Important Family Update

This is important to me.  As in, it is a BIG DEAL around here. I think Joe will write about it and include pictures, since he's the more tech savvy one around these parts.

But...For anyone who has not yet heard the news, we have enrolled all of our school aged children, except Louisa in the local public schools, Red Lake County Central-Plummer and Oklee. I can't believe I didn't write about this earlier, but I've been too swamped to even think about blogging until today. OK, I did squeeze in a few book reviews and a few just for fun things.

But I really wanted to give this topic a nice post all of its own to present the things that lead to our decision. But I've decided they are to many to list and a few  are somewhat private matters.

Suffice it to say that maternal overload was a big factor. As was our positive experience with the Oklee school, the teachers and administrators with our older two last year.

It's all been very exciting and somewhat overwhelming. But we had a good week for the most part. We managed to get to bed on time and get up on time. I made hot breakfast all four mornings.

The kids mostly like school. They love seeing friends each day and having structured things to do. For the most part, they like the classes, too, but some things are difficult compared to how we did them here.

Sophie is pretty tired at the end of the day. She's is a bit frustrated by her reading level compared to the other kids in her grade. I've been in touch with the teachers and principle about this and we are sitting on it for now.

The Plummer school has a very nice program in place that combines the kids in third and fourth grades; and then again the fifth and sixth graders. Each of the two pools of kids is then divided into ability levels so that the kids can be taught closer to their ability level than a simple grade division would accomplish. The children are given brief assessments several times during the year to determine that they are still working at the correct level; and also to look for red flag areas in which the child might need that little bit of extra help.

I'm pleased with how things are going and I look forward to hearing from the teachers this week on whether they think Sophie would benefit from bumping down a level.  I'm touched by the amount of care and personal interest the teachers are able to give.

I spent my time at home this week well and have begun the arduous task of reclaiming my domicile from it's years of neglect.    I just keep saying to myself, as in What About Bob?, "Baby steps with the laundry, baby steps with the kids' rooms, baby steps around the house."

Group Dehumanization

Our society is becoming increasingly divided.  Many of us fit into groups of various labels;  we each make use of these labels to a greater or lesser degree.   I, for instance, am a white Christian woman; I am a homeschool, stay-at-home mom; I am within the income level some call "below the poverty".  All these things combined are not really who I am; and certainly no single one of them expresses accurately even a fraction of who I am.

Along with this grouping into various factions of society, comes a constantly increasing amount of group identity.  What starts as a way to help one or another group, ends up diminishing the individual member of the group.  This group identity, then, leads to perpetually decreasing individual humanity.  Gradually none of us is seen as his or her self, a unique individual person, given life by a loving heavenly Father.  Instead  we are mere shells; a mythical sum of our various group identities.

Society has undergone many changes throughout time that are for the good.  Even as recently as the last fifty years, for instance, we have made cultural changes that allow people of color to participate fully in our society.

We eschew labeling anyone by his or her color or gender or religion or occupation, or whatever label you might choose, but at the same time we are increasingly dependent upon those various labels for one purpose or another.  Sometimes it is for political clout.  Sometimes it is to get something from the government or from a non-government charitable organization.  Sometimes for some other reason.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was filling out the application for the reduced price lunches for those of my children who are attending the local public schools.  Yes, these free lunches for which my kids qualify certainly are a financial boon for us.  But is it a necessary thing?  No.  I have been providing healthful meals for my kids here at home for many years and I could certainly continue to do so even with them attending public school.  I could provide sack lunches for them with the occasional luxury of a cafeteria meal.  Yes, I could do this.

But, somehow, income level has become tied together with learning difficulties.  This labeling equates poor people with individuals who have learning challenges to overcome.  I'm not exactly sure how this works and it's a stereotype I despise.  But there we have it; the amount of money the school gets for Special Ed programs, if I understand correctly, is based on the number of children who qualify for free lunches.

One sees the same thing in the Head Start program that is specifically aimed at people of the lower income levels.  Do all mothers who live below the poverty line provide poor educational preparedness for their children?  Conversely do all higher income level mothers provide needed preparedness?  Vain labels, indeed.

Here is another example of this labeling that made me especially frustrated a few years back.  I received in the mail a supposedly voluntary survey.  It was from some state organization, I believe that in conjunction with the University of Minnesota was researching the relationship of timely pre-natal care to low birth weight babies.

