Rambles With No Easy Answers
Mamacita says: Women who had difficult labors probably hate me already right now, but I’ll go ahead and make it worse: I loved being pregnant. I felt GREAT.
Even when I was sitting still, doing nothing, I was still doing something wonderfully productive. I was euphoric. I felt very off-balance, but I’m so inclined that way anyway it wasn’t too bad. But mostly, I just felt good. The concept that after I had the baby, I would actually HAVE the baby, hadn’t sunken in yet.
I was scared of my babies. I knew I was too ignorant to deserve them, and I felt it was just a matter of time until my supreme ignorance caused me to do something with or to a baby that would toss me in the state pen for life, and deservedly so. I could hear the sentence in my head: YOU ARE FAR TOO STUPID TO GET TO HAVE BABIES!”
Somehow, I managed. WE managed. My kids are fantastic today, so maybe they didn’t suffer TOO much. Sigh.
But, between panic attacks, I had fun with my babies, too. I made zillions of mistakes and did tons of stupid things, but I had fun. I hope they did, too.
I know I was half-asleep through a lot of it, esp. anything that happened in the early morning hours, and I know I was an odd mommy, and I hated having to leave them and go to work but I had no choice, and I know I packed some really bizarre lunches for them to take to school, and I know it’s probably my fault that both of them are night owls like me, and I know I embarrassed them a lot (that was my job, after all) but I also know that the good things far outweighed the bad, even if I could remember all the bad, which I don’t, which is probably best for the perpetuation of mankind.
After all, they’re alive, and they’re still speaking to me. I call that a good sign. And, they’re curious about everything and they love to go to see live shows. They also both love music and enjoy living outside of the box. They’re both sensitive and tenderhearted and like to help people, and they enjoy being odd on purpose to make other people mad. I’m sure I have no idea where they learned THAT.
This ramble probably makes no sense, but I’m sitting here with a soul-splitting migraine, wishing I were tired enough to just get up and go to bed, and knowing that if I did I’d just lie there for hours and hours, feeling guilty because lately I’ve been wishing for my children’s childhoods back so I could do a better job this time, and knowing that with some things, well, even the gods can’t unscramble eggs. . . .
I also wish I could solve all the problems of the world with a wave of my hand, and knowing I can’t, and wishing I could, anyway, and wondering why some people have to be so cruel, and wondering how some people can be so upbeat in the face of unspeakable horror, and wishing I were thinner, and nicer, and more fun, and knowing I probably could be if only I weren’t also so lazy, well, I’ve got a massive migraine and these thoughts aren’t my fault. They’re not, they’re not, they’re not!
Maybe I should go to bed and get up early. I almost wish I had a pile of quizzes to grade. Life has all kinds of quizzes, doesn’t it. The quizzes in my briefcase usually have easy answers.
P.S. It would be lovely if there were a prize for the person who counts all the run-on sentences and comments with the number, but there isn’t one. Do it anyway if you’re the O/C type, and I’ll thank you, but that’s all you get.
Quotation Saturday: Shades of the Past!
Mamacita says: “Shades of the past” is an expression I occasionally use. I’ve said it several times these past holiday weeks, in fact. So I thought, well, why not use it as the theme for this week’s Quotation Saturday?
I know it’s Sunday now. Shhhhh.
How very seemly to quote about the past when my deadline is past.
1. Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense. — George Ade
2. The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present. — Barbara De Angelis
3. It is one thing to learn about the past; it is another to wallow in it. — Kenneth Auchincloss
4. Nostalgia is a seductive liar. — George W. Ball
5. The past should be a springboard, not a hammock. — Ivern Ball
6. A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. — Sir James M. Barrie
7. The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying. — John Berger
8. The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. — Henri L. Bergson
9. If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present. — Les Brown
10. One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us. — Michael Cibenko
11. To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another. — Charles Caleb Colton
12. The past always looks better than it was because it isn’t here. — Finley Peter Dunne
13. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. — Leslie P. Hartley
14. If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotized by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change. — Robert Hewison
15. If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time. — Russell Hoban
16. Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened. — Gerald W. Johnson
17. What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now. — Unknown
18. Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed. — Wayne Dyer
19. Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future. —
Paul Boese
20. I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.– Sophia Loren
21. Looking back you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life- and it was you. It is not too late to find that person again. — Robert Brault
22. Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future. — Euripides
23. When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things – not the great occasions – that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness. — Bob Hope
24. Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. — William Ralph Ing
25. We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice. — Stephen Covey
26. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. — John F. Kennedy
27. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. — Oscar Wilde
28. Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable. — George S. Patton
29. A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. — Marcus Garvey
30. We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present. — Marianne Williamson
31. The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. — Rene Descartes
32. You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes. — Denis Waitley
33. Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. — Thomas Sowell
34. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. — Erich Fromm
35. We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible. — George Santayana
36. Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. — Ray Bradbury
37. If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system. — William James
38. The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. — George Eliot
39. Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die. — Thomas Carlyle
40. The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today. — Harriet Beecher Stowe
41. Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. — Vladimir Nabokov
42. The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
— Zora Neale Hurston
43. Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. — Corrie Ten Boom
44. A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories. — Honore de Balzac
45. If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past. — Baruch Spinoza
46. You can’t undo the past… but you can certainly not repeat it. — Bruce Willis
47. Nostalgia: A device that removes the ruts and potholes from memory lane. — Doug Larson
48. God gave us memory that we might have roses in December. — Sir James M. Barrie
49. Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday. — John Wayne
50. Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead. — Lillie Langtry
Limited-Vocabulary Readers are the Devil. Yes, THAT Devil.
