Dilemma

I wrote this in Jan 2010 as a journal entry and just now posted it.  Epilogue to follow...

It’s frightening to realize how much power I have over the interests my children are allowed to develop.  Which passions I choose to nuture or ignore, their total dependence on me for their schedules and therefore how they spend their time.    The decisions I make for them, both consciously and unconsciously, are very much rooted in my life experience: what exposures I did or didn’t have as a child, or what I wanted for myself but didn’t attain. 

From my windowed corner of a ski lodge, I am watching my 10 year-old daughter ski by herself, effortlessly, comfortably and happily.  She has the psychological security of a walkie-talkie communication with me, and familiarity with this mountain.  In the brief glimpses I have as she finishes her run and zooms into the lift-line, she looks graceful and confident, and I am so filled with pride and joy for her that I’m near tears.  That both my son and daughter are skilled, confident skiers is important to me.  It comes from loving the outdoors in winter, loving New England, loving mountains, loving snow and loving a sport I cannot do.  Learning as an adult in my early 40’s has proved difficult, and recently, fraught with peril.  I love skiing but from a safe distance at this point.  However, I am making very sure that my kids will not have my problem and we are a lucky family indeed to ski for 5 weekends a year.

 My current dilemma has little to do with skiing in particular except that skiing is a choice.  Really the dilemma is about what I am not choosing for my daughter.  It’s about riding horses: my experience as a rider and my daughter’s sudden passionate love for horses.  I am frozen like a deer in the headlights of my own conflict and hope that writing will help iron out my confusion.  Of course, this is a dilemma of the affluent.  If the rest of the people in the world had my problem of the moment, this would be a nice world indeed.  Nevertheless, it is my problem and I am searching for clarity.

C was suddenly smitten in 4^th grade.  I had assumed that we were safe.  My irrational and all-consuming worship of horses started well before kindergarten.  Horses were all I drew, daydreamed about, collected.  There were no dolls in my life, only Breyer model horses, eventually well over 100 of them.  My exasperated second grade teacher forbade me from bringing any more model horses for show and tell.  No one in my family knew anything about horses except my grandfather who had grown up on a ranch in Nevada during his childhood, but like us, was well anchored in suburban life just outside of New York City.  My first cousin, Jule, whom I did not really know as child and lived on the other coast, was equally smitten.  Is horse-craziness genetic?  I’ll never know.  At any rate, I did not grow up in a household that encouraged anything horse-related and drove everyone wild with my myopic focus. 

I took C to a barn once for fun when she was in preschool and popped her up on an ancient gelding.  Her legs were so short that the soles of her feet ended 6 inches before the bottom of my saddle’s flaps.  I led her around in her yellow bicycle helmet and she beamed.  And that was all.  I haven’t sat on a horse since before becoming pregnant with her and had settled happily into total denial of my deep addiction, or so I thought.  And then, just before her 9^th birthday, C asked, “Mom, do you think that someday I could have a horse-back riding lesson?”  I acquiesced, of course.  Little harm and great joy could come from a riding lesson or two.  I found a place nearby which, despite its ramshackle appearance, had reliable school ponies and happy horses turned out on grass paddocks.  I liked the way the older girls rode, the high standards of the head instructor, and the fact that everyone appeared to do their own work around the barn, and were nice to each other and their horses. 

After each lesson, the blazing light in C's eyes was unmistakable.  As was her total focus on committing me to the next lesson and the next.  Later that summer, I was hearing about how talented my daughter was, what a natural athlete she was on a horse, what a hard worker she was, how much they loved having her around and could they enter her in a show?  I said no.  And there were tears.  Too expensive I explained to C (the fee for the pony, for the instructor, fees for entering the classes, the shipping, not to mention the new clothes she would instantly outgrow).  But really, we could have easily afforded that single show.  So then why not?   Think Pandora’s box. 

I had worn my mother down too.  After years of hard lobbying, first riding lessons started in 4^th grade once per week at a local barn. “As long as there is a carpool,” said my mother who was buried alive between my traveling father and two sisters who were then 4 and 5.  The next year, lessons were twice a week.  Then summer riding camp but only for two blissful weeks in late August.  I spent most of each summer lackadaisically participating in the sorts of activities that make middle class children well-rounded and waited for my two weeks of horsey bliss.

