“It’s a six-day immersive experience for the kids and within that context we can offer the kids time, something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives. Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived, and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around. Nothing ever turns out as planned, ever. The kids soon learn that all projects go awry and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success or gleeful calamity. […] Success is in the doing and failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear. When faced with particularly difficult setback or complexities a really interesting behavior emerges. Decoration. Decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation. From these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before.” -Gever Tulley

The TED people don’t quite get it — the talk is titled “Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering.” Tinkering is the *opposite* of being taught. Tulley is facilitating their learning simply by giving them the space and time to discover it for themselves, organically. It has nothing to do with teaching, and in fact teaching would be a hindrance to it. They’re sure on the right track, though, for hosting Tulley and his ideas.

From SARK’s The Bodacious Book of Succulence:

When considering choices in your life, the “most alive choice” feels like a bit of a risk, makes you giggle, or makes the hairs at the back of your neck stand up. It can be a simple and tiny shift, such as taking a new route. Or as large as moving your whole life somewhere you haven’t lived before.

We are consistently presented with choices. Often, our inner critics run the whole show, and we use a lot of language with these words:

have to

should

I’d better

or else

(these can be bullies of the language world)

Sometimes we have to wonder who is making our life choices! We might stumble from one obligation to another, lost in a series of have-tos. People buy wedding gifts they don’t want to buy, attend birthday parties out of guilt or fear, spend time with people they don’t even enjoy, or push their children into unwanted activities. (And then we all get crabby!)

I remember moving succulently as a young girl in Minnesota, from bike flung to the ground, to deep lawn, to creek bulging with turtles, to eating rhubarb for breakfast and fat, vine-grown tomatoes for lunch. The most alive choice was a natural step — one to another.

I think that as adults we become rigidified, encrusted with grudges, wounds, and protective devices that don’t work anyway. We walk carefully along, checking our purses, pockets, and car keys. Gone are our bamboo walking sticks and flags for countries that we’ve made up. I think those things are only gone because we’ve stopped calling them. We’ve stopped counting fireflies at dusk, standing naked in the rain, fingerpainting with our feet and stuffing a bag full of costumes and making our “poet’s corner” in the backyard, with lanterns and tents made out of chenille bedspreads.

We deserve to be the caretakers for our spirits and dreams, and this means truly sensing and listening for our most alive route. It may not be a common path, or a popular one, yet it will be clearly ours.

John Taylor Gatto:

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.

How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work.

Gatto was a public school teacher for many years and was awarded the New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year awards. This piece was published in the Wall Street Journal shortly after he quit for good, and is published on his website as part of his book The Underground History of American Education. Thank you to the habit of being for putting this up and reminding me that I really ought to put something about Gatto up on my blog. I’ve posted more links to his essays here, starting with “Why Schools Don’t Educate” and ending with “Nine Assumptions of Schooling”.

I have this feeling like the decades of my life have roughly corresponded to… paradigmatic modes, I guess. How I regarded the world and myself, how it felt to me, what I was, what I was becoming. So I’ve been fully expecting my 40s to be something different. And I feel that happening, that becoming, in fact now that I am in it I realize that I had predicted it, not in a magical way, but because I recognized something about myself that could logically progress only in a certain way.

To be here looks different from what I saw from the outside of other people here. I’m not even sure now that I’m in the same place. Is it all my own, or do others share it with me? I don’t really know.

The landscape is changing. I’m aware of things I wasn’t before.

I keep thinking of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. How could anyone think of that as anything but an allegory? It’s so obvious. Maybe not as a child, but now, as an adult, that is the path that I choose to be on. I don’t like it sometimes. But I want to know anyway. Because not knowing, and this is what the story doesn’t tell you, not knowing doesn’t mean that you don’t commit evil. It means you don’t understand it and so cannot challenge it.

When I was a child, opportunities to be unhappy were so much fewer. I was fed and clothed and had time to myself, and that was a kind of Eden. I didn’t know about corruption and greed and the damage it does. I knew about barbies and swings and irises and earth and rain and tricycles and climbing and my front steps.

