how do we show each other who we are

I have always disliked labels. I owe this largely to having been raised and homeschooled by an anthropologist, as well as the Baha'i community. I learned early that they are often a deception; they whittle down complex identities to one or two words. Labels are generally static in the minds of those defining them, while the identity of anyone being defined is a dynamic thing, daily growing and being pruned. They are often assigned or inherited, and can be a constant hindrance to a person’s being seen by others or even understanding themselves.

One the other hand, they can be powerful and beautiful tools when they are self-chosen and self-defined. A dear friend has recently begun demanding that the people in her life let her define her Chinese-Americanness for herself and be willing to learn (as we so desperately need to) about how our behavior and attitudes might be racist without intending or often even realizing it.  You can find her words on this here in her blog. She has been a strong inspiring force for me to keep examining myself, and to see positive and negative aspects of my mind with confidence to best become who I want to be.

Knowing these things has made my feelings towards labels complicated. I am sometimes too wary of  the judgments I will receive from others for identifying myself with an idea or group, and sometimes wary of the problems that I might be allowing myself to sweep under a rug and ignore by placing a label over the areas of my identity involved.

I am lucky that in the Midwestern US the notable elements of my identity are chosen, invisible, or both. I do not wear my minority religion in my skin; I do not wear my parents’ divorce in my face. One cannot tell by looking or even talking to me that I was homeschooled, however much of the stigma against homeschooling they may buy into. I blend very easily into the white middle class majority. I cannot escape from being labeled female (my boobs have seen to that since seventh grade, and my love of dangly earrings rather reinforces it). I spent a lot of time in middle and high school experimenting with how 'female' I dressed and how people reacted to me. I hate how big of a difference there often is in how well people treat a feminine-ly dressed woman verses a more androgynous-ly dressed one, but I nevertheless am usually in the well-treated category.

The Baha’i Faith has often been central in my thoughts about chosen and denied identities. When my parents separated and my family identity shifted radically, and I began public school and lost the present tense in my alternative-schooler identity, I took a big step away from my identity in the Baha'i community as well. Partially this was confusion; I didn't understand the change in my other identities and thus didn't understand how this one could stay the same. I could also feel a strong desire in myself for stability, for something that I could rest my identity on and stop thinking about it, and it frightened me to think about how much I would stop thinking about if I gave in to that desire.

I did not identify with religion at all during middle and high school. I investigated quite a few philosophies and religions and learned a lot about myself, largely through counselors and support groups. The removal of my primary identities gave me an excellent and rare opportunity to look underneath my labels and clean out my definitions of myself, and the help that I received allowed me to take advantage of it. 

During my freshmen year of university I decided that I was far enough from my former identity as Baha'i to investigate it again. I started looking through the books I still had and eventually decided to try praying and see if it made a difference in my life if I didn't tell anyone else about it. I did and it did, and after a while I decided to call myself Baha'i. I think this was one of the best decisions of my life. I affirmed my ability to define myself and was able to grow all over my mind and spirit with the ideas and discipline of Baha'i teachings.

Lately, however, I have been realizing that my Baha'i identity has been becoming more negative than positive. This is partially because I have been far away from my home Baha'i communities and thus haven't had as much input available on how to keep myself moving in positive and intentional directions, religion-wise. And mostly because it has begun to get tied up with my insecurities and other mental and emotional shortcomings. I have been feeling this label pulling me away from other people, making it hard for me to understand them rather than respect them for who they are. I do not think that this is inevitable with religious identity, but I don't think I'm the only one who has these struggles. There is a Truth in the Baha'i writings that I experienced pulling me up to a place above labels, where I could see more clearly what people around me were offering and the burdens they were carrying and how beautiful they were. But more recently I have been feeling myself holding this label up as proof that I don't have to look (and simultaneously being frustrated for lack of beauty in my life), that obviously if I am Baha'i I am seeing what's important.

Because of this I have decided that I need to take off my Baha'i label for a while. I am looking at my other identities and trying to figure out what I should do with them. I don't know if I am taking off my religious label forever. I don't think so, but I think to be honest in the self-investigation I need right now I cannot make any promises. 

I am so grateful for all of the sincere people in my life who constantly inspire me to look at myself and what I am giving to the world carefully, and for all the love in my life.

