A conference for people who work with kids with special needs

I spent the weekend at the California Association for the Gifted Conference in Sacramento. This isn’t a conference for people who doubt what “gifted” means, though I would guess that most people at the conference dislike the term as much as I do because of its implication of a value judgment. The conference focuses on the needs — psychological, educational, social — of kids that present a large number of common characteristics. [See the NAGC's FAQ page for specifics.] Let’s call them accelerated learners.

It’s clear to anyone who has worked with them that such learners have special needs. I remember when my four-year-old daughter’s therapist recommended, “You should refer to her at her school as a child with special needs.” I was initially shocked — that term is most commonly applied to kids on the other end of the learning spectrum.

But these days I totally get what she means. And so did pretty much everyone at the conference. Whether they were parents of these kids, teachers of these kids, or therapists of these kids, they could see the group as clearly as special education teachers see kids with Down Syndrome.

The aspect of this group of kids that interests many of the people at the conference is not the fact that they can learn quickly. That’s like saying that those who care for and educate kids with Down Syndrome are focused on their slower learning pace. Their learning rate is part of the whole package.

What many people who are working with these kids are interested in is the fact that not all these kids are doing well. Yes, there are kids like that straight-A student, captain of the football team, president of the student council. But most kids who present the characteristics of this group have unrecognized problems. Many of them are unlikely to be designed “gifted” in school — not a small percentage of them are put into remedial learning. Many of them are not socially adept and end up lonely and confused. Estimates of how many of them drop out of high school range from 10 to 20 percent.

So although there were some talks aimed at what these kids can do, most of what I heard was about what we need to change to help these kids negotiate the minefield they were born into. I went there determined to wear my reporter hat and go to lots of “schooly” talks about GATE funding and the differentiated classroom. However, I found myself drawn again and again to the psychologists who are learning why these kids are like they are, how they can reach their potential, how we can keep them from falling into those negative statistics quoted above.

[I did go to some "schooly" talks and will be writing about those soon.]

The various developmental theories that are being developed attempt to explain why a child who learns to read at 3 can’t seem to get along in a social environment till she’s 8. Or why a child who can do math in his head just can’t seem to get himself to write it down. Why some children start out fast and then slow way, way down. Why accelerated learners can present symptoms of ADHD, bipolar, dysgraphia, sensory integration disorder, etc. [See Hughes.]

No matter what approach they take, psychologists see an usual progression of development in the brain. These kids seem to be getting more signals into the lower brain — there were many knowing chuckles in the audience when one presenter mentioned the kids who are annoyed by their socks, the sound of the lights, a smell no one else notices. It’s also clear that they seem to be developing the frontal lobes (the reasoning area) long before they are developing the parts of their brains that usually develop first, such as emotional and social skills. [See NIH News.]

So what you end up with is kids who present differently but are treated similarly. The kid who presents ADHD excels in a faster, hands-on learning environment. The kid who can’t get along with other four-year-olds gets along just fine with older kids with a higher academic level. The kid who hates school and gets awful grades loves her “gifted” program and does even more work than is assigned. [See Grobman.]

This is hard for other parents to understand sometimes, and can lead to conflict. Many kids would do better in a GATE program than they do in our test-obsessed, repetition-heavy classrooms. But not all kids would. The average kid designated “gifted” needs around 2 repetitions to learn a skill. The average kid needs 8-10. So in the perfect world, each student would get what she needs in any classroom, and none of them would be bored. But in our world of finite resources and test-obsessed administrations, we’re having to choose who gets which services and which learning environments.

What’s clear to me is that the “they don’t need any help” attitude is not serving these kids at all. Sure, some of them excel, but the CAG Conference was full of people working with and studying even more kids who don’t. They do have special needs. Yes, all children have gifts, but accelerated learners need the disabilities that can accompany their gift to be acknowledged and understood in order for them to live successful, fulfilling lives.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education, Psychology.

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By Suki Wessling – March 9, 2010

Buy local, be local

It is no secret that my local health foods store has, to put it mildly, somewhat high prices. I have also noted that our local pharmacy, owned by the pharmacist and staffed, along with others, by his wife, can’t offer me the same discounts as my health insurance company’s online pharmacy. When I tell people that I shop at our local farmer’s market, they often point out that I pay higher prices there than at Safeway.

Heddi Craft at the Educational Resource Center

Yet, silly me, I keep shopping at these places.

I have decided to invest some of our income in our community, and I feel it’s a worthwhile investment. When we moved here, we had a small office supply store a mile away. At their going out of business sale, I spoke to the owner and he told me that the store had never made money. Our local residents, apparently, preferred driving to Staples for the discounts. Now, I have to say that I love Staples and do shop there sometimes, but I try just as often to make myself go to a local store and pay that slightly higher price so that they’ll stick around. It used to be I had to drive or walk a mile to get a specialized envelope or the right kind of paper. Now I have to drive into Capitola to Palace (preferably) or stop at Staples because it’s convenient and I’m in a hurry.

I remember our lost office supply store when I consider driving elsewhere to buy something that our local natural foods store sells. I’d love it if they could afford to charge slightly lower prices, but that will never happen if they can’t afford to stay in business.

I just heard that we got a new little science store nearby and once I check it out I’ll put up a review. You can be sure I’ll check it out, and you can be sure I know that it will have higher prices and lower inventory than Mindware.com. I love our local educational toy store, Kaleidoscope, and I go there even though they don’t always have what I want. Every time I consider ordering things they carry online, I imagine life without Kaleidoscope. Our bank account would be fuller but our lives would be less rich.

I make a point of buying books from Bookshop or Bookcafe, even though I know I get better deals at Amazon. Bookshop has started a “One Book Pledge” program on Facebook. Their point is…

A recent study found that even customers who would define themselves as a loyal independent bookstore customers only buys four out of every ten books from an independent bookstore. Imagine what would happen if everyone dedicated themselves to buying that fifth book from an independent as well. For a store like ours, it means more local jobs, more author events, the ability to carry more unique, small press titles and more money flowing to local schools and libraries…

Exactly. Remember that we used to have a wonderful store full of wooden toys and other high quality things for kids? We used to have a great number of specialized bookstores (we probably still have more than average), local hardware stores, more local natural food stores. In my time here, more and more local stores have died as big chain stores come in, lowering prices initially but starving us of variety as well as local money that stays local.

I am trying to force myself to consider the value of an item, and whether it makes sense that it should be sold locally. If it does, I try to support our local store, at least, as Bookshop suggests, once a month.

Speaking of which: Go on over to the Educational Resource Center and check out the new offerings. It just gets better and better. Now, in addition to a great collection of toys, games, books, videos, curriculum, dress-up clothing, building sets, and art kits, there are classes for kids of all persuasions. Fun (and educational) classes for preschoolers, homeschool classes, and afterschool classes for elementary school kids. This is a resource that makes our community richer, and if we don’t support it, we’ll lose it.

There are some things you just can’t get online.

Posted in Avant Parenting.

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By Suki Wessling – March 5, 2010

Learning to read

I have a vivid memory of how reading was taught in my son’s first grade classroom. His teacher had returned to the classroom after working as a homeschool teacher, and had brought some pretty unusual (from the perspective of public school, that is) ideas back with her. One of those ideas was the given the right rich environment, most kids will learn to read in one way or another, but you don’t have to instruct or push them in first grade.

What? No more phonics/whole language wrangling? No “reading readiness” homework? Just enjoying learning? [Read Alfie Kohn if you want to learn more about this approach.]

Needless to say, her ideas didn’t appeal to all parents or all students. It’s hard for parents to feel comfortable when they’ve been taught that children learn to read in first grade, and here comes a teacher who says, children learn to read when they’re ready. In this classroom, the teaching happened through reading aloud, telling stories, writing, and sharing. One student who’d just had it with waiting for reading instruction had a friend teach her! (Of course, her teacher thought this was fabulous.)

My experience and the experiences of lots of homeschoolers say the same thing: most kids are going to learn to read when they’re ready, and though many of them are ready in that 6-7 age year, outliers disprove the idea that learning to read in that timeframe is necessary or even appropriate or healthy for many children.

Psychology Today just came out with an article on this very topic, which sums up what a lot of educators are noticing. First, kids learn to read at radically different ages if you leave the process to a more natural development. Second, the age a child learns to read actually doesn’t correlate with how well s/he will do in school, how much s/he will enjoy reading later, or pretty much anything else.

There are the outliers, of course: kids who learn to read fantastically early and then go on to show other remarkable early intellectual growth may thrive in a different type of educational environment. Kids who have problems such as dyslexia or other learning disabilities will clearly need a lot of instruction and help.

But all those other kids, it turns out, do just fine being read to, listening to recorded stories, and learning in the myriad other ways that humans learn without reading. Once they’re ready to read, they’ll show interest in learning and will ask for help when they need it.

