For Random Learning Comes

Documenting the Homeschool Experience

trying to make the scales balance

Of Peanut Butter and Privacy

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Living in my house means growing accustomed to things being out of place.

Peanut butter smeared on the roll of paper towels.  A random sock in the center of the floor.  A bottle of ketchup, with its lid hinged open, abandoned on the counter.  Dishes, strewn like offerings, before the altar of the desktop monitor.

These things no longer surprise me.  They make me crazy, to be sure. But I do my best to be zen about it.  It is what it is.

In an article in the HSLDA blog, Homeschooling Now, there is a quote from Marcia Ramsland’s book, Simplify Your Life: “The faster the pace of your life, the more organized you need to be.”

This may seem like a truism to some, but it hit me on the head with its bluntness. What may have worked, at least passably, when you were young and single may not cut it when you run a household of six.

Rewind

I have never been much good at organization.  It is really no surprise to anyone that my children, in some small way, might take after me.  As they say, the apple never falls far from the tree.

I remember lying on my bed, reading, in my perfectly ordered teen bedroom.  My mother, whose preferences ordained that it must be so, entered unannounced.

“Why,” she asked, pulling out a dresser drawer and exposing its brimming papery contents to the surrounding atmosphere, “do you have this?”

I could manage very little, by way of logical explanation, beyond a shrug.  Perhaps the real answer was, because in all my life I had only had this one little drawer that was mine, that I could organize as I pleased.  Or not.

That drawer was full of papers, my papers.  It happened to be a collection of letters from a very special friend.  I had kept them, because they needed to be kept.

You need not remind me, that this is the mantra of a hoarder.

A Quiet House

Going to my parent’s house has always seemed a bit like a vacation in my adult life.  Not because of their desire to take my children off my hands. My not-always-good kids were tolerated and celebrated.  They were bathed with admiration and treated to actual meals, sitting at a table, without a TV or other screen in sight.  With nothing but conversation to entertain them.

But the real miracle of my parent’s house was the wide-open spaces.  The cleared, or carefully-, but sparingly-decorated surfaces.  The aura of cleanliness and order.  It was calming.

It did not scream at you of unfinished business.

Settling

Orchestrating a meal for six at the table has proven to be too much for me, except on special occasions.  A pristine house has been equally elusive.  I have learned to settle for less than the ideal.  For I would have gone nuts in the attempt to reach it.

When it is a choice between anything and sanity, I always pick sanity.

So, at meals, we each serve ourselves from the stove top.  Everyone goes to their favorite corner.  On the rare occasions that my husband has returned from work in time for dinner, he and I enjoy our repast by the modern hearth.  We watch comedians or Netflix or the news, as we please.  And pausing to mute the device, every so often, we engage in real conversation.

It is not pretty.  It is not idyllic.  I doubt the American Academy of Pediatricians would approve.  But it works for us.

Perhaps it’s Privacy

Perhaps it is just my failure to instill good habits in my children early which has come back to bite me.

Perhaps it is laziness.  Perhaps it is a schizophrenic kind of modern feminism, that casts off the shackles of traditional housewifery, the cleaning, the scrubbing, the keeping up with the Joneses, while still cherishing the many freedoms and advantages and pleasures of being a stay at home mom.

Or perhaps it is my association of punctilious housekeeping with an invasion of my privacy, that makes me resist a thorough overhaul of my house before all the chicks have flown the coop.

Privacy is a funny thing.  It is so personal to each of us, and so variable between us.  My privacy, the type of things I choose to keep private, may not be the same as yours.

Often the difference is generational.  My parents didn’t even want to have to deal with having a smartphone or a social media account.  My own generation seems to be mixed, between those that embrace the technology, often to the horror and embarrassment of their children, and those who shun it, as a waste of time.  Meanwhile our children, and their children even more so, naturally swim in its amniotic fluid, never suspecting what poisons might lurk there.

Privacy in the Virtual World

The recent news items having to do with social media and privacy have led many of us to consider the price of online openness.  Or, conversely, how much are we willing to pay for our privacy?

Being online today is like having an automobile in the age before roads.  One must put up with a certain degree of peril and inconvenience, to exert the freedoms associated with this new technology.  But eventually, one would hope, roads will be built, and not only roads, but street signs and stoplights and methods of laying blame and holding people accountable.

