random musings...

Adbusters #95 May/June 2011 19(3)

2011-05-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

I just recently purchased the current issue of Adbusters magazine; it is titled "Post West", and subtitled "the philosophy issue".

I found a fantastically insightful (well, to me, at least) passage by Jacques Waardenberg, from "Reflections on the West" which is a chapter in Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century:

Today the West stands for a disintegrating society in which egoism and human solitude prevail. It is the land of the loss of mind, where materialism reigns and where people are imprisoned by their desire for goods and money. It is the land of the loss of soul, where a secular way of life dominates, and people drift without deeper norms and higher values. It is the land of the loss of true feelings, where changing appetites are the norm, and people fall victim to desire and lust. It is the land of the loss of human dignity, with a value system based on economics, and where people aggressively exploit each other. Finally, it is the land of metaphysical alienation and loss of God, with man-made idols and people who have no relationship to Being, nature, history and each other. This barbarian West is seen as not only destructive to itself, with violence flaring in bitter economic, social and political conflicts, but also as a real danger for the rest of the world, and especially the Muslim part of it. (emphasis mine)

Another passage, uncredited (and so thus editorial?) is the following:

Instrumental rationality - the calculation of the most efficient options for achieving a given desire - has overwhelmed Western thinking over the past 300 years, generating a cold, empirical, calculating mindset.

The problem lies in the Western process of thinking - how we 'think about thinking'

There are several more excellent passages floating on a sea of disturbing images (e.g. Jessica Simpson peeling off a pair of camouflage shorts to reveal a 'Stars & Stripes' string bikini, with a wad of chewed bubble gum stuck over one eye) which suggest just how insane the Western world has become in the eyes of the rest of the cultures on this planet. I've just barely begun reading the articles, and already I'm both terrified at Western hubris and its inevitable fall, and encouraged by the small acts of resistance to Western hegemony that are reported in the pages of this excellent publication.

I feel vindicated for my (unpopular) interpretation of Western society's celebration of the killing of Osama bin Laden, for my desire for my culture to consider the reaction of other cultures, mostly Muslim peoples, but also other peoples (I'd love to see a sovereignist Indigenous perspective!) before creating YouTube videos such as the one included in my last post.

I love the editorial statement that acknowledges "we are embarking on an era of "contested modernity," one in which Western nations no longer impose their own values on the world at large." I just hope the West wakes up to this fact soon!

on the killing of an Islamist extremist

2011-05-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

Why are people so happy about this?!

Or am I the crazy one because I do not believe an eye for an eye is the way to operate in the era of universal human rights? Did we learn nothing from the Holocaust? Are we really content to spread HATE and malice around the world?

I read a fascinating post online through a facebook friend. It was a speech from a fundraising event, spoken by Chris Hedges, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of al-Quaida for the New York Times. This writer stated he knows al-Quaida intimately, and he is terrified by this organization... even more so now that bin Laden has been killed. Hedges stated bin Laden had absolutely no operational role in al-Quaida, and killing him will not stop this organization.

Yet so many are jubilant. So many feel this is an end to al-Quaida.
---
Also on facebook, I have seen the following posted over and over and over:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank goodness for compassion!

on the federal election

2011-05-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

I am somewhat alarmed for the country with a Stephen Harper conservative majority. Although voting 4 times in 7 years is as frustrating as many journalists have recently suggested, I'd gladly do it every year if it meant avoiding a neo-liberal majority.

I have grave concerns for the environment, especially oil tankers off the BC coast, the AB tar sands, and most importantly, the health of wild BC salmon while farmed salmon remain in our oceans (I have lived very near to these net pens and I have seen the damage they cause first hand).

I am also lead to believe that women's rights and reproductive freedoms may be at risk?! Further, the same sources suggest gay marriage is similarly at risk?! Some sources say Harper won't legislate anything specifically regarding either issue, rather, he will appoint ultra-conservative judges who will attempt to affect these matters. Other concerns include dismantling the CBC, privatized health care or slashing public services to pay for corporate tax cuts.

I also have concerns for the demise of the Liberal and the Bloc Québécois, as suggested by these two articles. Although I am pleased for both the Green party on electing their first MP, and for the NDP on becoming the Official Opposition for the first time, I worry that neither now has any effective power (my sources were the elections coverage last night on CBC, CTV and CHEK).

However, this was the very first time in all my history of voting in both federal and provincial elections that the candidate for whom I voted was first-past-the-post. This will be the first time in my life that I am represented in my riding by a candidate with similar political and social values. So this is a small personal victory, I suppose... I'm just having a hard time celebrating.

on finishing my practicum

2011-04-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

Thursday was the last day of my 420 hour final practicum. I have a paper and an exam remaining for my Disability Issues class, and then I can get a letter of completion of BSW requirements from the university, which means I can get a job.

A job!
It's been 3 years since I've worked, and 5 years since I started back to school after becoming a mom. I'm so happy to soon be receiving paycheques!! I can pay bills! I can buy groceries with cash instead of credit! I can work towards becoming financially solvent!

However, I had my interview with MCFD 3 weeks ago, and I have no idea when I will finally hear if I will be hired as an auxiliary. I hope it is in time to receive a paycheque before June's rent is due :S

Sad heart

2011-04-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

This has been a hard semester for my family, not just because I am so busy with a 30 hour per week practicum on top of course work. We have had 3 deaths in the family in 3 months.

The first was my mother in law, at the end of January. She had no chronic conditions, so it was rather a shock. However, she was 68 years old, so it didn't seem outside the realm of possibility. Further, she had raised 10 children and had almost 20 grandchildren (including foster and step kids). She had lived a full life.

The second was my husband's foster father, with whom he had lived from the age of 11 until about 16 or 17 (when he moved in with his girlfriend and her family). He was not so old as my mother in law, being in his early 50's, however, he had been very sick as of late. He had been in hospital for an entire year, had had heart surgery, and had lost his lower leg and half his other foot to diabetes. He had been out of the hospital for awhile, and had died of a heart attack at the end of February.

The last was very tragic, and also very recent. My 23 year old cousin was shot by police at the end of March, and it is believed to have been suicide by police. He had tried to o/d in January. I hadn't seen him since my wedding a year and a half ago. My heart aches for his loss.

Further, less than a week before my cousin's death, I was volunteering at the crisis line, and I spent 2+ hours talking to a suicidal young man, who eventually ended the call to kill himself. I had nothing but a phone number from call display, but I felt the risk was immanent, so I called 911 with only that information.

I have been feeling overwhelmed by death and sadness, so I have taken this past week off of practicum. As well, my profs have both very kindly extended all my papers and assignments. I am grateful for their generosity, and that of all the MCFD staff who are supervising my practicum - two different social workers and their Team Leaders, as well as the practicum coordinator.

My sister (slash roommate) has also taken most of this week off, and my husband had already had it scheduled off as vacation time, so as to care for our two boys during spring break (daycare is expensive). It has been nice to be together as a family, and to just relax or to work on our new garden.

My cousin was 12 years younger than me, and his family had lived with my family for a couple of years when he was 3 and 4 years old. He was a very sweet boy who would cuddle with me any time. He loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My mom made him and his brother capes while they lived with us, and the boys loved running around with the capes billowing out behind them. For the last Halloween that they lived with us, they dressed as Super Mario and Superman.

Time has made this loss easier to bear, but the memorial service is still to come. Many people, family and friends, are flying in form across the country to be with my aunt and her husband as we morn for our loss. This will make it fresh again. I ask that your thoughts and prayers are with us in our time of grief.

The Children Left Behind: UNICEF report on children in the richest countries

2010-12-16T21:50:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to prepare a blog post for readers of GPS so as to answer some of the questions posed to me in the comments of these two posts. Like something explaining what "social control agent" means. Or describing exactly what a child welfare specialization entails. I'm getting there.

However, this is too important to not blog about right now! The link takes you to a page which is a press release for the report, and where you can download the pdf version.

The following is copied from that page:

"[The report] ranks, for the first time, 24 OECD countries in terms of equality in health, education and material well-being for their children. The report looks at a particular aspect of disparity – bottom-end inequality – and asks how far behind are rich nations allowing their most disadvantaged children to fall."

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives blogs about the report here, in a post titled "UNICEF shames Canada for inequality among children". (That's right, they SHAME Canada. If only UNICEF could impose harsher sanctions than shaming. CCPA concludes by wondering if our government has any shame at all.)

CCPA reports the study "looks at inequality by measuring the gap between those at the middle of the pack (the median position) with those at the bottom. The critical question, the report says, is just how far behind children should be permitted to fall?"

One final quote, (from UNICEF) and I will end my rant:

"The idea that inequality is justified as a reflection of differences in merit cannot reasonably be applied to children. Few would deny that children’s early circumstances are beyond their own control. Or that those early circumstances have a profound effect on those present lives and future prospects. Or that growing up in poverty incurs a substantially higher risk of lower standards of health, reduced cognitive development, of under achievement at school, of lower skills and aspirations and eventually of lower adult earnings, so helping to perpetuate disadvantages from one generation to the next.

None of this is the child’s fault."

feminism and women's role in North American society

2010-12-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

I took a course on feminism in the political science department of UFV almost 2 years ago. At the time, I felt I had a firm grasp on the ins and outs of the term. We studied Liberal feminism, radical feminism, anti-racist and post-colonial feminisms, Marxist feminisms, Indigenous feminisms and male feminisms as "centers" of feminist and gender politics. We also studied the "category of woman" including questions of commonality, of difference, of identity and intersectionality. It was a pretty thorough study.

However, after the theoretical course ended, I began bumping up against "feminist" ideals in the real world.

Most notably, while attending the BC Association of Social Worker's (BCASW) annual conference, I listened to a speaker who operates a woman's shelter, Vancouver Rape Relief Society. The first year I heard her speak was during a plenary titled, "Where's the Harm", which discussed Canadian prostitution laws and the two Constitutional challenges to these laws. Her perspective here was that women were forced into prostitution because of social, cultural and financial marginalization; women didn't have a real choice. However, men who purchased these women's sexual services DID have a choice, and they were making the wrong choice. At the end of the talk, I felt very disempowered, because I felt that men were the "bad" guys, this was a war, and I'd better choose the "right" side to be on for the duration.

The second year was a plenary titled "A Master Class in Advocacy" and this same speaker decided it was a good idea to shame social workers for not doing enough to help marginalized people, especially her clients. She felt there was no point in negotiating with government, and that she was perfectly entitled to flout the law. Social workers were "the privileged" and had better start sending personal donations to women's organizations, because Stephen Harper has quietly cut most of their funding.

Other "real world" encounters with feminism include that whole "Sarah Palin is a feminist" debacle. Um, yeah, okay Sarah, if you say so... Another was at an ethics committee meeting for people, mostly social workers, employed in elder care. A woman who works for the Alzheimer's Society talked about a Muslim woman she saw in her community (in the Greater Vancouver area) who was wearing a veil. This woman felt the Muslim woman was oppressed by the veil, as if she couldn't possibly have chosen this garment on her own.

But really, my brand of feminism does say that if you call yourself a feminist, then you are a feminist - no policing the boundaries of the feminist politic. No one gets to be the expert, no one gets to say, "no, you're NOT a feminist!" My brand of feminism foregrounds individual experiences over theory. My brand of feminism is interested in being inclusive, in solidarity movements, in forming alliances. It's about action. It's sometimes called "third wave" feminism, but sometimes it rejects such labels, reminding us that there never has been a cohesive woman's movement! Even the second wave movement in the US in the 60's was about middle class women and their rights, not about the rights of Black women or Indigenous women or disabled women, etc...

Regardless, feminism seems to have a bad rap these days. Often, "third wavers" prefer to think of themselves as a part of a post-feminist world, and to think of feminism as "the F word". In some ways, I can understand this, such as when it's a reaction to the "war between the sexes". I don't want to fight against men; I have 2 sons, and they are the most important people on the planet to me. Then again, I'm mystified and horrified by gendered violence, by the patriarchal dynamics of power and control that play out in intimate partner violence. How do our sweet boy children become these 'batterers'? How are they led to believe that it's okay to control their wife or girlfriend through intimidation and fear? When I think of the violence committed against Muslim women by their governments in oppressive countries, I feel devastated and helpless. How can feminism ever hope to stand against such willful aggression?

It can't. We can't "divide and conquer" when it comes to such beliefs about intimate relationships. We have to work together, in partnership, without vilifying one another.

Still, it is important that feminism stay vital and relevant, because there is a great deal that needs to shift about women's roles in Western Society. Why is it okay that mothers are judged by much harsher standards than men?

I see this a lot in my studies to become a child protection social worker. We talk about "mother blaming" a lot. Especially in the rhetoric of violence against women - a woman who chooses to stay with an abusive partner is "unwilling" to keep her children safe, and may have them removed. Of course, intimate partner violence has a devastating impact on children, but mothers are not the only ones responsible for children's safety. The husband, the partner, the father, also has a significant role to play, especially if he is the perpetrator. Why is being a "bad mother" so much more stigmatic than being a "deadbeat dad"?

violence against women

2010-11-28T15:17:00.000-08:00

Another thing I've been reading a LOT about lately is violence against women. It's one of those topics that is briefly discussed in several of the core social work courses, but doesn't have a class dedicated to the topic. Once class in Policy was on this topic, as was one class in Feminism (actually, that was a Poli Sci class) and the Sociology of Families, as well as being mentioned in the Aboriginal class, and probably in 110 and 210. It was also one of the advocacy cases I read in my Advocacy Writing elective, and was discussed in my crisis line training. Just yesterday, at my crisis line shift, I was asked to read some of a 75 page document from MCFD on "Best Practice Approaches: Child Protection and Violence Against Women." It is also a topic that came up in both of the two BCASW conferences I have attended, most notably by Lee Lakeman of Vancouver Rape Relief Society, a Downtown Eastside women's shelter.

The general consensus is that domestic violence is NOT about anger management, NOT about mental illness (although being a victim of it is VERY likely to cause mental illness), it is about power and control. As well, it is the general consensus that domestic violence is overwhelmingly gendered, hence the term "violence against women" replacing the non-gendered term "domestic violence".

However, this kind of violence is compounded by other forms of social marginalization. So, women who experience a lack of power beyond their gender identity experience much more violence, and that violence is much more severe. For example, Aboriginal women experience intimate partner violence at a rate of 20%, whereas mainstream stats place it at about 7%. This means Aboriginal women are 3 times more likely to experience intimate partner violence. As well, immigrant women, racialized women and women with disabilities experience more violence than the general population of women.

One interesting fact, however, is that intimate partner violence occurs in lesbian relationships, as well, and it is not mutual violence or aggression. This violence is also characterized by the need to exert power and control.

Thus, I would argue that violence against women is NOT a gender issue. Rather, I contend that it is an issue of power and oppression, and that by focusing specifically on women as victims and men as perpetrators, we end up "othering" men. This is NOT to say that I think we should NOT talk about violence against women. Rather, it is to say that we need to use a post-modern approach, recognize that this ISN'T a war between the genders, and that these men, although apparently not mentally ill, are in some way damaged by our culture, by our culture's need to oppress and marginalize groups of people.

My Aboriginal Social Work prof (Gwen Point, who is of the Stó:lō Nation, and whose husband is the Lieutenant Gov of BC ) seemed to empathize with First Nations men; she asked us to imagine what it must feel like to be a man, socially constructed as the provider, and then have your ability to provide for your family and your community stripped from you.

I think that we need to stop dehumanizing men who commit violence against women, and acknowledge that they need help. This is a pervasive issue, beyond individual pathology; it is an issue built into the very structure of our social systems.

The unfortunate thing, however, in this neo-liberal political climate, is that there are no voluntary services for men who commit intimate partner violence. There ARE programs for these men, but they are either through Corrections or through MCFD. Thus, these men have to either have been charged/convicted of committing such violence (in which case, it's been going on for a LONG time, and the woman is probably extremely damaged from the constant terrorization), or the violence has to be a part of a child protection investigation. In my opinion, this is a day late and a dollar short.

the ethics of child protection?

2010-11-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of reading and writing lately specifically about child protection as practiced in BC.

I've had several assignments based on the 2001 Bruce Spangler movie, Protection, which is billed as a "realistic" look at child protection (I highly doubt it is, this social worker, who is drinking wine and smoking pot in the playground at Trout Lake, proceeds to cut her hands on the bottle, then smears the blood all over her face). Regardless, we have used the 'fact pattern' of the actual investigation for 2 assignments in my law class. One was a paper which combined a Report to Court with a critique of the social workers in the movie, the other was an oral assignment where we acted as a social worker giving testimony in court. A third assignment is a paper for my Child Welfare class, where we use the 'fact pattern' to write a case recording, and followed by a personal and professional reflection on our own possible reaction to the investigation, referring to texts and journal articles which are critical of mainstream and historical child protection practices.

I've also listened to several guest speakers in these two classes over the semester. Some were lawyers, some were social workers. Some presentations centered on child protection practices - what they do, how they do them. One recent one was more reflective, a social worker who had Bob Mullaly as an instructor (Mullaly has written two social work books based on critical theory in social work practice and on structural social work, both of which are anti-oppressive).

This social worker is done with child protection in BC. More specifically, she is burnt out by the endless, possibly needless changes in the bureaucracy. She has worked in BC for 12 years, but is leaving in the spring, to return to her home province on the east coast. She discussed a case or two where she felt it was ridiculous for her to have investigated, but was compelled to do so by her supervisor. She pointed out just how intrusive this is, and how the information collected stays on file forever. She also talked about how the Deputy Minister, "in all her glory," has decided to do away with the current child protection tool, Risk Assessment, which BC began using in response to Judge Gove's 1995 inquiry into BC's child protection system after the death of Matthew Vaudreuil. However, the new 'tool' is going to be the child protection workers themselves. To this worker, this means more work will be piled on top of already overworked staff.

I have also recently read everything I could find about MCFD since the 2006 Hughes Report, especially what was available about the changes Deputy Minister du Toit intends to make. She is scrapping Risk Assessment in favour of a new model, called "CAPP" which stands for Child and Family Support, Assessment, Planning and Practice, and which is mostly described in aspirational, visionary terms. Specific, measureable outcomes are not published, nor are details pertaining to what staff will actually be doing. Not very transparent, in my opinion, and thus, not very ethical.

Two further reports I have recently read are Broken Promises (2008) and Hands Tied (2009), both researched and published by Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver. The first talks about how the system has consistently failed children and their families for generations in spite of legislative reform, internal reorganization and changing governments. The second talks about why BC child protection workers are leaving their jobs at an alarming rate: not enough staff, and too much political churn.

As well, I have been reading whatever I can find about MCFD in the public domain - media articles, blog posts, and comments on both. One specific blog I have been perusing is GPS, which is "a personal weblog advocating for the Bayne family reunion and suggesting potential corrections to B.C. child welfare." The comments on many of these blog posts have lead me to conclude that British Columbians despise social workers.

I, however, would like to distinguish between social workers and child protection workers. Social Workers in BC are governed by the Social Workers Act, unless they are employed by a government or its agency, a school or a band (um, that's a LOT of exceptions!). Despite Judge Gove's reccomendation that child protection social workers actually be social workers (pretty radical, I know!), child protection workers are not required to have a degree in social work, nor are they required to be registered. They can hold a degree in Child and Youth Care (or they can hold a Masters in Clinical Psychology or an M.Ed. in Counselling).

Regardless, as Pivot (2008) points out, "apprehensions are generally the result of a parent’s struggle with poverty, addiction, mental health issues or family violence. The government’s lack of commitment to providing publicly funded services has severely undermined the ability of [MCFD] to take a preventative approach to child protection issues."

I believe social work education, which is highly anti-oppressive, which requires continual deconstruction of the current and historical political ideologies which inform social policy, which insists that all knowledge is socially constructed to benefit a small minority of citizens, can effectively train workers to treat all clients with dignity and respect. It is a social worker's job to look for the structural, systemic causes of a parent's "bad behaviour" rather than blaming individual pathology. We consider the person in his/her environment. We stand with our clients, in solidarity. Our mandate is social change, social and economic justice for all citizens, not just for the "good" ones.

I just have to keep reminding myself of my mandate as a social worker (as described, above), not as a child protection worker (whose mandate is contradictory, to keep children safe from parental maltreatment while maintaining the family home as the ideal place for children). I have to keep reminding myself that I chose this profession out of my stand for social justice for all, especially the most marginalized; that I chose social work out of an ethical responsibility I feel to children. Otherwise, all those commenters who write that child protection workers are evil, could lead me to despair, lead me to think child protection is a pointless career, characterized by burnout, not appreciated by anyone. And we can't have that!

New beginnings

2010-11-19T14:26:00.000-08:00

Big changes are afoot in my household. Today was my practicum interview with MCFD. I think it went quite well. Also, today I contacted the public elementary school I'd like my boys to attend for the remainder of the school year.

The boys have been home with me for the last few months, homeschooling through Self Design, an online publicly funded private ("distributed learning") school. We chose this based on the upheavals and transitions in our lives as we moved, for the first time in 6 years, from South Surrey/White Rock to north Surrey/Bolivar Heights. I felt that I couldn't manage finding a new school and a new childcare provider (we've been with ours for 5 years) on top of the move and the new semester. As well, we chose homeschooling because the boys were HATING school, the structure, the repetition, the endless worksheets. I was having to force them to go every day (not physically, they did comply when I said they had to go), which does not represent who I say I am as a professional, as an anti-oppressive practitioner, as an advocate for social justice.

However, my practicum will be from 8:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Thursday, for 16 weeks. I don't have the funds to pay for the childcare required to cover those hours, and I don't have the family support to get those hours covered for free AND have their learning supported. Thus, the boys will be returning to school.

The program I am looking at for them, however, is not mainstream. The school is a "choice" program, with a district-wide catchment. They have less than 90 students. There is a gr K/1 class, a gr 1/2/3, and a gr 4-7 class. They work to foster a strong sense of community in a non-competitive environment. I think this will be such a good fit for my son!

(Last May, I went to our old school's Sports Day. The school was divided up into 4 teams, and earned points for each event. At the end, the scores were tallied, and ribbons were handed out, from 1st to 4th place. My son's team came in 3rd, as they did the previous year. My son was devastated, sobbing, and refused to take a ribbon. I carried him off the field and into the classroom to pick up his backpack. I think this is damaging. I think primary aged children are not developmentally ready to be designated winners and losers.)

I've also sent off an email to the local community services agency's (MCFD funded) child care referral program. I'm nervous and excited about the prospect of finding a new caregiver. We've been with our current provider for 5 years. Before that, I had 5 different arrangements over 2 years. It was too much, and I was feeling overwhelmed and desperate, and was so happy to find a provider who got my son.

