bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Intrinsic.

    "We were promised an election, not a damned trolley problem."

    Such has been my one-liner about the 2016 presidential race.

    + + +

    The big problem with the concept of "choosing the lesser evil" is that, in speaking the phrase, we reduce a fairly complicated, nuanced and lengthy moral discourse down to four words.  There are, so to speak, a lot of conditions and considerations that go into the discussion before you come out the other side with the conclusion, "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is permissible" or even "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is a positive good."  

    A moral argument in complicated circumstances is a structure built carefully upward from a firm foundation, all of its pieces working together like a truss to support one another and ultimately to support the weight of unforeseen future circumstances that will test it.  Having dismantled the relatively intricate structure of the argument, reduced it to nothing but its shadow painted on the ground, we dubiously free ourselves to follow the traces of that shadow and build upon it, taking "choose the lesser evil" as the postulate of a new moral system — sometimes building a structure that would be completely unrecognizable to the original architects, unless they happened to peer at it from just the right angle — and that, the direction from which the light fell upon it.

    But we want our philosophical structures to make sense from every direction, especially the directions that look toward it from the darkness.

    + + +

    I find it interesting that "Choose the lesser evil" is being deployed both to justify voting for the GOP candidate and to justify voting for the Democratic Party candidate.  It is being deployed from both directions to say, "Even though you think you have to vote for [candidate] because [particular evil], I'm here to tell you that you may vote for [other candidate] because [different particular evil].  

    I am detecting a common error in the arguments:  the notion that picking between the two major candidates is equivalent to some sort of referendum on which evil is worse (or which set of evils is worse).

    As if "Choose the lesser evil" means "That which I choose, I declare its evils to be lesser."

    Coming down to specifics right now because it's too exhausting to keep talking in generalities.  Here's the notion I'm talking about:

    • That choosing Mrs. Clinton means "I say that mass deportations and other bad things that Trump champions are worse than abortion and other things that Clinton champions."
    • And that choosing Mr. Trump means "I say that abortion and other Clinton-championed causes are worse than mass deportations and other Trump-championed causes."

    We then devolve into an argument about which kind of devaluation of human life is the worse kind of devaluation of human life, complete with arguments that the other side is pro-degradation because it has a different favorite kind of degradation.

    And that's not even getting into the wrinkle of both sides turning and attacking the ones who say, "I refuse to choose either."

    + + +

    It's almost impossible to find a discussion of the moral nuances of voting that doesn't come at it from one side or another.  I thought this was a pretty good piece laying out advice from Bishop Flores of Brownsville, TX.  The direction it comes from is "You might think you have to vote for Mr. Trump because Mrs. Clinton clearly supports legal abortion.  But maybe that's not so, because it isn't that simple, and Mr. Trump's policies also represent an assault on human dignity."   I'm not highlighting the piece because I think this particular direction is the direction that most needs highlighting.  I'm highlighting it because it digs, a little, into the not-so-simple structure that gets simplified as "Choose the lesser evil":

    Prudence judges circumstances in light of principles that are rightly ranked in terms of gravity. Keeping that in mind, circumstances are different this year. It is not possible now to take the issue of immigration policy only as a matter of having diverse positions on a badly needed reform of the system. One could argue that in prior elections there was a dispute between the parties about whether a reform was needed, and about what principles would guide a possible reform.

    This year, there is a proposal on the table to proceed with mass deportations of undocumented men, women and children. One cannot in conscience countenance a program of mass deportation. It is a brutal proposal. In some instances, particularly dealing with the Central American mothers and children, and deportations into some parts of Mexico, we are dealing with placing them in proximate danger of death. I consider supporting the sending of an adult or child back to a place where he or she is marked for death, where there is lawlessness and societal collapse, to be formal cooperation with an intrinsic evil. Not unlike driving someone to an abortion clinic.

    So, even as a Catholic finds the radical pro-abortion platform of the other party beyond reprehensible, there is no comfort for the conscience of a Catholic on the side of a radical program of mass deportation. Both positions are assaults on the dignity of life, and in the case of mass deportations, can be linked to no. 24 of Faithful Citizenship (FC), “treating the poor as disposable.” Overall, I think we have to look at nos. 35-38 of FC very carefully. We should all read it and think about its implications between now and Election Day.

    I think it is worth citing number 36 in particular: “When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”

    It seems that if a Catholic votes for either major candidate, he or she must do so with a conviction that the evil the candidate supports can be successfully opposed, and that other aspects of their policy proposals are sufficiently good to warrant voting for them. Thus if a Catholic votes for a pro-abortion candidate or for a pro-mass deportation candidate, for what FC calls “morally grave reasons,” because the candidate is deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods there should be conscientious commitment by the voter to oppose strenuously the pro-abortion agenda or the pro mass-deportation agenda respectively And there are other factors that FC rightly asks us to think about, including a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue.

    And note, that I have not even addressed the issues of targeting innocents (who may be relatives of evil-doers) in military actions, or indiscriminate use of drones in warfare. Nor have I mentioned a great many important issues raised in FC and which we must take into account.

    …

    The bishop reminds us not to fall back on a simple formula, like "Choose the lesser evil."  Rather, we should return to the source (the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount) and to its development in American pastoral theology (Faithful Citizenship, a.k.a. Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship:  A Call To Political Responsibility, a teaching document to U. S. Catholics advising us how to exercise our political voice.)  

     

    We are in the situation described by paragraph 36 of that document, but not in the way that faithful Catholic voters expected to be.  The document reads:

    36. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

    I submit that most pro-life voters imagined that this describes an election where every viable candidate is a pro-legal-abortion candidate.  

    Instead we have the (much more realistic, technically ever-present, but now extremely obvious) situation where every viable candidate openly supports an intrinsic evil, but it's not the SAME intrinsic evil.

    Thus we are divided, and distracted into arguing about which intrinsic evil is the worse intrinsic evil.

    This is a fool's discussion.

    "Intrinsic" evils do not permit us to distinguish between a greater or a lesser evil.  That is what "intrinsic" means.

    It means that whichever way we go, we walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

    We may as always distinguish prudentially between a greater or a lesser danger, but not between a greater or a lesser intrinsic evil.

    And if you'll take a look at paragraph 36, you will note that the U. S. bishops do not advise U. S. Catholics to vote for the candidate whose evil is deemed lesser.

     Instead they advise us that we may (a) choose not to vote for either candidate or (b) may vote for the candidate that is less likely to advance the evil parts of his/her agenda and more likely to advance the good parts of his/her agenda.

    In other words, if we are to vote at all, we are obligated to consider the structures of platforms and of power as wholes — not merely their foundations.  How would each candidate be constrained in their political goals by opposing parties, by checks and balances, by the slow lurch of bureaucracy?  Who can inspire the masses to support them, and what can that inspiration accomplish?  Do the respective platforms contain (besides the rotted planks) sound, achievable goals that further justice and mercy?  What role will competence and incompetence play in the advancement of the good and evil parts of the agendas?  What role will self-interest play, and how strong is it in each candidate?

    "Choose the lesser evil" is not going to work as a slogan this year.  We have a much harder decision ahead of us all.  

    —

    |

    1 comment on Intrinsic.

  • Sending off the pilgrim.

    As I write this, our 15-y-o son is on a plane from Paris to Prague. We left him at the airport yesterday — him and 60-some other Minnesota teens, plus chaperones, a handful of priests, and Bishop Sirba of Duluth.

     

    They’re on the way to World Youth Day in Krakow.

     

     

    He’s carrying the same green canvas backpack that Mark carried when he did his solo Eurailpass-and-hostel tour in college, 21 years ago (a drinking age ago?). That’s a good bag. It has one broken strap-clip and a cracked zipper pull. Still works fine.

    He woke up in the morning and said, “I’m finally getting excited to go. Up till today it’s just been getting ready for something that will happen in the future. Now it’s real.”

    I kept myself busy by randomly poking my head into the room, and asking, “Did you think of [thing]?”

    “Yes, I have one.” “I decided I didn’t want to bring that.” “They said we didn’t have to.” “Yes, Mom, I have two.”

    + + +

    Several years of Scout camping trips have made it easy for me to relinquish control over my older boys’ packing for trips. We gave him the list and let him worry about it, offering to help track down any stray items. We already had almost everything on the list. Travel wallet on a string? Borrow Mark’s (come to think of it, I think that travel wallet is also 21 years old). Sleeping pad for the night in the field? The 12yo Scout, who likes to roll ultralight, lent him his superthin inflatable. Do we have mylar emergency blankets? Do we have mylar emergency blankets? Take two, they’re small. Cash for a snack in the French airport? Mark opened his wallet and pulled out a fifty-euro bill.

    The 15yo raised an eyebrow and said to his dad, “You carry fifty euros around with you in your wallet?”

    “Yes,” I teased him, “something like that would never come in handy!” He shook his head.

    + + +

    “Did you think of phrasebooks?”

    “They’re on my phone, mom.”

    “In German and Czech and Polish?”

    “Yup.”

    “Do you remember how to say thank you in Polish?”

    “Yes.”

    [suppress with great effort the urge to demand he prove it]

    + + +

    I took him shopping at The Mall (you know I live in the Twin Cities, right? Yes, I mean That Mall) a few days ago for less-beat-up-looking sneakers and shower shoes. It seems a bit silly, but I honestly had such a good time walking with my teenage son from store to store, chatting about various things. He showed me how the Pokemon Go app worked and told me a story of the time he was at the mall and spent his last half hour playing Ingress there, changing portals from green to blue; then his phone buzzed all night with notifications as someone in the mall (“probably an employee or a security guard,” he said) walked around changing them back from blue to green. The shopping trip made me ridiculously happy.

