It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Thanksgiving in the Great Hall

We’re dining at Hogwarts this Thanksgiving weekend. 

Ok, not really, but it’s pretty close.  My parents’ home has a large ‘great room’ with a vaulted ceiling and huge stone fireplace.  It’s normally the least used room in the house; big, and kind of echo-y.  It’s also the only room in which we could hope to seat 17 people around something resembling a single table.

Yep, 17.  We haven’t had this many family members gathered for a holiday in several years, and the logistics took some contemplation.  There’s been a generation shift in our family over the last decade or so, and the transition has been a bit uncertain. My parents are both only children, and so the holidays of my youth were a combined gathering of our core family unit and both sets of my grandparents with the occasional addition of the odd great-uncle, aunt or cousin.  But, since neither set of grandparents had any other children to work into the equation, their presence at holidays was a given.  We rotated major holidays between the three houses or occasionally a rented cabin or condominium.  The biggest logistical quandaries were who brings the turkey and who’s in charge of the Christmas tree.

Fifteen years ago, I married an only child, and the traditions continued essentially unchecked as our family, ameboa-like, absorbed my husband and mother-in-law into the matrix.  Then, roughly a decade ago, my sister met her now-husband, and things got more complicated.  Mike (yes, my sister and I married men with the same name – get over it.) has a brother and sister with spouses and children of their own, and a family with its own tradition of large, boisterous gatherings.  This was unsettling.  Suddenly, my sister’s presence at a family holiday was no longer guaranteed.  Granted, there were any number of childhood Christmases where I would gladly have sent her a few hundred miles in any direction if only I could find a box large enough or a jet pack, but as adults, we’ve reached that intimate, bickering symbiosis known only to two people with shared history of hair-pulling fights and sneaking in the cold dark to open Christmas stockings.  The first Christmas morning where my pre-dawn companion(s) in stocking reconnassaince was(were) not my sister but my children, was the first holiday where I felt the jolt of time.  I wasn’t the kid anymore.  I had moved up a rung on the generation ladder.  And, I didn’t like it.

During this same time period, the other end of the ladder shifted.  The grandparents, around whom our family memories of holiday foods and traditions center, were aging, fading, and dying.  When my maternal grandmother died – fittingly on Christmas Day – two years ago, the shift was complete.  Like it or not, each of us had stepped into the next role.  My children are now the children, not just generational hangers-on.  Santa comes for them, not for Steph and me; they put the olives on their fingers at Thanksgiving.  Mike and I are the parents; my mother-in-law and parents are the grandparents.  And, in this shift, our traditions have been tweaked and our core unit has shrunk. 

This Thanksgiving, however, through some cosmic serendipity, we have expanded again.  My brother-in-law’s siblings both had other Thanksgiving plans, and so, for the first time, his parents join our holiday.  The multi-cellular family organism has collected other matter as well.  My father’s cousin, his wife, and two sons arrived yesterday as we sat down to bowls of clam chowder.  After the required awkwardness of kids forced to join a table of half-strange adults, the bowls were cleared and the house pounded with laughter, shouting, and the clatter of billiard balls.

And Mom, who had called me no fewer than three times while I was in Texas on business wanting help with logistics and cooking (at one point, she was demanding a pecan pie) regardless of my geography or other commitments, said while stirring the gravy, “I’m enjoying this.  This is good.”  Her tone had about the same level of amazement as if the candles in the great room had actually started floating.  Our places have shifted over the years, and we’ve had to rearrange furniture and expectations, but the core magic of Thanksgiving remains unaltered: food, fun, and family.

Occupying My Mind

Tomorrow at least six of the twelve adults who will gather around our Thanksgiving table are products of the University of California system.  My parents both hold degrees from UC Berkeley, my sister and her husband from UC Santa Cruz, my husband and I from UC Davis. 

My campus is in the news this week.  While I was in Texas, continuing my education, my academic birthplace dominated headlines and social media feeds.  UC Davis isn’t a headline kind of place.  It’s not the school you seek if you’re hoping to rabble-rouse, party hard, or set the world afire.  Pastoral, self-effacing, hard-working – those descriptors generally fit the campus, its students, faculty, and culture.  Seeing that campus in the news, the quad packed with thousands of protestors, is like opening the morning paper to find that the quiet kid in the back of math class is the celebrity of the month.

