DESIRE & PANIC

March 9, 2019March 9, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

The author had my attention from the hilarious introduction to his memoir, Between Panic and Desire. I recognize the world he describes. Unlike his parents, my father never left; it was my grandparents who all divorced, some remarrying, some not. But while he was not yet 6 years old during the Bay of Pigs, I was already 8. I remember. My parents were fierce supporters of JFK, and Boeing Field was just down the road. However, living on the West coast, in the suburbs of Seattle, my life was never at risk during those tense days. The bombs could not reach so far. The eventual fallout, WW3, escalating tensions? I recognized those risks even as a child.

Fifty years ago, shortly before midnight on 16 April 1961, a group of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by the CIA launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs.—BBC

Dinty W. Moore recalls the period of our shared youth and I recall all the events he does—the international crises and threats, Squeaky Fromme, the assassinations, the same presidents, the same falling Towers. All the events that haunt his childhood memories. He yearns for his absent father, and goes looking everywhere for a replacement.

Moore was about 12 when Fromme joined the Manson “family”; I was not quite 15. I had to look that up because I never found her the least bit interesting. I remember Martin Luther King Jr.’s death as vividly as JFK’s. The balcony. The black horse, my mother explained, was “spirited because our president was spirited.” I never considered any of the presidents to be father figures, and I got over southern accents with LBJ. Happily, I met the person I would marry (whom I also mistakenly assumed on first sight was otherwise connected) at the age of 16, so I was spared Dinty Moore’s years of lonely drug abuse. My husband was not a user. However, Dinty Moore and I did not experience the 60s in the same way. My memory has a great deal more music and fewer cars. Many of my friends died. Peace marches. Feminism. Later, the AIDs epidemic. Identification as a visual artist. A long period of yearning for a country life. Moore had other concerns. I still do not consider that our failure to develop a strategic response to terrorism might have been a serious oversight. I wanted then to address the cause: ongoing imperialism. The corroding root.

When Dinty W. Moore lost his father, I was worrying about the world population explosion. By junior high school, my best friend was African American. Perhaps this is because I lived on the other side of the continent. I still do. I met the Dinty Moore in 2002, while attending a novel writing workshop with Bret Lott in Milledgeville, Georgia. He and Bret sat on a wide porch smoking cigars in the dark. (Perhaps only Brett smoked—I could be wrong about that.) Dinty will not remember me. I was the one typing on my laptop about twenty feet away, the Mac logo glowing.

While I was in Georgia that week, my mother drove the few blocks to her local Post Office and found she could not get out of the car. She drove home, crawled into her house, and called for help. My husband called me in Georgia on a landline and had to leave a message. I borrowed a phone to call him back. I wanted to fly home immediately, but this was the start of Memorial Day weekend and there were no flights available. The workshop organizers made no effort to help. Still, I got home on Monday, in time to sit in the waiting room while Mom had back surgery. Her surgeon promised immediate improvement. There was none.

This did not go well, I realize now, because she’d already been taking Fosamax for years and that bone-building medication actually interferes with the healing of bone. There was research suggesting that even then, but no one considered it for my mother. She was eventually placed on a deadly combination of opioids and benzodiazepines, failed to drink enough water, and was mostly housebound or hospitalized for the remaining five years of her life. Many, many trips to the ER. Broken bones. Slow healing. Pain. There is probably a way to make this a funny story, but I do not have the gift Moore does.

I have quit teaching, but the third essay in this collection, “Double Vision”, has a masterful structure, and I immediately and inevitably considered how I would use it as a model for student essays. There is no self-pity but considerable humor concerning his diplopia. He nails the short form. Well, what would I expect?

The award-winning memoir is elegant in structure and voice. These are very funny stories, a masterful and unique memoir of absent fathers, drug abuse, and eventual insight. Now I shall have to find a copy of The Accidental Buddhist.

LETTING GO

March 7, 2019March 8, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

In preparation for the move to a brand new campus in the next couple of years, the Library has been downsizing. Books that had not been actually checked out recently were disposed of, some were pulped. (Yes, I find this distressing.)

The other day a relative posted a meme with hideous and clearly inaccurate images and information. Further investigation revealed the creator of the meme was a Danish neo-Nazi spouting appalling anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant and other hate messages. I can’t help wondering if his profile is a fake Russian bot spreading discord and disinformation. As a good researcher, I am distressed to witness such careless disregard for truth.