    Also, I got credit for finding the shoes he wanted at a 20 percent discount. Nordstrom Rack FTW.

    + + +

    After we left him at the airport, I asked Mark if he didn’t mind going out for dinner, because I wasn’t feeling great (nothing big — just a headache and general malaise, but I had had it all day). Friday night it’s hard to get a table for six, so we wound up at the family restaurant in our neighborhood — the one that’s been around for nearly sixty years, the one with the pie specials. I ordered soup and toast, and Mark the fish and chips, and the 10yo had waffle fries and an egg; the rest got standard kids’ meals.

    While we were waiting for dessert an older gentleman dressed in painter’s clothes and carrying his bill stopped by our table, and complimented us on having said grace at the table in the restaurant. He said he lived with his son and his grandchildren, and that his son’s family with their small children always says grace in a restaurant (“They’re not Catholics like you,” he said, “but they have a strong faith and they walk with the Lord”). We nodded and thanked him. We told him about having just sent our son off to Poland. He told us that his brother was a missionary in Poland.

    He lingered, and told us a little bit of his life story, marked by not a little tragedy. I looked away, fed the 2yo French fries, feeling a twinge of discomfort from a stranger’s sharing of details; and then I forced myself to turn back and look him in the face and to listen, really listen. It is not that I was not interested, it’s that I have a sort of automatic avoidant reflex. You don’t know where this sort of thing is going. I probably worked harder on looking like I was listening than on actually listening, but Mark kept the conversation up. I was concentrating on suppressing signs of visible alarm that someone had breached the Upper Midwestern wall of polite detachment and was trying to make a human connection with me, with my family; concentrating on connecting back.

    When he was about to leave I reached out my hand and grasped his, and looked him in the eyes, and said, “It was very nice meeting you.”

    + + +

    A few minutes later, after dessert had been served, the waitress stopped by, her arms stacked high with plates, and said, “That man who stopped by your table? He just paid for your dinner. Dessert too.”

    + + +

    Mark and I stared at each other for a long time. “I guess we won the game,” he said.

    “We should have bought his dinner,” I said, thinking back over the story he told.

    “I guess we pay it forward,” said Mark.

    + + +

    I exchanged texts with our son later in the day, complete with photos from the pre-WYD tour of Prague, and was sure to pass the story on to him. Grace is where you least expect it sometimes.

    Wonder what the next ten days will bring.

     

     

    .

     

    —

    |

    No comments on Sending off the pilgrim.

  • The seventh corporal work of mercy.

    Philando Castile (whom I mentioned in a post the other day) was laid to rest here in the Twin Cities on Thursday. Mr. Castile's funeral was hosted by the Cathedral of St. Paul at the request of Valerie Castile, his mother. There are some moving photos taken outside the building here at this article from the St. Paul newspaper website. There you can also view photos of the program detailing the chosen readings and speakers.

    At the end of the article are comments, which I in no way recommend you to read. Some of them gave me the impression that the Archdiocese has received some comments from persons identifying as Catholic who object to the Cathedral's welcoming the Castile family to bury their son at a public ecumenical service. Castile was not a Catholic, and a Baptist minister was invited to deliver a sermon, while the rector of the Cathedral delivered introductory prayers.

    My impression was strengthened by the Cathedral's release of the following statement:

     

    The Archdiocese was honored that Philando Castile’s mother, desiring that her son’s funeral be an opportunity for “people to come together in a new way,” thought our cathedral could be a fitting setting for an ecumenical service at which our community could unite with her family to pray for peace and reconciliation.

    During his general audience on September 9, 2015, Pope Francis said “the assembly of Jesus takes the form of a family and of a hospitable family, not an exclusive, closed sect.”

    At this difficult moment we feel privileged to have the opportunity to offer hospitality to the Castile family and to our hurting community.

    We are praying that our cathedral might serve as a place where all might encounter a God who offers consolation and hope.

     

    I endorse this wholeheartedly.

    Some of the objections to Mr. Castile's burial from the Cathedral are of a character that I will not dignify with a rebuttal.

    On the other hand, the question "Why can Mr. Castile, a non-Catholic, have a 'Catholic funeral?'" is a reasonable one, even if expressed–rather insensitively–during the funeral in question, to judge from the time-stamps on the various comments. So is the corollary continuation "….when my brother/dad/son/grandpa was not allowed to have one?"

    Let me just offer some context for that one.

    The term "Catholic funeral" is imprecise. There is such a thing as a Requiem Mass, which is the quintessential "Catholic funeral." It can only take place inside a Catholic church or Catholic chapel.

    There is also among the ecclesiastical funeral rites a "Funeral Liturgy Outside Mass," which is also a type of Catholic funeral. If you have been to a "Catholic funeral" in a funeral home chapel, in a private home, or in a cemetery chapel, that is what you most likely experienced. Sometimes (for example, in families that include Catholic and non-Catholic members) this is deemed the most fitting pastoral choice regardless of the location of the funeral.

    It is also permitted (in fact it is encouraged!) to hold ecumenical prayer gatherings inside Catholic churches, presided over by Catholic and non-Catholic clergy, for many different reasons. These can include funerals and memorial services. Mr. Castile's funeral would seem to fall into this category.

    Finally, at any memorial service at all, at a gravesite, in another church, at a wake, in someone's home: if a Catholic priest happens to be in attendance, he might accept an invitation to offer prayers or a blessing.

    The first two categories, because they belong to the ecclesiastical funeral rites, are properly called "Catholic funerals." The latter two are not.

     

    The diocese and the pastor have leeway in deciding who may or may not be buried according to the ecclesiastical rites, anyway. In some dioceses, under some circumstances, a baptized non-Catholic may be buried with full funeral rites. In other dioceses and in other circumstances, it may not be allowed. It can seem as if the standards are looser for non-Catholics than for Catholics, because in some dioceses a so-called "non-practicing" Catholic might not be permitted a "Catholic funeral" while a person who never was a Catholic might be permitted one, or at least might be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

    It is undoubtedly upsetting for a bereaved family, at a vulnerable time, to be told that their loved one cannot receive a requiem Mass, or that a requiem Mass cannot be held at the location and/or time that they are planning to have the funeral, or that the deceased is ineligible for the ecclesiastical rites at all. Some of the commentary and pushback probably comes from this place.

    To that I can only say: This post is the short answer giving reasons why Philando Castile could be permitted a memorial service in the Cathedral. There really is no short answer as to why some particular person might not be permitted the type of funeral desired by his or her family. You would have to talk to the pastor, and listen to the explanation, and then possibly do a lot of reading, in order to understand that. No short answer. I am sorry I cannot help relieve that pain.

     

    The purpose of Catholic ecumenism is to foster true Christian unity. When Valerie Castile called the Cathedral and asked that it host her son's funeral "for people to come together in a new way," this was precisely what she was asking — and she asked it not just of the Cathedral parish, but of the whole local church, the diocese. In a sense she asked it of our universal Church.

    Who are we to turn her son away?

    If I had been the one to take that call, I would have wept in humility before Mrs. Castile. It was she who honored our church, not the other way around, by reaching out to us.

    Furthermore, everyone knows that Mr. Castile's funeral was not just a funeral. It was also a gathering to call for peace, justice (in the Christian sense), and love in the wider community.

    For what the Catholic Church has said about ecumenism, I encourage you to refer to the Pontifical Council's Directory for Application of Principle and Norms on Ecumenism (link). Here is an excerpt:

    108. Where appropriate, Catholics should be encouraged, in accordance with the Church's norms, to join in prayer with Christians of other Churches and ecclesial Communities. Such prayers in common are certainly a very effective means of petitioning for the grace of unity, and they are a genuine expression of the ties which still bind Catholics to these other Christians. Shared prayer is in itself a way to spiritual reconciliation.

    109. Prayer in common is recommended for Catholics and other Christians so that together they may put before God the needs and problems they share—e.g., peace, social concerns, mutual charity among people, the dignity of the family, the effects of poverty, hunger and violence, etc. The same may be said of occasions when, according to circumstances, a nation, region or community wishes to make a common act of thanksgiving or petition to God, as on a national holiday, at a time of public disaster or mourning, on a day set aside for remembrance of those who have died for their country, etc. This kind of prayer is also recommended when Christians hold meetings for study or common action.

    110. Shared prayer should, however, be particularly concerned with the res- toration of Christian unity. It can centre, e.g. on the mystery of the Church and its unity, on baptism as a sacramental bond of unity, or on the renewal of personal and community life as a necessary means to achieving unity. Prayer of this type is particularly recommended during the "Week of Prayer for Christian Unity" or in the period between Ascension and Pentecost.

    111. Representatives of the Churches, ecclesial Communities or other groups concerned should cooperate and prepare together such prayer. They should decide among themselves the way in which each is to take part, choose the themes and select the Scripture readings, hymns and prayers.

    I see no evidence at all that Mr. Castile's memorial service was not a suitable instance of the sort of ecumenism discussed in this document.

    (Incidentally, paragraphs 120 and 121 of this same document explicitly grant to the local ordinary — normally the bishop — the discretion of offering full funeral rights as well as prayers and blessings of other types to non-Catholics.)

    For a deeper examination of the role of ecumenism, one could consult two documents of the Second Vatican Council in particular, Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio.

