Smarty Pants

It makes me sad, and not a little exasperated, that “educated” has become synonymous with “undesirable.” Your immediate reaction might be to argue that stance with me, claiming that my status as an educator gives me a heightened sensitivity to such things, but, think about it, everywhere you turn people who have formal, advanced schooling are suspect these days. They are elitists who eat arugula and listen to NPR. They are Wall Street, not Main Street. They don’t plumb or actually work. They aren’t in touch with the real America. They have book learning but no common sense. And so on. As a natural knowledge-seeker, I find that tragic. As an academic, I find that deplorable. As a parent, I find that terrifying. If the message my children are consistently getting from their world is that being smart means being shunned, what can I do to convince them otherwise? What should I do? In times like these, it feels like raising bright kids is almost doing them a disservice. When I read articles showing that people who were in the Greek system and have minimal education are twice as likely to get hired as less-hearty partiers with PhDs, I wonder if I would give my kids more of an advantage by teaching them which letter of the Greek alphabet Pi is rather than what the square root of pi is. But it’s all I know. So, we read Sarah Phillips’ My Picture Encyclopedia and I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Picture-Encyclopedia-Sarah-Phillips/dp/1846104459

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Sarah-Phillips/author/

My Life In The Anthill

Coming from a religious background where nobody gets paid to do anything, I was taught early and well that group gatherings were never really over until the place was cleaned up. However, this message doesn’t get through to everyone. So, at the end of every function, it was always my family and a handful of other families putting away chairs and running the vacuum cleaner. Which I resented a lot. It bothered me that other people were allowed to make a big mess and a small crew of us with uptight parents would have to clean it up. Then I became a parent myself and heard my kids doing the same griping. One time after our church group attended a baseball game, I made my children pick up trash so that we wouldn’t leave a bad impression in the community. They hated it and I remembered being the kid of a cleaner-upper. But somebody has to keep the place running even if others benefit by being lazy. I thought of this at storytime the other day. The sweet librarian is big pregnant and starting to show the strain of combining excessive cheerfulness and procreation. It always makes me sad when parents and kids rush off and leave the craft-time devastation behind for her to take care of. Unfortunately, it’s just the way communities seem to work. When reading Henry Pluckrose’s Ants, I couldn’t help but feel kinship with those worker ants. It’s thankless work, but somebody has to do it.

http://catalog.tempe.gov:90/search~S7?/sSisters./ssisters/25%2C-1%2C0%2CE/exact&FF=ssmall+world&1%2C4%2C

http://www.jacketflap.com/persondetail.asp?person=61682

An Apple A Day

It is interesting, and vindicating for moms, to see how often wives’ tales and superstitions are shown to have real-world application and scientific benefit. For instance, it is wise not to walk under a ladder not just because it is bad luck, but also because ladders can come tumbling down on unsuspecting heads, sometimes bringing heavy things, including people, with them. You get the idea. An especially useful piece of folk wisdom is the one about eating apples and keeping doctors away. In times before common nutrition knowledge and readily available medical care, staying healthy was not only smart but absolutely necessary. I like apples in most forms--sauce, pie, sliced, dried--but I’ve never really known much about them. Since Scarlett and I have been working together at home, we began at the beginning with “A,” which naturally led to paying attention to apples this week. And even though Scarlet is the student, I’ve learned a ton. Did you know that the channels where apples keep their seeds are called carpels? Or that over 250 million bushels of apples are grown in just the United States every year? Apples, which seem so American, are not native to this country, and all apples, despite their seeming variety, are some combination of red, yellow, and/or green. Fascinating. Well, it has been for me, anyway. In Apples, written by the number one children’s nonfiction writer Gail Gibbons, I found out why apples are such a big deal. I think I’ll go have a snack.

P.S. Happy Anniversary, Oba and Grandpa Dan!

http://www.amazon.com/Apples-Gail-Gibbons/dp/0823416690

http://www.gailgibbons.com/

In The Treetops

You can’t stop a climber. If you’ve got one, you know what I mean. Of my four children, two are climbers and have occasionally scared me witless with their antics. If you don’t curtail the scaling of climb-prone kids, lots of people--friends, family, and strangers alike--will weigh in with both warnings and critical clucking. Addison was a runner and Keilana was a good-senser (I had to go to the tops of slides and retrieve her until she was six), but Connor and Scarlett are my monkeys. Today Scarlett, clad only in a diaper and bedhead, wedged her tiny toes into the crack between the tops of the cabinets and the bottom of the silverware drawer to heft herself up onto the counter that is higher than her head. When I asked her just what she thought she was doing, she said, “Go way me! I climbing!” Obviously. It’s no use arguing, apparently. My mother has always said I was a climber, and I believe it considering how much I love trees. Not in a tree-hugging way (well, not just in a tree-hugging way), but in a get-my-hands-dirty-pulling-myself-off-the-ground way. As a child, I spent far more time among the branches of the trees in our yard than I did earthbound--and my mom got to hear all about what a terrible mother she was from the neighbors. When we read Margaret Hodges’ The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed, I couldn’t help but feel glad that my mom never listened to the naysayers.

