Reframing

Any casual stroll through my Linkedin timeline shows multiple “inspirational” posts or articles referring to the “secrets of success” of wealthy entrepreneurs. The implications are obvious. If you do what these people do, you’ll be successful too! And if you aren’t successful, it’s probably your fault for not doing these things.

Sure, getting up early enough to go for a jog and make yourself a smoothie is a good habit. But I know successful people who roll out of bed at 8am, suck down a cup of instant coffee, and launch into their day still wearing pajamas. So I think maybe that’s not really it.

But there is something real that most very successful people share. It’s called privilege.

As soon as you mention the word “privilege,” some folks get their knickers in a twist. I know, it’s not comfortable to talk about. We’re so used to the American narrative of “hardships overcome” that we uncritically accept a rose-tinted version of reality.

I’m here to challenge that. Let’s look at a few success stories.

Bill Gates grew up in an upper-middle class family in Seattle. His dad was a lawyer, and his mother was primarily a full-time parent who was actively engaged in public service projects.

The story told is that Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage. And so he did. Not everybody has a garage. Or a degree from Princeton. Or parents who can invest $300,000 in their kid’s business idea.

Michael Dell, of course, is the college drop-out who made good. He is also the son of a Houston stockbroker and got his first computer at age 15, at a time when computers were so expensive that very few families could afford them.

Google Elon Musk and you’ll find multiple reports of how he was badly bullied as a child. Not to downplay how awful bullying is, but Elon Musk also grew up a wealthy white kid in apartheid South Africa. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a model and dietician. He attended private prep schools as a youth.

Steve Jobs grew up in Silicon Valley with supportive parents. His mom taught him to read before he started school. His dad was a mechanic who gave him workshop space and taught him how to use tools and build things. He had a teacher who saw his potential and mentored him when he was struggling with school. A neighbor down the street taught him about electronics and helped him get into a student program sponsored by HP, which led to him getting an HP internship.

Warren Buffet’s dad was a stockbroker and a Congressman, and his mother was a full-time parent.

George Soros was born to a prosperous family in Hungary. His father was a lawyer who edited a literary magazine.

Howard Hughes was the son of a very successful inventor, businessman, and entrepreneur who patented a roller bit for oil drilling that made him a rich man.

Peter Thiel is the son of a chemical engineer.

Paul Allen attended private schools in Seattle and had access to computer labs to experiment and learn in at a time when home computers were unheard of.

And so on, and on.

It’s not that nothing bad ever happened to these guys. But they had advantages that other people don’t have. They were born white and male to educated and prosperous families. They had books and education and support. While not everyone with these things succeeds to the level these guys did, it honestly would have been a stranger tale if they had been complete failures. Their stories aren’t that interesting to me. You could write a book about them and call it “White Patriarchy Still Works.” So please don’t position them as role models for all the people who don’t fit that mold.

I’d much rather hear about the people who aren’t white men. Be they conventional successes or cleaving their own paths through the challenges of life. I’ll learn much more from those.

 

Hi

 

“Hi.”

Just that, in my DMs. From a guy I don’t know IRL and have never had any public exchange of information or ideas with.

After a few attempts to follow up on this type of gambit, my automatic reaction now is to disconnect from anyone who does this. Why?

Would you walk up to a complete stranger on the street or at an event and just say “hi” and stand there? Really? Don’t you think your audience would consider that creepster behavior?

If you want to engage with a new acquaintance, comment on their posts in a way that’s thoughtful and genuine. That boosts their exposure and shows that you are interested in what they have to say.

Good reasons to DM me would be if you want to ask for an introduction to someone, introduce someone you think would be helpful or interesting for me to know, share some thought-provoking content that you are pretty sure I’ll be interested in, seek my advice, invite me to an event, or explore the idea of collaboration. And you would only do any of these things if you had already established a dialog in the public space of the platform.

“Hi” is just a random demand for my attention. You’re not offering me any incentive to engage with you. You haven’t proven yourself worthy of my time and attention in a public forum. You’re invading my day, and it’s an unwelcome intrusion.

Odd that I’ve NEVER had a woman do this.

What Are You Trying to Sell Me?

 

Facebook has been blitzing me with ads for four days. This is unusual. Usually their ad blitzes only last about 24 hours. It’s a bit of sport, blocking them all.

I’m beginning to think that FB has stock in the ad blocking apps. That would make way too much sense.

