Fear and locked doors

Dear Ms. School District Superintendant

I'm writing to express my distaste for the recent board-level changes in school security policy. 

I chose to raise my children in this area in large part because I wanted them to grow up in an environment free of pervasive media-drive fear. Not free of risk, of course: none of us can ever live entirely free of risk. But I wanted them to grow up in an environment uncontaminated by the sort of fear and distrust that is rampant in larger centres and other countries. I wanted my children to believe that the world is by and large a good place filled with good people. I wanted them to learn to keep risk in perspective. 

[Our community] and [our K-12 public school] seemed to provide that kind of environment. The school and the community are friendly, open and trusting. Not to the point of stupidity, but they provide a balanced openness and acceptance. We have not fallen prey here to a paranoid distrust of each other or of strangers. Children in our area who are asked for directions by tourists respond helpfully rather than cowering in fear. The school has had an atmosphere of welcome acceptance. School staff have worked hard to build connections between school and community, between living and learning, between the natural world and the people living within it. Children attending school have felt part of a school community that encompasses the larger world, rather than held in an institutional community turned inwards, insulated and protected from the larger world. 

The new security policy strikes at the heart of this openness. It creates an atmosphere that draws a firm line between the scary outside world and the supposed safety of school. It is also a terribly unscientific interpretation of risk. Considering that schools are supposed to be helping children learn to critically examine and interpret information, this sets a very poor example. The risk of a Canadian school student dying in a motor vehicle accident on the way to or from school is hundreds of times higher than the risk of dying in a school shooting. Why are we letting a media frenzy relating to an incident in a different country with a radically different health care system and firearms law dictate which doors we can walk through?

If the school district is truly concerned about reducing the risk of school shootings from negligible to even-more-negligible, they should consider the factors that are commonly cited by experts as motivating such gunmen. School shooters tend to be isolated loners who are fearful and disempowered, and they tend to take out their anger on institutions where they perceive their isolation and disempowerment to have begun. Surely it is no stretch to see that a school lockdown policy -- which inhibits the free interaction between school and community, which symbolizes the isolation of students from the wider world and which restricts student movement and location -- will tend over the long run to increase the likelihood of disturbed individuals choosing that school as a target. It is no mystery why US rates of school shootings continue to rise as schools get more and more controlling and "secure." Such policies are dehumanizing. They put up barriers. They isolate. All factors that play into the disturbed thought patterns of future potential mass-murderers.

For goodness sake, let's keep risk in perspective. The risk of a school shooting here in our corner of rural BC is virtually nil. The risk of choking on a piece of food at a school lunch or dropping dead of cardiac arrest on the soccer field is higher. We're not rushing around banning team sports or grapes. Why is the school district buying into media-driven fear, and in doing so eroding healthy attitudes towards community and the wider world, the sort of healthy attitudes that are protective against violence? I hope that the recent directive was a misguided attempt to comfort families by being seen to be doing something in light of the media hype surrounding a shooting in a nation very different from ours, and that upon realizing that parents do not need or want this sort of "comfort" the administration will revise the policy.

I urge you to rescind the current directive so that the wonderful healthy openness between students, families, school staff and communities can be preserved. Barriers build fear and resentment and reduce student security both real and perceived. A policy of openness serves our students, and their security, best.

Sincerely,

etc.

A School of Common Sense

The comments in response to my post about all-day junior kindergarten got me thinking again about what we could change about our society, our communities, our lifestyles, our institutions and our values to promote Gross Domestic Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product. As I wrote in my follow-up comment, there's no simple answer; systemic change is required. But sometimes, I think, systemic change takes root in a thousand small simple answers. Tipping Point and all that.

So here's what I think is one of those simple, common-sense pieces of the puzzle. A Common Sense school. We have one in our community. This school provides K to 12 educational schooling to about a hundred kids. It's feeling the economic belt-tightening like so many schools. Declining rural enrolment has made it tougher here than many places. But still it remains a vibrant pillar of the community.

