The World Is Full of Joyful Noises, Even If We Can't Hear Them
Mamacita says: Today is the last day of the rest of your life class before finals – next week is final exam week, every student’s favorite week, naturally.
I predict that several students will come to class the NEXT week, and be all astounded and sputtery that the semester is over and the lab is empty and they can’t take the final. But then, most of this kind of student didn’t even know when the final WAS, or what it was about. Tuition was paid, by somebody, but the student seldom showed up and is still enrolled, which means he/she will get an F on the transcript. It happens every semester, and it’s scary. For the nation, I mean. SCARY. (Did I mention that each student has four opportunities to take the final exam?)
Sometimes, even at this level, a parent will call me at home to tell me why Junior was absent and to tell me that he’ll be at the college on such and such a day to take the final which I will please hand-deliver to him at his convenience and monitor (without pay) the three hours he’ll need to take it. To which I reply that I am not permitted by law to even acknowledge that I’ve ever heard of Junior and there is no way I would ever tell someone over the phone who is and who isn’t in my classes. Then the parent will get all huffy and imperious and say something about paying Junior’s tuition, blah blah blah, and I’ll start to snicker silently on my end, because after all those years of having administration force me to kowtow and give in to this kind of parent, I am finally allowed to be sensible and professional about it, and simply hang up on anyone who raises his/her voice to me. If the parent tries to go over my head, it won’t work. At least, it hasn’t yet. My department head is awesome. (Thank you, Carol. You rock.) Helicopter parents are a pathetic joke at any level, but if this attitude extends into a kid’s college years, heaven help the universe!
I am giving exams at three different campuses next week, and I’d bet money, if I had any, that I can tell you exactly which students will be there, pencils sharpened, alert, and ready to take that test, and who won’t be. And who will be there, but will have to borrow something to write with because he/she “forgot.” Again.
Have work ethics changed much? Darn right they have. And not for the better, either. Sigh. I’ve had younger students, used to years of community classroom supplies, actually expect to find colored bins of pencils, free for the taking, in a college classroom. (Community classroom supplies are the devil.)
Dear Helicopter Parents of College Students: Your kid is raised. Stop raising him. If he’s still an immature weenie, let life hand him/her some consequences. It’s about time somebody did.
Love, Professor MeaniePants
P.S. Your kid is nineteen years old and still can’t remember to bring a pencil to school. And no, he can’t borrow mine. Suck it up. If he wants a grade on a test, he can go down to the bookstore and invest in a two-dollar collegiate-licensed pencil. Yes, they are too expensive and yes, it’s ridiculous. At Target he can get a whole package for a dollar, but then he’d have to remember to bring one to class. You are not allowing your kid to grow up, and he doesn’t have what it takes to do so himself. This is your fault. Back off. Let him struggle and fail, and then perhaps he will struggle and succeed. No, this is NOT being cruel. Cruelty is keeping your kid a kid too long, and doing all the work for him. Step back and don’t give in when he comes crying to you about how hard life is.
Remember Helen Keller, who had to be removed from her doting parents’ home in order to be educated properly, because her parents were so sorry for her that they gave in to her every whim and turned her into a smelly obnoxious beast who demanded her own way and got it in every situation. Poor little Helen, let her have it; she’s been denied so much! We can’t expect poor little Helen to do anything; she can’t SEE or HEAR. Just let her be. Cater to her every whim. Put up with tantrums, etc., because she’s disabled. Poor, poor little Helen. We can’t expect her to be able to do things other children do. We musn’t require it. Annie removed her from her parents’ home and forced her to live up to her potential. It wasn’t pretty. But it worked.
Annie Sullivan wasn’t sure exactly what would work for Helen, but she knew enough to know that catering to the child’s every whim was definitely the wrong approach. She was willing to try new and different things to try to reach Helen through the silence and darkness, and she knew that sometimes, trial and error ARE the best approach. Helen’s parents knew they were not up to dealing properly with their daughter because nothing they tried, worked; they were too close to the situation and couldn’t bear to see their child unhappy. Mr. and Mrs. Keller gave Annie free reign with Helen, and Annie’s methods worked. Say and think what you will about Annie’s methods; they WORKED. Why can’t modern parents and administrators see it? Nowadays, Annie would be in the Rubber Room and Helen would be a smelly obnoxious adult with no future, no real life, no way of earning her own living, barely “put up with” wherever she was taken, illiterate, unmannerly, with no self control, and with her intellect imprisoned and unused, instead of the successful college graduate, public speaker, writer, and advocate of education and human rights that she was able to become thanks to Annie’s unorthodox but successful methods. (Helen was also on vaudeville, and in a couple of movies. She’s one of my heroes.)
Thank you, my good students, for being what you’ve been all semester. I’m so proud of you. Oh, and don’t sweat the final; it’s nothing but a piece of paper. Do your best with it, but don’t let it boss you around. Each of you is more important than a few pieces of paper. (This batch of students will bring all the proper materials on finals day, do their best, and their best will be great!) I’m not worried about my students this semester; they’ve done well (the ones who come to class, that is) all semester, and they’re going to do well next week, too. They’re awesome, and I’m not wasting that word. Awesome, like a rainbow over the Grand Canyon. I’ll miss them.
The world is a mess, but each of us can, at least, create order in our own homes and lives, and creativity out of chaos, if we work at it. It takes a lot of hard work, I hope y’all realize.
Life is good. Dig it.
And when life isn’t good, dig it anyway. If you keep digging, you’ll strike gold eventually.
Oh, and bring a pencil to class on test day. Them nasty professors will show you no mercy; they can’t, because they have no hearts. Nope.
