Lift Up Your Hearts!

You’re surprised I waited so long for this one, right?  I value home education so highly that my gratitude for that privilege almost goes without saying.  (But gratitude should never go without saying.)   Because my joyous thanksgiving for the legal protection that homeschoolers now enjoy cannot be overstated, I will understate it here.

Educational opportunities have expanded for everyone, not just homeschoolers, over the last 50 years.

When I was a child living in upstate New York, educational choices for most families were simple:  Your children went to the local public school after they turned five years old.  If you were Catholic, you had one more choice:  parochial school.

Later we moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, where there were several well-established private schools to choose from—if you were wealthy and willing to commute.

Today?  There still isn’t as much choice as I would like, as the system is heavily weighted in favor of public schools and against parents who choose another path.  But tremendous improvements have been made.

• Education is now provided for all children; in the past, “all children are to be provided a free, public education” often did not apply to children with handicaps.
• Homeschooling is legal in every state, albeit with varying degrees of governmental interference.
• Within the home education realm itself, materials and support (and with them, options) have exploded over the last 20 years.
• Private school options have multiplied:  non-Catholic Christian schools, Muslim schools, Montessori schools, unschools, specialty academic schools—if there’s an idea, someone has turned it into a school.
• Public school options have also multiplied, with magnet schools, charter schools, and in some (too few) places even the right to choose which regular public school to attend.  Even limited competition has encouraged public schools to be less complacent.

Would I call the system great?  No.  In some ways schooling is worse now than when I was a child, although to be fair that’s mostly due to sociological changes.  But overall the system is much better than it was 50, or even 25 years ago, because we have choices.  Whether in the end we choose public, private, or home education—or a combination thereof—we (and our children) are better off for having the opportunity to make these decisions, rather than passively accepting the status quo.

I’m thankful for push-button phones, cordless phones, cell phones, answering machines, voice mail, Voice over IP, and video calling.

I didn't mind dialing a number—numbers were shorter back then—but phone buttons are used for a lot more than dialing these days, and that became possible when the clicks were replaced by tones.  (Can anyone besides me remember phones that converted button presses into clicks?)

Once upon a time the 25-foot phone cord was the great new technology that let one actually get some work done while talking on the telephone.  It was almost always in the kitchen, where it may have caused a child to trip or become entangled, but was overall much safer than using a cell phone while driving.^*  Still, cordless phones are much more fun, enabling work to be done in other parts of the house … and poolside relaxation without fear of missed calls.

Not that missed calls are so much of a problem anymore.  Various answering devices have all but eliminated the slavery induced by the fear that this call is the all-important, critical one from your boss, or from a family member in trouble, and therefore it has the right to interrupt any and all other activities—even though nine times out of ten it turns out to be a sales call and 999 out of 1000 is something that could have waited.  Call forwarding technology performs a similar liberating function, especially the kind that allows one to forward only calls from specific numbers.

Call waiting, annoying as it sometimes is, is a boon to those who like to have long telephone conversations—and to those who share a phone line with them.

Cell phones?  Yes, they have in one sense tethered us.  (What do you mean I can’t reach you on vacation?  Don’t you have a cell phone?) But the freedom they have bestowed is even greater, especially on women and children.  Think about driving (or letting your child drive!) alone late at night without a cell phone, and you’ll see what I mean.^**

I won’t get into Blackberries, iPhones, and other amazing devices here, because I don’t own one.  Yet.  It’s really hard to think about giving up my $100/year cell phone plan.  But they have liberated many people from the need to lug their computers around with them, which I can appreciate.

Voice over IP and video calling?  One word:  Grandchildren. 

By now you’re tired of hearing me say this, but you won’t believe…

…the things one couldn’t do without a Y chromosome when I was growing up.

My own parents were great—and a bit ahead of their time—at encouraging me not to be fenced in by my sex.  I had backhoes and construction sets as well as dolls for toys.  I was encouraged to climb trees—and mountains.   But society at large was still severely restrictive.

In sixth grade I expressed the wish to be an astronaut, and was emphatically told by my (male) teacher that girls could never be astronauts, because all astronauts had to be test pilots, and test pilots were only men.  (Take that, Sally Ride!)

Those were the days when girls took home economics classes and boys took shop.   Period.  End of story.

There’s no point in detailing all the restrictions—there are too many, and this is about thanksgiving, not griping—but here’s one I just learned:  Until the late 1960s no woman could run officially in the Boston Marathon.  My running friend says women were told they would damage their bodies if they tried to run such a long distance.  (Now some of the best ultramarathon runners are women.)