    + + +

    I am grateful to Mrs. Castile for reaching out to our diocese, and I am glad that our Cathedral rector responded with welcome. I'm sorry that anyone calling themselves Catholic publicly objected to the rector's decision, which was entirely in accord with Catholic teachings. May Mr. Castile rest in peace, and may eternal light shine upon him.

    —

    |

    4 comments on The seventh corporal work of mercy.

  • The hard work of marriage.

    The Darwins write about the work of marriage:

    Used to be that when people would make a remark about family size or me being pregnant again, I'd say, "Oh, what's one more?" In a sense, that's true — if you have a crowd, one more isn't going to make much difference. And yet one more person makes a lot of difference. When you have teenagers trying to talk to you about teenage problems while a ten-year-old and seven-year-old are sparring and a six-year-old has her own complaints and the two-year-old's new hobby is sitting inside the fridge, and they all want to tell you about it at one time, then one more is an awful lot. One more activity, one more drama — it's a lot.

    For years I used to scoff at the notion that marriage was work. But you know? It is work. Not bad work, but necessary work, if one isn't going to sink in a sea of daily fuss and busyness, and emerge on different life rafts, floating near each other but not quite together. To stay united is work. To maintain a family is work. Everything this side of heaven is work, the daily bread earned by the sweat of our brow.

    + + +

    Before I got married, I was warned that it would take a lot of work, this marriage thing, to succeed.  In fact, I was told not to expect my marriage to last very long at all.  

    That warning turned out to be overkill.

    On the other hand, I don't feel I was adequately warned about how much laundry there would be.  I am a great ignorer of laundry.  But then, it turned out that my husband is not an ignorer of laundry.  He very kindly refrains from complaining about it on Saturday mornings, while he carries baskets about and sorts.  I should remember to say "thank you for doing the laundry" more often.  I thank him for many things, but not enough for the laundry, probably because I have forgotten it was ever there, because nobody warned me about it.

    + + +

    In my experience, the people who usually write or say "Marriage is hard work" are almost never talking about the rolled-up-sleeves work of supporting and running a home and a family.   Which is funny, because from my perspective — that is where all the work has been!

    It's unusual these days, the belief that the purpose of marriage is to create and maintain a home where children and adults can thrive, and — should they come along one way or another, unexpected or no — to give those children in particular what they need to thrive.  For those of us who still hold to it, the "work" of marriage is or should be consubstantial with the work of supporting and running that home and family.

    But if you google "marriage is hard work" you find that people mean "weathering stormy periods," "making life-altering decisions," "recognizing that you have to accept the good and the bad." 

    Oddly enough sometimes they seem to mean "going out on dates" and "having meaningful conversations."  A good gig if you can get it.

    I'm paging through articles — you can do the same — even for articles that are written by parents who mention how tough it is to care for a bunch of little kids, they aren't dignifying their daily work by identifying it with the "hard work of marriage."   By that phrase they mean things like "ridiculous fights over nothing" and "talking our relationship out of a hole" and "hours wasted angry at my spouse."  They don't mean settling squabbles and cleaning up the kitchen.

    The work that brings in the paycheck that feeds and clothes the children doesn't get a nod either, but how can that not be "hard work" that is part of the work of the marriage?   

    It's like the term "hard work," applied to marriage, is actually just a metaphor for managing stress and anger and interpersonal conflict.  

    Don't get me wrong, that is a necessary part of making the home and family a place where children and adults can thrive.  But really, the kind of work that marriage requires is mopping the floor, and cleaning the toilets, and trying to fix the garage door, and calling in a professional to really fix the garage door, and sitting in commuter traffic, and mowing the lawn, and standing at the stove, and holding people's hair while they vomit, and updating the budget spreadsheet, and teaching the children.  Marriage requires hard work that is actually work in the sense of economically productive labor, the purpose of which is always and everywhere to support families.

    It isn't a freaking metaphor.  Or at least it isn't only a metaphor.

    All marriages require work.  Some marriages also require frequent management of interpersonal conflict, which is not at all surprising because people are involved.  Pretty much every human relationship requires some management of interpersonal conflict, of course, but for lots of us — with the help of aligned values, grace, and habitual respect, gratitude, and good will — the so-called "hard work of marriage" isn't actually the hard part.   

    —

    |

    8 comments on The hard work of marriage.

  • “A little knowledge…”

    I don't believe in putting bumper stickers on my car.

    The caveat here, before I explain myself, is that I don't care if you want to put bumper stickers on your car. Do it as much as you want. It is a matter of personal expression, and I am cool with that. But I don't put them on mine — I guess you could say that an unadorned bumper is my personal expression.

    It isn't that I don't appreciate a well-turned, pithy statement. I am fond of KILL YOUR TELEVISION. I like very much WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME TO QUESTION AUTHORITY? I wholeheartily agree with LOVE THEM BOTH. I have a special appreciation for outrageously large window decals of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You have a lovely stick figure family.

    I just … don't want such things on the outside of my car. Not even the tiniest, most unobtrusive rosary sticker in the corner of a back window. Definitely not anything political. There may be a sticker out there that I would be comfortable putting on my car, but I have not yet seen it.

    Once, without consulting me, Mark put a sticker on the Volkswagen supporting a particular vote on a local ballot-initiative. Given that he knew I was planning to vote the same way he was, I think he was probably surprised by how annoyed I was that I had to drive around town in a car with a political bumper sticker on it. I made sour faces, I drove the minivan instead as much as possible for the next several weeks, and I made him peel it off the car on the first Wednesday in November. I didn't just feel annoyed about it, I felt unreasonably angry, and I spent a lot of time behind the wheel trying to articulate to myself why. I didn't quite come to an answer.

    The other morning when Minneapolis and St. Paul woke up to the viral video of Phil Castile dying of five bullets in the front seat of his car while a panicked policeman shrieked "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I briefly wondered — as I have wondered about various political and philosophical statements over the years as they became timely — if it was maybe time to get a Black Lives Matter sticker. Some of my neighbors have the signs in their front yards. I don't mind signs in my yard as much, we've had candidate signs in the yard and that has never bothered me. I wondered very idly if I, bearing such a sticker, might be more likely to be pulled over. I wondered, too, if the same neighbors would see such a thing with appreciation or with derision, now that virtue-signaling is A Thing.

    Two days later after the five Dallas murders I waded into one too many comment sections and I knew from my reaction to them that however sympathetic I may be to #BlackLivesMatter — and even though I could still do the yard sign thing, like I said, I don't have the same feeling about yard signs — I wasn't going to put any bumper stickers on my car, not of any sort. And I think I have figured out why.

    It isn't that I don't want you to know what I think.

    It's that I don't want you to think you know what I think.

    + + +

    Last December Ken White, an attorney who blogs at Popehat, published an op-ed in the L. A. Times about "culture-bundling." He was writing about the unproductivity of most debates about gun control — and it's a useful contribution to the discussion on that subject, too — but what really stuck with me was just one of his three points, namely, the "bundling" concept. Bear with me, I know this passage uses gun control as its example, but I'm quoting it not for that particularity but because of the general concept that I have underlined.

    We culture-bundle when we use one political issue as shorthand for a big group of cultural and social values. Our unproductive talk about guns is rife with this. Gun control advocates don't just attack support for guns; they attack conservative, Republican, rural and religious values. Second Amendment advocates don't just attack gun control advocates; they attack liberal, Democratic, urban and secular values. The gun control argument gets portrayed as the struggle against Bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NASCAR-watching hicks, and the gun rights argument gets portrayed as a struggle against godless, elitist, kale-chewing socialists.

    That's great for rallying the base, I guess, but that's about all. When you culture-bundle guns, your opponents don't hear “I'm concerned about this limitation on rights” or “I think this restriction is constitutional and necessary.” They hear “I hate your flyover-country daddy who taught you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were 12” and “Your gay friends' getting married would ruin America and must be stopped.” That's unlikely to create consensus.

    The original blog post , not bound by external editorial standards, uses a bit more colorful language. I think I prefer it. About an example of a pro-gun-control meme, White writes,

    The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

    And about an example of a pro-gun-rights meme,

    Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."

    I encourage you to read the whole thing there.

    + + +

    Even for straightforward messages that one might think could not be misinterpreted, the phenomenon of culture-bundling means that people are tempted to make assumptions about each other. The Jesus Fish drags a trail of associations behind it like so much grimy seaweed. The Black Lives Matter sticker is smugly, mentally, made to bow and scrape as a mere corollary to All Lives Matter. Every car can be neatly shunted into the left and right lanes.

    Such assumptions are not warranted, ever.

    Yes, but…

    No. They are not warranted. Not ever. The environmental-responsibility sticker doesn't also mean "People are bad and abortion is good." The second-amendment sticker doesn't also mean "Gay marriage is an oxymoron." The Jesus-loves-you sticker doesn't also mean "Keep evolution out of the schools." The support-our-troops sticker doesn't also mean "I -heart- the death penalty." The opinions behind the strawmen may be correlated one way or another, but human persons are not correlations.

    The assumptions aren't warranted. They aren't warranted because when we make them we are seeing a human being as an object: an object of our own self-gratification, the pecular good feeling because it reinforces all the things we already think.

    Bumper stickers tempt people to see each other as objects.

    Bumper stickers tempt people away from compassion and toward derision.

    And that is not even counting the occasional sticker that actually expresses something that's not just unpopular, a minority opinion, or countercultural, but actually vile.

    + + +

    And what about Christian witness? Have I got something against proclaiming Jesus Christ on the outside of my vehicle?