The Occupy protests and their associated ramifications and consequences trouble me, even as they inspire.  Since Occupy Wall Street began, I’ve been curious to see how the movement would play out, and I’ve been unsettled.  I don’t think I’m alone.  To say that our society is not at a tipping point is naïve.  We’ve been hurtling toward the precipice for a good decade or more.  Like people, all societies have a finite lifespan.  We’re all dying, but some are doing it faster than others.  In the past couple of decades, American society has been chain-smoking, binge-eating, and drunk driving its way toward economic and cultural terminal illness.

Group-think scares the hell out of me.  Most bad ideas manifest as a group saying, “Hey, look.  Here’s a really good idea.”  So, while I believe firmly in advocacy, action, and speaking out, mass demonstrations make me squirm.  As much as my personal economic theories range toward the socialist end of the spectrum – I’m sorry, but I’ve just never understood why the concept of shared wealth and support became a bad word – I’ve also resisted the notion of corporate-political conspiracy.

And yet…

I was born just a few days before the Kent State Massacre.  My parents graduated from UC Berkley in 1967.  I’m not a child of the Free Speech Movement by any means, but I’m old enough that the lessons (good and bad) of the 60’s are a part of my consciousness.  Among the basic principles of my childhood were:

1)      Think for yourself.

2)      Stand up for your beliefs.

3)      Defend those who need you.

4)      Never.  Ever.  Judge another person until you have ‘walked a mile in their shoes.’

That last principle confounds things more than you could possibly imagine.  In an increasingly black-and-white world, it’s tricky to maintain objectivity and even trickier to feel justified in my own opinions while trying to see through someone else’s eyes.  And that’s a good thing.  Despite what pundits, protests, and politicians tell us, thought and belief shouldn’t be easy.  This is hard work, folks.  We should scrutinize protests, even those with goals that generally match ours, and see beyond the placards and chants.  We should look at everything – from the trash on the ground to the behavior of authority – and we should question.

This is one of the things that has always made me a bit queasy about large-scale protest.  It’s like advertising – protest deliberately puts out only one side of the story.  But stories are like onions (and ogres), they have layers.

So, this fall, aware of the layers, I’ve watched the Occupy protests from the distance of a computer screen, ignoring the e-mails from community organizing groups to join the movement.  And there’s the lesson.  Ignoring issues doesn’t drive them away.  No matter how far into that sand we bury our heads, sooner or later the predator finds us and bites us on the ass.

It took the courage of students who were born sometime during my undergraduate years to show me that sometimes the other side doesn’t have much of a point.  These students, raised into a world of $5 coffees and disposable electronics, face a world for which nothing had prepared them.  They lived their childhoods in an America of ridiculous affluence and excess.  They face adulthood in an American that has crumbled under that excess.  They’re mortgaging their futures in the pursuit of education in a system that has failed to deliver its side of the contract.  I’m worried for them.

And, I’m worried about members of my family who will be dissecting their stuffing to pick out offending mushrooms and sticking olives on their fingertips.  I wonder if my children and their cousins will have any hope of obtaining the affordable, amazing education that was taken for granted by previous generations of Californians.  Is education a right or a privilege?   Many who already have or who never wanted higher education seem to now take the view that the experience is a privilege.

They are wrong.  The point of the state university system was to eliminate the concept of a privileged, educated elite.  The driving force behind the public universities of California was the notion that if you were smart enough and willing to work hard enough, you should be entitled to the same caliber of education as that obtainable by the scions of wealth.  Education, in short, was a right.

When I entered UC Davis in the fall of 1988, tuition fees were around $450 per quarter.  My understanding is that UC tuition is now ten times that amount and increasing.  I’ve seen projections of annual tuition of over $20,000 within just a few years.  Add in books, housing, and food (ramen at best), and a Bachelors degree will soon cost roughly the same amount as the house of my childhood.

What are these students getting for what amounts to a mortgage on their lives?  A deal that would cause any businessman worth his salt to break the contract immediately.  In what other business transaction does the seller get to increase the price by an indeterminate amount during the period of the contract while simultaneously lessening the services provided? 