On Tuesday morning, while I was administering a final exam, two women burst through the door to set up for their own presentation. When most of my students had left, believing I was overstaying on their room reservation, I invited them in. They bustled about the room, chatting while they set out snacks and handouts. I had allowed students to work long in order to finish, but eventually I asked the women what time they expected their people to arrive. It came out that they were two hours ahead of their time, that their presentation was scheduled for the afternoon. I asked them to note that students were testing and they stopped calling to one another across the large room. A very polite student confided he had made the decision to drop my class the next term. Teenagers often decide to coast their last term. I understand this.

I should let all this go, I know I should. There have been a great many disconcerting things. This day was it. The tiny proverbial straws that broke the camel.

As a result, though these are not legitimate reasons, not reasons at all, not the real ones, I made two key decisions despite how much I love reading what people are up to on Facebook, and even despite my genuine affection for my current students.

Last week, I went off Facebook, at least for a while.

Yesterday, I quit my job teaching.

The English Department Chair immediately accepted my decision. I told the Pacifica Project Director I would not be creating the program this year, participating in rehearsals, or scoring the presentations themselves—that nearly brought tears. (Mike and I have a long shared history of commitment to public service.) I told the person in charge of the bulletin to take Open Library off the schedule “for now” as I was asked to do, and informed the Library Aide the same thing. I touched base with a couple of people to let them know I was leaving. I returned my key to the college.

Breaking my contract means no more than a dozen students might need to rearrange their Spring Term school schedules (only 8 showed for the scheduled WR122 meeting that afternoon). I have made a problem and I am sorry for letting them down. After speaking directly to students who expected me to teach next term, I also sent an email to everyone in the class just ending, CCing a copy to admin. As I always do, I offered to provide editing and references later and to share with them the materials I would have taught them in that class. I am honored when they take me up on it.

Perhaps the school will find someone else to teach these classes. It is time for me to step away.

It is done.

Once my late student hands in a final essay, I may enter grades for Winter term. I will be able to do that after next week.

I love teaching. Everyone must know I do.

Way back to the beginning of the Pacifica Projects, a service-learning project required of all seniors, we hoped to challenge students in a grand manner. Among our prime goals was to allow students to put the full range of their skills learned throughout their education to use. Other aspects of the program include a public presentation and a persuasive essay. The goal of the paper was to allow them to achieve excellence, to demand excellence, and to support them in getting to that level. Students are almost never required to produce excellence. Some do, of course, but that is on them. We almost never demand it of them and support them through a lengthy process to that achievement. The Senior Research Paper was intended to be like that—a completed work so strong that students were impressed with themselves for having made something excellent. Not genuine perfection, perhaps, but something close enough to that ideal from a teenager, a work standing in witness to their persistence and power.

That was always my goal, to drive and challenge students, to reveal to them their own strength.

Well, now I am pretty much ranting. I am not angry or even particularly upset. Tired. Fighting the tail-end of a cold. More than a little sad. Glad to have decided. Wishing they had tried earnestly, if fruitlessly, to talk me out of my decision to leave (they didn’t and never have) or shook my hand or something. I am resigned that, at least, they may let me go without much fuss. A concern seemed to be that I might tell students something unpleasant about my decision. Even if I had something unkind to say (I don’t), how would that serve anyone?

I know I have served my students well in the past, and believe I might have gone on teaching for years, as I planned. I am sorry to stop. Sorry to miss future students. Most often I am appreciated, eventually, and I continue to treasure the relationships I have built with students over the years.

So why leave? I might come up with a list, but these would all be trivial complaints. I recognize this. No one really wants that list, least of all me. None of what really matters is lost, but lately I have sometimes felt more concerned about the trivial than teaching, and that is not right.

I will move on and do something different, something productive and not because I am broken.

This camel might write a book.

IF YOU’RE SO SMART WHY ARE YOU STILL TEACHING?

March 6, 2019May 3, 2020 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

My first teaching job was at Forest Ridge a school of the Sacred Heart, an elite Catholic girls’ prep school in Bellevue, Washington. Sr. Bunny Flick hired me in 1976 to teach 6-12th grade Art part-time. She was eager to see her students both challenged and supported in their education. At the same time, she never seemed quite comfortable in her role as a school administrator, but she was kind to me. Midway through my time at the school, Bunny left for a new job and, though she might not even remember me, I still check in on her online from time to time. She is a generous, good-hearted woman committed to education. I wish I could let her know that I think of her patience and guidance, and I’ve continued to grow. I’m a better teacher now than when she hired me.