My Education, part 3: Beginning Public School

My mother taught my brother and me at home until 1998, when I was finishing 6^th grade and Isaac was finishing 4^th. My parents separated that year, and both Isaac and I started public school in the fall. I had attended I think a month or so of first grade (after which my mother decided it wasn’t the best place for me to learn) and I believe two weeks of fifth grade (after which I decided it wasn’t the best place for me to learn) in public schools. I had just lost my identity as a family and my identity as an alternative-schooler (and moved house twice in five months), so for me a sharp identity-less panic was cast over the general malaise that is middle school adolescence. *

Even while I was attempting to just keep my head down and get good grades so no one would look at me and I could try to find some solid mental ground to stand on, I was horrified by some of the things I found in public middle school. Not that it was a bad school or that I had bad teachers. Many of my teachers were good, a few of them were excellent and there is only one who I would credit with increasing my anxiety. For one thing, I found that cliques were real, even though every book or movie or anecdote I had ever heard of seemed to prove that all cliques did was build walls between people who should have enjoyed each other.

More than that, I found that I had trouble relating to how the students learned. They were not used to having any control in their learning, and so didn’t often seem to evaluate the worth of a piece of learning outside of what it meant for their grade.

The experience that stands out most illustrating the difference I felt between our minds was a lecture by the eighth grade Social Studies teacher while I was in seventh grade. I don’t remember if it was just my grade or the whole school that was required to attend, but I remember being sent rather unexpectedly to the auditorium first thing in the morning instead of to my first period class. This teacher was originally from Laos and he told us the story of his family’s escape from their probable deaths in that country. I have never been a morning person, or terribly fond of changes in my schedule without my consent, so I don’t remember being thrilled to be in the auditorium at 8am when I was expecting to be in Reading class but I was moved by the offer he was making of such a personal experience. And I was impressed by the odds against this kind of story coming to me in Ames, Iowa. So I resolved to thank him for it.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want his attention when I talked to him. I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. I didn’t really want anyone to look at me. I just wanted to get through my classes so I could go back home. But I finally convinced myself that, even if not because of the magnitude of what he had offered, I had to thank him because everyone else would and I would be the obvious one missing.  So I wrung my hands for a while when everyone was milling around in the cafeterias afterwards and finally walked up and thanked him for what he had shared. He said I was welcome, and I think said another warm-hearted thing, and then as quickly as I could I made an awkward retreat.

A week or so later during a break in my Social Studies class, my teacher asked me (in front of everyone) if that had been me who thanked his colleague who had made that presentation. I said I had, and he thanked me and said I had been The Only** student who had thanked him, and that the presenter had been very moved that I had spoken to him.

Aside from this total backfire-- attention-wise-- of what I had been trying to accomplish, I could not believe this. I could and can hear some homeschool parent voices in my mind saying that public school kids don’t have manners, but honestly I think those voices can be dismissed pretty quickly. There were many students who were at least as worried about looking good as I was, and many also who were genuinely kind people. Somehow this just wasn’t personal for them, somehow they didn’t relate to him enough to want to talk to him. Or, if they wanted to, some other social force stopped them.

*I realize this is more or less a demand for pity, but this had a huge effect on the way that I experienced public school and I haven’t found an honest way to talk about this phase of my education without it. It probably also made my opinion of middle school much more negative. Please bear with me.

**I remember “The Only student”, and it may have been “one of the only students” or “one of the only students who wasn’t in his own classes.”

A note on home and public schooling

Writing about homeschooling and public school I am afraid that I may seem to be criticizing teachers in the public education system. That is not what I mean to be doing. Teachers attempt to be the living spark that crosses the distance between the institutions and necessities of public education (separation of learning into subjects, standardized tests, large classes with one schedule for many minds, and many more that public school teachers can identify more accurately than I) and the needs of living breathing students. The fact that teachers do this and even do it well is nothing less than incredible, and they have my constant respect.

On the other hand, homeschooling is highly stigmatized. Most people seem to think that parents who choose to homeschool their children are religious fanatics, abusive, or both. I'm sure there are families who sadly choose homeschooling for both of these reasons, but I don't know any. I knew a few homeschooling families who were sheltering their children more than I would have been comfortable with, and some families including my own who were not entirely functional emotionally. But I found a much higher percentage of children who thought badly of their minds when I started public school, and was shocked to find that only a few exceptional public school students even seemed to have a clue about how they learned and what characterized their individual minds. I think every homeschooler I know could have explained pretty confidently by the time they were eight years old whether or not they would learn from a lesson, and how they would need to supplement what a teacher or parent did to make sure that they did learn from it. 