Now I am angry and hard a lot of the time. I am driving down the road, and here is my internal litany: That girl is a bully and her parents are clueless or don’t care, I don’t know which but I hold them in disdain anyway. Finally spring is here, warm enough to open my windows and smell the trees, and people are burning, filling the air with acrid smoke. The sky could be blue, but it is hazy. My hair will no longer be pretty for me, my face is red, my nose is big. Vanity. Patriarchy, patriarchy, patriarchy. Consumerism and waste. Ignorance. Doctors who have the power to control your access to medicine, who have the power to report you. Dentists who do shoddy work and charge too much, all you have, and what then? Stupid electronics that are not made with any degree of thoughtfulness. Planned obsolescence. I hate current styles, these expensive ugly clothes. The Goodwill charges too much, those bastards, and now I hear they are burning toys because they can no longer sell them under the lead law. Oh, the arrogance! of those who think they are fashionably thin or healthy or rich all because of their own inherent strength and goodness. My children refuse to be independent and self-sufficient on the level I want them to be so I can get on with my things, and I lash out, I am tense and impatient and rushing and critical and just in general a terrible parent. I don’t have time to write, time to allow the right mental space to exist, for the words to flow as they should, as I deserve, as I am meant to do.

What would happen if I let go of that, what would I lose? I tell myself that I would lose nothing that is valuable to be — it’s not going to change things for me to be so angry, and I cannot change those things anyway, so why focus on them? And yet, it seems like an outrage, a wrongness, that I should not rage against them. But I think this is a lie, so I try and try and for a moment at a time there is no hard heart, there is only the joy of children and the scent of spring blossoms and mown grass, and the landscape on either side of me is transformed into simplicity, is-ness, not just the landscape but the shape of my mind in response to the world. I’m in a dream of loveliness. I remember feeling this way. It was exactly like this. I want to stay there, I don’t think I should, that’s not what responsibility looks like to me, but I will if I can, and I will my mind to stay there but then someone cuts me off on the road and it’s gone and I am fuming again.

What I think is that I don’t belong in this world. Or, rather, I do, but not in this society, this culture. It’s ugly to me, and hostile. I retreat. More than that, I quit. I would love to say that. I QUIT! But I can’t, not yet anyway.

Yesterday I did a lot of things, only a few of which I think were really worthwhile. I loved my daughter, who I have a difficult relationship with because she is my opposite in every way. I watched Mario hacks with my sons and understood and shared in their enjoyment of it. I ate chocolate cake with buttercream frosing with my friend, which we made together. I also ate my new favorite ice cream. I washed and fixed my husband’s bed linens and swept his room. (This is not my job. It feels to me like choosing to take care of him, as he chooses to take care of me. I don’t always feel this way about my work, which is why it was worthwhile.) I drank a half a glass of wine in the afternoon. I obliged my friend her magic in dosing me with Bach flower remedies and the Victorian charm of their claims. (I am Water Violet and Beech. )

I finished Doris Lessing’s book The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. [ETA: Link removed because the only reviews I can find I feel miss the mark entirely about the point of the book.] Now I want to read everything else she’s ever written. In thinking of what I would say to people to convey to them that this was an important thing for me to read, something I was already thinking of as having a permanent spot on my bookshelf with only a few dozen other books, I could come up with nothing satisfactory. My inability to explain why this book touched me reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s words: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. […] For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited….”

I thought about writing a letter to Doris Lessing, and about what I would say about who I am that would explain what this book was to me. And that started off all the introspection that you read about in the beginning, which I am never very far from.

I found this through Gloria Lemay, thought it was quite good. I’d like to see the whole film.

(Caution — the excerpt includes graphic photos of genitalia, frank talk about the sexual function of the foreskin, and footage of babies being circumcised.)

From the film’s website:

“Cut is a documentary film by Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon which examines the subject of male circumcision from a religious, scientific and ethical perspective. Using cutting-edge research, in addition to interview footage of rabbis, philosophers, and scientists, Cut challenges the viewer to confront their biases by asking difficult questions about this long-standing practice.”

