The idea of attacking something monumental is usually so overwhelming, none of us wants to even begin. When staring a blank dissertation or thesis in the face, most mortals would happily volunteer to do Sherpa duty for a climber up Mt. Everest. Or chew glass. Or shove ice picks under our fingernails. Pretty much anything but having to sit and write something intelligent (even intelligible would be good).

The guest post The Graduate Educator has up about good advice to follow regarding the writing of a dissertation reminded me of this story of my stubbornness being vainly pitted against my Dad’s. (I lose).

During the spring semester of my sophomore year at Cal State, I spent the term in New Zealand and Australia. One of my courses was an independent study course for which I had only to do some research and write a big fat paper on the marine ecology of the South Pacific. I’d done the research–literally up and down the two islands of New Zealand in every city and university library along the way.

I arrived back in the States with a huge pile of Xeroxed pages (it was the 1990s, and the “Internets” weren’t so much). All I had to do was read through the pile and spew out the information in a new and interesting form for my biology prof. It was May, and the paper was due by August. I hadn’t had a break from the academics all term, so I was ready to not think and to start making some money at my summer job, working as an electrician’s apprentice with my Dad.

Too bad for me my Dad’s a total workaholic pain in the ass (I come by it honestly, it seems). He found out about the unwritten paper, and despite how much he needed my help, he told me no job until the paper was written and he’d proofread it for me. I was pissed, and spent at least three days ranting and stomping my drama-queen way around my Mother’s house, waiting in vain for my Dad to call and tell me he’d changed his mind. That never happens, by the way, and at age 20 I should have known better.

By Day Four I’d realized the ranting wasn’t getting me anywhere (he lived in a different house in a different town, so it’s not like he was having to listen to me yell) so I sat my ass down and started. It sucked. Sitting down with the objective of writing an entire paper is asinine. I lost a few more days of my money-earning summer vacation figuring that out. Around 2 a.m. on the sixth night I’d had the life-altering epiphany that if I broke the whole project down into manageable sections, I could kick each section’s ass easily.

I disassembled the entire mountain of suffering into viable bits, and every day I just wrote about that bit, paying no attention to good writing or perfection. I just spewed until it was done. And then, when I felt no more pressure and the mountain was decimated, I relaxed and did my editing and rewriting. And then[italics] I called my Dad and told him to come over to Mom’s house and read the draft. I still have the copy he edited. In red pen. Jackass.

I got an ‘A’ on the paper. And for the record, my Dad’s a total pain in the ass, but he’s also one of the most amazing humans on the planet. And, as he still feels the need to point out whenever this incident is recalled, didn’t I learn a valuable life lesson about getting sh*t done?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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image credit: jesse newman for TIME

Here’s another entry for my List of Reasons Why I’m Justifiably Pissed About the Lack Of Time Machines: the Blue Man Group started an elementary school. And if you know anything about elementary school, then you’ll be up on the pertinent info regarding age restrictions for enrolled students. I was eligible in, like, 1980 to attend the Blue School’s kindergarten. So you see why I need a damn time machine.

The school itself sounds amazing, and I really want a do-over so I can attend. But possibly more wonderful than the school is the reason for starting it up in the first place. The founding members of the Blue Man Group– Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, Chris Wink—started their oddball performance group as “sort of a support group for people whose creativity had been all but squeezed out of them by education,” says Wink. “At one point, we asked, What if there was a school you didn’t have to recover from, that didn’t make you question the idea of being creative?”

image credit: NY Post

The Blue Man philosophy plus the Blue Man Group bank accounts added to the appearance of Blue Man Progeny equaled the formation of The Blue School. It’s a private school in Manhattan, so it’s not cheap. But it’s imaginative, has a good soul, AND it’s an accredited school. I’m happy and am thinking good thoughts for the kiddos who get to go. I hope they understand there will be nary a sympathetic ear should they ever bitch about their elementary education.

Further Reading and Viewing:

NY Post: Blue Man School
Time Magazine’s Video of The Blue School
The New Yorker: Cool for School

Posted by Alexa Harrington

While I understand the need every parent has—on a weird, biological level—to do as much for their child as is feasible in order that said kid’s life path can be as smooth and highly elevated as is everly possible, I have never been able to be anywhere near fine with the insane pressure and bizarre hoop-jumping some parents put their kids through.

Succeeding in life is super great, don’t get me wrong. Going to college for the sake of the education and the life experience is not something that can be duplicated. I’m pro-success and pro-college, absolutely. But I really (a whole damn lot) can’t fathom how working your ass off from preschool on through grad school to be in the top 5% of your cohort for any and all school and extra-curricular activities is either necessary or healthy. Plus, it can’t be all that fun.

