Thou Shalt Subsidize Thy Neighbor's Children

When we were buying a house several years ago, we looked at towns with reputations for good schools, parks, strong community ties, easy commute, cultural opportunities--all the typical things a family with young children might consider. As you can imagine, a community with all of these attributes in a major metropolitan area is not easy to find, and not cheap. When we finally found the house we eventually bought, within days of the house being listed for sale, there were three identical offers from, I suspect, three interchangeable families. Real estate to me is proof of Darwinian theory. And we did indeed prove to be the fittest of the trio of over-educated couples with a pair of precocious children.

Both my husband and I spent most of our lives in urban apartments. In these settings, there are usually more dogs than children, and you can run into someone hundreds of times in the mailroom before realizing the person is actually your next door neighbor. No one knocks on your door, unless it is the Chinese food delivery person. For the childless or pre-child person, it is as ideal as it gets.

So you can imagine our shock--dare I say horror--the first time we heard the doorbell chime at our new home. We looked at each other not knowing what to do. Why was someone ringing our doorbell? Had one of us ordered pizza without mentioning it to the other? After considering the Dominos option, my mind went completely blank as I tried to think of other possible reasons someone would be at our door. The panic continued as we flailed around wondering what to do. Should we turn off the lights and pretend we aren't home? Should we grab a baseball bat? Should we call the police?

I tiptoed to the front door and peered out the peephole. There was a smiling man with a stack of brochures. In my best fake-calm falsetto I asked, "Can I help you?" He mumbled something about wanting to know if we needed anyone to touch up the paint on our house's exterior. "No, thank you!" I shrilled through the peephole. The anxiety over our uninvited visitor gave way to anxiety about our house's exterior paint. The house looked tidy and maintained, but how would we know? We never owned a 1920s Spanish home before. Was there some protocol about exterior upkeep we were not privy to? Was this intruder judging our home-owning skills?

The house-painting solicitor, it turned out, was the first of many similar seemingly judgmental would-be entrepreneurs. I learned to identify the men-with-homemade-business-cards by their shuffling footsteps and liberal use of the word "ma'am" or "senora" through the locked door. No, we do not want new windows, driveway paving, garage door, gardener. Sometimes, the knock on the door would yield not a single person in coveralls, but a group of elderly adults in their 1970s Sunday best. These folks did not carry business cards--at least not calling cards for an earthly business. Rather, they were selling something more than just a maintenance service. They solicit for their "man." These geriatric disciples persevere despite our neighborhood being replete with bumper stickers for Obama, against Prop 8 (i.e. in favor of same-sex marriage), peace signs, and a spattering of those stickers with the word "Co-exist" written in an intertwining of crucifixes and Jewish stars. Good luck with your proselytizing, witnesses of Jehova!

As disconcerting as these strangers are, they are easily ignored. The same cannot be said, however, for the hoards of neighborhood Girl Scouts, Orchestra members, Little League players, and Eagle Scouts. There's no way to get out of buying cookies, wrapping paper, caramel popcorn, or cookie dough when you know the kid's parent is on your block's Neighborhood Watch committee and can make the difference between  your car being burglarized or not. And you would be amazed how much 8 ounces of cheddar popcorn goes for when it is being sold for a "nonprofit." The unspoken quid pro quo of kid-friendly 'hoods is the old "you buy my child's fundraising items, I'll buy your child's fundraising items."

However, we learned pretty early on to interrogate the little urchins before ponying up any cash. The requisite questions are: 1) Who are you? 2) Where do you live? 3) Can you name at least one of your parents? 4) Can you provide a picture identification that you are related to said person? I have considered acquiring a monocle so I can grill them like the prosecutor in "Judgement at Nuremburg" or "Witness for the Prosecution"--some sort of histrionic prosecutor. Once they have successfully answered all four questions--the pass rate must be 100%--we succumb and purchase the least expensive item available. We once inadvertently committed to buy magazines from a boy in a Scout uniform who, it turned out, lived in a different town altogether, but one that did not yield as many suckers as ours. We will never make that mistake again.