The other thing that the Psychology Today article mentions is the harm that comes to kids when they are pushed to read before they are ready and willing. The process our public schools use for teaching reading can be brutal to a kid who really isn’t ever going to learn to read well until unusually late. I remember those kids in my school — the “stupid” kids. Yes, we all knew who they were, and the other kids could be quite cruel to them.

(I hope I was nicer than the kids I remember, but perhaps not. I remember a lesson in humility early on when I had to help one of those kids with a spelling quiz and I mispronounced a word – “wholly” – because I’d been reading in class rather than paying attention! He was actually very kind to me when he corrected me, and I think we both thought it was pretty funny.)

As all reasonable people know now, those kids aren’t “stupid” at all, and I bet most of them can read just fine now. Their success in life had absolutely nothing to do with the age at which they learned to read.

What else can happen to a kid who’s not an early reader? Being held back, for example. I was shocked when my sister told me that her son had to learn 30 sight words by the end of his kindergarten year or he’d be held back! My son, a prodigious reader, didn’t know 30 sight words by the end of kindergarten. Imagine if he’d been held back — what good would that have done him? (Or the school, given that when he took the STAR test in second grade, he was at the top of the curve.)

About why most children learn to read, the author has two memorable pieces of information: “Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end” and “Reading, like many other skills, is learned socially through shared participation.” It’s clear that most kids in that great variety of humanity will learn to read if they are in the right environment and they see good, compelling reasons to read.

If our schools relaxed their approach of pushing kids to read, they could pay special attention to kids who are showing real difficulties — special positive attention. There’s a difference between a kid who’s not ready to read at 7 and a kid who is showing signs of dyslexia, and a good teacher can see that. Then everyone can relax and not be pushed into being failures at the age of 6.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education, Homeschooling.

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By Suki Wessling – February 28, 2010

Tell me the truth

OK, so tell me the truth: are my kids weird?

Last week did your kids think that chicken apple sausage was the very best thing they’d ever eaten, and this week did they deny ever putting such a thing in their mouths?

Do your kids get in fights over such deep insults as “You were looking at me weird!”?

Do your kids desperately tell you upon getting off the bus that they need Valentines for school on Tuesday, then deny all knowledge of Valentines when you sit them down to make some?

Do your kids wear their shirts backwards or inside-out? How about their raincoats?

Do your kids believe that you want them to come into your office, play with your mouse, and swivel in your office chair?

Do your kids think that the word “poop” is the funniest in the English language?

When you say, “Stop dropping your food on the floor — I’m the one that has to clean it up” do your kids say, “But Mommy, you like cleaning!”?

When you ask, “Why do you think I like cleaning?” do they answer, “Because you do it so much, so you must like it!”?

When you say, “Please put your lunch dishes in the kitchen,” do your kids answer, “You’re mean!”?

Does he say, “You’re not the boss of me!” when he’s four?

Does she say, “I’m not your slave, you know,” when she’s 7?

It’s been raining for three days straight. Your child tries to leave the house without his raincoat. You ask where it is. Does he say, “Why should I know where it is?”

Has your child learned to tie his shoelaces yet?

Does your child express complete confusion as to why, in the two hours he’s been working on his report, he’s only typed two words?

When you ask your children how something happened, do they blame their imaginary friends?

When your children say they can’t find something, can you find it in under 30 seconds?

Does your child wear mismatched socks? On purpose or because he didn’t notice?

Will your child only wear socks that suit her mood?

Did your child dress up as H1N1 for Halloween?

Do your children talk babytalk when adults as them questions?

Do your children freak out adult strangers by using the correct words for things when they are two?

Can your children repeat the same phrase, over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over,and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over….

…..No?

Really? Oh.

Well, uh, mine don’t either.

Just asking…. Bye!

Posted in Avant Parenting.

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By Suki Wessling – February 22, 2010

What is gifted? And why?

I was talking to a friend recently about my work on Examiner.com concerning gifted children. What is gifted? she asked. A very reasonable question, and one that no one has completely defined yet – to my satisfaction, at least.

I’m planning an article on Examiner.com about all the various definitions of “gifted,” but here I can address my personal reasons for getting into all this in the first place! (If you want to know when I publish that article, or if you want to read my articles in general, click on “Subscribe” on either of my Examiner pages. You’ll get e-mail whenever I publish anything, and I get paid a higher rate with more subscribers!)

There’s the part of “gifted” that most people are familiar with: my son is a good example. Very smart boy, very sensitive, not into sports. Very good in school. Until he was nearly 9, I had no interest in knowing more or applying the label. Frankly, although it was obvious he was smart, I didn’t think anything more of it. I’m sure I have written before of the experience I had when he was in first grade and a dad said to me, “I wish my son could read as well as yours.” And I wanted to (but didn’t) answer, “I wish my son could hit a baseball!”

Because of course, we get the kid we get, and if we’re good parents we give up on the idea that our kids are going to be Tiger Woods and settle for who they actually are, the magical, amazing person they came out as. (Actually, I was probably more hoping that our son would be Buckaroo Banzai!)

But then along came our daughter. She was amazing as well, but incredibly frustrating. We just didn’t understand her. Nothing I read, no one I consulted with, could tell me anything that rang true for her. After pulling her from kindergarten in frustration, some little bug in the back of my brain spoke up. Gifted. What was it that I had read about difficult gifted children?

So I went on the path that you can read in past posts. I hired someone to work with her who was well-versed in the variety of gifted kids out there, and she gave me some little pushes in the right direction. We went from having a baffling, difficult, unsuccessful child to having a baffling, difficult, amazing, happy, successful child.

Whether or not the present explanation is correct, there is an explanation that fits my daughter. She showed incredible academic intelligence abilities very early. She showed very weak emotional intelligence. Where other kids were going through those stages that didn’t fit her (and frankly hadn’t fit my son so well, either), she was doing her own thing. The explanation that works for me is that like many people labeled “gifted,” she skipped the normal phase of emotional/social development and went straight to figuring everything out. She couldn’t tell you why she’d thrown the math materials all around the room, but she could figure out real-world math problems with ease.

So yes, I hate the word “gifted.” (Read my post on that if you want the long explanation.) It’s a stupid word that implies value judgment and leaves so much space for ambiguity. Is that kid who could hit a baseball right outta the park in first grade gifted? Of course he is. “Gifted” in the general sense just means that someone was blessed by an ability that they have chosen to develop to the point that other people notice and admire it.

But as a technical educational term, “gifted” is much more specific. And the kids to whom it is most valuable are not necessarily those well-behaved kids sitting the front row with all the answers. It might be the 13-year-old girl getting C’s in middle school so the boys would like her. It might be that totally out-of-control boy who gets medicated for ADHD without an attempt to provide him the right sort of environment to stimulate his unusual brain. It might be that quiet kid in an out-of-control inner city school who gets no notice because her teachers are busy putting out fires.

Those are the gifted kids I’m particularly interested in. They’re the ones that the rest of us don’t recognize, who get stigmatized for their unusual behavior, who get drugged or shoved into remedial classes. They are the unsuccessful gifted kids, but we can help them. As I said in another post, my daughter needed educators who recognized that she needs specialized, not special, education. If I’d put her in public school, she’d have a diagnosis by now, and probably some drugs. I’d have a huge guilt burden that I knew that something was wrong with the diagnosis.

So when my friend asked me, “What is gifted?” and I felt that weird feeling again like using the word was making a value judgment — placing my kid over hers — I just didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what gifted is, really. Researchers are getting closer, but they really can’t tell you for sure, either. But I do know that the label allowed me to access the information I needed to help her get along in the world.

It’s definitely not a value judgment. I treasure my daughter, but all children truly do have gifts to share with us. I loved writing about Lizz Anderson who talks about how her son with Down Syndrome has changed so many lives. There is no way to predict what value any individual will give the world. But as parents, we can do our best to help our child be successful in whatever way that is meaningful.

Some of you out there may have baffling kids as well. If any of this is sounding familiar to you, get yourself over to Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted and start reading. Like me, you may not like the word or the label, but the collected wisdom of lots of parents, educators, and mental health professionals working with these kids might help you as it did me.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education, Psychology.

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By Suki Wessling – February 18, 2010

The uninvited wedding guest

In this week’s newsletter, Parmalee mentioned that she loves to hear skunk stories. Now that’s a challenge I can’t pass up!

It’s a day after Valentine’s Day, thus 12 years and a day after my husband proposed to me. We were the perfect model of the modern couple: we lived together before we decided to get married, and were planning to discuss it and announce to family when appropriate. The diamond ring? Probably not. White dress in a church or temple? No way!