Obviously it is possible for a public school experience to lead to developed and fulfilled minds, but I am hoping that my voice as a former homeschooler can help me and others to think about some of the reasons that it often doesn't. Because, honestly, I think that I received one of the best elementary-age educations in the country.

My Education, part 2: Homeschooling with My Mother

Luckily for my brother and me we did not begin our education in public school, where we both would have been stuck with labels that could have damaged his sense of self worth and my easily inflated ego irreparably. My mother decided to teach us at home after I had attended I believe a couple of months of first grade. I wasn’t a problem student, and I remember having fun with classmates, but I wasn’t happy there and she wasn’t happy with the methods and especially the priorities that are employed in public schools.

We spent our days learning, and mostly trying not to label it too carefully. I don’t have very clear memories separating years except when we moved between houses when I was seven or eight years old. My mother worked hard to make sure we were learning things in all of the subjects we would have been taught in school, mostly so she could record this and keep us officially official. She was always flexible and happy if we had our own ideas about what or how to study. I remember being delighted to learn one year that  a person could read about a subject and then write down what they had learned and then, if one provided a name or some designation of topic, other people would be happy to read it—I had discovered essays! I proceeded to write I think thirty-two of them that year (as I have said before, I was very fond of numbers and of documenting my accomplishments). Most of these were a short paragraph or two long. One was entitled “Dolls” and I believe was the result of original research. The longest was on King Tutankhamen, for which I drew my own reconstruction of the Nile on our computer.

My mother was also very considerate of our different learning needs, which along with our age difference (which is only a year and a half, but a year and a half can be a big deal in grade school) required a lot of creativity and careful thought. Isaac, as I began to describe in my last post, is I think a kinesthetic, visual, aural learner. He could listen to my mother read to him for very long periods of time as long as he had something to do with his hands, and would remember just about everything he had heard. I loved to be read to as well, but more often needed to stop doing anything else so I could focus on seeing what was being described or just the words themselves in my mind. 

Most of my memories of day to day learning are by myself, with frequent projects with Mom and Isaac. We spent a lot of time in parks talking about biology and ecology. We spent time with craft projects, often in a weeklong craze that petered out rather abruptly. Mom bought a loom and I learned to weave. I journaled and thought about my mind. I read books—sitting in the branches of trees when possible.

Learning this way taught me to respect my mind and to take responsibility for what I was learning. I decided myself how best to test what I was learning (for things like math, anyway, which I felt benefitted from checking to see what I remembered. Many things, like vocabulary and history, can just be re-looked up if you really need to know them and find you have forgotten) I would wait until at least a week had past since I had studied a chapter and then do as many of the questions at the end as I could. If I ended up getting more than fifty percent, I was proud. I knew that I had really internalized this knowledge, and was not just parroting back things I managed to keep in my short-term memory. These skills of knowing my mind, knowing how to learn something and how to check if I had have served me well all my life.

My Education, part 1: Isaac and My Mind

My younger brother has always been a touchstone for me in thinking about education, though I'm sure it would surprise him to read that. And I think he would be surprised for the same reason I try to always keep him in mind: His brain does not work the same way mine does. His mind (from what I understand) functions mostly in pictures and sounds. He is very good at putting things together and at making them look the way he wants to. He is good at showing ideas visually. I am not. I function in words and numbers, primarily. I love to read and I am very good at math. This also means that I am very good at tests, especially those lovely bubble tests I took every year starting in elementary school.

Isaac, you might guess, is not so good at those kinds of tests. He learned to read quite late, and even after he did so, expecting him to derive some concept from flat black words on a flat gray page and then find the appropriate flat black words from the list provided wasn’t an appropriate way to measure what his mind was capable of.  He could and can get decent scores and decent grades, but most of the ways that students’ minds are traditionally measured miss the majority of his intelligence.