My last principal was also committed as an educator and as a supporter of educators. I mention this because I am about to criticize administrators, and I want to make clear that my concerns do not apply to all administrators and they certainly do not apply to my favorites.

I have written elsewhere defending teachers. I chose to become a teacher because I realized that I was good at it, and that teaching was a role I had been committing to at every opportunity since I was young. I have worked at the profession for a long time and I think I’m mostly a good teacher.

Bad teachers are rare, I contend, because they usually don’t last very long in the profession. Shortly after I posted an essay about this, a student came to me, having read it, and asked if I really believed bad teachers were rare. Well, yes, I do. I think most teachers are doing the best they can and most of them are doing a good job. There are exceptions, but here’s another problem: There are bad and indifferent administrators.

This matters to teaching because, other than the teachers themselves, only administrators have the position and power to improve teaching.

This is where I admit there are bad teachers, and it’s true that some teachers are mean and some have unrealistic expectations or absurdly high (or worse: pathetically low) standards. These aren’t necessarily the bad ones. Even mean teachers take the choir to State and prepare teenagers for independent thought and college. Students learn to let the meanness roll off their back. “Unrealistic” can become reality in about two flicks and then students are doing stuff no one else thought they were capable of. Students survive the high standards, and sometimes they even thrive because of them. So for now, let’s set aside the “mean” and expectant ones.

Let’s look at the teachers who wish they were doing something else—something else in particular or anything else. These are the teachers who really wanted to go on playing high school sports for the rest of their lives, or who thought teaching would be an easy job, or that working with children would be good practice for being a mom, or that they would have weekends and holidays off. There are teachers who don’t really care much about their subject. The ones who fell into the job and never really wanted to teach to begin with. The ones who think they have chosen a 40-hour-a-week job. The ones who don’t like students. The ones who don’t want to work that hard. And the ones who discover they simply don’t like teaching.

Most teachers who are unsuited to the profession don’t last. In fact, teaching has among the highest attrition rates of any profession in the United States. Studies find various results, but up to 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years. Imagine if, after five years of training and with less than five years of work, half the plumbers, electricians, and lawyers chose another profession. (That this is not true for teachers in some other countries might give us pause. In Finland, for example, teachers are not paid differently but the job has more respect and time. Top college students in Finland flock to teaching, and they stick.)

What do teachers who leave the profession do instead? Tend bar, start a small business, sell real estate, join the family business, study law. I’ve considered some of those jobs and others, but I am forever becoming a teacher.

Some teachers become administrators. My observations suggest that, like the reasons for entering education to begin with, there are a few less productive reasons for studying administration. Some would-be administrators are bad teachers who don’t want to choose another field. Some are looking for a job where they don’t have to work so closely with students. Some are looking for more money. Some want power. Status. Some see administration as a natural advancement, like becoming the manager of a retail store. Some want more respect from their community, more autonomy in how they spend their days, or less face time with children. These are all good reasons, I suppose, but not one of them concerns wanting a meaningful roll in improving education and in supporting the educational process with teachers, students, families, and communities, which are better reasons for becoming an administrator.

Administrators work hard. Most of them work hours as long as mine and for another month out of the year. They, like me, are never quite off the clock and always engaged with educational concerns, even during down time, though most have more flexibility.

But some administrators are not skilled at their jobs. Some can’t manage the thousand discrete and sometimes competing demands of community, teachers, students, and finances. Some were well-intentioned but bad teachers and perform no more effectively with peers than they did with students. Some cannot imagine how to get from where they are to where they need to go. They have no vision. Some see the world in black and white and cannot cope with an occupation that is many shadings. Some do not actually like or feel comfortable around students or their parents. Some do not even like children. Some do not respect the choice of others to continue teaching instead of seeking a “promotion” to administration. I’d like to believe these issues are all pretty rare. I see this in other occupations too—electricians, dentist, doctors, small business owners who wish they were doing something (anything) else.

Years ago The Oregonian published an Op-Ed about the disrespect that teachers face every day, including the disrespect from administrators with the attitude that if teachers were really smart, why are they still teaching? I get that a lot. Teachers are sometimes treated as if they were their students. For eleven years I was a substitute teacher in my district and there were principals who treated their teachers like the children they taught. This was especially grating when I subbed at an elementary school where the principal treated teachers like young children. (And if you’ve never worked all day with a room of 26 nine-year-olds, you really do not know what exhaustion is.) Because I teach children does not make me a child myself.