They have no heart, and they never fart. That’s why they’re so mean all the time.
And now you know.
Word, students: when you think you’re down to nothing, make a vuvuzela with a balloon and a hex nut. You don’t really need a lot of stuff to make a joyful noise. Or to share it with the people in the lab down the hall.
Wishes, Fairies, Achenes, and Clocks
Mamacita says: I will never understand why people will pay out the wazoo for lovely nursery-bred flowers to plant, and then pay out the wazoo for someone to kill the lovely golden blossoms that are already growing.
Is it because dandelions are so common, and grow so easily, that we take them for granted and prefer flowers that really aren’t all that much prettier but which are harder to grow, expensive, and are a bit less common? If dandelions weren’t sprinkled everywhere, turning plain green lawns into starry universes, common, easy, beloved by children, would they be more popular?
Whenever there are too many of pretty much anything, we tend to take them for granted and consider them less than first class. Take a look at our overcrowded classrooms, for example. But I digress.
If we examine each individual child flower, we will see that it is wondrously made, unique, adds to the quality of the universe, and is worthy of attention.
No florist’s creation will ever rival the Dixie cup with a few short-stemmed 
dandelions plunked down in it.
Nothing store-bought or paid-for will ever rival the dandelion even in its death, turned into a white fuzzy clock that will tell a child the time, according to the number of breaths it takes to blow all the fuzz away. And, of course, FAIRIES love to ride on the soft, fluffy achenes, granting wishes right and left. Every child knows that if you can blow ALL the achenes off with one breath, your wish will definitely come true.
How sad, to be a child without dandelions on the lawn, to have nothing but plain green landscaping that he can’t even play on because of all the chemicals, to have expensive blooms and blossoms that he can’t pick. How sad the house containing children but no Dixie cups of short-stemmed dandelions all over the countertops. My heart actually breaks over the thought of children living in a house where blowing dandelion clocks is forbidden, lest the seeds take root and ruin the “look.” No wishes or fairies dare come near such a domicile. There’s a big difference between a house and a home, and to people like me, who believe firmly in fairies, wishes, and stubby little bouquets in paper cups, a house has a green, chemically-treated velvety lawn, and a home has grass, sprinkled with tiny golden stars. And, if the children are especially lucky, lots of little purple violets, as well.
I believe that dandelions are flowers, in the same way that those expensive hybrid roses are flowers, and every bit as beautiful, especially when they’re thrust in our face by a grubby little child, put in a Dixie cup, and placed where everybody can see and admire them.
Dandelions represent summer, and childhood, and the love of a little girl or boy for a parent, and a Dixie cup of stubby dandelions means more to me than anything delivered by the florist’s truck.
Put that Dixie cup on the coffee table between two cereal bowls containing floating periwinkle blossoms and catalpa blooms, and House Beautiful can go blow. I prefer the individual touch when it comes to home decor.
I also welcome the fairies. Heaven knows I can use all the wishes I can get.
What’s that? You’re afraid of the bees? Sissy.
Dick Clark and Our Sofa
Mamacita says: Dick Clark has died.
This will make little difference to most of you, save that your New Year’s Eve will be hosted by someone else now. But to me, this is another one of so many things, lately, that I call “The end of my childhood.”
When my sister and I were little, my parents used to roll up the rugs and dance to American Bandstand. Other Sister and I would sit on the couch, the buckles of our Mary Janes catching on the upholstery and pulling out long oval threads until we kicked and broke the thread. Our couches always had long threads waving about in the breeze from the two open, “screened-in” windows in summer or the breeze from the registers in winter. Our sofas, when OS and I were little, always looked like something that had been rescued from the sunken Titanic, infested with tendrilled sea creatures.
We loved watching Mom and Dad dance. Occasionally they had friends over, and all of them danced. We had records and a player at home, and a radio, but they didn’t dance to those; they danced to American Bandstand. I overheard Mom say to a friend once, that “American Bandstand makes me feel like I’m at a party.” I think it had that same effect on a lot of young people back then.
Mom and Dad would have been in their twenties during this period; two twenty-somethings with two little girls, and I know now that those two little girls were the reason Mom and Dad did their dancing at home, and not at a real dance.
Except that, watching them laugh and dance, whirl and twirl in our living room, rolled-up rugs leaning in one corner, rock and roll music blaring from our black and white TV, I realize now that these not-all-that-long-out-of-their-teens young parents WERE at a real dance. As for my sister and I, sitting on that couch, legs so short they were sticking straight out, picking upholstery threads with our shoe buckles and breaking those threads right and left with our wiggles, we were like old-time movie children watching the ball from between the bannisters.
It was as if those dancers were someone else, not Mommy and Daddy, someone from the TV dance, laughing and jiving like real people who weren’t parents at all.
Like American Bandstand people. Magic people on the TV screen, only in living color ahead of its time, not black and white.
Dick Clark made that happen. It wasn’t just on TV that he encouraged young people to dance, and exposed them to new music. He did those things for people in living rooms, too.
Our living room. Our southern Indiana living room, where the American Bandstand theme music caused rugs to be rolled up, Mommies and Daddies to kick off their shoes and rock the casbah, and little girls to turn a sofa into a mess of fringe.
Thank you, Dick Clark. In my heart you’ll always be young; you know, like you appeared to be even when you were old enough to be a grandfather, like the Picture of Dorian Gray. To me, you’re not a New Year’s Eve host, or a game show host. You’re Dick Clark, of American Bandstand, teaching the world to cut loose and dance, and encouraging us to listen to new and different music.
I’d tell you to rest in peace, but I know you never wanted that kind of peace. Crank it up to eleven, angels, Dick Clark is in the building now.