During the school year, evening lessons took place in floodlit outdoor rings in the frigid dark.  Ponies, frisky from the cold and bored from endless lessons, would imagine goblins and bolt, and I remember being scared but never so scared I would skip a lesson – they were too precious.  One evening, my instructor gave us a break and walked us on our ponies to the edge of the “main ring,” to watch the big kids ride.  Older girls jumped brightly colored fences and danced their horses effortlessly in and out of the floodlights.  To me their riding was magical, and I remember being consumed by ambitious, driven desire that evening.  To be like them, to ride like them.  

This fall, C has pined for riding lessons but our family schedule was too tight between her 7^th grade brother’s activities, her activities and my work to fit in one weekly commute to the barn.  C is a dancer: it was her first true passion—she has been dancing in her room, in the family room, around the dinner table since she was tiny.  When I send her up to get a sweater or a hairbrush and she doesn’t return I listen for the overhead thump of dancing feet.  Now she attends ballet three times per week and will start her beloved modern dance class as well this January.  Too much.  I meant to make her choose: riding or modern dance.  We can’t do both – too expensive and too much time.  Lo and behold, an email came from the barn offering a short January session of 5 Saturday morning lessons.  I caved and C is ecstatic.   

All the while knowing what I need to tell her.  That I will support her development as a dancer but not as a rider.  In my heart of hearts I know that if offered the larger choice she would instantly opt for an existence with horses over dance.  But while riding feels good and welcoming now, it will not in another year or two when all her peers are leasing or owning horses.  I caved because I know there is no better place on earth for a girl than a dirty, airy barn full of horses.  Am I the peak of hypocrisy because I was the embodiment of that happy girl at the barn?  Or am I the good mother protecting her daughter from the bottomless ache of only being able to touch this world with her fingertips, or the catastrophe of running full-throttle into the cold wall of finite cash flow?  Do I wish my mother had protected me?  Or is it better that I experienced my private school of hard knocks?

“You were so good while you were having your heart torn out.”  My mom looked at me dead-on as she said this in a recent conversation.  By high school I had my own horse and hit that wall brutally hard when our financial world fell apart.  The story is complex for everyone in my family, but the abrupt ending of everything horse-related is what counts in this particular dilemma.

When I look too closely at C's copy of the book, A Very Young Rider (the same author wrote A Very Young Dancer, A Very Young Skater, etc.), I can feel ancient teenage tears lurking under the surface.  I see photos of my horse’s veterinarian, farrier, a judge I worked for, a store where I bought my bridle, and familiar show-ring faces.  The girl who is featured in the book trailered her horse to the barn where I boarded and she and I trained with the same rising star instructor.  In a corner of my mind, my ego rants and raves a very old and hysterical tirade.  “You have NO idea!  I was going to be good, really good – I would have qualified for the National Horse Show…. 

The lurking impact occasionally reveals itself in a recurring dream: loading my kind, big-hearted horse onto a trailer and watching the door slam, never to know what happened to him.  The dream always takes place trapped inside the sixteen year-old mind’s denial of reality, naïve belief in the good intentions of horse dealers, and adolescent ostrich-like hope of bigger and better horses and competitions which were obviously never going to materialize.  Another darkly comic side-effect is that even today I cannot enter horse show grounds without suddenly needing to squelch involuntary tears.  My good friend K is the only person I dare take with me to watch big riding events.  Ironically, she doesn’t particularly like horses but finds herself invigorated by the teamwork and passion in the cross-country rides and gets a rush out of spectating.  As we turn into the grounds and the tents of the temporary stables come into view, she shoves the kleenex packet at me.  When I’m composed , we hustle to the warm-up ring and have a fabulous time plotting the best strategy to see promising teams over favorite obstacles.

I have been upset in retrospect, from time to time, about the role my parents played in all this.  Or the role they didn’t play. Why weren’t they more involved?  Why didn’t either parent or any relative attend even one show?  No photos, no memories in anyone’s head but mine.  But these are petty, adolescent complaints.  The sport was mine and mine alone.  I rode public transport to the barn, begged rides to shows from other, "helicopter" parents, and took pride in working to afford my bridle, saddle and some lessons.  More importantly, to the obvious question: "how could my parents have had so little insight into the financial ramifications of me horseback riding that they let me climb so high and fall so far," the answer is that they were fighting complex challenges, and they loved me, saw all the good that riding did for me and none of our lives comes complete with a crystal ball.  Even so, my inner teenager has been licking her wounds ever since and my inner helicopter mother is determined, rightly or wrongly, to protect C from the same fate.