    Yes, I do. I do not deserve to prominently display the Holy Name on the outside of my car. I have a lead foot. I have a big scrape on my minivan door where I hit a pole in the co-op parking lot on the day before Thanksgiving. I accidentally cut people off while shouting at squabbling kids. The best I can do for a justifiably pissed-off fellow commuter is that super-apologetic "Sorry! My bad!" wave. I don't think my displaying a Queen of the Rosary sticker is going to do either the Queen of the Rosary, or myself, or the guy leaning on his horn, any good in that moment. My mishap may do more damage because of it.

    There are shades here of Luke 18:9-14. Being a Christian behind the wheel should mean driving with awareness, attention, and courtesy, not driving the right car or having the right sticker. I need the mercy of God inside my car.

    + + +

    And the world needs the mercy of God outside it, too, which is one reason I don't want to tempt anyone to think nasty thoughts. There are plenty of other places to speak the truth: places where, unlike on the bumper of my car, I get to speak the whole truth, put things in context, show my face, be seen as a whole person and not a hashtag.

    A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have seen that this week, to our national grief.

    —

    |

    7 comments on “A little knowledge…”

  • Father’s Day Twitterstorm.

    I had an interesting experience on Twitter the other day.

    I don't tweet much, as a rule, although it's becoming my preferred way to find political news, and I've gotten more active as the presidential race has gotten more… interesting.    I love Lin-Manuel Miranda's morning inspirational tweets and the Post-it Note conversations that Alton Brown puts up.  I follow the accounts my tween son follows, as a matter of parental prudence.  I retweet more than I tweet, I think.  I follow less than 100 accounts (a small enough group that I don't need to manage it with lists) and I regularly unfollow accounts as I get less interested in them or as their usefulness to me expires.  I do so little on Twitter that for a very long time, I had email notifications enabled for everything so that in the rare event that someone replied to a tweet of mine, I wouldn't miss it.

    I don't tweet much, but I'm not above tweeting back at people who say things I think are silly  – at first glance.

    + + +

    So, on Father's Day, via someone else's tweet, I saw (not long after it had been posted) this tweet by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a think tank CEO and former State Department official:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    So, I read that, and I thought it was really, really funny.  And I dashed off a semi-snarky (but true) response and thought no more of it for a few hours.

    + + + 

    A little background here, so you don't think I acted out of disdain for Slaughter herself.

    A few years ago I read with interest and not a little empathy a longform article that Slaughter had penned for The Atlantic called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."  It's a personal tale leading into the assertion that the existing structure is bad for both men and women, after which she calls for buy-in from organizations of all types to enact family-friendlier policies.  There isn't a whole lot there philosophically that is new to the great Working Mothers Debate, but I like reading personal stories, and hers was interesting.  She left her State Department job to be closer to her family (among other reasons), and she wrote about the condescending reactions of other women, and the hollowness of the "have it all" message, and the difficulty of living a reasonably human family life while serving in a high position in Washington.  

    I thought I remembered Hillary Clinton throwing some shade back at her in response,  and a quick Google search turned that up: "Clinton said Slaughter’s problems were her own and that 'some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs … Other women don't break a sweat,' according to the story."

     All this is to say that I have some good will toward Slaughter in general, and I really did think her article was important (which is to say, if there's a snark battle between her and Hillary Clinton, I'm going to be on Slaughter's side).  Work and family life do need to be balanced — in my view, the best way to put this is to remember that the purpose of all labor is to support families, and not the other way around.  It is good for the rest of us if women are well represented in government, and academia, and think tanks, and all the other sorts of elite positions that Slaughter was writing about in her piece.  Slaughter was pointing out that it may be good for the rest of us, but it isn't always a good deal for the individual women (paycheck aside).

     I also get that one of the great annoyances faced by married, white-collar working women, is tension between themselves and their partners about the division of child-raising labor.   Some of that can't be helped much (if only one of you can breastfeed, for example); other parts are amenable to mutual agreement, but the nature of even the best compromises is that sometimes people feel cheated, and — this is key — not every compromise is actually a fair one, and sometimes people really are cheated, and that kind of stinks.

    BUT.  

    I read her post and I pictured saying to my spouse, wagging a finger:  " I expect you to be an equal caregiver and competent in the home!  Happy Father's Day!"

    So I tweeted back:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

     

    And then I went on my way and didn't think about it again until I checked my mail and found the hundreds of notifications.   When I noticed that Instapundit had retweeted me, I turned the notifications off.

    Several days later, Twitter analytics tells me, the number of people who have seen this tweet is 46,559.  

    Slaughter had replied directly to me:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Another person replied:

    Slaughter again:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    And then people really started piling on her.  I decided to tiptoe away slowly, metaphorically.

    + + +

    As far as I can tell, nobody in all those retweets reacted negatively to my tweet, which is pretty damn amazing, considering Twitter.   I muted some likers who had racist handles, also some obnoxious MRA's and white nationalist types.  Ew.  

    It's too bad some of the replies to Slaughter were terribly rude, because I wondered if she would listen to the more reasonable ones trying to explain to her why her original tweet was so laughable.  I kept thinking about how on earth she could possibly have thought that her expression, which recalled a schoolmarmish "I expect these papers to be neatly handwritten in ink," or a paternalistic "I expect this mess to be cleaned up when I get home," constituted praise?  I mean, I wouldn't have pegged her as the type.

    Some days later, I have a theory.  

    + + +

    The word "expect" has an ambiguity about it.

    If I say "I expect" an event to occur, it might mean that I am confident that the event will come to pass.  I believe it will happen.  I anticipate, I may even take steps to be ready for it.

    But in the very special case where the event is an action that may or may not be performed by another person…

    …and I am speaking to that person…

    …then "I expect" is tantamount to a demand that the person carry out the action.

    It is an indirect way of saying "I will be very very disappointed if you don't do the thing."  It is an implied threat!  A mild one, but a  threat nonetheless.

    + + + 

    I took Slaughter as meaning the latter:  as saying, "Let's commit to being very very disappointed in fathers who are not equal caregivers and who aren't competent in the home."  Apparently so did almost everyone else.  And they can hardly be blamed for it — the evidence suggests that this is not an "unexpected" way to read the tweet.  The word "expect" is loaded.

    But it does strike me as plausible, especially given her dismayed and incredulous response, that she meant it the other way, and doesn't understand why on earth people could have been offended.

    In that reading, Slaughter might have meant to say:  "Let's commit to confidence in the competence of fathers — that they are not second-class caregivers, and that they can succeed in roles traditionally designated as 'women's work.'"  

    If that's what she meant to say, then it is praise for fathers.  And it's a message we need more of — popular culture is full of dismissive images of the dumb, incompetent dad, burning the dinner and duct-taping the baby to the wall.  The ditzy dad is not a helpful corrective.  It doesn't help dads, and it doesn't help moms — who go on bearing the brunt of society's disapproval for anything whatsoever that goes wrong within the family, because no one "expects" dad to be the equal caregiver.

    Unfortunately, it was an inept way to phrase it, because of the ambiguity in the word "expect," and it wound up meaning the opposite.  That's because we use "I expect you to do it," so often, as a means of  communicating "I don't expect you to do it, unless I remind you."  So "let's commit to expect" sounds like "let's commit to remind."

    + + +

    I still am not sure which meaning Slaughter intended, but I'm leaning toward the more positive interpretation.  I think we owe people the benefit of the doubt, to choose the most charitable of several possible interpretations.  However, it's reasonable to call her out on her wording.  She writes for a living, and she tries to make policy:  clarity is not optional.  I feel bad that so many people responded to her so rudely, but it is entirely unsurprising.  

     I stand by my tweet.   The ironic thing: my professed love and appreciation for my spouse and the father of my children is indeed unconditional, but it isn't unearned.  He earned it, as we should all earn it from one another, by being trustworthy, competent, and caring.  The two of us have our own spheres of responsibility, and each of us takes care of what we're particularly gifted at, but I absolutely would call him an equal caregiver.  He's made it clear to me — from long before we were married — that he would be.   So I think (if Slaughter meant what I think she meant) — we don't actually disagree.

    We all could use a little work on our tone sometimes, eh?


    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    —

    |

    2 comments on Father’s Day Twitterstorm.

  • Presenting as imperfect.

    I'm so glad that Anne at Preventing Grace gave me this kind shout out in her piece If I Work Hard Enough I Win the other day:

    … I am about to turn in all my school reports. And I have made a detailed book list for the fall. And two friends were chatting away about bullet journaling (which turns out not to be at all what I imagined). And then Bearing Blog wrote about how she divvies up her time and keeps her mental health always in view. (Oh how I love Bearing Blog and her calm, rational way of thinking.) And it reminded me that, when I’m in the thick of a school year, I do get into an ugly, constraining loop of not being able to stop working.

    In fact, sometimes when I am on holiday I am not able to stop working. And sometimes, when it’s a nice, pretty day outside, I am not able to stop working. Last year I spent most of our sunny weeks away cleaning, picking up, and neglecting the stack of books I had brought to read….

    So, obviously, as per usual, of course, necessarily, as I vow every year, I don’t want to do this again. I want to find The Perfect Organizational System that will remove entirely the existential gaping maw of failure. Because, of course, if I just do all the work, I won’t fail. Right. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s me just working hard enough and not forgetting anything that is the difference between life and death.