From 8:55 a.m. to 3:11 p.m. about a hundred and eighty days a year, the school serves its primary mandate. And more. The now-surplus classroom is rented out to the preschool society for their programs. Anyone is welcome to come into the library, browse, sign out books. Anyone. For free. Anyone is welcome to attend special events like performances, special assemblies and the like. Retired adults have taken part in the instrumental music class. Parents and other community members come in and share their knowledge and passions. Homeschoolers are welcome to attend class for special workshops, festivals, field trips. Not because they generate funding (they don't), just because it makes sense to allow them to attend if they want. Classes are involved in community service and in outdoor education, including extended canoe, hiking and biking trips. There's a beautiful garden area that's cared for by students and staff. The school created an amazing intergenerational education program that had 9- and 10-year-olds attending part of every school week at the local nursing home, integrated with the daily routines, activities, social milieu and living history of the residents there.

And then the bell goes to end the school day and rather than standing empty the building is used by the community. The grounds play host to community soccer games. The gym is used for community basketball and an evening a week by an informal group of badminton players. The classrooms and library are used by music groups, literacy groups, for community college extension classes, for meetings, community cooking, round-tables, rehearsals, discussions, social activism, fundraising. During the summer the entire school is used for three solid weeks by a non-profit music education society for a nominal fee. Any of these activities could be sidelined by concerns over liability or security, by fees charged or paper-work required, by administrative hoops to jump through. But they're not.

There are schools elsewhere in our province (and in other provinces) that have been given the designation of "community schools." They get extra funding, administrators, protocols and guidelines and they do much of what our school does. Our school applied for the designation, but already the funding had dried up. You'd think they'd just give up on the idea. But no. They just became a de facto community school anyway.

So when Noah's quartet needs a place to rehearse on a Sunday afternoon in October, I can just call up a teacher and I'll be told "oh sure, just come, I'll meet you there and let you in; we'll find you a room to use." Or when Erin's youth choir comes to town to do a fund-raising concert and we need a place to host their lasagna dinner of course we just use the school Foods Room. How blissfully sensible.

If there were more of this community-minded common sense, if we were less driven by fear and more interested in removing barriers to the generation of grass-roots energy, I think we'd be increasing our GDH.

All-day Junior Kindergarten

It's our annual tax deadline today. Which means that I've spent much of the last week wretchedly catching up on the accounting, and most of today on the computer trying to drag my way through tax return preparation. And which also means I've made some enthusiastic diversions into heated discussions on various message boards for no other reason than that they're not columns of numbers.

So someone asked if anyone cared to share their thoughts on full-day schooling for 3- through 5-year-olds. This is something the province of Ontario, which already pays for half-time schooling for kids from September of calendar year in which they turn four, is considering. And, craving some [virtual] human contact, something to throw some emotional energy at and a creative outlet for my left brain, I replied thus:

As a society we're institutionalizing our kids more and more, younger and younger, contracting out parenting responsibilities to beat the band, and standardizing the little holes we drop our kids into so that almost any child with any uniqueness needs a label to cope. All in order to serve the relentless drive to increase GDP.

It's all about money. It's about getting parents out earning and spending, and kids turned into consumer-oriented compliant workers, so that everyone can continue to drive the economy towards higher and higher numbers, plundering the planet and exploiting poor nations as we do so.

We live in a society where most families need two working parents, so full-time schooling makes economic sense for them. But if we examine that "need" for two working parents more skeptically it becomes apparent that it's a "need" only as defined in reference to a 21st century lifestyle, the one we've been led to by that same economic machine.

"Need" now means cable TV, high speed internet, a computer, separate bedrooms for every kid, a vehicle, two TVs, a DVD player, two bathrooms, a cellphone or two, ballet and swimming lessons for the kiddos, a dishwasher, BBQ, microwave and automatic clothes-dryer, eating out a couple of times a month, and a recorded music collection that would take several days to play through once. How many of these things did our grandparents or great-grandparents need as young parents? Probably none of them. Yet we're institutionalizing our kids at 3 because we can't imagine living without them.

I make it my business to imagine living without them. And to question this slippery slope ride towards a society that institutionalizes kids at birth so that their parents can continue to consume resources at unsustainable rates.

The race that is childhood

Message board copy & paste:

"One of the bragging points is 'My little Johnny doesn't watch those shows anymore. He's much too mature for Barney and Dora. He much prefers watching Arthur and Spiderman.' "

My, everything has got so competitive, hasn't it? Even child-rearing is a race.