There are many large and important lessons I learned from navigating the whole affair.  Certainly I have drawn on those larger life lessons to become who I am now: a largely happy woman immersed in a rich tapestry of family, career and projects that sustain me.  C has no such autonomy: the only way for her to get to any barn is to rely on me, and the riding world is too much my world to be completely her world.  But perhaps in my role as gatekeeper, I am depriving her of those larger lessons.  Or perhaps, the bottom line is really that in my own snobbish way, I simply don't want her to be viewed as "second class" by her horse-owning, horse-showing peers, when actually she would be completely O.K. and would ultimately benefit from the experience.

Someday C will be upset with me for a grave parenting mistake no matter how hard I try to do right by her.  An error in my judgment that will, in retrospect, cause damage and anger and upset her.  Will she ask, “why didn’t my mother let me ride more when she knew how much it meant to me?” “Why did Mom let all of HER unnecessary baggage get in the way of me just wanting to learn to ride a horse?”  After all, which is more painful: to be cut off from your heart’s desire before you can touch it or after you’ve possessed it as yours?

C, who is pink-cheeked in her helmet and done with the icy cold, is getting impatient with me.  She wants her well-deserved cocoa and is spelunking in my bag for cash.  A shrewd observer of my moods, she voices concern about the expression on my face, “Mom, are you O.K.?”  It seems her mother has been taken over by aliens as she types.  I have not told her what I am writing about and am not going to.  Right now, hot cocoa is definitely the only answer, and satisfactory for us both.

What’s good for my life versus how to help the world

I wrote this as a journal entry toward the end of a year as a long-term sub in our local high school.  I wanted to wet my feet teaching again -- I had missed it, and at the end of the year this high school wanted me to stay.  The school is a good one -- my son is there now and enjoying excellent peers, programming and teachers.  Even so, my writing captures the intensity of high school teaching at a particular moment in time, dealing with a particular population of students., Even in "good suburban schools," there are plenty of issues and at this point, far too little funding to deliver on what the public has been led to expect.  There is an enormous gap between the reality of being a classroom teacher in any school and what those of us who don't teach in similar circumstances believe teaching to be like.  That we sometimes can't hang onto good teachers even in suburban schools comes as no surprise to me.  Just recently, a friend -- an excellent teacher who has only been at it for 5 years -- let me know that she is "done."  I am sad for both her and our schools.

5/22/07

No matter what, I’m guilty.  Part and parcel of a hybrid upbringing: Catholic original sin and Protestant work ethic.  No matter what, I will always second guess what I do, while driving myself crazy doing it such that I live up to my self-imposed, unrealistic standards of “good enough,” and concurrently chastising myself for being a slovenly half-committed lazy-ass.   There.  Now that that’s out of the way I can talk about my real and surreal worlds.

I just turned down a very nice 0.5 FTE (that’s half-time for the uninitiated) teaching job at xxx High – minutes from my house -  just as I have gotten my sea-legs and started to think that maybe this teaching/real-life balance is within reach after all.  Of course, there was little “balance” to this year.  Today I caught myself – as I slammed down a salad, logged in attendance, and set up for the class coming in 5 minutes –  and stopped to take a deep breath.  In that quiet moment I could feel how abnormally high my “idling speed” was.  The foot is always on the accelerator even in park.  I am going back to my “cushy University job,” (thank goodness for it) in the “real” world.  As I write part of me sighs with great relief while the other part aches. 

High school teaching (I can’t speak for any other kind) is so impossibly intense it’s indescribable.  You are on-stage most of the day, racing in between classes and constantly communicating to kids with the utmost care.   H.S. teachers have to deliver nuanced responses in constant split-second interactions with students.  This takes a lot of practice to read between the lines and respond accordingly in real time.   And teens do not generally bestow benefit of the doubt on the adults in their world.  They’re not supposed to.  It’s exhausting.  The teaching I’ve been doing this year is intense in a gritty, watching-every-move, who-is-about-to explode-and-how-can-I-diffuse-distract-and-refocus, survive-the-class-period, trying-to-maintain-momentum-in-a-direction sort of way.  I feel sad that a new physics teacher this year, who is talented and whom I like a lot is not coming back next year.  And perhaps never teaching again.  He never stood a chance when the department saddled him with 4 classes like mine.  I knew already exactly what I was getting into and even so this was an incredibly difficult year. 