I don’t watch TV, and I live where nobody bothers with billboards because there just aren’t enough eyeballs to see them. So my exposure to advertising is mostly limited to what I see online. That’s bad enough.

I have a friend who enjoys finding old adverts from the 50s-80s and posting them on social media. They are mostly horrifying (Beatles-inspired wigs for men was a thing?) although there are a very few that stand the test of time. They’re terrible not just for the production value but also for the incredibly biased and simple-minded content.

Today’s ads are different but just as bad. Especially during a pandemic.

“Stress will make your skin age, so use this product!”

“Improve your immune system with our proven herbal system!”

“Cozy and happy at home with these 400 thread count sheets!”

“Show your colors by wearing these Dissent earrings everywhere you go!”

“Wear this crystal bracelet to align your energies!”

“Get fit in 4 weeks at home with this scientifically proven device!”

“In Zoom meetings all day? Wear this posture-correcting corset!”

“Stand out in these hand-embroidered face masks made by Mexican artisans!”

And the favorite of online advertising during a pandemic - “Due to COVID, we have to discontinue operations/this product line. Buy now and save big!”

Seriously, it’s enough to make me completely lose faith in humanity and go live in a cave.

I’m sure all these companies are using “big data” to figure out who to market to. They clearly know I’m a middle-aged white female who leans left. But what is the point of targeted marketing if you’re going to insult me? Your advertising clearly reveals your bias – that people of my demographic tend to be overweight, obsessed with appearance, ignorant of science, and guilty about our domestic shortcomings. Is this advertising or gaslighting? I’m smart enough to know that burning sage won’t protect me from a virus and woke enough to know a new bra isn’t empowerment. Honestly, it’s offensive.

Seriously y’all. Use your big data to engage with me respectfully. Try to sell me products that add real value to my life if you are going to market to me. Otherwise, go rethink your business strategy and come back when you’ve got it right. In the meantime, at least the block button still works.

The Screaming is Predictable

Photo by Sam Wheeler on Unsplash

He was born in a small southern town at the beginning of World War II. His dad worked for the railroad. His mom was a typing teacher at the local high school. He grew up in the carefully curated world of a rural southern sundown town. White men ran things. White women were feminine and subservient. Minorities were obsequious or invisible. Everyone pretended to be a straight Christian. Non-conformers left town as soon as they were old enough to.

He did pretty well for himself. Tennis player. Good student. Went to college and got a degree in accounting. Got a government job. Married the girl next door. Had 4 kids and worked slowly but steadily through the ranks. He wasn’t brilliant, but government offices are filled with people who learn how to apply the rules correctly and perform their duties adequately. It’s the sort of work that doesn’t reward intuition or genius. He wasn’t racist or sexist, of course, that would have been unprofessional, but he always thought his female or minority colleagues who excelled at their jobs were unusual and noteworthy.  

He got an MBA. His wife wrote all of his papers for him, but that probably doesn’t really matter. After all, he was a very busy man. By keeping his wife on an allowance and counting every penny, he managed to save a good bit of money. He read all the financial magazines and invested his money cautiously. It made him feel like a high roller. He could talk about “my stock portfolio.” He had a disabled son who took a lot of the parenting energy and resources. His other children turned out pretty okay, all things considered. They all disappointed him in some way, but none of them were really failures either. 

He retired, got a party and a plaque, and bought a little place in the country. He got a part time job with the local senior center, driving the van three days a week. He walks every day with his neighbor. Saturdays he takes the trash to the dump. He likes a predictable routine. It feels safe.

Then COVID19 happened.

He’s an educated man. He knows that science is real. He watches a documentary now and then. So he wears a mask to deliver meals to shut-ins and takes his temperature every day. But he doesn’t want it to be real. He’s watching his stock portfolio take a beating. His grandson’s college closed and his church switched to virtual services. Family events are cancelled. And it just doesn’t go away. He wants it to go away. He wants to be in control of things in his world, the way he used to be.

After a while, he starts to believe maybe the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. After all, he doesn’t personally know anyone who has it. His little town hasn’t seen many cases, and maybe those were really something else. He’s tired of wearing masks. He wants to see his grandkids and sit down for lunch at his favorite burger joint and get his hair cut and to watch his stock portfolio creep upwards.

He’ll vote for Trump again. Because it’s not really that bad. The media’s blowing it all out of proportion. Maintaining the status quo is more important than anything else when your world is a fragile house of cards. Even if the status quo is literally crumbling to the ground. Because if the status quo isn’t real, isn’t preserved, then what was it all about? All those years of living according to the rules, checking off the boxes and slowly accumulating the accouterments of a successful life. It has to mean something. Anything else is terrifying. Anything else is unthinkable. 