Croquembouche, though not our croquembouche

Then we went out for Valentine’s Day to the old Oswald Restaurant, which you may remember was in a very intimate space near the Locust Street parking garage. My hubby confessed later that he’d planned to do the standard thing and propose in the romantic restaurant, but we were literally less than a foot from our neighbors’ backs and he lost his nerve. So on the way to our car, at the entrance to the Locust Street Garage, he popped out a diamond ring.

It was as surprising as it could get for me. He’d recently visited his mom and told her about our plans, and she gave to him the ring that she’d been given by her husband, whose mother had received the ring from her husband, my husband’s grandfather. It was a diamond cut in 1925. Later my husband’s aunt told me about when she was a child in Brooklyn and her mother lost the diamond in a mud puddle! It’s a ring with a history, and I love it.

So with that part done, there was just the deed to do. We thought about just getting it over with, but my father said, “But the landscaping isn’t in yet!” It was our last El Niño year, and it rained and rained and rained. We set the wedding for June at my parents’ new farm, figuring how could a June wedding in Watsonville be rained out? It rained the day before, but our wedding day dawned sunny. The photos show an infant vineyard, now 13 years old, and intensely green hills not seen in June since then.

It was a family affair. My sister’s soon-to-be husband had recently been trained as a pastry chef. He dipped strawberries in chocolate the night before and left them in the garage to cool overnight. He made us an amazing tower of a cake, a Croquembouche. My photographer brother took photos. My younger sister spoke in the ceremony. The judge we hired tried to keep a straight face while reading the vows we’d written, and finally broke off with an aside, “I didn’t write this, you know.”

There was only one hitch: I noticed vaguely amidst my flurry that there was a “Do Not Enter” sign on the door to the garage. I may have noticed that my soon-to-be brother-in-law was dipping a new set of strawberries. It wasn’t until later that I asked why: When my father got up at the crack of dawn and went into the garage, he found an engorged skunk asleep, happily snoring away. He’d eaten all the strawberries.

A sleeping skunk, though not OUR sleeping skunk!

My father hastily locked the catdoor, locked the doors to the garage, and put up the sign. At dusk, he carefully opened the door to the outside and backed away.

For an uninvited guest, I have to say that the skunk behaved himself. Apparently the cats were wise enough to stay away, and soon after the door was opened, the skunk ambled away, probably having noticed that no new feast had been set out for him.

My personal opinion is that no good wedding is without a major hitch, something to make it a more memorable day. I consider that skunk a treasured guest of the day, one who I will never forget though he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Psychology, Santa Cruz.

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By Suki Wessling – February 15, 2010

From babytime to tantrums with not a moment to spare!

My kids and I just got back from the snow. We found an amazing place that is an easy drive from Santa Cruz. Really. No, I’m not going to tell you. You’ll tell your friends, and then, well, you know what will happen.

My experience with visiting the snow in California was completely confined to visiting my husband’s cousin in Truckee. The great thing about Truckee is that it’s the first stop on the top of the hill. After you’ve endured the grueling drive, which lasted one time 8 hours sitting on 80 far from any bathroom, Truckee seems close.

Fun in the snow

But it’s also amusing to a Midwesterner, this idea of driving to snow. I never did it when I didn’t have kids, but then it started to seem important. They Have To Know That Life Isn’t Always Easy.

We went with a friend who has two kids and a baby. We decided to rent a cabin in a place where we could shoo the kids outside while their mothers sat inside eating bonbons. We forgot the bonbons, but otherwise it was pretty true to the plan. We shooed the kids outside; one came in crying. We shooed her outside; another came in crying. Pretty standard fare, I guess.

We got to some of the many projects we’d planned, including my forcing my kids to make the Valentine craft I’d brought along. “This holiday is about Love, darn it! Get making those Valentines!”

My son protested that he didn’t need Valentines. I reminded him that he’d said, getting off the bus the day before we left, “I have to have Valentines when we go back to school!” He denied everything. Good thing I’m the parent.

The snow was fine, and I enjoyed the pine-scented air, but what was really great was baby-time. To think that I spent almost 35 years not getting baby-time! When I was pregnant, I thought, well, it won’t always be a baby, right? It’ll learn to read and play music and talk politics, and then I’ll get to enjoy it.

And then my son popped out with his curly dark hair and dark grey eyes, and that was the end of not getting baby-time. Babies are perfect beings. As my friend said, “I just can’t believe that in five years she’s going to be driving me crazy!”

In retrospect, our trip back was predictable, though I do find that my predictive abilities lie in hindsight. We stopped at a cave tour, which lasted nearly an hour, and then, of course, the bathrooms were at the back of — yeah, you already know that I’m going to fall for this, don’t you? — the gift shop! So daughter of mine wants to buy something, and though I had been saying, No No NO all the way through the tour, I said, “Oh, OK. You can get a rock.”

Son of mine takes me at my word, though he stretches the assigned budget by ten percent. He’s working on being a software engineer. Not sure what my daughter is working on. She just couldn’t decide. And I knew this was going to happen. And she hadn’t eaten anything for well over an hour, and I had further evidence that it was going to happen.

But I think that being a parent sends some sort of memory-erasing hormone through your blood so that each night you forget the horrors of the day that passed.

She can’t choose a rock. She’s mesmerized by the candy, all the colorful rows of it. Finally I have to drag her out, and she has not gotten her rock. All of a sudden she must have that rock. She NEEDS that rock.

“When I’m 13,” she says in a moment of lucidity amidst the storm. “Ask me if I remember this trip. I Won’t Remember This Trip! I will have Nothing to remember this trip by! You Must Let Me Buy A Rock.”

It occurs to me that those who know my daughter now don’t have much of a grasp of where we’ve been. She goes along these days with little eruptions: she is constantly tempted to pull long hair; she is obstinate and defiant; she says things she shouldn’t say. But people who have met her recently don’t know what we’ve come through. From about 18 months to 6 years, this sort of incident was routine. Some days we could take hours just to get out of the house because she had to throw unbelievably long tantrums. She had a husky voice then from all the screaming. She couldn’t go to school. She couldn’t find a way to calm herself.

Babytime

It’s been a long road to here, when I had no warning signal that the tantrum was coming. I was walking blissfully along, offering my seven-year-old girl a rock. I should have known better.

But I do know better: these times are further and further from normal. She’s never ceased to be a difficult person, but she has ceased being that child that could never fit in. When she was four, I would never have considered asking a friend to share a cabin. Now, I didn’t think twice about it. Our lives march on.

And life isn’t always easy. But in raising children, it’s all worth it. First you get baby-time, and in kissing that fuzzy head you get to experience perfection. Then you get a person. And you watch them grow and marvel at their abilities and disabilities. It’s a bumpy ride, that’s for sure!

Posted in Avant Parenting.

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By Suki Wessling – February 13, 2010

Big cats, little cats, wild cats

When I heard that there was a wild cat show at the Rio Theater, I thought about how much I love cats, I thought about how busy we were, and I thought about how there was some incident…

Then the publisher of Santa Cruz Parent asked me if I wanted tickets.

Wild cat adventure

What can I say? I love cats. I love my three heat-seeking love units (i.e. domesticated cats). I love to see big ones from a distance and imagine touching their beautiful coats. But I’m also a wimp, and thus did not become a big cat handler. I’m a big cat handler wanna-be.

So the Wild Cat Adventure is just about perfect for me. Sure, I still wanted to stroke their coats, but seeing them up close was almost as good. Let me tell you: these cats are gorgeous. And they aren’t stressed out in a zoo, pacing around in their cages, lolling around like they’re drugged or just checked out. These cats are engaged, and so are their presenters. It’s quite a show.

Barbara and Rob, a wife and husband duo, talk on the stage and bring out the cats one by one. Barbara does most of the talking, Rob most of the handling. It’s clear that they respect the cats and understand them and care for them. As Rob said, “We love them; they use us.”

The five cats we got to see were a Canada lynx, a cheetah, a serval cat, a Geoffrey’s cat, and a California mountain lion. All of the cats were born in captivity and the presenters were deeply knowledgeable about their role in the animals’ lives. They explained that their main goal was education: they want to bring these cats into people’s lives so that we can learn about them in the wild and understand what is happening to them.

They offered tidbits of knowledge about each animal, much of which I, a cat lover, didn’t know: Our bobcats are lynxes. Cheetahs are diurnal so that they won’t be eaten by nocturnal lions. What we call a mountain lion has 65 different names because its original habitat was across all of North America, and each local tribe gave it a different name.

They also gave a glimpse inside the psychology of each animal. The serval cat is a mouse-catcher, so they tempt it to hunt by presenting a piece of raw chicken at the bottom of a tube (their simulation of a mouse hole). The Geoffrey’s cat looks like a house cat (though more beautiful than any tabby aspires to), but is a biter. Rob said, “I respect these cats and I never turn my back to them.” No kidding.

