August 4th, 2007
My older two boys almost wore out my patience with the board games designed for three and four year olds many many years ago — the ones with no reading involved, no counting higher than six, much less strategizing, bluffing or showing off vocabulary (too much online scrabble this week. lying next to my husband at bed at night with both our laptops open. makes me feel really old and married.) I’m talking about games that really require one skill and one skill only, taking turns. Not a small skill to develop, but once you’ve got it — hard to find the challenge. Still, today, we had a a child over to play with the older boys and my four year old was disconsolate at being left out so when he begged for me to play a boardgame with him we dragged out the Chutes and Ladders. Candyland is easier to cheat at, to sneak the kid cards so he can win quickly and you can do something else, but whatever.
I remember preferring Chutes and Ladders as a kid, and sat studying the pictures which are really nothing but little cartoon depictions of actions and their consequences. As a cute as the girl sweeping and getting to go the circus is, the boy riding his bicycle with no hands and getting a broken arm, it occurs to me these could use updating, things with a bit more moral sophistication. The thing is most squares would have both a ladder up and a chute down, that most behaviors have a risk that could go either way; the skateboarder could get a major contract with a gear company and he could end up with lots of broken bones, the cat rescuer may have a grateful cat and may also get scratched up and bitten trying to approach a panicked animal, you refuse to let somebody copy your homework in class and you don’t get in trouble in class (hopefully, though I can remember getting in trouble, unfairly, when someone else was talking to me) but you get beaten up at recess.
And no, that’s probably not the appropriate message you want to send your four year old. For now, I’ll let him believe that there are things that are clearly the right thing to do, things that are clearly the wrong thing to do. But I am moving away from layering my consequences on top of the inherent ones in his behavior.
For example, at the library last week, there was a child manning the treasure chest of small plastic trinkets to reward kids who had participated in the summer reading program, and my four year old went and picked one out, wanted it so badly, but had to put it back because we haven’t participated in the program. Part of it is that I am too lazy and too time-hungry to keep track of time my kids spend reading and being read too, but the other part of it is, as my ten year old came up and said in my voice, that “Reading should be its own reward.”
I really was impressed by the argument in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards. I am even learning to trust that doing the wrong thing is its own punishment. This was part of the argument in Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, that the coercive carrots and sticks are not respectful and distract kids from the inherent consequences. It may be a fine line to walk, I am not abdicating my responsibility to be the one with an eye on long-term consequences, but I am working on getting the kids to understand consequences and to make decisions for themselves, especially on the relatively low-stakes stuff.
August 2nd, 2007
It’s one of those side benefits of parenthood, getting asked the big questions and dusting off the undergraduate philosophy books, and answering, wait, this really is what I believe. And your answers hopefully don’t sound tired and clichéd to a ten-year-old, right? So the question of the day is what is there between the absolutist rock and the relativist slippery slope?
I am so uncomfortable with worldviews that hold that only this one version of the truth can be real, the arrogance of believing you have access to capital T Truth that others don’t, that one arrow alone is hitting the bullseye; at the same time, I have this horror of a nihilism that denies that there is any absolute truth to get at. Maybe this is what makes discussions of religion so potentially uncomfortable, because conviction clashing with conviction has an inevitable outcome, and conviction clashing with anything other than conviction either makes the person not holding the conviction look indecisive or the person with the conviction seem like a blowhard. But I am completely in favor of convictions. And I am completelly in favor of open-mindedness. Damn, I am waffling again!
There is a book of art projects for preschoolers titled “It’s the Process not the Product” and that’s sort of where I come out on the question of the nature of truth — we are all pretty much blind, and arguing tends to favor the good arguers, who are not necessarily the possessors of truth. I am sure my Philosophy 101 survey textbook responded to the question of absolutisim vs. relativism with the story of the blind men and the elephant, but it works for me. If you don’t give primacy to the trunk, to the tail, to the tusks, if you don’t try to persuade other people they’re not experiencing what they are experiencing, if you can put aside the apparent contradictions for awhile and accept them all, you can get on with the deeply rewarding and very important work of trying to figure it out — and understanding where another person is coming from, having your own ideas handed back to you enlarged but still recognizable, just, that’s better than chocolate.