It breeds something I call pseudo-maturity -- the adoption of pop-culture affinities, behaviours and attitudes of people who are older than you. Kids are considered "ahead" of their peers if they like the pop icons, clothing, music and friendship of kids older than they are. And so we have 4-year-olds who are too cool for Treehouse, thongs for 8-year-olds, and Grade 5 classes where everyone has a "crush" on someone.

But none of this real maturity, which I would define as a strong sense of values, a secure sense of self, and the impulse control and sense of responsibility required to act on those core values. I've noticed that often it's the kids who exhibit relatively "young" likes, meaning they still play with stuffies at age 10 or admit to enjoying Treehouse at age 6, are the ones who end up demonstrating the most real maturity.

(Do I dare admit that my kids have occasionally vegged in front of "Treehouse" up to the age of 10?)

Adolescent responsibility

Somewhere I read that the shift to night-owl-dom in adolescence once had a biological imperative. Young teens in tribal times were the ones who were given spears and left to guard the encampment from enemies and predators by the fire all night long. Now that's meaningful responsibility -- life and death stuff! By contrast today's young teens are given the responsibility of finishing their social studies essay on time.

People often ask me how I am handling having Erin off on the opposite side of the earth, having adventures I know next to nothing of, travelling with a loose itinerary I can't possibly keep track of, out of reach of telephone and internet. Honestly, I don't find it hard. Partly because my parental pride at her courage and adventurousness offsets the worry. But mostly because I think this sort of independence, responsibility, self-sufficiency and risk is an absolutely crucial part of maturing towards adulthood. I did a lot of really stupid things as a teen, trying to test my mettle. I hope that as they grow through adolescence all my kids will find smart ways to test their mettle. Erin is having her turn now.

Adolescence rant

Copied & pasted from a discussion board where it was being argued that young adults from 18-25 ought to be cut a little slack by the justice system when they do stupid things like engage in credit card fraud -- because science has shown that their frontal cortexes are still developing. "There is good reason why we now consider adolescence to last a dozen or more years," it was argued. "It's because the brain is still maturing all that time."

The prolongation of adolescence has nothing to do with knowledge of brain maturity and everything to do with keeping inexpensive pools of labour out of the workforce by maximizing educational and economic dependency. As we expect less and less of our young people, they live down to our expectations. Yes, most 18-year-olds are immature and irresponsible -- because we haven't given them to fodder of life experiences, freedom, autonomy, meaningful involvement in family and community life and other forms of responsibility that they need as catalysts for the development of maturity. We treat them like children far too long. I'm not putting the blame on parents here so much as on society. We don't let teens make decisions for themselves, live self-sufficiently, drive, sign legal documents, travel, get married, leave school, drink alcohol, have sex, work during certain hours of the day, vote ...

Robert Epstein and John Taylor Gatto have a lot of interesting historical perspectives on adolescence. It is indeed a relatively recent invention -- and they make a very good case that it is an ill-conceived social construct that contributes to the problem it purports to solve, that of immaturity.

The real agenda is economic, as it is for most things. The business world has traditionally wanted compliant willing workers who have been trained through years of schooling to conform. Trade unions have traditionally sought to prevent young people from entering the work force because they put a downward pressure on wages. On this one issue they have been united -- keep young people out of the work force and apart from the real workings of society.

I agree that the brain continues to develop into adulthood. But it continues to develop and change throughout adulthood as well. At some point we have to afford our citizens freedom and responsibility as full members of society. Shifting that age of majority later in the teens and well up into the 20's will save a few immature individuals from the consequences of their irresponsible choices for a few more years. Is it worth the cost to the rest of our young people -- infantilizing them far beyond the age when it is healthy for them.

Neurophysiological development is not the explanation for immaturity. No doubt my 10-year-old has the neurophysiology of a 10-year-old -- but she's not stealing, engaging in reckless behaviour or making other stupid choices. Neither are my 12 or 15-year-olds. Maturity is something rather different from neurophysiology, and in my opinion we're setting kids up for arrested moral development if we assume they're the same thing. At some point we have to start giving young people responsibility -- including the responsibility of living with the repercussions of their mistakes. They need responsibility as a catalyst for the development of maturity -- and a few more years of pre-frontal-cortex synapse development alone won't give it to them.