If cutting classes and raising registration fees weren’t insulting enough, the UC system has, for several decades now, decided that the best method of handling client complaints is through condescension, broken promises, and now force.  The tone of Regents and campus Chancellors alike toward students over several years has been one of exasperated adults toward fractious children.  This attitude prevails on most college campuses, I suspect, and it may be inevitable where you have a population comprised of “experts” in their fields placed in positions of teaching and administrating a demographic whose days of Saturday morning cartoons aren’t far in the past.  However, this must cease.  University students are not children.  They are adults by the dictates of law, society, and physiology.

And, on Friday and through the weekend, on the UC Davis campus, the students were indeed the adults.  They occupied a campus, not as trespassers, but as shareholders and stakeholders.  They occupied a campus that is theirs by right as citizens of the state of California and as paying registrants of the UC system.  They held their ground peacefully in the traditions of non-violent protest that have deep roots in academia.  And they were met by violence of the worst kind.  The campus police were not pushed to the brink or threatened by an unruly mob.  They pepper-sprayed a group of seated students with the contempt of pest-control technicians. 

It speaks volumes that the faculty have chosen to stand with the students who swarm their office hours begging for a better curve on the midterm or an extension on a paper.  The faculty of the departments of English and Physics have called for the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi.

Chancellor Katehi and UC President Yudof have given lip-service to their “horror” at the actions of the UC police on the Davis and Berkeley campuses.  Yet, more telling than all of the pretty, rote, and empty words, was the expression in Chancellor Katehi’s eyes at the protest on the UC Davis Quad this weekend.  In video shot before her ‘apology’, you can see the Chancellor roll her eyes as a student speaks.  Words mean nothing, Chancellor.  Courage means everything.  And you have none.  You, and any of your like-minded colleagues, must go.  Californians want our universities back.  Our children deserve better.

The video below was posted on YouTube by Capital Public Radio:

 

 

Failure as Fertilizer

Your child is a failure.  My children are failures.  You are a failure.  I am a failure.

Ok, don’t start throwing things yet.  Our society vastly underrates the value of failure.  We all fail.  Most of us fail daily: at school, at work, in art, in the kitchen, at play, and in our relationships.  We are all failures.  We need our failures.

Just as Edison needed his myriad ways not to make a light-bulb in order to achieve success, we need our failures in order to learn.  We need our failures in order to learn what doesn’t work and by extension what does.  We need our failures in order to learn how to problem solve.  We need our failures in order to learn to adapt.  We need our failures in order to learn to persist.  We need our failures in order to grow.

Sunday was diorama drama day in our house.  As part of a 4^th grade book report, Aidan was making a diorama depicting the California Gold Rush.  His original plan had involved making a figure of a miner panning for gold out of modeling clay.  Now, while I did buy him some of the little pine trees (they were adorable; how could I resist?), we do not generally allow our kids to have pre-fab presentation kits.  You want to build something?  You find the materials and you build it.  You want an animal?  Make one – needle-felt it, sculpt it, whatever.  Do it yourself.

Aidan had drawn a miner with a pickaxe in the background, painted the riverbed, and figured out how to affix the trees.  Now he was ready for his figurine. 

Scene 1: Clay blob.  The modeling clay was too wobbly to support a kneeling figurine.

Scene 2: Wire skeleton.  He decided that his guy needed a skeleton.  So, Aidan went to the garage, found the reel of fencing wire, borrowed the wire cutters and got to work.  He bent the wire pieces into the shapes of kneeling legs, a torso, arms, and head.  He then pressed the clay muscle and bones onto the skeleton.

Scene 3: Tears.  Of the words parents hate to hear coming from a work area, “THIS IS STUPID!” has to top the list.  The miner (which I actually thought was much better than anything I could have done at that age) was not to scale.  He dwarfed the pine trees; ok, they looked like weeds.  Mike and I tried the “the trees are in the distance” approach, but Aidan wasn’t buying it. 

I take back my earlier statement.  Where school projects are concerned, there is another set of words that I dread even more than the above.  “Several (yes, my nine-year old talks like this) other people have turned in their dioramas already.  And they were PERFECT!  Mine looks HORRIBLE!” Hugging my son and growling under my breath, I told Aidan, “Well, I don’t think it’s bad, but it’s your project, so do what you need to to make it look the way you want” and went back to my office.

 

Scene 4: Facebook status update. 

A plaintive plea to other grade school parents: please, please don't do your child's projects for them. Don't even "help" substantially. Help them figure out how they want to do it. Let them struggle a bit. Help them problem solve, but don't do the construction. It isn't fair to those children whose "mean" parents feel that school projects are for children to do. My kid should not have to compare his work to that of 30, 40, or 50 year olds. Thank you. That is all.

