A letter re: Kindergarten class sizes.

Dear Mr. Allison, Mr. Hoskins, Ms. Laskin, and Ms. Broten,

I'm writing to you today to express my concern over the current number of students in the kindergarten classrooms at Maurice Cody Junior Public School and in classrooms across the province, and to petition you on behalf of my three-year-old son and all incoming students in the full-day kindergarten program:  please amend the terrible overcrowding situation that we have seen in kindergarten classrooms this academic year.

I am a volunteer instructor with the anti-bullying program Roots of Empathy (http://www.rootsofempathy.org/en/what-we-do/about-our-program.html), and as such spend an hour every week in my daughter's kindergarten classroom.  This year, the class I'm instructing is 31 children.  The program encourages students to talk about their feelings and aims to make every child feel included, but in a 30-minute class, there just isn't enough time to allow all 31 children to tell the stories that they feel important.  Physically too, there is barely enough room to seat all of the children around the big green blanket that is both an emblem for the program and a safe place for the other "teacher" (a neighbourhood baby) to sit and play while the students observe his non-verbal communication.  At 4 and 5 years old, these children are already easily distracted, and sitting so close to their classmates inevitably leads to jostling, arguing and complaining instead of learning.

The classroom I'm in is used for before and after care.  Before and after school, it falls under the guidelines of the Day Nurseries Act (http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/regs/english/elaws_regs_900262_e.htm#BK13), which states that the room is large enough for no more than 24 children. Why is it then, that once the bell rings, it's acceptable to add another 7 children to the room, plus two or three adults?  I know for a fact that several children have repeatedly experienced bathroom accidents during school hours because there is only one washroom in the classroom and it is frequently occupied.  Imagine how embarrassing it must be for these children - if they have a change of clothes with them, it is outside in the hallway in backpacks (no room for backpacks inside the classroom!), so they need to parade across the classroom TWICE in wet clothing before they can change.  Sirs and madams, please try to remember that children at this age can be unintentionally cruel, and the mockery that often accompanies accidents like these can colour a child's entire public school experience.

More troubling is that I have personally witnessed a 5-year-old child being unintentionally left behind in the playground at the end of the day and locked out of the school with no expectation of an adult to pick her up.  With one hundred and eighty kindergarten students milling about at the end of the school day and 12 staff members to oversee them, she was lost in the shuffle.  I found her on the sidewalk near the school, crying and utterly terrified. That incident ended well, as I was able to help her find her way back into the school and into her daycare program, but it could just as easily have ended in tragedy.

Life in a classroom of 31 kindergarten students is chaotic to say the least.  At ages 4, 5 and 6, the children are boisterous and the noise level when they are at activity is intense.  Research on temperament traits by child psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess identified that children who are sensitive to their environment may experience problems with focus and concentration in a such situations, and with so much going on in the room, students who are easily distracted can be drawn away from their tasks and have difficulty returning to them.

I firmly believe that our teachers are making the most of this situation, but I have no doubt that the children's learning potential is also being affected. There is a disproportionate amount of time being spent on the logistics of having 30+ kids under one's care—getting them in and out of line, getting them in and out of footwear/outerwear, setting up for snack and lunch breaks, supervising the bathroom and hand washing, handling transitions between activities, etc.—rather than on the real business of learning.   Further, with larger class sizes come more students with behavioural challenges who require more than the usual amount of attention.  In a class of 20, one or two children will require extra help, and that's manageable.  When you bump the class sizes though, that number more than doubles, as children who might have borderline behavioural challenges don't get the basic attention they need and begin to act out.  All of this is time during the day that the teacher and EA are NOT spending teaching our children. 

The Canadian Education Association, The American Educational Research Association, the Journal of Educational Psychology, The American Journal of Public Health, the Scottish Council for Research In Education and many other reputable organizations have all produced documents extolling the many virtues of small class sizes, and it's an intuitively good idea:  teachers get to spend more time with each student, students are able to make better use of the resources available to them, problems (whether behavioural or academic) can be apprehended and addressed early, and the classroom is a calm place where children can learn and grow.  