They explained that our feelings for the cats are not reciprocated. What we saw as the cats being affectionate with them was the cats marking their territory. They explained why cats get shot by ranchers and why people think cats are getting more dangerous, when really it’s the other way around.

We, they pointed out to us, are the fiercest predator. We have a mythology of fear of cats, but we are running them out of their native lands, hunting them to extinction. The tiny Geoffrey’s cat with its gorgeous coat has been hunted nearly to extinction for the value of its tiny furs.

Moremi, a caracal

“Can you imagine how many of these cats it takes to make a coat?” they asked.

The children in the audience were in awe. When the first cat, the lynx, jumped up on the table, a quiet, awesome, “Ah” rose from the audience. This was much closer to religion than entertainment. This was not the circus of our childhoods, in which the big cats were dominated by the man with the whip. Rob clearly understood each cat. Though the kids didn’t notice, I noticed that when he had his biggest, heaviest, fiercest cat — our mountain lion — on the table, it was on a white-knuckled, four-inch lead.

As we left the house, my husband joked, “Don’t sit in the front row.” But I have to say I wasn’t concerned at all throughout the show, even for our friends who really were in the front row. At the opening they explained that they won’t show any cat over one hundred pounds (half of Don’s weight), and that they wanted us to follow some rules about what not to do to excite or scare the animals. Though they clearly cared about the audience, their greatest concern was for the comfort of the cats, which would determine the safety of the audience. They refused to start the show till all the house lights were brought up so that the cats wouldn’t be greeted with shadows, which spook them.

I felt like we were in an ancient temple, with the awesome power of nature in front of us. Unfortunately, given what we’ve done to nature, it was more like a museum, like the Temple of Dendur inside the Metropolitan Museum in New York. There was a sadness to the presentation, underneath the worship and amazement. As they told us over and over, we can’t live with these animals. They are predators, and they need their own space to thrive. Our challenge is to figure out how we can do that for them, simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education.

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By Suki Wessling – February 7, 2010

Standards for everyone!

I didn’t need any more convincing that Alfie Kohn is one of the clearest thinkers about education out there. When my son was in first grade, his teacher handed out a copy of his article on why homework is unnecessary. I’ve been a fan ever since.

A friend pointed me to this article that he wrote for Education Week about national education standards. As usual, he’s right on the money. This is his summary of No Child Left Behind:

Today, we survey the wreckage. Talented teachers have abandoned the profession after having been turned into glorified test-prep technicians. Low-income teenagers have been forced out of school by do-or-die graduation exams. Countless inventive learning activities have been eliminated in favor of prefabricated lessons pegged to state standards.

And here’s what he says about imposing more of what preceded that wreckage:

Advocates of national standards say they want all (American) students to attain excellence, no matter where they happen to live. The problem is that excellence is being confused with entirely different attributes, such as uniformity, rigor, specificity, and victory.

I’m not a great believer in the conspiracy theory of education that some homeschooling advocates cite: They’re actually trying to make school dumber and dumber to get kids to become more compliant adults who will churn out widgets in Mr. Big Man’s factory. Mr. Big Man, of course, went to fancy prep school and Ivy League college, so he has no stake in public education except in that it churns out his perfect workers.

Perhaps I would have believed that theory in 1958, but now? As we all know, America needs more creative, scientific thinkers and more entrepreneurs. We’re importing those people in scores while we bore our children into submission in our test-driven schools.

I think what’s happening is that people who are well-educated are just completely out of touch with what got them there in the first place. They all think, ‘I did well on standardized tests so that’s what it means to be educated.’ I have to admit that I was one of them before my kids forced me to open my eyes. I always knew that I had largely hated school, that high school was a big waste of my time and I ended up dropping out. So why was I so focused on my kids going to “good” schools and getting “good” grades?

Before I had kids, I figured our local neighborhood school would be fine for them. When I saw how incredibly boring it was going to be, I started to look at alternatives. My son’s first grade teacher introduced me to the idea that even public school didn’t have to be boring. Learning about homeschooling made me focus more on what education really is.

Let’s face it: every child is different. A child can’t be tested for efficiency like a condom or a stapler! Each child has his or her own strengths and weaknesses, things that excite him or her and things that are just plain boring. Our job as teachers is to encourage the strengths and excitements, and to gently address the weaknesses and lack of interest.

My son now goes to one of the best private schools around. “Best” in my definition, of course. We just had a meeting with his fifth grade teacher. His teacher told us that he figures his first semester job is getting to know the kids, helping them form a community in the classroom, and gaining their trust. Yes, that’s what he does for the entire first semester.

The second semester is all about gentle encouragement (i.e. pushing) to remedy their weaknesses and to encourage them to expand from their focused passions. My son’s school does standardized testing in a few grades, but they aren’t testing whether the teacher is doing a good job. The test of the teacher is that grown-ups who had him when they were in fifth grade are still starry-eyed about what he did for them. The test of the teacher is that my son, who was at the top of the standardized test scores and has achieved the learning goals for fifth grade, still wants to go to school.

Here’s the problem with a standardized nation: how would my son’s teacher look as represented by numbers to someone in an office in Washington D.C.? Frankly, he had nothing to do with his students’ test scores. My son went into fifth grade at the top of the curve. My son’s test scores are largely reflective of his parentage, our parenting, and the whole of his school career. Standardized tests can’t measure whether his teacher has him fired up to learn and be a good, concerned citizen.

That’s what school needs to do: excite kids, teach them how to build on their passions, remedy their weaknesses to the point that they can become functional adults who contribute to our society. Not all kids are going to be proficient in all subjects. If they were, what a boring nation we would have! All those scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who are snapping up our green cards don’t want to be here because we are “proficient” and “standardized.” They want to be here for the passion, the opportunities, and the grand vision of this country. That’s the only standard that I want.

Posted in Culture Critic, Education, Homeschooling.

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By Suki Wessling – February 2, 2010

Grey minivan people

Is there anything better in California than a day like today?

Today's lovely beach

My sister told me that they were coming to visit (from the East Bay) and that they were planning to go to the beach for low tide. I like an excuse to get me to the beach. Perhaps it’s not this way for your family, but for my family, going to the beach always turns into a Big Thing. We need to get the sand toys, the towels, the snack, the sandals. Ten-year-old turns up ready to go in sneakers. No, sandals! He disappears. Mommy realizes that kids will get ridiculously hungry and thus blow up (after coming back from the beach) so she has to go pack a snack. We decide that maybe they will want to go boogie boarding. We find out that their wetsuits are six inches too short and they have to trade up. 7-year-old has to complain that her suit hurts her wrists. Amost-11-year-old is always convinced that he hates going to the beach…before we go.

Finally we get in the car, we drive past Seascape and La Selva, and we’re at the beach.

High Surf – No Swimming

Oh, well.

The beach was wide and gorgeous. Enormous waves were crashing far out and their wake was a smooth, wide spread of tantalizing water. The cousins were already up to their ankles. Then their knees. So much for high surf advisory.

My sister and I went for our walk. We got to marvel at the crazy houses people build on the cliffs, admire the various dogs, and look for sand dollars to take back to the kids.

Then my sister says, “What’s this?” She reaches down and jumps back as the unusual-looking thing reaches out towards her.

Our barnacles

What it is, I cannot tell you. I have e-mailed the photo to the two marine biologists that I know. I can tell you it’s some sort of bivalve with a long foot and red lips. It seemed to sense my sister reaching for it, and then me. It reached toward us.

“Oh, should it be in the water?” she asked.

I said, “It would probably be happier there.”

We loaded it onto a piece of driftwood and my sister gave it her best Little League pitch out to sea. Plop, it went into the water, and then the wave retracted and there it was, on the sand. We hoped that the next wave would pull it in and we went on our way.

[Note: I have been told that they are gooseneck barnacles, a crustacean. They, along with lots of other unusual creatures, are being washed up by the storms.]

We got back to find the cousins working collaboratively on a canal system in the sand. They were focused and serious as only kids can be, when faced with a monumental task of no importance except for itself.

My editor at Examiner.com sends out an editorial calendar before each month starts. On it, they note the special features that they will have throughout the month – holidays, love-your-secretary weeks, that sort of thing. First on the calendar for February was Groundhog Day. I copied the text and e-mailed it to a fellow Californian Examiner. “We live in California, we don’t need Groundhog Day!”

No kidding.

The great thing about a winter like this is the punctuation of sunshine into the rainy days. A fine California winter is like a symphony: you have your downpours, your serene sunny days, your mudslides, and your happy ending.

Our happy ending was a glass of wine and a slice of cheese, Nana’s homemade bread, and the cousins getting along. It was a glorious day in California.

The beach, sun going down

I’ve just realized why I called this blog entry “Grey Minivan People.” After we went to the beach I went to the library to pick up some books. I came back out into the parking lot, unlocked my car, and opened the front door.

