Writing Maternity

We interrupt these vacation musings to bring you an article about childcare ...

from Emily Yoffe's "Human Guinea Pig" column.  One moment I'd like to highlight:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 1.4 million child care workers, and is it an occupation in high demand. The BLS says child care workers must be "mature, patient, understanding, and articulate and have energy and physical stamina." In exchange, the median national salary is $17,630. (At Gap, the average worker makes about $22,000.) The advocacy group Center for the Child Care Workforce points out that only a handful of the more than 800 occupations surveyed by the BLS have lower wages—these include parking lot attendants and dishwashers.

And, a really good phrase that I'd never heard before but will now have to use, routinely: the "late-afternoon period of childhood, when it's not time for dinner, when bedtime seems an eon away, is often called the arsenic hour."

It's a good piece, hitting on many of the most important notes.  But I'm a bit sorry that it concludes as it does:

So the pay is lousy, it's exhausting, but still the job comes with satisfactions no parking lot attendant receives. A week after Malik's transfer to the Lions, I went to check and see how he was doing. When I called his name, he emerged from amidst his classmates and ran to me and gave me a hug. Then he picked up a ball and said, "Ball, ball!" (who knew he could speak?) and threw it, which caused him to fall down, which caused him to laugh hysterically. Malik was happy now, and I was happy for him.

I'd like us to get away from thinking that it's okay to pay child-care workers miserable wages because of the emotional compensation they get.  (Who is it who riffs on the impossibility of buying groceries with emotional compensation?)  While that's certainly not Yoffe's argument, this image gives us perhaps too happy a note to end on, given the state of that particular industry.

On a slightly related topic, Carolyn Steedman had a great article in Critical Inquiry recently about eighteenth-century servants being driven to violence by their responsibility for the diapers of their employers' kids.  When you think about the tremendous physical labor of laundry 200+ years ago, it makes a terrifying lot of sense.

back, but pretty well brain-dead

The trip was great, and re-entry hasn't been as rocky as we'd feared: the girls slept until close to dawn the first morning home, and are now sleeping until light has definitely broken.  I took notes while we were gone, so will start filling in the great big gap soon, but of course further stories and musings are crowding in with our return.

So, to start, I'll launch into news about schools ...

We learned on Monday (once we got our mail) that Squiss was not granted an intradistrict transfer to attend Hippie School.  Apparently scads of kids were turned down (17 from Hippie School, 25 from NE High Scores School, and so on).  Either there was a baby boomlet in our town c. 2003 or (ahem) the superintendent decided to stop allowing so many transfers.  We actually have information that it's the latter, which I'm sympathetic to administratively -- what a headache they must've been! -- and ideologically.  But if this were going to be the year when they stopped honoring pretty much all transfer requests carte blanche, couldn't they have made the announcement in, say, January?  before the parents of rising kindergartners spent lots of time and energy investing emotionally in their choices?  hmph.

As you know, I've swung in all sorts of directions.  And after a moment of fairly serious disappointment, I'm back to where I was before we applied for the transfer.  I'm happy with the school -- especially the kindergarten program.  I'm delighted with the commute -- I'm happier walking than biking, really, and Squiss is excited to ride her glider rider.  And I'm happy, as well, to be investing our time and our lives in a school that isn't one of the most-precious-and-bestest.  I'm pretty confident that this is a perfectly good school, I love the fact that it's very diverse, and I'm excited to think of being part of helping it become even better.

On other school-related issues, Tricksy is now also a "Montessori kid," currently being in the midst of her third day at the sister school to Squiss's.  I'm cautiously inclined to say that it seems to be going well, although transitions with two-year-olds (why qualify?) are probably never perfectly smooth.  On the first day, she happily kissed me good--bye and settled in to play with some blocks with her teacher (Miss Baltimore) and another child.  When I returned at 11:15, she was sitting in the teacher's lap looking completely exhausted but otherwise calm.  (Well, she'd been up since 5:00 AM.)  Miss Baltimore said that after the first hour you could see her simply starting to crash; and that she'd just wanted to stay with Miss Baltimore and hold her hand.  (Apparently she was also gently stroking the other children's arms.)

