Agitation

Today, we finally got our new washer and dryer. It was supposed to come last week, but with all the snow and the city's refusal to plow our "tertiary" (read: unimportant, unless you're the people living on it) road, the delivery truck refused to come up the hill and deliver our stuff. They managed this refusal from the bottom of the hill. I was steamed, let me tell you... but today the snow held off well enough for them to haul the two big boxes in, cursing at the snow and the large basement step, and set things up. We had to do some last-minute running to get everything in position but now our first load is in and we're happily saving money with a high-efficiency, agitator-less washer.

I've been excited for the washer all week the way a kid is excited for a new toy. For one thing, this means we don't have to drive across the city to use grandma's 70's-era appliances, which have ruined at least 2 of my sweaters by mysteriously shrinking them and take forever to dry heavy loads because the dryer overheats and has a long cooldown cycle. For us, the washer/dryer in the house is a convenience. We could have kept using the ones available at grandma's, but we managed to afford a set of our own. And it got me thinking (what doesn't, these days?).

First thought: poverty. Yeah, yeah. I'm wearing that welcome mat thin. It struck me full-force today just how badly we treat the poor, though... and how even a simple thing like doing laundry can hurt. See, we've been in the position before (when we moved down here, in fact) of having to visit a laundromat and PAY to do our laundry. One huge basket and $10 in quarters later, half my jeans were still damp and we'd run out of money. Keep in mind we weren't even paying for detergent - we brought our own. What do the poor do? They certainly aren't getting much help as far as washing clothes is concerned. I wonder as I look over my own struggles what the people living so far below my income level can possibly do about laundromat fees. Even people with washers in their apartment complex have to pay - often a couple of dollars per washer. How do the poor manage to pay? At college the washers started at $1.10 my freshman year, and by my senior year were up to $1.50. Those who could go home on weekends never used the dorm washers.

Which brings me to kids washing clothes. A good number of people I knew at college didn't know how to separate light and dark clothing, let alone read tags, wash red shirts alone to remove excess dye, or not shrink things in the dryer. Many of the students at my college were there on scholarships; some though had no excuse for not knowing how to do laundry, other than the fact that no one taught them. I don't know about other households, but I was taught how to do the laundry and so were my sisters. But it seems that a lot of kids are missing out on this essential part of life, and it makes me worry. Parents seem to put a lot more emphasis on good grades and lots of sports practice than on good life skills these days.

It also makes for an interesting comparison to autistic kids, many of whose parents can only wish that their child will be able to do his own laundry one day. I see a lot of treatment plans for kids on the spectrum that call for self-help skills like making sandwiches and folding clothes - stuff most of us take for granted. It's interesting that while the rest of us are busy worrying about whether our children will be doctors or lawyers, the parents of autistic kids have it right and are worrying about whether their child will be able to make chicken nuggets without burning the house down. I guess having a kid with a developmental delay really makes you re-think your priorities.

The above is not meant to downplay the frustration that comes with raising kids, especially autistic kids. Parents with kids on the spectrum often do want to be able to dream normal dreams for their children. They want to be able to blithely mention that Timmy's growing up to be really good at math, and might become an engineer, or that Susie won an award for her high school speech competition. For most, autism takes away the opportunity to dream, and replaces it with a daily struggle to complete the most mundane tasks. I've worked with 11 year-old kids still in diapers, with first-graders who couldn't identify the letters of the alphabet. It's not easy to teach those kids how to tie their shoes, let alone read the instructions on a box of macaroni and cheese, follow them properly, feed themselves and clean up after eating. To get a deeply autistic child to that point would be a lifetime effort in many cases.

[offtopic]
And speaking of autism: I've been reading a news follow-up on that mother who killed her son in NY earlier this year. To have an 8 year old who can't even tell you he's hungry, let alone that he loves you... what a distressing idea. But it seems to me she was going about things the wrong way. The article quotes friends who describe her as a woman on a crusade - one even goes so far as to suggest that her "devotion" to finding a cure for her son was itself something twisted by her own motivations: "[one friend] believes her obsession was ''a control issue, the feeling that she would be the one to save that child, almost a salvation quest.''" They mention that for all the money she had, she didn't have a secondary caregiver (nanny, babysitter, behavioral therapist). Hmmmm.

I get the impression that this woman really was somewhat insane. Whether she ended up that way or started that way we'll probably never know. She certainly could have used help with her child, but for some reason reconsidered sending him to specialized schools or finding a state which would provide good wraparound care. She spared no expense on strange, cutting-edge treatments but refused to let the child out of her own hands. She seemed so desperate for help... but only if she was the one to give it. And I wonder: are the overbearing/underbearing parents I so often see with kids on the spectrum simply showing normal human behaviors on high alert due to their child's diagnosis, or is a parent with one of those two polar personalities showing gene expressions which in a child may become autism? It certainly seems that some parents show obsessive or otherwise autistic behaviors themselves (but have no diagnosis), but no one has yet studied personality traits of parents in relation to their child's diagnosis, and I doubt it'll happen soon - likely it would be seen as adding insult to injury to claim that our personalities affect our child's abilities.
[/offtopic]

Well, the washer's caused the basement drain to back up and spill rich, black silt all over the basement floor (third time this year the drain's done that... first two times were due to sudden thaws after long cold snaps). Guess it's time to call a plumber. Still, I'll take a backed-up drain over a laundromat any day. The basement is warm, the washer works beautifully (and quietly!), and sooner or later the snow will melt and give me an excuse to garden while the laundry does its thing. I already have onions and peas and lettuce and mint sprouting. Onward, spring!

