Montessori-speak

Perhaps it is unfair to pin this on Montessori schools. Because we had some of this in our daughter’s preschool, which was without discernible doctrine. And really, I’m happy enough with my boy’s school, beyond a vague wish that we could actually afford it. But still. There is a way of speaking that the Montessori teacher excels at, and it drives me slightly insane. Clinically speaking, it involves referring to me in the third person though I am standing right there in front of the teacher. A recent snippet while dropping the boy off:

“Good morning Nico”

“Hallo”

“You don’t have your naptime bag?”

“Umm, no.”

“Maybe your daddy forgot to bring it?”

silence (the boy might have been equally confused by her speaking to me through him–I am, after all, standing RIGHT THERE)

“Your daddy must have forgotten the bag this morning.”

“mm”

“It’s okay this time. But daddy should bring your naptime bag after each weekend…”

I was tempted at this point, of course, to say to my son something like “maybe the teacher doesn’t know that daddy is standing right fucking here.” As if the teacher and I were a divorced couple communicating through our children in that annoying way that divorced couples sometimes do.

Instead, I broke down the fourth wall and spoke directly to my interlocutor, who, to her credit, was also able to communicate that way just as well. She explained that the naptime bag with sheets and other things my boy might pee on are sent home on Fridays, and need to be brought back on Mondays. There, that wasn’t hard to say, was it?

It’s fine. A small thing, of course. But as with many small things in Montessori, I’m sure the teachers would defend the pedagogy behind it with their lives. If they talked directly to the parents, no doubt, it would simply diminish the poor child which yet again has to listen as adults converse above them. But if a child-centered conversation means two adults talking through a preschooler, then count me out. Or, rather, tell the teacher to count daddy out.

Adieu Abkhazia

On the beach at Gagra

My favorite response to my announced plans to spent the last two weeks in and around Abkhazia came from a guy I work with: “say hi to Borat for me.” It’s funny, of course, because Abkhazia is nowhere near the real place that the fake Borat supposedly came from. But it is a gentle reminder, which I often need, that people in the west neither know nor really care about small, damaged places like Abkhazia. I need that reminder because otherwise I find myself talking with a lot of excitement and spittle about those places in inappropriate venues, such as PTA meetups, cocktail parties, and meetings with editors.

The short version of Abkhazia, which I just came back from over the weekend, is that they won their war and then lost the peace. So they are de facto independent, yet shunned and struggling. It looks like the war, which ended in 1992, ended yesterday. There is very little work, abandoned homes are everywhere (many still with bullet holes pocking the plaster), and every man I asked about it said they have at least a handgun and an AK47 at home (some even have M16s looted from retreating Georgian troops in the Khodori Gorge in 2008).  All of that for a place that could actually be quite blessed, wedged between the warm Black Sea shore and green mountains with white peaks. It is like Cuba, as I told my wife after I got back, without the smiles.

I’ve got some ideas about who is to blame for their long troubles, but I’ll leave those for the article I’m writing about the place in a few weeks. For DadWagon, it seems most relevant to say that once again I am awed by the many seemingly terrible places where children manage to grow up and survive and sometimes even thrive.

There are, I’m sure, residual damages for the kids in Abkhazia. Twenty years after the end of the war, we heard time and again that the youngest generation was even more nationalist than the generation that had fought so savagely for independence. War doesn’t just wash off in a generation. And then there’s the poverty.  Everyone talked about the lack of jobs, the high drug use. Facilities are crap: A schoolhouse we visited in the ethnically Georgian southern district of Gal was half occupied and half abandoned. The teacher there said they needed textbooks, supplies, and more, that everything they had was donated from WorldVision and UNICEF.

But even that school was sending some students to college, either in the Abkhaz capital of Sukhum or in the nominal enemy’s capital, Tbilisi. And we met people who are smart and high-functioning even though they grew up not just in Abkhazia, but during the war, when irregulars on both sides were stringing the ears of their enemies onto necklaces.

