Albert 2

Albert passed away on February 22, 2013.  After some weak days following his diagnosis, he "perked up" and ended up accompanying the kids, Tilly (the pit-boxer mix) and I on our prearranged trip back home to Washington.  He had some awful moments on the trip: cholla in his foot pads, a toe caught in the slider door, spraying dog diarrhea all over a hotel room, falling out of the van, looking embarrassed when I had to haul him back up into the van.  He just wasn't ready to go in the days leading to our road trip, though, resolutely eating all of his food and stoically reminding me that we had a daily walking date, even if it was only a few feet out the front door.

When we arrived at my mom's house, he happily received all manner of pats and hugs from my family, and promptly laid down.  After 1500 miles of indignity and an unknown amount of years of discomfort from his disease, he finally showed how tired he was.  I slept with my hand on his head for two nights, and he passed his last days hanging on his dog bed and thumping his tail at Grammy, KK, Shell, Bubba, the kids and I - it might have felt like old times if he could have just made it up the stairs.  On the second morning, he barely raised his head.

I was able to take him to the vet clinic I'd brought him to for all of his 12 years, and K, my cousin-the-vet-tech, was right there with us.  He submitted to K, the Dr.'s and my request to lay down on the linoleum (courteously cushioned by K) and leaned into me.  When the Dr. injected the last shot, he melted into my arms with one big sigh.  We all choked a bit on tears when Dr. voiced how perfectly he fell into my arms.  I held him for a while, hugged K, and waited to fall apart in the car.        