We take all these traffic amenities for granted.  But when we lived in South Florida early in our marriage, Hurricane Andrew blew through.  Right afterwards, my husband was on a team to help clean up some neighborhoods in the Homestead area that had been hardest hit.  He came back with horror stories of a flattened wasteland.  No street signs.  No traffic lights.  No landmarks.  No Google Earth either.

Everything was gone or disfigured.  It was impossible to orient yourself, to know which way was which, in this landscape.  It was distressing and frightening.

Much like the modern internet.

Even I could not tolerate that level of disorder for long.

Privacy and Teens

Of course, we do not perceive privacy as a good thing, when we are the ones being shut out.  Such is the plight of the mother of a teenager.  Everyday, I endure dirty looks from teens who apparently consider my quick glance at their open screen to be an invasion.

But I have to confess, I feel the same when I am at the computer, writing.  A work in process, like a half-dressed person, is not suitable viewing for anyone.  And those who want to view, who insist upon viewing…Isn’t that the definition of leering?  Isn’t that being a Peeping Tom of the worst order?

The unfiltered openness of young children, on the other hand, or even those with less developed social skills can be astonishing. I once entered an autism classroom and was immediately greeted with the insightful observation: “You’re fat!”  Sadly, some things cannot be hidden.

Our Shared Mind

When Early Intervention came to my house for therapies all those years ago, I was first introduced to the concept of Theory of Mind.  At the time this was considered a deficit in those with autism and so therapists were carefully watching for any indication that perhaps my son did not grasp, at the appropriate age, that other minds were thinking other things.

It seems to me, that without this awareness of other minds, and the ability to exclude them from our own thoughts, the concept of privacy cannot germinate.  It Is only by realizing that we can keep a secret by not speaking (or writing) what we think or have done, that we assign a value to those things remaining untold.

If the right to not speak something, or to carefully choose to whom to divulge our secrets, has value to us, then having that choice taken away seems invasive.

In the past, these thoughts, which we might want to keep private, were spoken to a limited audience or, at most, written on paper, which could be burnt or otherwise disposed of.  We could be reasonably confident that our confidences would be kept.

Now, in this vast brain that we all share, our thoughts are being transmitted across space we do not control, by people we do not know, and used by forces we do not comprehend.  That leaves us feeling very vulnerable, indeed.

So perhaps we ought to do like our teens, and shoot the Internet a dirty look.  And let it know: This is private!

Alarming

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When you’ve had your smartphone for a while, you accumulate a lot of clutter.  You know the kind I mean: old texts, emails from people you hardly remember, screenshots, reminders and notes to yourself, bookmarks, saved articles and e-books.  Our phones have taken the place of photo albums, journals, messages scrawled on the back of an envelope.  And, in large part, they have replaced memory itself.  Why do I need to remember something, if I have it on my phone?

 

Long ago, when I was in elementary or early junior high, having a good memory still held some prestige, some relevance.  I learned Lewis Carroll’s poems “Jabberwocky” and “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by heart, as we used to say.  I learned the notes for sight reading on the piano, with the mnemonic devices F-A-C-E and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge.  And of course, I had to memorize the telephone numbers of my friends.

 

Now, we rarely have to use our memories, except when we need to enter a password or code.  But Heaven forbid, then, if we forget!

 

Failing Memory

 

We had a lovely time dealing with the perils of a faulty memory the other day, when purchasing cellphones.  The salesperson was very helpful, walking us through the many steps to get each device up and running.  But unfortunately, she assumed that the person before her had a degree of memory that in fact, he did not.  She allowed him to enter his passcode before allowing me to see it and write it down.

 

Memory is often an issue with autism.  My son has been able to recall events from the distant past with clarity, and yet draw a blank on something he has just learned or has just done within the past few minutes.  Math can be a real struggle, since so much of early math depends upon memorization of math facts.  The calculator can usually compensate for weaknesses in this area, but not always.  Visual schedules were a staple in his early days in school, a way of organizing and guiding a mind that did not always tread the well-worn path that others could walk blindfolded.

 

We continue to have issues with oft-repeated commands:  Put away the cheese.  In a plastic bag.  Sealed.  In the cheese drawer.  In the fridge.

 

Any one of the components of this multistep command could be missing from his memory.  I have found the block of cheese, shamelessly naked, but carefully placed in the cheese drawer in the fridge.  I have found the cheese in a plastic bag, but unsealed and on the countertop, approaching lukewarm.  This is a minor annoyance, but one fueled by an issue with memory.   No amount of reminding seems to guarantee full compliance with the rule.