We are attending a fall fair at the new elementary school tomorrow so that the boys can have a look around the school. I'll get a phone call from the principal on Monday. I'm starting to feel that fresh, new year vibe.

I love new beginnings :)

Interview w/MCFD

2010-11-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

After a couple of weeks of waiting, I finally have an interview scheduled with TWO Team Leaders from MCFD Aboriginal Services, the Intake and Investigation team and the Family Services team.

I'm so super excited! I really see myself working in this area. It just kills me how many Aboriginal children are in care. The other night we were watching the news on APTN, who stated that, nationally, the population of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is about 3-4%. However, about 60% of Aboriginal children are in care. Excuse my language, but W.T.F??

All I can say is that this is continuing colonialism...
but, then, what is it for the mainstream (white people?), for immigrants? Perhaps still colonization?

I know this isn't the accepted way to think about the oppression of poor white people, but bear with me for a minute...
Who are the people from the mainstream culture who have children in care? Poor people, drug users, people with mental illnesses. People who aren't coping well with the mainstream culture. People who maybe don't identify with "middle class values." People who need to be brought into line...
Sounds like colonization to me.
Reminds me of the terms of the Indian Act, once upon a (not so distant) time, when Aboriginals (men) could be enfranchised, could earn the right to vote, if they gave up any claim to their culture (if they STOPPED being 'Indians').
Pretty oppressive, no?

I don't think child protection workers are any less oppressive, despite Judge Gove's insistence that child protection workers hired by MCFD should be social workers, with a degree. Social Work education is HIGHLY anti-oppressive. Almost every class we take is centered around a social constructionist framework, around discourse analysis. This means continually looking for systemic, structural answers to individual problems seen through the lens of pathology by most other helping professionals.

A social worker stands with her client. A social worker starts where the client is. A social worker is a social change agent, is committed to professional ethical values such as social justice for all.

Especially for Aboriginal women and their children.

4th year practicum, coming up!

2010-11-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

I had my first interview with MCFD a couple of weeks ago. Interview Number Two is with the actual team I'll (may possibly) be working with for 16 weeks pre-graduation.

This interview is not yet scheduled, but I spoke with the intake team lead, who wants to set up a concurrent interview with the family services team lead.

Oh, and did I mention, this is with Aboriginal Services? Yay, just what I asked for!

I'm pretty excited...

...and maybe even more excited by the possibility of a PAYING JOB?! Maybe even in the Lower Mainland?! Double yay!

Vengeance?

2010-10-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

I just saw this post on Facebook, by my sister in law: "Fxck!ng b!tch that makes my daughter upset better watch out!!!!!!!" That was 7 exclamation marks. I counted. All I can think is, "oh, dear!" (and I added the symbols in the swears) Well, that and, be SUPER sarcastically glad to have all these new family members in my life. Seriously, though, her daughter is in first grade. Is this another first grader my SIL is referring to? Or an older child? Is it an adult, rather than a child? I suppose if this were the case, I could understand the sentiment, but if it's another 6 year old?!? What kind of message is my niece picking up from her mother?

I am currently taking a 4th year social work class titled Family Centred Practice, with a textbook titled Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. Last week we handed in a 12 plus page paper where we were to make a genogram of 3 to 4 generations of our family, then analyze our families using Family Therapy concepts. Maybe I should've analyzed my in laws? Yikes.

I want to leave a comment, be something of a voice of reason, but I have no idea what to say. It'd have to be something pithy (well, maybe short and sweet, rather than concise and forceful).

Vengeance is not something I hope my children learn from me. In fact, last night while driving home from my mother's house, stepson was having a conversation with son. He was talking about some (made up) person who was "sucky" at a video game. I couldn't let it pass, and asked exactly what that meant. At first, they said "never mind," (I guess recognizing my tone?) but I wouldn't let them off the hook. So they said that it meant he was bad, meaning he wasn't skilled at playing the particular video game.

I then talked about the difference between who we ARE and what we DO, or our behaviour. This is a crucial concept in Child Welfare, my particular social work major. We need to distinguish between poor parenting and "bad mothers." Anyone can overcome bad behaviour, but if someone is a bad person, is there even a hope of redemption for that person? We cannot write people off because of something bad that they DO, this, to my mind, is oppression.

I'm sure my children are used to my moral lectures, but my sister in law is not, and would likely not take kindly to it. Thus, those of you who read this blog get to read my rantings.

Did I mention I'm miserably sick? Perhaps I'm a bit short-tempered as a result :S

what are we eating these days?

2010-10-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about food a lot lately.

Hubby and I have been canning. My dad gave us a 20lb box of tomatoes from Keremeos, in the southern Okanagan Valley. (Dad works in Penticton and lives in Mission, so he drives the Crowsnest Hwy twice a week, usually.) We roasted three panfulls, removed as much skin as we could, and then canned them in a hot water bath - 35 minutes!! Much too long... a pressure canner takes 10. So we're thinking of buying a pressure canner as an early Christmas present to one another. They're about 100 bucks :)

Investing in a canner would allow us to can pretty much ANYTHING, including salmon (yum!), without fear of nasty organisms. I could even can jars of broth instead of freezing them in plastic containers - like the massive amounts of broth I made out of my aunt's Thanksgiving turkey carcass. We might also be able to manage a bulk meat order, like, say from a local beef producer (1/2 a cow, anyone?).

Once upon a time, I lived in the Mainland Inlets (specifically Knight Inlet), near the north end of Vancouver Island (around Alert Bay and Pt McNeill), on a float house. My partner hunted deer meat, and we canned it. That was the easiest stew starter I've ever had. Nowadays, when I want stew, it usually means defrosting something first - almost a 2 day process for this busy lady. One pressure canner batch of gristly meat could make a winter's worth of 'stew starter'. The possibilities are endless :)

However, this doesn't get at the heart of my food concerns - I mostly wonder about the grain products we consume, such as cereal, crackers, corn chips, bread tortillas, muffins... I've even recently become concerned about the SUGAR in juices labeled 'unsweetened' - I read on a Yahoo homeschooling list that Health Canada thinks of the sugar in juice as a PROCESS, not an INGREDIENT. WTH?!

Add to this the fact that most sugar is now produced from genetically modified sugar beets... how on Earth is a person with a limited budget supposed to stay on top of this?

Running to stand still

2010-10-12T23:43:00.000-07:00

That is the title to one of my favorite songs off of U2's 1987 album, The Joshua Tree...

You got to cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice

...and those were some of my favorite lyrics from the song.
Sometimes I want to scream, but I don't because I don't want to disturb the peace... do something illegal? Cause civil disruption? Is that part of the social construction of my identity as middle class? a citizen? a woman?

The title, Running to Stand Still, describes how I feel these days. The beginning of the semester eases into midterms and I'm on the hamster wheel again. It hasn't been as crazy as last year, when I got married and when my stepson, age 6, moved in. We did move this September, but I've finally taken the plunge, trusted, and we're homeschooling, and I'm happier.

But I have no time.
(Can I use but like that? Or do I have to say something like however? Are there any English majors out there?)

I have no time, and today I got cranky, because I had a paper due and I hadn't finished the rough draft. I was also late reporting for the distributed learning school. Being late is my Achilles heel.

I got mad at Stepson when he wouldn't, or couldn't focus on our "Observation for Learning (O4L)." We do this every week, and I always ask him to talk about the last week and I help him by prompting and reminding him, but today he couldn't come up with anything to say, and I was just putting words in his mouth. So I raised my voice and told him we had a two week trial period and failure meant public school. Did I mean that? I don't know...

Regardless, I'll have to apologise for yelling, and I guess we'll try discussing what's working and what's not working about homeschooling. Then what? Can you talk with almost 8 year olds about wants and needs in relationships? Maybe son will get it, but it's over stepson's head.

Son is verbal, Stepson, not so much. Rather he's full on kinetic; half the time you've got to hold both his hands and bend down to his eye level to be sure he's processing what you're saying. Son can be quite protective and supportive of his stepbrother, and this is often a help, but neither remember routine tasks well. What can I say, they're still 7. As well, I have noticed an improvement in their listening over the past few weeks, however, their improved behaviour doesn't coincide with my poor behaviour, of course :S

To conclude, I've had the Grateful Dead's Box of Rain stuck in my head for two weeks, now.

Look out of any window
any morning, any evening, any day
Maybe the sun is shining
birds are winging or
rain is falling from a heavy sky -
What do you want me to do,
to do for you to see you through?
this is all a dream we dreamed 
one afternoon long ago 
Walk out of any doorway
feel your way, feel your way
like the day before
Maybe you'll find direction
around some corner
where it's been waiting to meet you -
What do you want me to do,
to watch for you while you're sleeping?
Well please don't be surprised
when you find me dreaming too

Look into any eyes
you find by you, you can see 
clear through to another day
I know it's been seen before 
through other eyes on other days 
while going home --
What do you want me to do,
to do for you to see you through?
It's all a dream we dreamed 
one afternoon long ago

Walk into splintered sunlight
Inch your way through dead dreams
to another land
Maybe you're tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted
with words half spoken 
and thoughts unclear
What do you want me to do
to do for you to see you through
A box of rain will ease the pain 
and love will see you through

Just a box of rain -
wind and water -
Believe it if you need it,
if you don't just pass it on
Sun and shower -
Wind and rain -
in and out the window
like a moth before a flame

It's just a box of rain
I don't know who put it there
Believe it if you need it
or leave it if you dare
But it's just a box of rain
or a ribbon for your hair
Such a long long time to be gone 
and a short time to be there

Writing Centre awards ceremony

2010-09-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was UFV's first ever Writing Prize awards ceremony, where I received my certificate and spoke about my paper, An Anti-Racist Critique of Avatar (this link is provided by the Writing Centre at UFV). I won one of 12 total awards, as did another student from the BSW program. My category was Upper Level Discourse Analysis, and Christina, my fellow BSW student, won in the Upper Level Process/Policy Analysis. Social Workers are smart cookies :) Way to represent, School of Social Work and Human Services!

back online...

2010-09-28T18:15:00.000-07:00

...well, I have been online for about a week and a half, but that time has just whizzed by!

Moving was successfully accomplished, although we moved most of the garden slowly over the course of the month, then insuring my sister's truck this past weekend to bring over some of the numerous tractor scoops of garden mix we've purchased over the years.

Yesterday was also a marathon canning session, finishing off the last of the 40 pounds of peaches my father has gifted me recently (Dad works in Penticton Mon-Thurs, and from home in Mission on Fri, so he often drives through Keremeos). We canned a dozen pints and 3 quarts of peaches, and hubby made both peach and peach-plum jam, also canned.

Apples are next, the main crop is just starting to come in. Dad gave me a half a box with the last box of peaches, and he says he'll keep buying for me as he goes by the stands every Thursday evening. I'm seeing yummy jars filled with spicy apple sauce, sweet apple juice and thick apple butter.

We've also yanked all the tomato plants out of the garden at the old house - two Tiny Tim plants, two other varieties of cherry, a Russian heritage, two Brandywines and two Roma/paste tomatoes. My cupboards are crammed with green tomatoes! I'm envisioning salsa galore! I'm also planning to try several interesting green tomato recipes - pickled, salsa, relish, even green tomato mincemeat.

The semester is really heating up, with papers and presentations and reams of reading.This is my last academic semester of my degree, and I am filled with both excitement and trepidation - will I actually like Child Protection? Will I find a job with MCFD? If not, will one of the delegated Aboriginal agencies hire me? Will I have to move out of the Fraser Valley to find a job?

Oh, yes, and I won that writing competition I wrote about back in May :) First place in my category, Upper Level Discourse Analysis, and $100. There is an awards ceremony tomorrow, and I get to speak about my paper for 3 to 5 minutes... off to write that speech!

Moving day anxiety

2010-09-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is moving day. Correction, today is moving day, being that it is now 12:52 am. I can't sleep. I have been laying in bed for almost 2 hours, trying to sleep, but I can't.

There is so much to do! We have been packing for days! We've used up 4 batches of boxes and we could still use more. We have so much stuff! I'm beginning to wonder if we're hoarders?! Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not, having been on and off the Flylady bandwagon for at least 8 years, but still...

My husband has been hoarding empties for almost a year, now. He finally HAD to deal with them. There were at least 10 garbage bags full. He got over 60 bucks at the bottle depot.

We also filled up the box of my sister's "lady truck" with stuff for the Sally Ann, and I'm sure once we're done unpacking, we'll have another truck-bed's worth. Mind you, much of that was composed of kids clothing, a lot of which was given to us when they should've taken the clothes to the Sally Ann... but I did get some useful stuff for my ever-growing boys, so, oh well :)

I hope I can sleep.

back to school bru-ha-ha

2010-08-24T01:52:00.000-07:00

I have an old friend who lives in Texas; her son is back to school this week. Gosh, here in BC, we still have another two full weeks of summer vacation, which includes the Labour Day long weekend. Poor kidlets.

And, of course, my boys will not be going back to school, at least not to a bricks and mortar school. We have finally been chosen by a learning consultant, so now I wonder how we arrange to meet? Will she send me an email? We shall see. Regardless, we will be picking up a bunch of fun school supplies. We will be able to get whatever the boys want, there will be no lists to check.

I remember at this time last year, I was shopping for two children for the first time in my parenting career. Not to mention, my wedding fell two weeks after school started, so I felt as though I was frantically throwing money all over the place. (I was my own private stimulus package, groan!) New coats, new backpacks, two new pairs of shoes each. Plus new pants and shirts and hoodies - I spent over $300 on them in the first week of school. I felt like a consumption machine.

This year will be such a relief from all of that! Of course, I'm moving, with all those attendant costs. However, I won't need to buy indoor shoes for school. As well, I'll be getting education money to buy books and supplies, even curriculum, if I'd like. Or, I can use it towards our internet connection, maybe even swimming lessons.

I feel so relaxed. Maybe we won't start right on Sept 7th, maybe we will have a not back to school picnic :)

On the importance of understanding research in context

2010-08-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

An old friend of mine has a mommy blog. She professes to believe in 'guilt-free' parenting, which I think is amazingly healthy, as well as beyond my capabilities and my anxiety disorder :)

Recently she wrote about an article her husband showed her from the Globe and Mail, titled Coddle or let the kid cry? New research awakens the sleep-training debate. My friend's opinion is that the parenting 'experts' should leave parenting to the actual parents, and stop trying to guilt new mommies into feeling they have to be available for their babies every second of the day and night. Her concern is babies who wake up in the middle of the night but won't go to sleep without the breast, even when they aren't hungry.

While I agree with that, I also agree with the 3 'experts' written about in the Globe article. I just think the reporter takes their research and their professional opinions out of context, and presents the research data as a debate, a fight, instead of as scientific evidence carried out in a rigorous manner with the intention of furthering knowledge. The reporter actually talks about sleep deprived parents being "stuck in the middle" between the 'experts' and other equally offensive (to me) statements pitting 'experts' against 'experts' against parents.

I have recently studied research methods in the social sciences; as well, I have designed and conducted research. So I find the reporter's statements offensive because the point of social science research is NOT to be an 'expert' and tell people what to do. The point is to make sure current practices are evidence based, NOT based on ideology, or a particular sub-set of society's values (as in the tyranny of the minority).

Thus, I felt obligated to look at the actual research (I have access to several electronic databases through my university's library) to see what the researchers were actually studying. The article mentions 3 'experts.' The first is Penn State researcher Dr. Teti, the second, the famous Dr. Ferber, and the third is "British parenting guru" Penelope Leach, whose credentials as a child development psychologist the journalist recognizes only later. I have only looked up one source document to compare to the article. This is Dr. Teti and colleagues' Penn State research, titled Maternal emotional availability at bedtime predicts infant sleep quality (Teti, Kim, Mayer & Countermine, 2010).

My friend read the article and wrote about sleep-training as necessary when baby is waking up all night long, even when not hungry, and wanting the breast to soothe baby back to sleep. My friend feels waking up at 1am and 3am and 5am is bad for mommy. I agree. But I was a co-sleeper, so I didn't have to wake up to give baby the breast. He fussed, I rolled over in my half asleep, half conscious state, baby latched on, I went back to sleep. No problem. (I'm guessing my friend is not a co-sleeper.)

My friend's blog post also talks about the Globe article's mention of the detrimental effect of cortisol, a stress hormone, on baby's developing brain. She hears, "mommy should never leave baby, even if that means mommy gets postpartum depression." The Globe article concludes with parents who tried 'crying it out' but won't talk about it with their friends, for fear of criticism. I personally think all this criticism comes from popular media such as this newspaper reporter, NOT the actual 'experts.'

If you need to let your baby cry it out alone because you fear you're going to shake that baby, then I'm fairly certain the experts would say, "go for it" - this opinion is based on reading hundreds of articles by 'experts' on attachment theory and the neuroscience research that is backing up the theory (initially developed in the 40's). Much of this research shows that it's best for baby to be with mommy (or alternate primary caregivers), unless mommy is too stressed out, whether by poverty, or relationship circumstances, or what have you. Then baby is better off in daycare, or with grandma, or whatever, for part of the day, because mommy needs that time and support to be the best mommy she can be in the circumstances.

In reading the abstract and skimming the research report Dr. Teti and colleagues published, I noticed that they were concerned with chronic sleep disruption as the clinical research problem, which is associated with "daytime externalizing and internalizing behavioral problems, sleepiness and attention problems, and poor academic performance, and plays a critical role in the regulation of neurocognitive and neuroaffective systems in children and adults." So they are interested in sleep problems which are approaching the clinical level, and not just regular sleep. They are also as concerned with the risk to parents as they are to children.

Teti's study looked at previous research, which highlighted the importance of consistent bedtime routines, without actual observations of parenting in the home. The study's authors note that where research does make actual home observations, the focus was again on parenting practices. The current study felt there was a gap in the research, in that no one had looked at the emotional quality of these routines. Teti et al. though this gap is noteworthy, considering the vast literature linking parental sensitivity, etc., with socioemotional and cognitive outcomes in children.

So Teti et al weren't saying sleep training will damage the parent-child relationship (the conclusion my friend believed the 'experts' came to based on the Globe's reporting). What they were saying was the following (straight from the Discussion section of their paper):

Results suggest that what mothers do with their infants at bedtime (e.g., whether they make use of close physical parent–infant contact, quiet bedtime activities) may be less important than the emotional quality that underlies bedtime activities in promoting quality sleep in infants. Specifically, maternal EA was inversely associated with the frequency with which mothers had to return to their infants at bedtime, the frequency of infant night waking, and mothers’ ratings of whether their infants had a sleep difficulty. By contrast, no linkages were obtained between specific bedtime practices and infant sleep disruption.

My conclusion is that I feel it's vital for the average person to have a basic understanding of research methods and the interpretation and dissemination of research findings so that the media isn't able to spin science in such a manner. Context is everything. My friend is an excellent mommy, because, regardless of her parenting practices (what she does, such as sleep-training), she is an emotionally available mommy. And THAT, my friends, is what Dr. Teti and colleagues were writing about.

We are moving

2010-08-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

This stresses me out, and I struggle to deal with my anxious feelings almost hourly.

We are still in the process of looking: searching through ads, trying to get a look at places on google maps, considering neighbourhoods vs. commutes, yard sizes, square footage, and monthly cost. My sister would like to move by the first of September (our current rental has both a leaky roof and foundation, neither of which the landlord deems worth fixing), but that's not set in stone: the landlord won't mind us staying until Oct 1 (it's not like she'll get another tenant, and the market hasn't quite rebounded to her benefit).

I am hoping to find a place close to our current neighbourhood, but nothing in our price range is available; it's an expensive town (think ads for 'executive' suites). I'd really like to find an older house on a larger property that is being rented out while waiting to be developed - that would fit my price range and my desire to garden and keep laying hens.

All of this is uncomfortable for me, mainly because of having to face the unknown. The fact that September is already a month of new beginnings for me and my kids makes it even more challenging. Add to that the thought of moving a 1/2 hours' drive from our current neighbourhood (45 minutes in traffic, yuck), into the heart of Surrey (not the most up-scale area), and I worry I'll be moving my kids into a crime-infested area where we're living cheek by jowl to our neighbours.

I'll certainly miss the privacy of our current yard, as well as the access to my childcare provider for the past 3 years. Not to mention my mother, who is only 5 minutes away in White Rock, and often provides free daycare.

As well, there's all that packing to contend with. We'll have to rent a truck, because we have a piano. And, of course, there are two outdoor cats to move and get acclimatized to a new neighbourhood and new neighbour cats to fight. Finally, there's our garden - how does one move a garden?! We'll be dividing, potting up, harvesting all sorts of veggies and ornamental plants, not to mention the five 7' x 7' raised beds to dismantle. We'll try to bring some of our trucked in soil as well. Sigh. This is going to be just as big a job as moving the contents of the house.

We're going to look at a place in about an hour. Hope it's not too ghetto.

August happenings

2010-08-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

I am finally finished my coursework for this semester - my 11th of the total 13 semesters I will take to earn my degree. I began waaay back in the fall of 2006, and I have now completed 4 years of part time schooling. Two more semesters to go, thank goodness!
I still haven't heard anything from SelfDesign, but I am looking forward to the fall, especially since all those back to school commercials don't apply to our family. Gosh, they're offensive - "It's the most wonderful time of the year!" playing in the background as dad drags a couch through Staples. Why does our culture think it's so important for parents and teens to be on opposite sides of some argument or fight?
This makes me think of a book I read recently, "Hold onto your Kids" by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate. [One of Mate's sons is a friend of mine, so I have quite the collection of his books, all free copies :)] In this book, they focus on the attachment relationship between parents and teens, but argue that it applies to all inter-generational family relationships. They talk about adults and seniors being segregated by age group as well, and argue for the resurgence of attachment communities (or villages? forget which term they chose). I agree :)
August is shaping up to be a busy month of birthday parties and bbq's. We had planned for hubby to take a week off work so we could do some family camping or something, but we may just need to use the time for all these parties! Living in the lower mainland, our community is so spread out - I'm in Surrey, my Dad and little sibs are in Mission, my hubby's sibs are all over, from Chilliwack to Surrey to Coquitlam, his friends are in Burnaby, and mine are in Surrey, Abbotsford, Maple Ridge and Port Coquitlam. They're all very close, the furthest being an hour's drive, tops, but there's just so much traffic to contend with!
Maybe we should plan a "not back to school" camping trip for the family? Except I'm going back to school :( so we'll have to plan it around my classes (not too hard, they're Tuesday evening, and Wednesday afternoon and evening, fairly compact schedule).
Let the "relaxing" begin!

on choosing a Learning Consultant

2010-07-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of choosing my SelfDesign Learning Consultant for the next school year. Or actually, I've chosen 4 Learning Consultants, and I am now in the process of waiting to see who chooses me.

