You Say "Mommy" Like It's a Bad Thing

Longtime readers of my blog likely suffer eyestrain and numbness and tingling of the fingers due to poor workstation set up but may also remember that the Qweenbean was what they call RIF'd. That means she was laid-off by her school district because California state funding is besieged by the tyranny of tax-dodging whiners who want to destroy the state's public infrastructure and curse our future to ruin. Plus, they got theirs so screw everyone else, right? It's an ownership society.

Anyway, she's... we've been a little stressed out because the bacon I bring home is made up of those chewy fat pieces that don't seem to cook or chew easily and you can hardly raise a kid on that. Plus, she really enjoyed her job, and she was good at it. That is a whole other source and type of stress. Something she enjoyed, something that was good, something that was fulfilling was taken from her. Drag.

I've spent enough time in a classroom to know who is and isn't a good teacher. The Qweenbean is a good teacher. I was recently speaking with an acquaintance who told me how difficult it was to be a teacher because "kids these days"* are so disrespectful and don't want to learn. He had seen classrooms- or at least one classroom- wherein kids were jumping around, yelling at the teacher, not listening, and generally doing the sorts of things that might discourage one from being a teacher because it plants the idea that kids these days are disrespectful and don't want to learn. He was telling that story to prove how horrible public schools are and thank God for the gift of private and home-schooling, but that may only be slightly here or there. In any case I've seen classrooms like that too. I've known kids who are instigators in classrooms like that. I was a kid who was an instigator in classrooms like that. I realize that there are worse and better environments but what a kid will try to get away with is largely dependent on the kind of environment the teacher creates, whether the classroom is public, private or "home". Whether a kid will act disrespectfully or act as if they want to learn largely depends on what a teacher will let a kid do.

The key is not whether students are allowed to pray in class, or whether their pledge to a piece of cloth includes the phrase "under God", or whether science as a discipline concerned with the natural world makes reference to a super-natural world. The key is teachers who care about student's learning and see teaching as a profession or vocation rather than a job. The Qweenbean is one of those teachers. She is a person who sees the art of teaching as transforming kid into students. Anyone... most anything could transfer data from one location to another, from one brain to another; that is not teaching. Imparting the range of data in a field (a range of data that changes over time) creates little more than well-trained animals. Good teaching, whatever the subject, involves discipline. I don't mean beating children, at least not in this instance. I mean the training involved in developing in someone the skills necessary to learn. I mean the art of turning someone into a student, a learner. Of course her subject area does involve the transfer of data, and these days, the data she transfers are seen as worth less.

I know that to many, the value of Home Economics, or Family and Consumer Science as it is called in districts with some sense of self-preservation, is less than that of Algebra or Physics, or, closer to the truth, curricula specifically designed to prepare students to vomit answers onto a standardized test, but there is no convincing argument for eliminating those programs unless one is committed to the destruction of any sense of a future common weal.

So that's what was taken from The Qweenbean, and with the best or most condescending of intentions people have been telling her that it's okay because with the baby coming she'd rather be "a mommy" anyway. It's good to have lost this because now she can focus on being a good momma. To that, she has been less and less inclined to be patient.

It's not such a strange thing that the idea of a mother is abstracted in a way to keep women in "their place," abstracted in a way that serves dominating interests, abstracted in a way that fosters the destruction of public education. That's what we tend to do with abstractions: steal, kill, and destroy. Oh, maybe that's too much.

At the very least, we ought not think that being a mother- or rather "a mommy"- requires The Qweenbean accept this disappointment and the conditions that led to it. Or maybe, being a mommy does while being a mother doesn't. Maybe mommy and momma are the words children use to refer to their parents, and though I only write out of my butt on the matter at this time, it seems what a child thinks a parent is and what a parent must be are two different, too different ways of being. Actually, only one is a way of being, the other is an idea that a child has and in this case, in the wrong hands, is used to impugn The Qweenbean's desire that she be a teacher and have a child. It makes sense for a child to think of a mommy, it does not for an adult. "When I was a child" and all that.

That said, she has an interview next week with a new school district. Depending on whether you think she ought to be a mother or a mommy, you may or may not want her to get that job.

*Is there another expression that reveals better than this that what the speaker means is "Stuff I don't get is weird and probably wrong"?