The more things change, the more they stay the same

Christmas in America is so different from Christmas in Ireland.

• In America, you go to a performance of The Nutcracker. In Ireland, you go to the pantomime.
• In America, the big shopping day is the day after Thanksgiving. In Ireland, it's traditionally the Feast of the Assumption, December 8th; because all the schools would be off and everyone from the country would come up to Dublin. After going to Mass, of course.
• In America, you have to be careful to say "Happy Holidays", in case someone is Jewish or of some other faith, because you wouldn't want to offend anyone. In Ireland, you say Happy Christmas, because offending people is a national pastime and insulting someone is a true mark of friendship.
• In America people drink egg nog and eat candy canes. In Ireland they drink whatever you're having yourself, and eat selection boxes and Quality Street.
• In America, Turkey Day is Thanksgiving; people eat all sorts of different traditional foods on Christmas Day, depending on their heritage. In Ireland, Turkey Day is Christmas Day and that's that.
• Americans bake gingerbread houses and peppermint bark; Irishers bake mince pies and Christmas cake.

And yet, my Facebook and Twitter feeds - full of people from both sides of the Atlantic - confirm that:

• Everyone is unable to believe that it's December already.
• Definitely nobody is ready for it to be 2014.
• People everywhere have either done all their shopping or are leaving it till the last possible minute.
• Christmas is becoming more commercial every year, but the Christmas spirit is still alive and well if you take a moment to look for it.
• Some people's Christmas trees are already up. Some are not.
• Letters to Santa are being written and some children, on both sides of the Atlantic, are having up close and personal encounters with the man himself. (Don't ask how. It's magic.) 

I think it's just possible we are all cut from the same cloth, after all.

Notes on Thanksgiving

That is, notes about Thanksgiving that I wrote on the day of Thanksgiving.

The point of Thanksgiving, I've decided, is that it's one holiday the whole country can get behind.(Except the Native Americans, maybe. I'm not sure how they feel about it.) Instead of trying to smush a bunch of different religious celebrations into one time of year, everyone can just eat turkey and be thankful and watch the Macy's parade on TV and lapse into a tryptophan coma at the same time. It's pretty much like SuperBowl Sunday except you don't have to watch the game. And less finger food; you'll probably need to use a fork, at least to eat your mashed potatoes.

The other point is to provide a second holiday in the winter season, so that you can spend one with your own family and one with your in-laws. In a country this big, where people often end up far from where their families live, this is a very important consideration. You can't just do Christmas Day at your house and Stephen's Day (that's the day after) at his folks', and vice versa next year, the way we do in Ireland.

Further, another point of the whole thing is so that everyone can bond on Twitter and Facebook about how much they're panicking about it, how fabulous they menu they've planned is, how they're simplifying their lives and ordering out this year, how gross Martha Stewart's Twitter photos of food are, and how they've now eaten way too much and cannot possibly move off the sofa for another week.

And don't forget the way it provides a handy entrance point to Christmas. You can complain about Christmas creep all you like before Thanksgiving, but once that's done it's jingle all the way, baby, and no two ways about it. Many people put up their Christmas decorations as part of their Thanksgiving ritual, just to hammer this fact home.

Mostly, the point of Thanksgiving is to give the poor overworked American populace a chance to take a day off, or even three, without depleting their teeny tiny vacation allowance. They will probably spend most of this time stuck in traffic, but dammit, they will have their turkey.

And pie. Pie is very important at Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading, wherever you are.

A student

This is the first year that Dash has brought home letter grades on tests and reports instead of smiley faces and stars and mostly meaningless abbreviations like IP for in progress and PR for proficient. (The checkmarks and smiley faces and stars actually followed a progression that the kids were well aware of, so they may as well have been A's and B's and C's, really. But it seemed friendlier and less pressured.)

Dash never really asked what was in his report, and I never particularly told him. I said it was fine, and that was that. It was usually a mixture of IPs and PRs and an OG for reading. (That means "on grade" level.)

Dash's first report this autumn had a lovely line of straight A's. I was happy, and feel this slight improvement can probably be credited to his vision therapy. In general, though, he's a smart enough kid who's well-behaved in class, listens to the teacher most of the time, and is liked by the staff. I'm pretty sure that these are the traits that lead to A's from your teacher when you're in elementary school just as much as your test results and your homework does. (Especially in fuzzy subjects like PE, for instance. Then it's all down to how much the teacher likes you.)

I told him he had straight A's, and he was pleased, because he knows that's a thing that people aspire to.

I would like to leave it there, but in American schools there's this little thing called Honor Roll.

Twice a year (three times? I don't know yet) in our school, all the children who have all A's and B's or higher on their reports are deemed to be honorworthy, and they have an assembly to which their parents can come to watch them be presented with a certificate saying that they're on the Honor Roll. There are bumper stickers, even, saying that this car is driven by the proud parent of an Honor Roll student at your particular school. It's all made a bit of a big deal of.