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the other “perfect” dioramas, so I have no idea what, if any, parental input they received.  However, I have seen plenty of school projects over the years that were not completed solely, primarily, or perhaps even in part by children.  As a parent, the clean-edged, polished display that is obviously beyond the capability of an elementary school child makes me grit my teeth.  It’s hard enough raising kids with perfectionist tendencies without knowing that they are comparing their efforts to work that was not done by their peers.

But, there is another aspect to parental project participation that makes me sad.  The children whose parents “help” by doing all or most of the cutting, gluing, design, etc. are losing out.  They are being denied the gift of failure.

We all need to screw up.  We need to plan something and watch it fall down or crumble to bits.  We need to make a figurine that isn’t to scale.  We need to put forth an effort that was less than our best and face the consequences – even if those consequences are a bad report or a failed grade.  We need the gift of our mistakes – they are the fertilizer of our lives.  (Don’t make me use the obvious excrement metaphor.)

How many of us have crossed the waters of adulthood without foundering?  Speaking personally, I have: been fired from my first professional job; lost a house; been laid-off another job, hurt and been hurt by the ones I love; and made more mistakes than I care to contemplate.  But, each failure has made me stronger, braver, more creative, and more loving. 

How have I been able to grow from my failures?  I have a memory of cross-country skiing with my family.  I must have been about ten years old – about Aidan’s age.  Descending hills on narrow skis that are longer than you are tall is tricky at any age, and given that I had trouble walking without falling down, my rear was no stranger to the snow.  Halfway down one hill, I took a particularly spectacular tumble.  I was on the steep edge of the hillside, legs twisted, skis pointed in opposite directions and one pole out of reach downhill. 

I was cold, wet, bruised of butt and of ego, and my legs ached.  In tears, I asked my parents to come pull me up.  They came and stood near me, but didn’t extend a hand.

“Help me up!”

My dad handed me my wayward pole.

“I can’t get up.  Help me.”

“You can do it yourself.  Get your skis straightened out and pointed across the hill.”

“I can’t do it.  I need help.”

“You’re big enough to do it yourself. You know how.”

“I can’t.  I’ll fall.”  I pushed myself halfway up and slid partway down the hill, skis still in a knot.

“You aren’t trying.  Get your skis straight and parallel.  Use your poles.”

“I need help.”

“Someday you’ll fall and we won’t be around to help you up.  You need to learn to do it yourself.”

 

Later, there was hot chocolate, and I’m sure that in my mind at the time, that was the only thing that redeemed my parents from utter cruelty.  But, as an adult, I don’t remember the hot cocoa.  I only remember the gift of that last sentence.  As a parent, I now know the struggles that my parents didn’t show me as they stood there.  I know how hard it was for them to let me try, and fail, and not rescue me.

I wrote a guest blog last week about “saving” others.  One of the points I made was that rescuing diminishes the rescued.  Every time we refuse to let someone fail or to dig themselves out of failure, we tell them that we believe them incompetent.

Sometimes I hear parents say that they don’t want their children to feel overwhelmed or bad about their mistakes.  I find myself sometimes arguing the opposite to teachers.  Please, please challenge my children.  Please push them.  Please call them on their sloppy work, on their failures.   Please tell them that they are better than that.  Please let them know that you believe that their best efforts, uneven edges and all, are the work you expect from them – and then let them know that you expect better next time.

Life doesn’t get easier as we get older.  The scary, frustrating, and challenging things that attack us from the outside and from within only get bigger and darker.  Like everything, overcoming adversity takes practice.  Facing failure is like the metaphor of the man lifting the calf every day from the moment of its birth.   Eventually, he is still able to lift the grown cow.  If we allow our children to cope in small ways with the frustrating and scary, perhaps, someday they will have the tools to lift the whole thing.

Circling back to school and teaching; this is the best description I have ever seen of the value of a teacher:

  

Wandering the Web

I'm guest-blogging about the trap of the "helper" today at my friend Steve McCready's site.  I've cross-posted to Steve's blog before, and it's well worth checking out his other posts while you're visiting.  He has some great insights and advice on relationships and mental/emotional well-being.

I'll be back in a while...