Tuesday, October 24, 2017

The Magic of Music at Morrison Elementary

The other day, an old friend tagged a bunch of us "Morrison kids" in a Facebook post, and it got me to thinking about how special my elementary school was. I was kind of tempted to think it was just a product of its time (late 70s to early 80s), but having talked to several people, including my husband (who is my contemporary and with whom I went to high school, but we attended grade school in different towns), I realize maybe it was just a truly spectacular pocket of the educational universe that we had the privilege of walking through.

There were many things that made the school pretty different. For one, the classes were in an "open classroom" format, meaning that there were two "pods" in the building: One contained 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and a 1st/2nd split; all separated only by rolling bookshelves and cabinets, which were probably taller than the youngest kids, but not the older ones. The other space had 4th-6th grades. Kindergarten was its own giant room off to the side, with so many interesting stations and areas. Anyway, some years, I remember all four teachers in the 1st-3rd area had their desks together in the center of the space, and some years, they chose to put them against the far walls.

Except for my 5th grade teacher, I had educators who seemed not only to love teaching, but to love me specifically, and I feel like they probably made other kids feel that way, too. But it wasn't just the teachers. My friend Theresa Baker and I adored the janitor so much, we'd often purposefully tighten the lids on our Thermoses just so we could ask whoever had lunchroom duty if we could go get him to open them. Looking back, of course the teachers and the janitor were on to our little game. I hope he enjoyed the visits. He was extremely kind to us.

Then there were the field days, the fall festivals (oh, the cake walks!), science fairs, spelling bees, and the fun Santa's Workshop "store" where we kids could shop for our family members' Christmas presents without tipping Mom and Dad off to what they were getting.

But the one thing I remember as having made my elementary years the most enjoyable on a consistent basis were our music classes. First, please let me introduce you to one of the most fun adult women I had ever met up to that point (I'm sure when you only have to deal with kids for an hour at a time, you have the luxury of being a lot more fun than "regular" teachers!):


There. In the middle, between my sister and me (yeah; I know. It was 1986 and I was in my awkward phase. Whatever.). That's Becky Pickle. Her laugh... I can't even describe it. I just hope she enjoyed life as much as it seemed like she did.

Music class was, I believe, twice a week, and held in the big, wide-open multi-purpose room (that last time I drove by was being used as storage, sadly) where we could do things like play cage ball if the weather were too bad for recess. We didn't learn to play instruments, per se. I think we did do rhythm sticks and recorders, but things like orchestra and band were introduced in 5th grade and were separate animals. Also, she introduced us to notes and time signatures and all of those things, but it wasn't primarily a music theory class. Really, we did a bit of everything. Mostly, we sang. A lot.

We put on programs.


For Valentine's Day.



For Christmas.


For something having to do with the founding of America, maybe?

We learned such a rich variety of music, too. We sang a bunch of folk music. American, sure; but also Japanese ("Sakura"), Cuban ("Peanut Vendor"), Jewish (The Hanukkah Song), as well as some Caribbean stuff that I remember specifically.

Some of the songs were beautiful and I remember to this day. Also, I can see now that some were basically just variations on other scales set to words so we could be introduced to them and recognize them. And some were exercises in rhythm. We also learned to square dance. And we learned tinikling.

Even more importantly, I think, Ms. Pickle let us to choose things to sing, setting aside time in class for various students who wanted to to perform. I never listened to country music, but had Sylvia's "Nobody" memorized, having listened to my friend practice it over and over. I remember when a couple of girls sang the MASH theme song. I felt very in on something mature and maybe even wrong that we were listening to our classmates singing about suicide.

I think Ms. Pickle made music fun and accessible to everyone. We didn't have to try out to be in the programs; we were all automatically in. And we practiced a lot, but ultimately, it was just a great time.

If I could wish one thing for the education of everybody's kids, it would be that enrichment programs could stay around. These are some of my best memories from elementary school, and I feel so fortunate that I got to be one of Ms. Pickle's students.


More singing.


We did a lot of programs.


I'm fairly certain that this "Caribbean" night might be considered culturally insensitive today. But I remember feeling very festive. 


Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Mal's Three-Year-Old Brain

This morning, Mal and I had a long drive all the way through Austin to meet my sister and nephew at Altitude Jump Park. We were listening to Weird Al's "Mandatory Fun" album, which has been Mal's recent favorite, and of which I approve, especially after six months of the single "Music Together" CD that's been his go-to.

As an aside, his favorite song is "Sports Song," which has a bridge that repeats, "We're great and you suck" over and over again. When he was belting this at the grocery store yesterday, I can only imagine the admiration other people had for my parenting prowess.

Today, though, at the beginning of the requisite polka, Mal asked, "Mom, do you hear the accordion?" I did. A few minutes later, "Do you hear the trumpet?" That one impressed me because it was muted. Then when we went back to "Sports Song," he asked, "Do you hear the xylophone?" It's specifically a glockenspiel, but that's a xylophone, so it counts. Then he asked, "And now you hear the drums?"

I was really amazed. James has an app on his phone that has different instruments, a sample (sometimes pretty bad) of the sound, and then the name (which is pronounced by an autobot voice, so often mispronounced, or just wrong -- i.e. a djembe is called a bongo). Regardless of the quality of every portion of the app, Mal loves it. He scrolls through it and goes back and forward to his favorites. He actually has used it a lot less recently than he did six months ago or so, but apparently it's stuck.

Two days ago, this video popped up in my Facebook memories. It is from last year, and shows Mal running up and down the hall at our hotel in Waco on our way home from the State Fair of Texas (which we're missing this year; sigh). What struck me, aside from the fact that he just has always had a crap ton of energy, is that he was basically non-verbal. He says, "Daddy," and something else that might be "fast" or might be something he made up. He does the sign for "cry" and makes a vocalized motor noise to indicate the elevator. But he just wasn't talking yet. He had just turned two. The "average" vocabulary at that age is 50-75 words, and adding more daily. He just didn't have that. We weren't worried, though, because he knew a bunch of signs, and we knew he could understand us.

Cut to exactly a year later, and I couldn't count how many words he knows. He talks all the time. He knows all of the words. Take-away from this: Don't waste too much concern on milestones if you don't have other reasons to worry.

"All aboooooooard!"
Mal has very strong opinions about how things should be. If I rearrange the colored chairs at the table in his room after I've vacuumed, he says, "You made a 'stake!" and puts them back the way they were before, which, of course, was completely arbitrary in the first place. He has a set of "rainbow" drawers in his toy cubby, and when James purposefully rearranges them, Mal tells me, "Daddy just made a 'stake!" and fixes it.

One of his funniest (to me) insistences is that I am not to wipe his nose when he's crying. If he's particularly snotty, I'll ask, "Do you want me to wipe your nose?" He'll say, "No! I want to cry!" I tell him that he can still cry, but it doesn't matter. There have been a couple of times that what has come out of his nostril is so gross, I insist and swipe it. He says, "You took away my cry! I wanted to cry!" For some reason, those things are connected.

Mal really seems to like lists. I posted a video to Facebook tonight of him going through is Star Wars workbooks, naming every character on front. He does the same thing with the Cars 2 set Nana and Pappy got him for his birthday. He also does it with a set of print-outs of Paw Patrol characters we have. He also likes to "count" things, although, even though he can count out loud, it's sometimes difficult for him to keep track of what he did and didn't count. If he skips over something, he'll usually come back, but then he'll recount whatever is after that that he did already count. I show great restraint in not explaining that he made a "'stake."

Cute times. I love this age so much! He's still an energetic handful, but, gosh, he's funny.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Things People Say #1: "She's Really Let Herself Go"

There are a lot of things that people say that make no sense to me. Either they're vapid to the point of being meaningless or they're rude and unhelpful, or they seem duplicitous, or some other thing that just sticks in my craw. I'm going to do several posts about these, and this is the first. If you have any thoughts, or any phrases that similarly bother you, please leave a comment and let me know.

The first one I want to take a look at is "letting yourself go." In the title, I used the feminine pronoun because, honestly, this is the one I hear levied the most. It typically refers to a female who perhaps used to be more conventionally "attractive" than she is now, whether it's because of hair color and style or weight or clothings choices. And when this woman is seen after a few years, whether it's an actor who's been quietly living for decades or an old church friend someone sees at the grocery store, some people will either say out loud (or in website comments) or think to themselves, "Man! She's really let herself go!"