    I was going to leave a comment at Anne's blog along the lines of "You really should say, 'Bearing Blog wrote about how she TRIES to keep her mental health always in view,'" but then I remembered my own advice to myself in the linked blog post, the one where I resolved to blog before I get any work done or do anything else.  Well, there was more to it than that, but  anyway, I should blog before I write the key to the chemistry test, and if I leave the comment at her blog first, my thought will be spent.

    (One of my problems is that my mental health is always in view.  I am forever craning my neck to see over and around it.)

    + + +

    At any rate, today I want to share a post from the excellent physics blog, Gravity and Levity.

    Momentary digression.   I first started blogging in 2005, not quite a year after I finished my Ph.D. in chemical engineering.  It was probably right about the time that I was deciding to hang up the idea of switching to technical editing and developing a free-lance network.  And I hadn't yet gotten to  the place where I would accept that I wasn't ever going to get around to cutting and polishing the three publishable pieces of my thesis and shopping them to the appropriate journals, a place of acceptance that I wouldn't finally reach until my academic adviser passed away about two years later.

    At the time, I thought that I might do quite a lot of science blogging, in between the recipes and the self-help, commentary on news articles and the like, and so I read some science blogs.  But as time went on, I got bored with all but a few.  It turns out that I don't have time to write commentary on all the Science News that passes by the world's eyes day after day, shining for a moment, inspiring a burst of chatter, then passing back into oblivion.  

    It also turns out that a steady diet of Science News is extremely irritating — maybe not to everybody with research training and a grasp of mathematics and statistics, but at least to me.  Oh my.  I don't even want to go there right now, lest I lose the whole point of my post, but Science Journalism is bad.  It's not all bad, but so much of it is very bad.  And Science Facebook is also very bad.  Painful, even.   Ok, I don't want to get into this, but just so I can be a little less vague, the features that bug me the most are 

    • Identifying non-science (e.g., engineering, technology, and nature-education) as "science"
    • The disturbing lack of a word other than "science" for fields in which reproducible experimentation is impossible, meaning that those fields' findings acquire an undeserved aura of certainty and universality that should be reserved for physical law
    • Identifying the policy opinions of a person who is employed as a scientist as "science"
    • Appeals to authority — the logical-fallacy form, that is
    • Ascribing magical certainty to anything called "science"
    • Statistics deployed for any reason by people who do not understand them
    • The entire system of publish-or-perish and peer review, which discourages negative results and which relentlessly pressures working scientists to get "good" results, thereby undermining the scientific method

    There's also the problem of specialization.  I only studied in depth one little tiny area in materials science and engineering.  I can't comment with a post-graduate level of expertise on anything else, except for the general skills that one develops along the way (mostly math and procedure).  

    Anyway, the gist of that is that I don't read many science blogs anymore.  I do read some scientists' blogs, though, because people who write generally and well and bring their perspective as a complete nerd to whatever interests them are the people I like to hang out with, virtually speaking.

    Ahem.

    + + +

    So, back to Brian's recent post at Gravity and Levity, Toward a Culture of Tolerating Ignorance.   He begins with some words about impostor syndrome, and then dives into the practical advice, which I'll quote at length.

    There is one practice that I have found very helpful in my pursuit of a scientific career, and which I think is worth mentioning.  It’s what I call fostering a “culture of tolerating ignorance.”

    Let me explain.

    As a young (or even old) scientist, you continually feel embarrassed by the huge weight of things you don’t know or don’t understand.  Taking place all around you, among your colleagues, superiors, and even your students, are conversations about technical topics and ideas that you don’t understand or never learned.  And you will likely feel ashamed of your lack of knowledge.  You will experience some element of feeling like a fraud, like someone who hasn’t studied hard enough or learned quickly enough.  You will compare yourself, internally, to the sharpest minds around you, and you will wonder how you were allowed to have the same profession as them.

    These kinds of feelings can kill you, and you need to find a way of dealing with them.

    I have found that the best strategy is to free yourself to openly admit your ignorance.  Embrace the idea that all of us are awash in embarrassing levels of ignorance, and the quickest way to improve the situation is to admit your ignorance and find someone to teach you.

    In particular, when some discussion is going on about a topic that you don’t understand, you should feel free to just admit that you don’t understand and ask someone to explain it to you.

    If you find yourself on the other side of the conversation, and someone makes such an admission and request, there are only two acceptable responses:

    1. Admit that you, also, don’t understand it very well.
    2. Explain the topic as best as you can.

    Most commonly, your response will be some combination of 1 and 2.  You will be able to explain some parts of the idea, and you will have to admit that there are other parts that you don’t understand well enough to explain.  But between the two of you (or, even better, a larger group) you will quickly start filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge.

    A culture where these kinds of discussions can take place is a truly wonderful thing to be a part of.  In such an environment you feel accepted and enthusiastic, and you feel yourself learning and improving very quickly.  It is also common for creative or insightful ideas to be generated in these kinds of discussions.  To me, a culture of tolerating ignorance is almost essential for enjoying my job as a scientist.

    The enemies of this kind of ideal culture are shame and scorn.  The absolute worst way to respond to someone’s profession (or demonstration) of ignorance is to act incredulous that the person doesn’t know the idea already, and to assert that the question is obvious, trivial, and should have been learned a long time ago.  (And, of course, someone who responds this way almost never goes on to give a useful explanation.)  An environment where people respond this way is completely toxic to scientific work, and it is, sadly, very common.  My suggestion if you find yourself in such an environment to avoid the people who produce it, and to instead seek out the company of people with whom you can maintain enthusiastic and non-scornful conversations.

    + + +

    Of course, I have two general responses to Brian's post, which you should really go read in its entirety (if only so you can follow the embedded links — they are also very good — and read some of the comments).

    The first response is the almost obligatory, "I wish I had read and assimilated this before I started graduate school."

     High school, even.   I emerged into adulthood with a defensive habit of pretending I knew things instead of asking dumb questions or even shutting up and listening, because I feared scorn.  Even though I only had this habit in some contexts, not others, it didn't serve me well in the long term.  (Being able to bullshit very well can be a lucrative skill, but I don't possess that kind, at least not in person.  Maybe Anne's praise is evidence that I can do it in writing a little bit.) 

    The second response is that one does not have to be working in academia to put this advice into practice.  Almost any collaborative community in which you find yourself is one in which people have varying levels of knowledge of the subjects at hand.  You can use it at work, in your volunteer groups, in your teams, and in your family.   

    Ask questions.  Honor questioning.  The higher your position, the greater your responsibility.  Answer questions.   Eliminate scorn.   

    (The hardest part?  Resisting the temptation to conversationally scorn for their ignorance people who are not present, including public figures in the news.  And yet, if you wish to send the message "You are valued, unconditionally, and it is no crime to be ignorant," to impressionable and vunerable people around you, you must demonstrate to them that your tone will be the same even when the vulnerable people are out of the room.)

    + + +

    There are so many things I didn't have figured out when I was starting out, things I realize now that I wish I could have known then.   It was true about my brief time in academia, and it's true about my longer life making a home and raising children.   But that's the nature of living in time:  you get wiser as you go, and logically that means you must have started out pretty green.  Embracing that logic really does relieve a lot of stress.  

    But that, too, is the sort of thing you get better at with practice.

    —

    |

    2 comments on Presenting as imperfect.

  • College prep — for us.

    I had an appointment with Mark yesterday, put on our calendar a few weeks ago.  

    It was the "Sit down and figure out what we need to do to help our firstborn navigate getting ready for college" meeting.

    + + +

    This is not the first time we have thought about it, but it was the first time we sat down and tried to make a to-do list for ourselves.   Part of me is tempted to say, "Hey, 15-year-old, this is for you to figure out."  It's not our job to make him hit all the deadlines, I know it isn't our job to fill out his college applications or to tell him what to do.  

    On the other hand, ordinary students in ordinary high schools have guidance counselors.  It's their job (ostensibly) to let kids know when they can take the ACT, to help them find information from different post-college programs, and to review each young person's high school plans for consistency with what they say they want to do afterwards.  If I am homeschooling, I figure that "guidance counselor" is one of my hats.  And I want to be one of the good guidance counselors, not one of the crappy ones that I often hear about.

    + + +

    It's my first time navigating through this from the homeschooled-student point of view, and we are slowly getting a handle on how to scrape together the information we need.

    We've done a little bit of work already.  Mark went to a workshop a few years ago about record-keeping and credit-accounting, and that's been helpful as we planned the high school program.  He stopped in at one potential university a few years ago to find out what they want from their homeschooled applicants, and that information has guided my attitude towards grades.  (Yes, it's stupid that they want grades assigned by the student's own parents.  Nevertheless, if they want them, I guess we'll provide them.)  We've queried our student, and he has two specific and different ideas of what he might major in; he wants to know more about them.  He seems confident that he wants to go to a big public university, which narrows it down nicely, and which is also compatible with wanting to keep open two specific and different options.  

    Too many options on the table tend to paralyze; so Mark and I decided on a strategy of outlining in detail a few options at each step and a default high school path, while making it as clear as we can that if he wants to swap out one strategy for another, or change paths, we'll support him and help him figure it out.   The ACT people will send your score to four schools for free.  If it's the day before the test and you still don't have the first idea where to send them, I'm happy to say, "well, the Universities of X, Y, Z, and Q would all be good places to send them, but by all means, if you have a different idea, send the scores there instead."  And so on with other questions.  When should he take driver's ed?  Should he get a job this summer or next summer?  Should he take college courses as a high school student or not?  We mapped out some ideas for the rest of high school that, we think, would work.