I rode the crest of the wave of change, with doors opening all around me.  I was the first (and only) girl in my high school’s jazz band, the only girl in my Boy Scout Explorer post, the only girl in many of my physics classes.

It’s true that in our enthusiasm we’ve allowed the pendulum to swing too far, forcing women to face a different kind of restriction:  While a myriad other opportunities were becoming available, women were finding it more and more difficult to choose the noble career of homemaking that had for millenia been taken for granted as their birthright (and duty).

A course correction is necessary to fix this injustice, but let’s not lose sight of what we have gained, nor be tempted to push the pendulum back too far.  These may be perilous times, but if you’re a woman, you don’t really want to go back to the 1950s.

I’m thankful that today’s girls can dream about becoming astronauts.^*  Or whatever else they might want to be and to do.

I am of the last generation to know what life was like before pocket calculators.  Even that name is revealing; who calls them that anymore?  Who remembers when “adding machines” were big, clunky things like typewriters?  (Have you seen a typewriter outside of a museum or an old movie?)

I remember my parents doing their taxes with a nifty little plastic device with a set of numbered dials like a telephone.  (Uh, who remembers dial phones?)  There was a 1’s dial, a 10’s dial, a 100’s dial, etc. and you used a stylus to turn them to the correct numbers.  You could add and subtract by turning the dials clockwise or counterclockwise.  The device was handy for checking all those tax numbers, and lots of fun for me when I could get my hands on it.

As a science major in college, I had many tedious calculations to do, and often found it worthwhile to make a trek through the cold and snowy winter night to use one of the half dozen Wang calculators made available to students by the physics department.

When I graduated from college, I received a thrilling (and expensive) gift:  A Texas Instruments SR-10 calculator!  It was especially cool because it handled scientific notation.  Take a look at the keyboard and note that it did a whole lot less than the calculators you can buy today for $10 at your friendly neighborhood Walmart.  The last time I visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, I found my wonderful graduation present on display amongst the other relics.

I firmly believe that everyone should know how to do basic arithmetic functions easily and quickly, and think it’s deplorable that we have cashiers who can’t make change without a register to do the calculations.  I’ve never forgotten Isaac Asimov’s prescient story, The Feeling of Power (1958).

I also believe that everyone should know how to make bread, but that doesn’t stop me from being thankful to be able to buy bread at the store.

Thus, without apology, I am thankful for the handy, portable, convenient, powerful, inexpensive, labor-saving pocket calculator.

When I was young there was no such thing as recycling, per se.  We still produced a whole lot less trash than the average family today, because we had a whole lot less stuff, and what we had was often reused (e.g. milk bottles).  Food scraps went, not into the trash or down the sink, but into a compost pile in the back yard, where hardworking worms and bugs and microbes recycled it their own way into fertile soil.

Times changed.  Almost without being aware of it we had become a disposable society, and our piles of trash grew.  And grew.  Newspapers could be recycled—indeed, one could make good money by collecting people’s old papers and taking them to the paper plant.  But metal, glass, and the ubiquitous varieties of plastic went straight to the landfill.

Finally, cans and bottles began to be recycled, but one had to be committed to the cause to drive one’s accumulation to a place that would accept it.

Today we have two recycling bins in our garage, one for newspapers, magazines, and cardboard; the other for steel cans, aluminum cans, glass, and all forms of plastic with a recycling number.  Once a week a special truck comes right to our driveway and empties them.  At the grocery store I can easily recycle plastic bags and Styrofoam.  Other cities collect office paper.  Auto parts stores will accept used motor oil.

Recycling is no longer a money-making proposition, at least not for most individual citizens, but curbside collection has greatly improved community involvement.  We may never reach the remarkable Swiss compliance rate (81% for PETE plastic, 91% for aluminum cans, 60-80% for other forms of aluminum, 94.6% for glass bottles and containers) but it’s certainly better than it was 40 years ago.

We’ve always recycled whenever we could (and try to reuse, and use less, as well), but I’m thankful for community-based recycling, both for the convenience and for the way it encourages widespread participation.

Think “reproductive freedom” and what comes to mind?  Birth control?  Abortion-on-demand?  The freedom, in short, not to reproduce while indulging in the activity specifically designed for reproduction?

What I’m thankful for is the inverse.

My generation grew up in the days of Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and fears that the world would outgrow its food supply by the mid-1980s.  It was seriously suggested that giving aid to distressed peoples was morally wrong, on the grounds that helping them now would only enable them to reproduce and then more people would starve to death later.

(It was also seriously suggested that we spread dirt on the polar ice cap to help counteract the global cooling that was threatening our environment, but that’s a different issue.)

