Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

A little about writing

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You want to know the definition of happiness?

(For a writer, at any rate.)

I stopped working for a couple of weeks—can I help it that there was a major holiday and everything came to a screeching halt and I couldn’t concentrate on writing anyhow?—and, as happens every time I stop, I find it hard as hell to start up again. Writing? A lot like exercise. You have to keep doing it, or you start finding excuses not to do it at all. Anyhow, I opened the piece I was working on prior to stopping for three or maybe four weeks and…

…it’s pretty good.

I was amused by what I wrote. It’s entertaining. Had someone else written it—and, presumably, written more than I have so far—I would have kept reading, and there is no higher compliment one can pay a writer, even when that writer is one’s self. If you know what I mean.

Of course, relief at discovering I am writing well and on an interesting project does not manage to make it easier to start up the daily writing gig. The gears grind, the oil of practice is needed.

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In a stunning upset victory for the Evil Empire over Snooty Elitism, I’ve found that I actually like to write at Starbucks. At least the Starbucks near my house. It’s big, there are plenty of tables, the staff is great, and, best of all, they’ve clearly designed the place with people like me—that is, people who come laptop-equipped—in mind: lots of power outlets scattered around the place.

(And now every Starbucks on the planet is installing T-Mobile Wireless, so I can goof off on the Internet here, too.)

I used to go to a little European place that’s nearby. Tiny, no power outlets, not comfortable. I used to read the paper there and then exit, stage left.

At Starbucks there are five or six of us regulars who show up, our computer briefcases or backpacks in hand, looking for one of our usual spots. We nod at one another, sometimes ask what the other’s working on. Every other person typing away is working on a screenplay, except for a woman who I know from Fia’s preschool—she’s working on a novel too. Oh, and there’s the law student who’s forever doing briefs or book reports on Brown’s. Once in a while someone uses Excel and pie charts start popping up; the rest of us glare until the newcomer gets the hint and fires up Final Draft.

The most annoying thing about working in Starbucks is the most annoying thing about being out in public anywhere these days: cell phones. I mean, when I say I’m treating Starbucks like my office I don’t actually mean my office, okay? But these people yak away at the top of their lungs and seem to have no idea that sound travels beyond the perimeter of their little tables.

I love the way that most of the kids—and they are kids, sob: they’re 21 year olds in bands—remember everyone’s name and their drink. It’s like a bar, except with no alcohol and tastier snacks. And once in a while the kids show their appreciation of their regular clientele by pushing a snack off the back of a truck.

Not, of course, that I’ve ever had that happen. It’s just a rumor.

Mo Pie, get off the hotline to Seattle right now.

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Our AirPort went toes up recently. At home I can only access the Internet while attached to a Big Ugly Cat-5 cable. It’s monstrous. I can’t sit anywhere I want to in the house and surf!

It’s like I took a time machine to the prehistoric days of 1998 or something.

Homeschooling

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If you’ve followed my links under “On Education,” you might have noticed a certain theme running through them: homeschooling. I’ve developed a serious interest in homeschooling. I have one metric ton of book suggestions, if you happen to be interested.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading on education and educational theory over the past few months—if you want educational whiplash, read E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think back-to-back. The net result of all this reading has been that my ideas of what a good education is all about have changed radically. I used to say that the kids could never know until they were in their 20s that Daddy dropped out of college—now I’m all over the idea that they should make their own way in the world, pursue their own goals, don’t follow the beaten path!

And one of the educational ideas that I have found extremely attractive—in the abstract, of course—is homeschooling. I don’t know if we can do it: all of the personal accounts I’ve read about homeschooling families certainly make it sound like a gigantic investment of time on the parents’ parts. But on the other hand…isn’t that why we had kids? To get them ready for the world?

Pros:

  • Darin and I are pretty smart.

    I can’t imagine there’s any topic that between the two of us we don’t know something about. For example, one thing I’ve read over and over again about homeschoolers is that the parents have a fear of mathematics. Well, Darin and I both loved math in school. I was even going to major in math at Stanford (until I discovered that there are a whole bunch of people out there who were way better at math than I was).

  • We know a lot of smart people.

    Anything the kids need an explanation of that we don’t know? I’m quite sure one of our very smart, and extremely pedantic, friends will be happy to oblige.

  • You get to take vacations any time you want.

    Not that we’re taking tons of vacations now. But being able to take advantage of the off-season, should we ever take a vacation, has definite attractions.

  • Being able to follow your interests is wonderful.

    I know how I learn a subject: I dive in and go nuts. I would love for my children to have that freedom as well, whether it’s reading every American Girl book at the library or taking jujitsu classes or whatever. Without having to do the stupid crap at school that we all remember doing (and hating).

  • I still love learning.