    + + + 

    Which feels… embarrassing?  It is a truth universally acknowledged that offering strong suggestions for what your kid should do for college means that they will write angsty poetry and/or join a theater and/or burst into tears while spending Saturday in detention with the Cute Girl and the Jock.   I feel compelled to explain to my son, over and over again, that our suggested defaults do not constitute big bad PARENTAL PRESSURE.  The wind blows where it will; we're not just going to let the boy drift.  We'll show him some ways to set the sails before we step back.  

    + + +

    Mark had the idea to assign him to write several short research papers.  In each one, he'd investigate and describe a particular possible career path and reflect on how his interests and aptitudes intersect with what he has learned.  Then, said Mark, he would help our son meet with a couple of working people (not us) and talk to them, or interview them, about their education and work.  (Mark called this the "two lunches" plan).   It sounds like I will be working this up into a half-credit's worth of high school "career exploration" for the junior year.   Because I can turn anything into a syllabus.

    + + +

    I really hope the kids are listening to us when we tell them, "You know, we are just making this parenting thing up as we go along.  Don't ever forget that."

    —

    |

    6 comments on College prep — for us.

  • Clocking out.

    A little more than two years ago, when my fifth baby was small, I wrote a series of February posts about resolutions — not belated New Year's resolutions, not early Lenten resolutions, but "new baby's resolutions."  I knew that our lives had been upended, yet again, and I couldn't go back to spending my time the way I'd been spending it; I needed to reset my priorities.

    I've been getting overwhelmed again, and (more importantly) unhappy with life's balance.  I "wasted" a couple of mornings in the last week or two, sitting outside in the spring weather with a book and sunglasses while my two-year-old played in the sandbox.  I liked it.  I decided I needed to do it more.  I decided that I have been working all the time again and I need to put a stop to it.  End of the school year is as good a time as any.

    + + + 

    So, I mentioned a couple of months ago being in therapy.  I went for about a year, and then just recently I decided to stop and see if I felt like I still needed or wanted it.  But I'm still trying to put into practice some of the recommendations — the mindfulness exercises, for one thing, and also the therapist suggested I make time for myself to blog, as a sort of grounding exercise, probably because I kept talking about how much I wanted to get back in the habit.  Anyway, it's clear to me that I need to spend some dedicated time on my mental health, on my interior life, on examining my priorities.

    So I adjusted my "six things to spend time on."  

    I decided to chop it up a little bit differently this time, based on relationships.  Here's what I came up with:

    Screen Shot 2016-06-04 at 1.18.04 PM

    (What's that?  "Top-level homemaking?"  That's stuff I can't or won't delegate.  The kids can load the dishwasher and pick up the floor and even cook dinner.  I'm going to be the one making the grocery list and scheduling the pediatrician.)

    + + +

    Then I sat down and worked out time requirements.

    Eight hours of sleep.  Thirty minutes each for meals (I realized shortly after this that "breakfast" is almost exclusively in the green "me alone" box — win.)  I probably get to sit with Mark having coffee or after dinner for an hour a day.  Forty-five minutes for getting up and dressed in the morning.  Activities, let's say two and a half hours.  Five hours a day for schoolwork.  

    I subtracted those things and left myself with five-and-a-quarter hours per day.  Then I took a deep breath and committed one of those hours to "mental health" activity:  mindfulness, blogging, Mass maybe, priority-setting.  Remaining for work:  4.25 hours, that is, 255 minutes, which feels nice because of all the 8-bit NES games I played as a child.

    That's a bit less than I figured back in 2014, which is fine.  Good, even.

    The 4.25 hours is really only for Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.  I employed a very rough estimate to figure out the work time for the other days of the week:

    • 2 hours on Mondays
    • 3.25 hours on Thursdays
    • 3 hours on Saturdays
    • 2.5 hours (from after dinner to bedtime) on Sundays

    Add all that up and you get… 20.5 hours a week.  So, about twenty.  It turns out that my "work" is a part-time job.  Not counting the teaching-the-children part of homeschooling, which brings it up to full time.

    + + +

    So, my idea here is a little bit more ruthless than the last idea.  

    Last time, I was going to use my knowledge — how many minutes in the day — to stop feeling bad about all the stuff that I tried to get done but couldn't.  That actually worked pretty well — I've done a better job of letting go of the things I didn't get to.  I still tried mightily to cram in as much as I could, and if I had extra time I always put it into work.

    This time, I want to use my will.  Not just to stop feeling bad… but to stop.

    I want to use those times to set a ceiling, not a floor.   

    If it's Tuesday, and I've been school planning for four hours, I need to wrap it up and go outside with a good book and an iced tea.  Or read somebody a story.

    And if I don't work for four hours, I need to let it go.

    + + +

    The other thing I want to do is make sure that I hit that "mental health" requirement.  One hour – before the work starts.  

    So this is sort of a dual resolution:  Before I "clock in" and try to polish things off my to-do list, I want to spend an hour every day on my own mental and spiritual health — not resting exactly, but thinking about the things that help me keep perspective.  

    And at the end of the time I've decided to allow myself, even if I'm not done, I want to "clock out" — put the work away and not return to it till the next day.

    + + +

    I'm not sure I have the self-discipline to do this.  It requires thinking ahead and prioritizing.  I mean, there are some things I need to get done.  I've already committed to writing a chemistry test for next week, for example.  And I have… uh… sixteen work hours between now and when it has to be ready.  I mean, that should be plenty for doing the chemistry test, but I have other things too.  So I'm going to have to budget my time.

    And (quick back of the envelope calculation) there are about 240 work hours between now and the start of school in the fall.  Is that enough to set everything up?  I don't know!  I guess it will have to do! 

    + + +

    Well, I wrote a blog post.  It took more than an hour.  I guess I'll deduct from my Saturday work time.  Let's hope nobody minds having waffles for dinner.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    —

    |

    1 comment on Clocking out.

  • Unreasonable expectations in design.

    True or false:

    It is irresponsible and negligent for a parent to take a picture of his or her small child in public, especially at a crowded, dangerous place like the zoo. Every photograph of grinning, sticky-faced siblings, posing in front of the aquarium or the cat house, is evidence of the crime of child endangerment.

    Silly?

    Well, let's think about what has to happen for a parent to take a photo of her child in public. First the parent has to let go of the child. She needs both hands to manipulate the camera or the smart phone. Then she has to step a few feet away — maybe a dozen feet or more, certainly out of arms' reach. She has to take her eyes off her charges for long enough to select the proper settings or apps before finally locating them in the viewfinder. Once the picture is taken, she may pause to stow the camera away before returning and once again securing the child in a firm grip.

    She lets go. She steps several feet away. She looks elsewhere. It is long enough.

    + + +

    What I see in the great rush to condemn the mother (it is always the mother) of a small child who crawled into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo this week: a widespread refusal to believe that bad things can happen to "good people like me." She MUST have done something wrong (i.e., "something I would never do") for a terrible thing to happen to her child.

    It's very important for some people to put distance between the grieving and themselves. I see this elsewhere; I often read articles about cycling accidents, because I am interested in traffic safety in my town, and let me tell you, getting hit by a drunk driver when you had the right of way is no excuse: you should have been more aware or you shouldn't have been on that road, you two-wheeled freak. We all know that many cyclists today completely ignore the law. So it goes.

    I think we can extrapolate from the evidence (many small children at zoos, the existence of preschool educational programs at zoos) that it is widely believed (whatever some folks may think) that a zoo is a good place to take small children for a fun family outing. So to go so far as to say "well, of course you don't take a 3-y-o to a zoo, that's for older children" is, shall we say, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM of thinking.

    The notion that no reasonable parent would ever enter a situation where a 3-year-old might escape her notice long enough to get into serious trouble is a little more understandable, given the low amount of experience that many people have with the wide variety of three-year-olds. Most people only ever parent zero to two of them.

    Some commenters who take a position closer to my own have been focusing on "It's not possible to keep your eyes on a three-year-old 100% of the time so they can't escape." I'd like to point out that we don't really WANT mothers (it's always mothers, isn't it) to do what would be necessary to prevent three-year-olds from escaping. Because we would have to do more than just watch them all the time. We would have to grip them all the time. That is why I began by having you think about picture-taking, how it is an utterly normal thing for parents of children to do at zoos, take their child's picture; and how the act of taking a picture contains within it all the possibility that allows for an escaping child.

    There's this strange thing about children: they want to explore the world around them. They will pull and actively try to escape you. The zoos, along with science museums and other places that attract children, incidentally, have this odd feature (often, not always) — they have exhibits here and there that seem to encourage children to explore the environment. "Please touch," they will have signs up for the petting zoo, or they will have fish tanks that are down near the eye level of toddlers, or they will have buttons to push and things like that. It seems almost as if the zoos…. EXPECT there to be three-year-olds with their parents, three-year-olds who are not buckled into strollers! I think the last few times I've been to the zoo I've even seen groups of preschoolers on a field trip, not with their parents, but with teachers and chaperones!

    + + +

    I'm very sorry that the zoo had to shoot the gorilla. I'm thrilled that they apparently had a backup plan with a "dangerous animal response team" that included a take-down-the-animal plan. This was good planning for a situation that, however unthinkable it may be, clearly someone had thought about it in advance. It's the zoos' job to keep people away from the animals and animals away from the people.

    And yet… sometimes people get in.

    Isn't it also the zoos' responsibility to protect the animals from people who might harm them? Is it really reasonable to assume that visitors will police themselves sufficiently that the exhibits need not be made secure?

