunities to receive the sacraments and encouragement to be active in the parish and community were additional ways that our school exudes its Catholic identity.  And while the teachers are human and some are better than others, for the most part the teachers seem to role model an active, loving practice of their faith.  I've been very happy with our little school, other than some minor quibbles - mostly about fundraising and the occasional questionable choice about things like music that the kids dance to at the Fall Festival. Nothing overtly scandalous, just mediocre and thoroughly secular.  The school has a mix of parents who choose it for its Catholic identity and those who choose it because it is academically rigorous and safe. I wish there were more at the school for the first reason, but ideally Catholic schools would work on the hearts of the parents who aren't religious, in addition to the kids.

So we'll be continuing to send the kids to school at our next duty station, about which we should be finding out soon. I'm beginning to get a little twitchy - time to either move or to find out we are staying so that I can commit to activities and relationships.  In a new location, I always begin with a desire to jump in and make connections and form friendships, but as the tour goes on, I begin to feel myself pulling away, even at this early stage.  I don't feel a need to exert myself to sell raffle tickets like I did last year. I haven't joined any new committees or jumped up for volunteer jobs, partly because of the new baby, partly because I have enough volunteer jobs, and partly because I don't need to use those opportunities as avenues to meet more people. I'm sure I'll be back at it next fall. A friend in the DC area just emailed me about deadlines for choice schools and magnet programs - already thinking ahead to next fall as the first quarter finishes up.  DC is a potential next stop for us, but if we happen to stay in a mild to tropical clime, I wouldn't complain... I just don't particularly want the desert outpost that is going to get assigned to someone in my husband's peer group - or him.  Then again, I've always been pleasantly surprised by how much we end up liking our duty stations, so we may find something or someone to love even in a remote oven.