I’ve also been patronized and ignored by college professors, including people who teach Writing and Lit. at community colleges, who have never published anything of significance, and who have barely been alive as long as I have been teaching. I merely taught high school for close to 30 years. Now with a decade of college level teach, I suspect my experience, concerns, and observations still matter less than theirs. Perhaps I did not matter at all.

Elsewhere I have complained about the expectation of some people that everyone must commit to teaching as if it were a sacred vocation rather than a job. Sr. Bunny Flick is a nun. I am not even Catholic. I loved my job, though it is not a sacred obligation, it’s something I choose. But there is some whiff of truth in that expectation of commitment. No one does this job to get rich, but it is an occupation that should suit the practitioner, one they will do their best for even in the moments when it’s hard and unrewarding. They should be paid decently for their expertise and responsibility. (No teacher expects to get rich, but securely middle class is not an unreasonable expectation after a minimum of 5-6 years university education.) I also think it’s a reasonable expectation that if teachers do their job well they should be treated with the respect due to anyone in a skilled profession.

Teaching first graders is not easier than teaching college Physics.

Teaching is not easier than acting as an administrator.

We all work hard in education and administrators and the public can make things easier for everyone. Or not.

TWO MOVIES

March 5, 2019March 7, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Friends tend to express surprise that we still receive DVDs from Netflix. Perhaps “surprise” is not the word I mean. Shocked? Dismayed?

Nevertheless (a favorite word), we enjoy movies, the local theater is chilly and has sticky floors, and some films never get here. And then we find them on DVD, sometimes long after they were released. Wonderful, surprising, important films no one we know is talking about. They are not nominated for Oscars, their stars were not the thing that year, and yet, these are the ones we loved, these odd films we find entirely outside the general rush.

Last year we found Wind River (2017). Last night it was The Bookshop (also 2017).

Wind River is not an easy film to watch but it’s beautiful. I might wish this were not another film starring a white person but really about people of color. Even so, there is respect. There is a great story here. There is genuine honor.

During a winter season in Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, expert tracker and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent Cory Lambert discovers the frozen body of 18-year-old Natalie Hanson who was barefoot, without proper winter attire, miles from any building, and had a blood-stained groin. FBI special agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate a possible homicide. The next day, Jane learns from Natalie’s father, Martin, that his daughter was dating a new boyfriend, but he does not know the man’s name or whereabouts. The autopsy shows blunt trauma and sexual violence and confirms Cory’s deduction that the girl died from exposure, specifically pulmonary hemorrhage caused by rapid inhalation of sub-zero air. …statistics are kept for every group of missing people except native American women. Nobody knows how many are missing.—IMDB, rated R

The Bookshop is a sweeter, sadder film. Have patience for this one. I got a kiss from my husband for this movie filmed in Northern Ireland (outside) and Catalonia (inside).

England, 1959. Free-spirited widow Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) risks everything to open a bookshop in a conservative East Anglian coastal town. While bringing about a surprising cultural awakening through works by Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabokov, she earns the polite but ruthless opposition of a local grand dame (Patricia Clarkson) and the support and affection of a reclusive book loving widower (Bill Nighy). As Florence’s obstacles amass and bear suspicious signs of a local power struggle, she is forced to ask: is there a place for a bookshop in a town that may not want one? Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel and directed by Isabel Coixet (Learning to Drive), The Bookshop is an elegant yet incisive rendering of personal resolve, tested in the battle for the soul of a community.—IMDB, rated PG

“Smile, you’re beautiful.”

March 4, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

from 19 April 2013 in The Humanist

This afternoon a student passed me, grinning. She’d just visited the eastern-most toilet stall in the “senior” bathroom. The room is decrepit, the soap dispenser is often empty, and the stall doors don’t latch. But on the inside of one door is a hand-written message: “Smile, you’re beautiful.”

I’ll admit that part of the reason I smile when I read this is because it’s spelled and punctuated correctly. But there’s more to it—a student wrote that note. It’s something to think about.

I have always loved teaching. I love sharing what I know. I love seeing the glow when a student gets it and realizes they can achieve excellence. I love watching worlds open up. I love being around young people on the cusp of life—fully aware and capable of thinking and questioning and growing. Their lives flutter with possibility.