It's true that some Trump supporters and science deniers are uneducated mouth-breathing idiots. But most of them aren’t. They are just nightmarishly afraid of change and clinging desperately to the mirage of a stable and understandable past. Never mind that they world they lived in was a very narrow slice of reality. It was their slice and they lived comfortably within its rules and confines. COVID is disintegrating the walls around that world. The screaming is predictable.

Never Ever Do This Thing

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. “Never mix business and politics.” “Keep politics off Linkedin.” “Keep your political opinions to yourself.” But here’s the deal. Politics are what I do. I’m a political activist. I’ve been a precinct chair, an event organizer, a videographer of political events, a political blogger, a grassroots organizer, a voter registrar, and a non-profit director. Politics have expanded my world and taught me more than I ever imagined when I drove to my first modest little protest in Oklahoma City 10 years ago.

• I learned how political campaigns are structured, staffed, and run.
• I learned how data analysis is used to design get-out-the-vote and voter outreach strategies.
• I learned how voter registration and elections are run.
• I learned how to run a fund-raiser.
• I learned how to seek out partner organizations to help achieve a goal.
• I’ve learned to always have the music first, the speakers second, and the marching last.
• I learned the confidence to pick up the microphone or stand in front of the news camera and speak my piece clearly and boldly.
• I learned how to evaluate candidates and campaigns to determine who has the best shot of winning and who deserves my support.
• I learned how to pick up the phone and call a gubernatorial candidate out of the blue and convince him to come halfway across the state to my event.
• I learned how much control lobbyists have over the political process, and that many politicians are completely bought and paid for by their cash, and that those politicians are pointless to talk to.
• I’ve delivered hundreds of pounds of emergency supplies across the ocean and beaten FEMA to the site.
• I’ve learned how to moderate and sustain a grassroots organization of thousands of members.
• I’ve learned who to trust for the long haul, who to partner with for the short-term, and who to avoid at all costs.
• I’ve learned when to step forward and lead and when to step back and follow.
• I’ve learned that people in positions of power are not necessarily smart or admirable.
• I’ve met my heroes and learned that they are ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses and quirks.
• I’ve cried with strangers at vigils and funerals and I’ve laughed and danced with strangers at rallies and celebrations.
• I’ve had sniper rifles pointed at my head and I’ve dared arrest in the Senate chamber and in the streets.
• I’ve seen my friends attacked by counter-protesters and dragged across the floor by the police.
• I’ve seen my convictions challenged and tested and found that they stand up to scrutiny and are worth defending.

Coincidentally, all of these things make me better at my “day job” as well. I wouldn’t be nearly as good at analyzing business processes, working with stakeholders at every level of an organization, asking the key questions, building an effective team, getting to the heart of a business problem, envisioning creative solutions, or challenging assumptions without my political experience.

So please don’t tell me to “leave politics out of it.” I could no more do that than I could leave my heart or my kidneys or my lungs out of it. It’s a package deal. And it’s a damned good deal too.  

Aw hell no, Sergeant Major

My first annual training (AT) in the reserves, after spending 4 years active duty, was an Educational Experience.

The reserves are about as much like active duty as Fredricksburg is like Germany – not very. But I quickly found that I much preferred the reserves. There was a lot less focus on formality and image and a lot more focus on getting the job done. Maybe because you’re always trying to figure out how to run a unit and train your soldiers in a ridiculously compressed time frame. Less energy left over for bullshit. And everyone’s role was bigger and more integrated than in active duty, where we had each been relegated to one small piece of the puzzle with very little collaboration.

I was an E5 when we rolled into Fort Hood for that AT, just a squad leader, not really in charge of much and still figuring out how it all worked. We set up our SCIF and the GP medium that served as our quarters and began 24x7 operations.

Three days later we got orders to move. We packed it all up and relocated.

And then did it again.

And again.

Moving a SCIF is no small feat. The setup was three 577’s parked side-by-side with vestibules extended, a GP small guard shack, a perimeter of three courses of razor wire, and camo netting spread over all. Only after the MPs approved the set-up could the radios be turned on and communications re-established. Communications is the whole point, since the raison d’etre of the SCIF is gather, analyze, and disseminate information. And of course, we did it all in 100-degree heat with cactus needles piercing our uniforms and razor wire ripping our gloves and scorpions, fire ants, and blister beetles bringing their own form of biological warfare.