 

Well, it is easy to see how a passcode entered one day could have disappeared from memory by the next.  And it did.

 

After three hours with a rep on a customer service line (again very helpful and nice, but the experience was no less infuriating for all that), I was in possession of a wiped and restored phone, ready to be added to our family Cloud account.  Only, unfortunately, it would be three days before another customer service rep could call and set that up for me.

 

So, after getting to enjoy the fresh independence of having his own phone for all of 24 hours, my son has to go without it for the next three days!

 

What was the first thing I did?  I put a reminder on my phone.

 

Remembering What to do Next

 

Our smartphones are not just repositories of memory, treasure chests of the past.  They are also heralds of the future.  With dictatorial tendencies.

 

Two apps in particular seem to lend themselves to charting the future, in our family, at least.

 

First is the reminder, or “to-do” listing app.  A number of bullets, which you fill out, to chart a certain sequence of events or a number of objects.  Great for grocery lists.  Not so great for life planning.

 

My list app had in excess of 50 lists when I changed phones.  Aspirational for the most part.  A health list.  A house organization list.  A weekly cleaning list.  You get the picture.

 

The Perils of List Making

 

Each list I created with the best of intentions.  But each brought me only disappointment and guilt.

 

On any of the lists, have the tasks, so lovingly compiled, actually been completed?  Other than the grocery list, I would have to say probably not.

 

When you have that many lists, you actually need a list to keep track of your lists.  My problem was, my aspirations were limitless, and optimistic, but my time was limited and inevitably curtailed by event after unforeseeable event.

 

Homeschooling lends itself to lists.  Layers upon layers of lists.  First, there are the students.  How many you have determines the number of lists you make. Then, there are the subjects.  Unlike in public school, in homeschooling one can really go wild here.  You could have ten or twelve, rather than the usual six.  You could teach philosophy to kindergarteners, if you wanted to.  Then there are the goals, or tasks, that need to be accomplished within each subject. Learn the times tables, for example.  Read at a second-grade level.

 

This is where the list becomes dictatorial.  Rather than allowing a homeschool (for example) to go forward organically, pressing the boundaries of today’s abilities to blossom into tomorrow’s, this tendency to revert to lists makes the process less pliable, more mechanical.  Less fun.  Despite my aversion to Common Core and other state standards, I found that, over the years, I had created my own set of “standards” almost as rigid as any the state or federal government could supply.

 

Naturally, I have decided to leave those on my old phone.  And how remarkably freeing that decision has been.  To start from scratch without an obligation to my name!

 

Now that I know the perils of list making, I will think twice before clicking on the app.  I remember a scene from one of Amy Tan’s books, The Joy Luck Club, I think, where the main character is numbering off on the fingers of one hand, the tasks she has to do for the day.  Imagine, only having to do five things!

 

Time as Dictator

 

It is ingrained in our beings now, that there is a single concept of time, that it “is” a certain time at any given moment.  I remember reading or hearing somewhere that this was not always the case:  once, not so long ago, time was somewhat variable across distance.  People had local time.  Not just in the sense of multiple time zones, but in the sense of being asynchronous, minutes or more apart from one town to the next.  Now, with everyone internationally synchronized to the nanosecond, it is hard to imagine living with such anachronistic disparities.  And horrifying, to imagine the chaos that might ensue.

 

Our use of smartphones only intensifies the power of time as dictator.  I remember my early days as a lawyer, when beepers were just coming into use.   I was appalled at the notion of actually carrying something on my person that would allow access at any time, even if only to give me a callback number.  Wasn’t it enough that I was in the office for hours each day and could receive messages there?  This seemed to me such a gross invasion of privacy.  But others considered it a godsend, a great time management tool.

 

Needless to say, I was late to convert to cellphones, and later still to make the further conversion to smartphones.  It still creeps me out to think of all the ways my online behavior, my purchasing, my social media presence, my blogging, even my physical to and froing, may all be remotely and continuously analyzed and parsed to someone’s profit.

 

No Cause for Alarm

 

One way to bow to the power of this ever present, synchronized ruler of our lives is to use the alarm feature found on every phone.  Rather than glancing at the clock (or watch, if you still have one!) every five minutes, as an event or deadline approaches, we go into our alarm app.  We set it and forget it.  The sudden noise is annoying, but better than constantly worrying that the deadline will be missed.