Schools and rules

A Grade 6 class is expected to read a book of their choice per week at home independently and submit a book report for each. They should read a range of genres. Multiple books from the same series are not acceptable. Non-fiction books are not acceptable. The aim of this home reading program can only be inferred. Presumably it is to encourage students to read regularly, to enjoy reading, to broaden their exposure to authors, styles and genres. Book reports are to likely to gauge comprehension and provide proof that the book has actually been read.

A particular student has chosen "The DaVinci Code" as his current novel. He is not a voracious reader, but is a strong enough reader that he enjoys the book and the challenge it presents. But the book is many times longer and more complex than the books his classmates are typically reading. He does not want to choose lightweight books instead or in addition to this one. He would like to continue challenging himself with The DaVinci Code over the longer term, and instead of weekly book reports, submit weekly summaries of chapters he has read. He says that if he's forced to abandon DC and pick up shorter, less challenging books that he's not currently interested in, he simply won't do the reading and reports. He's happy with DC and the challenge it's giving him, and wants a compromise.

Many parents on the message board where this issue was being discussed seem to feel that the rules given by the teacher are hard and fast, and it would be disrespectful and defiant to even ask for a compromise. "You can't tell your boss that you don't like the work so you won't do it," they say. "Children shouldn't grow up believing that the rules don't have to apply to them." They also believe that this is not a place for a parent to support and facilitate the request for a compromise. "Any kid old enough to understand The DaVinci Code is old enough to deal with this himself." Or "I would tell my kid to buck up and get with the program. The school should not have to bend their rules because some kid thinks he has a better idea." Other parents suggest "School is a kid's job. He has to do the work."

I am left shaking my head in bewilderment. School cannot be likened to a job. When you work for an employer, the work you do is for your employer's benefit. In exchange you are given a salary which compensates you for doing work for your employer's benefit. It's an economy. And you have choice. If you find the work is making you miserable, you can seek a new job. You're presumably an adult and have control over your life and your choices, as well as the maturity and experience to make tough decisions.

When you work at school, the work is for your benefit -- to educate you. No money changes hands because the benefit (supposedly!) accrues to you. And most kids have zero choice. If school is making them miserable they can't quit and find another way to learn. They're also young, inexperienced and immature.

So the situations are different in fundamental ways. There are, in my opinion, a number of very good reasons why the school should be the party that is flexible and accommodating in situations like this.

I also bristle at the suggestion that reading level can be equated with social-emotional maturity. Fiona, for example, has quite a lot of social-emotional maturity for her age. She is gracious, respectful and assertive. But I am quite sure that now that she is (brag!) reading at a Grade 4 level, her social-emotional maturity still does not keep up with her reading level. No matter how you slice it she is not a 9-year-old. When I think back to Erin the asynchronicity was extremely stark. She had been reading her way through books at the Harry Potter level and beyond for a full four years before she had the confidence and maturity to open her mouth and speak to an adult she didn't know intimately.

For the record, in the scenario I describe the teacher has not yet been approached. It is certainly possible that the teacher will be receptive to the compromise the boy is suggesting -- I hope that's the case. What dumbfounded me was the resounding consensus among most parents contributing to the discussion that the child's role is to toe the line, even when the line makes him miserable and he has a compromise to suggest which it seems is likely in keeping with the spirit, if not the letter, of the rule.

It seems that most parents have bought the premise that children serve the curriculum rather than the other way around. I think they've got it totally backwards.

Edited to add: A follow-up post from the mom makes it clear that the teacher has been wonderfully accommodating. She would love the boy to read The DaVinci Code and report based on that. The requirement that he read from a variety of genres is one made with a year-long view, not week by week. I'm not surprised that the teacher has been flexible; I've seen lots of great examples of flexibility in the school system. What surprises me still is the response of so many parents to the original dilemma as presented.

Two sinks or one?

When you travel a journey gradually, apart from others, sometimes you don't appreciate how far you've moved beyond what others see as normal, or at least comprehensible. Maybe my quest for simplicity is like that.

