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I have too many irons in the fire right now and, as a consequence, am feeling stretched thin and constantly distracted. I'm supposed to hear "by the end of January" about the national grant that my institution nominated me for, and I'm the midst of a high-stakes conversation with the Dean, so there's always a question mark in my mind about both when and what I'm going to hear next.
Not that we're surprised, but the official word is in: Tricksy (ht. 31 inches, wt. 28 lbs.) is in the 90th percentile for weight, the 78th for height, and the 59th for head circumference.
In other words: she's tall, and it's all in the belly.
And if you happen to be in my local Kaiser pharmacy office, the reason you can't find any of the Purell hand sanitizers they're selling is because Tricksy spent our time waiting moving them from one shelf to another. She also mixed up the flavors of packages of cough drops, but I figure that's less confusing.
***
A going-home ritual developed some time ago, whereby Squiss asked for a cracker when we arrived at Tricksy's school and one of the teachers complied. Squiss stopped needing to ask ages ago, since Tricksy started dashing to the snack drawer the minute she walked into the room. This evening, Squiss walked into the room first and, by the time I got there, Tricksy, The Wiggle, and Twisty Boy (the three kids who hadn't been picked up yet) were all standing by the snack drawer, ready and waiting. (Squiss was there, too.) When she saw me, Tricksy started to run over, exclaiming "Mama! Mama!" only to stop halfway: Mama? or cracker? You could see her weighing the options.
Cracker won out.
***
We've been reading Squiss D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths for the last couple of weeks. (It stands up to my childhood memories impressively well.* Although I have to say that I do object a bit to the strikingly blond-and-blue-eyed princess Andromeda of, ahem, Ethiopia.) Today, she reported after school that she, Gemstone, and the Transmogrifier were "playing Greek myths": he was Zeus, Squiss was Hera, and Gemstone was "baby Aphrodite." At least, she was until some other friends "took her, and changed her name to Rosie."
"So what did you do?"
"Well, I was really angry, and so I just got sadder and sadder. I mean, how would you and Papa feel if someone took me?"
Really angry, and then just sadder and sadder, indeed.
* I have more a bit to say about the role of nostalgia in one's selection of books and toys for one's kids, and, in fact, in one's parenting choices more generally -- but it's going to have a wait until my department is done searching and the dust from various other matters settles a bit more. meg and I have promised one another a nice, bloggy exchange about it at some point, but given her spring travel plans, I may have to just go it alone.
Today was one of those days where there wasn't enough time to do anything, and what time there was had to spent doing things that are annoyingly necessary but not substantive. Something was up, because I was running late and then nearly forgetting incredibly important meetings just about all day long.
As you may recall, Squiss has never really shown signs of concern that we eat things that were once small and cute. We may be entering the end of that era, to G's and my infinite regret.
Last night, as we were sitting down to a dinner of braised lamb shanks, Squiss asked what we were having. "Lamby-lamb," I announced.
"Oh! Yummy!" she exclaimed. And then, displaying knowledge, "Lamb is sheep."
"Yep," I replied. "It's baby sheep."
And there we went. Her face screwed up in an expression of some sadness. "Oh, I feel sorry for the baby lamb!" she sighed.
Fortunately, we had an out: her school says a non-religious grace before meals that they call simply "bon appetit": "Thank you to all the people, plants, and animals, that made this meal possible. Bon appetit, you may eat now." Squiss went through a stage of insisting that we say it every night at home, and G and I liked it, so it recurs intermittently. When Squiss started to melt down at the prospect of eating baby lamb, G jumped in with the idea that, in that case, it was especially important that we say "bon appetit" tonight. So we did.
"Thank you, to all the people, plants, and animals -- especially the baby lamb -- that made this meal possible." And so on.
It seemed to work, at least for the moment. She then settled down happily to her lamb shank (our girls eat their meat on the bone, thankyouverymuch), and worked on it so hard that she had sauce everywhere except her forehead.
Kindergarten registration in my town starts at the end of this month and runs through the end of February. You can essentially choose any of the six elementary schools is the district, so we're heavily into the season for difficult decisions and parental obsessing.
For us, the decision is between Hippie School, which is a couple of blocks from my office; and Neighborhood School, which is a couple of blocks from our house. (The two are a mile apart, so these questions of distance aren't terribly important, in any case.) We've visited both; we've liked both enormously. Squiss would clearly thrive at either, and each has particular things that pull us toward it.
So here's the question. When weighing two different but comparably attractive options, how do you decide?
In a months-long conversation last year that resulted in a radical overhaul of the curriculum, my department kept returning to the question of what we wanted students to be able to know and do when they graduated from our school with an English major. Historically, I think, English departments at highly selective schools have tended to want their major to prepare students for graduate school. There are several of us at my current institution who feel strongly that this shouldn't be our mission -- and, hence, that it shouldn't be our major.
But then what is?*
In some ways, the difficulty of the conversation is that it forces us to try to define what we think is the unique contribution of English studies to the liberal arts. And if you don't want to be content- and canon-based, and you also don't want to go Arnoldian and think about sweetness and light, it gets difficult. I spent some solid days in January writing a presentation that will hopefully this spring become an article about the role of both writing and English in the liberal arts, and these meditations emerge partly out of that. They also emerge, however, out of this IHE piece that reports on a survey of employers about how well-prepared they find college graduates.
