A Fine Line

So we had the Halloween parties all afternoon on Friday, the kids went trick or treating on Sunday and now I hear some neighborhoods are doing it again on Thursday evening? Do we think kids aren’t enjoying their childhoods or something? This gets to be expensive for people. That’s why I just walk the dogs between five and seven. I must say I wasn’t the only one gone Sunday, either. Home Depot was full of people with no Packer game to watch, passing off Halloween on someone else in the family and I‘ve never seen so many people walking behind their usually homebound family dogs at the dog park. I understand. It’s not that much fun to sit at the front door waiting for kids who you’ve never seen before, who are standing with their uncomfortable parents or weirder yet, were driven over to your neighborhood and dropped off at the corner. Poor Lake Drive. I know lots of our future who tell me they go there because they get big candy bars.

I saw about four teenage guys sitting at the bus stop with their bags of candy and very lame costumes. They were going through all the free stuff they managed to scare people into giving them. Who is going to tell four fourteen year olds, they don’t get candy? Kids are huge these days. They might come back and take revenge.

I was thinking of using my old tactic of putting an empty candy bowl on the front porch with a cute sign that asked the children to “Take just one, please”. Then I thought of giving out everything I plan to take to Goodwill, or put a used book in everyone’s bag and watch the smile disappear. One of my students told me that last year I said I was going to give out toothbrushes. This year I just crossed a big ladder over my front steps. I’ll bet no one even looked to see if I had fallen off it and was lying dead in a basket of the neighbor’s mini Hershey bars.

Let’s all put a fork in trick or treating and if we must, do it at different times throughout the year on dates known only to the people in the neighborhood. If word gets out early, the day is automatically changed to the next day. If football size boys come to the door and they can’t tell you the name of a sixth grade teacher at Lake Bluff or Atwater well then sorry, Buster. Give them some aftershave and send them on their way.

When something is so hopelessly broken don’t bother trying to fix it. Hit it over and over again with a sledgehammer until you kill it. Only then, can we truly start all over; that is if we want to.

August is available…

I wonder if parents know how much teaching time is wasted on Halloween. Sure, it’s fun and all but it is a real drag on momentum just forming around this time of year. It is probably most intrusive with the youngest school kids. It seems by sixth grade, walking around school in a plastic painted bag with lipstick on has lost its luster. They just want candy.

This year, it is particularly glaring. Halloween used to be on October 31^st. Through the years, the 31^st has become the day adults celebrate Halloween and kids do it the Sunday before. This year, the schools are having Halloween a whole week early--tomorrow, the 24. Why? Because people have come to expect schools to take care of this Halloween for them.

People may not understand that for elementary teachers, Halloween starts around September 15, at least as a main topic of conversation and excitement. Some classrooms begin to make masks or decorations or Halloween stories or something so everyone has at least one thing (sorry Jehovah’s Witnesses) Halloween. The orange and black paper stock is depleted by the 10-15 and gone after the 20^th. Even teachers who swear they aren’t going to let the class get distracted for a whole month give in when the time comes. We’ve traditioned ourselves into it and now we can’t let go. We’d feel too guilty.

Aside from the zany classroom atmosphere, there is the day itself. Some parents send costumes still in the plastic bags. Others send kids with a make-up supply thinking we can apply it at a convenient time, which is never. One year we had a kid come to school with his packaged get-up. Two of us teachers spent almost half and hour trying to get the blood circulating around through the tubes in his costume. It was clearly a dud, but this child really could have used the positive attention this horrible costume would have given him. It had its own parade in the sink at the back of our classroom. One child devastated.

We also have to pin skirts up, hair dress, apply face paint, make masks fit on faces so little that no elastic will hold it anywhere but around the hopeful neck of that poor kid trying to hike up fabric with one hand while pushing that mask up with the other.

There are always parents who come to help and far that we are truly grateful. They bring the kind of enthusiasm dressers should have on this day of days. Teachers just want to get it over with.

In the future, if trick or treating falls on a weekend the Friday before which is a day off school, please don’t do anything to accommodate us. Making sure children are trained in the traditions of non-nationalistic holidays shouldn’t be our jobs. If families want to have a Halloween parties, they should have one. Teachers, even those who teach the little ones, have enough to do trying to get through our curriculum requirements without giving up days for Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and even Christmas and Easter in some districts. I would, however, lobby for April Fool’s Day to be made a national holiday. That one, our school traditions have completely prepared us for.

Some fifth and sixth graders have been running an election over at the elementary schools. They elected party nominees, developed platforms, made flyers, had conventions, press corps, campaign managers and a videographer. They prepared a debate between the two presidential candidates with moderators and a quiet audience of about 100. The moderators prepared insightful questions and the debaters answered each one thoughtfully and respectfully. It was cute. This is, of course, how we have taught our students American politics works and sure enough, they believed us.

It was impressive to see all the participants taking their jobs so seriously. Of course, they had some realization that there wasn’t a whole lot their sixth grade nominee could do about healthcare, Iraq or taxes. It felt…well, good. It felt like the way things should be. I think all the parents and teachers who attended wished as I did, that this could really be how things go every four years. Certainly, there were great differences in the two parties and their platforms, but there was an air of class and respectability to the one-hour debate session as well as the leafleting, conventions and signage of each party. The framers would have been pleased.