 

I do use alarms, and I became cognizant of exactly how much I use them, when I went to transfer my alarms from one phone to the other.

 

My son’s failures in memory did not come out of the ether.  I also have failings in that department.  And whereas I used to write notes to myself incessantly, or glance at my watch, or check my calendar habitually, now many of these memory tools are contained within my phone.  When I switched over to my new phone, I discovered that, over the course of a few years, I had set up an alarm to go off nearly every quarter hour of my waking day.  They weren’t all “on” at once, but they were ready if I needed them.  And, apparently, I had needed them at some point, or I wouldn’t have set them up.

 

Trip down Memory Lane

 

An interesting aspect of setting alarms on a smart phone is that they allow you to name them.  And thus, in the course of deciding which alarms to keep and which to toss, I got to relive a number of memories I had all but forgotten.

 

Years ago, I had one kid in college and the other in high school while two more homeschooled.  None of them had a car of their own, so I was constantly dropping off and picking up.  My alarm names reflected this incarnation of myself as an Ueber driver, with quick abbreviations, like PU for pick up and DO for drop off.  Finally, we were able to have a third car for their use, but each time there was an accident or a car was in the shop, the same type of alarms would show up.  Much of that has quieted down now, but it will ramp up again as the younger kids’ social lives do, I’m sure.  When these alarms disappear altogether, I’ll know my kids have grown up.

 

Another set of alarms were medical in nature, mostly associated with my surgery earlier in the year.  I had early morning alarms for physical therapy, multiple alerts each day (and night) to remind me to take my medications, and always, the better angel on my shoulder, reminding me (by way of alarm) to get out and exercise.

 

Some of the alarms were more eerie.  I’m sure many of you have alarms like the ones I described above.  But perhaps fewer have lived through a hurricane season such as we recently had.  My alarms from this period were ominous:  High Tide.  End Flash Flood Warning.

 

I don’t think I ever was so happy to hear that beeping noise!

 

All I did to change my alarms was to delete the names I gave to them.  Setting became much easier, if I didn’t have to sift between which title was more relevant, which easier to edit.  In fact I had multiple alarms for the exact same time of day!

 

To-Do List

 

For those of you who enjoy the process of organizing, checking lists and responding to alarms, more power to you.  But for the rest of us, who just feel pushed, jostled, irritated and downright bullied by them, maybe we should all take some time, going through our treasure trove of lists and alarms.

 

And edit mercilessly!

Security Blankets

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Warm.  Soft.  Cozy.

 

This is the time of year when we snuggle under them, wrap ourselves in them, tuck old and worn ones under our favorite shivering pets, cover our legs with them, ready for an invigorating sleigh ride.  And rumor has it, some of us even knit them!

 

I am not such a one.  The closest I ever came to knitting anything was the front panel of a pullover sweater.  It was significantly wider at the waist than at the shoulders, and full of rather inartful gaps and snags.  It was a labor of love, and I keep it still.  But no one would call it “clothing”.

 

Warmth

 

The only reason I tried knitting was because I noticed that, during my ten-month stay at a German university, so many young women kept busy with their needles all through those interminable lectures.  Somewhat less interminable for them, than for me, since they probably understood most of what was being said.  But as soon as the truth came out—that I could not knit, that I had never knitted, that I had never even had the slightest interest in knitting, in my twenty odd years of existence—well, then I became a charity case, and all the women who could knit between 15 and 85 felt it was their duty to instruct me.

 

You can understand why knitting, and blankets, for that matter, might be popular in a place like Germany, known for fairly cold winters.  (Although I cannot vouch for the fact that it is still popular, since my brief knitting experience was easily thirty years ago.)   I had the most wonderful night’s sleep during winter break in Germany, windows wide open for fresh cold air, snuggled deep under a feather comforter.  Germans do know how to do blankets.

 

A Fabric Embrace

 

Here, though, in Florida, the popularity of warm things: blankets, sweaters, shawls, scarfs… Well, it boggles the mind.  We are rarely given more than an instant of chilly weather at a time.  It is now absolutely gorgeous here, with clear, dry, sunny, room-temperature days.   I prefer the weather we had last week.  Nippy, even cold, at least for a Floridian.  You needed a jacket.  And that is not something you can say every day.