I recognize that the primary motivation behind such large classes is financial, but ultimately I do not believe that the money saved is worth what we're losing.  I do not know what the solution is to this problem -  I don't have access to the financial and enrolment data that you do, and wouldn't have the expertise to use it if I did. What I DO know is that the status quo is not really serving anyone.  It's generating a cohort of students who have learned that in order to attract attention in class they need to act out, a group of teachers who are exhausted by and frustrated at not being able to give their students the education that they deserve, and a large number of parents who are disappointed and disillusioned with the system put in place to foster the development of our most precious resource.

Studies have shown that a child's academic career is defined and strongly influenced by the quality of their early education.  Please, please don't short-change my son, the other children in his cohort and those to come.  They deserve better from us.  Please consider reducing class sizes in the kindergarten program so that all of our children have the opportunity to develop to their full potential.

Thank you,

Jaimie Cowles

The scarlet M

So I'm a Mom, I get it.  The capital M has been affixed with a makeshift paste of oatmeal, mashed banana, and squished-to-death frenchfries.  I should go cut my hair into a shoulder-length bob (Just long enough to pull into a ponytail!  All one length so you can cut it yourself!) and start drinking peppermint lattes and do whatever it is that today's mommy-cliche does.  Part of me is tempted to do just that - to really dive in and embrace the costume and habits of the subculture.  My Inner Nerd sometimes tells me that being a Mom can be like being a Goth or a Ham-radio operator: I can make it into a whole *thing* and be the Mommiest Mom I can be.  It can be fun!  Baby fandom!

But my Inner Nerd and my ovaries don't really speak the same language.  There's an integral disconnect between pretty much everything involved with the existence of my two children and....well, the whole rest of me.  My Inner Nerd is part of the unchanged core elements of my personality that I consider my Self.  My Inner Mom, so far, hasn't been granted that honour.  I've been a Mom for only 2 years or so, after all.  My nerd cred goes back to elementary school.  The Nerd part of me and the Mom part of me are trying to understand each other, and they get along, but....there's an element of distrust and an inability to really get what the other is trying to do.  They're like neighbours who have nothing in common but want to be friendly but don't want to be *too* friendly and get stuck with a 24/7 BFF.

So much of my personality is not Family-friendly.  So many of the things I think, say, and am interested in are inappropriate for children, and so inappropriate for Moms.  So much of my Self doesn't jibe with my hatchling MomSelf.  It messes with my head sometimes.  Casts me into existential crises weekly.  It's like the person that I am, that I still feel myself to be, is but a fuzzy shadow-image to strangers.  Once they see the toddler and the baby I cease to have, in their imaginations, the potential for being anything else - not an intellectual, or a weirdo, or a hipster or a neo-pagan or whatnot - I am a Mom and should be conversed with accordingly.  ("Wow, you must be pretty busy, huh?  They're so cute.")

But....I still think I'm cool!  I'm right here, under the snugli.  I'm fun and smart, but they can't see.  It's just weird.  Mommy Dysmorphic Disorder?

Bad Things Chicks Do No. 1

So I have been fighting the urge to take and post a photo of the tag of my pants.  Because I can't remember when I was last this size.  Because somehow this unintentional decrease in mass has made me inexplicably...proud.  At first I thought it was just a reasonably-healthy expression of pride in my post-babies-body-accomplishments.  Then I thought it was some semi-harmless narcissism.  Then I thought I could convince myself that it's somehow fitting, in a proto-feminist body-image post, and pretend that I wasn't really hoping to get virtual pats on the back.

If these were the real reasons, even the embarassing last one, I would take that pic and it would be all jpg-y in seconds.  That shit would be ON the internetz, cluttering it up with more me me me.
But I'm not going to take a photo - hell, I'm not even going to reveal the size.  Because what drives the whole concept is the beginning of a Bad Thing Chicks Do.