From the back I heard, “Hello?’ in a teenaged voice.

Oops. Wrong grey minivan. I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but there it is…

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education, Santa Cruz.

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By Suki Wessling – January 30, 2010

All I Want is a Good Night’s Sleep

Right now, as I type, my daughter is awake in the living room. She has made a nest on the couch and she is reading a Franklin book. No matter that she could be reading something more…well…elevated. She likes Franklin right now.

It is exactly 38 minutes after her bedtime. Her father is out for the evening, which is when things like this happen. Somehow, kids can smell my weakness. I won’t force them to eat; I won’t force them to pretend to sleep.

My first baby came out skinny and energetic. He turned over for the first time when he was a few days old. When he was a small baby, he was awake for two hours, then asleep for a half an hour. Not just during the day: day and night. Thus I was awake for hours, asleep for very few. After a few months, he switched his nighttime pattern so that he’d sleep two hours at a time.

They do sleep...when you can't!

This lasted until he was approximately three.

I remember one day when he was a toddler and for some reason, my parents had come to my house and then I was going to theirs. I had a moment of lucidity in which I asked my father to drive my car. As he drove onto the one-lane bridge we have to cross to get to their house, another car came around the curve at us, full speed. If I’d been driving, we’d no doubt be dead. I was so sleep deprived I could hardly think.

You’re wondering now we why didn’t use the method you used which was so successful. Well, we used them all. We tried Dr.-Scream-it-out (I have apparently suppressed his name from my memory). We tried Sears’ family bed. My husband bought a book called All I Need is a Good Night’s Sleep. We bought a video on Amazon.com by a Dr. Hull — we called him Dr. Dull but still, we tried his method.

When we flew to Italy when our son was a toddler, we even tried illicit drugs. Some friends gave us a sedative they sell over the counter in France to make kids sleep. Our son slept for 45 minutes and then was up for the rest of the flight, charming the flight attendants, but wearing his parents’ patience thinner yet.

When our son was three, we had been thinking about having another child, and I was joking that I was going to wait till our first one was sleeping through the night. One night I just lost it. I stood outside his room holding the door handle screaming, “Go To Bed! Go To Sleep! Leave Me Alone!”

Did you know that moms can scream in capital letters?

Almost exactly a month after that fateful night when my son finally did figure out that even if he didn’t sleep, he didn’t need to tell me about it, I was pregnant again. Be careful what you joke about.

Our second baby was a parents’ dream. She woke once a night for feeding when she was young. At one year, she never woke us again at night.

Till she did.

Our second one sleeps just fine, as long as everything is in order. You see, a child’s daytime personality is not necessarily her nighttime personality. Our son, so quiet and [occasionally] obedient during the day, was a wild man at night. Our daughter, who seems so full of bravado, not to mention vim and verve, during the day, falls sleep at 8 and sleeps a solid 11 hours.

Unless she doesn’t.

It’s always a disturbance in the routine: dinner at 6, bath at 7, put to bed at 8 by Daddy. If I put her to bed, she’d wake me at night. If we went out to a friend’s house for dinner, if we skipped the evening bath, if she didn’t like dinner. The reasons piled up. During the day, she’s afraid of nothing. At night, we never know. Our daughter, she of the bravado, has nightmares about Casper. (Yes, the friendly ghost!) She had nightmares about The Borrowers, for goodness sake.

It’s not fair to her, but her father and I now have no tolerance for these disturbances. Three years nearly drove us over the edge. Now as I sleep I am still poised, waiting for that baby to cry, the sound of “Mommy!”, the opening of a door. She didn’t get her first three years to disturb us, so she’s making up for it now.

All I want is a good night’s sleep.

And I’ll probably get it, tomorrow.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Health.

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By Suki Wessling – January 27, 2010

They really do grow up…

I’ve been noticing lately that our family has left a whole era behind: the era of the little kid.

Yesterday I took my daughter to a wonderful workshop at WaxWorks West. My old friend from my pre-mom years, Daniella Woolf, is a wonderful artist who does encaustic and started a studio with her friends Judy and Wendy. All three were there to guide a bunch of homeschoolers through a workshop in which they learned some basic techniques.

They do grow up!

Encaustic is an art where you embed various media in hot beeswax combined with a resin to make it harden when it cools. So obviously, this workshop included the use of hot wax, not to mention a blow torch, and thus wouldn’t have been appropriate for little kids. A few of the parents with younger siblings had to keep their kids downstairs or went elsewhere while the other moms watched their kids. I volunteered to keep my eye on one and then two.

A year ago I would not have done this. I would have told the other parents, I’m sorry, but I have to keep a watch on my daughter, then six, and still definitely a “little kid” when it came to being in a room with a hotpot full of molten wax. This year? No problem. My daughter drew, transferred, dipped, and torched to her heart’s content while I made sure the other two girls had their needs provided for. OK, I admit she got adult help with the torch and the dipping! But still, it was this odd feeling that I have moved into a whole new world, with independent kids who don’t have to be “watched.”

This world is one that I looked forward to before I had my first baby. I assumed that having a baby would be OK, though I didn’t particularly like babies. I thought having a preschooler might be fun because I like sandboxes, too. But I was really looking forward to kids who could ride bikes, cook, read, and clean their rooms (haha) by themselves.

Then I had the baby, my son: Of course, I fell totally in love with him and was sure that no baby could be as wonderful. Then he became a toddler and I thought, wow, how could I ever have thought he was interesting as a baby? Then a preschooler, and those toddler days with hauling around the diaper bag and special food seemed so passé!

Then his sister came along and I got to do it all over again: Really, was any baby so sweet? Was any toddler more interesting?

I was so embroiled in the fact that his sister was, uh, a bit too interesting as a 3 to 6-year-old that I only vaguely noticed how independent my clingy, shy son was getting. It wasn’t until this year when my daughter started to do it, too, that I realized how my life had changed. I forget, when I try to set up a time to meet the mom of a preschooler, about naps. When moms tell me how they haven’t gotten any sleep, I am sympathetic, but I also think, that’s not my life anymore. (Well, OK, not usually!)

At 7 and “almost 11″ (we’re not allowed to say ten anymore), our kids are really their own people. Though of course they still need guidance, there is so much that they can do themselves. Of course, there are still things they can do themselves that they don’t (when will my daughter start flushing the toilet?), but I can even trust my son to do “grown-up” things quite well. When I suggested that the public library might be interested in getting a copy of the environmental DVD that my son’s class is doing, he wrote a well-worded, very polite letter to their children’s services director, and she answered immediately.

There’s a whole different relationship that develops as your kids don’t need you for the most basic aspects of their existence. On the one hand, I miss the constant touch that I had with my kids who needed feeding, diapering, and dressing. On the other, now they can [almost] keep up with me at a normal walking pace, and I don’t always have to try to lose games when we play together! I can do something better than them and it’s not just “Oh, of course Mom does that for me because she’s the parent,” — it’s more like, “So that’s a way I can learn to do that better!” Instead of holding their hands when they’re dumping flour into the mixing bowl, I can tell them the best way to measure flour… and they can remember it!

This is the time that I was looking forward to before I had kids, and I have to say that I’m probably enjoying it more than I expected then. Instead of sending both of my kids off to school every day so that I can do “my own work,” my own work has become entwined with what they’re doing. There’s no way I could have predicted this path I’ve taken, and it’s all due to them that I’ve taken it.

Being a parent is a weird and wild journey through the lives of the beings we create…

Posted in Avant Parenting.

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By Suki Wessling – January 23, 2010

For me, it was an easy choice, but hard work

My mother (Mary N. Wessling, who’s a medical researcher) pointed me to this article in MedPage Today: Are Physicians Too Quick to Medicate ADHD?

The article posits whether family physicians are prescribing ADHD drugs at a too high rate to kids they see, without referring them to a qualified mental health professional. Clearly, this is the case. And clearly, the medical establishment has abdicated responsibility for it.

When my daughter was a preschooler, I was told by a doctor that it was common knowledge amongst doctors that you can diagnose ADHD by giving stimulants to kids. “If the stimulants work to help them focus, then it’s ADHD.” I believe that this is still a common belief amongst physicians, even though it’s been proven without a doubt not to be the case. Look at the recent New Yorker article about how college kids are taking black market ADHD drugs so that they can focus better when studying for tests. These are not college kids with diagnosed ADHD: these are kids who have always done just fine in school and have never been diagnosed as hyperactive. And surprise, the drugs help them focus, too.

A while back I started to research various theories of behavioral problems. I would have had no problem getting an ADHD diagnosis for my daughter (many doctors fill parent requests for ADHD drugs without much investigation if the parents say the child needs them, especially if a school recommends them). But I didn’t want to drug her. I wanted to figure out what was going on. She was a hyper-smart, funny, loving, creative person who in certain situations (like school) completely lost it.