The following was posted, in all seriousness, on a parent-oriented message board I frequent, on the topic of "should we put two sinks or one in the kids' bathroom?"

"Once you've had the two sinks, it would be hard to go back to one. Not a necessity, but really nice for two people to be able to brush their teeth at the same time, or one to wash their face and another to brush their teeth...."

I am just floored by this. Words fail me. This person lives in a different universe from me.

We have two bathrooms, though we could manage with this one if it had room for a shower. This is the tiny one that was in our house when we moved in. It is the bathroom that is used 95% of the time by six of us, except when bathing or showering. It has one sink. Sometimes we brush our teeth at the same time and take turns spitting in the sink. What an onerous imposition it is to have to wait for a turn to spit in the sink!

Still shaking my head.

February

I've had just about enough of this month. The rink is soggy. The driveway is soggy. There is dirt on the snow everywhere, and the snow is still piled deep and high. It's wet and cold and it's not pretty. Even a Steller's Jay does little to cheer things up outside.

Inside we are bored and testy. We had a Nothing Day today, one of those normally precious days where we had nothing scheduled. And nobody much enjoyed it. There was no creativity, no initiative. We sat around killing time on the computer, reading, puttering, lying on the living room floor. There was no imaginary play amongst the kids. There was no energy.

I'm just about ready for April. Enough with February already. Too bad there's still March in the way.

Where have all the raincoats gone?

Last fall, before our canoe trip, I did my best to scrounge around and find everyone a rain jacket. I came up short. It was early September and we were heading into the cold wet months in our area, but there was nothing on the racks in the stores. They had windbreakers/warmup jackets and polyester fleece and cotton fleece. And in the high-end stores for $250 you could find parka shells made of waterproof-breathable fabrics, with taped seams, designed mostly for layering over fleece for waterproofness in the snow ... though there was nothing in kids' sizes in our neck of the woods. I didn't have time to mail-order; I'd just assumed that rain jackets were everywhere during the back-to-school season.

It was much to Sophie's detriment that we failed to find appropriate rain gear in the stores before our trip. I had given Erin an old waterproof jacket of mine, and Fiona was fine in a slightly-too-small yellow rainslicker that I had sewn up several years earlier for an older sister. Noah had a lovely Wetskins jacket that I'd managed to scoop up at a thrift store the previous spring. But when we got caught in a day of cool fall rain out on the lake, poor Sophie suffered. Upon our return I was determined to find her a good-quality waterproof jacket no matter the cost.

When I was young every kid had a rain jacket. You would have a winter jacket and snow pants, and winter boots for the coldest months, and the remainder of your core outdoors-wear wardrobe would consist of a rain coat, rain boots and maybe an umbrella too. Plus sweaters for warmth underneath. So why could I not find a single waterproof jacket for Sophie in any store in the area? (I must admit that we have very few shopping options. There are three thrift stores, a WalMart, a high-end outdoors store and a baby boutique that carries a few items for children as well. But still ... why was no one selling raincoats in September? I had expected to find two or three racks of choices, at least, at the WalMart, but there was nothing.)

I have a feeling it's because children aren't expected to spend time outside in the rain any more. Most don't walk to school on nice-weather days any more, but even those that do certainly wouldn't be expected to do so if it's pouring rain. Outside play is much less common in these days of wii's and million-channel TV, but would certainly not be expected if the weather is at all inclement. Children just do not spend the kind of time outdoors that they once did.

At any rate, I finally found a source for lovely Oko-tex standard imported Swedish rainwear right under my nose; some Scandinavian homeschooling acquaintances in Nelson were importing them, having been unable to find anything comparable in North America. I bought Sophie one right away. Last week they e-mailed to let me know that they were liquidating their remaining stock to make room in their lives for other things so I took the opportunity to grab Fiona one of their lovely jackets too at half price.

I now know how rare and precious a good child's rain jacket is. We're thrilled to have these two jackets in the family now, and will cherish them.

Swamped by simplicity

Simplicity is a real catch-word in my life these days, and also in several of the on-line communities I'm part of. This morning I awoke with a cold and ended up feeling particularly grumpy.