 

Despite the fact that most Floridians could survive the year just fine, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, hoodies are very popular and will be worn at the slightest provocation.  Long pants, especially heavy jeans, are the uniform of the teen set, just as they were in my youth, several degrees of latitude further to the North.  Girls and women encase their necks and shoulders in thick donuts of scarves as if guarding their tender skin against renegade snowflakes.  And velvet dresses and thick woolen coats make an appearance in the doorway at every Christmas party, if only to be shed immediately, and left in the bedroom with the purses for the duration.

 

So, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that children, too, long for the comfort of a fabric embrace, the peace and calm offered by a security blanket.  We went through four.  Some had to be clawed away, or hidden, from kids entirely too old to be seen dead with them.  Some were gladly replaced with other cuddly items considered more suitable and age appropriate.  I would always rue the day when the blanket was not washed in time for bed. And I would always smile when the blanket calmed the worst tantrum, soothed the most passionate complaint, put the most sleep-deprived little monster out, like a light.

 

To Lock Out the Storm

 

Well, it was a security blanket, of sorts, that I was seeking this week.  Seeking and not finding, at least not immediately.  Winter break, with its release from the shackles of routine, seemed like the perfect time to sit down and attempt to improve the security (or at least the apparent security) of my blog.

 

That’s right.  I was going to install an SSL certificate.

 

Now, it is not completely clear to me what the acronym SSL stands for.  And don’t tell me I could Google it!   Several possibilities spring to mind, only a few of which I could share on a “G-rated” blog, such as this. Subtly Suicidal Legerdemain, for one.  So Stupidly Lengthy for another.  Simply Sorcery (Best) Left (to professionals.)  You get the picture.

 

All this trouble, for a little padlock.

 

No Such Thing as a Free Kitty

 

The short version is, I found out you could get a free SSL certificate on WordPress.  So, I went to my hosting provider, clicked on it and found out, nope!   I needed to upgrade my CDN service. (Can’t Do Nothing??)  So, I changed it –it was not lost on me that the SSL was no longer “free” at this point!  But I learned long ago the hard lesson, that there is no such thing as a free kitty.

 

One minor glitch.  To use that CDN service, my site security service would also have to be upgraded.  It was no longer enough to locate malware:  the malware had to actually be dealt with in some way.  The fact that I thought they were already doing something with it is not the point.  As a result of this upgrade I incurred a significant charge, but there seemed no other way.  I bit the bullet.  I was hardly feeling more secure at this point, with a bullet in my mouth.

 

Click, click, click.   Paid for it all, pressed the button and went to view my site…

 

Oh my… goodness!  (Trying to keep the G-rating here!) All of my beautiful tiles on my landing page were folded on top of each other into an unreadable heap!  Clearly everything was not ok.

 

I called in the big guns.  I picked up the phone!

 

This is definitely not sounding like a bedtime story so far.

 

Sage Advice

 

My hosting provider advised me that it was probably a plug in. and so I had best go plug and unplug all of my plugins one at a time until I found the right one.  Being a mid-twentieth-century baby, I could only imagine the agony of pulling the plug out of each electric socket in my whole house and plugging it back in.  I don’t even have the patience to go through a strand of Christmas lights to find the duds!

 

I managed to keep the rather reluctant tech support on the phone and pointed out that I had not added any plugins recently, and that everything had occurred immediately following the install of my SSL and security updates, all of which I did through the hosting site.  The tech guy agreed to reinstall the SSL but I would have to twiddle my thumbs for another 24 hours before it would actually take effect.

 

Everything is so much faster, now that we live in a world of instantaneous communication!  I mean this sarcastically.  The waits are not shorter, only more inscrutable.

 

I put my poor broken site to bed for the night, and woke early the next morning to check the progress.  Nothing.  24 hours gone.  Still nothing.

 

Christmas Spirit

 

You get the picture.  This has essentially been my last three days.  Full of the Christmas spirit, if by Christmas spirit you mean cursing under your breath and wishing you had taken up another career, preferably in the tech field.

 

My son, the budding tech guru, did briefly come to my rescue.  He has already perfected his reluctance skills, which apparently are highly sought after in the field.  He assisted me in deciphering various terms (jargon and acronyms aplenty) and figuring out which buttons to click, on long registration menus.   For a process that is supposed to improve your security, they certainly do ask for a lot of information!  But the site was still only partially working, by the time he gave up.  He’s a programmer, not a web designer, he likes to remind me.  As if one’s time could be better spent eating dirt.