What I found in my research[1] is that there are two worlds out there: there’s the world of the psychiatrist we saw who didn’t question that she needed drugs; she just wanted to figure out which one. Then there was the other world: practitioners of all sorts of therapies from Western to Eastern, concerned parents, and some Western-trained psychologists were all asking the obvious question: Why do we have ADHD now and not before? What has changed?

The answer is one that any amateur sociologist could have given: Our lifestyle and culture have changed. Our expectations of children have changed. Where we live, what we do, and how long we do it for has changed.

This is how my mother puts it: “We give disease names to behaviors that previously have just been considered difficult. That is not to say that things were better–these children were often the recipients of damaging physical and psychological abuse called ‘discipline’. We now have many more resources and information available.”

This is how the phenomenon is described by James T. Webb[2], a leading expert on gifted children (who are, he admits, often “quirky” and unusual): “I think our society has become increasingly less tolerant of quirkiness. Our schools, too. … In psychiatry and psychology, the number of diagnoses has proliferated increasingly. … For example, the unruly child is now seen as a diagnosable disorder, Oppositional Disorder . The town drunk now is an alcoholic and that’s a disease. There’s been a redefining. I think it’s been overboard.”

So this change has led to drugging children for what was once considered part of the normal continuum of human behavior. What’s shocking is not the research that revealed the success of therapies including diet change, having unstructured play time, and more time outside. What’s shocking is that our MDs just seem to have missed that boat. They are going happily along in their search for more and better drugs, and totally ignoring all the evidence that says that drugs are not the answer for many or possibly most of these kids.[3]

From the MedPage article: “Teachers and parents are looking for a quick fix,” added Mark D. Smaller, PhD, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Chicago who was not involved in the paper. “They’re reluctant to look at what’s behind that behavior, at what’s going on at home.”

The article cites child abuse as one possible cause of ADHD. Yes, that may be the case, but that rules out all the rest of us: the loving, imperfect parents who are just trying to raise their kids with the knowledge we have. And I don’t think that those parents would react badly if after explaining their child’s schedule to their pediatrician, the pediatrician suggested, “Perhaps you need to cancel tae kwon do one day a week and go for a long walk in the woods.”

Some of the alternative prescriptions for behavioral modification cost money: homeopathy, for example, is usually very expensive and not covered by insurance. Some of them take a lot of time: occupational therapy, for example. Some take a lot of change in the home: parenting changes, diet changes. But most of them are as cheap as a big bottle of fish pills from Costco. An hour walking in the woods with your child, finding out what he’s thinking about, giving him loving advice from the person he knows best.

But things that are hard are sometimes better. Yes, drugs are easy and cheap. But what does your child learn from drugs? That she can’t control her own behavior. That she can’t look at her environment and realize that it’s not good for her. These are not lessons I want my children to learn. I want her to know that she can make herself strong and healthy, that she can depend on herself and trust herself.

Last week one of the teachers in her homeschool program took me aside and said a few words about the changes she’s seen in my daughter.[4] One thing she said really hit me. “With a lot of kids who start behaving well in the classroom, you can see that they’re holding themselves back. They’re stopping themselves from doing things they’ve been told not to do. But your daughter has fundamentally changed. She’s enjoying her time in the classroom and she is doing what comes naturally to her now.”

Or she could be on drugs. I think we made the right choice. [5]

1. My article: Alternative treatments for behavioral problems
2. My article about James T. Webb and the evolution of knowledge about the particular social/emotional problems of gifted children.
3. I am well aware that there are children who desperately need medical treatments for real, difficult problems
4. Some details of the changes we made in our daughter’s lifestyle, including diet and environment
5. My news article on this topic on the Gifted Children Examiner.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Culture Critic, Health, Psychology.

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By Suki Wessling – January 19, 2010

Think there’s a problem with your child’s school? Think independent!

Lots of parents go for the school in their neighborhood and have positive experiences. Neighborhood schools serve many children well, and we are lucky that in our area we have so many dedicated educators who are not letting our state’s foibles discourage their teaching.

However, sometimes the local school doesn’t work out. Perhaps your child has an unusual learning style. Perhaps your child needs a faster pace, less testing, a more natural environment, or a focus on a particular academic area. Perhaps your child doesn’t have any special needs but your family does. If your neighborhood school is large and you are looking for a small community, that’s probably a bad fit. If you are a no TV, no junkfood family, you might be uncomfortable with your local school’s culture. Perhaps your child has done well in elementary school, but hates the social scene at her middle school. Perhaps your child’s grades have slipped because he is bored. Maybe you just like uniforms!

There are more reasons for choosing an alternative to your neighborhood public school than there are neighborhood public schools. Each family makes choices based on their own children, their own family values, and their own experiences. Luckily, for each family, there is probably something out there that fits their needs.

What sorts of independent schools are there?

Private parochial schools are usually aligned with a religious group. Saint Frances Central Coast High School, for example, is a Catholic school. Some private schools that are affiliated with religious groups have secular instruction, such as Mount Madonna School. Some private schools are based on a teaching philosophy, like Santa Cruz Montessori or Santa Cruz Waldorf. Some are based on a goal such as college preparation.

There are public schools that have a degree of independence as well. Charter schools are formed under the state charter school law and can have any sort of educational focus that they’d like. The charters in this county are diverse, from homeschool charter Ocean Grove to Alianza, a two-way bilingual immersion charter. Although charter schools are allowed to determine their own curriculum and methods, they do have to participate in the yearly No Child Left Behind testing and their charters, which must be renewed every five years, can be denied if they don’t show positive testing results.

Santa Cruz City Schools and Live Oak School District both have schools that are small school programs and thus exempt from testing requirements. Santa Cruz’s Branciforte Small Schools Campus hosts four small schools, each with its own educational focus and with a large degree of autonomy. Live Oak offers Ocean Alternative Education Center, a public homeschool program.

A large group of private schools in the county are holding the Central Coast Independent School Fair on Wednesday evening to give parents of kids from preschool to high school an idea of what they can find if they step out of their neighborhood public schools. If you are considering a change, or if you just want to see what’s out there, this is a good time to see the great variety of programs offered in our area.

If you are interested in finding a list of all the schools in our area, visit Santa Cruz Parent’s Resources page. If the school you are interested in is not at this event, it probably has an open house coming up soon. Check out their website or call for information.

Posted in Avant Parenting.

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By Suki Wessling – January 18, 2010

The many people our kids might be

A friend and I were talking the other day. I will preface this to say that this friend is fun, funny, outgoing, sarcastic, smart, and a good cook. All the things I like in a friend.

I confessed to her that every time I take one of those personality tests to determine what I should do when I grow up (if ever I grow up), they say that I should be in the category with “rabbi, priest, social worker, therapist.” In other words, nurturing professions where you take care of other people.

What professions have I practiced or considered? Writing, teaching, graphic design, law, music. The only one that comes close to nurturing is teaching, but I should add that before I started homeschooling, I never, ever wanted to teach children! No nurturing for me: just adults who knew what they wanted to be when they grow up.

Back to my friend: She said, “Of course those tests say you should have one of those professions. You’re a people person!”

Back to my description of her: fun, funny, outgoing, sarcastic, smart, and a good cook. Of herself, she says, “I’m shy, I’ve had to learn all the rules of getting along with people as I got older and had to attain those skills.”

In other words, just like me.

What this leads me to thinking about (what else do I think about?) is raising kids. Parents these days (including myself here) are generally pretty analytical about their kids. They watch to see if their babies attain all the milestones, and ponder what it means if they do them early or late. They wonder about the effects of artificial coloring and wheat and high fructose corn syrup. They worry about whether their kids get enough screen time. In other words, they’re paying attention, closer attention than parents probably ever have on the whole. They have a huge amount of resources coming at them over the airwaves. They can find out how people in Tibet parent, how much screentime kids in China get.

We pay so much attention to our kids that we have a good sense of them, often, by the time the start crawling. (Or not crawling: my daughter — and her mother — never did!) We think we have them pegged by kindergarten and we evaluate their potential teachers by the fit they have with our kids’ learning styles. (This is another conversation I’ve had with multiple moms!)

But here we are: my friend and me. We were both shy. I don’t know if this is true of her, but I remember that sometimes when an adult addressed me, I burst into tears. Perhaps this is genetic. My son did, too. Unexpected things, things that made me undefinably uncomfortable. I have pale skin: when I blush, people notice. Sometimes this still happens — it takes me unawares. One time I was asked by another parent to lead a song at a school function; I’m a singer and I long ago got comfortable with the fact that I don’t have a perfect voice. So I said OK. And there I stood in front of all those people, and though I’ve done this on a regular basis since college suddenly I felt that sinking feeling, like I was 13 again and something I was doing just seemed Not Good Enough…

My friend said I’m a people person. And I believe her. But that is definitely not the way anyone would have described me when I was a child. (I recently got back in touch with a close friend from my teen years; perhaps she will confirm this!) I remember myself as awkward and unhappy. I remember that as I got older, I realized what was making me unhappy (self-consciousness and self-critical thoughts) and awkward (worrying about what everyone else was thinking), and I made a conscious decision to change.

