Waiting For Superman: A Review Essay

It’s a question that parents keep echoing as they search for the right school for their children: Why can’t every school be good? Why isn’t this as easy as sending my kid to the neighborhood school?

I could read it achingly vividly in the parents’ faces in Waiting for Superman. It was painfully clear in their hopeful optimism as the families of five likeable children underwent a lottery to enable their kids to attend various charter schools, and in the faces of weeping kids who didn’t get into a school that could help them fulfill their dreams.

And here’s the biggest trouble I have with in-demand charters, especially ones that have a high rate of success in helping kids from poor backgrounds: how do you get rid of the lottery when the scarcity of a good “free” school is what undergirds the free-market demand for the scarce resource (a successful school)? A wait-list means desirability/demand, and a wait-list ensures that the public charter school won’t “go out of business,” so to speak. Despite the immense good that’s done by these schools, inequality is baked into the selection process in a way that it’s not for public schools, which must accept all within its district borders. Why can’t the successful charters take what they’ve learned and convert back to or import it back to public schools, where all are accepted? Do you see the logic of what I’m saying?

My Hippie Education, Or, Somehow I Survived My Gen X Childhood

Education is a hot topic currently, coinciding with the fact that we have an over-achieving president (of whom I’m proud). I am convinced he’s secretly Asian American despite an outer bearing that’s African American in appearance.

It’s also a topic of huge interest to me now that Hiro Protagonist is officially a first-grader.

Recently I’ve had to come to grips (somewhat reluctantly) that my son has a strong sense of numeracy. When he was about 3 years old, he asked me what odd and even numbers were. I showed him with my tented fingers how ‘odd’ means one left over from a double, and ‘even’ means a double. He had a period at four years old where he was enchanted with the idea of ‘googolplex.’ One time he asked me to draw out all the zeroes in googolplex, and we got pretty far before I had to quit and say it was time to go to bed. Then, just to make my life harder, I showed him what googolplex was written as an exponent.

The Kindergarten Chronicles: That *Other* School, Chinese School–or a Soft Gentle Kick in the Pants

We were lucky that our son took to kindergarten like a duck to water. He literally skipped home from school with me after the first day, and said, “Mama, that was the funnest day ever!” Day two yielded the comment, “That was the second funnest day ever!” Etc. (I was pleased but also a little skeptical….I wanted to say, “Pace yourself, kid, you’ve got a minimum of 12 and probably 16 more years to go.” But hey, take your little victories where you can get them, right?)

(Also, can I confess that we’ve had unbelievably smooth sailing with regard to homework, getting up in the morning, and so forth? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. He loves his reading homework–it’s usually the first thing we do when he comes home. I’m embarrassed to say it, but he’s asked me for more math homework. We’re doing simple addition and subtraction now, whenever he asks me for it, often two or three times a week. And we live a five minute walk from his school, so he can literally roll out of bed, get dressed, and have breakfast and be out the door. What a change from last year and the 60-75 minute long drive to get to his preschool. I tell you, we are just out of this world lucky.)

Hiro Protagonist making flashcards

It was the other school I was worried about. Those of you who send your kids to Hebrew school or Ukrainian school, and so on, will know what I’m talking about.

Super Why!, RATS & Other Things My Kid Loves to Watch–With My Approval

My kid’s favorite program right now isn’t on TV, it’s on YouTube: Robot Astronomy Talk Show.

It’s produced by NASA-JPL’s educational arm. It’s on whenever he wants to watch it, we can pause at any moment so I can explain (or try to explain with help from Google) strong nuclear force versus weak nuclear force, there’s actual astronomy to be learned from watching the show, and while the content is pitched a little higher than what my 5.5 year old son can truly wholly understand, with repeated watchings and explainings, he actually grasps quite a lot. He loves the silly robots with delusions of grandeur. The special efx are also pretty good.

Plus? It has true nerd cred points: it was eligible for a Hugo Award this year, although sadly, no one nominated it.

My kid also loves the Space Spitzer shows, which star a female space scientist who travels with a more benign, if snack-obsessed, version of IR-2, the power-hungry host of Robot Astronomy Talk Show. (More about IR-2 and Irrelevant Astronomy here.)

I think it’d be perfect if PBS picked up RATS as one of its shows. If it happens, you can send the finder’s fee check right here.

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Now, anyone who’s the least bit familiar with my blog knows that I generally think watching tv is like being stuck in traffic. It’s time out of your life that you never get back. Was it spent well? That’s kinda up to the person trapped inside the car. Just like the map is not the territory, the toy you played with in the car on the way somewhere is not your final destination.