Another drawback to living on a street with kids the same age is they are all selling the same things at the same time. My son's school and activities have many fundraisers each year that require the selling of tickets or items. Knowing that every kid on the block is vying for the same neighbor dollars, we opt for a kinder, gentler strategy: We write a check and buy all our son's tickets ourselves.

Unfair Science

It's that dreaded time of year again. The season that includes the inevitable incomprehensible, costly and humiliating ritual that leaves us drained of resources, resiliency and humanity.

Yes, it is Science Fair time.

There is no more compelling evidence of the misguided nature of our public school system than the Science Fair. Who had the bright idea that Elementary School children need to observe worms, grow mold, or mix household cleaners? Whoops. Did I type "Elementary School children"? My error. I am quite certain that no individual under 35 has ever had any role in the conceptualization or construction of a Science Fair project. If public school administrators think grown-ups need to hone their rock-collecting, soil-type identification, or velocity-measuring skills, they should make it a pre-condition of bearing a child. But since, as far as I know, this is not the case, Science Fair should be left to those two kids who enjoyed studying bugs in pre-school. The rest of us have TV to watch.

The date of the Science Fair is made known to the parents shortly after the start of the school year. And by the time your child is in second grade, you have at least one Fair under your belt and know what is involved. Yet, it isn't until days before the project is due--a good seven months into the school year--that many of these projects are even contemplated. Knowing the preparations involved--including tracking down the "household items" in specialty stores, remembering where you put the hot-glue gun from the previous year, and making sure you have enough cyan ink for your printer--why are most projects started until days, if not hours, before it is to be displayed in front of hundreds of high-achieving parents, many of them in the science field themselves?

The reason, I posit, is because every year parents desperately hope for a miracle: That their child will show an interest this year and come up with an idea themselves. Any idea. Seriously, anything.  Just so parents don't have to frantically go to the same "Science Fair ideas" website year after year and try to convince their child how their life would be enriched by studying why ice melts or which flavor of Capri Sun is most popular among their peers. If your child looks up from the Wii long enough to shoot down your ideas, the next line of reasoning involves undoing all the positive self-esteem you have tried to build in them by telling them their friends will make fun of them if their project is lame. When that doesn't get even the bat of an eye, parents pull out the big guns: If you do not do more of your project this year than last, no more Wii for a week.

Under dire threat, even the most unscientifically inclined child will feign some sort of interest, and humor the parent while the parent presents the child with articles, books, and still-in-the-package items for the project. Keep in mind that by this point (less than a week before Science Fair), the library is completely out of any science-related books (damn those organized parents with curious, disciplined children), so the parent spent all Sunday night on Amazon selecting a dozen books--sight unseen--in hopes that there may be a chapter or diagram in one of them that would relate to the chosen project. And, yes, these books were all shipped overnight at great cost. If you ever wondered why yard sales and used book stores are filled with never-opened school science books, wonder no more.

We have the unfortunate bad luck to live in a community that is just minutes from both CalTech and USC Medical School. A disproportionate number of our fine neighbors make a living conducting scientific research. Some may even have scienitific theories named after them. So perhaps the tenor of the pre-Fair negotiations are a little different in those households than in our own. But our own home consists of two Ph.D.s who are involved in the quest for (social) science knowledge, and neither of us seems to be able to muster any enthusiasm for this particular scientific process. Most of our attempts to convey physics theories to be understandable to a liberal-artsy 4th grader end with the phrase: "It's kind of hard to explain."

My son's first project was an 11th-hour study of what items Play-Doh adheres to. This involved me spending most of my work day sticking clay to things in my office and surreptitiously logging results and taking pictures in between patients. But the real work came when I had to cajole "observations" from my son (in "his" own words) to turn into printable statements that could be affixed to an enormous white board. If you have ever stared at a blank page and experienced fear-inducing writer's block, then you have some sense of what it is like to be mocked by 32X46 inches of clean, white cardboard. Just choosing fonts and colors can overwhelm even the most Zen of people.