    I'm thinking back to the last time a determined adult got into an exhibit (it does happen) and wondering if anyone was discussing whether zoos have a responsibility, grounded in the welfare of the animals, to make it impossible for determined persons to get into the exhibits. I think they do have a responsibility to make it very difficult for a determined adult to get into an exhibit. It is a completely foreseeable risk that a determined adult will TRY to get into an exhibit, and it really ought to be harder for a determined child to get in than a determined adult — so if the zoos designed to make it extremely difficult for determined adults to get in, it ought to be that much harder for a determined child to get in.

    It is a known risk that people occasionally attempt to breach the barriers — not just children, but also adults. Zoos face a design problem that we should probably acknowledge: their mission is to bring us close to the animals while their responsibility is to keep us separated from them. I have some respect for the argument that this design problem, with its inherent tension, represents a set of risks that is not worth the benefits; that is a value judgment and we can come to different conclusions about it. I don't have any respect for the argument that this design problem doesn't exist.

    Without saying anyone was at fault, I'm going to say that the design of the exhibit is probably the ultimate cause of this disaster.

    OK, then… why don't you go so far as to say "the zoo was at FAULT," then?

    Because design problems that involve inherent tensions between two design goals are notoriously difficult, and designers can act in good faith from start to finish, with the best of analyses, but still bad things can happen. I simply don't know enough details, and likely you don't either.

    Is it possible to design a zoo in which all barriers CANNOT be breached? Yes; would people want to go to that zoo? Would those who argue for better habitats for the animals' welfare be pleased with that zoo? It's possible that the designers really did act in bad faith, that they designed an exhibit that they knew was not up to whatever the commonly accepted standards of zoo barriers were at the time. That would be a kind of fault. It's possible that the zoo staff acted in bad faith: that they disabled safeguards that were part of the system put into place by the designers, or that the barriers were not well maintained, or something like that. That would be a kind of fault. But it's possible to have a design that turns out to BE FAULTY (in retrospect) without any person actually being "at fault."

    The public may have unreasonable expectations of the designers here. Not that it isn't reasonable to have as your GOAL "no one shall breach this exhibit.&
    quot; But that the public hasn't taken the time to really imagine what the tradeoffs would be that would make it literally impossible for no determined person to breach the exhibit, and they haven't considered that some of the things that make exhibit-breaches possible would make them enjoy the zoo less. Might even make them complain about the poorly-designed exhibits.

    Here are some links for your perusal.

    Last week at the zoo in Santiago, Chile, a determined man got into the lion enclosure, and the zookeepers shot the lions.

    Last month a determined woman got into the tiger enclosure at the Toronto zoo.

    This one goes the other direction. Less than three months ago, at the same zoo in Cincinnati, the polar bears breached their first enclosure.

    About six months ago, another woman was determined enough to pet a tiger that she got into the enclosure at the zoo in Omaha.

    2014. Copenhagen. A determined man entered the polar bear enclosure.

    2009. Berlin. A determined woman entered the polar bear enclosure.

    In the last link, a zoo official says of the exhibit, "It is already safe… People who want to jump in will always find a way."

    For the sake of the animals as well as the people, maybe we should be asking why that is good enough. It simply isn't true that a zoo can't be built with barriers that visitors can't breach. We certainly try to manage it in prisons that hold human beings and in museums that hold valuable artifacts.

    To ask why we accept risks is not necessarily to mandate that we remove risks. I respect those who argue that the benefits of zoos aren't worth the risks of bringing the public in close contact with animals. That Even though we don't come down in the same place, they and I recognize that there is a tension between the risks and benefits of zoo design, that it is acceptable to run some risk in order to reap some benefit, if the benefit is good enough.

    It turns out that there is also a tension between the risks and benefits of bringing children out into the world. If we are going to cut the zoo enclosure designers any slack here, if we are going to say about those who build barriers to protect the animals "You can't be expected to stop every determined person from getting in," then we also have to be ready to say about all those charged with children, "You can't be expected to stop every mischief that could possibly happen."

    In both cases, we could. But we choose not to. Because there are risks in that direction too.

     

    —

    |

    10 comments on Unreasonable expectations in design.

  • In case of emergency (repost).

    Here's a repost from a couple of years ago. Updated a bit to make it read more smoothly now that I have reposted it a couple of times.

    +++

    Once or twice now I have unwittingly worried a friend of mine in Facebook chat.

    I'd mentioned that Mark was out in Colorado on a climbing trip. The last exchange of the chat went like this:

    FRIEND: Prayers 'till Mark gets home!

    ME: Thanks! If he doesn't call by 11 pm I have to call search and rescue.

    Would love to chat longer but have to teach history now. Take care!

    + + +

    On Sunday at coffee and donuts she mildly chastised me for joking about the search and rescue. "I wasn't sure whether to be worried about you or not!" she said.

    "I wasn't joking," I said. Her eyes got wide.

    Of course, I hadn't been joking, but I also hadn't thought that it would have been the kind of thing that would worry a friend. Why did I throw the offhand comment out?

    I suppose it's one of those things you do in the Twitter age. We are now masters of the Short Enticing Comment Intended To Give The Appearance Of Having A Much Longer Story Behind It.

    The idea is, of course, that in your interlocutor's imagination, the story you merely hinted at will grow to hilarious proportion, and your interlocutor will project their own imaginings onto you, and you will be lauded for your sparkling wit. When in fact all you wrote was something like "OMG NO NOT THE MOLASSES #twoyearolds #bathtime #gin"

    + + +

    Anyway, the truth is that I was not, in fact, joking about the search and rescue — well, I did abbreviate a bit, as one is wont to do. My actual instructions were to wait until 11 p.m. for contact from Mark, and then start calling these numbers in order:

    1. Mark's cell
    2. His climbing buddy's cell
    3. The backcountry guide's cell
    4. His climbing buddy's wife back at home in Tennessee
    5. The mountain climbing school and guiding service
    6. A climbing gym that serves as the after-hours contact number for said service
    7. The county search and rescue (SAR) dispatch

    If you're wondering whether it isn't the job of the mountain climbing school and guiding service to decide whether it's time to call SAR, you're right — the service has a protocol for keeping tabs on their guides in the field. If one doesn't check in after a trip, they are supposed to follow up. (That's why I'm supposed to call the guiding service before going straight to SAR myself.)

    But redundancy is a good thing, and nobody's more interested in having Mark come home safely than I am, so nobody's better suited for the task of checking up on him should he go missing. Besides, he was planning to climb a different mountain two days later with his buddy and no guide, and in that case there wasn't going to be a mountain school looking over his shoulder.

    + + +

    "I'd be so worried if my husband gave me a set of instructions like that," a different friend said to me on a differnet occasion.

    I said, "I'd be more worried if he didn't."

    One of the first rules of safe backcountry travel is to let someone else know exactly where you intend to go and when you intend to get back. You'll find this advice everywhere; here it is in a well-written .pdf about backcountry safety:

    One important rule too often forgotten is to let others know exactly where you are going, with whom and when you can be expected back. I hate to sound maternal, but search and rescue teams often spend hours driving around on back roads looking for a subject's vehicle before they know where to enter the field to begin a search.

    By letting someone know EXACTLY where you intend to go, when you expect to return and where your vehicle will be parked, you can eliminate the possibility of searchers having no idea of where to look. Should your plans change in route to your destination, stop and notify that person of your new itinerary. In addition, if you leave pertinent information on the dash of your car (e.g. name

    and phone number of your contact in town, location of travel/campsite and so on) search teams will have a very timely idea of your plans. Otherwise, search teams can be of little assistance when all that is known is that you "went camping somewhere in the Gore Range."

    And then, it's nice to have specific instructions. That's one of the things I insist on, whenever Mark heads off to go backcountry skiing or climbing — guided or not: a specific set of "deadlines" and directions for what to do if he misses each one.

    If he were to tell me, "I'm parking at the such-and-such trailhead and planning to summit such-and-such a peak; we're going to turn back by 11 a.m. at the latest and I expect to be back in cell phone range by 5 p.m.," that would be … a good start. But that doesn't answer the actionable question, which is… so what do you want me to do if you haven't called me by 5 p.m.?

    I can't read his mind (too bad, that would come in handy for backcountry travel), and I'm hundreds of miles away and not familiar with the area he's in. Furthermore, it's his job to set up the safety procedures for his trip, not mine — even if I have a role to play in those procedures.

    Some people might think that the right thing to do is call the authorities the minute someone is overdue. But this would be premature. SAR is expensive, and part of backcountry ethics is being prepared to deal with delays and unexpected events. You're not supposed to have SAR be your first line of defense if anything goes wrong; you're expected to do what you can to aid in your own shelter and rescue. So, for example, if there's a signficant chance that a delay could force you to spend the night on the mountain (rather than trying to follow a difficult trail down in the dark), you bring bivy gear and extra food, and you instruct your contact person that your arrival time could be delayed by twelve hours or whatever with no cause for alarm. It would be silly to send out the dogs for someone who's comfortably ensconced in warm waterproof layers, seated on an insulated pad, munching energy bars, and waiting for nothing more dramatic than daylight.

    In this case, even though he expected to be back in cell phone range by 5 pm, he definitely didn't want me calling SAR at 5:01 . He figured on giving himself several hours of leeway time — time to accidentally go down the wrong trail, figure it out, and backtrack if necessary; time to sustain an ankle injury and slowly crawl back to the vehicle, should that happen; time to arrive at the climb, find it occupied by another party, and wait for them to finish before starting. None of those delays, not even an injury, are an emergency that requires calling out the authorities; they're all the kind of things that you're supposed to be prepared to deal with yourself. And if you wind up dealing with something like that, you'll be delayed. And that's okay.

