what “impressionable” means

[sophiaserpentia]

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This morning i had a jarring, chilling exposure to what the word “impressionable” really means.

My wife and i had to go to her son’s school this morning to deal with, well, the kinds of things kids do. All we knew was that the principal wanted to talk to her. I went along as moral support. We didn’t know they were going to drag her son into the room with us so that he could sit on one side of the room with four adults looking at him asking him about what happened. We had no idea we were going to be made into de facto accomplices.

And, to be fair, they didn’t grill him like interrogators. No, it was all maddeningly “reasonable.” It’s just that under any sort of scrutiny whatsoever he closes up, so we didn’t hear much at all of his side of what happened.

I’ve never seen anyone squirm so much in my life. And so, with him basically having been found guilty, we coached him through what he would say by way of apology and reassurance to the other aggrieved kids. To some extent that was appropriate, since kids are still learning about what it means to be an ethical person who respects other people’s boundaries.

But my wife and i were profoundly uncomfortable about the whole “words being put in his mouth” thing. And that’s all i saw everywhere i looked in the school. The “pledge of allegiance to the flag,” which was recited while we were there. Everywhere, ‘motivational’ posters with captions like “Curiosity: i choose to learn.”

The underlying message is, this is a place where we put words into your mouth. You know? I don’t think i’ve ever met a kid who had to be told to “choose to learn.”

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the liberty to choose what you want to do or say. You are told what you want to do or say. And it is often presented obliquely as if it is a desire coming from you, the kid. And when it is said this way often enough, and when you parrot it and get the appropriate reward, it sinks in. Really, really deeply.

It doesn’t matter whether or not kids understand what the pledge of allegiance is about. To them, it’s just dumb words that they have to repeat every morning… which they do in a droning, hypnotic, rhythmic monotone. But they do understand, on a basic level, that it is something they do to make the adults around them beam with pride (”What good, obedient, upstanding, patriotic kids we have!”) and to avoid punishment for not complying.

And much of this is about learning how to perform the gender we’ve been assigned.

Being in school helped remind me about how that worked when i was younger. I remember viewing adulthood as this barren wasteland where you wander around as a broken person, your dreams and individuality stunted beyond repair. I suppose that was my expectation because my preparation for adulthood consisted of this constant pressure to be someone-not-me, by way of the silencing of my own galla-voice and the replacement of it with something suitably “masculine.”

I remember, for example, eagerly joining the high school wrestling team after lots of input from my father about how much he had enjoyed it. I had never been a sporty kid, though being on the wrestling team was actually good for me in some ways. I wonder if people today look at my almost-thigh-length hair and somewhat femme presentation (minus, you know, the occasional stompy boots) and have any trouble picturing me grasping someone and pinning him to the mat?

But i would never have “wanted” to do that if it hadn’t been subtly put there, if it hadn’t been rewarded and encouraged once i said i wanted to do it.

On a bigger scale, this is why women’s “consent” to various kinds of things in a patriarchal society can be so sketchy sometimes.

But this leads into troubling territory because i’m wondering how we can distinguish between “educating” a kid (enabling their cognition while also respecting their identity and will) versus putting our thoughts into their heads and our words in their mouths. Kids don’t always know how to make decisions, it’s one of the things they’re still learning, and they sometimes have to be guided to a decision. (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

Comments

[alobar.livejournal.com]

> they sometimes have to be guided to a decision.
> (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

Ithaca NY was a very progressive town when I lived there 30-40 years ago. The public school system set up an alternative grade school for kids who did not do well in regular school. No dress codes. No codes about hair length of "gender appropriateness". I knew a gal who was a teacher there. Rather than many different discrete "subjects" her "projects" lasted for months, and dealt with many different "subjects" all locked into the projects. She found that by teaching material in an interconnected way that her kids rarely lost attention. Sometimes they wanted to continue class during lunch hour because they were hungry to learn more. Class was fun for them.

She was teaching US geography when I got an earful of what she was up to. The class project was to design a cross country motorcycle trek thru the US. The kids knew the motorcycle part was a fiction, and they would not get to go anywhere, but it grabbed their attention. What little kid would not leap on that sort of fiction?

First, kids did research and presented reports to the class which showed all the neat things one could see in various places. Then the class became an open discussion group where they pared the list of possible places down to a manageable handful. Then the class was guided in deciding their route to include all the items on the list, with the possibility to add in some of the places which had not made the final list, if they could be added without going too far out of the way. Kids learning to reach a group consensus while having fun was a spiffy combo for her to be guiding.

Lots of work with road atlases. They broke into 6 small small groups, each one taking a different leg of the journey. The groups then reported back to the class for general discussion.

Then came the math part. The class had to figure out how many miles between overnight camping spots. They needed to compute how much gasoline they would need, how to make a budget for meals, gas, tolls, etc.

