This morning I was watching the news while jogging. I saw that a kindergarten boy in Queens, New York was handcuffed to a chair by school safety officers for hitting adults. He was also physically restrained by two safety officers. The boy was then transported to a psych hospital for an evaluation. This was all without any notification of or permission from the boy’s family. To make matters even worse, if that’s possible, this boy has a diagnosis of ADHD, which means he should have had an IEP, a plan to help him, and any specialized services he needed.

When I was in first grade on the lower east side of Manhattan I had a teacher named Mrs. Lee. She would scream at us a lot, red-in-the-face, out-of-control screams. She’d slam her ruler down right beside our hands. If she was trying to intimidate us, it surely worked on me–I was terrified. And that treatment was nothing compared with the way she treated the boy she hated.

I think his name was Tommy, but I don’t recall for sure. I never saw him doing anything wrong, but then I spent most of my time with my hands folded on my desk so I wouldn’t get into trouble. Anyway, Mrs. Lee would periodically get very angry at this boy. She’d take his chair and put it in the girl’s coat closet (so he’d be extra humiliated), tie him into the chair IIRC with a jump rope, and ‘bolt’ the closet closed with a ruler through the door handles.

Mrs. Lee’s legacy is one of the reasons I home school. I’ve always felt silly saying that before, because I knew that no teacher would behave that way these days. I figured I was protecting my daughter from a memory and not from a real danger.

Turns out I was wrong.

I have two cell phones through my name with T-Mobile. This isn’t because I’m under any apprehension that they are a good, reliable, or ethical company that might give a damn about customers, the environment, or wage slaves–no, its because they were the cheapest.

One phone is mine, it’s the bargain basement model with the bargain basement plan, and it suits me fine. The other is for a teen family member. The accounts are both in my name because I set them up. The bills come jointly, and in my name. As far as the world is concerned, I have two phones.

For reasons I won’t go into I want to check whether a particular call was made from the teen’s phone on a particular day. I have an account on the T-Mobile site, so I tried to check there. I was unable to log in. I thought that perhaps the password had been reset, so I called customer service. I was asked for the last 4 digits of my SSN. I told them I don’t give out my SSN (and they shouldn’t have it because it’s PRIVATE). Was there some other information I could give them, like my address, to confirm I was me? Nope, they’d only take my SSN. Could I speak to a supervisor? Sure. After a seveeral minutes on hold the customer service lady came back and said actually I couldn’t–might she take my number and have one return my call? No problem, I can be patient.

A few hours passed, though it wasn’t yet 9 AM. I’d received no call, and my husband berated me for not simply giving my SSN, something he was sure I must have provided them with in the first place. I think he’s wrong, but I’m willing to play ball at the moment, so I call back.

I’m on hold for a long time. Eventually I get to a cs rep, and explain I can’t log in. She tells me my phone doesn’t exist, which is surreal since I am calling her on it. Then she tells me their website was down and is still not working properly. But perhaps she can help me? Sure she can. I ask her for the phone records and she tells me she cannot provide them. That’s right, I’m not allowed to get the call records from my own phone. Why not? Fear of lawsuits if someone were to impersonate me and acquire the information and then somehow–goodness knows how–use it to harm me. Aren’t they, I ask, afraid of lawsuits for refusing to provide people their own information? Yes, she says, but she still can’t give me the records. How am I supposed to get them then, I ask. Oh, you have to access them online from your account. But my account isn’t working, I say. Yes, she says, but that’s the only way to get the records. When will the website be fixed? She doesn’t know. Apparently it’s been messed up for 3 days and the note she has, which she obligingly reads to me, says the department is “working on it” and will have the site up and working real soon now.

To whom, I ask politely, can I complain about this Catch-22? Customer Correspondence in Albequerque. But I can’t call them, and I can’t email them, the two modes of communication most frequently used. no, that would make complaining too easy and therefore too frequent. I can only reach them by letter or fax, at which point they’ll look into the problem.

To add insult to injury, during the 30 minutes I spent on hold I got to listen to a loop of announcements, including one of T-Mobile congratulating itself on being awarded best customer service by JD Powers.

Ya gotta wonder how much they paid for that.

A moment of virtual silence. Because there is nothing, just nothing, that I can say.

