About a Bird

So: this year we get a free, organic, 21 lb turkey from the Spouse's employer, just in time for Thanksgiving! Yay! Of course, Sarcasm Girl is working that day, and may spend any time she isn't at work visiting The Beau's aunt over in their neighborhood. And of course, Avocado has just become a vegetarian again. And the three people we invited to join us for dinner declined (well, one said maybe). Meanwhile the Spouse's lovely sister, who lives in Sebastopol, called yesterday to say that their standing TG plans with another family have been cancelled this year, due to a medical emergency (other family's, not S-i-L's), and what are our plans.

So I invite them for dinner, confident that there will be more than enough free, organic turkey. Well, actually, she was hoping we'd be interested in coming up there and having dinner with some other friends of theirs.

I think we're going to do thanksgiving here, on our own. But I see a lot of Free! Organic! turkey leftovers in our future.

The Rhetoric of Success is Deadly

I woke up this morning trying to frame a letter to the Superintendent of Schools in San Francisco, whom we met at the SFUSD School Fair on Saturday (I love this about San Francisco: you can go in to look at high school offerings and wind up chatting with a portly guy in an untucked shirt who just happens to run the school district).

I'm trying to explain why the "Every Child Will Succeed" rhetoric has gotten so deadly to some children. Maybe it's partly because it has the "because I said so" feeling of the post-coup PA announcement in Bananas: "All children under 16 years old...are now 16 years old." But it's more that the kids see this, not as a challenge to the teachers to help ensure that success, but a kind of threat. We have ways of making you succeed. And a good number of kids I know have taken this rhetoric to mean that they must succeed, that failure is not an option, that you can't recover from a mistake, that every last thing you do will go on your Permanent Record and follow you throughout your life.

In eighth grade. When they have hormones and social functioning and algebra to deal with.

We already know that not all kids learn the same way (I was a whole-world reader in a phonics world, and until I threw out phonics when I was in 4th grade (!) I just thought I was too stupid to read). I think different kids need different encouragements, too. They need to be told that making a mistake isn't fatal, that mistakes are often how you learn, that a mistake can take you down a corridor to a huge success. I know at least two kids who were hospitalized for suicidality in high school because the anxiety got to them--the idea that they couldn't make a single wrong move. These kids didn't disdain a challenge, but they felt, after years of absorbing the Permanent Record of Life message, that the deck was stacked against them and it was all too much.

I talk to other parents and we agree that it wasn't like this when we were kids. I know the world is different place now, but I'm not sure we, as a society, can afford to lose these kids because we don't know how to make them sort out between the true no-mistake situations and the ones you can learn from.

Anyway, that's what I'm trying to say to Garcia. If anyone has any thoughts on how to make it clearer, please jump in. I feel like I'm trying to save lives here...