He suffered emotionally for the immeasurability of his mind beginning when he was quite young. I was held up as an ideal little brain, loving to read books and work with numbers. Most of the things that Isaac was motivated about were dismissed as games or hobbies, and not the stuff of ‘real’ education. I wasn’t usually convinced that the books I read were building my mind more effectively than the drawing of creatures and construction of scenes with legos or other toys on which Isaac spent his time. I was honestly often embarrassed when I tried to do what he did—he understood things about how shapes could fit together to make something unexpected that I could not keep up with—his creations were consistently more interesting than mine on multiple levels.

I was eternally conflicted about the different ways our intelligences were treated. I was made accustomed at a very early age to being thought of as the ‘smarter’ and often simply ‘better’ sibling. Most of the time I knew that that wasn’t true, but that knowledge by itself wasn’t always enough to make me unhappy hearing it, as least as far as I myself was concerned. I lived on praise. I did hate the way I could see it made Isaac feel, and because of this I sometimes resolved not to tell my family of something ‘admirable’ that I had done. I would conceal the fact that I had already finished a novel or how quickly I was getting through my math workbook. Sadly for both of us (and especially Isaac) my resolve did not often outlast my need for positive attention.

Even a step further outside of measurable education are our emotional compositions. Another thing that made it easy for adults to praise me was my retreating and people-pleasing nature. I tried to get out of the way or change the topic of conversation and make conflict unnecessary. Isaac did not. I often thought he was unreasonable, and he could definitely be disobedient, but he maintained a principle within himself of not abandoning things that mattered to him I have always admired and envied.

Education questions

I have pretty confidently decided on pursuing a masters in education/teaching certificate in the states, and then doing montessori certification afterwards. This will let me work with middle school aged students, as a montessori certificate alone almost definitely would not any time soon, and continue to learn about the montessori children's-minds-focused method of teaching/assisting students to learn.

I have been trying to find ways to break the large topic of education into pieces that I can realistically write about in separate blog posts-- I'm actually encouraged by how hard it's been because it's showing me how close I am to this topic and how big it is in my mind. It's a lot easier to see things that are farther away. However, I really do want to investigate this through writing. I want to write about my own educational experiences and what I have learned about how I learn, and about different educational philosophies. So! This is a placemarker/pledge to pick a small piece and start writing next week!

To begin with, here are some ideas I have been investigating:

Ken Robinson: "Schools Kill Creativity" and "Bring on the Learning Revolution" (talks on ted.com)
E. M. Standing: "Montessori: Her Life and Work" (book, which I highly recommend to any interested in investigating how they learn and what they believe about their minds)

I would love recommendations for things to read about education and cognitive development (especially for adolescence)!

Searching for a language that fits

I don't really like the way my "exploring the world" series is feeling. It's too vague, and not really helping be systematic in my decisions about myself and my future.

What I need to be searching for, or deciding on, this year is a language. Maybe German or Chinese or perhaps even Korean, but I don't feel I'll completely have to choose between them. I know that studying and reading books in foreign languages will always wake up my mind and my motivation and I'll be able to use them for whatever I do.

I have to choose an angle; I need a primary language through which to view the rest of my life's learning. I don't know if it should be a scientific language-- Chemistry's language of atoms and the push and pull of electrons between them driving life's processes, or Geology's language of the bones of the world. I could study the rise and fall of landforms and the dance of continents around the globe. Or then maybe Biology's tapestry of genes and food webs and the struggle to quantify what keeps life going. Physics would give my quantitative brain a lot of joy and would still let me zoom to any scale of study-- planets swirling through space-time or quarks spinning inside electrons.

Education is important to me-- I would like to continue teaching. I had the great opportunity to work in a Waldorf preschool while I was myself only in sixth grade. The Waldorf community speaks a language much more similar to the language of homeschooling than of public school. They both speak of children's ability and desire to learn on their own terms; to let children use their minds rather than push them to be used.

Living in Asia I have seen a different educational language: one that places discipline at the center and speaks not of what is in a student's mind, but what can but put there. Both of these have some wisdom-- I think it is dangerous to encourage children to search in their minds without also teaching them how to search outside of them-- but on the whole I think that it is more dangerous to teach them only to look outside themselves for wisdom and guidance. I am not sure how to translate these thoughts into a path.

So, in my previous post I tried a bit of writing in the Geologic tongue, and will find a different language for next Thursday.