Educational Flailings

             So.  Here lies the remnants of the literacy project I started with my daughters during our "Home-school or Bust" experiment.  We write, we talk, we learn about publishing and writing forms, we communicate about our recent life changes and grow spiritually and intellectually as a result.  Right.  The tatters here somehow represent a great deal about the last school year, so I'll sputter a bit about my time as a "home-school mom".
             I am a teacher (on paper).  I finished my BA last spring and ground out a decent understanding of what it will take to do the job between student teaching and considerable practice in my previous job as part of a preschool teaching team.  I like to teach.  It makes me feel extremely relevant when a student grows, shares and expands their knowledge due (in part) to my efforts.  My early childhood education background moves me toward teaching learners to explore and teach themselves rather than direct instruction, and I thought I might be able to curb my kids' growing apathy toward school.
              My kids didn't, and don't,  buy it.  I am "Mom" plain and simple, and every effort I've made otherwise is futile.  When I began, I looked to projects and surveyed my kids' interests.  I pulled some standards for integration, checked out what they could already do, and encouraged them to "take off".  They didn't.  My oldest wanted to know the "right answer", my middle child became infinitely distracted, and my youngest threw himself on the floor and whined at any mention of school work. 
              I felt like a failure before the end of the first week, but I "soldiered on", hoping to find a spark within myself and the kids and fan the flames of education.  This was July of 2012.  We were vacationing with family before returning to the Seattle area to pack up and shift the whole enterprise south to Phoenix.  Kids start school early in Phoenix (Aug. 1st in our district), and I reasoned that trying half days through our summer would yield a "yes" or "no" to continued home-school and give them a transition cushion while we settled our new home.
           We are all students.  P's law school is what brought us here, and I enrolled at ASU to finish my Master's.  My vision included a mini-learning community, all of us whittling away.  I knew that math would have to be less aesthetic, and I leaned on my mom, a middle school math teacher, for resources.  By the end of August, the kids were sick of my instruction in math, and I battled my youngest daily to do anything.  I realized in horror that most of my motivating strategies were socially based, and I didn't have what I needed - more kids - to use what I knew.  Connecting through the Internet to other home-school families busted.  I am not religious enough or had the wrong-aged kids for the few moms who answered my online queries.
            Half defeated, I looked into an online charter school program.  They provided support and resources, and structured curriculum.  P remained leery of the local elementary school, and  we both wanted some freedom to travel with the kids during the school year.  I enrolled the kids after selling them on the idea.  My oldest complained that she missed WA daily and thought about trying a new, "real" school, and I felt the delicate balance between granting kids too much freedom in decision-making with their respected opinions.  We decided to give online learning a try.   
           The school sent books, DVDs, paints, science activities and a room's worth of other goodies.  Feeling more organized, we dug into it.  Using an online shell wasn't new to me, having had to fit my school around kids' schedules for the majority of my college experience, and I reasoned that the girls should learn to navigate a very modern style of learning and interaction.
           After each month, I evaluated, fought, cried and decided that the "pros" for staying with it outweighed the "cons".  I received the structure and differentiated curriculum I needed, but received a heap of standards-driven, skim-worthy learning days in return.  My kids still do not care at all about most of what they learn.  Initially, I set up their science and art activities to be as collaborative as possible - rescheduling so that all three were painting at once, or inviting the neighbor kids to assist in the construction of water filters or topographical representations.  I planned and modified their lessons, and engaged them in deep questions.
            We got caught up in a schedule, but under pressure to finish six-to-eight lessons daily (in a four-hour required attendance window in the case of the youngest) we all learned that we could slack.  We skipped math practice problems to get to history, made short cuts out of interactive activities and beat our heads against the wall and said, "forget it" when the computer or the server decided no to load their daily plans.      
            After a few months, I didn't care.  Laziness won out.  I focused on making sure the youngest could read and set the girls up to study at the YMCA as part of a "blended learning" opportunity for part of the week.  Some days they came home done with their 5-8 daily subjects, and some days they had hours of work for me to lead them through after getting home at noon, but they got to see some kids, and I got a few hours to work one-on-one with my "I hate school" youngest. 
             There is a helplessness that distresses me about my children at the same time that it drives me to over-scrutinize.  In the case of home-school, that war nearly broke me (and possibly them).  No matter how much time I invested in encouraging higher-order thinking or metacognition or interest in expanding their understanding of a topic, the inexorable pull of the next lesson coupled with a desire to "just be done for the day" trumped meaningful learning.  No matter how I phrased, taught or walked away, someone always wanted me to do their work for them.  It's not my work.  "Correcting" math tests, a process that results in a good grade for the kids, and a headache for me, began as a formative assessment, an opportunity to see where they had gaps and give them a mini-lesson over the missed problem; it turned into "uh huhs" that represented, "Ok, ok, I get it, can I turn it in now so I can be done?".
             I am so disappointed and scared for my children.  Like many parents, I feel the temptation to place blame elsewhere, but the "education" and "parenting" red arrow points directly, poignantly, at me alone.  I went from helpful mom/coach/patient lady to someone who can barely imagine teaching any kids after this year.  My children have been witness and catalyst to this devolution, and I can never apologize enough to them.  In the way that "getting it right" burned into my oldest, organization and completing projects skipped my middle one, and I couldn't undo it.  I hope that they are inspired elsewhere, or that by my not being responsible for every single one of their educational needs alone, they can hear me and get genuinely excited about something academic the way that I do (my middle will, I think, despite my flubbing this year).  Some of my dearest memories are thumbing through my mom's geology, astronomy and anthropology books when I was my girls' age and asking her a million questions about what she was learning at the community college.  I want my children to want to know.
               We finish up in five weeks.  This week is especially interesting because I have to drop the girls off at a testing site to participate in the AIMS.  Next year, they will attend a "brick and mortar" ("BM" as the online-learning-coach-mommies I've met sneer in reference).  I will miss them, but I will not miss the feeling of near-child abuse that "motivating" my son entails or the bored indifference of my daughters.  They are excellent students, amazing human beings and deserve the best out of life.  I know that that is not me.
           To my children, I love you and I am sorry.  I hope you will look back on the year someday and think of some of the good times we had.  To other home-school families, I salute you and envy the academic supremacy that many children gain from a good parent-teacher.  My kid were so sick of me by the end of the day that they often sped through their chores and locked themselves away from me for the rest of the evening (an awful, awful feeling).   
           To anyone who reads this, education is a partnership between home, school and the student.  We are all a product of what we knew before and the influences that surround us daily.  Support each other in this production, and please don't judge my future classrooms by my failed home-school experiment.  I only wanted what was best for my kids, and I had to modify what "best" meant daily during the last months.

                   
                      

Albert

I did not predict the rolls of fur we brought home that summer would turn into a junkyard dog.  Holding him, eying his Rottweiler mom, I tried to mentally blur an adult Shar Pei with her massive chest and flat head.  The best I could come up with was something between a rhino and a gerbil.  Mama-dog lumped along gamely while humans scooped up her surprise pups, and I wondered if she knew we were a much better alternative to the pound.  At least, I hoped we were.  We had our own surprise pup, then nine months old, and a fairly embryonic vision of our family life.  I half pleaded with Paul, taken by the rolls of cuteness and worry that the pup’s breeding wouldn’t garner many offers, and he conceded and mentioned training him up to be my guard dog while he was on deployment. 