But there are days when it’s hard to smile. As a fellow teacher posited to me: “It shouldn’t be this hard to be a kid.” A student discovers she will be homeless this weekend, and the boy across the room hasn’t had a full meal since his free lunch ticket expired two weeks ago—his mother is too embarrassed to fill out the forms. Another girl couldn’t go home last night because the crack dealer next door burned out the entire apartment building, and the boy beside her couldn’t go home for other reasons. One boy sees violence as an inevitable solution because it’s the only one he’s ever seen garner results. Another won’t listen to facts if they favor a viewpoint other than his own.

I’ve often been told that teenagers think they’re immortal. They don’t. They behave like cocky animals and they talk big and they take risks and make stupid choices because they know they’re going to die. They’re terrified and worry their lives will end before they can make a difference in the world.

“What does Egypt look like?” a female student asks during a class discussion about protests around the world, including the strategies of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. “Is it sandy like in the desert? Are there buildings like in India with goats in the streets?” I talk about Cairo’s 17 million people and modern hotels, adding, “but yes, there is sand.”

“What do they want?” she asks. “Why are they in the streets?”

I tell her I can’t say for sure, but that they probably want the same things she does. They want a free country, they want some power over their lives.

I’m intrigued by her questions. This student has been practically nowhere and seen almost nothing. Usually shy, she stares off, perhaps imagining camels and traffic jams. “I want to go and see it,” she says.

Not one student in three classes has ever heard of Thoreau before today. A few recognize the name of Gandhi. “Mahatma,” one boy suggests.

“That means ‘great soul,’” I inform them.

One girl knows he went on a hunger strike to protest British rule in India. But no one has ever heard of how American men and women sat down at luncheon counters to order a cup of coffee and were abused, spat upon, beaten, and finally arrested merely because they were black. My students are shocked. I hope they’re equally impressed by the courage of those sitters who took abuse to call attention to injustice, and were incarcerated in order to publicize their goals. They have their place in making the world a better place. We talk about that.

The goal in school is to get an education, but for some students the overwhelming goal is survival. They are hungry, homeless, embarrassed by their clothing, their transportation, and by their families. They have no quiet place to study and no one at home to encourage them. They have undiagnosed and untreated health and emotional issues. They deserve so much more than they have. They deserve someone to expect more from them. All of them—every one—wants to be successful, but only rarely do they have a personal, practical, or emotionally satisfying image of what success looks like.

“Make a list of things you want to do before you’re old,” I tell them. “A bucket list,” they say back. They want to graduate and make money. They want to make their parents proud. Some say they want to buy their mom a house. Or go to Egypt. One wants to dance in the street in Chelsea. It’s good that they dream. They need these grand and beautiful dreams.

Too often high school culture concerns nothing much beyond sports and clothing, grades and money. Earning a living is necessary, but money by itself is a sterile goal. They worry too much about prom—it’s unlikely they’ll ever get to dress that way again—and not enough about mathematics. They read all their friends’ posts on Facebook and not nearly enough novels or history books. They use technology without mastering it. They know how to slip through the system without understanding that it’s here to serve their future. They earn grades without gaining an education. They worry about the wrong experiences of high school.

I can’t say who is at fault. Parents tell them the great lie: this is the best time of your life. I warn them that it shouldn’t be true. Life doesn’t go downhill after age eighteen. “It’ll get better,” I tell them. There is so much more.

Teachers try to provide incentives and rewards. I see possibility spread out before my students, waiting for them to find their way. I try to throw doors open to the world, but find students are too busy keeping on their feet to venture out. I see the world wide open to them, but they fear electric fencing. They fear failure. They fear the future. And because of these fears, some of my students will remain right where they are all their lives, turning in ever smaller circles, wearing a hole in their own tiny scrap of rug. I’d like them to fly. Get on a magic carpet and out the door. I’d like them to know the world.

Smile, you’re beautiful. Who wrote it? I wonder. All these students who walk the halls of my school—the future is still open and some of them will make beautiful lives despite bumps along the way, and they’ll return one day to tell about it. And even on a day like today when too many children are moving in frightened circles, I smile. They’re beautiful.

GREEN SPACE

March 3, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Sometimes the tide reveals the remains of a long-lost forest. This log in the foreground is waterlogged, usually buried under sand and rock, and probably hundreds of years old.