Word Play (and procrastination)

I should be doing my homework but I've been doing a lot of reading lately (me? read?!) and I wanted to share a few of the thoughts it provoked. As a reader and writer I really enjoy language - puns, playing on the meanings of words, homophones and homonyms and everything else. I'm no English major but I know enough to get by in polite society, or so I like to think.

As a natural offshoot of reading, writing, and playing with words, sometimes I come up with questions - What is the connection (or separation) between condemn and condone? I know their definitions, but 'con' as a prefix didn't quite make sense to me in those words. So what do 'demn' and 'done' mean and how does that change 'con'? (demn is from damnare, Latin: to sentence; done is from donare, also Latin, to donate.) Stuff like this runs through my head in the shower and if I remember later I go look it up with Mirriam-Webster and friends at Dictionary.com.

That train of thought - how easy it is to pull out the electronic dictionary on a whim - sparked some additional insight on teaching. Teachers today many times run into kids who either claim that school is useless for them or that they 'already know it all'. In many cases neither of these claims is true, but it is getting much easier to "know it all", with a little help from our friend Google. I would consider myself an active learner; I seek to engage myself in learning experiences on a daily basis and when I don't get them from a classroom I try to make other connections. A few years ago I probably would have had to find someone nearby to answer any questions I had about etymology, etc unless I had the full (and very expensive) version of Webster's Unabridged sitting around the house. Most people don't even HAVE a dictionary these days, or so it seems - This article tells a touching but probably all too common tale of third graders who were completely unfamiliar with dictionaries and who did not own them at home. And yet I can open a new tab and type the right combination of key words (which might take a few tries) into Google and get you that very article without so much as needing to know it existed, let alone having to look up where it was published, dates, or know how to scan a newspaper database. Information is literally a few keystrokes away.

This kind of open learning environment is one I love, but I think for many people, the knowledge that the information is there is not akin to being curious or able to access it. Someone can now claim to be a know-it-all, and as long as they're sitting at a computer connected to the internet they can try to prove it with virtually no physical, social, or mental work required. They don't even have to read what they're telling you - "key words" do the work for them (although it's always a good idea to pre-read or skim what you plan to present as proof, as many researchers will tell you). The skills to utilize that kind of open information setting are what we should be (and in some cases are) teaching in schools, but for a student who has seen what Google and Wikipedia do for his/her older sister's history report and his best friend's knowledge of how to "get chicks" (even though at 12 he's never practiced) it's probably already too late to start teaching good research skills, how to find reliable sources, and all the other practical parts of learning that no amount of reading Howstuffworks.com will ever give you.

I think in some respects the seemingly endless fountain of information available on the internet is liberating. It gets me out of the classrooms that I associate with powerpoint lectures and well-meaning teachers and into a realm of connections (links, key word searches, images, and video) which I can make or leave for later as I choose. I say "make" because for me reading the article on combustion engines will teach me something, but when I choose to read the connecting articles - on different fuels, maybe, or on rotary engines, how engines are built, or common engine problems, I am not just clicking links in the web, I am making more connections. I am adding more to that file folder in my brain that's now labeled "mechanics" so that later when I read something about fuel efficiency I can connect further. School sometimes fails to to this, but the tactics I learned in school to deal with forming and arranging connections have been invaluable to me as a denizen of the internets.

I love learning like this and I think many others do as well... but I worry about how this kind of learning experience is leaving some people behind (those without 24/7 connectivity or computer experience are foremost, along with those who are already lacking in the background cultural knowledge necessary to 'get' the jokes, arguments, and other things that show up in academia) and separating the classroom and the teacher from their preconceived purposes. This is not to say that the intended purpose of an educator and an education is today what it should be or has been. It is however a growing concern that students rarely see the use or legitimate claims of classroom knowledge in a world where the teacher often seems out of touch with rapidly growing technology and the administration even more so.

What is the solution to our information issues? Handing students the basic tools to explore their world and then letting go has been a wonderful teaching method in the past but there is such thing as information overload - and the internet in all its glory is certainly capable of causing it. It is also capable of sparking interest in "boring" subject matter, making things easily accessible for students of any age... and misleading us.

What is the role of the teacher in learning, if the student does not see a need for guidance in their search for information? Where and how do we set boundaries on what is to be taught, if boundaries are to be set? We can't enforce boundaries on learning if the student is determined enough to learn outside the classroom (which is actually something I would love to see happening!). And how do we excite the students who have decided that even with the knowledge of the world at their fingertips, they would rather not explore? What will bring them into the circle of lifelong learners? It's a very complicated issue... and Google doesn't have the answer! :(