When I was younger and kid-free, teaching was the center of my universe.  It had to be.  Without at doubt I feel I am at my most competent when I am part of a high school.  Am I a productive-enough member of society when I’m not teaching?  Should I care?   I do care whether I should or not.   Is it O.K. to have some time to exercise and not be bananas all-the-while not be living up to a perceived calling?  Am I an indulgent lazy-ass?

What did they need today?  The AM class.  Rs needed someone to sit him down and make him do his homework right then and there.  “I have frees the last three blocks today – I’ll do it then.”  Both of us knew these words were hollow.  His year average is at a 61%.  If he fails biology he’ll have to triple up on science – an impossible feat senior year.  If he doesn’t graduate next year, Metco will be done with him and he will be back in the Boston Public School system for a repeat of senior year.  Not a good scenario for an extremely bright, wonderfully likeable and terribly unmotivated kid.  Br needed the same sit-down-and-do-your-homework-now treatment, though he’s further up in the 60’s and likely to at least pass the year.  I should have sat down with Vl, gone over her hot and defiant outburst last Thursday, the reason that I wrote her up, given her the hearing that she craves but doesn’t deserve - that would enable us to end the year without a struggle. 

N, Al, Lr, Js and Jy needed a real conversation about evolution and the film we saw rather than a mind-numbing fill-in-the-blank notesheet.  They are so good, smart and completely ignored.  P needed someone to make sure he did write everything down, the homework assignment, the simple notes.  Take out your pen P.  Take out your notes.  Where is your homework?  Why didn’t you do it?  Can you get it in my mailbox by the end of the day?  Are you writing down what I am saying now on your notebook paper?  Pick up the pen and write this down.  The email circle between his SPED liason and teachers says this potentially brilliant kid is falling apart yet again.  He has been out for counseling sessions.  Something’s going on at home again. 

Ct needed someone to tell her to hang in there – that she can do one more unit if she doesn’t have a defeatist attitude and stays engaged.  Ct, stop text messaging your friends under the desk and pay attention.  Her father constantly puts her down.  She is so low about herself and I love her to pieces.  Where was Ab?  Probably somewhere smoking a cigarette and pondering life’s more interesting questions because he is interested in the world and able to ponder but isn’t interested in working much.  No matter – he won’t lose any ground.  Dv was on the ball and not terribly emotionally needy today thank goodness, as was Js.  Dv was not stressed, Js was not confused.  K is in a rehab center and L is home with her baby.  Both are supposedly trying to keep up with the classwork from where they are with very little help from me.  Sn was her O.K, space-cadet self, not trying hard but not missing too much.   Of course, we missed 2/3 of class yesterday due to class officer speeches, Thursday we lose time because of the MCAS schedule and Friday we miss time because of the awards ceremony.

Zoo class came in the PM.  I cut them so much slack…the need was in the air.  A discombobulated schedule – they were all over the place as usual when they walked in.  I gave them time to air their grievances with the world as I leisurely passed out papers and checked in with each student to see whether they’d done their homework.  Use this opportunity to make personal contact with each kid – something that often helps to settle them.  Pg came in late with that look – “I don’t care because I’m in front of everybody.” “I don’t care because that’s my best defense.”  “I don’t care even though I know you care about me, I didn’t do the work you are cutting me all sorts of slack for and I need to be able to hate you if I don’t pass.”  I won’t go through the needs of everyone here.  It’s endless.  Ab was a complete pain in the neck.  I nailed Br with the ultimate – the write-up for an admin detention – when his cellphone went off.  I was in the middle of class and he remained defiant.  He stormed out of early.  Everyone was cowed into submission.  Not a good way to end the day.  All he needed to do was apologize and put away the darned phone.

5/24/07

So, I was “mean” to them today.  I could feel their vibe on their way out, “Man, she was a BITCH today…,”  Just my last class – “zoo class.”  I just didn’t have the patience for the enormous physicality of 15 17-year-old boys, 3 flirtatious or troubled girls, the ensuing chatter and constant put-downs.  The harshness of the world which comes out of their mouths toward each other still floors me 9 months later.  It is never directed to me purposefully.  But I feel engulfed by it.  It takes so much energy round them up from their entry and maintain their attention.  To not be sidetracked by A’s outbursts.  (If he were a normal kid I would have kicked him out about once a week at this rate.  But his level of “good behavior” is a very low bar with his profound mental challenges and lack of any moral compass.   His “good” behavior is someone else’s terrible behavior.  At least he does his homework everyday.  The inappropriateness of his verbal blurts and noises remind me of Tourette’s but his are to gain attention from his classmates and therefore different.)