On the surface, this seems like a benign enough study.  But the questions in the survey were anything but neutral.  The assumption seemed to be that anyone who did not get to her pre-natal appointments was an under-educated, smoking, drunken, poverty level woman who uses drugs and whose husband beats her.  And I ask then, with all these other factors they seemed to quite obviously be anticipating, how could they even make a connection that the lack of pre-natal care was the primary factor in any low birth weight baby.  Or did they anticipate not having enough respondents within the pre-natal care parameters they were exploring, who were also without other risk factors, which would thereby make them unable to get a true correlation between the pre-natal care and the birth weight?  Either way, the group identity prevails.

At the time I received this survey, I had recently borne, I think, my eighth child.  The pregnancy was an especially fatiguing one.  I hadn't gone to all my pre-natal appointments.  If I recall correctly, I did not get to one until I was about six months along, so that by the time I missed a few more appointments, I think I may have had only four or five prenatal appointments as opposed to the recommended fifteen or sixteen.  Since I don't fit into any of the groups the survey seemed to be attempting to lump together, I really ought to have filled it out.  I would have broken their stereotypes. And even if they were merely trying to identify other risk factor in order to streamline the results, my ten pound healthy baby girl would certainly not have drawn any correlation between low birth weight and timely pre-natal care.

The above examples all exhibit a lack of personal identity.  People are labeled by group and identified by group and treated as a member of said group instead of as individual persons.

I don't know how far this trend toward group identity and ensuing lack of personal identity will continue.  With the passage of the new health care bill into law, it seems as though it can only go down hill.  How is a bureaucracy to analyze anyone's medical needs if not by some statistical actuarial interpretation of group data?

Or worse yet, is it happening already.  Are there in any number of public policy meetings or think tanks or what have you, "experts" discussing what to do with various ones of us; how to control us, or get the most out of us.   A morbid thought, but I don't know that it is far fetched.

This all makes more sense in my head, but trying to get it in writing was somewhat difficult today.  Feel free to leave any comments that might help clarify my thought processes.

I originally thought of all this today while reading The Old Curiosity Shop,

     Supper was not yet over, when there arrived at the Jolly Sandboys two more travellers bound for the same haven as the rest, who had been walking in the rain for some hours, and came in shining and heavy with water. One of these was the proprietor of a giant, and a little lady without legs or arms,...
     'How's the Giant?' said Short, when they all sat smoking round the fire.
     'Rather weak upon his legs,' returned Mr Vuffin. 'I begin to be afraid he's going at the knees.'
     'That's a bad look-out,' said Short.
     'Aye! Bad indeed,' replied Mr Vuffin, contemplating the fire with a sigh. 'Once get a giant shaky on his legs, and the public care no more about him than they do for a dead cabbage stalk.'
     'What becomes of old giants?' said Short, turning to him again after little reflection.
     'They're usually kept in carawans to wait upon the dwarfs,' said Mr. Vuffin.
     'The maintaining of 'em must come expensive, when they can't be shown, eh?' remarked Short, eyeing him doubtfully.
     'It's better that, than letting 'em go upon the parish or about the streets,' said Mr Vuffin. 'Once make a giant common and giants will never draw again. Look at wooden legs. If there was only one man with a wooden leg what a property he'd be!'
     'So he would!' observed the landlord and Short both together. 'That's very true.'
     'Instead of which,' pursued Mr Vuffin, 'if you was to advertise Shakespeare played entirely by wooden legs,' it's my belief you wouldn't draw a sixpence.'
     'I don't suppose you would,' said Short. And the landlord said so too.
     'This shows, you see,' said Mr Vuffin, waving his pipe with an argumentative air, 'this shows the policy of keeping the used-up giants still in the carawans, where they get food and lodging for nothing, all their lives, and in general very glad they are to stop there. There was one giant--a black 'un--as left his carawan some year ago and took to carrying coach-bills about London, making himself as cheap as crossing-sweepers. He died. I make no insinuation against anybody in particular,' said Mr Vuffin, looking solemnly round, 'but he was ruining the trade;--and he died.'
     The landlord drew his breath hard, and looked at the owner of the dogs, who nodded and said gruffly that he remembered.
     'I know you do, Jerry,' said Mr Vuffin with profound meaning. 'I know you remember it, Jerry, and the universal opinion was, that it served him right....
     'What about the dwarfs when they get old?' inquired the landlord.
     'The older a dwarf is, the better worth he is,' returned Mr Vuffin; 'a grey-headed dwarf, well wrinkled, is beyond all suspicion. But a giant weak in the legs and not standing upright!--keep him in the carawan, but never show him, never show him, for any persuasion that can be offered.'