As the exercise concluded, it became obvious that we had aced it. Located all the “enemy” units. Maintained OPSEC. Met all of our training objectives. We were feeling pretty chuffed and starting to relax a little and wind things down when the Sergeant Major walked in. A couple of folks were stripped down to their tee-shirts. Somebody was sitting on an upturned ammo box, pulling cactus spines out of his boots. I guess our casual demeanor offended his refined sensibilities, because he started to harangue us “smart-assed, card-playing, cigar-smoking college kids with bad attitudes.”

This was too much for our NCOIC.

“No, Sergeant Major, you don’t get to walk in here and talk to these hard-working soldiers that way. They just aced this exercise. They did a fine job. They’re the best team I’ve ever trained or worked with!” she yelled at him.

“At ease, Sergeant! You’re out of order!” he yelled back.

“Get out!” she snarled. “Leave my soldiers alone and get the hell out of my SCIF! If you have a problem, take it up with the commander!”

He got out.

The next day, we were relaxing in our GP medium after dinner. In our tee-shirts. The 577s were packed up and ready to load up for the trip back to Austin in the morning. In honor of our newly minted “smart ass” status, we were sitting on the ends of our cots, playing hearts and smoking cheap cigarillos. The Sergeant Major walked in.

“Hey Sergeant Major!” I called. “Pull up a cot and we’ll deal you in!”

He stood there for a moment, silent, radiating rage, then he spun on his heels and left the tent without a word.

Power is derived from the consent of the governed. Even in the army.

I’m still a smart-ass and I still play cards, but it’s been a long time since I smoked a cigar. There was that Cuban cigar I smoked on the white marble steps of the Houston Junior League, but that’s another story.

Healthcare's dirty little secret

In college, I worked for a year as a nurse’s aide in a for-profit nursing home. Basically if you were physically capable and didn’t have a criminal record, they’d hire you. If you made it through their two-week training course, you had a job caring for the sick, elderly, and disabled for minimum wage. You had to buy your own uniforms and stethoscope. Lifting belt and thermometers were provided.

I wasn’t a CNA. CNA is a state certification and my training/experience was insufficient for that. But there was no requirement for the nursing home to hire CNAs. Most of those with certification worked for a health staffing agency and earned well over minimum wage. So the nursing home trained their own, and only called the staffing agency when they were short-handed and needed to augment staffing for a shift. Which didn’t happen often, because most of the aides were happy to work a double shift when they could, to earn the extra pay. Since I was a full-time college student with the GI Bill, I usually only worked three 8-hour evening shifts a week.

My evening shift usually went like this:

• Get the patients who ate in the dining room up, dressed, and moved to the dining room for dinner. Since there were only 2-3 aides on a hallway of about 20 double occupancy rooms, this took a while, so the first patients I prepped got to sit in the lobby or dining room for an hour or more before dinner.
• Assist a table during dinner, which meant getting drinks and helping the patients who couldn’t feed themselves. The tables were semi-circular so that a single aide could sit in the middle and assist several patients at once.
• Take my patients back to their rooms after dinner.
• ­­­Take the patients who were due for a shower to the shower room and wash them. There were separate shower rooms for male and female patients, but the gender of the aide didn’t matter, and the shower rooms afforded no individual privacy for patients.
• Return all of my patients to bed.
• Check vital signs.
• Change bedding and clean patients who had soiled themselves as needed.
• Empty urinary drain bags and record quantities as needed.
• Provide hair care and tooth/denture cleaning as needed.
• Assist the nurse as needed.
• Respond to patient call lights as needed.

Since mine was a “skilled nursing hall,” almost all of my patients had significant impairment. Advanced dementia. Advanced multiple sclerosis. Multiple amputations. Infectious disease. Aphasia. Incontinence. It would have been difficult for 4 aides to provide sufficient care on that hall. When I started the job, we were usually staffed at 3. That meant that when any lifting of a patient needed to be done, we would have to take it in turns to help each other. Then, as part of a cost-savings effort, staffing was reduced to 2. Two aides, working solo, each caring for approximately 20 high-need patients. It wasn’t possible to always wait for a teammate to help with a patient, and as a result, injuries increased.

In addition to the lack of aides, there was little physical or occupational therapy provided, no entertainment or socialization outside of meal times, and no outdoor areas where patients might feel the sun or see a tree. The nurses rolled their carts down the halls, dispensed medication, and attended to such duties as could not be done by aides, such as catheterization or tube feeding. 