 

Well finally, today, a miracle happened.  The most beautiful Christmas Green popped up on the search bar, triumphantly proclaiming the site “Secure”.  The awful red exclamation point disappeared from my WordPress admin bar, as if making way for the Star to rise in the East!   I then plugged my naked babe of an un-http’d URL into Google.  And it took!   There, next to my site name, a padlock appeared.  I thought I heard an angelic choir.  At last my site was protected!  My naked babe had swaddling clothes!

 

Don’t ask me how it happened, or whether this Christmas miracle will last beyond tomorrow.  But it goes to show, to what length we will go, just to have a security blanket.

 

Happy Holidays!

 

 

Thank You: It’s Only Polite

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When my kids were little, every time they interacted with strangers, I felt a little boost of pride.  Once, my kids were polite.

My parents cared about politeness.  My mom had an old copy of Emily Post, where we would look up the proper way to do things.  Which fork goes where.  How long you can wait, before sending a thank-you note for a wedding present.  Which side of the spoon you slurp—or rather sip—your soup from.

I was in charge of setting the table—five cents per day! So, it was my job to make sure everything was just so.

Etiquette is to Behavior as Grammar is to Language

You would never dream of ending an exclamation (Watch out!!) with a question mark (Watch out?)  It’s just not done.  Mixing up your punctuation, or word order, or using an adjective instead of an adverb, halts communication dead in its tracks.  Meanwhile, the recipient of your message confusedly tries to determine what in the world you meant by what you wrote.

There were once strict rules for behavior, too:

  • If someone calls you, you should call them back.
  • If asked a direct question, you should answer, even if only to be evasive.
  • If, on a crowded bus, someone frail, or elderly, or pregnant, is standing, you should offer your seat to them.
  • If you are a man, you should open the door for a lady.

And so on.  There were some regionalisms, such as whether it was necessary to attach “Sir” or “Ma’am” when addressing an adult, but most of these common good manners held true across the country.

Many today would regard such rules to be insulting remnants of an entrenched sexism, vestiges of a long-lost, regimented, male-dominated culture.  Many would find these quaint formalities unnecessary, in our modern, first-name-basis, world economy.  Women were put in charge of such things, solely to keep them busy, while men excluded them from “real work.”

In my youth, we knew what to do, because we were taught.  Everyone seemed to agree, that as long as you stuck to those rules, you were doing as much as was required of you.  There was no need for additional bending over backwards, to ascertain someone’s state of mind, before determining if what you were saying might “trigger” them.

People expected a certain degree of respect and decorum in the actions of others.  But beyond that, each person was expected to be responsible for their own state of mind.

Modern Manners or Lack Thereof

Things are different now.  People still teach their children manners, but what they teach has changed over time, as society has gradually become more open, and at the same time,  more sensitive.

We no longer spend hours teaching our children the Victorian rules for leaving calling cards, or for keeping track of multiple forks and spoons on either side of our dinner plates.  Many of us rarely even eat at a table, except on special occasions.  Many of us rarely eat together as a family at all.  Is it any wonder that we focus less on table manners these days?

Even rules from my childhood, in the seventies, seem quaint and obsolete.  We no longer expect girls to always sit with their legs together, for instance.  Or expect grown women to wear pantyhose (good riddance!)

On the other hand, we suddenly have to confront sticky conundrums like,

  • which gender pronoun do I use? Or
  • will opening a door for a woman silently insinuate that she is incapable of doing so herself?or
  • will an honest compliment seem sexually harassing in some way?

Social rules change from place to place, too.

When I moved from Up North, I remember bristling whenever anyone said “Ma’am” to me.  Even though I now lived in the South, and it was still common practice.  I remember resisting calling teachers “Sir,” because it was reminiscent of the way slaves talked (in movies, anyway) and therefore, in my mind, demeaning to the one who said it.

I wanted no part of slavery, and as a proud Northerner, I felt quite completely absolved of our nation’s guilt in upholding the institution.  Despite the fact that my skin was pretty pale.

Years later, my husband explained to me that this form of address (Sir/Ma’am) was a way of showing respect for those older, wiser, or higher on the food chain, than you. He said it was very important to families with members in the military, where rank and honor are highly valued.  I gradually grasped that others could, on occasion, look at things differently than did.  I stopped being so darn convinced of my Yankee superiority.