I think today’s generation will not believe the societal pressure there was back then to have no more than two children.  If you’ve read Ender’s Game, think what it was like to be a “Third” in that society:  Having a third child was nearly as bad here.  I remember a friend who hoped for twins her second pregnancy, on the grounds that that was the only way she could have more than two children without having scorn heaped upon her.  Families with “extra” kids were clearly irresponsible and incompetent at birth control.

Nowadays many have decided that they like the one to one parent/child ratio—so many, in fact, that the birth rate in some countries has fallen below the replacement level—but  there’s a lot more choice going into that decision than there was in our day.  That’s a good thing.

An even better thing?  That some families now feel free to enjoy three, four, or even many more children.

The best thing?  In my case, more grandchildren!

For them, I’m especially thankful.

Overall, society has become much ruder, cruder, and lewder than it was 50, or even 25, years ago.  But sexual harassment, if hardly a thing of the past, is at least—like smoking—generally disapproved of, and the woman on the receiving end of a “friendly” pat on the rear from her boss or suggestive remarks from her co-workers now has legal recourse.  In the past, enduring such treatment was often considered as much a part of the job as making coffee.  (On a personal note, I worked with great people and did not have this kind of problem myself.  I didn’t make the coffee, either.)

Maybe we’ve gone too far in enforcing the new rules—suspending a kindergartener for kissing a classmate comes to mind—but for the most part they are in place because they are necessary.  I’m thankful for this civility.

It’s okay—it’s good—to be thankful for small things, too.  It may not be an earthshaking improvement, but I’m thankful for digital cameras.  One key to taking good photographs is taking lots of photographs, and in times past only the professional could afford to do so.  Now anyone can.

Digital cameras are also great for children.  Instant feedback is so much more satisfying than waiting to finish the roll of film so it could be developed—and not wanting to waste any pictures because film + developing = a lot of money.  Now there are cameras that let the youngest learn to take good photographs.

What’s more, good cameras—even video cameras—are small enough to carry in a purse.  A small purse!  Our first video camera was a huge monster that took full-sized VHS tapes.

Organizing photos into albums has never been easier, and there are so many more wonderful things you can do to present them.  On the other hand, having so many more pictures and options makes more work, even if the work is easier.

But that’s a minor quibble.  I love my tiny, handy, good-quality digital camera!

There’s no doubt the sociological upheavals caused by the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement have done much harm, but one great thing to come out of that time is a greater closeness between fathers and their children. 

My father was always actively involved with his children—unusually so for that generation, I believe—even before my mother’s early death forced him to take on double parenting duty.  And yet in his journals of our early years he always refers to the times my mother was not at home as times when he was “babysitting the children.”  No one I know with young children in this century would even think such a thought, much less express it.  How can one “babysit” one’s own child?

My own generation was at the cusp, I think.  Most fathers I knew still thought of their time alone with the kids as babysitting duty, at least when the children were very young, but overall they were beginning to be more involved in their care. That happened most as the children grew older, however—and dirty diapers were still the mother’s domain. 

Now—with the notable exception of breastfeeding—fathers seem to be doing everything.  Some even specialize in dirty diapers!  If the father is the family breadwinner and the mother the homemaker,^* then there is necessarily a difference in the quantity of time each has with their children, but functionally dads have taken on parenting in a way that only mothers had enjoyed.  It’s not that they’ve become mothers—watch a father playing with an infant and you’ll say vive la difference! once your heart rate returns to normal.  They’ve become better fathers.

Today I’m thankful for fathers, past and present, who learned the awesome truth that no selfish pleasure brings as much delight as nurturing a family.

It’s quite possible that the environment we live in is in worse shape now than 50 years ago, especially in places like China and Africa.  But here, now, it looks, tastes, and smells a lot better.  And not just because fewer people are smoking.

I remember when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, and when it was said you could develop film in the Genesee downstream from the Kodak factory.  My father worked for General Electric in Schenectady, and used to say that they returned the water to the Mohawk cleaner than it was when they took it out, which was no doubt true but should not be taken as an endorsement of the effluent.

The air in Pittsburgh was so full of smoke and particulates that when the Church of the Ascension expanded, they used black stone in order to match the soot-darkened original.

Automobile exhaust was something awful.  It’s not nice even now to walk or bike along a road full of cars, but nothing like what it was before pollution controls.

I even remember when the Freihofer bread delivery truck was horse-drawn, and you can guess what that did to the streets.  (But I loved to sit on our porch and watch it pass by!)

Environmentally, this is not a secure time to be living.   What’s more, I know that the improvements to our air and water quality are only partly because of pollution control laws.  Pittsburgh is a clean, breathable city because they no longer make steel in the home of the Steelers.  We have outsourced and off-shored our pollution as well as our jobs.