    It's not terribly fun to have to wait the few hours between "overdue time" and "call out the dogs time," but it's much better than sitting there wondering, "Should I call out the dogs, or is it too soon? I wonder how long I should wait? If I make the wrong decision SOMEBODY COULD DIE."

    I told Mark, he has to own the when-should-I-call-search-and-rescue decision. And he owns it by giving me specific instructions about when to call, and whom to call. And also by telling me everything pertinent: where he's starting, what he plans to do, and even what he's carrying (I like to know, for example, if he's prepared to spend the night outdoors and what weather he's prepared for, and for him to confirm that he has a GPS, map, and compass).

    + + +

    Every once in a while I run into the opinion that it's irresponsible for anyone, but especially a parent of young children, to engage in common adventure sports at all. Backcountry hiking, black-diamond skiing, rock climbing, etc.

    (Occasionally this extends to activities as banal-sounding as bicycle commuting. There's a lot of victim-blaming in the comments to news stories about cyclists who get struck by cars. It's very depressing. I have a theory that a large number of people simply don't believe that bad things can happen to good people.)

    I think it's irresponsible to think you can remove all risk from life. Every day we're surrounded by common risky activities: from the acutely risky, like riding in cars or taking showers in slippery bathtubs, to the chronically risky, like occupational exposure to low-frequency noise or sitting around getting no exercise. And many culturally-not-considered-extreme hobbies carry a surprisingly high risk; for example, recreational boating is well accepted here in Minnesota, but it's also relatively risky (one estimate from Ohio: about 1 fatality per million operator-hours; another estimate has 1 canoeing fatality per 720,000 outings.)

    Rock climbing is riskier than boating, but not the OMG IT MUST BE MANY TIMES RISKIER HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT WHEN YOU HAVE SMALL CHILDREN AT HOME!!! that you might expect from all the teeth-gnashing about it. Do you ever hear anyone say, "Gosh, I'd never have elective surgery under general anesthesia while I still had young children at home?" Well, that's more likely to kill you than a rock climbing trip.

    All this is to say: Hobbies are important. It's good to
    have them. And it's okay to have hobbies that carry some risk. The important thing is to diligently take reasonable precautions and follow well-accepted safety protocols; to keep your head and know your limits; and to talk about safety and comfort with the people who depend on you, to make sure that no one is forced into a situation where they're uncomfortable with the level of "adventure." Mark and I have worked pretty hard over the past few years to create an atmosphere in which I'm always on board with what he's up to, and if I'm not, we work together to figure out what needs to change until I am.

    +++

    I did it again on another Sunday a year or so later. "Is Mark having a good Father's Day?" asked a friend after church.

    "I assume so," I said, "He's out in Colorado rock climbing."

    Her jaw dropped a little and she said "Oh my gosh! I'll pray for his safe return!"

    "Go to Blessed Pier Giorgio," I said cheerfully, "it's what we always do."

    On the Saturday before I had run into a little bit of an issue because Mark forgot to tell me which time zone he meant when he sent me my schedule of whom to call when. Was that "call SAR if you haven't heard from me by 6 pm" Denver time or Minneapolis time? The difference is only an hour, so I sent him a text message letting him know that I was going to split the difference and call out the troops at 5:30 Denver time. Fortunately he got that message in time, because they took longer climbing on the glacier than they intended and the schedule had to change; he sent me a text later to let me know I should extend the deadline.

    So that was one thing learned on this particular trip. Another one — not so much "lesson learned" as "detail that occurred to us for the first time" — was that he really should tell me the make, model, color, and license plate number of the rented car he is driving to the trailhead.

    People still ask me if I am not worried about him. We are, a little bit, I guess. I definitely start to get a little antsy when the "I will probably be done by X-o'clock" time approaches. But it is an enormous help to know that I will never have to sit at home wondering if I should do something or not. I know I can drop that worry and leave it behind, trusting him to take care of himself if he can, trusting in the grace of the sacrament of marriage to take care of the kids and me if he can't. And he knows that I know, and so that thread of intention connects us, whether we are both in cell phone range or not.

    + + +

    I bring all this up now because today the man is in Colorado again, attempting to summit Hallett's Peak (via the "chimney" route, in case you are the sort of person who is interested in that), with a buddy and a guide.

    And this year, he remembered to give me the car description without being asked. So it gets better each time. I noticed partway through the day that I was totally at peace. And the main reason is that I don't, at least, have any uncertainty about what I am supposed to do "in case of emergency." That helps a lot.


    Well, the insurance policy helps too, not gonna lie.

    —

    |

    1 comment on In case of emergency (repost).

  • Wrapping up the year, and getting ready to change the space.

    Slowly we're coming to the end of our school year.  I don't usually plan it that way, but the various subjects tend to run out at different times, so that the children's workload diminishes bit by bit as they head into the summer.

    The first subject to peel off was middle-school geography.  This one is actually the culmination of a two-year curriculum; we spent two full school years working two days a week with Mapping the World with Art by E. J. McHenry.   The kids have, over the past couple of months, wrapped up their final project:  a world map in the medium of their choice.  My 12-year-old used pen-and-ink to produce a map centered on the Pacific, then decided to color it with pencils:

    IMG_1783

    Here's H's 11-year-old, working acrylics on canvas, from a few weeks ago:

    IMG_1789  IMG_1790

    The same 11-year-old produced this map on a cut-up grocery bag, completely from memory and without reference to any map or instructions, in about an hour.

    IMG_1764

    (As an aside, I highly recommend this curriculum.  If you do it 3-4 days a week, it's for sure enough to "count" for both social studies and art for anyone in 3rd through 8th grades, and with a little supplemental reading I think it also could form the core of a one-credit 9th-grade geography course).

     

    So, geography is complete.  My 9- and 12-year-olds will finish their ridiculously-unsupervised-by-me, self-taught and self-corrected science and language arts workbooks here in a week or two.  I should just tell them to go as fast as they want and be done sooner if they like.   My 15-year-old will not quite finish his precalculus book, but since I designated the last chapter (it's about probability) as optional, neither of us are concerned; and he likes probability, so he'll probably get reasonably far into it anyway.

    The high school Latin II students will finish their 32-week syllabus in about two weeks.  And next week I'll cover the last new material in their U. S. History course, which really deserves its own post — I'll write that when I do the course summary for H and M to put in their kids' portfolios.  They still have to take a test and turn in a project.  Which means I have to write the test.  Chemistry will be done in three weeks.  I have to write the test for that one too.  It'll be more fun to write than the history test.

    As for younger kids, some things (math, Latin) are never done done because I reserve the right to assign a lesson here and there all summer long as needed.

    + + +

    As usual, my workload doesn't diminish — it just turns more and more towards thinking about next year.   Lesson plans are moving along — not as fast as I wish — but I'm distracting myself from that by thinking about a major change I'm about to make in the first-floor workspace.

    Here is what it looks like to walk from the front door (to the right) through the schoolroom this very morning before anyone wakes up:

    IMG_1808

    Step a bit farther in…

    IMG_1810

    Take a left and head through all the way to the living room:

    IMG_1811

    Do you see those large, functional (mostly) metal cabinets and the reclaimed wooden kitchen cabinet, which I've lived with more-or-less peacefully since we moved into the house nine years ago?

    All about to go!

    + + +

    I have to wait about a month to order them, because IKEA won't let you order for delivery more than two weeks in advance, but over the Fourth of July weekend we'll be installing a bank of new cabinets in my schoolroom.  

    I had trouble getting the handles to work in the online planner, and you have to imagine the countertop.

    Screen Shot 2016-05-18 at 8.42.18 AM

    Isn't it delovely?

    I'm especially excited about having countertop seating.  Yes, I'm going to have to decrease the storage space in the schoolroom.  But really, I keep too much stuff in there anyway, and I don't actually have a storage problem in my house — I have school supplies in the walk-in pantry, extra art supplies on the coat closet shelf, and materials from past and future years on the bank of shelves in Mark's shop.  I'm looking forward to streamlining a little bit and having more workspace.  Most of what will be removed from the space is toy storage, which will find another home.

    The leftmost "cabinet" is actually two 24-inch wide cabinets — I only wish there was a single 48-inch wide one.  It's deeper than my existing cabinets, countertop-deep.  The 36"-wide base cabinet to its right could store things that little children are allowed to get out for themselves.  The narrower base cabinet next to it will be one of those pull-outs with space for a trash can and a recycling bin.  The far-right one I'll probably leave without shelves so I can slide big flat things in there — dry erase boards, puzzles, whatever.   The bigger wall cabinet will have shelves from side to side — possibly a place to store Big Paper.  And the small open wall cabinet will have five shelves in it — one for each child — to hold his or her "in-basket" where I toss things we want to save, the basket that I put in order and store at the end of each year.

    Obviously it won't look so spare when in use.  I'll hang a big dry erase board on each of the high-cabinet doors.  And the children's school desks will have to stay.  And my countertop will inevitably become cluttered with charging laptops and microscopes.  And someone will write in crayon on the cabinets.  

    And someday, it will all need to be repurposed, or else demolished and turned into something else.

    But that someday is quite a long way off, I hope (my youngest is two, and I enjoy homeschooling) so I think it will be well spent.  I'm already wishing I'd done it years ago.

    What do you think?

    —

    |

    2 comments on Wrapping up the year, and getting ready to change the space.

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

…more to come later