http://www.amazon.com/True-Tale-Johnny-Appleseed/dp/0823415090

http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/hodges/hodgesbio.htm

Prairie Girl

My very favorite literary character and author is Laura Ingalls Wilder. I have read every book many times and, if I believed in reincarnation, would think I once roamed the prairie in a covered wagon. We’re practically the same person. She was a brown-haired braid-wearer in a blonde-curls-are-better world. She was short, a bit round, willful, and tended toward a wild streak. She was a teacher, a writer, and spoke her mind (sometimes to her detriment). It all feels familiar for me, until we get to family composition. The Ingalls family had four children, like my family, but Laura’s three siblings were all girls and that doesn’t jive with my experience at all. But I feel like I understand a little of the sister bond from reading Laura’s books so often. Her dedication to and sacrifice for her sisters, particularly older sister Mary, are central themes in the series. In fact, Mary’s early and tragic loss of sight due to scarlet fever was the impetus for Laura’s writing career. When the sad diagnosis first came, Laura vowed to see the world for Mary, to be her eyes, and describe all that she saw in vivid detail. She wrote everything down on lined school tablets, and the rest is history. And literature. In Charlotte Zolotow’s Do You Know What I’ll Do?, a sister lists all the loving things she can think of to do for her beloved brother. We never again have any friends like the ones who share our parents.

http://www.amazon.com/Do-You-Know-What-Ill/dp/006027879X

http://www.charlottezolotow.com/

I Want To Grow Old With You

Connor once went through a phase of intense concern over what would happen to me when I got old. He would tell me every day what provisions he would make for my golden years--bring me groceries, buy me a house, take me to the doctor--and how he was going to pay for these plans. Just to yank his chain a bit, I told him that sometimes old people have to wear diapers and asked if he was going to change my diapers one day. Not expecting such a dilemma, he pondered a long time for a four year-old. Thinking he might have forgotten the original question, I asked him again if he was willing to do old-age diaper duty. He looked at me so innocently and said, “No…but I’ll pay someone else to do it!” Which sounds like a solution we can all live with. It’s hard to contemplate the aging of our loved ones, and fully absorbing mortality is almost impossible. As a girl, my grandmother made me promise that, when her time came, I would make sure she was sent to the next life with her toenails painted their customary red. I made the commitment never realizing that one day I would actually be insisting on it during funeral preparations. But insist I did. And prevailed. In Angela Johnson’s When I Am Old With You, a little boy projects into the future where he and his beloved grandpa will age together forever. I wish that could truly happen.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Old-You-Orchard-Paperbacks/dp/0531070352

http://aalbc.com/authors/angela.htm

Differently Abled

On July 26, 2010, the Americans With Disabilities Act celebrated its twentieth anniversary. While it’s pretty amazing to contemplate the protections the act has afforded the differently-abled, it is also mind-boggling to realize it took so long for such protections to find their way into law and that twenty years just isn’t very long. To put it in personal perspective for me, that means the act has been around less than half my life and the opportunities and rights I have always enjoyed having been blessed with a sound mind and body have only been mandated for everyone for two decades. I have a kid older than that. Having worked extensively with the disabled population for the last three years, I have been afforded a first-hand look at the challenges they face--and also the gifts and talents they possess. It’s often hard for people who don’t know and love these kids to interact with them. I forget this until we go on outings and see the varied levels of comfort people have with the unknown. Some do great either naturally or because of someone in their life, most experience good-intentioned awkwardness, and a very small few exhibit some malice. But mostly, people just want to know they are interacting properly with a population they know little about. In Stephen Cosgrove’s Fanny, a three-legged cat is sorely misunderstood by the barnyard, until a little puppy who doesn’t know any better makes friends. Sometimes different is just different until it becomes familiar.

http://www.amazon.com/Fanny-Serendipity-Stephen-Cosgrove/dp/0843114606

http://www.stephencosgrove.com/