The school recommends meeting your Learning Consultant as early in the school year as your schedules permit, stating this "provides an excellent context" for the learning plan. SelfDesign also states this creates an excellent context to "build a relationship." It's not stated with who the Learning Consultant will build a relationship, either with my kids, or with me. In my public school experience, the relationship is student to teacher and as the parent, I've felt left out, separate from that relationship. But in a digital reporting medium, is the relationship really going to be parent to teacher?

I wonder who will pick us?

I love my garden :)

2010-07-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

So it seems I've given up on my gardening blog :S
We've recently had a "heat wave" which, in the Pacific Northwest, means about 2 days of temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius. Those days were Tuesday and Wednesday, and in those two days, our corn plants doubled in size (Seriously. It could have been more than double!). Everything else is exploding, too. The squash, peppers and tomatoes love it in particular. It's so great, because just the week before it was still cold. Finally, my peas are producing! I started them in April!
Of course, now that the heat is finally here, the lettuce is starting to bolt. So we have blessed a lot of people with fresh garden lettuce. It feels nice to be able to be generous - a student's income doesn't allow for that a lot :)

campout in the yard!

2010-07-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

We are moving soon, so I have been packing and sorting and tidying. Well, I've been doing a bit of sorting and tidying... and today my boys and I packed two whole boxes! Box number one was this past year's leftover school supplies, as well as notebooks and scrapbooks of work. Box number two was books the boys read only seldomly, chosen by them.

I also decided to tackle the downstairs closet, which holds our seasonal storage: Christmas decorations and wrappings, sports gear and camping supplies. We pulled out both of the tents and chose to set up the smaller, "2 man" tent. It fits two 7 year old boys and several mounds of blankets and pillows quite nicely, and it has a door on each side, nicely taking advantage of the breeze.

The weather has been hot and muggy lately, which is typical summer, I know, but quite rare for the Pacific Northwest. So the boys have decided to take advantage of the heat and sleep outside!

I, however, will sleep inside, on my nice, new King-sized pillow-top mattress. This bed is my therapy. I'm not kidding! We've had it for a year (already?!) and every night, I lay flat on my stomach and stretch my hips. It's delightful.

Besides, we're all going camping next weekend, me and the boys to my family's annual All-Girls' Camp-out, and hubby off with his high school buddies. I'll get lots of sleeping on the ground in that weekend, thank you very much!

My first unschooling moment has arrived

2010-07-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Just 10 minutes ago, after a marathon Nintendo session consisting of one Wii console, two DS Lites, and 5 1/2 days of non-stop playing, the boys dressed themselves (one in regular clothing, the other in last Halloween's Yoshi costume), picked up their plastic light sabers, and WENT OUTSIDE. I had nothing to do with it, swear to G-d. They are now back inside, playing Nintendo again, but it HAPPENED!

Action on Poverty in Canada: Write your Elected Official

2010-07-06T02:04:00.000-07:00

So I'm starting another new blog :)
It is currently titled Write your Elected Official and it is my term project for my Advocacy Writing course.

The goal is to make it easy for people like me to take action on subjects near and dear to their social justice bleeding hearts. The way I see it, easing the pathway to political action will leave people feeling involved and good about themselves. I am quite aware that my recent swoop towards the depths of depression was partially brought about by overwhelm at situational problems, but more significantly, was triggered by over-exposure to social injustice on several fronts - local and global, affecting children, women, and traditionally marginalized groups such as people with disabilities and different sexualities and racialized others.

What has brought me from the brink, and is getting me through, is taking each day as it comes, focusing on maintaining hope and optimism, and focusing on campaigns which leave me feeling empowered. Thus, I plan to avoid issues such as violence against women and prostitution/sex workers legal/constitutional rights. These issues leave me feeling vulnerable and exposed, and unable to articulate or argue my point of view. I plan to stick with universal, individual rights we have as Canadian citizens. I intend to start with poverty reduction.

Writing letter templates on social justice issues will be a challenge for me as an academic writer. The object is to keep the message simple, clear, concise. No big words. Describe all terms that may be construed as jargon repeatedly. Make a request, suggest a pathway to action, to policy change. Couch it in terms of mutual benefits - how will those currently opposed see potential change as a benefit to themselves as well as to people living in poverty?

I'd like to write about 5 or 6 templates to start, over the next two weeks. The project is due at the end of the month, and it'd be nice to have 8 to 10 done by then. They'll only be a page long each :)

looking up

2010-06-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

yes, things definitely started looking up for me the moment I wrote my last post :)
Now it's time to get it off the top of my page!!

Hubby has been focusing on positive interactions with the kids (he taught them a bit of backgammon) and I've been focusing on happy family time (ice cream cones and a walk on the beach after dinner). We have been being deliberately kind to each other (he made me coffee without asking how).

And...
It's summer vacation!!
and maybe it's more than school's out for summer, maybe, for our kiddos, it's "school's out for evah!"

sometimes in my tears I drown...

2010-06-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

My depression and anxiety seem worse, lately, although neither have ever been at clinical levels. I'm not coping overly well, ignoring and avoiding things. But I'm coping, obviously, as I'm not experiencing clinical symptoms... or, my symptoms aren't up to clinical frequencies? Regardless, it's all a spectrum in my mind. The volume on my happy dial has been turned down low, and the volume on cranky-resentful, anxiety-panic-attack and sad-lie-in-bed-all-day are turned up high. I'm not interested in seeing my doctor about it, though, so I've got to focus on getting my needs met :) Elementary school is almost over for the year, so that will turn the anxiety-panic-attack knob down at least half-way, I'm sure. (Cue soundtrack: Alice Cooper's School's out for Summer!)

We attended a meeting of Home Learners South of the Fraser on Monday. It being June, not too many were there. The host explained to me that many families "take off early" for their summer vacations. There were the hosts 4 teenage daughters, who were doing their own things, my boys, and 10 year old twin boys. Later another two girls came, one a teen, one younger. Mostly the boys watched one of the host's daughters play a video game and the moms chatted. Kinda boring, but it's the last meeting until September, so I suppose it's not a typical meeting?

I have a concern that I'm focusing too much on the kids and their school as the "solution" to my anxiousness-purposelessness. There's also money, and hubby, and my school. We're going to move soon. There's other people's opinions about all of that - people are very free with their opinions. I've also been feeling a deep, deep sadness at the state of world affairs and the global lack of social justice. Much of my recent course work has focused on violence against women, and I feel a deep despair about that, as well as an inability to express my opinions and stance without people wanting to argue facts that have been studied enough by academics in a systematic, empirical way, that I see them as a given, and a waste of time to debate.

I've been looking at blogs and videos about hooping recently, especially The Happy Hoop, where I watched a video which used the song One Day by Matisyahu, which inspired the title for this post. That line especially unlocks my sadness, because I seem to be letting it get me down.

I think about Paolo Friere, and about Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Friere says that the act of oppression, the refusal to see those we oppress as human, causes us to lose our humanity. Hegel says the master needs the acknowledgment of the slave, however, Glen Coulthard, a Dene and a political scientist from UBC, says the colonial master doesn't care about or require such recognition. Friere says the oppressor cannot free himself, that the oppressed must use their humanity to do so. It seems like such an insurmountable task.

my last post was May 4th?!

2010-06-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

yeah, I don't blog anymore...
today was Sports Day at the elementary school.
I've talked to a few people about home schooling next year. No one thinks it's a good idea. Several have said there are some things you just have to do in life... (I thought only death and taxes were inevitable?)
Life is harder when you're poor. We live below the unofficial Canadian poverty line - Statistics Canada's Low Income Cut-Off. Yet recently the provincial government significantly reduced my access to Childcare Subsidy. They've told me my income went up. Actually, they've just started counting my federal student loan grants for low income families as income. I've been getting both for at least 2 years. So now life is a little harder than before. I just really need a break, y'know?

Choosing unschooling

2010-05-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

... does this mean deschooling for life?
;)

I guess the above statement refers more to myself than to my kids, who are both just 7 years old, and, so by the general deschooling 'rule of thumb' should need about 2 to 3 months of deschooling (they are currently in 1st and 2nd grades). I, however, was in public school for 13.5 years, and I have attended enough part time semesters of university to equal at least 7 years (of my time, not credit time), so we're talking 2 years of deschooling for this gal! And still 3 more academic semesters (and 27 credits) left of my Bachelor of Social Work degree, plus becoming 'designated' as a government child protection officer, before I'm done with this bout of schooling... and I'm pretty certain I want to pursue a graduate degree.

Currently, I am on a two week semester break. I had grand plans for how I was going to spend that time. I was going to clean and organize all the spaces in my house, from the mountains of laundry in my bedroom (clean and dirty, no one likes to fold or hang up clothes in this house) to the spare bedroom downstairs that the kids have littered with tiny Lego pieces, Bakugan's, Pokemon cards and figurines, knights, police guys, etc, ad nauseum, infinitum... I was going to work like crazy in my garden and with my seed starts inside (set up grow lights on timer, transplant to bigger pots, thin out the tomatoes...). Heck, I was even going to do my taxes, and submit that A+ paper to the University's writing competition... yeah, still haven't done that. Heck, I haven't done much of anything, except sit on the computer, surfing the net. I've been immersed in unschooling yahoo lists, reading posts for hours, following links, googling ideas and people and blogs and conferences. I came across the following quote on one of those lists:

unschooling is about more than education. It's a radical shift in how one lives life, seeing value in all things and being joyful and not succumbing to societal expectations of what is valuable and necessary and cool and acceptable. It's about showing respect and love. It's about honoring others and their needs. And that's just the tip of the unschooling iceberg.

Um, yeah, SO not me these days! I've been super tired and cranky and downright mean to my family. I am just plain ol' angry and resentful. I've probably been recovering from burnout, and I've recently realized I've definitely been deschooling. I'm also realizing it's a process, and I've got to trust the process.

A list of the things I've been doing in the last few weeks to support my journey to becoming an unschooling mama:

joined AlwaysLearning, Unschooling_Canada, and unschoolingbasics lists on Yahoo
contacted SelfDesign (an unschooling friendly Distributed Learning school) and put the kids on the list for next year
contacted HLSF, a local group of homelearners who have monthly meetings and a weblist, who suggested I join HS-Van, a list with homeschooling resources, etc, in the Greater Vancouver area
found all the unschooling related books at my local library, and requested a bunch, including a few by John Holt (just got an email that How Children Learn is available for pick up!)
currently reading Deschooling our Lives and The Unschooling Handbook
found the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Education (JUAL), edited by Carlo Ricci, PhD, and instructor in the faculty of education's graduate program at Nipissing University
joined the Radical Unschooling Info facebook group
talked with the kids about homeschooling (they're excited. they hate school. they want to learn more about math when we homeschool. we started skip counting right then and there)
talked with my mom about homeschooling the kids next year, and having her be with them on Fridays, one of her days off of work, while I take classes, study, have practicum, etc.
talked with mom about her concerns with unschooling (she wants to be sure they learn math. they love math, no worries, I couldn't stop them if I wanted to)
talked with hubby about him being the homeschooling parent one day per week

So far, so good, except for my crabby, resentful mood. Poor hubby, of course, bears the brunt of it :( And it's pretty tough to work on non-coercive parenting skills with him when I'm being so nasty... but when I'm feeling more generous, I can gently question his way of relating to them. Often it's based on his own (not so awesome) childhood. Like, when stepson (his bio son) doesn't eat his school lunch, and hubby gets mad, he'll say something to me along the lines of how he was lucky to go to school with any lunch at all, and stepson should appreciate the food he has. The only way to constructively respond to that is with empathy for hubby as a child :(

"Reel Injun," a documentary

2010-04-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I saw an ad on CBC for their show, The Passionate Eye, which would be airing a version of Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond's documentary, Reel Injun, described as follows:

Hollywood has made over 4000 films about Native people; over 100 years of movies defining how Indians are seen by the world. Reel Injun takes an entertaining and insightful look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North American Natives through the history of cinema (from http://www.reelinjunthemovie.com).

I missed the CBC airing (March 28th), but I watched the version posted on their website. I thought it was excellent! Now I want to see the whole thing, on the big screen! Unfortunately, it played @Tinseltown in February, well before I was aware of the film. So I joined their facebook group, and I'm waiting for more dates in Vancouver :(

Today I received a facebook email from that group, announcing 4 showings across Canada this week, as well as dates in Ottawa in May. I thought I'd share that information in solidarity with indigenous peoples across the globe.

----

Greetings, Reel Injun-ites!

I just wanted to let you know about 4 big Reel Injun screenings happening this week across Canada.

First up is Port Alberni, BC where we will be playing at 7PM on Wednesday, April 21st at the Capitol Theatre.

Also on April 21st we are playing the Victoria Event Centre in Victoria, BC as part of Open Cinema's 7th Season Finale. Reel Injun director Neil Diamond will be doing an introduction via Skype, so be sure to check it out! Doors open at 5:30, show starts at 7:00.

On April 22nd @ 12:10PM we are playing Toronto's Sheppard Grande Cinema 7 as part of the annual Sprockets: Toronto International Film Festival For Children

Our final big screening this week is also on April 22nd in Halifax, NS for the Viewfinders: International Film Festival For Youth. Showtime is 12:00PM. This screening is extra special, because Neil Diamond will attend the screening and perform a Q+A! Be sure to ditch work, school or whatever else to see Neil in the flesh!

In other big Reel Injun news we have booked 2 dates at the ByTowne Theatre in Ottawa. Join as May 12th and 13th @ 4:30PM for two very special screenings in the Nation's capital! A good showing will help us out a bunch, so make sure you don't miss it!

Be sure to check out our official website: http://www.reelinjunthemovie.com

and to follow us on twitter @reelinjun

Thanks so much for all your support and interest,

One love,

Justin

----

Also, here's the trailer:

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming :)

in other news...

2010-04-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

...family news...

I'm feeling a little more settled in my newly expanded family these last few months. Granted, it's not all smooth sailing, but my stepson and I are starting to connect a little more than we initially did. That was when he moved from Kelowna to live with us, back in August, less than a month before his dad an I got married and only 2 weeks before school started and I officially entered my BSW program.

We had a bit of a rough patch over Spring Break in March. I took my stepson to stay with his mom in Kelowna for a weekend, and he was pretty cranky for a week after. He also had a virus that hung around for just over a week, which didn't help. And then his mom and her husband and their toddler and baby came to Vancouver over the Easter weekend, so he spent 24 hours with them, and he was crabby for another week following. But lately he's been wanting me to pin him down and tickle him. He's not always one for physical contact with me, he can be surly about it, like I'm intentionally hurting him if I give him a playful poke. This creating attachment from nothing with a 7 year old is not an easy task!

Other than our struggles to develop our attachment bond, I've had the joy of having to explain another person's poor parenting choice to my stepson's community. While he was in Kelowna over Spring Break, he told his mom he'd like to have blue hair. So she bleached his brown hair and dyed it bright green (using blue dye - the colour didn't come out quite right). Can I repeat, she bleached a barely 7 year old's hair!!! Sure, there's no lasting physical damage to the kid, but, come on! Why would that be considered appropriate? Then, over Easter weekend, she brought me the extra blue dye so I could touch it up!! His mom isn't the most mentally stable, and is a little touchy. As well, there's no generosity in her relationship with my husband; he is incompetent and unworthy in her eyes. I haven't had the words to respond to this in a tactful way, so I've just bit my tongue. But I'm embarrassed!

On a more positive note, I put my family on the list for SelfDesign for next fall, a distributed learning school that is unschooling-friendly. I looked through some of the profiles of the learning consultants (teachers), and can see myself working with several from the Vancouver/Lower Mainland area alone :)

The kids are excited. I am, too! But I'm also a little scared...

my prof wants me to enter my paper in a writing competition!

2010-04-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

I wrote and anti-racist critique of Avatar for my Anti-Racist and Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice class. It was a 12 to 13 page research paper, and the assignment was very open to interpretation, as long as I included a section on implications for social work practice. My instructor commented that my paper was a nuanced, multi-layered analysis, and she'd like me to consider submitting it to the competition. Yay!!

I posted an update on Facebook about this, and 3 of my fellow students, as well as an old high school friend who is also an academic, are interested in reading it! I'm excited and honoured and... overwhelmed... The paper was a first draft. I didn't re-read it or edit it a bit before submitting it 2 days late... in some ways I feel I don't deserve the recognition because I didn't to it the "right way"... methinks we need a little more deschooling around this joint! I couldn't even graciously accept my instructor's compliment! I'm also thinking it's time to take a Landmark seminar... get a bit more aligned to 'what's so' rather than my fantasy or interpretation about how it should look :)

So, once again, yay me!!

modern colonial oppression

2010-04-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much lately, this has been a very difficult semester for me :) I've been out in the community on practicum, and have found the experience to be overwhelming... not to mention the lack of finances being overwhelming - I haven't been able to do any paid work this semester, and I'm really feeling it, anxiety-wise.

Regardless, it's been a fascinating and rewarding semester, academically. I took a course on anti-racist social work practice and a course on community development, where my group was involved with an event marking the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. I've learned a lot about white privilege, and the unseen effects of subtle, unconscious racism in entertainment media. I developed an anti-racist critique of the movie Avatar which I was privileged to present at the event, and for which I received much praise from a few professors!

Overall, I've really developed my critical ideas about race and racism, as well as about oppression in general (racial discrimination being only one face of oppression). I've been studying these critical theories for several semesters, now, but each time I engage with them, my understanding (and outrage) deepens.

I recently saw this article about the lack of anyone considered "Israeli" in the state of Israel - people are classified as either Jewish or Arab, unless the Rabbinate decide you're not Jewish enough, then you'll be classified by your nationality of emigration. A liguistics professor from an Israeli university is challenging this in court.

This is so interesting that I'm going to post the text of the article here:

Citizens Classed as Jewish or Arab Nationals

by Jonathan Cook / April 6th, 2010

A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as “Israelis”, a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self- declared status as a Jewish state.

Israel refused to recognise an Israeli nationality at the country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”. Although all Israelis qualify as “citizens of Israel”, the state is defined as belonging to the “Jewish nation”, meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.

Critics say the special status of Jewish nationality has been a way to undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights, naturalisation, access to land and employment.

Arab leaders have also long complained that indications of “Arab” nationality on ID cards make it easy for police and government officials to target Arab citizens for harsher treatment.

The interior ministry has adopted more than 130 possible nationalities for Israeli citizens, most of them defined in religious or ethnic terms, with “Jewish” and “Arab” being the main categories.

The group’s legal case is being heard by the supreme court after a district judge rejected their petition two years ago, backing the state’s position that there is no Israeli nation.

The head of the campaign for Israeli nationality, Uzi Ornan, a retired linguistics professor, said: “It is absurd that Israel, which recognises dozens of different nationalities, refuses to recognise the one nationality it is supposed to represent.”

The government opposes the case, claiming that the campaign’s real goal is to “undermine the state’s infrastructure” — a presumed reference to laws and official institutions that ensure Jewish citizens enjoy a privileged status in Israel.

Mr Ornan, 86, said that denying a common Israeli nationality was the linchpin of state- sanctioned discrimination against the Arab population.

“There are even two laws — the Law of Return for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs — that determine how you belong to the state,” he said. “What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?”

Yoel Harshefi, a lawyer supporting Mr Ornan, said the interior ministry had resorted to creating national groups with no legal recognition outside Israel, such as “Arab” or “unknown”, to avoid recognising an Israeli nationality.

In official documents most Israelis are classified as “Jewish” or “Arab”, but immigrants whose status as Jews is questioned by the Israeli rabbinate, including more than 300,000 arrivals from the former Soviet Union, are typically registered according to their country of origin.

“Imagine the uproar in Jewish communities in the United States, Britain or France, if the authorities there tried to classify their citizens as “Jewish” or “Christian”,” said Mr Ornan.

The professor, who lives close to Haifa, launched his legal action after the interior ministry refused to change his nationality to “Israeli” in 2000. An online petition declaring “I am an Israeli” has attracted several thousand signatures.

Mr Ornan has been joined in his action by 20 other public figures, including former government minister Shulamit Aloni. Several members have been registered with unusual nationalities such as “Russian”, “Buddhist”, “Georgian” and “Burmese”.

Two Arabs are party to the case, including Adel Kadaan, who courted controversy in the 1990s by waging a lengthy legal action to be allowed to live in one of several hundred communities in Israel open only to Jews.

Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former member of the parliament, said the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens.

“The State of Israel cannot recognise an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.”

International Zionist organisations representing the diaspora, such as the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, are given in Israeli law a special, quasi-governmental role, especially in relation to immigration and control over large areas of Israeli territory for the settlement of Jews only.

Mr Ornan said the lack of a common nationality violated Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which says the state will “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex”.

Indications of nationality on ID cards carried by Israelis made it easy for officials to discriminate against Arab citizens, he added.

The government has countered that the nationality section on ID cards was phased out from 2000 — after the interior ministry, which was run by a religious party at the time, objected to a court order requiring it to identify non-Orthodox Jews as “Jewish” on the cards.

However, Mr Ornan said any official could instantly tell if he was looking at the card of a Jew or Arab because the date of birth on the IDs of Jews was given according to the Hebrew calendar. In addition, the ID of an Arab, unlike a Jew, included the grandfather’s name.

“Flash your ID card and whatever government clerk is sitting across from you immediately knows which ‘clan’ you belong to, and can refer you to those best suited to ‘handle your kind’,” Mr Ornan said.

The distinction between Jewish and Arab nationalities is also shown on interior ministry records used to make important decisions about personal status issues such as marriage, divorce and death, which are dealt with on entirely sectarian terms.

Only Israelis from the same religious group, for example, are allowed to marry inside Israel — otherwise they are forced to wed abroad — and cemeteries are separated according to religious belonging.

Some of those who have joined the campaign complain that it has damaged their business interests. One Druze member, Carmel Wahaba, said he had lost the chance to establish an import-export company in France because officials there refused to accept documents stating his nationality as “Druze” rather than “Israeli”.

The group also said it hoped to expose a verbal sleight of hand that intentionally mistranslates the Hebrew term “Israeli citizenship” on the country’s passports as “Israeli nationality” in English to avoid problems with foreign border officials.

B Michael, a commentator for Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper, has observed: “We are all Israeli nationals — but only abroad.”

The campaign, however, is likely to face an uphill struggle in the courts.

A similar legal suit brought by a Tel Aviv psychologist, George Tamrin, failed in 1970. Shimon Agranat, head of the supreme court at the time, ruled: “There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people. … The Jewish people is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of diaspora Jewries.”