Last week I took dd to the library. As we were in the elevator another mom got on with her kids. We were going to 4, and she pressed L (lobby). Dd4 commented that L was wrong, and that we were going to 4. I explained that they were getting off on L, and we’d be going to 4. The other mom asked dd’s age and commented on how smart she is. Now, as much as I like hearing that, I don’t think that any real amount of intelligence was needed to understand. But okay, I’ll happily accept the compliment. Then this woman asks if dd has older siblings. Yes, I say, she has an older sister. Ah, she says, nodding her head wisely. That’s why.

Gee, thanks. I’m just here to do the laundry and cooking.

TWO REVIEWS:

1) Horsez for PC, by Ubisoft $26.99 on Amazon. Rated E.

First of all, what’s with the “z”? Is someone in the software industry under the impression that a game about horses is inner-city cool? Do the ponies rap? Maybe the folks at Ubisoft just forgot to run their spellchecker.

This was an impulse buy when I took dd4 into the game store to get a Sims 2 game for the teengirl. It has a mare and foal on the front. The back of the package says, “Pick your perfect pony from lots of adorable breeds. Learn how to raise, groom and feed him.” The three other comments on the back say that you can participate in horse shows, compete, and join an academy.

I guessed from this that dd would be able to play the initial game of picking a pony and riding it around, and we’d just skip the rest.

I got the damned thing home and installed it. It’s a linear adventure about people in a riding academy. There was no horse picking. That must come later in the game. Instead, I got to deal with their interface. I don’t have a lot of patience for things that are made poorly, and this crap is well into that category. I finally quit when I had to select a class schedule by clicking and dragging classes onto a scheduler. Except that I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t exit the screen either. The manual, as it’s laughingly called, didn’t address this or any other issue I had. So I made my apologies to dd, packed up the disks, and I’m taking the whole thing back to the store.

I think this might be a good game for a preteen girl who likes horses and has some patience with stupid game design. If Ubisoft had put *that* on the back, I’d have saved some money.

Website is here:http://petz.us.ubi.com/horsez/
I think the graphics look like something from the Teletubbies.

2) Nebel’s Elementary Education: Creating a Tapestry of Learning, Bernard J Nebel, Ph.D., Nebel’s Press for Learning. 2001. $18.27 on Amazon.

This is a 429 page softcover book that purports to be a “how-to” manual/guide for providing a complete K-5 curiculum. I figured it didn’t when I bought it, but I was curious.

Nebel has an interesting educational philosophy stressing comprehension and the interconnectedness of all knowledge. He divides his book into seven “themes” that made little sense to me. Water Wonders is a separate theme from Physical Forces and Principles, for instance. Other themes include Communication and the odd blend of Values, Purpose, History and Society.

I found the first few chapters of this book very useful, and they are the reason I will keep it on my shelf. In them, he talks about the practice of teaching. Through page 54 in the middle of the third chapter, I loved this book. Just for example, Nebel discusses how to handle student questions, how to praise, how to say you don’t know, and different teaching methods. After that, it becomes more focussed on what to teach than on how to teach it and I found that far less helpful. Perhaps if he’s put all that information into a list format I’d have liked it better, but its all embedded in prose. On the positive side, each chapter ends with a section of resources for the reader. In sum, for me the first few chapters were worth the rest of the book. If you are an experienced teacher you likely don’t need this, but I’m not and I will certainly use it.

Website is here: http://www.pressforlearning.com/

One of the reasons I homeschool is that kids, left to themselves, reenact scenes from The Lord Of The Flies.

While such behavior is undoubtedly the result of natural primate urges, I still don’t condone it. I certainly won’t encourage it.

I find it somewhat ironic that the kids in regular school environments, be they public or private, who are supposedly so much better socialized than home schooled kids, are in fact much more likely to start this sort of crap than my kid. Perhaps that’s a goal for some parents. I can hear it now. This is “the real world” kids need to “toughen up” and “learn to deal”.

Well, I’d like MY kid to learn to deal with needless cruelty by refusing to participate in it, and walking away from those who engage in it. I’d like her to learn empathy and develop a social conscience. And I don’t think I’m hindering her social development one bit by refusing to allow her to be mean.

And while I’m on a roll about child rearing, I’d like to throw in just one more thing. Child -rearing only works if you pay attention to your kid. Sitting there in a corner assuming your child is behaving well while you chat with your grown-up friends is NOT child rearing. Getting up once in a while to find out if she’s screaming at other children and excluding some from her games, and then forcing her to stop–THAT is parenting.