I was never truly part of a rat-race, discounting the 75-hour weeks I worked as an intern and occasional ER-shift-heavy locums during my first couple of years in practice. So even pre-simplicity I did my best to find balance. And back in the old, pre-simplicity days I used to get up, make some coffee and sit down and enjoy it before heading out for a ski or to visit friends.

These days my simplicity is More Evolved, and my morning routine consists of many or all of the following. I get up, split some kindling, light a fire in the wood stove, check the yogourt culture, empty the laundry airer and refill it with damp clothes, hand-wash some dishes, start the sponge for the bread, bake muffins, run the nut-milk maker, rinse some sprouts, feed and water the chickens, collect the eggs, roast some coffee, do some cursory snow-clearing on the driveway before it gets too warm and the snow gets too heavy ... and then maybe I can sit down and drink a cuppa coffee. Probably not, though, because my morning routine takes so long that something else usually needs to be done by the time I'm finished it.

When we moved to the Slocan Valley and began our slide towards simplicity, I thought quite fondly of our shift to a slower paced life. I still do, most of the time -- I really do love it. But from the wrong side of a snotty nose a slower paced life really looks like "everything takes such a damn long time."

Over-packaging rant

I have this cute wonderful little Sony MiniDisc recorder that can make hi-fi digital stereo recordings with nothing more than the poke of a couple of buttons, but its proprietary NiMH battery finally stopped holding a charge and while I could still use the AC adaptor the device wasn't half as much use not being portable.

(Here I must confess that I had the old nasty-toxic metal hydride battery in my purse to drop off with Lee, the guy who brokers the recycling and safe disposal of nasty batteries, but for whatever reason Fiona found it a quiet diversion during Erin's piano recital in May, and when we stopped for gelato on the way home from the recital, I realized it had got left behind in the church pew. I can only hope that some Christian eco-head found it the next Sunday morning and took it to Lee for me.)

Okay, that's my confession out of the way. I resolved to do a much better job of limiting my ecological footprint with my next nasty toxic NiMH battery. And so, after coming up empty locally, I found a Canadian internet supplier of replacement batteries and ordered one. It arrived quickly and effiicently.

But oh dear. Look at that package in front of Noah. He looks appalled, doesn't he? That box is 9 x 6 x 6 inches. Inside ...

Yup, one teeny weeny battery and half a gallon of styrofoam packing peanuts. An irate e-mail to the company hardly seems sufficient. I'm tempted to mail them back their peanuts. But I know they wouldn't be at all offended by half a gallon of peanuts. They'd just throw them in the trash -- out of sight, out of mind. Gone. Who cares, right?

So they're in my garbage. I'm incensed anew every time I walk by the garbage can. How dare they inflict all those peanuts on me?

Common as Dirt

"After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. "

John Taylor Gatto

That quote is obviously a bit of an unschooling manifesto. My goodness, Gatto turns a nice phrase. But it also touches on something I've been thinking of again in the past week or two. It began when an on-line friend e-mailed me a couple of links and suggestions from the TAGMAX e-mail list, and asked if she should continue forwarding such things, because maybe I was on TAGMAX. Was I? Would I consider joining? She recommended it. Good list -- busy, but lots of great info.

Well, I was on that e-mail list, once, for a while. See, the "TAG" in TAGMAX is "Talented and Gifted." The "MAX" I suppose has something to do with maximizing potential through an individualized, home-based learning approach. TAGMAX is for parents homeschooling Gifted Kids. Upper-case G Gifted. Members of that special club of the intellectual elite.

There was a time, many years ago, when I looked at the things my eldest was doing and felt proud, amazed, special, awed. I realized that there was some pretty unusual stuff going on there -- especially in its manner, depth and intensity. I joined TAGMAX and couple of on-line message board for parents of gifted kids. I admit it felt nice to be part of a 'club' of parents of, well, special-in-THAT-particular-way kids. It was helpful to hear from others who had grappled with barely-five-year-old fluent readers of Young Adult level fiction. It felt comfortable to be in a place where asking a question about explaining negative numbers to a curious five-year-old didn't get you accused of academic hothousing. And I especially enjoyed the stimulating discussion among outside-the-box, creative parents about all facets of parenting and education.