That view was echoed by the district court in 2008 when it heard Mr Ornan’s case.

The judges in the supreme court, which held the first appeal hearing last month, indicated that they too were likely to be unsympathetic. Justice Uzi Fogelman said: “The question is whether or not the court is the right place to solve this problem.”

Two quotes I'd like to re-iterate are:

“What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?”

and:

"the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens."

Yet Another TED.com talk

2010-03-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

This one is by Daniel Pink, a career analyst, who "examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward."

I loved the beginning of the talk, where he gets into research by behavioural psychologists. About 12 minutes in, he talks about intrinsic motivation, which he describes as a "new operating system which revolves around three elements" which are:

Autonomy: "the urge to direct our own lives"
Mastery: "the desire to get better and better at something that matters"
Purpose: "the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves"

I love TED.com :)

Sir Ken Robinson: Why teaching is 'not like making motorcars'

2010-03-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

I seem to be the queen of posting videos these days :) Here's a great one from CNN about how our education systems are failing our children:

(CNN) -- Sir Ken Robinson says our education system works like a factory. It's based on models of mass production and conformity that actually prevent kids from finding their passions and succeeding, he said.
"The problem is that educating young people is not like making motorcars -- at all," the author and educator said in a recent interview. "And one key difference is that motorcars have no interest in how they're made, and young people do."
Robinson, author of "The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything," spoke to CNN after a recent lecture at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California.

Schools today are "preoccupied with certain types of ability," he said.
Instead of trying to mass-produce children who are good at taking tests and memorizing things, schools should emphasize personal development, Robinson said. Not all kids are good at the same things, and the education system shouldn't pretend they should all turn out the same, he said.
"We can't just improve [schools]," he said. "We have to radically transform them."

More from TED.com

2010-03-24T07:35:00.000-07:00

Here's another great TED.com video, this one recommended on an unschooling discussion list.

Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how. Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

2010-03-19T21:48:00.001-07:00

My Anti-Racist Social Work Practice instructor showed us this great Ted.com video in class on Monday, and I've been thinking about it ever since, so I decided to post it here :)

unschooling and middle class privilege

2010-03-05T19:37:00.000-08:00

I found a very interesting thread on AlwaysLearning. It starts out with this:

I'm not going to talk about the economic reasons why I think unschooling is more accessible to the middle and upper classes as these are pretty self-evident. Instead, I'll talk about one of my own personal problems with homeschooling, which is that I often feel as if I've turned my back on the rest of the youth in our country...

...People, parents especially, have been led to believe that they lack the knowledge to do something--anything-- without an expert (or institution) leading the way. School has been touted as the great equalizer; if you "stay in school" you can be anything you want to be. It is hard to turn your back on the hope schooling offers when you're surrounded by people living "hopeless" existences...

...I used to talk about homeschooling with the woman who cleaned my office. She is from Mexico and went to school until she was twelve. The most important thing to her, was making sure her granddaughter finished school. This woman is one of the wisest women I've ever met. Yet she would never believe herself capable of facilitating a decent education for her granddaughter...

...It isn't a *lack* of an education that makes unschooling impossible, it is the fear that goes along with the lack. It is my suspicion that this fear is built directly into the educational system--the system that gets citizens ready for the hierarchies they'll need to deal with for the rest of their lives.

It was a long post, and I didn't want to really reproduce it here, I wanted to just give a sense of what the poster was trying to get across. I think she has some very excellent and valid things to say, things I can relate to, things, I also struggle with. I'm just a bit shy about posting anything on that list - I don't even home school my kids yet, let alone unschool them. I feel I cannot speak from an informed position on that list, and I feel that is required :)

However, I wanted to point out that the idea of middle class privilege is similar to male privilege, a feminist concept. We owe the idea of looking at privilege from second wave (1960's-ish) feminism, I think. Built on top of that are concepts like white privilege in anti-racist theory. I've also seen conversations about ablest privilege, and I've discussed "colonial privilege" although I've never seen that as a term. Power and privilege is something that my social work education discusses a lot. I'm taking a class on anti-racist practice right now, and we spent some time looking at our own 'identity' and 'social location'. I am white. Thus, I swim in a sea of privilege which I don't really even see. Things are just easy for me, and I take that as normal.

Similarly, I also see ideas related to colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonizing - if we consider public education to be an institution of colonial oppression. It sure was for Aboriginal peoples in Canada who did not have the right to decide how their children were educated, who could have been fined or gone to jail for trying to refuse to let the Indian agent take their kids away from them. (In my mind, that alone is evil. What right does anyone have to take a perfectly happy, healthy child away from his/her loving parents? I'm not even going to go into the atrocities perpetuated upon those children once they reached the schools.)

I can't remember where, but when I was first learning about unschooling, spending hours combing the 'net for information, I came across a posting by an Aboriginal teen who had recently chosen unschooling for herself. Her family didn't like it because of the history of oppression of Aboriginal peoples in Canada through the Indian Act - for many years, Aboriginal people were not allowed to pursue education beyond 8th grade. This teen's family were reacting to that.

Also, I see ideas about the 'expert' and the person who is deemed 'deficient'. We talk about this in the context of our future social work practice a lot at school. A social worker has a dual role in society - as a social change agent, committed to justice and activism, but also as a social control agent. The social control agent part is hard for a lot of us students - if we wanted to control people, we figure, we would've become cops!! Still we need to maintain our professional values inside of being a social control agent: autonomy, self-determination, starting where the client is. We are BSW candidates because we have a passion for social justice, because we want to stand up for the rights of people who have been trodden upon to the point where they cannot stand up for themselves.

I recently read an article about social work practice in my anti-racist class written by a Metis professor at UVic. She talked about the 'colonial container' that helping professions often come from (she meant doctors, social workers, priests. I will add in teachers) - the pathologizing tendency called the 'colonial code of relations' which is based on the following assumptions:

You are deficient (i.e. heathen, savage, falsely conscious, submissive, passive, internally oppressed, helpless, cognitively distorted and/or afraid).
I am proficient (i.e. critically conscious, expert, professional, closer to god and/or empowered by the state).
Therefore I have the right (duty, sacred obligation and/or authority) to perform certain operations upon you (prescribing, advising, educating, assessing, praying, counselling, legislating and/or apprehending children) for your own good.

So I feel it is critical for me to keep this in the forefront of my mind in both my practice and in my relationship with my kids. And I see how it can be very important to transform education - to decolonize public schools from their inculcating effects. And I absolutely see how difficult it would be for some people from traditionally oppressed cultures to see the good in unschooling, especially where education is a pathway to power and freedom.

I especially love the last sentence/paragraph I've copied, about the fear that goes along with the lack of education. It's an interesting line of thought, and makes me think of Paolo Friere and his classic book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Friere argues that only the oppressed can free themselves (and interestingly their oppressors) from the dehumanization of oppression.

the rollercoaster...

2010-02-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

This week has been hard for me. Really hard, in an emotional way.
This week and next week is midterms evaluations for me. I had an exam yesterday. I had my practicum evaluation meeting on Wednesday. My kids went into the city with my mom overnight to check out the fee Olympic stuff, and so I had to drop them off to her, packed and ready to go, before my early morning for practicum. I was late, I got in trouble, and I cried (but later, at home, alone in the tub. I know about managing my well-being, it's practically a required course for a BSW!) but my evaluation was pretty good, so at least there's that :)
On Thursday my tire blew out while I was driving on the highway. I wasn't finished dealing with it until 10:30 pm. I skipped practicum seminar on Monday because Anti-Racist was online instead of on campus for the Olympics. (My teacher lives beside one of the venues.) I'm two weeks late with some unmarked journals I have to do for practicum seminar. I missed my new crisis line shift this morning. Just plain ol' forgot to go.
I feel pressed from all directions.
I feel exhausted and overwhelmed and tired and achy and behind... I'm the White Rabbit, I'm late, I'm late!
I'm so far behind in my reading for the semester, I'm not managing my practicum Learning Objectives, I'm missing deadlines and I'm constantly late. I am stressed. And so, of course, I'm arguing with my husband and he's upset and needs soothing and that's just one more thing!
I want to explode...
but I feel like this every semester. This is not new. I get through it every time, but I just don't want to have this experience any more.
I want to have time to meditate and exercise and bake bread and make Real Food for my family. I want to have time to keep my house tidy, keep caught up with the chores. I want to feel zen, whatever that is :)

real food

2010-02-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

Today I wrote a very introspective post over at my other blog, aquilegia formosa, which is about my journey towards eating only 'Real Food'. Normally, I save introspective posts for over here :)

I've decided to take up NDiN's Real Food Challenge:

So starting March 1st and for the whole month I am challenging myself to eat nothing commercially processed that I cannot make myself...
I would love for you to join us! Come back March 1st and see what we have in store…there will be ways for you to take part and link up. This will be an opportunity to learn from each other as well as encourage one another to make a difference!
Come ready to share your plans here and with your own blog posts on March 1!

I'm taking up the challenge, albeit in my own modified way, and I discuss my reasons, as well as my ambivalence on the other blog. I'm keeping baby steps in mind, and I've decided this challenge is about educating my family, and getting them on board with me.

I'm declaring a few preparation challenges for myself for the next week. I'm going to make a batch of my stepmother's 18 hour no bake bread. I'm going to research whole wheat tortilla recipes and give one a try. Lastly, I'm going to browse my massive bread cookbook for a cracker recipe for the kids to try.

This is on top of needing to make a fresh batch of applesauce this week... and a midterm on Friday and another on the 1st.

;)

the opening ceremonies...

2010-02-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

...is cross cultural understanding enough? Or are we required to take an active, anti-racist stand? Are we always required to bring up questions of power imbalances?

Disclaimer: this is going to be a brief one, and not that clearly thought out.

I watched the Olympic opening games tonight with my boys. I was moved to tears by the participation of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada, but they were not only the tears of inspiration. Yes, their participation and endorsement is powerful and meaningful, but in a 'food, fashion and fun' respect, a surface celebration of diversity. There was no anti-racist or anti-colonial stance. There was no reflection upon the standard Canadian economic and social power imbalances. It was tokenism, in my humble opinion.

My stepson didn't understand who they were, and why they were dressed so funny. Through my tight throat, struggling to hold back indignant tears, I tried to explain that they are the first peoples of Canada, from before Canada was even a country. I said that we aren't from here, our ancestors came here from far away and stole their land. That was all I could manage, and he wasn't really listening.

I hope I'm laying a foundation of critical thinking, of questioning the status quo.

Canadian pioneers often perpetuated vicious atrocities against the Indigenous inhabitants.

I want my boys to grow up with this knowledge, this understanding of the damage that can be inflicted when we operate from a model of scarcity rather than abundance - when we feel we need to violently steal from another to ensure our own survival, when sharing and mutual respect and ethical action is no longer deemed an option.

So much for that groundhog

2010-02-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

Is it spring in the Pacific Northwest? I've been seeing cherry blossoms on trees for almost 2 weeks, now, along with crocus buds and full blown snowdrops. The rest of the bulbs have shoots several inches out of the ground, and the magnolias have their fuzzy silver buds. I've even seen red leaf shoots on rose bushes.

But the real kicker was the rhodo I saw blooming on the way to the kiddos' school this morning.

At the long term care facility where I am doing my social work practicum, I was recently 'trained' in administering the MMSE, also called a 'mini-mental.' It's a brief, language-based test of cognitive abilities in dementing adults. If one scores within a certain range, one is eligible for funding for Aricept, a drug for early to mid stage Alzheimer's. One is not to prompt the test taker at all while administering this test. Five out of the 15 points come from questions related to time and place orientation, such as, what day is it? Where are we? One question is, what season is it? If they say the wrong season, they get a zero. However, if they're off by a week, you can give them the point.

Spring doesn't 'officially' start until the end of March. That's a month away. And it has snowed in the Lower Mainland in March the last 4 years. However, based on observation, one could easily say it is spring right now. Would the dementing patient loose a point for saying it's spring?

"Being satisfied is... a commitment, a stand we’re taking"

2010-02-07T17:48:00.000-08:00

I came across this cool article about relationships. The gist of it: we often communicate from complaints in our relationships, rather than from happiness. You are the source of your own happiness, not your spouse, not your circumstances.

Relationships: Alive with Possibility

Cathy Elliott, Landmark Forum Leader

Here’s something from a piece I read in Harper’s Magazine by Laura Kipnis called “The Domestic Gulag.” The author offers a brief sample of answers to the simple question: “What can’t you do because you’re in a couple?” (This information, she points out, is all absolutely true; nothing was invented. Nothing needed to be.)

You can’t leave the house without saying where you’re going. You can’t not say what time you’ll return. You can’t go out when the other person feels like staying home. You can’t go out just to go out, because you can’t not be considerate of the other person’s worries about where you are, or their natural insecurities that you’re not where you should be, or about where you could be instead. You can’t leave your (pick one) books, tissues, shoes, makeup, mail, work, sewing stuff …lying around the house. …You can’t amass more knickknacks than the other person finds tolerable—likewise sports paraphernalia. You can’t leave the dishes for later, wash the dishes badly, not use soap, drink straight from the container, make crumbs without wiping them up (now, not later), or load the dishwasher according to the method that seems most sensible to you. … You can’t talk on the phone when they’re in the room without them commenting on the conversation, or trying to talk to you at the same time. You can’t read without them starting to talk, and you’re not allowed to read when they’re talking to you. You can’t use the “wrong tone of voice,” and you can’t deny the wrong-tone-of-voice accusation when it’s made. … You can’t ask for help and then criticize the mode of help, or reject it. …You can’t express inappropriate irony about something the other person takes seriously. …You can’t not be supportive, even when the mate does something insupportable. … You may not criticize the other person’s driving, signaling, or lane-changing habits. etc., etc., etc.

Lots of our behavior in relationships is driven by complaint. How powerful are a person’s actions when those actions are the product of complaint? It’s doubtful we know any truly powerful people whose actions are shaped and driven by complaint. Complaint weakens our actions and our thoughts and our feelings. “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life,” says contemporary poet, Adrienne Rich. When relationships are driven by complaint or by keeping track of who did what, or the need to be right, to control, they likely possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but cease to be interesting. The wonderful world of human possibilities ceases to reverberate through them.”

At some point in our relationships with our partners, our coworkers, family members, it seems we have the thought that we’re not fully satisfied. Even if there are long stretches where things are great, at some juncture we find ourselves disappointed about something, or feel that something is missing—that our particular relationship(s) are not all we’d hoped for. And once those thoughts make their way to consciousness, a refrain is sure to follow. Dissatisfaction invariably follows satisfaction, because what we so often do with satisfaction is try to hold on to it. Satisfaction held on to, however, becomes mechanical—the antithesis of satisfaction. In William Blake’s words, “He who binds to himself a joy/Does the winged life destroy.” Satisfaction can’t be held on to like a thing, it can only be created. To create something requires a space in which to create, and when that space isn’t there, most likely it’s because we’re holding on to something incomplete from the past.

Completing things comes down to a matter of getting beyond the “yeah buts” and “how ’bouts” and the “but ifs,” “onlys,” and “whens” about how things “should” or “need” to look a particular way. Completing things frees us up. It doesn’t automatically imply that everything is going to be just dandy in the future, but it does mean that we can address whatever there is to address in our present-day relationships, instead of dramatizing whatever might have been incomplete from the past. When something is complete it is as it is, there is not a need for something else. It’s as it is without being obscured by the way it should be. The should-bes, ought-to-bes, the way we want it to be—our ideals or comparisons with other things, other people, other times—all kind of drop away. There isn’t a sense that things “must” be different. It might be pleasant or preferable to have things be other than they are, but there isn’t an attachment to having something else, or a need for some part of it not to be there. The point is that something can be missing like a possibility vs. “missing” as if it is wrong or bad. When something’s missing as a possibility, there’s not a sense of insufficiency or inadequacy—there’s an allowing for and an acceptance of the way it is. What’s missing here doesn’t exist like a thing, but rather as a possibility for something—and with that comes a freedom.

Each of us has experienced moments in our lives when we are fully alive—when we have no wish for it to be different, better, or more. We have no disappointment, no comparison with ideals, no sense that it is not what we worked for. We feel no protective or defensive urge—have no desire to hold on, to store up, to save. Such moments are perfect in themselves. We experience them as being complete, and know a space within ourselves where such moments can be generated. It’s a shift or a state change, from being a character in a story to being the space in which the stories occurs—the author, as it were, consciously, freely. It is a transformation—a contextual shift from the content in our lives being organized around getting satisfied—to an experience of being satisfied.

And because relationships exist in language (not just as a set of feelings or accumulation of experiences, for example), there’s a malleability, a plasticity, a can-be moved-around-ness about them. When we walk around dissatisfied, thinking the other person should be different in one way or another, or say something like “they never really understood us,” or that “their expectations were unwarranted,” or “their idiosyncrasies were annoying,” what is really happening is that we are saying that. And the other person is likely saying, in some manner or another, what’s so for them. In all cases, it’s people speaking to themselves, speaking to others, or other people speaking about other people speaking to each other—it’s all occurring in language. When we shift the locus of our dissatisfaction and complaints from something “out there” to which language can only refer, to something that is located “in” language, what’s possible shifts.

It’s not necessarily a fact that we’ll be satisfied if such-and-such happens in a relationship, or doesn’t happen. Being satisfied is not a feeling later labeled with the word “satisfaction”; rather it is a commitment, a stand we’re taking for that possibility. That stand becomes the “chute” down which what we’re “up to” can be realized. When that happens, the conditions and circumstances for our relationships begin to reorder and realign themselves. How we see and hear others and how they see and hear us is transformed. This is what it’s all about—to be satisfied before anything happens.

moving from contemplation to determination/action*

2010-02-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

I just posted the following on the Radical Unschoolers Network forum category New to Radical Unschooling:

request for support/ideas re: unschooling and full time working parents
I'm looking for support and ideas for how to take the plunge from public school. My problem is around time and money.

I have two boys, both 7, one is currently a first grader and the other a second grader. My husband works 5 days a week for 8 hours and commutes for 4 hours (he doesn't drive, so a 30-45 minute commute ends up taking ~2hrs on the bus). I am just over a year away from completing a BSW (should grad April 2011) and I'll be ~50k in student loan debt (something I'll be paying off for over 5 years). With this investment of $ and time into my career, me becoming a stay-at-home-parent is neither what I want nor what will work.

My kids hate school. I hate that they don't want to go. Right now, my experience is that I cannot afford an alternate to the 5 hours a day in free childcare that school provides. I have a childcare arrangement outside of school as well, and I receive a government subsidy for those childcare costs (in BC, Canada).

Right now, I feel that I will not be able to take my boys out of school until they are old enough to be at home alone for longer than 10 minutes (and I'm nervous about that, too!)

I have a lot of family support, although I don't know anyone who works from home or doesn't work. My mom has Fridays off work, and I'm sure I could ask her to take them on those days. My childcare provider may be willing to continue claiming the subsidy and put it towards 2 full days of care rather than 5 half days of care. I'd require a 4th 5th day of care for them, and I'm not sure how I can cover that every week. We may be able to juggle my husband's schedule to cover one weekday.

I'm not sure if I can manage, as it'll place extra stress and worry on me as the 'manager' of all of this, and I worry that it will be a strain on my relationships with my husband and my family. Juggling school and a family is already a challenge.

I'm hoping for suggestions for other parents (esp single parents) who have juggled full time out of the home employment with unschooling. What did you try? What were your frustrations? What ended up working best for you? How did it shift and change?

Also, I'd love some feedback about when kids are able to manage alone for a few hours. I know I was babysitting other people's children at age 12, but don't remember much about when my mom started leaving us home without a sitter. What are your experiences with this?

Thank you kindly :)

I'm both nervous and excited!!

* my title is a reference to Prochaska and DiClemente's "Stages of Change" model for addictions :)

sick

2010-02-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

yuck.
I have a sinus cold, a virus.
The kids and I missed school today. Tomorrow is supposed to be practicum day at the extended care facility. I wonder if they'll want me to stay home? They have signs requesting you not visit if you're not feeling well.
--
The kids were so happy to get to stay home. It was daddy's regularly scheduled day off, so we were all home.
I wish I could stay home with them every day. Alas, this is just not feasible right now.
However, I let them choose their own activities all day, other than insisting they get dressed. They chose to spend the whole day playing DS with the tv on in the spare room. They had their Pokemon cards and some assorted figurines and Lego 'figurines' they've made.
Soon we'll start reading, then early to bed, because, ready or not, it's back to school/work for all of us tomorrow.

state of the union

2010-01-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

The American president recently gave this address, which I channel-surfed past several times. However, I like the idea of the title... so, what is the state of MY union? To me, union does not represent my country - I am Canadian, and white, from a mostly Anglo ethnic background (how weird is it to consider Anglo or white an ethnicity!). Our country was a colony, then a Dominion, then finally a country. We are not the United states. To me, union is my relationship, my marriage, and, by extension, our kids.

I've only been married a short time - 4 months. However, I constantly notice shifts in myself, in my thinking and in the way I now view the world with a permanent partner. I am learning every day about letting go, about letting him lead. It is hard, I was a single parent from the moment I found out I was pregnant with my now 7 year old son. My husband and I have only been together for 2 years, and his son has only lived with us for 5 months. I am used to being the only person I have to be accountable to. Now I find myself getting annoyed when I have to explain what I'm up to, or decisions I've made. Behind my annoyance is frustration at a perceived loss of control.

I notice myself from time to time looking at my husband and marveling at the commitment we have made. I am somewhat surprised that I have committed to never be sexually with another man. I'm not frustrated by this, nor do I find myself longing for other men, or tempted to be with another man, I'm just a little suprised by the experience as the commitment settles into my being.

I am finding myself feeling more and more affectionate towards my stepson, although I am still often frustrated and annoyed at his unfamiliar and sometimes unfathomable ways of being. I am learning to understand him better, and thus I can anticipate his likes and dislikes better. Things are becoming more harmonious.

However, I am still nowhere near a place to parent him in the radical unschooling way. I'm still not ready to give of myself so unconditionally, and this is partly because his living with us was thrust upon me, and I felt I had no personal choice in the matter. I did what was best for him, I did what my husband wanted. It was a huge financial burden because his mother and stepfather are not required to pay child support, and so they don't contribute at all. It was a huge emotional burden, one that my husband's father and brothers and sisters in law clearly recognize and vocally appreciate. That recognition is important to me, but I really want it from my stepson's mother.

I still regularly give in to the desire to control the outcome with my kids. Sometimes I'm a good 5 minutes into a freak out/forcing of my will, when I wonder why it's even important. It's really all about looking good, saving face, whatever you want to call it.