The available equipment was very shoddy as well. The shower chairs were made of PVC pipe and sometimes they came apart. One patient wound up on the floor of the shower room when her chair crumbled beneath her. She died a week later. I’m sure her family was never told anything except maybe “she took a fall.” The patient with chronic bedsores finally got a special therapeutic bed. She began to show significant improvement. Her wounds started to granulate and close. But insurance would only pay for the special bed for 6 weeks. Within a week after it was removed, her wounds were back to their original status or worse. In some places you could see her bones where the flesh had rotted off. 

The work was heart-breaking, and it was exhausting. I was 23 years old and Army-fit, but at the end of a shift I could barely stand. Technically speaking, we were supposed to have one 30-minute meal and two 15-minute breaks each shift. We seldom got to take that much time. I usually found time to grab a quick bite, but I never got any other break except for a quick pee.

Then came the day I showed up for my shift and found out that I was the only aide on the hall. The other aide had called in.

“This is insane. I can’t work this hall by myself,” I told the charge nurse.

“You’ll have to. We’re short-handed,” she replied.

“We have to call the agency and get a temp,” I said. “It’s not physically possible to care for this many patients single-handedly.”
“We’re not using the agency any more,” she told me. “It’s too expensive.”

“Okay then. I quit.”

“You can’t quit now. You have to work your shift.”

“No I don’t. I quit. Right now. So you go ahead and call the agency, because you don’t have anyone to work the hall now.”

I pocketed my stethoscope, walked down the hall, clocked out, got in my car, and went home. And that was the end of my medical career. A week later, I got a job with U.S. PIRG.

Make no mistake, those who run American health care are in it for the money. Understaffed, under-equipped facilities are responsible for many injuries and deaths, of patients and of care-givers. Nursing homes are the most chronically understaffed, but it's a problem across all medical facilities, and it is a huge contributor to the burnout that causes medical professionals to leave the profession. Attrition of RNs runs about 17%. Attrition of CNA’s is about 28%. I lasted 10 months.

The Roaring 20s

I’ve spent a little time on Linkedin this week, browsing through the endless flow of pandemic-related posts. They fall into a few predictable categories.

• How to stay positive, upbeat, and productive during a global crisis!
• How to manage your team to keep them positive, upbeat, and productive during a global crisis!
• Give me money for tools and tips to stay positive, upbeat, and productive during a global crisis!
• You can exploit this crisis to make more money!
• I just lost my job due to a global crisis!

Even in the best of times, Linkedin is mostly useless pablum, but during a pandemic, it becomes painfully obvious that the business world runs on positivity porn and intellectual dishonesty. It’s a dangerous bubble, disconnected from reality. Here’s an example that really made my hair stand on end:  “The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 was followed by the boom years of the Roaring 20s! We’ll bounce back just like that! Stay positive!”

Where do I even start? Let’s talk about the Roaring 20s, shall we?

We’ll start with the utterly useless or destructive presidencies of the 20s. There was Harding's corrupt presidential administration, noted for the Teapot Dome scandal where the Secretary of the Interior accepted bribes to lease Navy petroleum reserves to private oil companies at low rates with no competitive bidding.

Then there was the ineffectual Coolidge administration. Coolidge was a conservative who advocated isolationism and ignored the agricultural depression which was the precursor to the Great Depression, preaching self-sufficiency and limited government while he himself did almost nothing as the country’s figurehead.

The president who actually presided during the stock market crash and onset of the subsequent economic misery was Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer who decided that the best way to fight the economic downturn was to impose tariffs on foreign goods, thus increasing America’s isolation and reducing the demand for American products overseas.

The 20s also saw the rise of organized crime thanks to the puritanical and ill-fated experiment with Prohibition. Closing down the production and distribution of alcohol threw a lot of people out of work and opened the door to widespread smuggling and its cousin, bribery. Only 5% of illicit alcohol was actually seized by law enforcement, and alcohol poisoning rose 400% as people turned to unregulated or homemade product.

Then there was the common acceptance of eugenics as a practical approach to improving the human race. One of the outcomes of the pseudo-scientific eugenics movement was the forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit” to breed, which resulted in over 60,000 Americans being involuntarily sterilized. American eugenics inspired Hitler in his quest for racial purity in Nazi Germany.