Politeness in a foreign country can throw you for a loop as well.  Customs vary as you cross borders.  My trip to Germany left me feeling like an oaf in so many ways, most of all in my American lack of formality.  I found, at least in those days, outside of the University campus, you had to determine, before each interaction, your relationship with the other person.  Then you would know whether to address them with a formal or an informal pronoun.  Every reflexive form, every direct and indirect object must then also change to follow suit.  It was by far the most intimidating aspect of the language.

Connecting Without Borders

Now so much of our etiquette is focused on remote connections, rather than on the interactions between two people face-to-face.  We teach rules about online safety, such as which Facebook requests you can safely ignore, and which you had better respond to.

We also teach our children by example.  They learn that it’s ok to let a call to the home phone (if you even have one) go to the answering machine. They learn that you should never pick up the phone when you get a call from an unfamiliar number. They learn it’s ok to eat in front of the TV.  They learn that a few dirty dishes in the sink won’t kill anyone.  Speaking for myself, of course.

We have relaxed some rules to accommodate our busy lives.  We have also developed many new ones to protect us from brazen intrusions upon our privacy:

  • Unsolicited calls at all hours
  • Annoying pop-up ads
  • The collection of personal information for profit or criminal purposes
  • “Suggestive” selling
  • Failure to return emails and phone calls
  • Direct-to-voice-mail practices
  • Robotic or recorded call systems
  • The failure to provide human problem solvers
  • Referring exclusively to web content to explain things
  • Sloppy and careless use or storage of valuable personal data

What would Emily Post think!

Guiding Principles

Our society’s etiquette is no longer bent on trying to help, or trying to avoid offending, our neighbors.  I can think of many rules from my youth that are being violated in each of these instances:

  • Respect your neighbor’s time and privacy
  • Do not bore your neighbor
  • Do not self-promote
  • Do not use entrusted secrets for personal gain or malicious gossip
  • Don’t talk shop in social settings
  • Be responsive and prompt in communication with others
  • Do not avoid or procrastinate
  • Don’t pass off your work onto another just because you don’t want to do it
  • Respond personally to complaints
  • Keep everything in order so you can find it

It is true that people are human, and have always had lapses of etiquette.  Many rules are only honored in the breach.  But there are so many violations of simple etiquette rules in the internet world, that we might as well be living in the Wild West.

The Stream Reigns Supreme

Nobody says thanks anymore.  This is true, not just in my house, but across the culture.  Something happened, when we took our eyes off each other, and allowed them to settle, for a greater or lesser portion of each day, on a screen.

This same attitude, which acknowledges the supremacy of the internet stream to everything else in life, infiltrates every moment of our lives.  Especially as homeschooling parents of teens.

We face the constant challenge of competing with the ceaselessly entertaining content the internet provides. The internet eases our job in some ways.  It allows us to find resources with ease, connect with other homeschoolers, organize and attend events.  But it also makes homeschooling more difficult.

You can no longer simply bar the doors, or take the phone off the hook, to limit distractions in your own house.  To do so, you must unplug completely, and thereby cut off your own access to news, personal contact, and entertainment. The old saying, “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.  Or “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” For modern parents, pulling the plug like this is much like its hospital counterpart: replete with lethal effects.

Unplugging computers or TVs alone will not do the job, because there are wireless systems everywhere, and cell phone data plans to supplement, when wireless is not available. The controls are no longer in the hands of the parent, to decide how the child spends his or her time, unless the parent is willing to have eyes-on-screen with the child, 24 hours a day.

The mobile devices offering cell service and the internet, combined, are something that children and teens have come to expect.  All their friends have them.  They are a safety measure, after all.  To the young people, the services seem ubiquitous, like air, and equally comforting and necessary for survival.  How can such an advance for human society have become the enemy of learning, the naughty friend who lures your child away from his books?

I suppose you could always cancel all internet and streaming and cell services.  It is conceivable.  You could also live in a log cabin with an outhouse.

Either way, you can be sure that no one in your family will thank you.

Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be

My mother

  • never forgot to send a thank you card
  • never failed to remember a birthday
  • never invited herself anywhere
  • never forgot that she owed a lunch, or a dinner, or a book or a bicycle, in return for one she had borrowed.

Part of that mentality, I think, is about balancing the books.  Making sure you are not a burden to anyone else.  You should always make sure you are paying –at the very least—for your own upkeep and share in the expenses of life.  If you go to stay overnight at a friend’s house, my mom would say, make it look, when you leave, as if you had never been there.