Last year, my son teamed up with a classmate to do a project based on a kit the boy's father bought online. Neither my son nor his friend had any idea what sort of kit was purchased, but were excited about the prospect of hanging out together, maybe playing some Wii. I was thrilled not to have to be involved in the scientific process at all. However, nothing is as stressful to a control-freak, Type A mom than having someone else's parent--a father, no less--overseeing your child's academic output. Especially since the boy's parents lived apart and had more than a bit of tension  between them. The dad thought it was funny to let the boys go wild with tempera paint all over the display board, so much so that the paint obscured many of the results that I had spent hours designing, choosing fonts, and printing out. It was not funny. And to this day, my son still can't tell us what the kit the boy's dad ordered was supposed to demonstrate. Needless to say, my son will no longer be collaborating with anyone who is not related to him by blood or marriage.

This year, I was heartened that my son showed an interest in his project. He is a big baseball fan and enthusiastically came up with a number of innovative ideas related to baseball play or statistics. He even took initiative one day and dutifully logged each pitch thrown by a computerized Zack Greinke on his Wii MLB 2K10 game. I swear, the video players are even more realistic than the real-life players. But when he explained his idea, having to do with the probability of Greinke throwing a change-up to a left-handed batter in a certain inning, I realized that we were talking dissertation material, not 4th grade science. It took some convincing to dumb his ideas down to make them simple enough for me--I mean him--to do. I won't give away the end, but the eventual project involved a ladder, two parents, 18 balls, data collected, data lost, data recollected, balls lost, something about kinetic energy, and copious amounts of rain.

I am exhausted. And I haven't even picked a font yet.

Don't Cross Me!

I live a 4-minute-and-22-second drive from my daughter's school. I know this because the drive from door to door takes exactly the amount of time as the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (from the original motion picture soundtrack). I drop my son off on the way, so the commute from home to his school is even less than 4:22. It may not sound like a lot of time, but in those few ticks of the minute hand one can experience a whole day's worth of stress.

You might wonder what could possibly cause a relatively well-adjusted person to nearly self-destruct during a simple 4-minute-and-22-second drive. If you are indeed wondering, then you are fortunate enough not to have to encounter the same obstacle five days a week, rain or shine. More specifically, the same obstacle with a neon vest and octagon sign. You have never encountered The Elementary School Crossing Guard.

I am all for safety. I am the mom you might hear shrieking at her kids not to get run over in parking lots. I have been known to act as a human shield against unknown dogs at the park. I close schoolyard gates even if school isn't in session. And I am appreciative of the school district providing kindly retirees to monitor the crossing activities of students and related people.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that Crossing Guard Training may focus too much on sign-holding techniques and the proper care for orange reflective sateen, and not enough time teaching Guards the nuances of getting people from Point A to Point B. My son has attended two of the three schools in our community. I have observed lead Crossing Guards (who have the plum assignment of crossing people into the main entrance of the school), substitute Crossing Guards, and side street Crossing Guards. I feel that this sampling of Crossing Guards gives me an adequate basis for my observations.

None of my city's Guards come equipped with folding chairs, a practice I have witnessed while driving through neighborhoods where there is apparently a more relaxed attitude toward crossing people. But being a lazy-yet-highly-productive person myself, I don't think comfort necessarily equates with lack of attention to one's task. Our Crossing Guards commit a greater sin than kicking back on the job--they are so intent on being active players in the school crossing arena, they end up gobbing up the whole system.

The Crossing Guard at the first elementary school my son attended was a perpetually perky chatterer who honored each season with holiday-themed hats and personally greeted each crosser. Because of her friendly ways, I learned early on to avoid her corner by taking a different route to school; trying to drive past her station when she was commenting on a child's desert habitat diorama (yes, while in the middle of the street) was a true lesson in patience, one that I failed every time. 