But when it comes to breathing and drinking, I’m thankful for today.

This post could also be viewed as a mere excuse for sharing my favorite Tom Lehrer song of that era.

Into the Silent Land:  A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation , by Martin Laird  (Oxford University Press, 2006)

The physical benefits of meditative techniques are well established, and I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.  What has hindered me is that many—though not all—of the studies have focused on Transcendental Meditation (TM), the Eastern religious aspects of which have led me to keep meditation in general at arm’s length since I first learned of it some 40 years ago.  It will not do to gain a physical benefit at a spiritual loss—I can’t help thinking of The Magician’s Nephew, in which Digory was tempted to steal an apple that would have cured his dying mother, but if he had done so, both he and his mother would have later “looked back and said it would have been better to die in that illness.”

Yet Digory, having passed the test, was eventually given another apple, one that healed his mother in the right way.

Despite all the attention given to TM during my formative years, it turns out that Christian meditation is an ancient and respected practice.  Many of the techniques turn out to be similar, though not identical and of course the focus and intent are quite different.

You don’t hear much about Christian contemplative practice today, at least not outside of the more liturgical traditions—and not much in them, either.  Our cranked-up, frenetic, yammering world is not comfortable with either external or internal silence.

Nor does it help that those who have written about meditation are generally describing the indescribable, which makes them incomprehensible, as far as I’m concerned.  I plowed about halfway through Thomas Dubay’s Fire Within:  St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer before giving it up as being 'way too far over my head.

Into the Silent Land covers much of the same material in a shorter and simpler form, but it still leaves my head spinning—and this was my second reading.  So I cannot, at this point, give it an accurate evaluation.  I will say it’s worth a third attempt at some point.  For now, I’ve found a few ideas that I can hang onto and begin to put into practice, which may help illuminate a re-rereading.

Spiritual and physical benefits remain to be seen, but even what little I’ve been able to glean thus far has been of some help with no fewer than three of my New Year’s Resolutions:  Learn to Relax, Pay Attention, and Cast Away Fear.  (See  the Progress section of New Year’s Resolution #11.)

Side note:  Do you, like me, assume contemplatives must generally be introverted people?  Perhaps it's true; those who choose to be monks would be those who are comfortable with silence and solitude—not that all contemplatives are monks.  But having read recently that introverts have more activity constantly going on in their brains—more internal dialogue,  measurable in neurological studies—I suspect that we are drawn to meditation because we need it more.  We need techniques and much practice to be able to still the chattering mind and achieve inner silence.

What would today be without being thankful for our veterans, and all who work and sacrifice to protect the rest of us?

In the spirit of the Good New Days, I’m also thankful for our all-volunteer military.  The military draft cast a long, difficult, and painful shadow on life in the 1960s and 70s.  In that respect it is much better to be young today.  A career in the armed services can be a very good choice—but it should be just that, a choice.  It’s better for families, for society, and for the military as well.

Thinking in Pictures:  And Other Reports from My Life with Autism, by Temple Grandin (Vintage, 2006) (Expanded from the original 1995 version)

I’ve already written about Temple Grandin, the movie, which was the inspiration for getting this book from the library.  It’s well worth reading, and the only reason I’m sending back unread the two other books of hers I picked up at the same time is that I realized I must put the brakes on my reading for a while.  At the very least I need to substitute books I won’t be tempted to review. 

Thinking in Pictures would have convinced me, if Grandin’s own commentary on the DVD had not, that the movie is an accurate, if not perfect, portrayal of her life.  It’s fascinating to read about autism from the inside out, as it were, and also interesting to note her opinion that for all the advances we have made in understanding autism and Asperger’s syndrome, as a child in the 1950’s she had a few advantages over today’s children.  School classrooms were well-ordered and quiet; the noise and chaos often seen classrooms now would have been impossible for her to handle.  Parents, teachers, and other adults worked hard to instill good manners and polite behavior into children; these are difficult but essential skills for autistic children to learn, but they are sadly neglected today.  Finally, there were no video games then, which encourage solitary activity; she was forced to interact directly with other children through board games, outdoor play, and other normal, 1950’s-era activities.

Of even more interest to me is her theory that whatever causes autism spectrum disorders, it is closely linked to brilliant, creative thinking.  Too much of whatever it is deprives a person of the ability to function in this world, but a little bit makes for the kind of folks we cannot do without.  Not only are our potential Einsteins being shunted into special education classes instead of the gifted classes where they belong, but if genetic testing someday allows us to screen for risk of autism, we may never see another Bill Gates.