Day 2's departure was significantly rockier.  She was, to put it mildly, screaming with all the energy her almost two-year-old lungs could muster when I left.  She'd settled into the routine after ten minutes or so, apparently, and when I came back at mid-day she was sitting in the group with the other children listening to Miss Baltimore read them a story.  She came over eagerly but without tears.

Day 3's good-bye was also tearful, but she was comforted when Miss Baltimore picked her up so that she could blow me kisses at the window.  She's staying through lunch and nap today and then M. l'O will pick her up at about three, so we'll see how it goes. 

In the afternoons and evenings, she's talked about the slide, and about how she goes to "ouw-town mon-te-soh-ree."  She was really excited to bring her lunchbag today, as well.  On the other hand, she announces on the way home each day, "miss. wig-gul."  (She's also told me that she misses Squiss and Papa, which is just to say that we're tormenting our daughter by piling multiple transitions on at once: back to full days of school, to a new school without any previously-known friends, and the like.  Oh!  and jet-lag.  At least we didn't move cross-country at the same time, which is what we did to her sister at this age ...)

Gemstone's younger sister actively protested her transition to that Montessori six months ago, taking so long to adjust that her parents actually switched her back to her old school two days a week.  Gemstone herself had a pretty tough time with her transition when she was four and a half.  It's far too soon to tell with Trix -- I'm expecting it to go up and down for the rest of this week and next -- but I'm feeling generally lucky with my daughters' relative adaptability.  I'm hoping the adaptability Squiss has shown thus far stands her in good stead in the fall, since the move from Montessori into "traditional" public education can be disorienting for a lot of kids.

the whole world

Squiss made this in school over the course of the last month:

It was quite a complicated project.  To make the continents, you take the puzzle piece of that shape and trace it on a piece of paper.  You then put the piece of paper on a piece of felt and punch out the outline with a thumbtack (so much more precise than scissors!).  Once those were all done, the teachers draw the circles on the black board for you, and you then paint them blue.  Then you paste the continents in their places, and then you paste the names on them.)

With longer projects like this one -- even at a Montessori school -- you wonder how much the kids are doing on their own.  Squiss has been bringing home punched-out continents and states for ages, so that's clearly all her.  And internal evidence suggests that she wrote the names herself, as well:

It also seems fairly clear that she's fixing things herself when they go awry:

(Squiss really likes stapling and hole-punching these days, so I can easily imagine her insisting that it was better to fix the ripped South America with staples than to simply make a new one.)

This is by far the most complicated project she's completed to date.  She was talking about it for weeks before it was finished. There were a number stacked up on top of the cubbies over the course of last week, so it seems that a number of the kids in the class have all been working on these. 

Although my memories are for the most part from when I was a good bit older (9-12), the most satisfying work I remember doing in elementary school entailed this kind of long-term project that was both "academic" and creative.  In 5th and 6th grade, for example, we worked on something called "contracts."  These were essentially research projects, in which you chose a range of narrow topics, learned how to do research in order to write a series of short reports on them, and then put them together in a decorated booklet.  While these were technically the realm of "social studies," I suppose, that seems much too narrow for the work we did.  In 6th grade, for example, we studied the Renaissance.  The first of those contracts had us thinking about Marco Polo's trip to China, so some of the things you could choose for the contract included things like making a scale model of Venice, making paper, and creating a map that tracked his route.  Other things included learning about the kinds of cosmetics Venetian women wore at the time.  The final contract of the year in 5th grade -- when we studied the Middle Ages, starting with the Vikings -- was a "knighthood" contract, which included other kinds of "tests," as well: you had to learn to play backgammon and chess, pass various physical tests (which I've blocked out of memory), and had to design a coat of arms for yourself and then paint it.  These were hung all around the classroom.  I can remember, too, an experiment that I did trying to dye things with onion skins, only to learn the difficulty of getting a really dark dye.  This was combined with various more historical kinds of research projects: at one point, I learned about to write about "a day in the life of a Medieval peasant," for example.  And I'm sure that we were reading various kinds of historical fiction and/or biographies simultaneously.

I've doubtless horrified meg to no end with all the various anachronisms I've just spouted.  I'll just ask her to blame my fault memory, not the (really, quite outstanding) teacher I had for those two years.