I live in a tiny city or large town that has a college and is in close proximity to some of the best schools and cultural offerings in the country. Many of the residents here are well educated and very affluent. Its not a place I’d look for racism.

But it’s here.

A new playground opened. It’s a very nice, very small water park with some swings and climbing equipment and slides too. There is, according to a vocal minority, a serious problem with this park. They want a police presence there. They want to ban kids older than 8. To justify this they claim it is meant to be a toddler park, which you have to be both stupid AND illiterate to believe, and act like saying it often enough will make it true. They want to go there in groups and stage a kind of take back the park movement. They write emails to the mayor and the newspaper and the town council.

The problem with the park? It’s too close to the projects. You know, where “they” live. No one SAYS they don’t want their tykes to play with the African American kids or the Latino kids or, perhaps more importantly, the kids whose families don’t bring in six figures. No, that would be wrong.

Instead they complain that some kids roughhouse. They don’t like the water fights or the running around that kids will do in a playground. There have been two so-called incidents between parents and unruly children there. One was real, and one overblown crap that would never have gotten as far as it did if the mom had just handled it differently–and believe me, it didn’t go far even then. No one SAYS that the unruly kids involved were minorities. BUT they freely lament the proximity of the park to the projects, and discuss the supposedly poor home life of these problem kids, and otherwise make it clear that the children who bug them simply must have been from the projects. In other words, poor and minority.

How dare they come to “our” park? Well, maybe because its a PUBLIC park close to their homes where the kids can play and cool off in the water.

Come to think of it, that’s why I go too.

The other day we were at that park again. There was a cluster of Caucasian moms, and an extended family from the projects. They played separately. The family from the projects had some older kids, and they were loud and boisterous in their play. One of the Caucasian moms gave them some nasty looks, especially when her toddler was accidentally squirted with water. My daughter loves older kids and rough play, so she went right over to them and they welcomed her. The older boy allowed her to follow him around and play with him for a very long time. The girls accepted her. She had a blast. I chatted with the mother, which is how I know where they live, and she was lovely.

No matter their background, no kid is perfect. No adult either. We all have our moments. There are some bad apples in the projects, and also out of them in the brownstones on Bloomfield and Hudson and the incredibly overpriced lofts of the Tea Building. There are brats and jerks in any big enough grouping of people you care to name.

So freaking what?

I judge people based on their actions. If you act like a jerk, then I don’t want anything to do with you, nevermind the color of your skin or where you are from (or who you sleep with, or who you worship). What’s that to me when you just cut the line I’m standing on?

My four year old has the wonderful opportunity here to play with kids of all different sorts. When we walk down the street she’s twice said to me, ” Look, Mommy, her skin is brown.” “Yes,” I answer, “Isn’t that pretty?” She plays with anyone and will befriend anyone regardless of the color of their skin or even the language they speak. In fact not long ago she had a long conversation with a little boy who spoke only Spanish. Neither child understood the other’s words, and they had a good time anyway. I think play may be a universal language.

It would be a terrible shame if my child were to lose the openness she has to other kids who look or sound different. We try to foster it in her. When she gets older she’ll realize she has child and adult friends of many different types-gay, straight, Latin, Asian, Caucasian, rich, and poor. But for now all she knows is that she has a lot of people in her life who love her. I think that’s the most important thing of all.

I guess its as good a post title as any.

Who am I?

I’m a fat, middle-aged, home schooling mom trying to keep up with her four year old. Yes, I refer to myself in the third person. It’s an occupational hazard of motherhood (eg., “Mommy’s in the shower, you’ll have to wait, “For the FIFTH time, Mommy’s folding the laundry, she’ll get your milk in a minute”, “Mommy’s bleeding from the ears, you can get up off the couch and put your own cup on the table”).

What else? I’m a New Yorker living in Hoboken, New Jersey. I’m a neo-pagan. I’m a former mental health professional. I’m a Jew. I’m a stepmom. And those are just the things I’m willing to admit to on the internet. I have too many things I want to do and not enough focus on doing them.

What does all that mean? It means I have dishes in the sink, dinner in the crockpot, paintbrushes on the counter, laundry on the floor, and caller ID. I keep waiting for home schooling to get easier. I keep thinking that if I just found the right curriculum, the right organizer, it would all snap into place. But I suspect that home schooling is going to be what I do while I am figuring out how to home school.

Some days I think I don’t have the faintest idea what I am doing. I guess that means I get to invent it as I go along.