BTCDs happen.  We, as a gender, can often actually fulfill some of the stereotypes applied to us, and we, as a gender, do a lot of the same things.  Some of these things are self-sabotaging and stupid, and I blame the media for tricking us into them, but I'm not going to pretend we're not the ones actually perpetrating this behaviour, keeping it alive.  BTCDs seem to involve our body image or sense of beauty too often.  I like to think I resisted engaging in a lot of common BTCDs throughout my life....until After The Baby (tm)

I've never had a perfect body.  I've had dozens and dozens of stretch marks since I was twelve - they were angry purple stripes until almost 16.  I have a big moon face with freckles and three moles and a small jackknife scar on it.  I have winged shoulder blades and a sticky-outty rib and a farm-tan on my arms that never fades to match the fishbelly whiteness of the rest of my body.  My teeth are kind of crooked and my hair looks a lot like a drunk lion's mane.

But until I got pregnant for the first time, I never once thought of myself as ugly.

It was the water-retention that really did it to me.  The weight gain was only a little beyond the 'suggested weight gain' and I was ok with that.  But when the bloating started?  I kept no photos from my baby shower because my hideous doughy balloon-face made me cry.  And after the baby, when I had that floppy extra-belly worth of fatty skin to gaze down at every time I breastfed, I started, for the first time in my longish, nihilistic and fucked up life, to hate my body - really despise it, like it was something outside my Self.  Something I could battle, or at least resent.

Hating your body for no good reason is a classic BTCD.  As an umpteenth-wave proto-feminist I fought against it from my early puberty until somewhere in my late teens when I finally came to real acceptance of my own physical form.  Then I existed in a wonderful world of 'reasonably attractive and ok with that' until the aforementioned procreation.  Something about the whole process of pregnancy just left me open for all the newly-arrived Body Image harpies in my head, the constant hormonal fluctuations made me succumb to the resultant angst over and over, until it became a habit to allow those negative thoughts through.  I don't know when exactly it was that I crossed the line between self-effacing humour comments and bitter self-hating comments, but somewhere, there, me cracking wise about my imperfections became a string of small self-destroying words.  It became ok for me to make these harsh judgments about a body that was recovering from childbirth, to feel ashamed and not good enough.  To feel that my body had been broken, scarred, ruined.

Well, it hasn't been.  I know now that I was so very skewed, so very wrong.  In fact, I went back and had *another* baby.  I gained more weight this time, even.  I had another unscheduled c-section and another long slog through post-baby-belly why-me.  I still have a flabby stomach that will not win me any prizes, that I sometimes squeeze through my fingers like bread dough as if it's a costume I might be able to take off.

But I don't hate my doughy flesh.  And I don't hate *me* for wearing it.  Because I refuse to fall prey to the BTCD, not when I've already got so much on my plate, not when I have a chance to be a good example for my daughter, not when engaging in the behaviours will actually *make* me hate myself.

I am not perfect.  I am not beautiful.  I do not look the way I do in my head.  But that really doesn't matter.  Looks are, ultimately, such a small part of what makes a person loveable, no matter what the god damned media keeps trying to tell us.  I think my looks are 10% of what makes me myself, and I've decided my looks are 20% less appealing than I want them to be.  Not a huge defecit there, my 20% chunk of my 10% section.  See?  Doesn't matter.  Follow the math.  The math won't lie.

And I'm not going to tell you what size my pants are.  but here's a picture of my smile.

Attack of the Mombies

I was talking to my husband this morning - well, whining at him, really - about how erratic the childrens' sleep schedules are, how much energy they require, how tired I always am.  We've been watching The Walking Dead at night when we manage to get both kids to sleep in their own room, so I've got zombies on the brain too, as well as starting to resemble them more and more.

We've decided I have become one of the ambulatory undead.  That's right, somehow in the last 2.5 years I turned into a Mombie.  Part dedicated and loving mom, part falling-apart grotesquerie with dead soulless eyes.  Instead of hungering for brains, though, all I really want is sleep.

Some of you have little people, and  you are parenting them in a way that makes me glad I can't remember 1997-2000 clearly.  You're doing such an awesome job, and I tip my hat to you.

But most of you don't have teenagers yet. While you all know my biological son just turned 15, my "other son", the young man who is always here,  is 17.  These boys have been, as a duo, a constant in my life for five years now, and as always I've learned things the hard way.

If I could go back, and I mean that as a thought experiment because dear God don't make me parent little people ever again,  I would do some things differently:

1. Go for a long walk every Sunday afternoon, after or instead of religious services.  Right now your littles run everywhere, but unless you're raising an athlete, couch time for video games and TV time gets FAR more appealing.  Tiring them out will make bedtime before the school week starts much easier.
   