Fortunately, that Crossing Guard didn't have much to do because the PTA of that school was on overdrive and designated a team of Stay-At-Home-MBAs (SAHMBAs) to oversee the traffic and drop-off flow. Prior to the beginning of each school year, parents would get a memo from the PTA detailing the procedure for student drop-off. There were two entrances to the school, and each one was staffed with officious moms, complete with PTA lanyards, holding Starbucks travel mugs in one hand, and opening passenger-side doors with the other. The student's actual parent was to have no role in the disembarking of his or her offspring; only specially trained PTA officeholders were up to the task of opening the car door, unbuckling the child, and manipulating a bulging wheelie backpack from the back of a Prius.  These whirlwinds of credentialed efficiency were even known to zip jackets and pick up crumpled snack wrappers that blew out of the car with the child.  And remind harried working parents when it was Farmer's Market day (Thursday) so no family would be without organic chard for another week. At this school, drop-off had to be between 8:00 and 8:10--the gates opened at exactly 8 and were locked at 8:10 on the dot. Those PTA SAHMs got 500 kids and all their stuff in those gates in a 9:59 window. Pure poetry in motion.

Several years ago, we moved across town and my son began attending a different elementary school. This school has a more "crunchy" feel to it, with a PTA made up of fewer corporate types, and more academics, non-profit lawyers, and artists. Needless to say, the days of the military precision of school drop-off are gone, replaced by haphazard double-parkers, bicycle riders, and, inexplicably, families who walk to school even though they do not live across the street from the school itself. Truthfully, it is this last group that completely baffles me and, I must add, do the most for mucking up drop-off. 

I once Mapquested our distance from school. I believe it was somewhere in the vicinity of 1/2 a mile. I know we are .3 miles from Trader Joe's, because that was the biggest factor in buying our house, and the school is very close to TJs. I continue to be astounded that our neighbors--all of whom also hold down jobs--stroll to school with their children every day, rain or shine. Some drive to the general area of the school and walk. Not sure what that accomplishes, but the key here is that perfectly sane people who do not need to hoof it with their dawdling kids to school actually do. I don't know whether to admire them or build a more secure fence around our property. 

The only person who seems more confused dealing with people walking to school, however, is the Crossing Guard. The Crossing Guard of this school is an elderly man, who appears to be easily distractible--not a quality I personally would look for in a Crossing Guard for an elementary school. He holds up a line of a dozen cars in favor of someone walking a cute dog. Now, I like cute animals as much as the next person, but if your job is to cross 500 kids into a school within a 10-minute period (yes, the crunchy school has the same guidelines), then you need to keep your eye on the ball for the full 600 seconds. You are a football kicker whose only job is to kick the ball over the goal post. That is your moment to shine. So when it is that magic window from 8 to 8:10 am on a weekday (excluding Federal holidays, teacher furlough days, and "pupil free" days), you damn well better have an eagle eye out for those who are trying to get to school. 

Since this particular Crossing Guard most likely attended elementary school before the automobile was invented, he may not have a frame of reference what it is like to be a driver at the mercy of an unfocused and idiosyncratic guard. He doesn't appear to understand that it would be wise to heed the drivers, because a Range Rover can do a lot more damage than an ambulatory crosser, except maybe during the week of Science Fair, when students are bringing all sorts of chemicals and radioactive matter to school. Yes, it is sweet to see a grandmother crossing with a toddler on a leisurely morning stroll, but that family bonding moment comes at a high price for those who do not have time to wait for a 2-year-old to be cajoled aimlessly across the street. On a daily basis, I have to squelch the urge to honk, curse, or hurl a water bottle at the Crossing Guard, who never fails to cross form before function: Joggers with earbuds. Mothers with infants, but no older siblings in sight. If he could use the power of his position to stop the childless runner from crossing when there are 15 cars waiting, there might be fewer kids running for the schoolyard in a futile attempt to be on school property before the dreaded bell. There also might be fewer parents on medication due to the stress of the morning drop-off. 

Those Who Can, Don't Teach

My personal credo is: "Why take something at face value when it can be overanalyzed to the point of unrecognizability?"

I apply this belief to all aspects of my life. And, truthfully, there are very few facets of every day living that couldn't benefit from a thorough and methodical rethinking of its basic tenets.

Except when it comes to elementary school.