And I did. Not 100%. As I said, I stood in front of all those adults, most of whom I knew, and those kids, many of whom I knew, and I had something like a 13-year-old flashback. But fundamentally, I have changed.

And our children can, too. This is what my thoughts led me to: My friend says I’m a people person, and thus I have fundamentally changed. I used to be a cat-person, and a book-person, and a music-person. I was a child who locked herself in a closet with a book and a flashlight. I was a teenager who dyed a lock of her hair pink. I was a 20-some-year-old teaching teenagers and wondering if I had anything to say.

I’ve been many people, while still being fundamentally the same. And our kids will be, too, no matter how well we’ve analyzed them at the age of three. This is my thought for the day.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Psychology.

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By Suki Wessling – January 17, 2010

Avant parenting, Japanese style

Sometimes I wonder homeschooling is a sign of madness.

Then it occurs to me that parenting is probably a sign of madness. It certainly is for the men: they could go off and do the mighty hunter routine and go find another cave to live in, but instead they stick around with us. For the women, it’s less easy. It’s hard to reject flesh of your flesh, if you know what I mean.

This comes up because I’m exhausted. Today I ran “Japanese Culture Club” for four homeschooled girls. It used to be three, but four is a definite improvement. We added an older, calmer girl to the mix and gave it a good stir. Not quite the craziness of the three ingredient mix, if you know what I mean.

In the fall we did Nature and Baking Club with the three girls. That was exhausting but also easy. When my son was four, he and I went for lots of walks in the redwood forest that I’d been living next to for seven years and learned the names of the plants. We took photos and did research and then wrote a book about it. So teaching about the redwoods was something that I’d done before, and we did art and poetry and lots of playing in the creek.

Baking also comes naturally to me. I grew up in a house where lots of cooking happened, but baking was a powerful thing. My little sister still hasn’t forgiven me for making her grease the brownie pan over and over in exchange for getting to lick the bowl.

Hard at work at Japanese Culture Club

My brother and I were once inspired to make cheesecake and we stayed up til midnight waiting for it to get cold enough to eat.

But Japanese Culture Club is something different. Instead of something from my past, it’s something I’m planning for the future. The kids and I have been interested in learning Japanese for a while, but we’ve never done anything about it. Then I got a bee in my bonnet a couple months ago and decided that we were going to study Japanese, just do it. But in order to make myself do it, I had to raise the stakes. Thus three, and now four girls coming to my house weekly, expecting me to know a few words of Japanese, a song, and a meal.

Today was good morning, good afternoon, please, and thank you. It was tempura vegetables and teriyaki. Singing “Bun bun bun” about a bumblebee. At the time it didn’t seem like much. But it was.

It has left me drained and thinking about that flesh of my flesh thing. Now, why am I here when I could be living in that quiet, orderly cave I used to know? Why am I learning Japanese rather than sitting my kids down with a video from the library?

Working on the future is so much harder than enjoying the past.

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education, Homeschooling.

1 comment

By Suki Wessling – January 13, 2010

Getting rid of…part 2

Last week I wrote about cleaning out my closets, and I suggested that perhaps spring cleaning has moved to winter. Then I noticed that at least as far as my Facebook friends are concerned, spring cleaning is a thing of the past. What’s up here? Did the blue moon give us all cleaning out the nest instincts?

Last weekend we cleaned out our garage. Well, OK, we didn’t really clean it. Not wanting our cats to become coyote bait or bug us by banging on the screen door in the middle of the night, we lock them in the garage with a litter box, food, water, and a comfy blanket to sleep on.

They sleep on top of the cars, poop behind my husband’s motorcycle, and eat the moles they leave under the cars during the daytime. We try to make it into kitty spa, and they turn it into kitty skid row.

So OK, we didn’t clean the garage. I did scoop all accessible fossilized poop and stick it in the garbage, and we swept out the easiest to get dirt and leaves, but mostly what we did was organize and Get Rid Of.

What we got rid of: many, many cardboard boxes we were keeping for… uh…, a large bag of worn-out bath mats that we were keeping for… eh…, a bag of old clothing we were keeping to give to the Goodwill, a box of dishes we kept meaning to sell but ended up giving to our babysitter, a box of 8 place settings of a nice stainless silverware that had been discontinued and I couldn’t add to and kept meaning to sell but gave to our babysitter (starting to think you want to be our babysitter? Forget it — Vanessa is a saint for being able to keep up with Energy Girl for hours at a time).

What we didn’t get rid of: Hubby’s grandmother’s stand mixer, still works, still has lots of memories attached, lots of old sheets that we plan to use for, eh,… many boxes of books that I published years ago and can’t stand to throw away, two pieces of stained glass taken from a red-tagged building in New York City…

You get the idea. So I had the funny task today of calling a neighbor and asking if she would like, I mean, would be able to stand our putting lots of recycling into her bin. I went down the list of neighbors and decided not to call anyone with kids, the painting contractor, anyone who had a party lately… So luckily we have a single woman neighbor who said, Yeah, sure, bring me your garbage!

See, getting rid of even strengthens your bond with your neighbors.

We didn’t get rid of our skid row cats, but they found the process fascinating. Cats love any focused activity, though they personally choose not to do any work in their own lives. They’re great at watching and making rude comments, though.

“Hey, don’t get rid of that old rug! I like to pee on that!”

“What are you doing moving my favorite box that I sit in? Wait! Don’t crush it! How can I look cool sitting in a box that’s too small for me if you crush it?”

“Humans! They have absolutely no sense of what’s important.”

One of my Facebook friends asked if someone could come over and clean out her closets, but really, it’s no fun to clean out someone else’s old junk. How could you know what’s important? Frankly, the stuff we kept wasn’t all worth more than the stuff we gave away. I admitted to Vanessa today that the set of dishes was probably worth a fair amount of money. But ultimately, eBay just seemed like too much work and not at all as satisfying as passing on our old friend’s lovely pottery to someone I know who will love it.

Someday, perhaps, it will end up in her garage, and she can decide whether to keep or get rid of. And perhaps she’ll remember me, and our sorta clean garage, and our rude cats making comments.

“Ack. I wouldn’t even drink outta that bowl. Give it to the babysitter. She has a dog anyway.”

Posted in Avant Parenting, Psychology.

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By Suki Wessling – January 6, 2010

There’s a fungus amongus!

One of the things I love to do with this blog is point other parents toward really great resources and events in our community. Here is one that I can’t speak more highly of: The annual Santa Cruz Fungus Fair sponsored by the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz.

The fungus fair celebrates something about the Santa Cruz Mountains that you may have not noticed yet: it’s full of weird, wonderful, and delicious fungus! Our mountains are host to some of the deadliest fungus on earth, the Amanita Muscaria and Amanita Phalloides.

Then there are all the wonderfully tasty mushrooms: The boletes, the chanterelles.

And the weird and beautiful: One time I decided to see if I could bring mushroom-growing materials into my son’s classroom. I found a man who was running a successful mushroom company who agreed to give me some spawn for the kids to grow in the classroom. When I was at his mushroom-growing facility, I asked him how he got into mushrooms.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “First I was into the fun ones, magic mushrooms. And then I got interested in the other kinds.”

Mushrooms have all sorts of properties: hallucinogenic, healing, dyeing, nutritive.

Mushroom dyes make gorgeous colors. They’re not bright or fancy, but they are deep and mysterious. There is always a vendor of mushroom dyed cloth at the Fungus Fair. I’ve never wanted to spend as much money as she (rightfully) demands, but one year they let the kids dip pieces of silk into a mushroom bath. My son still has the piece he dipped, brown and warm and mysterious.

Some highlights of the Fungus Fair:

My kids remember first the food: candy cap mushroom ice cream, mushroom chowder, mushroom lasagne. The biggest room they occupy at Louden Nelson is taken over with a huge mushroom habitat: Mushroomers from all over bring in samples of mushrooms growing where they grow best: logs with gorgeous fungi sprouting out of them. The forest floor which gives us both chanterelles and amanitas. All the mushrooms are labeled with their common name, their Latin name, and most importantly, with their level of edibility: a knife and fork for “yum, yum, good!” and a skull and crossbones for “don’t even think about it.”

There’s a kids room with crafts and learning. Microscopes with slices of fungus. There are rooms where you can buy stuff: mushroom posters, mushroom growing kits, mushroom-themed art, actual mushrooms to eat.