Basically, I believe that any medium can be a total waste of time if used excessively (intertubez, oh bewitching siren you, you’re included in that). For example, I see how my parents, especially, are now that they’re retired. Having lived in suburbia, they fell into the habit of watching the evening network news, then watching whatever’s on til the 11 o’clock news, then going to bed. Six hours of tv a night, 42 hours of tv watching 7 days a week–that’s practically another job if you define a job as a 40-hour/7 day occupation! SE-DEN-TA-RY. Suburbia plus tv equals not healthy, physically or mentally.

So now that it’s clear I’m a total scold and wet blanket, probably the last one you’d talk to at a party, certainly someone you’d never go dancing and have mojitos with (your loss–I’m an excellent dancer and silly drunk), I should come totally clean and confess: We. Don’t. Have. Cable. TV.

Yes, we live in Los Angeles, and We. Don’t. Have. Cable. TV.

I know, I risk deportation from this fair city for a confession like that.

Don’t worry, we’re not staring at a black&white with actual knobs you have to turn over here. We have a newfangled HD digital flat panel tv. We watch dvds on it, if we watch it at all.

Can I just express for you the joy of *not* having my delightful, intelligent, loving, bubbly, focused, intensely curious 5.5 year old constantly bug me for product X?

Are there words to convey how ecstatic I am that Hiro Protagonist does not walk around parroting the latest snarky kid saying, complete with eyerolls and copping other attitude all up in my grill that some child on tv does?

Am I pleased my kid has not yet learned to whine, “I wanna watch tv”? That day is coming, but the longer I can push it off…

We love to watch things on…Youtube.

Pingu, for example:

You know why I like that little clay penguin? Because he’s a gateway drug to the glories of WALLACE AND GROMIT. Hallelujah. Now that is some cultural product shot through with awesome.

Youtube is free, program schedules are irrelevant, there’s no commercials, and I can do the equivalent of make a mix tape from Youtube vids for my kid. We can watch some Robot Astronomy Talk Show then watch the real shuttle launch, or maybe footage of a moon landing. We can chase our curiosity across whatever Youtube and Google have to offer. (I’d never allow my son to do this unsupervised, however. There are hard-edged, profanity-laced mashups of even the most innocuous clips out there. Parent, beware.)

Best of all, it is well nigh IMPOSSIBLE to go to a store and buy merch that ties in with much of what he sees. Even PBS has their universe of affiliated toys and tchotchkes. I mean, that’s fine, children will always want to feel surrounded by friends-as-toys and that often means character-laden clothes, sleeping bags, lunchboxes, whatever. But sometimes it’s nice to just step out of that entirely.

And while it’s as natural as breathing for Americans, myself included, to buy the experience by buying the t-shirt, sometimes I think it’s not so bad to lack that option. Like the cool Lego star wars animation you saw? Try recreating your own at home. Build it, figure out stop-motion animation, etc. Forget the t-shirt, how about getting your hands dirty experimenting with what you saw?

A media critic famously labeled tv a lean-back experience and new media a lean-forward one. In general I agree, but how about turning off the screen altogether and getting outside?

Or–gasp–try picking up a book?

These are all the attitudes I carry toward watching tv. Huz and I have been tv free for years. We save it for special events, like President Obama’s Inaugural Concert, the Inauguration itself, the Olympics, the Tour de France (for huz), or the Oscars. And even then, when we watch, we re-discover how irksome it is to watch commercials. We also realize how noisy and busy-seeming tv is.

So it wasn’t automatic for me to embrace even public television, even when I know I can trust what’s being served up to my kid.

Investigating PBS’ offerings was new to me. It hadn’t really occurred to me to do it.

Recently I attended a little PR event held by PBS at our local public tv station, KCET. (It used to be a film studio in the early days of Hollywood, back when DW Griffith filmed in Griffith Park and was based in Silver Lake.)

The purpose was to let blogging moms know that PBS has a number of shows that are educational, commercial-free, and vetted by numerous children’s math, science, and literacy consultants so when your kids 2-5 years old watch them, the experience isn’t brain rot. Instead, kids often learn quite a bit from the programs.

Go here to read the rest of the review.

Hiro Protagonist Lightning Round

‘J’ Was the Letter for Share Day

HiroP’s teacher has the children examine one letter per week as a way to explore the alphabet and introduce them to phonics. On ‘J’ day, my son brought in his Yoda doll–’Jedi knight,’ you see.