Let me back up. I come from an era where I don't think we were actually taught to do very much. I have no memory of anything academic ever being "explained" to me. Either teachers were lazy or just assumed we could figure it out eventually. For my early grammar school years, I attended a very 1970s progressive school where grades were mixed together and we "learned at our own pace." I recall sitting at my desk with stacks of index cards with various lessons on them, and flipping them over to see whether I got the answer right. I usually did. I was one of those kids who always liked school and, for a variety of reasons, attended quite a few different schools, so I have some basis for comparison. If you got the answer right, it was a good thing. I don't know what happened if you didn't because, frankly, I almost always got the answer right. I aced elementary school.

In school, I loved math. I liked to do calculations in my head and got a big kick out of numbers in every day life. I always loved baseball at the beginning of the season to see how a batter's average would go from 1.000 to .250 in the course of one game. A bummer for him, but awesome for me. This love of statistics was thwarted during graduate school, however, when the manipulation of digits stopped representing anything interesting or useful.

So when I became a parent to a school-aged child who also had an affinity for numbers, I assumed that I would be the best homework-helping mom ever. What I may lack as a moral compass or role model for my child I can make up for as an adjunct math helper. My role as parent would be redeemed through long division.

First and second grade were a piece of cake, cementing, in my mind, my reputation as a leader among tutoring moms. I demonstrated unparalleled excellence in quizzing my son on his addition tables. He was a natural, of course. Subtraction. No problem. Multiplication tables? Score! My son, the offspring of two Ph.D.s, clearly had the math gene.

Things took a precarious turn in third grade. Not for my son, but for me. He continued to solve long-division and other equations. But there was a new wrinkle added to the mix by the public school system: Students had to show how they got their answers. My son proved adept at getting the correct answers, but was not as great at showing his work. We are a family of head-calculators. I can quickly tabulate the tip on a 5-course meal in my head, but frankly would be lost if I had to note how I came up with the answer. When the task fell to me to model for him how to show the process, my answer was always: "I don't know how to explain why that is the answer. It just is." Tragically, elementary school teachers are not big fans of this explanation.

The situation further deteriorated with word problems. As a psychologist (and avowed over-thinker), I try to take the context into account when solving such problems: Why is Beth selling seven cupcakes at the school bake sale? Did she make 12, but ate five of them? What is the school raising money for? Did Charles make the oatmeal cookies or did his parent buy them at the supermarket? So perhaps you can understand why my poor son has resorted to slogging through these problems solo.

This inability to conceptualize grade school work is not limited to just math. Although I love math, I was actually an English major and if there is anything I am more obsessive about than numbers it is deconstructing sentences. One day my son came home with a reading comprehension passage for which he had missed one of the answers. There were four options, and he chose "B." So that left A,C,D. To me, the passage did not provide an adequate foundation from which to make any of the selected assumptions. However, being a veteran of many, many standardized tests, I dumbed down my thought process and selected "C." My husband, also a master of analysis, looked at the passage and selected "D."  We then spent a good 15 minutes justifying our answers to each other, but we all remained unconvinced not only about the others' selections, but about our own. This was the one instance where I put aside my "no providing homework excuses" policy to pen a note to the teacher that I apologize, but three intelligent minds, including a savvy 8-year-old, two Ph.D.s and an Ivy League English major could not come to a meeting of the minds.