Then they were assigned the task of learning about motorcycle maintenance. How to change oil. How to lube & grease. How to adjust the carburetor. Etc. Kids made after school field trips to motorcycle garages, read books from the library, talked with family members who owned or used to own bikes.

They then had to figure out how to pack lunches, how to make simple meals on a campfire each night, how to shop for foods without going over budget, etc.

When the project was completed, the teacher had a big surprise for the class. My friend Carl brought his big-ass motorcycle to the schoolyard. The class all went out to watch Carl drive around the yard. Then each kid got a turn riding with Carl in the schoolyard. They spent the entire day riding around in circles. Carl told me he got very dizzy going around and around the small schoolyard all day long, but the kids loved it.

At the end of the day, with the bike quite hot, the kids then helped Carl to check the oil, fill up the gas tank from a jerry can he had bought. One kid extracted the spark plugs, scrubbed them clean with a wire brush, the re-gapped them. Carl was dubious at first so he kept an eye on the kid. Carl told me he was impressed by the kid's expertise. I believe these kids were in fourth grade.

He brought the bike back the next day. The kids then washed and waxed his bike without assistance. Carl was impressed with the job they did.

As I wrote earlier, the alternative school was set up for troubled kids who tended to get into fights, not learn, and were in danger of flunking regular school. Many were poor black kids with family problems. As word of the school spread, many Cornell profs enrolled their kids in the school too. So the diversity in classes was great. All the kids prospered.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

Glad Day Press printed up the weekly school newspaper. The gal I knew was the coordinator of the newspaper collective. She asked if her kids come down to observe how the process worked. The kids sucked up knowledge like a sponge. Before long, they were leaning about the lithographic process worked. They asked a gazillion questions. They were fascinated at how a printing plate with no raised type was first coated with an acid-water solution to repel ink, then ink was rolled on, which then stuck only to those areas which were not coated in water. They learned how artwork was turned into photo negatives and how those negatives were assembled together under a sheet of yellow paper, then a sharp corner of a razor blade was used (very carefully) to cut thru the yellow paper, but not the film negative, so the strong UV light of the platemaker could harden the parts of the plate which would later accept ink.

The kids kept back, week after week, learning more and more. They were quite seductive. Before long, they were doing all the work while me and my partner, Dale, just kept an eye on them around all the dangerous sharp, moving, or poisonous stuff they needed to use to make their newspaper.

One kid asked Dale how much ink was used to print a single sheet of their newspaper. We had no accurate lab balances at Glad Day in those early years. He told the kids they would have to figure that one out for themselves. So they brought in a balance from school. Dale put ink on a piece of waxed paper. The ink was weighed. He then put the ink into the freshly cleaned press. The newspaper was run off. Then Dale scraped the ink fountain clean & put it back on the same was paper. The before and after weights were compared. The press run was 500 copies, 3 sheets, both sides printed. The kids then did the math. Nobody assigned them this project. They just wanted to know and it was worth it to them to figure it out.

One girl burst out laughing while she stripped her first page of the newspaper. I asked her what was so funny. She said "I can't wait to see the look on my mother's face later when I tell her that I learned how to be a stripper today!"

One of the kids did a weekly comic strip in the paper. It was a very surreal strip about his family life from the viewpoint of his pet raccoon. At some point I met his parents and got to visit with the family at home. It was there I discovered that the kid really did have a pet raccoon. Immensely overweight. At first I did not realize it was a living critter and almost sat on it because I thought it was a footstool. raccoon came and went like a dog. It scratched on the door when it wanted in or out. It begged at the table, liked its ears scritched, and always seem to be observing the humans in its family. At that point I realized the comic strip was not so much surreal but just a documentary.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

As the kids began graduating from the alternative grade school, the school system decided to extend the alternative idea into an alternative highschool. In the mid 1980s, I knew another gal who was a college student at Wells College who was a part-time teaching assistant at the Alternative highschool. While there, she connected with one of her older students. They became lovers. The kids parents got to meet her and had no problem with the idea of their 16 year old son having sex with the 20 year old teacher. She then told the school administrators and she got her assignment changes so she was not in a supervisory position over her student lover. Seemed like a very sane way for the school to handle the situation. She was one of folks on the fringes of the local pagan community.

To her, our Circles were "pagan parties", which annoyed me. She brought him to Circle. He loved exploring my bookshelves. He had never heard of most of the books on my shelf. He joined us for rituals and trip circles. He was a very mellow balanced guy. Not at all the "problem child" he told me he had been when younger. He was smart and very inquisitive. Their relationship was sweet.

So, in my observation, kids do want to learn, and can do so with minimal supervision. Guidance -- sure. But not brainwashing or control.