One of the things that is great to do with kids is to get one of the mushroom-growing kits. (Do this last — they’re heavy!) You buy an ordinary box of dirt, add water, keep it out of sunlight, and voila! you get beautiful, edible mushrooms.

Mushrooms have a completely different life cycle than plants. The actual organism is the mycelium, which lives underground. When the mycelium feels threatened, like when a downpour of rain comes down, the mycelium sprouts its fruiting body (mushrooms or fungus) which give off spores, which are like the seeds of the mushroom organism.

If you like to do activities with your kids or if you homeschool, mushrooms are a great subject to study in Santa Cruz County in the wintertime. You can download this mushroom workbook from the American Mushroom Institute.

I made this diagram to show kids in my son’s kindergarten class how mushrooms are different from plants:

The other great thing you can do with kids is just go out into the forest and look. Any redwood forest has a great variety of fungus at this time of year. We live next to Nisene Marks and the stuff we find is fabulous. All the photos in this blog were taken by me somewhere in our county.

If you are knowledgeable about mushrooms, and ONLY if you are knowledgeable about mushrooms, going mushrooming is fabulous for kids. Our earth offers us a bounty of amazing food, and to get amazing mushrooms, all you have to do is look. My brother decided a few years back to educate himself, and since then, we have been the beneficiaries of many a fine mushroom feast at my parents’ house, such as this bunch of chanterelles at Thanksgiving:

Just on my parents’ property near Corralitos, we have found probably thousands of dollars worth of mushrooms over the years. But we never sold an ounce of them!

Mushrooms are fun, delicious, beautiful, fascinating, and very local. Happy mushroom season!

Posted in Avant Parenting, Education, Santa Cruz.

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By Suki Wessling – January 2, 2010

Getting rid of

I was halfway through emptying out the front hall closet when my mother-in-law called.

“What are you up to?”

“I’m going on a cleaning binge! Right now, I’m cleaning out the front closet. I actually don’t think I’ve cleaned it out since we moved here.” (That was going on 14 years ago.)

“Oh, I love getting rid of. When I moved to Florida, I got rid of almost everything, even things I still liked.”

Getting rid of. It’s not something I’m good at. I look at every plastic bag, every piece of string, every cardboard box as something I might need… someday. But inspired by my MinL (as she calls herself), I brought three garbage bags full of stuff to the Goodwill truck today.

I wasn’t alone.

Apparently spring cleaning is a thing of the past. We just got back from staying with cousins up in Tahoe, and she said that she’s looking forward to her winter cleaning.

“I never do spring cleaning,” she said. “I like going through things in the winter when it’s cold.”

It was cold up there, and gorgeous. Beautiful, powdery snow, the stuff that skiers all over come for. The first day, my daughter was dismissive. “This snow is too dry to make good snowballs with,” she said.

Then she got her ski lesson. Good thing we’re not the types to even think about having a place in Tahoe, going up every weekend in winter to ski. If we were, we would’ve been calling the realtor.

Instead, back down the mountain we came. As a transplanted Midwesterner, I’m charmed by California’s version of snow: Powdery, dry stuff that you can brush off your clothes and boots; sunshine during the day that heats you up so much you don’t have to wear a scarf; snow that you can drive to in a day. I grew up with the mucky, icy, freezing cold stuff that started in November and, if we were lucky, left at the end of March. As a teenager I ran every day on icy sidewalks, in slushy gutters, a scarf wrapped around but not touching my face. Within minutes, the scarf would freeze to a perfectly molded face mask that I’d breathe into so the sub-zero air wouldn’t go straight into my lungs and freeze them.

California’s winter, as I said, is much more charming. It’s the sort of winter you can drive out of (with thousands of your newest friends) and be home in time to unload closets, load up the minivan, and drive to the nearest Goodwill truck. They could have made money renting out parking spaces. By the time the Goodwill guy had given me my receipt, four other cars had pulled up into make-your-own parking spaces.

Now perhaps I need to have MinL give my daughter a lesson in getting rid of next time she comes. Before I started on the closet, I announced that I, and only I, would get to make decisions about what gets kept and what gets thrown. Immediately, she grabbed her fort-making kit (that’s staying, she said), her fold-out tent (definitely staying, she said), and a miniature version of a Radio Flyer wagon that we got filled with blocks.

Her eyes lit up, and she immediately did the thing that sent that darn little metal deathtrap into the closet in the first place: she put on foot in it and started to roll.

“Stop!” I commanded. “That thing is Dangerous and it’s Going Away. Don’t even Try to ask for That One!”

She paused, considered the tent, the fort she’d already built, and the singing Happy Birthday bear I’d made her put in her room.

“OK,” she said. “But when we start on my closet, we’re Not Throwing Anything Away.”

Like I said, MinL is going to have to come and talk some sense into her.

Until then, my son’s closet is fair game as long as I do it when he’s not home.

Posted in Avant Parenting.

1 comment

By Suki Wessling – December 30, 2009

How to fix our schools? First, ask the right question.

A friend forwarded two articles about the state of education in California and all the political wrangling: How do we best improve our schools? How do we get more federal money? What is the effect of teacher’s unions on reforms? What is the effect of charter schools on kids and on neighborhood schools?

I realized that some of my strongly held opinions make me just step away from arguments like this and say, “They’re arguing about the wrong thing.” In both arguments, test scores formed the basis for “proving” that one approach was better than another. But depending on how you read the data, you can use test scores to prove pretty much anything!

Here’s the problem with test scores: It has been proven that one way to predict a school’s test scores with alarming accuracy is to look at the zip codes of the parents. It’s also been proven that a way to predict a particular student’s test scores is to look at what scores the parents would get. Schools have so little effect on test scores that when all these politicians argue about them, their arguments are invalid right from the beginning!

You can look at my own family as an example: two PhD parents. Our high school grades were all over the map – from an excellent student to a poor student. Test scores for all of us? Right at the top. Doesn’t matter how well we did in school, because that’s not what standardized tests are testing.

So then come all the arguments about charters. Their scores are lower, thus they aren’t succeeding. Their scores are higher, thus they are leeching the best students from the public schools. See? The scores can be used to mean anything that people want them to mean, and thus they are meaningless!

Here’s how I think we should “fix” our schools:

First, I believe that for one chunk of students, CA public schools are too academic. These students should be given an education appropriate to what they’re planning to do in life. They don’t need to be forced to take all sorts of academic classes that eventually convince them to drop out of school. They need well-equipped shop classes, classes in money management and health, classes in bookkeeping and law clerking, and other sorts of practical classes that will engage them in becoming productive. No wonder they drop out: school has nothing to do with their lives.

On the other hand, the old method of “tracking” students based on their class and race was stupid: students should choose tracks based on their interests and their plans. They should be able to jump tracks anytime they want, just in case they wake up one day and realize that what they really want to do is be an English professor or a rocket scientist. And community colleges should be there, well-funded, to help everyone if the path they chose in high school doesn’t end up working for them or if the jobs in their field dry up.

For students who want to go on to higher education, programs should exist to support their needs also. In that case, high schools should focus the more academic classes on kids who are trying to get into a university and who will need higher level math, higher level research skills, and advanced sciences.

The second major change that I think needs to happen is in the structure of schools. The idea that a school draws kids based on their location rather than based on their interests and needs is outdated. Schools should be based on an area of expertise, and students should be allowed to attend full-time or just by the class. A kid who homeschools should be able to take a math class at the high school, regardless of his age or “grade.” The school should get funding for the classes it offers, and if a class isn’t well attended, it gets cut just like at a college.

As a result of this, everything would need to become more community-based. I’ve heard a persuasive argument that kids’ sports should be taken out of schools and turned over to communities — I think this would become necessary. Kids would join leagues just as they do in sports that are not traditionally supported by high schools. Schools would start to need to serve kids’ needs rather than administrators’ needs.

I’m not totally anti-testing: I think all kids should be tested a couple of times during their education to make sure that problems are caught early and that we are providing all our kids with the tools they really need in modern life. But once schools become more fluid environments, having something like the California high school exit exam would be meaningless. More kids would be able to graduate from high school with meaningful degrees, and they wouldn’t have that dreaded feeling that their lives are set in stone by the age of 18. That reality is one that died in the last century.

All the arguments about improving our schools are meaningless to me until the idea of school gets into the 21st century. Few people think that the old model ever worked, if they really look at it. It’s just what they’re used to, and change scares people. Just look at the health care debate: Before it became a possible reality that change was going to happen, everyone agreed that our health care system was broken. As soon as a bill was being put together, all of a sudden people hugged onto their awful, overpriced, overbureaucratic health plan like it was their beloved baby!

Incremental change is happening in education in places like Santa Cruz County, but we need to identify the right questions before we can create a system that works with our modern culture.

Posted in Culture Critic, Education, Homeschooling.

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By Suki Wessling – December 26, 2009

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