Racism and racial violence ran rampant in the 1920s, with the KKK re-emerging as a national force with 6 million members across the country. There were incidents of mass violence like the Tulsa riot where at least 200 black Americans were murdered and their community destroyed. During the decade there were about 300 known lynchings of black Americans.

And lastly, there’s the unfortunate truth that the fabled prosperity of the 20s was enjoyed by only a few Americans. The majority, 60%, lived below the poverty level. Farmers, immigrants, minorities, and rural Americans were almost totally excluded from the glittering consumerism popularly associated with the 20s.

So no, I don’t want a repeat of the booming 20s, thank you very much.

Americans need a lot less happy talk and nostalgia and a lot more reality. Some people are using the pandemic as an opportunity to talk about and work towards a more equitable, healthy, and sustainable society. Some people are using it as an opportunity to exploit the market and scoop up undervalued assets in a downturn. And some are using it as an opportunity to push destructive agendas such as racism, isolationism, and environmental exploitation.

Which kind of person are you?

How to Survive a Plague - Homeschooling

Since suddenly everyone is very interested in homeschooling, and I’ve been doing it for about 10

years now, I thought I’d write down a few things that might help. Don’t expect homeschooling to be like a public school classroom. You don’t have the resources, the structure, and the support systems that exist in a well-run school. Also, you’re the parent with a different relationship with your children than a teacher has. Your number 1 job is still being the parent.

In times of trauma and transition, kids need time to detox. When my youngest child started homeschooling, she’d been in a sub-standard school with a second-grade teacher who wound up going to jail! You don’t know all that your child is feeling and they may not be able to tell you, so be patient and give them time to run, draw, make mud-pies, or do whatever they need to do to get their heads right. Creating a space of safety and acceptance has to happen before learning.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Homeschooling rules vary from state to state. I’ve homeschooled in Texas and Oklahoma, where it’s pretty lax. All I had to do to withdraw my kids from public school was to submit a letter to the school district stating my intent. Although I was a certified teacher at the time, it was not a requirement for me to have a certification or even be a college graduate. I have not been required to submit any documentation or comply with any standardized testing. In order to go from homeschooling to college, my oldest had to take the SAT and submit a homeschool transcript. I broke the transcript subjects down by semester and made a pretty document out of it. Then I included a letter explaining that we did not use grades in our homeschooling and why. I also included the official transcripts of her online classes and pre-homeschooling public school classes. This documentation was accepted without question by the admissions counselor at Austin Community College.

There are different flavors of homeschooling, so don’t expect your experiences to match someone else’s. Some people stick to a very structured approach, either buying or creating a curriculum that tracks closely to a public school format. Some people do something called free-schooling, which is a collaboration between child and instructor where the instructor is really in a supportive role, providing resources and assistance but letting the student lead with their interests. And then there is unschooling, which is letting the student follow their own interests without much guidance or support, trusting to the innate curiosity of the child and relying on the educational value of play and experience.

My oldest started homeschooling at age 13. She is a very motivated, driven, and organized person. She created her own education plan, located books and resources, and pretty much drove the whole process. I helped by purchasing textbooks, signing her up for online math classes, and answering questions. When she turned 16, I found that I was having a harder time giving the support she needed for the more advanced material she was learning, and I nudged her gently into college. She started at ACC at 16 and graduated 4 years later from the University of Texas with full honors. By most measures, she could be considered a homeschool success.

My youngest is completely different. She utterly rejected a structured approach, hated online programs, and resisted every attempt to get her to write anything. She abandoned Rosetta Stone and would rather walk on hot coals than solve an algebra equation. Does that make her a homeschool failure? She reads voraciously, she’s watched every science documentary worth watching, she excels at extremely complex, strategic board games, she’s a self-taught expert at Adobe Photoshop, she’s tamed and trained two rescue horses, and she’s had a front-row seat to some really interesting and historical political moments. She’s 17, so it remains to be seen what trajectory her life follows, but chances are it will be very different from mine, or her sister’s.

In retrospect, I think the greatest gift of homeschooling is the freedom that comes with unstructured time and relief from constant peer pressure. Even if you choose a structured approach to schooling, most parents find that they can get through a day’s schoolwork in half a day, leaving more time for playing, sunshine, and creativity. You’re giving your child the time to figure out who they are, what matters to them, what thrills their imagination. Instead of training them to be good employees, you’re freeing them to be themselves. You might find it’s tempting to just push them harder. After all, you’re in charge and you don’t have to track to a class of 25 other students. Some children will want to jump ahead and fast-track their way to college. Some won’t. It’s okay either way, if you let it be.