It is a kind of self-respect, a kind of independence, that our age seems to have sloughed off. You make sure to reciprocate–if possible– for the help you do receive. Instead of running the ball, by yourself, all the way to the end zone, you pass it back and forth.

And when you can’t reciprocate, you at least say thanks.

Extreme DIY

We define independence differently these days.  Today you are independent if you rely on no one for help.  If my main purpose in life is to get the best deal for myself, I will, inevitably, harm others.  And never value their contribution enough to thank them.

It is like my daughter, the gardener, often says.  We are living in an extreme DIY (do-it-yourself) culture.

How can you

  • buy plants for your own garden
  • seek out the best prices for yourself
  • put them in on your own time, with the sweat of your own brow

and not, as a consequence, take a job away from someone else?

You saved a few pennies, yes, but you took a gig away from someone who has devoted their life to becoming good at that very thing.  And to top it off, in comparison to their work, yours looks shabby and amateurish, because you so haphazardly put it together.

Amazing leaps in technology have allowed us to skip the middleman in so many transactions.   We can look at the price of a house ourselves, and decide whether it is too much.  No need for a realtor.  We can make a will for ourselves using legal software.  No need for a lawyer.  We can do our own taxes.  No need for an accountant.

We do this at our own peril, and with disastrous economic repercussions. There is no telling, whether we are botching any of these pursuits and thereby harming our own interests. But who cares? We did them ourselves!

Meanwhile we chip away at the livelihoods of people in our community.

By seeking out the lowest prices for everything, we also, unwittingly, encourage the consolidation of business interests.  My generation remembers how, gradually, fast food came to replace Mom and Pop restaurants.  Now, much the same thing seems to be happening in all sectors.

We are gradually cutting out, not only the middleman, but everyone, except the highest man on the totem pole.

The internet, which was once viewed as an agent of democracy, is morphing into an agent of monopoly.  If we no longer have loyalty to the business person in our community, whom we could, at least, have an actual, concrete relationship with, how is he to compete with an ethereal internet conglomerate, which is not even loyal to a single country?

If we never accept help from others, or only by way of cheating them, to obtain help at a reduced price, we have no reason to say thank you.  We–our cunning, our industry, our charm, our merit, our hours of searching the internet–are the reasons we received the benefit.  The existence of another in the transaction is inconsequential.  We convince ourselves that we did it alone.

The Fiction of Independence

Of course, the idea that we did it ourselves is a fiction.

There is not “no one there”, when we interact online.  There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions.  The internet has not made us more independent, but more interdependent.

  • We owe the people who made the internet, those who gave up copyright royalties and put in long hours, and chose to share with us, for free, the fruits of their labors.
  • We owe every server along the way, every network built, every researcher and scientist and programmer and inventor and politician that made this conglomeration of machines and software we call “communications” today, possible.
  • We owe our parents, and our grandparents, and our contemporaries.
  • We even owe our children, who adapt so easily to this new paradigm, and help ease our way through it.

Saying Thank You by Buying Local

The modern world economy has echoes of the old-style noblesse oblige.  The exchange of money and goods is never a one-way street.  We benefit from the work of others, who in turn depend on us for their livelihood.  Whether our purchases are made here in our hometown or halfway round the globe: our buying habits help shape the world, for good or ill. The master or buyer has duties he owes to the servant or seller.

If we live in reasonably prosperous communities, with strong businesses that have spurred that prosperity over years and years, we owe those businesses our loyalty.  If new businesses have sprung up and need our support to thrive, we should at least give them a chance to show us what they have to offer.

The internet is full of huge conglomerates, popping ads in our faces, like obnoxious bubble gum, demanding that we buy their goods, use their services.  They do not ask politely.  They demand.  They demand that we help them prosper.

Huge sums are paid to get our attention.  Huge sums are expended to convince us buy, out of guilt, or shame, or envy or greed.  Meanwhile, the smallest players, those who live and breathe in our own towns and cities, the ones who need our help to survive, have to scream to be heard above the din.

I think we have forgotten, that the better part of politeness is saving your fellow man from the indignity of asking for help.  By helping before they ask.

So check out your local businesses this holiday season.  Actually walk inside a store you’ve never been in.  Actually hire a local service or business to do work for you.  Show your children that you know what it is to be grateful to the people who help your area to thrive. And when you finish the transaction, and receive a good product or service for a fair price, tell them Thank You.  Out loud.  In front of your children.

It’s only polite.