I’m still jetlagged. I’ll write more about this later, I think, and post a few more pictures. But sometimes I think it’s all just a lark, this idea of parenting well. There are kids attending to my son’s $20k-a-year Montessori who are going to be extremely fucked up and malcontented adults. My son could be one of them. And there are kids who are growing up in the mossy squalor of some small Black Sea ethnic enclave who will grow up to be happy and successful. I don’t mean to trivialize the need to have access to clean water and security and safety. But once those barest minimums are covered, maybe the children are just going to be who they are going to be, and all our daily interventions and niggling corrections are just warring without purpose.

Cock-a-Doodle-Don’t, Part 2: ‘Girls Have Vaginas!’

Last Sunday night, Sasha was eating her dinner—noodles!—at the little coffee table in the living room, and I was sitting behind her, on the couch, in my underwear. (Yeah, I lounge around the house in my underwear. So?) All of a sudden, Sasha turned around and pointed at my crotch.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“What?”

“What’s in there?” she asked again—and poked me. There.

“Uh, that’s Daddy’s penis,” I said, figuring honesty was best.

“I have a penis too!” Sasha said.

“Well, no, you don’t.”

“I have a penis too! I have a penis too!” By now she was standing up and pulling down her undies and pointing at where, if she had one, her penis would be. “Look! Sasha has a penis too!”

“No, you don’t,” I said, helping her pull her undies. “You’re a girl. Girls have vaginas. Boys have penises. Girls have vaginas.”

“Girls have vaginas?” she asked.

“Mm-hm.”

Sasha turned back to her dinner and continued eating.

***

All week long, Jean has been away on a business trip, meaning I’m doing things I wouldn’t normally, like waking up early and taking the kid to school. On Wednesday morning, Sasha and I were beginning the tedious descent of the three flights of stairs in our building, when all of a sudden she stopped.

“Daddy,” she said, “girls have vaginas!”

“Oh?” I said. What else could I say?

She took a couple of steps down, then said: “Girls have vaginas!”

“I know,” I said. Why was she bringing this up now, a day and a half after our impromptu anatomy lesson?

“Girls have vaginas, Daddy!”

“That’s right.” Had she been mulling it over all this time, and only now understood it well enough to repeat it?

“Daddy! Daddy! Girls have vaginas!”

“Uh-huh.” Or had there been a lesson at school? Had she seen one of the boys peeing in the potty and been reminded of what I’d told her?

“Girls have vaginas! Girls have vaginas! Girls have vaginas! Girls have vaginas!”

***

Now, if I could, I’d insert a third anecdote here that would tie everything together, but it’s been almost a week and nothing more has happened. Sometimes life just works out that way.

But what I will mention here is Theodore’s reaction any time I tell him about this kind of thing. Here’s what he always says: “You’re going to jail, man! You’re going to jail!” Which is a funny enough response, but it’s also the response of a guy who, up till recently, has only had a son to deal with—and thus hasn’t had to face the question of difference. Which is, after all, a very natural question: Boys and girls look different, and at the toddler age, when they begin to notice, they’re going to ask why. You can answer in different ways, with different vocabulary, and it’s always uncomfortable to varying degrees (many of them hilarious degrees), but you’ve got to answer.

And so, Theodore, two years from now, when Ellie’s poking at your junk, and you’re facing the same awkward questions and responses, I will have myself a nice, long laugh at your expense. In my jail cell.

Parental Involvement in Schools: Not for Me!

Let’s for the moment drop all the pretense and admit that what we talk about when we talk about more parental involvement in our schools is not really more parental involvement in our schools but better schools with absolutely no more involvement than necessary—crazy stay-at-home parents excepted.

All of which is to say that if the volume of paperwork that I receive at home each day from JP’s kindergarten classes continues at this pace, I am going to take him out of school and send him to work on a farm in Alabama. I’m sure I can find one that will employ domestically born 5-year-olds.

Sheesh.