I still occasionally read through the forums on RUN (radical unschoolers/unschooling network?), and I still regularly feel shamed when reading comments/replies written by Sandra Dodd. However, I'm starting to have small moments of grace, where I hear her voice as I'm sure it's intended: full of compassion. Mostly, I feel overwhelmed by the prospect of unschooling, of even taking the boys out of public school. Who would take care of them? How could I possibly afford to stay home with them? How would I manage to keep myself sane if I was always caring for them? How would I have time for me and my own interests? Would I just give up on my degree when I'm finally close to the end? How would I ever pay off my student loan debt? What about all my other debt? How would we ever manage to get by on just my husband's meager salary?

There are still too many questions, too much uncertainty, and far too many feelings of shame and control to take the boys out of public school.

The Tyee — 'Red Tent' Campaign

2010-01-25T20:02:00.000-08:00

'Red Tent' Campaign Planned for Homeless during Olympics

Pivot Legal wants city to let it provide 500 tents to people sleeping on Vancouver's streets.

By Geoff Dembicki, Today, TheTyee.ca

Picture homeless people camped on downtown sidewalks. Big yawns inside bright red tents as the sun rises on another Olympics day. Early next month, Pivot Legal Society hopes to ask city council's permission to start handing out 500 collapsible shelters to Vancouver's most needy. Pivot's rights activists want to confront a city enthralled by Olympic jubilation with the reality of local poverty. And test the limits of constitutional law.

Pivot's John Richardson with red tent.

To read the rest, go here
To learn more about the Red Tent campaign, go here

Just say no to GMO's

2010-01-25T00:28:00.001-08:00

on the new semester and self-care

2010-01-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

So far the semester has been shaping up to be just as busy as I anticipated; I'm taking 12 credits, which is the equivalent of an 80% course load. Half of those credits are for my practicum, which is 3 days/wk over 15 weeks, totaling to 315 hours, all for a grade of either 'credit' or 'no credit.' I'm also taking 2 regular academic courses at the 3rd year level. Luckily, only one is super-intense, with 2 or 3 journal articles to be read for each class and 2 major papers. This is an Anti-Racist course for social work practice. My other class is Community Development. The text is an easy read, we are graded on a midterm and an exam (which may be 'take-home' which I think means a paper), as well as a group project. Normally I don't like group work, but this should be interesting - the class has been divided in two, so my group has about 14 members. Large, yes. Unwieldy? I don't know - I already know and like most of my group members, having had at least 2 classes with most of them. The School of Social Work is very small, one could even say 'tight-knit.'

Despite only having 2 'academic' courses, this semester is way busier than any other semester I've taken. I'm busy every weekday, and away from home for 7 hours a day. I'm used to having classes on 2, maybe 3 weekdays, leaving lots of time for at home study. As it currently stands, I have class Monday morning from 8:30 to 11:30, and every other Monday I have my practicum seminar from 11:30 to 2:30. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I have my practicum from 9:30 to 4:30. Friday I have class from 11:30 to 2:30 in Abbotsford, a 45 minute drive from my home. I try to run errands or do research at school between dropping my kids off at school and going to class. Soon I will be trying to fit in some on-campus time to continue with my work-study job as a Social Work research assistant around the school's policy manual and their new master's program. As well, I'm still volunteering for the Surrey Crisis Line for 4 hours a week, but now I have no time during the week, so my shift is Sunday mornings. Saturday is my only sleep-in day, now.

This is a huge adjustment for me. I haven't been employed in the workforce since July of 2008 - a year and a half! I have been really spoiled in that. The job I was at was one I'd had for almost 4 years, and I was quite comfortable with my employers and co-workers, for the most part. Now I have to get used to a whole new set of expectations, as I'm job shadowing a professional, it's a position which requires at least a bachelor's degree. It's a high stress field characterized by burnout in a lot of instances. No one outside of the profession really understands a social worker's role and what s/he does all day long. Because the job is really about managing relationships, it is characterized by "putting out fires," which tend to disrupt the normal flow of work and any sort of routine or schedule which one may have put in place.

Also, the field of geriatrics is something I've never considered or studied in an academic way. Despite my last post, where I noted the theoretical similarities to child protection work and the related ethical dilemmas of consent and capacity, I have no experience with elder care or dementia. Both my grandfathers are still living and both my grandmothers passed quite suddenly. Both lived with arthritis for many years, but I wasn't really associated with those experiences. I don't know anything about diabetes, heart disease or any of a number of medical diagnoses that I've heard medical staff discuss using acronyms I can't catch. I don't know what any of the medications they mention are, beyond Tylenol, baby aspirin and a few narcotics for pain. I don't know anything about the various types of dementia and the stages involved. I don't know how to be with these residents, how much they can understand. It's all so new and unknown.

But I was prepared for all of this. I anticipated the busyness, the lack of professional knowledge and experience, the long days, the lack of time at home alone. Still, anticipating this, being prepared, does nothing to ease the actual transition (except for maybe relieving me of experiences of guilt, feelings of not being good enough, etc...). I'm still busy and overwhelmed and I'm spending a lot of time single-parenting. My husband needs to learn how to drive an effing car now.

So I am paying particular attention to self-care this semester. To me this is mainly time alone, with no demands and interruptions. I am an introverted person by nature, and I need at least an hour to myself every day. Mostly, this is spent reading. I read novels for pleasure and I read numerous online blogs. A lot of my time spent in blog-land is centered around self-sufficiency. Gardening, less reliance on the industrial food system, animal husbandry, cooking from scratch, even 'prepper' blogs focusing on peak-oil preparation. (What can I say? I'm crunchy granola. Why else am I in a field committed to social justice?) However, over the past 2 weeks, this hour has been pushed to 11pm to 12am. I'm not getting enough sleep. Case in point - I slept 10 hours last night, and the kids and I are still in our jammies at almost 4 in the afternoon. It's our day of 'recovery' from the week. (Lord knows the kids need it just as much as I do - they hate school!)

So I've been looking to find other ways of expressing my need for self-care. I've been developing my existing friendship networks. Of course, my family is as awesome as always, but I'm also cultivating friendships with my fellow social work students, many of whom are mothers and are older than the average college student. There have been some fun times after classes this past week. I'm also working on a regular 'date night' with the hubs, even if it's only a movie on the couch. I'm also considering how to work into my schedule more movement and exercise. Maybe a bike ride with the kids or a walk on the beach? Maybe a yoga class? I'm not sure how this will pan out, but at least I'm engaged in trying to find the time.

on consent...

2010-01-18T16:17:00.000-08:00

I've recently started a new semester at university, I am taking 2 classes and a practicum. My practicum is at Delta View Life Enrichment Centre, an extended care facility for people with dementia. I intend to do a Child Welfare specialization with my degree, qualifying me to work for the provincial Ministry of Children and Family Development as a designated child protection worker. My degree requires 2 practicums, one at the 3rd year level, and one at the 4th yr level. For me, because I've chosen the specialization, the 4th year practicum will be in an MCFD setting. Thus, I decided my 3rd year practicum would be about broadening my experience of social work as a career. However, I'm finding that there are a lot of connections between gerontological social work and child welfare social work. Both client groups experience ageism. Both groups are considered to lack capacity to consent, to be autonomous and to determine the course of their own lives. Both experience powerlessness that is institutionalized.

I'm finding that social work with patients who have dementia is filled with ethical dilemmas. And I'm finding that these ethical dilemmas center around consent. If the client/patient (this is a medicalized setting, after all, the clients are primarily cared for by nurses and care aids) refuses to take his/her medication, do we (the care team, the institution, the government who makes the legislation) have the right to force that client to take the medication that is prolonging their life? Can we lie to a patient, give them their heart pill and say it's for pain? If they need pain meds, but refuse the pills, do we have the doctor prescribe a 'patch' and put it on the client without his/her informed consent? Basically, although it'd be easier, and in the clients' best interests, we don't have the right. We don't get to say what's in their 'best interest' because that is something that can only be determined by the client, him/herself.

So, with this new flash of insight into consent, I've been reading the forums on the Radical Unschooling Network and Sandra Dodd's Unschooling site. I'm able to see all of this from a new point of view, and it's easier for me to 'get it', whereas before I struggled and I judged myself as somehow lacking as a parent and a woman because I couldn't see myself as able to 'measure up' to unschooling standards.

Of course, there's still more understanding and "aha!" moments to come before I can see myself as able to cope with the radical unschooling lifestyle 100%, but I fell that I'm taking a significant step in that direction. And for the last 4 months, I haven't seen that as being possible.

I'm finding myself engaging in ideas about consent and control in a very different way than I have in the past.

thoughts on the new year and on resolutions

2010-01-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

... now that Epiphany has passed.

As previously stated, my New Years resolution is to simplify so I have more time to focus on being happy. But it's more than that, it's also about pursuing what makes me happy. I recently read Eat, Pray, Love as well as these two posts over at Unclutterer and I wanted to somehow make my resolution of happiness pursuable.

So, to that end, I've begun creating a list of goals, some SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely), some purposefully vague, towards me living a lifestyle that I currently think will make me happy. So far, a lot of those goals center around food sustainability. My garden. 'Local' eating. Less shopping, less relying on the industrial food machine. A lot of the blogs I've been reading over the past year relate to these goals (and I'll probably list them at the end of this post), so I'm well on my way towards achieving them, but also, in some senses, I'll never be done, there will always be something more to achieve. Regardless, I've started a new blog, over at wordpress (because I think the tab thingys at the top of the page are 'cooler' than what blogger has, silly, I know), to track my goals and my progress towards them.

However, that still leaves me with a gap between my goals and my resolution. I'm looking at simplifying my life so I have more time for the things I say make me happy. So the simplifying process is somehow all tied up with food, with feeding my family healthy, nutritious local, ethically raised and prepared food. Food is a chore to me. I don't really enjoy cooking, even though I do it all the time. I do love eating, and I do love feeding people. I especially love preparing food with a friend, then enjoying it together. I really love being appreciated for the food I put on the table, and feeding my kids just doesn't provide the kind of appreciation I'm looking for. (I think I need to look into communal living!) However, what makes me happy is a happy family. No whining kids. No husband sitting, staring at the tv (although this makes him happy, or so he says). Being active together. Beaches, bike rides.

So what I'm seeing is that, for me, happiness looks like friends, it looks like being active, it looks like a garden in summer. Happiness looks fresh and green and slightly out of breath.

It also looks like ease and support. For me, ease will be a goal around my academic pursuits - finishing assignments early, and whatever is in the way of that for me. I'm going to talk with a about my experience of anxiety with a counselor at my university. And support will look like redeveloping or rekindling my friendships with my girlfriends from my 20's, from before I had family responsibilities. Maybe girls' night out once a month? Maybe dinner with another family once a month? It's another one of those nebulous goals, I'll have to flesh it out as I go along :)

UPDATED: (blogs I've been reading over the past year that relate to my sustainability goals)
fast grow the weeds
Living the Frugal Life
Subsistence Pattern
Throwback at Trapper Creek
One Straw
Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op
Not Dabbling in Normal
Surviving the Suburbs I've just started reading this one, but so far, I'm finding it excellent :)

on having children

2009-12-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

My old friend started a blog this past spring, mostly about mommy-hood and stuff. I subscribed in my Google Reader, and proceeded to enjoy for a few months. However, sometime at the beginning of July, I stopped getting updates. I figured, "well, she's got a toddler and 3 stepsons aged 10 to 5, she must be busy!" However, as my New Years resolution is (always) to simplify and unclutter my life so I have more time to focus on being happy, today I was going through my blog reader, and deleting those that don't update, or that I don't enjoy. I decided to check out the actual blogger address for her blog. Lo and behold, she hadn't stopped posting! I re-subscribed and all her posts from the summer showed up in my blog reader. (So much for uncluttering, now I've got reading to catch up on!!)

I read a couple, laughed a little, then came upon this post, titled "to breed or not to breed." Mostly, she discussed how she'd like another child but would not like to deal with the inconveniences of pregnancy and infancy. Of course, this was a "eureka!" moment for me, because I feel the exact same way! A friend left a comment referring to this McLean's article, titled "the case against having kids" which mentions the strangely radical notion (strange that it's radical, and not more common) that children should be something people have because they really want them.

Of course, that got me thinking, society NEEDS children (which is clearly why that strangely radical notion is actually radical after all) to be the workers of the future. Thus, would people who were willing to go through all the trouble and work of raising children be honoured and supported by society as an incentive?

The entire next paragraph is taken from the McLean's article:

Speaking up on the subject can elicit a smackdown. Last February, the 37-year-old British journalist Polly Vernon wrote a defiant column in the Guardian enumerating the reasons she didn’t want children: “I’m appalled by the idea,” she wrote. “Both instinctually (‘Euuuw! You think I should do what to my body?’) and intellectually (‘And also to my career, my finances, my lifestyle and my independence?’).” The response was terrifying, she reports: “Emails and letters arrived, condemning me, expressing disgust. I was denounced as bitter, selﬁsh, un-sisterly, unnatural, evil. I’m now routinely referred to as ‘baby-hating journalist Polly Vernon.’ ”

To me, it sounds like she's making the right choice for herself, because no one should have to be raised by parents who resent him or her. Yet she is vilified. Bad woman. This is frightening, of course, to my little feminist heart. And equally concerning to my child protection worker mind, although not frightening, because parents resenting their children is old hat for most cultures, especially all the various European, Christian ones from which I am descended.

The following is also from the article:

Why this is happening is the subject of much theorizing: educated women delay childbearing until it’s no longer an option; they refuse to pay what economists call the “motherhood premium” in which the salaries of university-educated women plateau after childbirth and then drop, while fathers’ incomes are unaffected; they recognize that raising children is a sacrifice of time, money and freedom they’re not willing to make; or they simply don’t want to have children and are able to say no.

(The matter is complicated, Foot observes, because income level is also linked to procreation. What is known is that paying women to have children doesn’t work: the only variable proven to increase the chances of women having children is to offer a supportive social network, as evident by the rising fertility rates attributed to government initiatives in Scandinavian countries and France, where generous tax breaks, incentives, and maternity- and parental-leave provisions have resulted in the birth rate rising to 2.7 per woman, the highest level in Europe.)

Once again, I wonder, would people who were willing to go through all the trouble and work of raising children be honoured and supported by society?

My more cynical self suggests this will only be so when corporations see it as economically necessary.

And so this is Christmas...

2009-12-24T10:32:00.000-08:00

...I hope you have fun... The near and the dear ones... The old and the young!

What a busy season, despite my attempts to avoid commercialism. I've still needed to do my regular grocery shopping and of course I waited until the last minute to purchase the few gifts my family is giving this year. The upside to that is I was able to take advantage of some wicked sales, the downside was the near panic attacks I had while trying to park my car in mall lots and trying to navigate around other shoppers in the stores.

But I am done with everything related to shopping, except for a quick visit to the local produce stand located 4 blocks from my house. I have enough butter and sugar and flour and eggs to drown us in cookies. My presents are all wrapped and under the tree. I am not making a holiday dinner this year, so I will only need to travel to my father's tomorrow evening and then to my mother's the following evening. I will spend the next few days as a glutton, drinking Irish cream and wine, eating mandarin oranges and chocolate and cookies and pie and tarts and turkey.

But I will be thinking about that song I quoted in the title, I will be thinking that "war is over... if [we] want it." I will be thinking about our industrial, capitalist, commercial system, how it has affected every area of our lives for generations, and how we can subvert that system a little, just to give ourselves some room... but we will have to subvert it a lot to make room for everyone on this planet.

However, I will also be thinking about "tidings of comfort and joy."

God bless you and your families :)

Blog of indescribable awesomeness

2009-12-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

I have fallen in love with hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com
seriously. go right over there and read her. That's what I'm doing :)

climate refugees

2009-12-14T11:06:00.000-08:00

I was just reading this article over at the Angry Indian, about the Climate Talks in Copenhagen. Written by REDOIL*, the short press release states the following:

"The American government wants to drill for oil off Alaska's northwest coast as early as next summer... [The US] Department of the Interior has endorsed drilling for fossil fuels in the climate-effected ecosystems of the Arctic, where global warming already impacts Alaska Natives and entire villages are in danger of losing their lands and way of life."

"Shell says 'the Chukchi Sea could be home to some of the most prolific, undiscovered hydrocarbon basins in North America,' but we're here to remind Salazar and Shell that it is our home and our lives that will be devastated by the drilling," said Faith Gemmill, Executive Director of REDOIL, who is attending the Copenhagen Climate Talks."More fossil fuel drilling will only bring more pollution to the Chukchi Sea, and ultimately, more devastating climate change to the world. Salazar should know: We must leave those fossil fuels in the ground and invest in real renewable solutions that uphold Indigenous Peoples rights."

* REDOIL is a network and movement of Alaska Natives who are challenging the fossil fuel and mining industry and demanding our rights to a safe and healthy environment conducive to subsistence. The REDOIL network consists of grassroots Alaska Natives of the Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Tlingit, Gwich'in, Eyak and Denaiana Athabascan tribes. We aim to address the human and ecological health impacts brought on by the unsustainable development practices of the fossil fuel and mining industry. REDOIL strongly supports self-determination rights of tribes in Alaska, as well as a just transition from fossil fuel and mineral development to sustainable economies, and promotes the implementation of sustainable development on Alaska Native lands. Visit: http://www.ienearth.org/redoil

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Other articles/press releases about the Copenhagen talks posted on the site are here , here, and here.

I find myself getting very upset when I read news like this, especially when I also understand "official" policy on climate change issues, and the position of pundits who claim climate change is a myth. (See this article for an example of what I mean.)

I'm quite passionate about Indigenous People's rights. And it's not just because I believe we've done some nasty things to aboriginal peoples around the globe in the name of colonialism, industrialization, "progress" and "efficiency." (By the way, I'm using the "royal We" to indicate "White" people's complicity with colonialism. I am a 6th generation Anglo-Canadian, and so I find it ontologically necessary to my anti-colonial stand to recognise my own historic participation in the colonial process. It's about ownership, and infinite responsibility,a concept taken from Levinas on the Holocaust.)

But also, I'm passionate about Indigenous rights because their rights are inextricably tied to the lands, and the right to healthy ecosystems. In one scholarly discussion I read recently, this was tied to a concept the author called "ecocide." He was relating the genocide of Aboriginal peoples to the pollution of their land base. The discussion centered around the 1990 court case Delgamuukw. He argued that the case asked the question, 'what if we had always operated from a nation to nation perspective?' If European colonizers had always treated Indigenous peoples as sovereign, colonial governments and resource extraction corporations may not have had such a free hand to desecrate entire river systems, etc. with toxic waste products. Maybe things might have been more transparent, and governments might have been more accountable, not just to the sovereign Indigenous Nations on whose land they are extracting resources, but to the rest of the citizens of Canada, who are, technically, the owners of Crown land. So Indigenous rights are ecological rights. Ecological rights protect the land and resource base for future generations, of people and animals and plants, of Natives and English and French and of all other immigrant groups. We all want a healthy planet for our children and our children's children.

The REDOIL article uses the term "climate refugees" to describe people who have lost their homes to the shrinking of the Arctic coastline. I suggest the term applies to all human beings and we all need to take action against governments and corporations who trample our rights as citizens. When I think of humans as "citizens" I'm mostly thinking about the social contract as Rousseau talked about it (or, about my philosophy instructor's modern interpretation). As I understand it, our constitutions are our social contract with our elected representatives. If the government breaks the social contract, the people (the "body politic") have the right to overthrow the government, as did our American neighbours with their Declaration of Independence. If governments and transnational corporations continue to disregard sustainability concerns, there will be no climate left anywhere. We will all be climate refugees.

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So now I'm starting to imagine what my own declaration of independence from a dysfunctional and destructive state might possibly look like - especially considering my socioeconomic status and my dependence on the state's economy to feed and house my family. I cannot, in one decisive move, reject the government and the social contract. I do not have the resources to 'create my own state' or to move to a more agreeable social contract. I can look at how to become more independent in providing my family's food, and other purchased goods. I can save up to buy land and animals. Yet I will continue to pay taxes, I will continue to receive Canada's redistributive payments, like pensions and EI, the Child Tax Benefit and the provincial Childcare Subsidy. My husband and I will continue to have jobs. We can't extricate ourselves entirely from the social contract.

This leaves me thinking of how I can then participate in altering the social contract, modernizing it so that I can agree with it, accept it. I don't know if that looks like changing the Constitution. That's not something we've been very successful with here in Canada, despite several attempts. But what about expanding representative democracy so that more people have access to the political process? I had a sociology prof once who talked about direct democracy being more possible in our contemporary times because of the availability of the internet. It's an intriguing notion, but I would just be happy if I felt my vote actually counted towards the governance of my country and province. Right now, with the first past the post system of elections we use, I have never voted for an elected representative in my home riding. My voice has thus never been heard in any legislative body, and that defeats the purpose of a social contract, in my opinion.

That leaves me in an interesting place of knowing I have rights, but of not being able to exercise those rights to protect what I feel is most important. It's a place of questioning, of wondering how to go forward, of wondering how to make a difference. It's uncomfortable, but it's a good place, because it's filled with possibilities.

I love you, Grandma

2009-12-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

My Dad just called. His mom, in Ontario, passed away about 2 hours ago. He's flying back east tomorrow.

He was crying. Even at 34 years old, with all my counseling training, it still seems scary when either of my parents cry.

Now both of my grandmothers have left this world. Now neither of them are in pain anymore. Death is only hard for those who are left behind.

Economies of giving

2009-12-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to work out some ideas related to a paper I'm currently writing for my Politics of Multiculturalism class. I'm writing about Indigenous issues and Multiculturalism policy. My thesis is that Multiculturalism policy erases Indigenous difference and colonial responsibility for our history of genocidal policies, and is therefore a pretense of inclusion for all Canadians.

I've got numerous sources, all which have some really great points, but I've got to relate it all back to Multiculturalism as a policy, and I'm having a hard time doing that. I have some sources related to legal cases and to the Constitution, specifically the Charter, however, I'm at that point in writing out my ideas where it expands waaay beyond the limits of the paper and the thesis. I want to argue about Indigenous sovereignty. I want to bring in a whole bunch of quotes from George Manuel's 1974 classic, "the Fourth World". I want to talk about parallels to other indigenous cultures, such as the Maori and Aboriginal peoples in Australia, such as Palestinians in Israel. There are, of course, many excellent parallels, but I'm having difficulty in tying it all back into Canadian Multicultural policy.

I've got stuff to say about official and academic discourse, and about arguing from a standpoint, i.e., rejecting the traditional Western view that knowledge is objective and the knower is irrelevant.