Mamacita says: I don’t think there are any words coined yet that would adequately describe the complete and total loathing I have for simplified, edited versions of good books.
I’ve heard quadrillions of elementary teachers argue that small children learn best when there are few challenges, but I have to disagree with that, too. How condescending!
I am not saying that we should require second graders to read War and Peace and understand it. I am just saying that exposure to big words expands not only a child’s vocabulary, but also his/her understanding of the world. Everything is Six Degrees of Separation, but if we withhold that first degree from our children, how can they be expected to connect what they’ve never been exposed to, to anything else?
Seriously, I have to wonder if maybe our schools are too afraid that the ADULTS won’t understand the words, and will be made to look ridiculous to the children who WILL understand if they’re give the chance. I’ve worked with a lot of adults who have very small vocabularies. Not acceptable.
As for those “educators” – and I use that term loosely here – who think that the Flopsy Bunnies ate lettuce that made them feel sleepy sounds better than the fact that the lettuce had a soporific effect on the bunnies. . . . well, those are not educators; they’re merely censors. The vocabulary in Potter’s little stories has opened many a door to a child: a door that would have remained closed if “soporific” had been replace with the cheap, bargain-basement “made the bunnies feel sleepy.” I do not believe in dumbing-down anything for our children. Children who are exposed to nothing but dumbed-down readings stand a good chance of being dumbed-down, themselves.
As you can no doubt figure out, I am against anything that does not allow our children’s minds to grow and expand and connect the dots from one thing to another, and from there to Alpha Centauri. Boring little limited-vocabulary stories are not the answer.
The contrast between a third grade literature textbook of our grandparents’ day, and the limited vocabulary, politically correct reading books of today, is horrifyingly large. There is no way a typical modern elementary reader could be construed as literature, whereas my mother’s third grade Lit book had excerpts from Les Miserables in it!
Perhaps one answer might be to bring back remedial reading classes and to hell with self esteem. And whose self esteem are we talking about, anyway? The child’s, or the parent’s? I’ll put my money on the parents. And wouldn’t self esteem soar on its own, EARNED, if our children were taught to read properly, without the distraction of other children reading encyclopediae in the next seat over? (Self esteem is earned, or it is nothing. Nobody can give someone self esteem. Self esteem must be earned. EARNED. )
If I had a nickel for every little boy I’ve ever seen, sitting out in the hallway with a tutor or a helpful older student, struggling mightily to read Harry Potter because of the wonder and whimsy and elegance and cool of it, when wild horses couldn’t drag that same boy near enough to a limited-vocabulary horror to spit on it, I’d be rich today.
Part of the problem with many elementary reading programs today is the fact that the reading material is boring, stupid, condescending, edited, highly censored, and so politically correct and squeaky clean that there is nothing left to hold anyone’s interest.
Add to this the fact that there are some school librarians who take the “suggested audience’s age” blurb on a book seriously, and it’s little wonder that so many children who have the potential to be excellent, excited, interested readers are simply shunted to the back of the room and forced to “study” little baby things they outgrew eons ago. Good parents will bring their children to the public library, but what if some good parents don’t have a public library within practical reach?
When my husband was in lower elementary, he used to bring National Geographic magazines to school, so he’d have something to do while other kids were still working on the lessons. One of my lower elementary teachers took Gone with the Wind away from me because watching me read it was making a few of the other children feel bad about their own abilities. Our children were not allowed access to the library books “upstairs” because their numerical age was too low and the librarian was an ass a firm believer in matching a child’s age to the recommended age on the book cover.
They brought books from home to take up the slack. You know: forty minutes of wonder stretched over a six-hour day. But what about those eager little readers whose homes had no books? They were counting on the school to provide worthy reading material for them, and all they got was pablum.
I hope very hard that all elementary teachers allow their students access to whatever level of reading material they are ready for, not just some prescribed limited heavily-edited, “children’s version” censored horror for kids with problems unlocking symbols from the page. Yes, those kids deserve material for their level, but THERE ARE OTHER LEVELS, and wouldn’t it be loverly if those high-achieving good readers were allowed access to Stephen Hawking and Jane Austen in the second grade if they wanted Stephen Hawking and Jane Austen?
Remember Charles Wallace Murray, trying to cope with first grade when he had the intelligence and reading ability of a highly gifted adult? And if you don’t know who Charles Wallace Murray is, I hope you’re not a teacher. . . .
Our society is far too fixated on equality in the classroom when the reality is that some children will always be more advanced and some children will always be behind. Separate them, so some children can fly while others are still trying to learn to walk. Requiring such disparate abilities to study the same things at the same time at the same level will only frustrate both.
But then, who really cares? The only truly important thing in school is to prepare for those tests, isn’t it. . . . .