Back to School: Part One

               On a rare day off from work, I volunteered at my son’s elementary school. Even  though I was going to be amongst hundreds of unemployed 6-11 year olds, I made sure I was dressed in business casual so my son’s teacher and peers would perhaps see me as a no-nonsense type who possibly possessed advanced skills, and I would get assigned a really cool volunteering assignment, like color-coding flash cards or laminating worksheets. Basically, I was angling for anything but grading papers.
                There is something about being at an elementary school that can be very unsettling for those of us with still-raw memories of their own early school experience. If I screw up being a Mom Volunteer at school, will it go on my permanent record? I felt like I was in trouble right off the bat--It didn’t even occur to me that I was supposed to sign in at the office, let alone put on a bright red “Visitor” sticker. While the front office staff did not officially “tsk tsk” at my attempt to breeze through the office, they clearly were not going to have any rebellion here. An Insubordinate Mom would not reflect well on the child, who will in turn never be nominated for the school’s monthly “Best Citizen Award” because of his parent’s own poor display of Citizenship. I entertained the notion of signing in as somebody else’s mother, but had visions of them asking me for ID, and then being publically shamed by the assistant principal on the PA system once my ruse was discovered. 
               I put on the sticker with a smile, hoping to get bonus points by commenting on the charming bubble-letter font used to identify me as an oversized interloper at an elementary school. The principal was just getting up from his desk, so I pretended to be acutely interested in a flyer for Chess Club as he walked by me out of the office. Cleverly greeting the principal would be way too much pressure for a not-fully-caffeinated Monday morning. An awkward pause or poorly received attempt at lighthearted small-talk could send my son’s academic future down the toilet. Once he was gone, I scurried out of the office into the perfectly symmetrical courtyard, enclosed by identical looking structures where the classrooms are housed.
                I have been to my son’s school many times, but have never entered the school grounds from the same entrance more than once. I think finding the classrooms (no directional signs appear anywhere) is a test to see if your kin is genetically predisposed to have a semblance of intelligence and spatial relations skills. Well, hopefully no one will spill the news to the school department that I finally found Room 102 only after being pointed in the right direction by a first grader with a bathroom pass. I took a deep breath and rapped on the door several times. When there was no answer, a slight paranoia came over me that the teacher had dared the classroom to play a practical joke on me by hiding under their desks and pretending to be at recess. I peeked in the room, calling “Helloooo???” in my most cheerful-sounding falsetto. Nothing.
                After convincing myself that I was not re-experiencing a traumatizing school-age prank from my own childhood, I regrouped and went back to the front office. I explained to the efficient front desk administrator how I was pretty sure this was the day I was supposed to volunteer, but maybe there was some sort of miscommunication because no one was in the classroom. The staffer sensed my insecurity and did nothing whatsoever to assuage my anxiety. “Really, no one there?” she asked, gesturing in such a way to indicate that this was a great mystery to be solved. “Well,” I apologized, ”maybe I just didn’t see them. I mean, I didn’t look all around the classroom, just opened the door and didn’t seem to see anybody.” The staffer wondered if perhaps the class was at the principal’s “Discipline Assembly” in the Multipurpose Room, and why didn’t I go check there? Already feeling humiliated at not being able to locate 35 pre-teens in a 20X20 room, I didn’t have the nerve to ask for directions to the “Multipurpose Room,” but I thought how if the sign on the door of the room spelled “Multipurpose” as two words, I would have no choice but to go back to  the office and inform them of this engraved grammatical error; however, a hyphen  between “multi” and “purpose” might not be worth ruffling any feathers. My mind then wandered to thinking that if someone donated a wad of cash to the school, they could get the “Multipurpose Room” named after them, as long as the bequest didn’t specify only one purpose, because then it would have to be called a “Singlepurpose Room,” especially if the money were given anonymously. My focus was completely shot at this point and the thought of Xeroxing or sharpening pencils was getting more and more daunting as the moments ticked away.
                I ventured back into the courtyard and stood for a minute as though I were contemplating the dimensions of the courtyard for a renovation project. I was hoping that another bathroom-bound boy would take pity on me and show me where the Multipurpose Room was. Alas, a custodian sensed my confusion and offered to escort me there personally.
                The Multipurpose Room, despite its many purposes, had only one entrance. The principal was standing at a podium just feet away from the open door. He was on a roll, pointing at his Powerpoint slide and explaining an awkward acronym meant to serve as a mnemonic device for elementary school students to remember not to fight, cheat, embezzle or chew gum while at school. The teacher was sitting across the crowded room and did not initially see me standing at the doorway; however, the principal and the 100 members of the school’s fourth grade certainly did, and turned around in unison to stare at me. I had flashbacks to the time I gave a presentation in class not realizing I had a visible booger in my nose. I tried to scan the room to find my son, but the teacher had already started her journey toward me, stage-whispering “excuse me” every few kids and trying not to trip. When she finally reached me, my mind went completely blank except for the thought that she looks exactly like my son’s teacher from third grade, and I suddenly couldn’t remember what her name was. I should have crammed more for this outing. Going back to elementary school is not something that is covered in graduate school… but for those of us who double-degreed in parenting and academics, seminar on how to be an adult in a child’s setting would have been a class with actual real world applications. But I digress……