    I want my kids to have that love of learning too. And studying some subject together would be a great way for us to have projects together—”Let’s go take a Latin class! Yeah, we can have a secret language!” “Mom, would you dial it down a notch? Do you have to be so excited about everything?”

    Although Darin’s probably right: the kids will simply think the way their parents are is the way parents are.

Cons:

  • Darin is a big believer in the public school system.

    He and his brothers went through the wonderful public school system in Highland Park, IL, where they all got great educations. He still has friends he met from when he was in kindergarten. He had some amazing classes in high school he still talks about.

    I am not a big believer in the public schools. I attended public school for one year: I started out in kindergarten, moved into first grade, and was about to move into second grade when my parents said, “No, perhaps not.” I attended parochial schools until my parents couldn’t stand the screaming any more, and after that I attended private schools, right up through my master’s degree.

    Add to this living in California, where Proposition 13 and other forces have conspired to trash the public school system from the bottom up. Plus the “back to basics” and “No Child Left Behind” standardized testing—I don’t need my kids to be champion test takers, thanks. (And as a graduate from elite private schools, I know perfectly well that the politicos who are deciding that kids need to be tested constantly aren’t sending their kids to schools where they’re going to be tested constantly. Which makes me wonder exactly how important that testing is.)

  • I’m sure our families wouldn’t think much of the idea.

    Every homeschooling family I’ve read about reports that it took time to win over other members of the family, if, in fact, they could be won over. Darin’s mom was a teacher for years.

  • I would miss out on the babysitting aspects of school.

    I know, that’s kind of a sad thing to say, but school is the primary babysitter out there, the social construct that makes it possible for parents to work.

    But school is what, six to eight hours a day? That’s crazy. If school were three hours a day, I might be more inclined to send the kids off, but eight? No wonder parents complain that their kids are strangers: their kids are strangers.

    We had two weeks’ vacation from preschool and by the end I was counting the days until preschool started again. Preschool. What’s going to happen by the time she’s in kindergarten?

  • I don’t know if I have the patience to be with the kids that much.

    There are times—like, just this morning!—when I find myself thinking, “It’s me or it’s them,” and the fight music from “Gamesters of Triskelion” starts. My friend Mary, who has two kids who are slightly older than mine, says she knows exactly how I feel, because she was at this same place when her kids were this age. And the more time I’ve spent with the kids the easier it’s been to be with them. But sometimes I wonder if I could be with them all the time.

  • I don’t hang with reactionary, right-wing, religious types.

    Like everything else they touch, reactionary, right-wing, religious types are all over homeschooling, making it sound like a way of shielding kids from that godless secular humanism stuff at school. Actually, that godless secular humanism stuff, like evolution, is one of the things I like about the public school system. I don’t believe in shielding kids from the more difficult parts of life, I believe in teaching them how to deal with them.

    One of the great secrets of parenthood—well, I didn’t know it, at any rate—was that a great portion of your social life post-children revolves around your kids’ friends’ families. You’d better like them; you’re going to be spending a whole bunch of time with them. If homeschooling means I’d be hanging out the Religious Right, well, thanks, I’ll pass.

I don’t know what’s going to come of all of this—Sophia may turn 5 and I’ll shriek in a crazed way, “Which kindergarten can we drop her off at?” But I like watching her discover things, learn how to do new things, and I’m not at all sure I want her to be off somewhere else half the day (and half her life) learning how to do them.

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Every parent I know is doing a lot of thinking about schools: asking every other parent they run into about which schools they like, what they’ve heard about various schools in our area, how much each school costs…

Something curious I’ve noted is that many of the moms I know have checked into LA Unified’s Gifted and Talented program. They know which schools are GATE magnets or have GATE programs. They know what the GATE programs consist of. They know that the GATE programs are the extremely good side of the LA USD. And they all assume their kids will be in the GATE program.

Now, it’s quite possible that I have managed to luck out and my kids just happen to hang with the most gifted and talented kids in Los Angeles. Or maybe we’re all so crazed about our children that we won’t accept any label less than “gifted and talented.” Of course, I do keep in mind that a friend of mine, who’s a teacher in the LAUSD, knows how to hack the system to ensure our kids get into the GATE program. She told me all about it.

Alfie Kohn, in his wonderful book What To Look For In A Classroom, discusses the phenomenon of gifted and talented programs and how they’re basically draws to keep middle-class white kids in the school system—albeit segregated from the Great Unwashed.

After reading Ellen Winner’s Gifted Children (did you think I was kidding when I said I’d been doing a lot of reading?) I know my friends and I have bright kids but so far none has shown any signs of being truly gifted. So I don’t know whether the LAUSD is just chock full o’ kids who are off-the-charts in terms of abilities, or whether they have a different measuring scale than Ms. Winner does.