Here are some resources and ideas for folks who are homeschooling for a little while or longer:

Khan Academy – This is a great site with self-paced programs in math, science, and more. Short instructional videos are provided to help students grasp new concepts. Available in multiple languages.

DuoLingo – You don’t have to pay for Rosetta Stone to get a robust language learning app. I use this on my phone to keep up with my German and French vocabulary as well as starting to learn Spanish. I’ve taught foreign language, but this works as well as classroom instruction.

Crash Course – Fun educational video series by John and Hank Green in multiple topics. I really like the Anatomy and Physiology series, and Crash Course history is excellent too.

Oxford University Press American History Series – Get these from the library if you’re a fast reader, or pick them up used if you can. This is serious scholarship, but a junior high or high school age student can read them alone or together with you. It’ll probably take you at least two years to get through the series, maybe longer, but you’ll know a lot more about American history than you would learn from any American textbook.

BYU High School – When my oldest was still in public school but had exhausted all the coursework our rural school could offer, we turned to BYU classes for structured classes in math and science. If you need a structured approach and a transcript from a reputable school, this will meet your need, but it’s not cheap. We used this primarily for math. There may be better alternatives out there now.

Reading/Writing – The key to learning how to read better is to read more. The key to learning how to write is to read more. The key to learning how to speak well is to read more. Just read. It doesn’t matter what. Let them read anything and everything they’re interested in. Graphic novels. Fantasy. Science fiction. Murder mysteries. Romance. Economics. I have a shared Kindle account with my daughter. I’ve discovered that if I download it, she’ll eventually read it. You can download e-books from the library too. Particle physics? Forestry? Jewish history? All the President’s Men? The Underground Economist? It’s all good. Take time to read together out loud, especially harder stuff. They love being read to at any age. Maybe they’ll read to you too.

Experiential Learning – Most people learn best by doing. When we moved school districts and my oldest daughter suddenly had to take a standardized science test, she was nervous. But afterwards she told me “It was really easy. I’d learned all that stuff hiking and attending ranger talks.” Take your kids places and talk about what you’re seeing and doing. Even if museums are closed and concerts are cancelled, you can go explore local trails and parks. Look for bugs, take pictures of the flowers, explore cloud formation and weather, look at the rocks and figure out how they were formed. Encourage their curiosity and look stuff up together when you get home, because you won’t know how to answer all their questions. You’ll be teaching them a skill that they may not learn in a classroom, how to see the world with questioning eyes and how to teach themselves.

Most importantly, trust yourself, trust your kids, and accept that you’ll make mistakes along the way!

A Boy in a Gray Hoodie

Photo by Jannes Jacobs on Unsplash

Among my other career adventures, I was for one year a full-time middle school teacher. It was probably the weirdest, most exhausting, and most frustrating year of my life. Towards the end of the year, all the teachers were asked to submit the names of their top students from each grade for an academic award. There wasn’t any guidance given on how those top students should be identified. I looked through my class rosters and considered what metrics to use. It became obvious that if I based the award on grade average alone, all my top achievers were girls. So I decided to recognize the boy and girl from each grade who had the highest average. This was a difficult decision to make, but I decided that it was a bit like having male and female competitions in the Olympics so that contestants are competing on an equal footing. After all, girls are 70% of high school valedictorians. Clearly, in secondary school academic achievement, the girls have the advantage. Since the class I taught was one semester long and I taught three grades, I submitted 12 names for recognition.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the awards assembly; my class schedule didn’t permit it. But one of my fellow teachers reported that when my eighth-grade boy honoree (I’ll call him Jay) was called to the stage to get his certificate, he looked around him in stunned silence, turned red, and stumbled up to the podium to claim his award in complete confusion, blinking back tears. Apparently Jay had never, in his entire 9 years of school, been recognized or rewarded for academic achievement.

Since Jay had been my student in the fall semester, and the school year was drawing to a close, I never saw him to speak to again. I’ll never know if or how that moment of recognition affected him beyond the immediate moment. But I do know what I learned.

1.      Metrics matter. They don’t replace creative thought and decision making, but they can provide new insights and open our eyes to things we might be missing. Jay was not an outstanding student in any way. He was frequently disruptive. He showed little enthusiasm in class. He had to be nagged to finish assignments. It wasn’t until I sat down and looked at the metrics that I realized he had outperformed his peers.