But the good stuff came at a price for me. I found that hearing about early achievements made me want my kids to meet or surpass those achievements. When I heard of kids being fast-tracked academically, of parents advocating long and hard for academic challenge and enrichment, I felt competitive stirrings inside me. I found I was trying to reassure myself that my kids could do this or that, at least if they wanted to. I didn't act on those feelings, but I didn't like having them and it cost me emotional energy to beat them back.

I unsubscribed from TAGMAX pretty quickly. I was pretty sure that in a school situation my kids would meet the criteria for giftedness, but I lost all interest in the label. Gradually I felt much better. I just relaxed into what was working with my kids, and things seemed to flow pretty well without the need for specialized approaches and resources. What I discovered is that it just doesn't matter whether an unschooled child is intellectually gifted or not. There is no poorness of fit with the curriculum, or with the classroom of age-peers. There are no problematic asynchronicities when you step outside the box of a conventional educational approach. There is no need for a label, for testing, for Identification in an unschooling environment. If your child is reading and comprehending at a high school level but doesn't yet print lower case letters, it doesn't matter one whit. If your child relates best to older children or adults with similar interests and is a fish out of water with agemates, that's perfectly fine.

That was the first realization: giftedness is a non-issue in an unschooling environment. That was the easy one. The not-so-easy one came later, more gradually, and it has to do with Gatto's "common as dirt" comment.

First I should say that I know, and understand why, comments like "all children have gifts" raise the dander of parents of highly gifted kids in the school system. That phrase often epitomizes the perspective of a person who seeks to remove individualized educational resources and services from children who are intellectually precocious. It can be a way of saying "everyone's special, so we should just treat everyone the same." Personally I believe if everyone's special, that means we should treat everyone uniquely, including the most intellectually precocious kids.

But I tend to agree with Gatto: genius is as common as dirt. See, I teach Suzuki violin, and over the past decade of part-time teaching I've taught probably twenty or thirty children. And while I haven't seen that spark of genius inside them all, I've seen it in so many of them that I'm pretty certain that when I haven't seen it, the deficiency is in the observer, not the child. It's not always academic-style genius, of course. But neither is it the platitude type of pseudo-genius, the sort of thing you make a point to publicly recognize in people who haven't really done anything exceptional but do have strengths in one area that occasionally let them shine. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about real brilliance. So many children have it!

Some children are like shiny coins you can hold in your hand and you see their brilliance staring you in the face. Other children are like shiny coins dropped on the lawn -- every bit as brilliant, but you won't see that brilliance unless the sun is shining, and you're standing in just the right place and looking in just the right direction.

My children are more like shiny coins you can hold in your hand and admire. They have clear intellectual precocity that people notice easily. Erin and Fiona especially. Sophie is sometimes like that, but at other times is a shiny coin left in the change pot on the kitchen counter, merrily shining away but not attracting as much attention. And Noah is sometimes the shiny coin you put in one of your inumerable jacket pockets and have to search for for a couple of minutes to find. My children are incredibly special and incredibly brilliant. I'm thrilled that I've had as easy a time as I have discovering and nurturing their gifts, and that unschooling has allowed them to soar by, as Gatto suggests, managing themselves. They're exceptional, perhaps, in that their gifts are easy to see and show up seemingly magically in neat and tangible ways. But I don't think they're exceptional in having gifts. Just common as dirt.

Small real-life rant

I heard myself say this after supper this evening, in carefully clipped speech:

"You know, there's no rule that says the oldest female in a family is responsible for all the housekeeping and cooking and has to do everything all the time for everyone, unless someone should deign to do her a rare favour by helping out with something."

Alas, while the children were all witness to my rant, the spousal unit was asleep. The total extent of the effect of my rant was that a 10-year-old boy consented to finish sweeping the kitchen floor without mentioning the "slave" word again.

It felt like a very long day and, Erin's lovely performance aside, I am feeling really sick of holding the ball for everything and everyone in this family. All I wanted was half an hour to practice my viola, without things going from bad to worse in the rest of the house. Is it too much to ask that just for once they might even go from bad to less bad? That someone around her might just for once wash a mixing bowl, fold a piece of laundry, wipe their oogy stuff out of the sink, pour Fiona a bit of cashew milk, cook a meal? Apparently.

I need sleep.