Besides my basic belief that no one should feel comfortable judging the appearance of another person negatively at any rate, this line of thought bothers me because it makes a false assumption: That the lady in question used to care enough about herself to "take care" of herself, and now, through whatever life changes that have happened, she has apparently become lackadaisical about it and has just gotten uglier and let everyone down.

That is utter bullcrap, friends.

If you've followed me for long, or if you've known me for many years, you probably realize that my weight has fluctuated a lot during my life, mostly resting on the "higher than I'd prefer" end of the scale, but with three very dramatic weight loss events during my 20s and early 30s. If you met me when I was 26 and then didn't see me again until now, you might be tempted to think, "Geez. After she had kids, she really let herself go!"

But you'd totally miss the point.

I let go of stuff, but not of my self-care, self-esteem, or respect for my husband and family.

See, to maintain a weight that is below the level deemed by the medical community to be "overweight," food and exercise has to be the main focus of my life. I have to plan what to eat, buy those things, eat different food than my family does, track every single thing I put in my mouth, refuse random bites of food my toddler wants to share with me, spend lots of time fantasizing about the next time I "can" eat, puzzle how to consume the most amount of food with the fewest total calories, etc. I also have to take at least 90 minutes every other day to do strenuous exercise outside of the normal rhythm of my life.

For 20+ years, I worked out every other day, save about 3 months when I lived in a travel trailer in my mid-20s. I either did a combination of the Jane Fonda 1980s and Dolph Lungren 1990s workouts, or I went to the gym. Save Zumba, I never enjoyed a minute of it. I thought it was cool when I could run 5 miles (at 195 pounds, by the way), but I HATED running. I was proud of how many sit-ups I could do with no one holding my legs, but I never enjoyed the actual sit-up part. I dreaded working out, even when I did it at home while watching television.

I did both of these regimens because society, and in a couple of cases, people near and dear to me, told me that being big is gross, unlovable, and shameful. My natural base weight wasn't good enough. It had to be lower. And I took the message so seriously that no matter what I weighed, I never felt great about it. I never looked at the scale and went, "That's it, then. I made it!"

But even if I had, there's this myth in weight loss. It's called "maintenance." It's the idea that you have to work really hard to lose weight, but once you get it off, you transition to an easier phase where you just have to maintain that weight.

Actually, maintaining your lower weight is much more difficult than losing it. You can eat fewer calories, and you have to work out harder, especially if your work-out uses your own weight, ironically making the work-out easier once you don't weigh as much.

It requires a huge amount of energy: physical, emotional, and mental.

And for this chick, it just stopped being worth it.

I want to play with my kid instead of insisting on an early bedtime so I can get my work-out done. I want to eat when we go out for ice cream. I don't want to have to pull out my phone every time I eat a grape lest I forget to log it.

We eat mostly vegetarian meals, whole grains, and the like; and I get quite a bit of naturally-occurring exercise keeping up with my preschooler. It's not sustained target heart rate for fat-burning, but my body does what I want it to do and is quite reliable

If someone sees me and thinks less of me because I am not sad enough about not having worn a size 12 in 5 years, then they have it backwards. My life is fuller and happier and better now. I let go, yes, but not of my self-care or self-view. I let go of some vanity, and of requiring an approving eye to make me feel worthy of love. I let go of spending time doing something I found drudgery because I decided you don't make someone you love do stuff that sucks the life out of them.

I'll admit: a big part of this freedom to me has been living with someone who loves me unconditionally. Not being afraid that I'm going to lose the affection of the person most important to me in the world goes a long way toward giving me permission to be myself and feel comfortable about it.

So maybe your reacting negatively to your high school sweetheart's letting her hair go grey or stopping wearing heels says more about you and your need for an attitude adjustment than with her mental or physical well-being.

Maybe "letting go" isn't about not caring, but about caring for more important things. Maybe it's maturity and priorities and contentment. Maybe, instead of judgement, congratulations are in order.