For tedious reasons, Dash didn't actually get a second report this term, and therefore was not eligible for Honor Roll this time, but his teacher assured me that he would have been on it, and apologized for the oversight. (Okay, tedious explanation: what happened was that we had to un-enroll him from school when we went to Ireland, so that his absences wouldn't count against the school and bring down their average, and so his records were all inaccessible when the reports were generated. We've done this before and it's a simple matter to re-enroll him when we get back and he slots straight back in as if he'd never left. It's fine.)

Not only did I not care about the second report; I was actually a little relieved that he wouldn't be in the Honor Roll thing. And that seemed weird, so I put some thought into figuring out why I felt that way.

As a child who enjoyed reading and tended to "lick up to" the teacher, (pretty much the same as brown-nosing), I usually got good marks at school. But somewhere along the way I took in the fact that it was bad manners to ask what someone else got in a test, because that was tantamount to bragging about my own grade. Test marks were like salaries - you don't ask, but if someone else offers information you can reciprocate with yours.

So having a ceremony where you proclaim to the whole school that we're the smart kids doesn't seem fair.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're showing the value of hard work and application. Maybe that's the only way you get A's and B's; but somehow, when you're seven years old, I don't think that's really it. Maybe they're proclaiming that they're the kids with the involved parents, the families where a parent is around to help with homework, where books are read as a matter of course, and, often, where English is a first language. I'm pretty sure all those factors also contribute to high grades, and those have very little to do with how hard the kids work at their studies.

Maybe I'm wrong, and all the other kids watch the Honor Roll-ees troop off for their assembly with nothing but goodwill and ambition in their hearts, happy for their friends and newly committed to learning all their spelling words this week so that maybe next time they'll be one of the hallowed few. Maybe, in fact, half of the kids at school are on Honor Roll, and the others couldn't care less about it. Maybe some kids would actively hate to be on it. Maybe it would destroy their street cred, and is just one more reason not to bother doing their homework.

I'm not sure I see the value of grades for elementary school students at all, for one thing. In general, bragging about grades (albeit in a fully school-endorsed way) sits badly with me. If Dash ends up on Honor Roll next time, I'm sure I'll go along to the ceremony and be delighted for him, but I'm not going to be the sort of parent who pays for grades, or rewards an excellent report card with an extravagant present. Not at this stage. Maybe never.

When I googled to find that news story I linked to above, it turned out that I'm not the only person who maybe thinks Honor Roll - or even grades in general - aren't the greatest idea ever. But apparently lots of other people think that the people who complain about Honor Roll are like the ones who don't want winners and losers in kids' soccer games because they want to protect their little darlings from ever feeling "less than." My point is exactly the opposite: I don't want a group of kids to feel that they're "more than," when - in elementary school at least - I think that hard graft and dogged perseverance are not major contributors to good grades. There are way too many other factors at play in the early years.

Tell me what you think. Do you think Honor Roll helps kids do their best, or would you rather it didn't exist?

Shut down

I keep trying to write about the shutdown, and I keep stalling out. Politics and economics are not my things, and I don't want to get something wrong, and it's not directly affecting me; but still, it's happening and I feel that it would be irresponsible of me to ignore it. So let me try one more time.

The American government has shut down. You can read much better informed explanations of why elsewhere, so I'm not going to try to do that here.

All staff members deemed "nonessential" have been sent home and told they are not allowed work. Here in the suburbs of Washington DC, this affects a huge number of people - I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say probably more than half the families I know have at least one person out of work over this. It's been going on for two weeks now, and that's 14 days too long.

We are lucky and not much has changed in our household. My husband is a contractor who works at a government facility. As such, he is expected to continue working (and will continue to be paid) but he can't go into his office, because it's closed. Nor can he access most of the big computers he usually remotely logs into to do his work, because they've been taken offline. He's working from home when it's quiet here, and from Starbucks when the kids come home from school.

This whole thing is insane. The government is holding the people hostage. The thing is, I'm not sure the government actually knows what sort of effect it's having, so I don't think it's working. All the people in the top offices are probably considered "essential," so it's business as usual for them, only worse, I imagine. They're not seeing the regular people, the moms and dads who are unaccustomedly picking their kids up from preschool and walking around the park and playing video games in the middle of the day and taking the opportunity to paint the hall and trying to quell that gnawing, nagging voice that keeps them awake at night asking "Will I get paid? Will the bank let us pay a reduced amount this month? What if I don't get a check at all? When will this end?"

The knock-on effects are enormous - restaurants and cafes that rely on lunchtime trade from the huge NASA or FDA office campuses, daycares whose children are not attending because their parents are home from work; people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, and who might not recover even if the government reopens tomorrow. (It won't.)

And then I read about the Antarctic.

This is stupid. It's farcical. It's not the way a country that sees itself as a world leader is supposed to behave towards its citizens, its working people, its families. Be in charge, dammit, Government. Bring the people back and let them do their jobs.

Come on, Mr Obama. I know you're in there.