Albert, or “Fat Albert”, “Albert Einstein”, “Albus”, “Albie” or “Asshole”, grew in sync with my marriage, my babies and my heart.  I tried many times to figure him out as he growled and embarrassed one minute, then cuddled protectively around one of my kids the next.  He never got the hang of being around other dogs in public, spectacularly breaking my nose one night as I stooped to reengage his “training” collar while he strained toward a barking mutt across the street.  I figured out late in his life that he’d taken Paul’s missive to heart somehow, and was only able to relax when I was 100% in charge and staying calm, or when he was far from “his” property, off leash.  As soon as the leash came out, he was hell bent to show all of those other dogs and people that his mama was protected.  I am so grateful that nothing worse than some intimidated people sprang up from his bad habits.

I take responsibility for his behavior.  Parenting the two legged children, traveling, and my previous experience with submissive pet dogs served Albert a bum deal sometimes.  By the time I recognized he was dog aggressive, I was too broke and too scared of what he’d do to take classes.  Despite all of that, Albert loyally developed into a fantastic companion.  He is a house dog, sweet and friendly and extremely comical from the ends of his folded-napkin ears to his scimitar tail.  He pines for me when I leave, sometimes crying like a baby for days, and sometimes melting into a puddle, communicating with his caretakers only through eyebrow codes and deep sighs.  He has a special affinity for females, gazing adoringly at my mom and accepting all manner of necessary abuse at the hands of my cousin and her fellow vet techs over the years.  My daughters dressed him up, used him as a pony and paraded him up and down the street, completely relaxed in a way he never could be with me holding the leash.

Until now.  Here in Arizona, Albert rediscovered walking.  His arthritis is bad, so he eagerly does one park loop and hobbles back to bed while Paul, the kids and I cruise around a couple more times with Tilly.  Each time I pull on my tennis shoes, Albert’s eyebrows track me, and he shuffles himself into position near the door.  He is a perfect gentleman, smiling as his collar goes on, wriggling his now-twisted hips to show me that he’d gladly sit down to show his readiness if his body would only let him.  He follows me, glancing at the ever-present quail and rabbits, then back at me “Look, Mom, I am so content to just stay with you.”

Except, he can’t stay with me any longer.  After almost 12 years, his kidneys are shutting down, tiredly giving up against a congenital disease we didn’t know he had.  He’s thin, weak and tired.  Tail flat, eyes dull, his eyebrows still tracked my tennis shoes this morning, hoping a little bit that I’d wander to the garage door for leashes.  I fancy he looked satisfied when I sat next to him instead.  The kids are saying their good-byes, and hospice care involves a lick or two of a rib bone, an extra quilt and a lot of quiet.   The vet couldn’t give us an exact time, but I think he may be telling me.  He is sicker than ever today, the medications no longer staying down.  He keeps looking at me expectantly; his head lower and lower to the blanket each time I walk by.

I hope he understands that the tears, hurts and chaos that accompanied our early family time cemented us, made us an indestructible unit.  Often, I relied on him to be the warm back against mine, the goofy expression to break a cloudy mood, and the listener that never tired as long as I rubbed his ears.  Those contributions, invaluable and beautiful, bolstered my patience and love and made me try harder:  with him, and all of his various siblings.  I hope my head pats and nicknames over these last days say the volumes that my heart longs to.   

I love you, Albert.

-Mom                

In by Mommy

In

Quiet remains forced and yielded

A "let's pretend" of a once coveted and

Necessary piece of love, life and 

Survival

 

We (the we we created) encompasses and stands

Politely and insistently tugging around the edges

Reminding the in, the out and the all around

That survival exists on a scale

 

I'll balance, 

Throwing the counter upwards and down

Deciding how much of this space says "me"

And where my feet can fit

 

Because we can enliven quiet 

Vary it, carry it and unmask it for its truth

Give and take and remind that fluidity labels

Real and Quiet and Here

Many ways to say "that's what's in".

Inside. 

Rain storm Orchestra

Rain Storm Orchestra by Adie

Lightening claps like cymbals 

Thunder beats like drums 

Rain twinkles like chimes

Wind whistles piccolos and wind strums like violins 

I crash my fingers on my keyboard  

..............for I am playing with the Orchestra of the Storm!    

Orange Poem by Adie

Orange

Orange is a color 

But also a fruit

Orange can't decide if it's

A fruit or a color

I think you should decide!

IF you're a fruit OR a color at all

Come on!  Some of us just can't bear it

MAKE UP YOUR MIND