Is it peculiar and freakish that I lump “success” and “happy” in the same pile? Perhaps. I love my kiddos, and I really do believe the high-pressure helicopter parents love their kiddos, too. We have different ways of showing it, however. I have some grandparental units who showed their love for me, for the first 25 years of my life, in ways similar to the hyper parents of today; they wished me every success, including unfounded dreams of sending me off to medical school because that’s what they had done and that’s where all of their friends’ grandkids were obediently marching off to (like cranky little lemmings, I might add).

My grandparents’ way was to coddle, protect, pressure and prepare me for the future until I was incapable of getting their lecturely tones out of my head. For the most part I’ve let it all go and have moved past the self-doubt and the second-guessing and the perfectionist tendencies I harbor. I put a lot less pressure on myself and I don’t intend ever to crush the souls of my own progeny, turning them into miserable beings, incapable of happiness or contentment. (It’s conceivable that I haven’t moved on entirely.)

My way is to support my kids and the choices they make, and to make sure they have a rich, well-rounded education, both in the classroom and at home. My main goal is to have happy kids. I honestly don’t care where or if they go to college, and whether they go right after high school or never. That sounds incredibly slackerly of me, I realize, but there it is.

The older I get (I just turned 35) the more I realize how hard it is to be a content and beatific adult. I’m happy, but only after letting go and unclenching a little. I’m fine with giving my kids an education (one where they are not expected to kick everyone else’s ass) and following their lead as to where they want to go in life. In this day and age, that’s a pretty revolutionary statement. I’m supposing people will respond with, “That crazy b**ch is going to let her kids do what they want with their lives!”

Anyway, this spew was brought on by Eduwonkette’s guest blogger, Hilary Levey. She’s a PhD candidate at Princeton, and wrote her dissertation on the whole high-pressure parent phenomenon, specifically the credentials those parents expect, want, and need their kids to acquire and achieve. The post is basically a summary of her dissertation, “Playing to Win: Childhood, Competition, and Credentials Bottlenecks.”

It’s a great article, and in it Levey does such an excellent job of explaining what the motivation is behind these insanely gung-ho parents, that I was able to open my mind up a smidgen more and maybe, a teensy bit, see the parents’ point. However, as much as I’d love to read the actual dissertation and all of her research (because her papers and her research sound fascinating), I think it would either enrage me or curl me into a ball that I wouldn’t want to come out of for a few days.

I realize it’s perhaps a little odd to be writing for an education blog and to be so cranky about uber-achieving parents and their offspring. I’m not against education in the slightest; I love education and I can’t get enough of learning in any form. Education is one of the greatest achievements of mankind, right up there with Ziploc bags, libraries, matches, wet wipes, cell phones and duct tape. But I’m just not on board with turning education (in all its forms) into a crazy competition where only the highest-scoring student has succeeded and everyone else has failed.

Everyone needs to unclench a little, step back, and see that their kids are amazing regardless of the credentials they may or may not hold. And to please realize that the winningest kid does not necessarily grow up to be the most successful or the happiest adult, and that the average kids don’t always turn out to be unsuccessful, miserable. low-income earning losers with no shot at kicking ass on the world because they screwed up that third-grade soccer championship.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.

This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.

My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.

A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.

I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.

I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.

My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image credit

I’m curious as to whether it’s the kids or the parents who need to be convinced to have elementary school students enroll at the “no-stress,” alternative Christa McAuliffe School in Cupertino, CA. The nearby Faria Elementary, a more traditional, all-standardized-tests-included school, has people lined up to enroll. But the no-pressure “research magnet school” where the students are engaged in their education every day and are all encouraged to think outside the box, be creative, and ask questions has seats available.

The cranky, cynical, hater-of-high-pressure-parents in me would be willing to bet large sums of cold, hard cash that it’s the parental units who are enrolling their offspring in the more traditional school, and if an objective third party (clearly not me) were to take the prospective students aside and ask them to choose between the two educational institutions, the kids would choose the happy engaging place.

For the record, kids from both schools go on to do well in high school and beyond. And the Christa McAuliffe School isn’t some new-fangled hippy-dippy place; it’s been around for 30 years and it used to have a waiting list. But now it’s one of the only low-key happy places in Silicon Valley, which pretty well solves the mystery as to why parents aren’t sending their kids there.

If someone’s looking for a research topic, I’d love to know at what point during parenthood do progeny-producing adults tie up their own self-worth so inextricably with the performance of their offspring that they can no longer just let them happily survive in a forward trajectory. When does it all become only about how much amazingness your kid can exhibit on paper?

My theory (which I’m totally pulling out of my posterior) is that the decades-long state of sleep-deprivation brought on by parenting tiny humans retards the logic and compassion functions in the parental brain. This is why there are so many hyper parents running loose in our society, demanding higher, better and faster hoop-jumping from their kiddos. And god knows we don’t want our kids growing up happy and calm; that would only lead to contented adulthood (a scourge we should all be striving to obliterate).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image: shilo shiv suleman