On the sensory sensitivities of someone with autism spectrum disorder:

Washing my hair and dressing to go to church were two things I hated as a child….  [S]hampooing actually hurt my scalp….  Scratchy petticoats were like sandpaper scraping away at raw nerve endings.

I can relate to that!

When I was a child, I was expected to sit through formal Sunday dinners and behave.  Most of the time I did.  Rudeness was not tolerated and I was taught to say please and thank you.  Normal family activities provided structured opportunities to learn social skills.  Sit-down meals and activities such as playing cards and board games like Chinese checkers taught turn-taking and patience. …Today many children lack this structure.  Video games and time on the computer are spent solo.  Many of my favorite childhood activities required participation with another child.  … Even the normal children today are growing up with more social problems.  Later on they do not know how to behave at work.

I can drive because the operation of the car, steering and braking, has become a fully automatic skill.  Research has shown that when a motor skill is first being learned, one has to consciously think about it.  When the skill becomes fully learned, the frontal cortex is no longer activated and only the motor parts of the brain are turned on.  I learned to drive on ranch roads in Arizona and I did not drive on the freeway or in heavy traffic for a full year.  This avoided the multitasking issue because when I finally started driving in traffic, my frontal cortex was able to devote all its processor space to watching traffic.  I recommend that people on the [autism] spectrum who are learning to drive spend up to a year driving on easy roads until steering, braking, and other car operations can be done without conscious thought.

That might have saved me the debilitating car-phobia I had for many years.  It took me much longer than most people to reach the “automatic” point, and until then, every second behind the wheel was torture.

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive.  After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear.  It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire.  Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

It is likely that genius is an abnormality.  If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic-depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas.

Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are left-handedness, allergies, and nearsightedness.  Both learning disability in mathematics and math talent are associated with left-handedness.  Young children who show very high ability in verbal reasoning and mathematics are twice as likely to have allergies as the rest of the population.  Students with extremely high ability are also more likely to be nearsighted. The old stereotype of a little genius with thick glasses may be true.

During my career, I have met many brilliant visual thinkers working in the maintenance departments of meat plants.  Some of these people are great designers and invent all kinds of innovative equipment, but they were disillusioned and frustrated at school.  Our educational system weeds these people out of the system instead of turning them into world-class scientists.

On her vocation in the livestock industry:

I do not believe that my profession is morally wrong.  Slaughtering is not wrong, but I do feel very strongly about treating animals humanely and with respect.  I’ve devoted my life to reforming and improving the livestock industry.  Still, it’s a sobering experience to have designed one of the world’s most efficient killing machines.  Most people don’t realize that the slaughter plant is much gentler than nature.  Animals in the wild die from starvation, predators, or exposure.  If I had a choice, I would rather go through a slaughter system than have my guts ripped out by coyotes or lions while I was still conscious.  Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death.

A couple of generations ago, overseas travel for pleasure was only for the rich.  Even business travel was uncommon, unless one was a missionary or in the military.  Today we visit our family in Switzerland more frequently, with less effort, and possibly even with less relative expense than my family travelled from New York to Florida to visit my grandparents when I was young.

Telephone service was once so expensive that long distance calls (remember long distance?) had to be kept brief—as in just a few minutes.  Overseas calls were out of the question most of the time.  Today our grandchildren have long conversations with us on the phone, and we can call Switzerland at six cents a minute.  Skype costs even less (less as in free); the quality may not be as good as I'd like, but it allows us to see each other.  The long-dreamed-of video phone is here!

You think sending a letter via the Post Office is snail mail?  Letters used to travel by truck, not airplane, and on slow roads at that.  Overseas mail went by boat and could take months to reach its destination.  Imagine seeing your spouse, parents, children, grandchildren, siblings, or friends go off as soldiers or missionaries to the other side of the world and having to wait weeks before knowing they arrived safely.  Now mail flies and e-mail is nearly instantaneous.

When I was in college, communication was by mostly by letter, and that not very often.  It wasn’t expensive, but you know how college students are about writing.  Perhaps I would have written more had I not been blessed with parents who didn’t mind footing the substantial bill for weekly phone calls; most of my friends did not have that privilege.  But with today’s instant, varied, and frequent communication—phone, e-mail, SMS, Facebook, blogs—the sudden and unnatural break from loved ones can be a thing of the past.

If one has far-flung family and friends, this is a good time to be living.   Do I wish our grandchildren lived where they could walk to Grandma’s house for breakfast?  You bet!  But with today’s easier and less expensive travel and communication choices, we’re a lot better off than my own grandparents were.  So I’m thankful!

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