choice time

Dear fellow wonderer,

Welcome to my new newsletter! (I’m posting it here on my website; it will also live on Substack.)

I’d like to jump right in by taking you back, back to 1990, back to the classroom of the people in that photo, those magnificently expressive thirty third-graders (plus two more not pictured!) and that earnest young teacher in her bobby socks and patent leather loafers. A carpet centers the middle of the classroom, a remnant that my equally young, Converse-wearing husband scavenged for me, gray and maybe eight feet by eight feet, surrounded by student desks arranged in the shape of a U, in clusters of four to encourage cooperative learning during math, social studies. On this carpet the students spend much of each day–circling up and telling a highlight from their weekend, listening to me read books (so many books), sprawling across it for feedback on a draft with a peer during our writer’s workshop, racing over it during silent reading time (Walk, please!) to nab the latest must-have book from the featured book bin. (A delight–then and always–to see kids racing for books.)

My principal stood in the doorway, curious, when he first saw how I’d set up this classroom. The carpet, the clustered desks. He’d drop by, drift around the room with his hands behind his back, admiring the walls. Not posters from the teacher supply store, but student work, student art on every wall. The grid I’d formed in one corner from yarn, where each student had a square to tack a project of their choosing.

At the end of the week, if the students had earned it, we’d have Choice Time: fifteen or twenty minutes when I’d play music and they’d play games, solve puzzles, read. Hangman on the carpet. Ed Emberly at their desks. If the students had earned it referred to a collective gathering of points that they did or did not amass during the week, depending on whether they’d followed my instructions–a concept that feels controlling, looking back, and icky. Still, choice mattered to young-teacher me; I admire that now. My inclination, even then: offer students as much choice as I could muster.

Years later, an image of this classroom came back to me, unbidden, as I made the six-hour drive down the endless expanse of dirt and farmland and gas station mini-marts known as I-5, from our home in Oakland to Los Angeles. It was January 2022, peak pandemic. I had a car full of camera gear. A month before, the Surgeon General had released an advisory on the decline in young people’s mental health. A week before, my husband and our oldest, then thirty, and I had forgotten the camera gear when we’d moved that thirty-year-old out of our house, where he’d been staying for a few months, having left New York after ten years, after the pandemic shut down what had been a burgeoning career in freelance cinematography and off to Hollywood.¹ It wasn’t until we were halfway down I-5 that it hit us: we’d forgotten, of all things, the kid’s camera gear!

I was working on a book then, a memoir of our homeschooling life, and to pass the second trip with that carful of gear, I’d printed out questions from a literary agent, questions for writers seeking agents. Driving 75 past almond groves and the stink of beef cattle at Kettleman Ranch, I’d glance to the passenger seat at the list of questions, questions I’d printed in font-size 26, and answer them aloud like I was some guest on a podcast.

Somewhere past the incongruous outlets of Tejon Ranch, this one: What argument does your book make?

My book-in-progress was a memoir, not a how-to book, yet this agent insisted that every successful nonfiction book makes an argument. Cruise-control enabled, I wasn’t even pushing the gas, just barreling forward, thinking, when a sentence arrived, as if the cloudless sky had dropped it through my sunroof, fully formed.

We need to give children, now more than ever, freedom to guide their learning and their lives.

It’s a good thing I-5 is so straight; fired on too much black tea steeped at rest stops, my mind started pinging all over the place. We need to give children, now more than ever, freedom to guide their learning and their lives. Ping to how much freedom kids have lost in the world, nothing like my childhood days of running the neighborhood until my mom hollered Tricia! out the front door for dinner. Ping to how much freedom they’ve lost in daily life, their after-school days booked with choir and soccer practice and coding class–and that’s before the homework starts.

Ping back to my classroom with the carpet where I tried to give my students choice. I’d been trained to give my students choice, was allowed to give my students choice. The prevailing educational pedagogy back then: center learning on the students. Offer open-ended math problems that encouraged students to find their own solutions, let them share those solutions across the cluster of desks with other kids. We’d gather on the carpet, compare methods, and each student would build their own mental toolkit, their own knowledge. The same in science, in writer’s workshop, where they’d write stories or nonfiction, whatever they wished, get feedback from other students, read their final drafts from the Author’s Chair, the audience cross-legged on the carpet, clapping and cheering.

Although I left teaching in 1994, I knew what happened to classrooms after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001. Learning became standardized, textbook-based, and aimed at specific skills for specific tests, tests, tests. Child-centered learning, an aim of the past.