My husband and I made two simultaneous and life-changing decisions in 1979. We would move to my family’s property in my home state of Oregon, and we would begin a family. We had been living just a few blocks from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and often spent time in the wild Lower Woodland area east of the zoo. Gary had worked in the zoo ands recently returned to college for a masters degree in education. He planned to teach elementary school. But the illness of his father threw his family into chaos and too much of the emotional burden seemed to fall on him. His sisters called most evenings, his youngest brother is mentally ill and his older brother, in California, did not make the trip north for the funeral when their father died.

Our new home in Oregon offered the ocean, the broad beach, and a forest behind our backs. Both Gary and I had grown up playing in wild places. It felt right that our children would have that same opportunity. Recent research suggests our choices were fortunate for the future mental health of our sons.

Urban residence is associated with a higher risk of some psychiatric disorders, but the underlying drivers remain unknown. There is increasing evidence that the level of exposure to natural environments impacts mental health, but few large-scale epidemiological studies have assessed the general existence and importance of such associations. Here, we investigate the prospective association between green space and mental health in the Danish population. Green space presence was assessed at the individual level using high-resolution satellite data to calculate the normalized difference vegetation index within a 210 × 210 m square around each person’s place of residence (∼1 million people) from birth to the age of 10. We show that high levels of green space presence during childhood are associated with lower risk of a wide spectrum of psychiatric disorders later in life. Risk for subsequent mental illness for those who lived with the lowest level of green space during childhood was up to 55% higher across various disorders compared with those who lived with the highest level of green space. The association remained even after adjusting for urbanization, socioeconomic factors, parental history of mental illness, and parental age. Stronger association of cumulative green space presence during childhood compared with single-year green space presence suggests that presence throughout childhood is important. Our results show that green space during childhood is associated with better mental health, supporting efforts to better integrate natural environments into urban planning and childhood life.—from the recently U.S.-published Danish study: “Residential Green Space in Childhood Is Associated with Lower Risk of Psychiatric Disorders from Adolescence into Adulthood” by Kristine Engemann, Carsten Bøcker Pedersen, Lars Arge, Constantinos Tsirogiannis, Preben Bo Mortensen, and Jens-Christian Svenning, published in PNAS

Both Gary and I thrived in a generation that allowed children to run free. We ran and walked and biked sometimes for miles. We followed trails in woods or scanned the desert, climbed trees or rocky cliffs, swam in local ponds and sloughs, and experimented with all sorts of dangerous stunts.

It is a wonder we are alive. Perhaps.

Or maybe these early childhood opportunities are the reason we are alive. No one should fall for the fallacy that various threats to childhood are something new. There were bullies in my childhood. I nearly drowned in tiny Echo Lake. Gary and his friends stretched a rope across a road in the absurd attempt to catch a truck. I climbed so high into a tree in the cow pasture that the top flopped over, leaving me upside down and close to a hundred feet in the air.

Yet, here we are.

A man up the street used to strip his children and beast them with a strap. The hunting dogs kept in a pen in the back yard of the house across the street were widely viewed as dangerous. The adult son of the owner of those dogs was in prison. The pastor living in a brand new house behind our back yard famously piled up old furniture in the empty lot, poured lighter fluid over it, set it alight, and drove away with his family. This was 60 years ago. I know children have always been at risk both from experience with my peers throughout school and from reading.

My experience also suggests that hovering over children encourages their misbehavior and fears. I built a fort in our yard when the boys were little, a distraction from the beach, which was not a safe place to play when they were very small. The threat of a sneaker wave was very real and I did not allow them out on the sand without being there myself. On the other hand, I found that my sons would hang off their new fort in the most dangerous manner while I watched. I realized they assumed I would protect them from harm. This was true even when they walked along the railing eight feet from the ground and while I was not close enough to catch them. They seemed to have some magical faith in rescue.

If I went into the house and watched from behind the blinds where they could not see me, they stopped hanging upside down and balancing on railings. It took me a while to figure this out. Maybe it isn’t always true.

Whenever our children were doing something they shouldn’t, the best response was distraction. Gary was especially good at this. Are they throwing the little plastic animals? Gary will have them lining up all the plastic pigs. They want our attention, but pointing that out is not useful. Young children want our attention, not to hear about the psychology of their needs.

As a grandmother now, I mostly keep my observations to myself unless I am asked. (I am not usually asked.) I wish my grandchildren had a wild wood in their front yard, but their parents take them often to play in parks. I wish my sons had studied behavior modification and educational theory that urges only positive reinforcement and redirecting attention rather than relying on threats. But they do pretty well without my help.

I suppose most people do.