HiroP asked me later, “Who is the guy on a stick that …. brought in for share day?”

“Man on a stick?”

“Yeah, he’s nailed there or something.”

“Who brought that in???” I asked, trying to buy some time. Big Life Questions always blindside you when you least expect it, when you’re thinking about what you should make for dinner or silently emanating giant ‘fuck you’ vibes to the asshole who tried to merge into your lane with you in it. In my disequilibrium, I wanted a name and a face to blame.

“C. did. And when he showed it, everyone went [gasp] ooooohhh!” He mimed shrinking away, as maybe the effect garlic would have on a vampire.

“Like they were scared? Of the guy on the stick?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you scared?”

“No. Why did they nail his hands to the wood?”

“Some people wanted to punish him.”

“Why?”

“Because they thought he had done bad things.”

“Did he?”

“People who believe in Christianity say no, he was punished unjustly.”

“Oh.”

So there you have it. A major symbol of Christianity as seen objectively and with no context, from outside the religion. It’s incomprehensibly cruel that a man would be nailed to pieces of wood, and then there’s also a corresponding oddity (ghoulishness? bloodthirstyness? a deep pathos?) that other people would venerate this.

Context is everything, isn’t it? I answer these kinds of big questions the way I answer other big questions about sex and procreation, immortality/dying, or about unsavory events that get reported on NPR (genocide in Darfur, oh what a joy that is to explain–not): neutrally, as factually as possible, and with a very limited scope to my answers. This won’t be the only time we talk about this. These questions are the ongoing conversations of a lifetime.

I try to answer until the questions stop.

And my kid is five. He’s capable of understanding a great deal and at the same time there are limits to what he can grasp.

I can see there’s much more of this down the road.

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Questions, Questions, Questions

I happened to go into the classroom with HiroP one afternoon while his teacher, Ms. R., was still there. (The teachers at the school do these lovely, lengthy narrative reports about what our children did all day long. These summaries are FABULOUS and great prompts to ask HiroP what he did, and thought, and said.)

Ms. R: …And all the other kids wanted to know, how come HiroP knows all the answers?

Me: They said that? Well, he asks a lot of questions.

Ms. R: He does ask a lot of questions.

Me (beaming): And listens hard to the answers.

Ms. R: Yes, he remembers everything you tell him.

Me (beaming even more): That’s my boy! A good listener! He retains a lot.

Ms. R (to HiroP): That made you feel pretty good when the other kids said that, didn’t it?

HiroP nodded and smiled, and buried his face back into a book.

Thank you for the compliment, Ms. R. I later told HB and the grandparents. And HiroP got to be showered with admiration and approval for his curiosity and good memory all over again.

I’ve Heard the Whales Singing

Call me Ishmael?

Woke up at an odd hour much earlier this morning with the following strange dream:

I was on vacation and happened to go boating with friends. (I think this was Hawaii.) We were not too far from shore when suddenly I spotted an enormous whale tail and then very rapidly following, the huge, black head and body of a giant sperm whale. It was pleasant and wondrous at first, then all of us watching the whale come directly under our boat were filled with a slight feeling of panicky dread, as we realized the whale could easily crest from under us and tip our vessel over. Or heave itself into the air on top of our boat, crushing us. (It wasn’t showing any signs of the latter; I think we all simultaneously realized how powerful and indifferent to our safety the whale’s will was.)

So as the whale sort of roller coastered in and out of the air and depths of water near our boat, our emotions rocketed around from elation to delight to abject terror.

At one point, the whale lunged into the air very close to me, maybe 20 feet away. I remember looking at its boxy head, the rubbery charcoal grey of its gleaming body, and its black eye. The eye closest to me opened wide. It rolled a little in its socket; I could see its whites. Reflected in the blackness were easily as many thoughts and emotions as we humans were experiencing in that moment. That split second in my dream seemed to last eons-the whale suspended in air, me agape and planted on the boat’s rolling deck, the water foaming and rising up around the whale’s body.

Then, I woke up.

And wondered if my subconscious was delivering a message to me about failure, a giant metaphorical Twitterese for “whale tail fail.”

Dream logic. Odd.

HB had a strange dream too. He came to tell me that all he could remember was that he had the dream, not what it was.

We decided it was from the bright-red Wuxi pork belly we’d eaten at a nearby (and very good) Chinese restaurant near our house. It was too vivid a color to not also provoke hallucinogenic dreams.

When You Were a Tiny Baby

You horked all over your grandfather. In public.