I've got stuff to say about grassroots organizations and solidarity movements.

But what I really want to say, is the way we are doing it is WRONG. I really want to say that Western culture, "white" people, European colonizers, (whatever term you want to use for us) are destroying this planet because somewhere along the way we decided there wasn't enough. Not enough land, not enough food, not enough resources. We decided it was a competition, with winners and losers. And we were WRONG.

According to one Indigenous writer, Aboriginal communities had economies organized around GIVING instead of taking. And it worked. There was enough. No one was rich, but no one starved, either. THIS is the fundamental distinction between Western and Indigenous values/worldviews. It's the difference between TRUST and FEAR.

Incidentally, this is also the distinction between radical unschooling and the public school is best mindset, a mindset I really struggle to resist. Because it feels like, if I just give and give and give, no one will give back to me, and I will get used up. Maybe that's the fear of international colonizers, that if we try to shift our way of being in the world, we'll be consumed.

I want to get these big ideas into my paper, and still link it all back to Multiculturalism policy. Right now that is occurring as impossible. And it's due today, at some unspecified time, via email. Time to "eat the frog".

happy birthday baby brother

2009-12-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

Today was my brother's 10th birthday, and we drove out to Mission to my dad and stepmom's house to celebrate. I am 24 1/2 years older than my brother. When my dad called me to tell me my stepmom was pregnant, he asked if I was pregnant, too. Just because he thought it's be cool if his son had a niece or nephew who was older than him. That's my dad for you :)

Lately (since this past summer, so 6 months or so), my brother has been... annoyed? that he has 2 older sisters (Me and my sister who is 16 months younger than me. So, really, we're more like aunts). He wants to be the oldest. He's been pretty rude about it, too. My brother lacks social graces.

One of the cards my brother received mentioned that he'd be a teenager in just 3 years. My stepmother blanched. She is not quite ready for her kids to be teenagers! She said she misses having 2 year olds.

I, on the other hand, do not miss having babies or 2 year olds. I have been loving having 4 to 7 year olds, and I particularly love the stage my little sister is at right now, at age 8 1/2. I have been thinking a lot about having another child, a daughter, something that I've wanted since I had my son. Now, I'm not so sure. By the time I graduate and have worked long enough to be eligible for an EI maternity leave, my boys will be about 10. Do I really want to have an infant and two 10 year olds? Somehow, I think I won't want to go through the baby stage again, complete with an inability to communicate except through crying and tonnes of dirty diapers. However, we certainly won't know until we are there.

Lately I've also been thinking that I'll either have none, or I'll have two. I think children are better off with sibs who are close in age, who are peers. I mentioned this to my husband, and he said, "let's have none." I don't know how I feel about this, part of the reason we got engaged was because he was open to having more children. However, I have been joking about how I'd really like to have a 5 year old daughter right now, to go along with my two 7 year old sons.

on Christmas, and giving

2009-12-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

Christmas is fast approaching. The season of mad purchasing and greed is upon us, and my children are being swept away along with all their classmates. My son wants an iPod from Santa. Silly me, a couple of years ago, when I was feeling a little more flush than this year, post-wedding, I gave him a Nintendo DS and told him Santa's elves made it. Now he thinks Santa's elves can make him an iPod, and that price is, therefore, no object. Oh, the crazy lies I make up to create a little childhood magic.

We need to keep it low-key this year. I am at an all-time financial low, having spent the majority of my student loan on my mid-September wedding. Normally, I have enough cash set aside to make healthy VISA payments, as well as manage the first month of the next semester's rent. (Canada student loans don't pay out until the first day of the semester. This year, that is not until January 11th.)

So we've opted out of the adult portion of my hubby's family Christmas draw this year, leaving only the kids to exchange gifts. And we are only buying for our kids and my dad's kids, who are 8 1/2 and 10. We also normally buy gifts for my 2 sisters, my mom, my dad and stepmom, my hubby's mom and my (no longer) stepdad. Also, we are not buying gifts for each other, beyond the usual stocking stuffers.

Hubby works at crappy tire, and a couple of months ago, the display models of the Dyson vacuums were sold at an incredible discount. Hubby could not resist. We got a Dyson slim for $150. I believe the regular retail price for that item is over $400. So that is our Christmas present to one another. (Worth every penny. We vacuumed with our old canister vacuum one day, and the Dyson the very next day. The canister FILLED UP with hair and dust!)

So we've pared down our list and we're making do with the decorations we already have. We'll likely skip hosting a holiday meal, complete with a turkey, thus saving at least $100. The adults in our family are very content to lower our expectations. However, the children do not quite get it.

This is because I have always loved the magical quality of my childhood memories, and I want to recreate that as much as I can for my kids. If that means convincing them Santa is real, then so be it. However, this year we have also begun to talk a little about the baby Jesus, and the true meaning of Christmas.

Now, I am not a religious person. I am culturally Christian, in that I celebrate Christmas and Easter, but I could never call myself a Christian. For starters, I don't know if I believe that Jesus actually existed. Is there archaeological evidence to prove it? I'm not certain there is. Secondly, as a teenager, I was quite interested in Paganism and the celebration of the seasons according to my Celtic heritage. There are a lot of remarkable similarities between the Pagan solstice and Christmas, most importantly the birth of a god. Finally, I was taught to meditate by my father when I was very young, and he introduced me to Swamis and gurus. He even once suggested that the three wise men who visited the baby Jesus were East Indian gurus. The idea that Christ is the only pathway to God strikes me as arrogant. To me, Christ is a very important spiritual figure, a prophet amongst prophets, but no more. To me, he is not a god. Certainly, he is the son of God, but only in the same sense that you and I are all children of God.

Yet, still, Christ is an important spiritual figure. He preached compassion and infinite responsibility. He counseled non-violence and pacifism - as I understand it, when he is quoted in the Bible, saying "turn the other cheek," it wasn't just to turn away from violence, it was to offer up the other cheek for a second slap. Because what you resist will persist. However, if you let it be, it will run it's course, and then disappear.

I've been reading "The Fourth World" by George Manuel, of the Shuswap Nation. Aboriginal peoples have traditionally honoured giving as an important way of being. Manuel wrote that, if an Indian went hunting for a deer, he would have already earmarked each part of the deer for people in his community. The hunter himself would only keep the neck, the worst part. Everything else he would give away, knowing that someone else would have earmarked a choice piece for him at some point in the future. This was how people gained status and power in Indian communities (he used the term "Indian" - the book was published in 1974). This was why the potlatch was so important to Aboriginal communities of the West coast. To Aboriginal peoples, acquisition of goods and resources was just not done. You shared. With everyone. Always.

So we are talking about compassion, and what that means. We are talking about how it is better to give than to receive, and what that means. These are big, difficult concepts for my 6 and 7 year old boys, growing up in a Westernized, consumer culture, being working class in a middle class community. Heck, they are big concepts for me!

beyond adoption v. abortion?

2009-12-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

So lately I've been thinking about adoption and abortion, mostly in reaction to a few posts from Kim, the inadvertent farmer. It started with this post on the stillbirth of her twin daughters, continued with this post celebrating adoption, and culminated in this post advocating for adoption over abortion. I felt inclined to comment on the last post. It was a very lengthy comment, practically a blog post in itself. I think the main thing that bothered me was the implication that women who choose abortion over adoption are somehow being selfish.

I can, of course, understand Kim's point of view in advocating for adoption, however, I can also understand many women's need to avoid the shame and social stigma of an unplanned pregnancy. I have a problem with the idea that it is a woman's mistake, her poor judgment, that has put her in this position. As an unapologetic feminist, I need to say that men must be equally implicated. Further, I need to say that it is unlikely that women will choose adoption over abortion while our society continues to shame them.

I think that what's important to me in all this, is that there are children available for adoption, but they're not all babies. Sometimes they have special needs. Lots of them have been through the child protection system. However, the focus on advocating for adoption was to compare it to abortion, thus, on newborn babies. And the focus in the comments was on unplanned pregnancies and shame.

But what about adopting a 7 year old who has been permanently removed from her parent's care? What about 5 kids, aged 10 through 3? What about the 2 kids with FAS? Who wants to adopt them? Some people do, but not as many as those who want babies.

I just think advocating for adoption is more than advocating against abortion.

done and done... one more to go!

2009-12-01T01:11:00.000-08:00

Papers, that is.

Yesterday I wrote a Statutory Interpretation paper for my Legal Knowledge for Social Workers class. Sounds so high-falutin' doesn't it? Yup, I was given a written scenario about a marriage, it's breakup and some weird happenings in each partner's new relationships. Then I was given a series of questions pertaining to the legal issues of said scenario, and I had to answer them, giving direct reference to statutes. Statutes means government Acts. Like the Family Relations Act and the Mental Health Act. They're online. It was windy yesterday. My internet connection was flickering in and out like a guttering candle. It was very annoying, being so dependent on technology.

Today, for my Social Work Practice with individuals class, I met a classmate on campus and we went to IMS (Information Media Services, I think?) to record ourselves role-playing two different scenarios where one of us is a student social worker offering counseling services. It was supposed to be 20 minutes. Mine was 11. Hope I don't loose too many marks :S The I came home, watched the DVD I made, and then chose 5 minutes of the role-play to transcribe and "process record." Not that I'm sure of the meaning of that, but it was the name of the assignment and all. It took 2 hours to transcribe 5 minutes. I have to learn to type with more than two fingers on each hand.

Then we took the kids to floor hockey. Then we came home, hubby made dinner (pancakes and bacon, he needed my help. Sigh. Why aren't men taught to be more self-sufficient? But I digress), and I began writing out my reactions and reflections to every comment made. As well, I was to describe the skill used to support my intervention. I was intervening. Doesn't that sound intrusive? "Hey, your life's a mess, let me tell you how to fix it, lady!" Okay, it's only terminology, that's not how I'm taught to act or treat clients :) But the whole process was unnerving and uncomfortable.

But, yay, I'm done! I just have to proofread/edit any rough patches in the morning! And then it's off to my Political Science class for an exam review, and later to Legal Knowledge for more exam review and to hand in that paper. Then, first thing the next morning, I'm back to hand in the process recording and DVD of the interview. Gulp. I hope I do alright :)

Then the Political Science paper's due next Tuesday, and both of my exams are the following Tuesday. That brings me to Dec 15th, and the beginning of my Christmas vacation! It is extra long this year! I don't go back to school until Jan 11th! That's a week after the kids start back! I'm gonna be able to be a stay-at-home mommy for a few weeks! I really need this break.

Now that those two papers aren't looming on the horizon, I can see the end, and I'm starting to feel less exhausted, just writing about it :)

crisis line

2009-11-26T13:39:00.000-08:00

wow...
I just got home from my first volunteer shift since July at my local crisis line. I am feeling emotionally drained. I think I'd forgotten how overwhelming other people's emotions can be at times. I took 5 calls in total. The first two and the last one were from callers contemplating suicide. The first two were from the same man, he is a regular caller, and is not seem as being high risk. The other caller was a new caller, and, beyond the suicide and the crisis that preceded her feelings, also had a lot going on in her life, in her past.

Sometimes I feel like I do as much as I can for these people, offering to listen and to be empathetic, but sometimes it just doesn't feel like enough. My task is to help them restore their own ability to cope, in the moment, and to offer referrals to community resources as appropriate. Sometimes, though, I want to be able to do more. I guess that's why I'm studying social work - so that I'll be qualified to help people over the long term, to offer interventions that, over time, actually make a difference, and maybe improve the quality of life the client is experiencing.

However, it is important to recognise that there is only so much I can do, and that what I am doing DOES make a difference, even if only slightly. I felt like I was able to help the last caller, even just by giving her a phone number to help her find a GP. However, I don't feel like I helped the first fellow. He just wanted to know how to die and said that no one would tell him how. He's depressed, it's not like Sue Rodriguez or anything, where he's fighting for the right to die with dignity. He just feels like a burden to his family. We talked about how to get through a given period of time, but he didn't seem to want to try anything, other than lying on his bed and crying. That kind of hopelessness/helplessness is so hard for me to be with, to empathize with in a meaningful way, without wanting to make some glib comment, like pull yourself together for your family. (Not helpful!)

So, despite feeling unsettled, unfocused and out of sorts, I am choosing to congratulate myself for being there as much as I can for these callers, and I am going to breathe, and do the dishes. Maybe then I will be able to focus on writing my research papers. (Next week is my last week of classes for the semesterand I have 3 papers due!)

more on teaching and learning

2009-11-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote about what teaching is to me. It was mostly in response to this radical unschooling notion that teach is somehow a bad word. The following was a comment on that blog post:

"But you aren't teaching if a kid is thirsting for the knowledge you impart...that is responding to that child's drive to learn....you can't "teach" a child whose brain is not there yet...it's developmental...one can't want to learn to read unless one is ready to read...and every child is different...."

So, firstly, I'd like to say that I'm not talking exclusively about children learning. I'm also including my own present experiences of being a 34 year old undergraduate student. I love learning, I love education. I plan to work in my chosen field for maybe 5 years, and then return to the ivory tower to earn a masters degree. I will graduate in a year and a half, which will make me about 40 when I plan to earn my MSW. I can also see myself pursuing a PhD. I can also see myself teaching at a college or university one day.

It's not just children who are learners. We learn all of our life, from formal academic teachers, from our bosses at our jobs, from workshops or conferences we attend, from our fellow employees, from our friends, from our relationships, from our children, from life. Education never ends.

Secondly, I'd like to respond to the statement, "but you aren't teaching if a kid is thirsting for the knowledge you impart."

This is, I think where I differ from the radical unschooling perspective, and I think it's a philosophical difference, that is, a matter of opinion, rather than truth. Or, that there are multiple truths out there, and no one has a monopoly on truth.

I say you can't teach anyone unless they are thirsting for knowledge, child or adult. It's like the axiom, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." But why can we not consider the leading to be teaching? I think this is a distinction, a truth, shall we say, that I will never understand.

Perhaps the distinction really is between being and doing. Perhaps these radical unschoolers are rejecting aspects of the doing of teaching, the rote, mechanical parts that sometimes occur when the teacher is not inspired, when the teacher is not being teacher.

Often, when I find myself struggling to understand something (and, like Werner Erhard said, understanding is the booby prize!), I often find myself turning to the dictionary, thinking, "just what, exactly, does that word really mean?

So I'd like to share something from my dictionary about the word teach:

To impart knowledge by lessons; give instruction to: to teach a class.
To give instruction in; communicate the knowledge of: to teach French.
To train by practice or exercise.
To follow the profession of teaching.
To impart knowledge or skill.

synonyms: Teach, instruct, drill, educate, school, discipline, train and tutor mean to guide in acquiring knowledge or skill. Teach is the most comprehensive word; it embraces all methods of imparting knowledge, information, guidance, counsel.

And then from my dictionary about the word learn:

To acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, practice, etc.
To find out; become aware of: to learn the facts.
To commit to memory; memorize.
To acquire by experience or example: to learn bad habits.
To gain knowledge or acquire skill.
To become informed; know: with of or about.

Nowhere in any of these meanings can I see the suggestion that teaching cannot happen, that it is only learning that is possible. Thus, I will continue to reject the rejection of the verb teach. However, in no way am I suggesting that you can force a child to learn something s/he is not yet ready to learn. What I am suggesting is that, if there is learning going on, there is also teaching going on. If the child is not learning, then the teacher is only trying to teach, and s/he is clearly not succeeding.

Finally, to look at the argument of development, it is abundantly clear that development happens in distinct stages. For example, the normal range for a a child to learn to walk is 9 to 18 months. That is a huge range. Consider, too, that not all children fall into this "normal" range. My son, for example, never really bothered with crawling. He went from rocking on his hands and knees to couch surfing to walking at 8 months of age. He learned how to crawl, he just wasn't that interested in it, preferring to be upright as soon as possible.

So, yes, I can clearly see that some children aren't developmentally ready to read until they are 8 or 9 years old. But what I don't see is that those children cannot be taught to read. I really think there is a distinction between reading and walking. As a species, we have been walking for far longer than we have been reading. Also, there is only one way to walk - standing up, on your feet, placing one foot in front of the other - but there are many languages to learn to speak and read. I really don't think reading is something that can be learned spontaneously, I think someone has to tell the learner what these symbols we call letters mean. Even if that only consists of reading aloud to your child while they look at the written words, you are still modeling reading in a way that the child is learning to associate a specific sound with a specific symbol.

I'd like to end by paraphrasing something from the Bible: "give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime." Can the man learn to fish by himself, can he teach himself to fish? Surely he can. However, if someone else teaches him to fish, might the process not be expedited? Might he not struggle frustratedly with just how to cast the rod, if someone explains the process, guides his arms, watches him practice and corrects mistakes in positioning, etc? I certainly would prefer to not reinvent the wheel, which is why I seek out teachers.

what teaching is to me

2009-11-19T13:47:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about what a teacher is to me, and why I value the role a person assumes when they take on the mantle of "teacher." I have always admired teachers.

These are the thoughts that come to me when I think of a public education in BC: My sister is a teacher, my stepmother when I was a child is a teacher. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I have admired several of my teachers. In first grade one day, they were testing the fire alarms, and I was terrified and crying. My teacher held her hands over my ears. I particularly liked Mr. O'Malley in grade 6. We had Russian penpals. My 10th grade English teacher made Shakespeare come alive for me. Not all of my teachers were great. Some were just okay, and some I didn't like at all. Like my 9th and 10th grade French teacher, who didn't seem to enjoy teaching.

This is also something I've noticed over my long and convoluted college career. My father pointed out to me that some profs are good teachers, and I should keep trying to take their classes if I could. My Social Work School has as many sessional instructors as full time instructors, and I really notice this distinction amongst the sessionals, who are professionals in the field with a masters level degree who teach one or two courses a calendar year. Some are excellent teachers, some mean well. The teachers that are excellent you try to work with as often as possible. Like my favorite political science dept prof, Rita Dhamoon. She has a PhD, she writes articles and speaks at conferences. I've taken a class in Gender/Feminist POSC, and I am currently taking her Politics of Multiculturalism class. She invites us to be radical, to deconstruct ideas and theories, to look at what's going on underneath. She is so inspiring!

But this is just the pathway to what I'm trying to distinguish. Teach is an important word, in my opinion. But I have noticed this thing in radical unschooling where people don't like to use that word. Like it's a bad word. Like learn is so much better a word. For example, I was reading a thread in a forum on radical unschooling, and people were discussing late readers, kids who were 8 or 9 who couldn't yet read, or at least not at the level that they were interested in reading. Kids who would get frustrated and stop trying. Some people commented that their kids didn't get reading until about 9 or 10, and one person said that by 15, the kid was reading at a college level or writing a story or something, and not to worry. However, there was this other element in the thread about how one girl was so frustrated, and her mom kept telling her it was like riding a bike or learning how to walk, that you couldn't be taught to read, your brain had to be ready and then you'd just get it. And another person commented that maybe the mom thought she could teach her to read and so she was subtly getting some message, but the mom said that wasn't the case, she truly believed she could not teach her daughter to read.

I don't get it. What do you mean, you can't teach someone how to read? Maybe I just truly have no experience with people who are not natural readers? I was chomping at the bit at the beginning of 1st grade. I couldn't wait to learn to read. I could probably have learned to read at 3 or 4, if I had been taught. My kids are like that too, both my son and my stepson. Natural early readers. But teaching was a big part of that - learning the sounds of the letters, learning some basic phonetic rules so you know when to use a hard vowel or a soft vowel, the teacher reading to the learner, moving your finger along under the words as you read, etc. Isn't that teaching someone how to read?

I guess I should explain what a teacher is to me. A teacher instructs you and drills you sometimes, yes indeed. But a teacher is also a mentor. A teacher requires compassion, an ability to see the world from another's perspective. A teacher is someone who creates a space for the learner to step into. A teacher holds that space, a space of the wonder and joy of education. So a teacher may not do anything, because it is about who the teacher is being. A teacher is passionate, inspired, a person who can communicate the joy of learning, of knowledge, and who can pass the flame to the next generation.

So this is why I feel that teach is too important a verb to dispense with altogether, despite any possible negative connotations it may carry. Because it is so much more than those.

some more thoughts on unschooling as elitism

2009-11-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a few blog articles (and their comments) that discuss the distinction between teaching and learning. As I went to find all the links, I found a new post which contains all the links, and a chronology of the discussion. I wrote a comment on on of the blogs, mainly discussing my distaste at some radical unschooler's choice to not use the word "teach". I wonder, why is "teach" a bad word? It's not that the writers had poor arguments, rather, they were coherent and well expressed. But I can't escape the feeling that it is somehow an elitist perspective.

Like I expressed in my last post, which has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost 3 weeks, I wonder if the unschooling phenomenon is something that is only available to a small proportion of our global population. I wonder if it is a distinctly Western, middle class phenomena. It may not be exclusively Western, but my only exposure to unschooling has been through Western technology, and so that is all I see. However, when I think of my social work education on Aboriginal issues and history in Canada, it's pretty obvious that indigenous peoples were "unschooling" their kids before the Indian agent came along and forced their kids into residential schools. Thus, if North American Aboriginal peoples were unschoolers, it seems quite likely that other tribal peoples were, too. As well, when I consider public education's history, I realize it hasn't been around all that long, and we must have been unschoolers before this time, unless we were aristocrats who could afford private tutors (still not "school").

But I also wonder, what makes the public school system so untrustworthy? While waiting in a doctor's office yesterday, I read an article in a Canadian parenting magazine discussing the route public education is taking in Canada (I felt this to be false terms of reference; the federal government is not involved in education, it is a provincial matter, and it thus varies across the country). One thing the article discussed was a classroom in Ontario where the kids were able to choose their own method of learning on the teacher's topic. I think it mostly referred to social studies and language arts, because the example referred to either writing a letter to the editor or creating a poster, among other options. Still, in the 6 page article, I did not find one reference to my own province, BC. Regardless, the article did say that the days of teaching to the middle of the class are gone...

But what does it really take to be a homeschooling/unschooling parent? For one thing, money. Money to have one parent home with school aged kids, all day, every day. Sure, lots of unschooling moms talk about the sacrifices they have made to live on one income, but are they the same sacrifices a low income family can make? Or is that low income family already making those sacrifices, just to pay the rent and the bills? Many Canadians have to choose between paying their rent and buying food. Suggest to those parents the option of taking their kids out of the public school system which would require a stay-at-home parent and see if it's a viable option for them.