2. Have a full sit down, hot-food, everybody there dinner at least once a week. I like Sunday, but any regular, un-rushed day works.   Have everyone help make dinner.  Decorate the table, even if only with simple arts and crafts and flowers from the garden or local field  Once sitting, turn off anything that plugs in. Light candles.  Life gets busy, having this as a solid ritual is good.
   
3. Once your kids are able to wield a butter knife without inevitable self-injury, assign each kid a night to make dinner once a week. If for the first five years of this you have peanut butter and jam sandwiches and whole apples with frenzies for dessert every tuesday, it's a win. They get a sense of power and responsibility, you get a night off cooking. Use the 'MyFoodGuide' to learn about food groups. As they grow teach them cooking stuff to replace the simple food.
4. Learn to play at least one video game they like.  I'm never going to play Black Ops or Modern Warfare, but having Minecraft in common is REALLY helpful  We're getting Myst for the PS3 and will solve it together.  I may not play war games but I know what a 360, no-scope-crossmap hitmarker is enough to understand why they just went (happily) berserk over it.
   
5. Don't ask them how their day was, because the answer will be "Fine."  Ask them the most interesting/challenging/weird part of their day, and let them know they can think about the answer and tell you before bedtime.  They will talk to you, it's like magic.
   
6. When the dishes overwhelm you, reduce the dishes in your house to one plate, one bowl, one cup, one fork, one knife, one spoon each for the number of humans normally home.  Put the rest in a box, very tall shelf or (ideally lockable) hutch.  When teenagers are helping themselves to snacks they will use a new plate or cup every single time, leading to a catastrophic level of dish-washing greeting you on coming home.  If there are limited available cups/plates/cutlery etc they will actually wash something to use it again for something different.  I swear.
   
7. Sit with them for at least 5 minutes every night at bedtime.  Tell them a story about when they were young. Tell them one (of the many) reasons they are awesome.   Yes, even teenagers need to hear that stuff, even if they pretend to be the most nonchalant  cooler-than-anybody human on the planet.  Once you say goodnight to them, take away their phone and ignore them unless you smell fire.
8. Have allowance be contingent on, if nothing else, successful completion of daily showers.  Teenage boy goat smell is. . . . undesirable, and it's like they get afraid of water at 13.  Conversely, once you get them into the shower, have cheap extra towels to mop up the swamp that they'll leave on the floor.
9. Knock before you enter their room, and respect their privacy. If it needs to be cleaned, clean it with them. If you need to enter, ask them first. They will respect your privacy once they realize how much they like theirs.
10. Have a board game you both like, play it together. Compete. With my son and I now it's Settlers of Cattan, but when he was little it was Rummoli and when he was really small it was Fruit Salad and Sneaky Snake and Memory.
    
11. Ask for hugs in public.  9/10 they are going to say no, 'cause a hug from mom in public will end the world, but keep asking. Sometimes they will let you. There is little so awesome as the feel of your little boy resting his chin on the top of your head. (My 'little boy' is now 6'0") 
12. When you most want to freak out, don't freak out.  I know, it's hard, but SO worth it. How I handled the 'caught shoplifting' thing  is something I credit with a lot of the very frank conversations we have about a lot of stuff here. I used a lot of 'I" statements, expressed disappointment, talked about the consequences of starting on that kind of path, and expressed a strong conviction that my boys would learn from their mistake and go on to make me very proud. (I then made the punishment fit the crime)
13. Reward good grades with cash money.  My mom and I set the bar every year - This year it's a minimum of 70% in every class, and a dollar for every point above that, for each class. My mom is talking about doubling it for marks in the 80s and tripling it for marks in the 90s.  (Keep in mind that my son is in an appropriate stream for his abilities, goes to tutoring twice a week and has an IEP in place, and gets support at home with organization and homework)  If  one grade is temporarily low but the teacher gives a glowing account of effort, that counts for a special bonus of some kind. They way we explained it, the workforce rewards diligent work with better opportunities and higher pay.  If you don't work to excel to the best of your abilities they stop paying you.  I want that to sink in  before he gets there.  