I got their attention today by reminding them that they had witnessed my having a “short fuse” the other day with Br and that today was no exception.  That I was unwilling and unable to spend my time after school overseeing my own detention and therefore, any detention would be administrative and unfun.  They were quiet while watching the film.  Some had good questions, I know, but I could not allow any interruption of the quiet momentum.  An educational conversation would have quickly devolved into random chatter and posturing, and I just didn’t have the energy or patience to constantly herd them back into line today.  I had asked them to take notes on a highly structured worksheet but few wrote anything at all.  The film went too fast for some of them.  Tomorrow we’ll go back over it piece by piece. I would love some decent discussion.  They will all be good people in the end.  Just right now they are incredibly large, loud, immature and disinterested.

My stomach will be in knots tomorrow because I really do need to corral zoo-class and force them to listen and learn some content.  Tomorrow we meet for the last 3 blocks on Friday in 95 deg heat with no air-conditioning.  I’ll turn on the fan and resort to the overhead again.  The overhead projector is like a narcotic.  I write down notes at their speed while reading the notes aloud and elaborating.  Everyone settles down and copies diligently.  The room is dark.  I am bathed in the lamp’s glow.  I do not have my back to them.  I realized the other day, as I used the board – something I rarely do with these classes – is that the board forces me to turn my back to them.  And I am behind the barrier of the lab table.  These two physical realities of the space put miles between us.  As soon as I’m at the board, it’s as though I’m not there at all.  The overhead is so mundane, so old-school, so effective.  Powerpoints don’t work.  They are pretty to look at and induce quiet but everyone becomes so much more passive with the powerpoint.  As though they expect the knowledge to seep into their brain without any reading, thinking or writing.  The overhead forces them to write real notes.  Forces them to look at me.  Forces eye contact.  Old-fashioned and effective.  If I could just get them to hang onto these notes long enough to study for a quiz then I’d really have done something!

When viewing films, I pull up a stool to one of the tables in the back of the class with my remote.  Make myself at home amongst them.  The students who are more likely to be subversive are back there but they suddenly turn to me with curiosity about the film.  They whisper questions to me that wouldn’t occur to them in the larger group because they’re so busy being on stage.  I answer some quietly and then try to direct them back to the film so they don’t miss so much that they are lost. 

Good discussions do happen but they are more likely when I do not feel like I am trying to keep a cork in a shaken bottle.  To craft that atmosphere of reasonable calm and focus with this group is very difficult indeed.  To succeed, we need the correct barometric pressure in addition to the perfect amount of “sit down and behave” balanced with “trust me and discuss this with me.”  It is best when Ab is either absent or quiet for some reason.  It is best when Pg and Br are not sullen about their lives.  It is best when I can find a way to kindly keep M (with his straight A average and Asperger’s) in check and answer his 10,000 inventive, relevant but off-topic questions later.  Thank goodness for him – his classmates show kindness to him when they won’t to anyone else.  They begrudgingly allow him to help them understand the material when he approaches them in his socially clueless and incredibly intelligent way.  M is the good side of inclusion and he is an absolute asset.  Unfortunately, I’m seeing more of the bad side.

What are we doing in schools?  This is not education.  This is passing the time.  I am a highly trained babysitter checking topics off a list even though about a third of these students fail any given test.  My students in zoo-class and I have experienced moments of education in occasional good group discussions, but almost all of it has been in small groups or one-on-one.  When I am one-on-one I can connect with them and bypass their grandstanding with each other.  But as I connect one-on-one with a student the rest of the class gradually spirals into oblivion if I have not structured heavy and, for some, punitive, busywork. 

I sat and proctored extra time in MCAS today.  Another T, W and Thursday completely disrupted by this crazy testing scheme.  Students missing hours of class and direction and momentum in a subject even when they’re not the ones being tested.  Teachers needing to proctor and proctor.   Couldn’t I be online trying to locate and structure good activities that will engage my students?  Couldn’t I be futzing with a potential lab protocol? Couldn’t I be cleaning the beakers in my sink?  This is completely ridiculous.