Cat Poop Cookies and the State of Our Educational System

[queerbychoice]

Anyone who hasn't read An Open Letter To Superintendent Grimmel by Robert Alter should definitely read it. This kind of thing is the reason I've lost my former conviction that I wanted to have kids. I'm not sure I could handle being so much responsible for the tragedy of a kid being, inevitably, socialized into the disgusting culture that is our own.

I forwarded it to my friend Megan, who is a fifth grade teacher and therefore stands accused by it. I never had a single elementary teacher ever who, looking back, I approve of at all. But I like to think that Megan is better. Not that I'd really know; I haven't seen her teach.

I bought myself a chair today. An office-style ergonomically correct $40 chair with adjustable height and such. The idea is to use it with my desk that I got free from work last year (they had an extra desk which for some reason they didn't want anymore, so they sent a mass email saying "anybody want a desk?" and I was the first to write back "yes" so I got the desk) and which has been sitting around unused for the past year since I never got around to buying a chair the right height for it. My current typing arrangement involves a tiny short easy-chair and a weird short little wooden computer stand. It's not really that bad but the desk would allow me a lot more desk space to work with. So anyway, I bought a chair. Then I called Megan and told her that I bought a chair, and that I hadn't put it together yet, it was still in pieces in a big cardboard box.

Megan: When you put things together, do you read the instructions?
Me: Yeah, I usually do.
Megan: Oh, I don't. I just look at the parts and explore how they might fit together.
Me: And then after a few minutes fiddling around with the chair-making kit, voila! You've created a desk!
Megan: A desk would be cool. I wouldn't mind a desk.
Me: Well, it would be interesting if you could really make a desk out of a chair-making kit.
Megan: But you could!
Me: No, my chair-making kit has parts that are quite distinctly shaped like a chair seat and a chair back.
Megan: But you could make a kind of desk . . .
Me: A modern art interpretation of a desk!

But I did read the instructions, and followed them, and created a chair instead. Even though Robert Alter would certainly prefer Megan's approach.

And Megan and I decided to go out to dinner tomorrow evening, though where on earth we'll eat is anybody's guess since there's not a single food category that either one of us likes which the other one doesn't abhor. A few years ago we went on a road trip to San Diego together for two weeks, and when attempting to eat together, we more than once resorted to finding to restaurants next door to one another that both had outdoor eating areas so we could get our food separately and still manage to eat together.

Which reminds me, I've gotten a surprising number of responses to my potato candy recipe, though Morgan is the only respondent who's actually eaten potato candy, and all the people who've never eaten it have the arrogance to assume they wouldn't like it. Well, if you like any candy bearing the Reese's label I assure you that you'd like potato candy: it doesn't taste like potatoes in the least, silly. You can't judge a candy by a list of its ingredients on paper.

But anyway, since candy recipes apparently get a big response, I can't resist mentioning that Andre recently linked to a recipe for cat poop cookies which has to be seen to be believed.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

(continued)

"We shouldn't forget that compulsory education was introduced because in the early 20th Century it was more profitable to send kids down the mines to make money for the family to live on, than it was to send them to school."

I think you should read some other historical interpretations of how compulsory education got introduced into various different countries. Generally, whatever is more profitable is what gets introduced, and when compulsory education has been introduced it has generally coincided with a change in job industries which has caused the corporations to need workers with a little better literacy and math skills. For example, I just read this excellent essay earlier today, written by a Queerchoice list member who taught English in a Nepali village that had no roads or cars and where government-run education (as opposed to the traditional home schooling) was just being introduced for the first time. Read that, and don't be in so much of a rush to deny that your own schools had an unspoken agenda incorporated into your lessons.

"Schools were invented to give kids freedom and choice in life, and they were really the beginning of the whole concept of 'childhood' which did not exist until alarmingly recently. Previously they were merely thought of as very small adults who had to work and be miserable like everyone else."

I'm not very fond of the concept of "childhood." You speak of it like it functions to give kids the option of not working. In fact, it forces them into complete economic dependence on their parents for a much longer time period than is preferable for many of them, such as abused children or queer children who are forced into dependence on homophobic parents. I think western society has ridiculously extended the concept of childhood simply to deprive teenagers of any opportunity for independence. In Nepal, for example, even now that mandatory government-funded formal education is being introduced, the children move out and live in huts of their own away from their parents by the time they turn 14. They go home on weekends, but during the week they live in their huts because it's believed in Nepal that teenagers should be allowed that kind of privacy to study in. And I think that's a healthy thing. I think that my own teenagehood would have been much healthier and happier if I'd had the means to escape my homophobic parents and subsist on a meager income of my own, working summer vacations and weekends and such.