So, while unschoolers quibble over the connotations of the word "teach," I wonder, does it really matter, as long as there's respect, as long as there's choice? Although I'm certain unschooling is the way to go, and I really wish I had the financial resources to make it a reality NOW, I can't help but wonder about the inherent elitism in a system that is only available to those who can afford it. That truly goes against my values of freedom, equality, liberty and justice. On that list of my personal core values is education. So many revolutionaries have written about the importance of education in achieving freedom. How does one educate the masses in order to assure they can reach for freedom, if not in the public system? I'm still reading Paolo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed," maybe I'll have some answers when I'm done.

Socialism, anti-colonialism and unschooling: a revolution for the elite?

2009-11-17T12:47:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I read this post
Then I wrote the following comment:

This is a fantastic piece of writing, filled with amazing, subversive thoughts, especially when your sister is responding to the person who believes that if everyone was unschooled, it would unbalance our current society. Now, wouldn't that be a marvelous thing?!
I am a 34 year old social work student and mom to my 2nd grade son and my 1st grade step-son. I am teetering on the brink of taking them out of the public school system for exactly the reasons your sister discusses. While I agree wholeheartedly with education as a value, and as a necessary component of freedom, I am coming to see public education systems as an element of oppression and government/elite control of "the masses."
However, I balk at seeing sinister intentions in individual educators, just as I balk at seeing myself as an agent of social control as a future child protection worker for the provincial Ministry. Rather, I see myself as someone who will have the power to advocate for social change on behalf of vulnerable persons/groups. I see myself as an agent of social transformation. Because of this, I do somewhat hesitate to outright reject the public education system. If I am not a part of it, how can I participate in its transformation? However, this is a philosophical standpoint that must give way to the practical needs of my kids.
The kinds of thoughts you (and, in this post, your sister) articulate are thoughts that I didn't have words for until I began studying social justice in my 30s. To think that my children could also be as articulate and radical as teenagers, rather than simply rebelling against claustrophobic parenting and learning environments, is inspiring.
For me, the only reason my kids are still in public school is related to my socioeconomic status as a student. My husband and I do not have the income to pay for the necessary childcare while I am in classes and on practicum. Then, once I complete my degree, in 2011, there will be a significant debt repayment, and I will likely be working up to 40 hrs/week.
Unfortunately, I need to rely on the free childcare the public education system provides for the time being, unless I can work out something else to provide for their care. Regardless, if I cannot find some way to manage in the near future, as soon as they are mature enough to be home alone for stretches of time, they will be able to leave the public education system. No way will they have to go to high school :)

I've been thinking more and more about the points I made regarding who I see myself as being as a social worker: as a space of transformation, as someone standing for a new possibility. Especially when I consider that my clients will be involuntary. Then I've been thinking about those future clients, and their socioeconomic status. Most of them will live in chronic poverty. Many of them will be single parents or aboriginal peoples or immigrants. Most of them will not be middle class. Most of them will not have the choices I have, despite my own state of (temporary) poverty.

When I think about this, I realize that unschooling is likely an option only available to a small percentage of parents, especially when considering a global context. I realize that the majority of children who have the opportunity to attend public school, to be educated, are privileged, by global standards. This makes me think deeply about my longing to unschool my children. As someone who considers herself a feminist, an anti-colonialist, a socialist, I wonder, am I being hypocritical?

That is, am I espousing something for my family that is elitist, and out of reach for most people? This goes against my personal and professional values like social justice, liberty, equality, democracy.

on the joys of sending my children to public school

2009-11-06T11:11:00.000-08:00

Oh, the joy...
The learning support teacher at my son's school just called to ask for my help in trying to motivate him to do his work... he just doesn't want to do it. I am at a loss, I "motivate" him through our attachment bond, I'm not supervising between 10 to 20 other kids at the same time.

Meanwhile, my stepson's teacher, who corresponds via email with all the parents of her students, shared some information she learned at a talk during a professional development day in October. The speaker was a "brain based learning facilitator" She shared some of her notes, including the following gem:

Children have to be constantly learning. If they are not learning their brain is not growing. Give them chores. Penitentiaries are full of people who never had chores.

Perhaps it's time to review my text and notes from that 2nd year Psych class I took on Cognition, but aren't we ALL always learning? Isn't that just the way our brains work?
Another lovely gem was the following:

Never allow children more than one hour of t.v. or video games a day, it "rots the brain" with electronic sedation. The flashing pictures take away your "captain", your thinking brain and cause mental passivity and lack of creativity.

So, I'm imagining the "captain" she is referring to is our frontal cortex, home of "executive functioning" (to use medical and psychological lingo). From what I've learned through my university studies, executive functioning is a part of "meta cognition" i.e. thinking about one's thinking, or even just a mental awareness of one's own thoughts. She offered to share the resources he provided, and I'm all over that. I'd like to see the studies/experiments that came to these conclusions - because I don't buy the hypothesis.

From my own experience, the "flashing pictures" on the tv screen don't really prevent ME from thinking. Why, just the other day I was watching the 'boob tube' (as my mother called it while I was growing up), and I saw a commercial protesting an upcoming 'tax' on local tv by the big American networks. My immediate thought was, "why is this important news to us mainstream North Americans? Why don't we care about 4th world (a term taken from George Manuel's 1974 book on the realities of being a stateless nation within a colonial country bound on assimilation and cultural extinction) issues, Indigenous issues? Why are we protesting the rising cost of tv, rather than America's Imperial wars, or the political hypocrisies in many African nations? I could go on, but my point is, I kept thinking, despite those flashing lights. Maybe that's because I have a mature brain, and kids are incapable of this because their brains are still developing, but I certainly watched a lot of tv growing up, and my brain works...

And I really fail to see how the "flashing pictures" of video games prevents my children from thinking. Don't they need to utilize problem solving skills to get past each obstacle? They can't continue to do the same thing over and over and expect different results... and, of course, they don't. They try something else, or they ask my husband for help.

In reply to my email requesting the references she had offered, the teacher wrote the following:

He said that they use very fast moving stimulus to cause the thinking brain to shut down. He said any child watching/using more than an hour a day was also susceptible to depression. I also saw the good things many children miss when they spend great amounts of time at the t.v. or computer, developing oral language, problem skills, socializing.

I recently posted some unschooling resources on video games being GOOD for your brain on my Facebook page, starting with Sandra Dodd's website. (The first link no longer seems to take you to the article, unfortunately). A good friend commented, saying that her son, who attends a French school, learned to read English in kindergarten by playing video games. As well, most kids I know use video games to socialize. They play the games together, they talk about the games together, they help each other out when they get stuck.

And the point about being susceptible to depression... yeah, I think depression is a BIT more complex than that.

Regardless, she writes that I am doing a good job with my stepson, and she is really enjoying having him in her class this year. However, I let that kid play his Nintendo DS for hours all weekend long, simply because they want to.

on "random"

2009-11-04T16:55:00.000-08:00

My son has lately been having a love affair with the word "random." He's not really sure of what it means, but he mostly uses it in context, and I haven't been able to clarify it any better, as "random number generation" is a little beyond his conceptual abilities. But, he has been "randomly" choosing chocolate bars from his Hallowe'en stash, and I'd say that's a pretty accurate usage :)
I must say that word more than I realize.
I love precocity.

on resentment

2009-11-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

I am reading an amazing thread on the Radical Unschoolers Network that started out as a discussion called "children 'need you to make choices for them'" and quickly morphed into some fantastic insights by some extremely articulate individuals on moms resenting doing chores. Also discussed are conventional parenting and subsequent 'withdrawals' by the parent, used later to 'bargain' for a behavioural change in the child. Below are the excerpts that speak to me the most:

"Conventional parenting wisdom -- which is the parenting most of us are familiar with -- leans toward getting the child to see the error of his ways. To the child that feels like the parent saying "I don't care what you want [the reason for hitting]. I only care what I want [to make you stop being bad].

Unschooling wisdom would, of course, stop the hitting, but focus on finding a better approach to help the child get what they wanted that caused them to hit. (Even better is being present to reroute situations before they get to the hitting point.)

Most people reading don't know that. Most people are reading to find ways to control an action. (Because, without realizing it, that's the foundation of the parenting they've always known.) It's not easy to turn thinking around. It's hard to let go of the need to punish a child for wrong behavior. It just feels wrong.

We can work at understanding how our kids see the world so that we avoid acting in ways that feel different than what we intend. We can't be perfect, but we can be better and better with awareness. So a lot of discussion has a foundation of helping parents see that kids are reacting rationally to the situation the child perceives, even if the parent thinks the child is being totally unreasonable."

"How do people perceive love? That's an important question to think about. Specifically, how do the other members of your family perceive love? That's more important, in terms of you showing them love, than how you perceive love. One way to communicate love is by doing things for others. When my partner brings me a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, or cleans the kitchen right before I come home from work, he's expressing love to me. For awhile he was all wrapped up in a recording project and stopped bringing me coffee in the morning - I had to consciously remind myself that it wasn't a deliberate act of love-withdrawal on his part, but it hurt my feelings a little, anyway.

I don't expect my kids to have that kind of understanding, yet, though. Heck, some adults don't have that kind of understanding (one of my coworkers suggested I withhold sex in retribution, for instance). So I try to be very careful of things that could seem, from another's perspective, to be acts of love withdrawal. Today, for instance, is the day of my dd's birthday party. She's 8, her actual birthday was yesterday. But she wanted everyone in the family to say: "Happy second day of your birthday" today. We all did (some with prompting) because that's important to her. It helps her feel loved. If one of us refused to say it, for whatever reason, she'd feel less loved today, regardless of any of our actual feelings."

I've found myself feeling very resentful of late. Much of it is tied up with money, specifically our lack of it, due to our recent (mid-September) wedding which included approximately 100 guests and cost a 'pretty penny.' However, much of it is also cultural, and I have been feeling this resentment for 7 years, now. I am an individualistic white North American. I often feel constrained by the role of a parent, the need to continually give and give and give to my kids. The words, above, often help with this. These writers points of view soothe me, make me feel like it is all manageable.

But then I compare my husband to the second writer's partner, and I feel jealous and angry and resentful again. My husband works 40 hours a week in retail. He is constantly on his feet, he does a lot of heavy lifting, and he is constantly having to cater to the demands of a public who believes that "the customer is always right," despite the fact that corporate law suggests corporations have far more power than people in our society. He commutes by bus, which often takes an hour and a half to travel what is normally a 30 minute drive.

I, on the other hand, do not have a regular job. I am a student. I commute twice a week, in my car, to a campus about 45 minutes away. There, I participate in stimulating courses of my own choosing, and I work minimally as a research assistant, less than 10 hours a week. The rest of the time I spend at home, reading, writing papers, and researching interesting ideas. Still this is draining work. As well, it is expected by my professors and the institution that I will spend 2 to 3 hours studying per hour of class time. That puts me to about 30 hours a week, all of which is extremely draining. Intellectual work is still work.

Plus, I am primarily responsible for the children, for all driving (my husband doesn't know how to drive), errands, grocery shopping, cooking, bill paying. I am responsible for most of the cleaning. My husband is responsible for doing the laundry, yet every week I have to ask him to do this, and then I have to remind him to take the clothes out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer. If I don't remind him to take them out of the dryer, they will sit there for days.

I feel like a domestic slave, and thus I feel angry and resentful. I feel that my academic pursuits are not considered as valuable as a "real" job. I feel that my real value is tied up in the domestic, unpaid labour I provide for my family.

I want to be able to approach this without anger and resentment. I want to come from nothing, so as to create a solution that isn't transactional, that isn't based on bargaining and withdrawals. So far, the only thing that works is to express my frustration and resentment and leave it with the kids or my husband. I usually see a difference for a very short period of time (a week with my husband, maybe an hour or so with my kids). They get it in the moment, however, they seem unable to maintain this.

This is an uncomfortable place for me. I want to be valued, and I want compassion. I want my family to demonstrate their love for me. Instead, I have to operate from the knowledge that, despite their actions, they do love me.

Still, I wish I could go on strike.

The "third shift" of parenting

2009-11-02T09:11:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about my experiences of public school as a parent. In that process, I remembered a piece of writing I did for my "Sociology of Families" class last fall and decided I wanted to post it here. It is academic writing, and so it refers to a few textbooks we used during the course, and to several academic sociological theories, however, I think it's still quite understandable to the average reader:

October-28-08 The "third shift" of parenting

My first grader is having problems at school. He disrupts the class. He doesn't complete his assignments. He lies down regularly on the floor. He has a great difficulty when required to attend to lessons. His teacher communicates with me through penciled notes in his planner. She asked me to speak with him before today's field trip. After the field trip, she wrote he "wandered from the group many times." As well, he's "still having difficulty with writing" and she will "be keeping him in at recess to see if this helps to motivate him." She then wrote that he was under his desk, which, when we discussed her note, he adamantly denied and then began to cry.

The teacher is quite experienced and, during a conference we had three weeks ago, stressed positive interactions and multiple modes of learning. However, my son is young for his grade; his birthday is in mid-November. I am concerned that this teacher has expectations for his behaviour that are developmentally beyond his mastery. I also think that recess, and running around, will improve his executive functioning, and therefore his control over his own behaviour. I want to be able to teach him some self-managing techniques, such as twiddling his thumbs while sitting in a group on the rug (which he reports she vetoed), but I have been unable to observe the situation, and thus to suggest appropriate interventions.

As a result, I've been spending time researching children's behavioural issues at the expense of my university studies. As well, I've added a half-hour on to our morning routine to wake up earlier to chat in bed and to be less rushed when getting out the door. This is after altering his bedtime last month, at the teacher's request. Now, I will be spending an hour and a half at my son's school tomorrow, in the middle of the morning. As well, I suspect I will be instituting a half-hour of study time in the evenings. Finally, I am looking into piano lessons for my son, as my research suggests this may contribute to the development of attention span.

These are excellent examples of Hothschild's "third shift" of emotional work to compensate for the time crunch of the first and second shifts of work and household and family labour (1989, 1997, cited in Ranson, 2007:77). Hothschild argues parents must manage their home lives as efficiently as their work lives, but by doing so, something is lost, and must be compensated for. This is the “third shift” of nurturing modern parents take on to compensate children for the time crunch.

My experience as a working mother reflects this, but it also reflects Lareu's middle class pattern of "concerted cultivation," which involves promotion of children's talents and abilities, but usually through “financially expensive” and “labour-intensive” means (2002, cited in Ranson, 2007:76). This middle class pattern, however, is not, for me, matched by a middle class income, as I am a student and a single mother. Thus, my financial resources are strained, and I take on the burden of providing such cultivation less through participation in paid activities like lessons and sports teams, more through my own, individual efforts. This requires efficient time management, as in the “second shift” of family labour, which then leads to the compensatory “third shift” in order to maintain the experience of myself as a “good mother” in an ideological sense.

It is a year later, and I am no longer the single parent of an only child, but rather the married mother of two. However, not much has changed in my experience of the public school system, and the need to experience myself as a "good mother." Despite this, I have discovered the concepts of radical unschooling and non-coercive parenting, so I waffle back and forth between "concerted cultivation" and "deschooling," where I let my kids spend their weekends doing whatever they like, without trying to direct their activities or limit their choices. If they want to play DS all day, I let them. After all, my husband spends his days off from work parked in front of the tv, why should there be a double standard? My husband, not quite understanding the philosophical underpinnings of my new parenting attitude, attempts to set limits on their video game playing time, to which I suggest he's being somewhat hypocritical. He's getting there. As am I. This is not an easy transition! We are working against generations of conditioning, where children are to "be seen and not heard." Bizarre. Developmentally inappropriate.

radical unschooling and a public school education?

2009-10-23T16:19:00.001-07:00

Is that an oxymoron? A contradiction in terms?

Well, I'm trying it out ;)

I've found the blog of the most amazing young woman, Idzie, from near Montreal, who is unschooled. I want my boy to turn out as cool as she is! She calls herself, among other things, an anti-civilizationist. I'm not super-clear on what this means, but it seems to be based on the premises that civilization is unsustainable, i.e. too many people living in the same places to provide enough food, and that civilization thus requires violence to secure enough food for it's citizens.

From my studies of oppression and marginalized social groups, especially the Indigenous peoples of North America, I'm inclined to agree, at least as a hypothesis. I want to read more, of course, but it reminds me of the readings I was assigned when I took an upper level philosophy course in applied ethics. We studied Liberalism, Libertarianism, and what my prof called Democratic Cultural Pluralism, for which we read selections from Iris Marion Young's The Politics of Difference. Young advocated for recognition over redistribution, arguing that one cannot redistribute such goods as respect and opportunity, exactly what is missing for marginalized people. She also talked a lot about regionalism as a form of political control, which reminded me a lot of the way First nations groups in BC have been negotiating self government.

But I digress. I want to raise curious, thoughtful children, critical thinkers who can deconstruct any opinion, value, attitude, political philosophy or policy. I want to raise radical thinkers, committed to getting to the root of social issues who are not content with a shallow life of media consumption. I am committed to authentic social justice, to the transformation of our political relationships, both locally and globally. I am not yet suspicious of the public education system, as are some of the radical unschoolers I have read on the internet, but I am very aware of the history of institutionalized oppression.

As I ponder what it's going to take for me to be able to walk away from public school, I think more and more of my own schooling. I've come to realize that I never liked school. However, I have always been extremely intelligent, and a voracious reader. I love education, learning, knowledge, wisdom, and I always have, but I felt both squashed and exposed in school. I think I am finally, after 15 years out of the public school system, 4 years of aimless, part-time college studies, a year of fine arts, childbirth and motherhood followed by 3 years of focused, full-time university studies, starting to really, truly enjoy my studies. I want to pursue graduate studies, maybe even law! However, I still struggle with anxiety, perfectionism and procrastination around my assignments, so I have a ways to go, yet.

But my boy, oh, I don't want him to have to deprogram himself the way I have to deprogram myself. I've been saving for his post-secondary education with an RESP since he was a couple months old. I want him to want to use that money. I don't want him to stress, to feel panic about exams, to write papers the night before they're due. I want him to be a true scholar, naturally reading and writing and exploring. And I'm starting to be convinced that the only way to achieve this is unschooling.

(I read on the internet about an unschooled 12 year old who was attending classes at Malaspina, a college on Vancouver Island. He got an A+ in Philosophy 100. He felt that high school students were treated like prisoners, whereas college students were treated like customers, free to leave if the class wasn't interesting. Good point.)

But I read on a radical unschooling message board that this is more than theory for education, it's a theory for parenting in general. Treat your kids with the same respect you'd treat an adult. What a radical concept, considering there is still a legal defense to assault of one's children in Canada. (You just can't hit them on the head, or with an object.) The post said that a child could be unschooled and go to public school if said child chose public school of his/her own volition - the key, according to the poster, was coersion.

However, my children do not choose school. It is childcare for me. Ugh.

university news

2009-10-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

I've recently been hired in a work-study position with my department, the School of Social Work and Human Services. I am a research assistant on campus, I work from 5 to 10 hours a week, from the beginning of October to the end of April. The job itself isn't particularly thrilling, I'm updating the department's policy manual (I was a little slow with applying, due to getting married and all). However, it's a great job for me; I can really use the extra cash, but I don't have the time to commit to even a part-time job - who wants an employee who only wants to work 8 hours a week?

My school is a very small one; there are so few BSW students that several of their upper level courses are only offered once a year, even once every two years. This gives it a cozy, close-knit feel, which I am really enjoying. However, sometimes things seem a bit too casual, like with my job. I don't really have any supervision, and I'm kind of making things up as I go. This isn't all that bad, I'm good with ambiguity in general, and I'm really great at creating structure (I am not very good, however, at maintaining structure!)

Case in point: the professional association for social workers for my province (BCASW) is having their annual conference in November. There are some really fascinating sounding lectures and workshops - one about sex workers, and their current Constitutional challenge before the courts, another about migrant workers and their quasi-legal status and lack of rights. I registered for one of the two days at the beginning of October, at the early-bird registration deadline. At this same time, the social work student association (SWSA) put out an email offering to sponsor students at the conference. I sent in a letter of intent, expecting to hear something back, but didn't.
Until today, that is, when I got an email from the BCASW. It was my official receipt for the moneys covered by the university!

So now I guess I see if I can get my money refunded?

UPDATE, Oct 28: So today I finally called the Association office to ask about a duplicate registration. The person who answered the phone looked me up, and found only one registration in the system - the one from the student association. I then clarified that I'd registered by phone, and she double-checked - yes, indeedy, they had charged my credit card $75, which will be refunded to me. Yay for being proactive!!

Farmer Boy

2009-10-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

I passionately loved all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books as a child. I remember 3rd grade recess and lunch periods spent sitting in a bathroom stall, reading away. Recently, my boy, who just started 2nd grade, has been studying pioneers. They went on a field trip to Fort Langley, and they're reading Little House in the Big Woods. So I borrowed Farmer Boy from the local public library to read to the boys at bedtime.

That was Saturday. I read the first two chapters to my boy on Saturday night. Step-son wasn't interested in giving it a try, so he read himself a Pokemon story.

(I'm sick of Pokemon. I thought it was high time we read a new chapter book. My boy and I read Stuart Little, Charlotte's Webb and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane last year, and he enjoyed them all, and I enjoyed reading a true story, written by a true writer with a voice and a style.)

Yesterday was Sunday, our lazy, do-nothing-for-the-whole-morning day. The boys played video games, and I read Farmer Boy. The WHOLE thing! I devoured it. I want to live on Almanzo's father's farm!!! What an amazing place, what a wondrous lifestyle! Everything was hand made. And the containers and dishes they used! Bushel baskets! Six quart pans for milk! I want them! Cellars for storing potatoes and apples and carrots and corn and salt-pork and flour you grind yourself! I'm totally enraptured.

I can't wait to re-read ALL of these wonderful stories.

thinking more and more about unschooling...

2009-10-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

Can I be a radical unschooler if my kids go to public school? I know I'm certainly giving it a try.

I do my best to allow them unlimited access to video games, although I have been known to make them go outside after 6 hours of uninterrupted DS time (and a few tears because SOMEONE was too busy playing to notice he'd been up for 6 hours without eating! Bad mom, I MADE him eat - he devoured his pb&j sammy)

I've been trying out the "strewing" concept - I took out a bunch of cool-looking books from the public library, books they could've cared less about while we were there, but which they've been loving at home. They took out Pokemon books, I took out an atlas and some joke books and a book about the history of hockey (to read with dad) and Farmer Boy. They love the joke books. One out of 4 ain't bad, eh?

I'm practicing saying yes. I'm practicing letting them do things I REALLY want to say no to. It's hard. The other night, my step-son wanted to sleep without his shirt on, and I made him wear it. Our house is old and poorly insulated, therefore cold at night. Step-son tosses about quite a bit in his sleep, usually kicking the blankets to the floor. He had a cold - sore throat and sneezes, so I explained that I worried he would be very cold in the middle of the night, which might make his cold harder to get over. This is a great example of the dictatorial, coercive style I'm trying to learn to let go of. It's hard.