Of course, if the story of the elephant seems like a cliched response to the question of absolutism vs. relativism, wikipedia offers this:
A joke exists in which three blind elephants argue what a man looks like. The first one feels the man with his leg, and says that the man is flat. The other elephants touch the man as well, and agree.
August 1st, 2007
Another sign of being a hopeless NPR geek is the crush on Ira…[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fradar%2Eoreilly%2Ecom%2Farchives%2F2007%2F08%2Fira%5Fglass%5Fon%5Fst%2Ehtml]
August 1st, 2007
I broke up with my kids’ violin teacher today. Not that I was seeing her socially, exactly. But then it felt really personal. No chance we’re still friends. I tried so hard to be diplomatic and express gratitude and respect while explaining we need something else right now. I had had a fantasy of going in for a final lesson with her (already paid for!) on Saturday with cards the kids had made and flowers, giving them a chance to say goodbye. But she’s very much convinced her way is the only way, and lay quite a trip on how I was betraying her and how much she has invested in me and my children (hey, I was the one writing checks!), and every point I had about what wasn’t working for me she argued prolifically, until I was left with a weak “yeah, I guess that’s how you see it.” But she was upset I hadn’t brought any of this up earlier, that it seemed so sudden… I hate that feeling of having something sprung on you, and yet, over the course of this last year, seldom has she seemed to actually hear me. I felt completely run over.
Still, over the last year, she’s let me know who she was. I do think her method works, but it was getting harder to cope with her style of dealing with children, with me. So today, I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths, convinced that this was the right thing for my kids, that they haven’t been consigned to never getting a good technique, that this phone call today actually proved that I made the right decision. After I came not-so-suddenly to the conclusion last Saturday that I couldn’t continue another semester with her, I have been losing sleep about having to tell her (and it seemed inappropriate to write even this publicly about it when I hadn’t talked to her. And I am trying not to go into a litany of what didn’t work and what was making me crazy). So I am looking forward to resting better tonight, knowing that I did the right thing, was honest and honorable and forthright and, for me, darn assertive.
Astonishing how much of my identity had gotten caught up in being a parent in her studio, knowing my place in the hierarchy there (we were going to have some seniority this year, dammit!) and how once that broke and all of the ripples of implication settled down, I felt lighter and a little freer.
Mi hermana, the wise ‘cello teacher, reminds me that this is a business transaction. She was shocked when I described the length of the conversation. Why didn’t I just say, “I’m sorry, this is the decision we’ve made. Thanks for your time.”? I’ll never be that person, I’m afraid.
Plus side: we had another lesson this evening with a different teacher, who teaches one of my son’s classmates, and he impressed me. He listened thoughtfully, had a style very much “This is great. One thing you could do to make it better is try it this way.” In fact, he seemed to be using a lot of the scripts I’ve heard from my sister in her teaching, which is my highest standard. And the eight year old responded terrifically. With the four-year-old, he managed a pretty good balance between listening respectfully, and keeping him on track. Which, considering the astonishing free association the child is capable of, was quite impressive. He laid out clear goals for the next lesson: the most important thing to work on is this, when I come next I am going to ask to hear this. My biggest fear was that I was going to be sacrificing some of the exacting learning-the-right-way-not-developing-bad-habits-muscle-memory that was the old teacher’s hallmark, and yet he was exacting about the hand-shaping and posture and holds he wanted from my son, and had new and different ways of explaining it, and I don’t feel like we’ve compromised.
I don’t think he’s the rebound teacher, and I don’t think the last year was wasted. And I think I won’t be tied up in knots trying to interpret things said off the cuff that have nothing to do with the violin. It’s a tricky thing about Suzuki, because it does have to do with the whole child and how the child is being raised. It works best in the place where their work is play and their play is their work and discipline and coaching and the relationships between parent and child, teacher and child, and parent and teacher are all in a good balance. But I know how to raise my children, have agonized over the decisions of when to push them, when to refrain from pushing, when to try and ask a little more of them — whether it’s in helping around the house or sitting quietly through a performance or tasting a vegetable that they are convinced they hate — and when to save my energy for the bigger battles, and these things are my privilege and my responsibilty as the parent, and what I really want from a violin teacher is really lessons in violin playing right now.