2.      Compromise your principles. My first inclination was to limit the reward to the top performer in each grade, regardless of gender. After all, don’t boys get enough advantages in this patriarchal world? But then I thought, what if I am biased? What if I am, by reason of gender and sentiment, giving girls the benefit of the doubt when I grade assignments? I don’t know why girls outperform boys in school, but clearly they do. What harm does it do to extend my recognition to more students? Jay’s stunned gratitude more than confirmed that my compromise was the right choice.

3.      Be fair. Once I decided on the rules to apply, I did not allow myself to be swayed by other considerations, such as absenteeism or deportment. Those things are heavily impacted by outside considerations like family situation and health issues. I kept it strictly to grade average as recorded on the school computer system.

4.      Recognition changes things. During the semester, it didn’t occur to me to praise Jay for his efforts. Mostly I was trying to keep him awake, in his seat, and on task. I noticed when he came to school on a snowy day in a light hoodie and pointed out to him privately that the school had a coat closet where he could get a donated coat. How much better would his learning experience have been if I had taken more notice of his efforts in class? Giving praise for small achievements, saying thank you for minor favors, can have a transformative effect over time, and it just makes everybody happier.

The Black Knight

“When you can laugh at yourself, no one can ever make a fool of you.” – Joan Rivers

A few months ago, I acquired a Facebook friend who was a real character. A Satanist who owned horses, jousted, did the whole black knight thing, called himself a Templar. I learned a lot about Satanism through his posts and conversations. Most Satanists don’t worship Satan. They don’t even believe in Satan as a real thing, as Christians define him. They are humanists who wrap their secular philosophy in the mantle of darkness to mock and confuse the fundamentalist and the evangelical. It works quite well, if the frothing panic of the religious response to Satanism is any indication.

Sadly, however, I unfriended this interesting Satanist this week. He just got too deep into his dark knight persona. He had begun to believe in his heroic posturing, in a “might makes right” world, a world where carrying a lance atop a draft horse was much more than entertaining cosplay or a farcical nose-thumbing in the direction of Rome. 

There’s a reason that I, a life-long skeptic, have avoided engaging with any religious tradition. I have attended Wiccan rituals, but they seem kind of silly to me. I might meditate for a few minutes after a spot of yoga, but I’m not chanting mantras or trying to tap into whatever that kundalini thing is supposed to be. Humans, it seems, have a natural craving for ritual and structure and tribe. But all forms of religion scare me. They seem parasitical, designed to consume their human hosts and smother independent intellect.

Some spiritualists argue that science is just another religion. “Science is just one way of looking at the world, but it’s not the only way,” the astrologist argues. “I just don’t believe in evolution,” the evangelical declares. But science is the only philosophy that contains, in fact is defined by, the very mechanism which constrains it. At every step in the process, reality is injected, hubris is swept away, and truth is revealed. After years of research, the scientist publishes a paper: “Here is my theory. I have no idea if it’s true and I don’t know how to test it and I don’t completely understand it, but hey, see what you can make of it!” How many religious leaders, or business or political leaders for that matter, say such a thing as that?

It is said that people desire certainty. They want the world to be explainable, understandable, predictable. They thought science would give them that, but science is no respecter of human desires. Middle school science with learning the periodic table, memorizing chemical formulas, calculating velocity, and examining the entrails of an earthworm on a black lab table, gives way to the radical uncertainties of quantum physics and a universe that seems to be mostly made of stuff we can’t detect, described by math that most of us can’t do. We see researchers who spend their entire lives pursuing a single theory and dying before we can figure out how to test its validity. In a world where our success is measured in well defined, short increments (a grade report, a quarterly earning statement, an election, a season), embracing the uncertain and endless quest of science is unthinkable for most people. So we bifurcate. The minority who embrace uncertainty and doubt and the majority who reject it. The intellectual honesty of the scientific approach is not promoted or elected. The majority demands an ROI; they require their stories to have a good guy and a bad guy, a beginning and a middle and an end and not too many pages, thank you.

My friend the black knight, in his protest against the corruption and excesses of religion, embraced an identity that, in the end, was just as consuming and illogical as the doctrine he rejected. He had to tell a story with his persona as the heroic protagonist. Like the fundamentalists he mocked, he constructed a reality that fit his internal narrative and by doing so, betrayed his goal. But then, how many of us can turn the scientific principles of skepticism, experimentation, and unflinching honesty on ourselves?