I so want to keep my boy out of school with me. I could do it, this semester. But, come January, I will be doing a social work practicum - 3 days a week, plus one day on campus, maybe two, depending on the scheduling of the other courses I need to take. Out of pocket child care expenses for that are prohibitive - we are broke, heavily in debt, and we can't subsist on my husband's income now, let alone paying 5 times as much for daycare.

Add to this, I don't really want to keep step-son at home. He exhausts me, and I just don't love him as much as I love my boy. And I'm coming to terms with that. He's lived with us for 2 months. My boy has lived with me for 7 years. I'm realizing that it's normal, and it's okay for me to love my boy more, just as it's normal and ok that my husband loves his son more than mine.

But still, I'm frustrated, and I wish it was a perfect world, where I had the financial support I need to eschew this whole public school thing.

if I was one of those religious freaks...

2009-10-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

...I would be saying that G-d is calling me to homeschool my kids. But I'm not a capital C Christian, I'm a bit too prosaic to really believe in a Deity who takes an active interest in His creation, nudging them this way and that. Don't get me wrong, religion is cool, and all, but I like my gods abstract. I don't want my god to tell me what to do, already :)

But really, most of the blogs I've been reading lately are those of homeschooling women. Hint, hint.

And a lot of my university readings discuss oppression - the bread 'n' butter of a profession committed to social justice. Today's assigned reading for my class, the Politics of Multiculturalism (government policy since the 70's here in Canada, the first country in the world to make it official) is the opening chapter of Paulo Freire's classic, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).

Pedagogy, of course, is the science or art of teaching, the theory of how to teach, but it also has connotations of conceit; a pedagogue is a pedantic, narrow-minded teacher. (You've gotta love the circularity of dictionary definitions. Pedantry is an ostentatious display of knowledge, an insistence on the importance of trifling points of scholarship, from the Latin paedagogus. All definitions from Funk & Wagnall's Canadian College Dictionary, 1989.)

But The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is about the struggle for justice and equity within the educational system. The first chapter explores the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer. Friere, like Fanon, cites Hegel, and ventures into ontological discussions of freedom and humanity and authenticity. However, so far I've been finding his analysis to be somewhat analytical. There is a dialectic between the oppressed and the oppressor, just as between Hegel's master and slave. But this duality, this opposition between the two keeps them separated. Who is the oppressor, in my reality? Am I the oppressor, a white descendant of European immigrants living on the stolen land of the original inhabitants of this continent? Or am I, a working class woman, a former single mother, a student with a significant debt, the oppressed?

Tied up in all of this is my role as a parent. Am I the radical parent with no rules, no rewards and punishment schemes, who follows, rather than leads her child? Or am I the oppressor, disciplining my child by yelling, forcing him to attend an institution he hates, telling him he has to fit the mold?

Add to all of this the fact that my son's teacher called today after school. He missed recess, lunch and art, if I remember the conversation correctly. This was because he passively resisted doing his work. He just sat there. His teacher doesn't understand his motivation. She is institutionalized, obviously, as she can't see that my son is resisting being institutionalized himself. Does this make her the oppressor? Am I the oppressor for continually requiring that he go to school?

If I had the resources, I tell myself, and others, I would homeschool my son. But we live on just my husband's meager salary from his retail job. I receive student loans each semester that I attend school. I'm creeping up towards $45000, with two more years to go. I don't have the time to spend being his teacher, I need to focus on my expensive education. If I take him out of school, do I lose my government funding for after school care? Besides, now there is my stepson. How can I take one child out of school and leave the other? How can I carve out the time to teach two rambunctious boys, to teach myself to teach them, and to study for my own classes - up to 30 hours a week.

If I was really one of those religious freaks, I'd be praying to win the lottery, or for my husband to miraculously double his salary...

But I don't really pray.

Aaak!! And now September is over!

2009-10-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

(as an aside, the Aaak!! in my title totally reminds me of Bill the Cat from Bloom County (? - the one w/Opus the penguin). My dad loved it when I was a teen)

Once more, a month has escaped me without a blog post. I'm supposed to be loving this. It is supposed to be my writing lite. As in not heavy-duty theoretical, as in not centered on social justice, or politics of identity/difference, as in, no heavy reading before-hand.

But then, silly me, I had a wedding. With a hundred guests. A HUNDRED!! I didn't really realize I knew a hundred people, as I'm a bit of a hermit, mostly just hangin' with the fam' - the ones who live in my household, and my folks, mostly. But, honestly, almost all of those 100 people were family. My husband is the youngest of 10 kids (neither Catholic nor careless, as the saying goes... mama had two families, the Laroses, 4 kids, then the Reeves, 5 kids, plus a foster brother. Gosh, brave mama, I certainly couldn't see pushing that many babies out of my body, yikes!)

It was a lovely wedding. We managed it all on a 'shoestring' budget - over 5 grand. Kinda makes my frugal heart sick to think of all that money spent on ONE day (it wasn't all our money, my parents paid a lot, and Ryder's dad bought a bunch of the booze). But this one day wasn't really about Ryder and I, or even us and the kids. It was about family. It was about community. It was about being together as one very large, brand new family grouping.

We invited one of my mother-in-law's cousins that no one really knew because her side and mama's side of their family had been estranged for years, and they were just now getting back in touch. How lovely to be able to host her and her hubby and grandkids. She asked to invite 2 of her 3 grown sons (who weren't able to make it), and we, of course, said "YES!" Cutting costs was about doing it ourselves, not cutting the guest list.

So, despite all the perfectly valid and reasonable reasons to NOT have a big wedding, I'm really glad we did. I'm really glad we created such a wonderful experience for our families. There were about 25 little kids there, one of the biggest highlights of the day for me. I'm sure I could say this better, and more theoretically. In my speech, I mentioned post-modernism, and I could go on at length here about that, and feminism as well, but I'm just happy to get a little loose, flowy writing out without worrying about my grade - now, on to the heavy reading - 2 hours with 12 pages, yeee-haw!

Oh, yeah, and so when does this feeling married thing kick in? (wrote that on Facebook, and stepson's mother told me I'm broken, which pissed me off, because she's the one who doesn't love her son - who's broken, b!tch?! - sorry, sometimes even social workers need to vent)

August is over already?!!

2009-08-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

I can hardly believe this looong month has really come and gone so quickly. We have been quite busy preparing for our upcoming nuptials, less than 3 weeks away. As well, my fiance's son has been settling in with us. The boys have bunk beds, and they switch from top to bottom every night :) It is certainly hard to believe school begins again in a week. Back to the routine of early mornings without TV, DS or computer. Back to no peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.

de garden...

2009-08-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

... is coming along nicely. De laundry, not so much :)

I am in the process of a crop rotation. The brassica bed is bolting in this heat, I simply can't keep up with the kale and chard and broccoli it is producing. The spinach and lettuce that were in there have long since gone to seed. Likewise with the peas - we simply planted too many in too small a space, and we can't get to them all, they can't be properly staked, and the few bush beans are being crowded out.

So, the brassicas are being cleared to make way for a few successions of fall carrots and beets (maybe onions and radishes a little later). Some peas have been pulled for now (but not all) to make room for the better-staked varieties and for the beans (pink and edamame), as well as to clear room for fall brassicas (more cabbage and broccoli, as well as cauliflower and maybe Brussels sprouts).

The fall peas may need to wait awhile, as I'd like to put them in the bed that is currently home to cosmos, zinnias, dahlias, asters, nasturtiums and sunflower seedlings, all planted in hopes of mid-September blooms to grace my wedding reception tables. I will start some peas in pots and transplant them into that bed when the flowers have been harvested.

The tomatoes are sort-of doing something. Despite an early start, they weren't doing too well in the bed they were transplanted into. The soil wasn't up to snuff. So we ripped them out, improved the soil, and started again with the other seedlings that hadn't made it into the garden due to space limitations. So we currently have small plants with very few flowers, and even fewer tiny green tomatoes. We are planning to build a 1"x1" frame around them and wrap them in poly for the fall in hopes of getting vine-ripened tomatoes. Usually, we get only green tomatoes, which we ripen on newspaper in the basement.

The squashes, in the new beds, dug out of a shady area of our lawn by an over-zealous house guest, are beginning to take off - they've started to climb in search of sun. First they twined up a dwarf Alberta spruce right beside the bed, and then a ladder left leaning up against the shed beside the spruce. Okay, my sissy actually wound them around the ladder - she likes the way it looks :) We got our first zucchini yesterday - better later than never!

P.S. I think I will add some photos, but a little later, when sissy and her super-cool camera are around - mine takes sucky pictures in comparison.

On taking on loving another child

2009-07-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

When I last wrote on this blog, I was concerned about how having my stepson come to live with me might affect my plans for maybe homeschooling my own son. I wrote that his step father ignores him, but his mom was awesome. Because, hey, he's her kid, right?

Turns out, not so right. Mom admits to me she doesn't love her first born the same way she loves her 2 year old with hubby. She hates herself for it, but there it is.

I just don't get it. However, I was not a teenage mom. I never considered adoption at any point, let alone when my baby was a few months old (even though that was his screaming, colicky stage). I WANTED my child. I still do. When I see him sitting on the couch in the living room, staring intently at the TV or his DS, I am overcome with a desire to kiss his cute little chubby cheek over and over again until he pushes me away in annoyance.

My stepson has never had that kind of love from his mama. That breaks my heart.

I am a fierce, warrior-mama, I would walk through fire or throw myself in front of a car to save my child. I completely identified with that woman who leapt between her two year old daughter and a cougar a month or so ago. I think being a mom and raising my kids to be strong adults, full of integrity and compassion is the best, the most important and planet-altering thing I'll ever do, no matter where my career in social justice takes me, no matter how I advocate for children as a social worker and maybe a lawyer, no matter what comes after that.

What it comes down to is that I am experiencing a moral dilemma, a conflict between my personal and my professional values. Personally, I think there must be something wrong with a woman who can look at one child and feel love, and then look at the other and feel nothing. Professionally, the principles of self-determination, autonomy, dignity, respect, and human rights, the worth of ALL persons, are being challenged by her lack of feeling toward my husband's son, toward her own flesh and blood.

But if I am to be a good and loving parent to my stepson, I cannot write her off as somehow broken, insufficient as a mother. My stepson deserves better than that. However, he also deserves his mama's love.

But he has mine, now, and I HAD been worried about when that would come.

On taking on another child and homeschooling

2009-06-16T09:17:00.000-07:00

As I wrote previously, my stepson, Nathan, wants to come and live with us. He is having a hard time at home with his mom and step-dad. They have a 2 year old son, and a baby girl on the way. Mom's awesome, but, hey, they're all her kids. Step-dad is not so awesome with Nathan. Mom says he ignores Nathan completely, spending all his family time with the 2 year old. Poor mom, over 30 weeks pregnant, thinks her son is getting depressed. He's 6. So once again, the conversation has moved around to Nathan moving from Kelowna to live with us in Surrey.

My concerns this time around are a bit different. I'm not as worried about my (almost) husband pitching in, as he's been making more than a little effort to pull his parenting weight. Plus, he (finally!!) got his learner's license, a small miracle in itself. Of course he won't be able to drive kids places without me for a year, yet, but it's a step in the right direction.

However, as I've also previously written, I want to homeschool my son next year. I'm very nervous about this - can I handle it? Will I be able to get all my own school work accomplished (about 30 hours of studying a week)? 6 year old boys want a lot of attention, which is, of course, normal and good, just maybe crazy-making for the parent who needs large blocks of time to focus on complex theoretical concepts, like what exactly is social justice, and what's the best solution to this ethical dilemma?

The latest news on the homeschooling front is that the 25 hours a week recommended by Surrey Connect and other Distributed Learning (DL) schools may not be so necessary. At a meeting of the Homelearners South of the Fraser (HLSF) that I attended yesterday, I was able to talk with actual moms who share similar child rearing philosophies to mine. Several of them have taken their boys out of elementary school, and haven't looked back since. One mom told me that at the 1st and 2nd grade level, approximately an hour a day would be sufficient. She had 4 boys that she homeschools.

Only one of the moms in attendance that day had worked while also homeschooling, and she has just recently had a new baby, so she is now on Mat leave. She had previously shared the schooling and childcare tasks with her husband, as well as her father, who was on EI for a year. As I was leaving, however, another mom told me they have a woman in the group who was a working single parent who, unfortunately, wasn't there that day. However, this group has a Yahoo group listserve, so maybe there'll be more information gathering opportunities throughout the summer.

The big challenge now, is do I homeschool only my son, sending my step-son to public school? Or can I manage to teach both boys? Currently, Nathan loves school, but he is in Kindergarten, and, according to the homeschooling moms I met yesterday, they all love Kindergarten. Also, what will his mom think? Do I get to make this decision for my step-son? (Really, the idea is that homeschooling is their decision, not mine, and I am being the good mommy who sacrifices her own time to meet their needs/desires. But isn't that what parenting is all about, anyway?)

As well, what DL do I choose? Apparently, a lot of them, like Surrey Connect, require weekly written reports on each student's progress, which some moms really resented. Another grading style is through portfolios, presented 3 times a year, which one mom said was always a horrible, stressful time in her home. Many moms had been registered through SelfDesign in Vancouver, which most really liked, but one didn't at all - her "learning consultant" (the teacher?) always found fault with her weekly written reports - the point of taking her kid out of school in the first place!

Also, the concept of unschooling cropped up in the meeting. The idea of spontaneous, non-coercive learning. It sounds fabulous, as a theory. But the thought of putting that theory into practice scares my institutionalized heart. Am I bad and wrong for not exposing my kids to the world of, "sit up straight in your seat", "stop wiggling, or you'll get a detention!", and "don't speak until you're spoken to, after raising your hand." Seriously. I'm so stifled, I'm afraid to not stifle my kids.

A lot to think about, indeed.

veggie garden in photos

2009-06-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

Picture One, the aerial view of the most established beds:

Here we have the brassica bed and the legumes bed.

I've got cabbage, kale and broccoli in there that I started from seed in my bathroom at the beginning of March. If you check out my previous post, you'll see a before-and-after picture of these two beds. In the before picture, all these brassicas are in the 4" pots. Now they are huge! and hopefully ready to produce soon.

The legumes bed contains several varieties of peas: shelling peas, snap peas and snow peas. There are also some bush beans (green and yellow wax), and some edamame - first year trying those, so we'll see how they do. I still need to do a second sowing of one (of three!) variety of shelling peas, as well as some pole beans.

Both beds are also home to lettuce and spinach and swiss chard, planted willy-nilly, wherever space allows. I also planted radishes at the same time as the peas - great as row markers, 'cause they come up so fast - but they're mostly done, due to the unseasonable heat the last few weeks.

Beyond the two beds you can see the space for the last bed in the original veggie garden, which is yet to be built or dug or sifted. The soil is actually quite compacted for now, but soon we will have carrots and beets and onions and leeks in there.

Where you see the 1"x1" will mark out the path, wide enough for a wheelbarrow. This bed is actually going to be divided up into two triangles. Should be cool when it's done :)

Picture Two, the aerial view of the edge of the established, center beds, and the yet-to-be-completed pepper and corn bed:

The edge of this bed is also on a diagonal, again for ease of walking/barrowing. We've decided that the two center beds are a bit big. That is, the path between the boxes and the neighbour's fence is too narrow - not quite shoulder-width. Next year we will move the beds back a few inches.

Picture Three, another aerial view - the new tomato bed with wee plants and the soaker hose that will be buried as the tomatoes grow and get top-dressed, and the corner of the yet-to-be-completed pepper and corn bed:

You can see the wee marigolds along the edge of the box. More will be planted into the tomato bed once they are top-dressed. We plan to go up almost to the top of the box, by pinching off the lower leaves of the tomatoes and burying their stems. Marigolds and tomatoes love each other. We are organic gardeners, and try to do as much companion-planting as we can manage/remember.

Picture Four, the new beds - tomato bed completed, nurse bed half-built and not yet dug up or sifted:

We've talked about some kind of temporary (as we are renters, and will eventually move) greenhouse structure here for a few years. We could use these two boxes as the base, and erect a poly-covered frame over top. Voila! Temporary greenhouse! (okay, maybe next year?) Of course, we'll have to move that comfrey plant, but for this year, we plan to just hack it down whenever it overhangs the tomatoes too much - the leaves will them be used as a high-nitrogen fertilizer - comfrey tea!

Picture Five, the other side of the garden:

Most of these beds are new. The strawberries were in the main veggie garden last year, but were moved to this expanded perennial bed in May. Behind the strawberries are a couple of sad roses, a burning bush and a few ground covers - the original plants in this bed. We also planted some horseradish in here. This is a bad picture, taken through my living-room window. Those are not rocks on my lawn, but sun spots on the glass.

There are wee squashes coming up from seed in the other two beds and a sprinkler hose running through it all. We like automatic watering systems, and are working on our own jury-rigged system. However, timers are expensive, so it's not yet automatic.

We also planted raspberries and two blueberry plants this year. We planned for rhubarb and asparagus, but I couldn't find any asparagus roots in any of the 5 nurseries I visited in late April/early May. I figured I was too late, so that will have to wait for next year (once again - I've wanted an asparagus bed for YEARS, especially considering they take 2 to 3 years to get established).

The state of the garden

2009-06-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

This was my garden at the beginning of May. It usually looks like this in early spring. We always have good intentions of maintaining a winter garden, totally possible in southwestern BC, but the previous few winters have been COLD and snowy. Record-breakingly cold. So the frost and snow killed the swiss chard and most of the leeks, and the lettuce, which I started from seed in late Sept/early Oct didn't do anything.

The contraption on the right is a soil sifter on a stand that my sister/roommate made. You are looking at the back of the sifter. It is designed so that a wheelbarrow can be wheeled underneath the mesh. It's very handy, although not super-sturdy, as she whacked it together quite quickly (My sissy's a handy girl, we jokingly call her the "man of the house").

Every year, we sift the soil, digging a little further down and mixing in copious amounts of topsoil, manure, peat, etc. Every year we "rotate" the "crops" we grow in a 4 bed rotation. This year, we decided to box out these 4 beds. We also decided to create two new beds, one for tomatoes, and one as a "nursery" bed - where I intend to start my fall and winter crops from seed in July/August. So far, so good, but maybe we're too ambitious? We have completed 3 of these 6 beds. Still, I love my veggie garden.
This is my garden today. In fact, it's almost the exact same shot!

thinking about homeschooling

2009-05-05T15:14:00.000-07:00

I'm just ending the very short break between the winter and summer university semesters, and as usual, my son's first grade teacher has complaints about his behaviour. His last interim report, dated April 24th, includes the following comment: "writing challenges prevail. Rory's behaviour continues to interfere with optimal classroom learning. It also hampers him from developing classroom friendships." The following week, he was sent to the principal's office for touching another boy's 'privates' in class - Rory was trying to get the boy's attention. The other boy was listening to the teacher. The principal was great about it and felt it was more about attention than anything sexual, however, this learning environment doesn't seem supportive enough for Rory's emotional and behavioural needs. So I've been researching home schooling options for next fall.

There are so many great options out there! BC purportedly has the best home schooling laws in North America. I would go with Distributed Learning, which isn't actually homeschooling. Rather, it's distance education with Ministry-approved curriculum and a teacher. There's a program in Surrey that could include Fine Arts, PE and music instruction through Jessie Lee, one of my local elementary schools. There's a Fraser Valley school that also does this, but in Chilliwack and in Langley. Also, this school allows the parent to work with the teacher to alter specific elements of the curriculum according to the family's interests. There's an independent school in Victoria that sounds amazing, they incorporate a program on local biodiversity and global sustainability.

My main concerns are around my own time and education. Will I be able to study 20 hours a week, on top of facilitating Rory 20-25 hours a week and attending three 3 hour classes? Will I be able to maintain some form of childcare subsidy, so as to be able to afford child care while I'm in class, maybe even some extra study time? Will my childcare provider be able to accommodate these new, strange requests? Will I be able to motivate my child? Can I manage this all? Will I burn myself out?

But, really, if I could ever manage to carve out the time to home school, this is the best time. I've only got 2 1/2 years left of school before returning to the full-time workforce. I haven't been working since last summer, and I've been able to manage, financially. I have an extremely flexible schedule and a lot of family support. I'm envisioning incorporating piano and painting lessons, and doing lots of cooking and gardening together. I'm hoping to utilize elements of the "unschooling" philosophy and to blend our daily activities plus my own university activities into Rory's home learning experience. I'm excited!

longing for the garden...

2009-03-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's been almost 2 months since my last post. February has come and gone, and it is almost spring. However, the weather doesn't feel like spring, or anywhere close to it here in the Pacific Northwest. We have had crazy weather, wind storms and rain, mixed with snow and hail. March is certainly being a lion.

I hope I'll be able to plant some seedlings in the garden by the week of April 1st, only two weeks away! I started some cool weather veggies in peat pellets a few weeks ago, and they're straining for light. I hope the weather cooperates. If not, I guess I'll have to transplant them into 4" pots, and pretend I'm working out in the garden. I've got some broccoli, cauliflower, kale, peas and lettuce started. I can't wait for June.

here I am! you found me :)

2009-01-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

Like I mentioned at my old blog, I never cottoned on to the old name, so I decided to shed it like an outgrown shell.

In my first post there, I write that blogs about frugality were my favorite, and that I might write about that topic. Now, my favorite blogs are Chickens in the Road and the Bloggess. Just because I like to mix pictures of goats with the nuttiest stories you've ever read. Sometimes I spit on the screen.

I also noticed that most of my posts are in the "social justice" area. That is, I usually tag those posts as such. I don't really write about frugality per se, I talk about gardening, including, in season, my vegetable garden, which produces well, and so that is frugal, but I don't tell you how to be frugal. I just talk about my garden, sometimes. I'm thinking about my garden these days. But winter has only just begun, so it shall be awhile before I get to garden again. Next year I'll have broccoli and stuff still going, I'll bet.

Really, I think I'll talk about a lot of that other stuff in the subtitle, under random musings... since that's what I wrote about on the other blog that I hope to be able to import over here one day... It's not working for me now :P

The computer interface, the internet, is such a strange phenomenon. I was in my early 2o's before I used it overly much. Now I don't go a day without going online, and sometimes I'm online for hours. But who am I when I'm online? Am I different things to different people, depending on how well they know me in 'real life'? I think so.

Lol, thank you, oh wise professor, oh guruji.