Of Thee I Sing

My son goes to public school. When he started school, I expected to have the
usual flashbacks to elementary school days: the creaky desks, the annoying
hair-puller in the row behind me, and all that good stuff that comes flooding
back when you have kids. But one memory that I apparently repressed was that of
the institutionally mandated patriotism—in both chanted and musical form. Until
I stood at Friday assembly at my then-first-grade-son’s school, watching
hundreds of children, teachers and parents solemnly grasping their chests and
reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (and “under God,” at that!) and then, in
unrehearsed unison, adopting a beatific stance for the Star Spangled Banner. Was
I really on a children’s playground (in Los Angeles, weather is good and land is
expensive, so most events take place on the concrete hardtop) in a town where
Priuses outnumber traffic lights, and progressive attitudes are to the right
only of Park Slope, Brooklyn? Who ARE these people who I thought I knew? Had I
stumbled onto the set of extras of the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
Needless to say, it was many months before I could attempt another appearance at
a school assembly.

As a child in public elementary school, I vividly remember my first grade
teacher, Mrs. Hogan, a quiet and solemn woman, whip into a virtual whirling
dervish of nationalistic excitement as soon as the pledge ended. We were led in
spirited versions not only of the “Star Spangled Banner,” but also “America the
Beautiful” and, inexplicably, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” It was in the last one
where she really made her mark—the same women who methodically wrote her name on
the blackboard every morning would gesture up a storm, with arms flailing on the
“grand” beat and raised to the ceiling for the “high flying flag” part.
Fortunately, I did not sit in the front row because I can only imagine the
spittle that was flying by the finale of the song.

Later, thankfully, I went to private school, where we weren’t as beholden to the
country’s history as we were to the school’s traditions. We had assemblies
several times a week (indoors, in a specially designated hall). I don’t recall
any singing, except for when the school’s Glee Club performed, and I am fairly
certain they only sang songs in Medieval Greek or Latin. However, when it was
time for Commencement, we practiced the songs as if our lives depended on it.
Because, in a way they did; a sour note or poor diction during the ceremony
would mar the over-achieving perfection that is a Boston all-girls’ school, and
if you were the cause, you wouldn’t get into a good college, never get a job or
have a family, and undoubtedly die an early and painful death.

I never recall actually being taught the words to any of the patriotic gems that
remain the staple of United States public schools, and perhaps that is why
generations of Americans do not actually know the words to these songs, let
alone the meaning. But in pursuit of a first-rank College Preparatory education,
nothing is left to chance, and we spent weeks memorizing every stanza of equally
obtuse and tortured lyrics, but ones that apparently paid homage to institutions
that are not the American Flag. In fact, one song was actually about merry old
England—the song was from a William Blake work called “Jerusalem,” and I
remember wondering why a school full of Boston WASPs were singing about Israel.
The other musical mainstay of Commencement was a whit trickier to master than
Blake’s alliteration about England’s “pleasant pastures”—the song (whose name I
do not recall) had a line that went “Give me your Chariot of Fire.”
Unfortunately, I was in school around the time the Academy Award-winning film
“Chariots of Fire” came out, and I cannot tell you the agony of trying to get
400 girls to not botch that line in rehearsal, lest we have to sing it one more
time. But the good news was, those of us who did not possess pitch that was up
to the school’s standards were instructed merely to move our lips to the music;
yes, I was a mouth mover. So I could have lip-synced all sorts of scandalous
things while my more talented sisters were earnestly asking for that Chariot of
Fire; sadly, I was not clever enough to do so, a regret I still have.