That's about the sum total of my learned-the-hard-way advice. 

Well, other than "wear shoes 'cause lego, plastic army guys and marbles hurt like hell to step on" 

B. 

Mommy Wars: Swim Win

I owe you a couple of updates on the mommy wars, which are held up by a lack of pictures.  I decided to go ahead and trust that my audience doesn't need shiny stuff to keep reading.

I took the baby to his first swimming lesson recently.  This might not seem newsworthy, but I would like to point out two factors; first, that I am heavy (the BMI calculation labels me "obese"), and second, that I have a water phobia.  Being in a bathing suit in a public place, and being near (never mind in) more than a teapot full of water, are two things that I generally work pretty hard to avoid.

There were also minor annoyances; having missed the first class, feeling like we were already behind and wouldn't know the routine, and being ten minutes late for no good reason other than I was probably subconsciously trying to sabotage the whole thing.

The thing is, though, once we were finally there and suited up and in the pool and introduced... the baby LOVED it.  He didn't cry once.  He floated on his back and on his front, and splashed with his hands.  He loved the other baby who was his age, and the toddler who insisted in kissing him, and the "big" boy and girl who could kick and push off from the edge.  I didn't love it quite so much, but I managed to stay in the water the whole 20 minutes of the class.

The best part was in the last few minutes of class, when the ladies started arriving on deck for their shallow-water Aquafit class.  They were in their 70s and 80s, I would guess.  Some were in Speedos, some in sexy ruched glamour suits, and all unself-consciously chatting away to their friends.  The best was the little old lady who waited for someone to open the change-room door, so she could push her walker out onto the pool deck and right up to the edge of the water.  I watched these fabulous women and felt tears pricking my eyes.  I wanted to be them when I grow up.  Hell, I want to start being them now; comfortable in their skins and their swimsuits, at the pool just because they love it.  And since all of this is happening in my head, I can control (or at least affect) it, and I'm going to try to do it.

This isn't really a "Mommy Wars" win, since I didn't take him to one of the low-chlorine, special baby-friendly swimming pools.  But it's a perfect example of how doing something that's good for him is good for me too.  Now I'm off to research Adult Learn-To-Swim classes and buy one of those Speedos...

A Little Time-Change Miracle

Everyone seems to love to talk about the extra hour of sleep you get when the clock goes back in the fall.  I don't know why, because there are plenty of people with little kids in the world, and those people all know that you are not getting an extra hour of sleep.

What you are really getting is Junior waking up at 5:30am instead of 6:30am, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and ready to start his day.  My oldest, who is almost 15, has an incredible circadian clock.  He has woken up at 6:30am pretty much every morning of his life; time changes and jet lag throw him off for a few days, but he adjusts quickly.  I'm not proud of this, but I taught him how to go on the computer in my bedroom and play his games (back in the "Pajama Sam" days) when he was about three, just so I could stay in bed a little longer.

I've been dreading this time change.  Our little foster baby is nine months old, and he has just learned to pull himself up to standing.  The crib is a perfect place to practice that.  As a result, the past week has been a no-nap nightmare.  Yesterday, for instance, he woke up at 7:30am.  At about 9am I spent an hour and a half putting him down for his morning nap.  He slept for an hour.  At about 2:30pm I spent two and a half hours putting him down for an afternoon nap.  At that point he was so exhausted that he slept for three hours, waking up at the time he would usually be going to bed.  We didn't mind too much because we were going to a 50th birthday party next door, so we took him along for a couple of hours until he was sleepy, then my husband brought him home and put him to bed.

Did I mention he's still up twice a night as well?

By 10:30 this morning it was time to try for a nap.  I offered to start the process if my husband would go to McDonalds to pick up a hangover cure, which he obligingly did.  I fed the baby, and realized his eyes were fluttering closed.  I put him in the crib; he rolled over and grabbed his blanket.  I thought... could this be it?  No, he dragged himself up to standing and gave me a big wrinkled-nose grin.  I laid him back down, on the verge of tears, thinking that like yesterday, I'd be repeating the process for the next hour and a half.  And, much to my surprise... he went to sleep.  I thought my breakfast would be stone cold before I got to eat it, and instead it was still on its way.