Driving from the flats into the mountainous I-5 section known as The Grapevine (actual scenery, peaks and lakes), I wondered, for the first time in the seven years since I started my book, whether I really wanted to write a memoir of homeschooling. That Surgeon General’s advisory about young people’s faltering mental health the month before–it had to be related to losses in independence. Ping. Homeschooling had taught me that. Ping. My kids had taught me that, upending everything I thought I knew about learning, showing me how they learned best, how they were happiest: when given freedom to pursue their interests, their curiosity, their creativity.

I didn’t just want that for homeschooled kids. I want that for all kids.

Let’s speed through the next few years like we’re still barreling down I-5. How I kept writing the homeschooling memoir, but planned to interject interstitial essays about cultural childhood shifts. How, at a workshop in October of 2022, the writer Melissa Febos wondered why I didn’t combine those interstitial essays directly into my personal story. How I balked–that would mean starting a seven-year-draft from scratch!

How I took another year to decide she was right. One fatal day (there’s a story there) I quit my draft and opened a blank page. I began to chase my inklings about childhood losses in independence. I dug, looking for the roots of things. For the past year I followed my curiosity in a dozen directions, a new topic each month, ping, ping, ping. Some of what showed up in my shovel:

• Shifts in motherhood, first noted in 1996 by sociologist Sharon Hays in her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, including the first use of the term intensive parenting.
• The explosion of parenting books in the late 1990s.
• Reduced free time for kids–7.5 hours a week lost between 1981 and 1997.
• The internet’s early-aughts commodification of the parenting “expert”–leading many “experts” to elevate themselves by undermining parental intuition, especially for mothers.
• Radical shifts in education following passage of the No Child Behind Act in 2001, away from child-centered pedagogies and toward standardized, textbook-based and test-driven curriculum.
• Increased fears over childhood safety, beginning in the late ’80s and ramping up until overprotection became normalized by the 2000s.
• The amping-up of the college application process in the early 2000s, starting with universities enacting Early Decision policies to up their rankings in the news and with financial institutions.
• Childhood losses in creativity, which had steadily risen since the 1950s, only to begin a downward decline starting in 1990 and continuing since.
• Changing parental beliefs about college acceptance in the mid-aughts, transforming childhood into an onramp for successful college candidacy, leading to increased extra-curricular activities–directed by adults–for kids. This coincided with the rise of for-profit youth sports.
• Changing beliefs for parents, high school counselors, and students about rigor in high school coursework, especially between 2000 and 2010, leading to accelerated math courses, increased honors and AP classes, and more hours spent on homework.
• Shifts in beliefs and expectations about motherhood, first with the rise of “mommy blogging” beginning around 2005, then with the explosion of “momfluencers” after Instagram took off in 2012.

Shit. If you’ve driven down I-5, doesn’t it all just stink like those massive, heartbreaking cattle farms? Childhood has become so regimented. Parenthood, so complicated. Is it any wonder that the Surgeon General’s latest advisory, Parents Under Pressure, calls parental mental health struggles an urgent public health issue?

It’s messy and stinky and complicated, yes, but in every instance, there is also choice. Like the choice I tried to provide for my students back in that classroom. The choices aren’t always easy to see. As I took Melissa Febos’ advice and wove research into my own family stories, I began to interrogate, for the first time, my own motherhood. A rebel mother, that’s how I thought of myself, eschewing the system, homeschooling with my kids. Pushing back on what culture demanded of me, of my children. But often, I see now, I sailed along with the culture, let it shape me. I did not always recognize a choice that could be made.

So here we are, dear reader. The camera gear arrived at the apartment, the blank page became a drafty manuscript. We’ve made our way here together and I have a plan. Each month on Welcome to the Wonder Farm we’ll look at one of the topics bulleted above–plus a few others–in more depth. I’ll share some research and personal stories–and I hope in the comments section, you’ll share stories, too. Let’s talk about the choices we’ve made as parents, educators, and people who care about kids. Let’s talk about the choices that are still ours to make.

(Two weeks or so after the original post, I’ll send a follow-up. The Wonder-Room will be a sort of wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities full of links related to the original post—to which I hope you’ll contribute your own good stuff. Ping, ping, ping!)

See me up there in that photo? I may have lost the bobby socks, but not, I admit, my earnestness. I have such hopes for this newsletter! Let’s start this conversation, shall we?

I’d love to know, which of the bulleted topics above captures your curiosity or riles you up most? Where have I not yet dug? Or tell us your own story, about kids or parenthood or classrooms or homeschooling–or, like the kids in my writer’s workshop, any place your imagination pulls you.

I’m so happy you’re here. Come sit in this circle on our virtual carpet. Let’s get this conversation going.

Truly,
Patricia

This post has been cross-posted on Substack.