From this preserve us heavenly Father!

Aspiring Authors! Serial Writers!

Announcing my exciting new blog, Write Like the Dickens.

Regular readers will notice it is the direct brainchild of the previous post on this blog.

What the Dickens?

It must be especially observed in justice to poor Kit that he was by no means of a sentimental turn, and perhaps had never heard that adjective in all his life.  He was only a softhearted grateful fellow, and had nothing genteel or polite about him; consequently, instead of going home again, in his grief, to kick the children and abuse his mother (for, when your finely strung people are out of sorts, they must have everybody else unhappy likewise), he turned his thoughts to the vulgar expedient of making them more comfortable if he could.

From The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.

I love when an author is able, through artful descriptions, to bring to mind specific personality types and social situations.  And Dickens is one of the giants of this art.  He is able to evoke very specific visual images with the written word.  And he creates characters that people relate to in a very personal way.  We love them or hate them or even fear them.

The Old Curiosity Shop, like many of Dickens' works, was originally written in serial style.  I was awed by the following description from a Dickens biography included with the edition I'm reading.  It portrays the depth of his appeal and the anticipation with which his readers awaited a given installment.

When the Irish Nationalist Daniel O'Connell finished reading The Old Curiosity Shop onboard a train, he burst into tears, hurling the sad pages from the window of his compartment.  In Boston, 4000 people assembled at the wharf to wait for the boat carrying Chapter 71 to arrive.  As the vessel approached the dock, those on the shore called out to the captain, hoping to learn Little Nell's fate.  When he shook his head sadly, a moan went up from the crowd.

We don't have anything in our society that can exactly equate with that.  We do have novels and movies that come out in series.  Many people lined up at bookstores for the final Harry Potter book, for instance.  But imagine the scene above.  Imagine the days before mass transportation and communication.  Imagine no instant internet information.

And next think about a book that took 71 installments to reach it's conclusion, each perhaps only a few pages in length.  Remember how Laura and Mary committed to making the stories in their Youth's Companions last throughout The Long Winter?  I know that in the niche genres of literature, such as science fiction, these serials live on.

But I wonder if there might be a place for something like this in pop culture.  What might it look like and how might it be distributed.  A blog perhaps, started by some obscure writer, gradually gaining readership as the story evolves.  Or might a famous author start something to be distributed in the big box stores. Perhaps a news magazine might feature a chapter a week by a rising literary star.  I suppose it could happen any number of ways.

A serial of this sort is probably a romantic idea on my part, but one that appeals to me nonetheless.

Toy Morbidity

This title is not, as one might think, a reference to a dying toy. Oh, no. But instead to a toy that has morbid qualities.

One of my kids got a strange toy in a collection of various toys bagged together at Goodwill for a buck. At first glance the toy just appears to be a Kid's meal type toy from a fast food joint. At second glance, this proves to be true. Notice the Burger King logo in the bottom corner.

But by examining this toy even more closely, the fun really starts. As I sat fidgeting mindlessly with this toy, I gradually became aware that the toy appears to depicts a small child drowning.

Now, I am sure there is some story behind this toy.  Probably, this is a character from a Nickelodeon movie.  Probably the child who might appear, to uninformed mothers to be drowning, is really some sort of super heroine who survives or even thrives while being slowly submerged in water.

But, alas, I see I do not possess a broad enough culturally literacy to be familiar with the story.  And without knowledge of the story, I am sorry to say, this is a pathetic toy.  Really.  What parent in his or her right mind would buy their child a toy depicting a child drowning?  Oh, yeah, those who let their kids buy a bag full of junk for a buck.  Oh, yeah, now I remember.

Please also note the "children's choice award" label at the bottom edge.  Hmmm.  Does this say something about our society's children?

I've prepared a little video depiction of this toy's special features.  Please do not let small children view the following.  I won't be held accountable if anyone is scarred for life...

I hope you have enjoyed tonight's feature presentation.

For Amy

Happy Thanksgiving - WKRP Turkey Drop - kewego

For Steve