I was particularly struck by one of the suggestions:
46 percent said it would be very effective and 70 percent
said it would be very or fairly effective to have students complete an
advanced project as seniors, demonstrating knowledge in the major and
in problem-solving, writing, and analytic skills. And 69 percent said
it would be very effective and 83 percent said it would be very or
fairly effective to see an evaluation of a supervised internship where
students apply college learning in a “real-world setting.”
It's no surprise that employers like the real-world setting assignment, and I'm actually not convinced that that's one of the pieces of advice we (all) need to take. To come back to the problem in English: what's a "real-world setting" for someone to write about literature? Should I ask students to imagine themselves journalists or critics? Or should I have them imagine themselves teachers? But what about all the English majors who use their close reading skills in law school and as lawyers, teasing apart the complexities of statutes and briefs? Very few of those fit particularly well into a course on Victorian literature, and I'm not convinced that the education my students would receive would be better if I made room for it.
The first suggestion, however, struck me as interestingly identifying the place where the goals (writ large) of the liberal arts and the goals (writ large) of the people employing our graduates intersect. But I think that we often think of those final assignments more in terms of content (mastering knowledge) than in terms of skills in critical, discipline-based, written inquiry.
Higher education shouldn't be simply or crudely instrumental, and I don't mean to suggest that it should. But I think that we miss an opportunity to re-examine our curricular and pedagogical goals when we dismiss considerations of what our students face when they leave our campuses.
* We actually came up with a beautifully flexible major that I'm quite pleased with, although I have fairly significant concerns about the challenges of implementing and administering it. We're riding that wave now.
I left the power cable for my laptop at home this morning and had to run back and get it.
This morning, both girls woke up on the early side of normal. This meant that breakfast was eaten, clothes were donned, and lunches were packed early enough for Squiss to convince G to sit down and read her some Mouse Tales. Shortly thereafter, Tricksy noticed that the lunchbags were sitting, ready and waiting, on the dining room table.
"Ba(g)! Ba(g)! Ba(g)!" she started exclaiming, running over to them and stretching up on tip-toes until she pulled first Squiss's and then her own off. Happily looping one over each arm -- like a manic old lady with purses -- she marched to the front door, ready to go. "Sure, you can put them by the door," I said, "and then we need to put on your jacket."
"Ha-guh! Ha-guh!" was the exclamation, as she left the lunchbags in her dust (but by the front door), rushing over to the jackets. We got that on, but silly slow parents and sister still had to deal with their own shoes and jackets and things like that. Next thing I knew, the little tug boat had started pulling my (large, laptop-holding) backpack toward the door, as well: "Bah-puh! Bah-puh!" she explained.
Sometimes you just need to get going in the morning, and everyone else is just holdin' you up.
G's out playing tennis, his usual Tuesday evening activity and his one regular time either to exercise or to get out on his own each week. His father just called -- at about 11:00 east coast time -- to ask in an urgent tone if he could speak with him. G's grandmother is not doing terribly well, and she's quite old, so my thoughts immediately leapt to the possibility that she had taken a dramatic turn for the worse.
"It's his mother's birthday, and I just wish he'd remembered."
We go through this almost annually, sometimes more often (because we forget the birthdays of both parents rather than just one). There's a tragic-sounding phone call from the other parent, full of reproach and generally indicating that birthdays aren't all that important to them, but are really important to the other one, whom we've just wounded irreparably. Part of me shrugs it off -- his family, his responsibility, not mine -- but part of me (clearly) feels responsible and therefore guilty and therefore pissed off that I'm being made to feel guilty about something that just doesn't seem so terribly important to me.
(Case in point: my birthday was last Friday. My sister called me on Saturday morning: "I'm sorry I couldn't call yesterday, but I was thinking about you!" Great. No problem. Really nice to talk to her, because it had been a week or more.)
In a family where adult birthdays are a bigger deal than mine, I can even understand some level of ribbing or complaint about forgetfulness. I don't understand the catastrophic tone that both of G's parents get around this issue, though, as though they've finally uncovered our/his true lack of caring or love for them. It's a problematic case of imperfect fit, and it's been true since he was a teenager: they need certain demonstrations of affection and caring that, for whatever reason, don't come naturally to him. He's a loving and expressive person, so it's a bit bizarre to wrap your head around this, but it has something to do with attention to certain kinds of "good manners" (thank you notes, birthday cards, and the like), and it has something to do with a kind of jealousy that sees him as always putting friends or work (or his own wife and children) ahead of them.
It's a tough situation on both sides. They should really come to terms with the fact that he's likely to call a day or so late for birthdays, and accept and love him as he is. He should really buck up and realize that this is incredibly important to them, and set a reminder on his computer. (I should learn not to feel guilty for things that it's G's responsibility to remember.) And no one should call us at 11:00 PM their time and speak in a deeply urgent tone unless there is actually someone sick or dying -- particularly when there are elderly family members to think about.
The kicker is that we actually got together with his brother before Christmas and bought and sent a gift way in advance. Now I'm wondering if that somehow got lumped in with Christmas presents and so we aren't even getting credit for that.
I just found editions of two fairly obscure nineteenth-century advice books on Google Books. Otherwise, I've only had my piecemeal photocopies and notes from the British Library to work with, so this is great, seriously great.
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