I had no interest in telling them that this was a rather distorted representation of how things really work, that it was sort of the Disney version of American politics, and in order to have full understanding they would have to take off the mouse ears and shove them down the throat of their opponents. Wise teachers protected them from this underbelly of political life. Next to their assigned vocabulary list of words like democracy, fairness and respectability, their teachers did not make them include robo-calling, innuendo, mud slinging, voter fraud, or dirty politics. It would have been like hiring a monkey to throw *** around in the art museum, I suppose.

I hope for these students, that the air of politics they breathe when voting in their first elections is as fresh as that in this crowded, hot, wonderfully engaged, seriously lively classroom. If things aren’t as they experienced in this mock debate, I hope they work like hell to pull it closer to the memory. We may need a few more cages for the monkeys, but it will be worth the expense. Congratulations, kids; and teachers, you’ve given their dendrites great and noble connections.

Nice one.

Finally, we got to hear “I’m in the Money” on NPR this morning. The market has been treated for its bout of de-regulation. All this has made me realize how much money I don’t actually have. I was not the product of parents who talked about money. It was a secret. I guessed my dad, who was a physician, had a bit more than others because whenever I told people he was a doctor, they seemed to think me more friend worthy; but if we were wealthy, I wonder why we lived in that old duplex under the really loud Polish family of five. I’ve certainly never had so much that I’ve lost track of it.

I don’t understand money all that much more now that I did back then, but I get that a dollar is like a Warhol, it’s worth is only what people deem it to be worth. It is almost impossible to talk with young children about what is going on around them causing their parents to watch the news a little more, maybe be a little grumpier, and insist you eat at home instead of in the car on the way to someplace fun and expensive. As I have taken in the news this past week-and-a-half, I’ve developed my own glossary of words we hear from every pundit, commentator, moderator and politician as we ride this wave of Wall Street meltdown.

1. Wall Street and Main Street: These two labels, often said in the same sentence are juxtaposed to talk about places where guys sport monogrammed shirts with their actual initials on the cuffs, and places where the rest of us work.

2. Crisis: An event that happens to investors before they realize they should have made a plan for it.

3. Rally: This can be a verb or a noun. As a verb, it is that last little bit of energy to go to the noun version of the word, knowing there will always be someone there who will embarrass you incredibly by yelling out something stupid or low class when there is a break between words or sentences of the speaker.

4. Red Meat: This is what you throw at a crowd when you want to get them all fired up and ready to actually tar and feather the opponent. Maybe even tar, feather and then re-tar. Words like

5. Terrorist: come to mind. I’m not sure what the entire definition of terrorist is, but apparently you don’t actually have to do anything to be one anymore.

6. Junket: That’s like a field trip grown-ups take, only with massage oil, golf clubs, a smirk and an ass that should have been served to them on a platter, but was saved by the American people instead.

7. Fundamental Difference: This is what you say when you describe the contrast between what you believe and what that knuckle dragging idiot you are debating with thinks.

8. A Bailout: What we’re being told we’re not doing for investment bankers and Wall St. mucky-mucks. In other words, it has been elevated to “rescue” status, to make the guilty seem like victims so we’re more willing to chip in.

9. Gonna, nothin‘, lettin’, somethin’: What happens to some politicians’ vocabulary when g’s are all in foreclosure.

Now that we’ve gotten through the wannabe crash, the threats, brigades of white horses and one day of hope, I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that the price of gas is going down. But then, you don’t need to fill the tank just to go into the basement and play ping-pong again.

May the financial force be with you.

As we all go forward with more of a thirst for financial reassurance, we see the importance of teaching our children the value of a dollar as well as the risk and importance of stoking the furnace here, because it keeps a fire burning everywhere else. Still, in regards to the bailout/rescue, the knee jerk reaction on ubiquitous Main Street was to punish the rich and have a people’s uprising. Then 700 points of reality dropped on our kitchen tables right between the gas bill and the new car brochures. I wonder if people are talking to kids about this.

I think that in Shorewood, if we want to talk with our students about the whole economic mess we can take advantage of what I see as a wonderfully serendipitous art installation on the lower playground of Lake Bluff School. While it may just look like a huge pile of dirt, it is the powerful half of an artistic, organic art installation. It and the hole it came from should be shipped up to Kohler Art Center and be put on display next to the Rhinestone Cowboy's house.

Let’s say we change the name of “Capitol Drive” to “Ball Street” at least in front of the gentrifiable high school. We must understand that if they do well, we all do well. They get additions, we get free dirt. That’s how things work. We ought to be  excited about the truck dumps of dirt because they make our lives better. With it, we can fill the dips and holes that have made America’s game a bit like little league rice-paddy-ball after a downpour, and you have to appreciate the metaphorical value of the orange plastic fence corralling the dirt, thwarting any plans it may have to sneak back to the whole it once filled just a few blocks away.

I think we all learned a little lesson this past couple weeks. We don’t know much about the food chain that is our economy. We need to do better with our kids at home and in our classrooms. So teachers and parents, take your kids over and show them the hole where the new and costly stadium will be. Stop at the site and thank the ground that has been broken for the good of our village and its taxpayers. Imagine how home values will soar when people get a look of that! Talk about investment, gains and losses. Then go back to the fence and stand at attention as you consider all the things we can use leftover dirt for. Revel in the power of money. Teach its value, talk about priorities, necessities, need vs. want, show vs. substance and how to say the word no once in awhile. Then tell them that if they want to play on the dirt, they will have to pay for it.