I started out today feeling angry about prejudice and ignorance and how it worms its way into even the most progressive minds and how there is no truly safe place, and feeling the need to battle it all here on this page. And then there was the warm water in the bathtub against my skin and the steam and a perfect stout little body of a four-year-old and a dark sky and star-shaped lights glowing against a pale blue wall, and the rain so loud and my husband bringing me a cup of pear white tea. And I was secure, and in a flash I understood in my body and heart (not just my mind) the difference between a cup half full and a cup half empty, and the saying, “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

I don’t feel like like doing battle anymore this morning. I want instead to talk about the things that are so good.

I’m grateful to share my life with a man who is a calming influence, who hears me when I’m speaking, and who after thirteen years together still makes me weak with desire.

For video games which are really pretty damn cool. When I was nine years old and thought Pong was amazing, I couldn’t even conceive of the beautiful three-dimensional graphics and complex virtual world of Mario Kart. I would have thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

For chocolate chip cookies and hershey chocolate eggs, and even yes artificial cocoa peeps.

For friends with whom I can be myself totally, for which I am loved. Friends with whom I don’t feel I have to talk at all for us to feel comfortable together, but with whom conversation flows effortlessly. Friends who delight in sharing what they have with no thought to equity, and who throw the superficial shoulds and shouldn’ts to the wind. (Hallie and Jessica and Pam, I love you.)

For friends who through example and never shaming remind me of what is true and right and give me the courage to live it. (Most recently Renee and Diana, thank you.)

For my audacious daughters and my sweet boys.

For the trees, the river cottonwoods eighty feet tall, which will soon release their ambrosial resinous scent into the air, that will leaf and shimmer in the sun and wind.

For the chickens, that are so funny and such regal beautiful creatures at the same time.

For untidiness and for corpulence. For filthy shirts and raisin english muffins with butter and happy singing. For old suitcases and crocheted blankets and social programs that help people not be hungry and cold in the winter. For trampolines. For unkempt hair and loud people. For quiet people. For nail clippers. For people who paint their houses lavender and teal and bright yellow. For cars and even minivans. For sequins. For Noam Chomsky and Julia Nunes. For cracked concrete and weeds, and the sound of rain on the roof. For the freedom to walk down the street without fear of being hurt. For music. For fire. For rocks and dirt and bacteria and spores. For deliciously tired muscles and soft beds. For the peace of yoga and a compassionate teacher who is sensitive to size and body image issues. For hunger and for satiety.

What a world! I forget sometimes. When I remember, it’s like a revelation and a blessing, each time, all over again.

I am from polyester, from Velveeta and magic markers.

I am from the old blue turn-of-the-century house with the stone stairs, avocado shag carpeting, tugboats lowing, and rain drumming on trash cans.

I am from bearded irises, wet green moss, crimson japanese maple, crumbling pavement, fog.

I am from wedding showers and packrats and collections, from Little and Big Grandma, from the Klingsporns and the Gays and the Valentines.

I am from the taciturn. I am from alcoholism.

From “Oh, Linda,” and “just eat a few,” and mostly, saying nothing at all.

I am from the Catholics, “who just want your money,” and from Edgar Cayce and Shirley Maclaine and the ouija board and seances.

I’m from Bess Kaiser Hospital in Portland, Oregon, from German and Scotch-Irish, from goulash and gravy and soft peanut butter cookies marked with the tines of a fork.

From the Marlon Brando-esque longshoreman who wore the nickname ‘Psycho’ with pride, and the explosion of cancer in the brain of a beloved matriarch stealing sharpness and strength and grace and replacing it with child-like behavior and dependency, and ‘Ma’ of the wispy white hair and the perpetual bra-strap sliding down the arm, published writer of pulp romance.

I am from brown cardboard boxes, black gummed paper triangles for attaching black and white photographs with white borders and the date stamped on the side to construction paper scrapbooks, magazine clippings stuck with rubber cement, silver lockets with small round pictures tucked inside, and costume jewelry in pink foam egg cartons.

Sarah is one of my favorite writers and birth researchers. She is a phenomenal speaker, verbally gifted and intellectual.

She wrote of her unassisted birth (after three attended homebirths) that she has “felt the awakening power of birth — more potent for me than any spiritual or shamanic practice” and that it “has taught me, on a cellular level, that birth is about love and ecstasy.”

From her article Ecstatic Birth: The Hormonal Blueprint of Labor,

Undisturbed birth is exceedingly rare in our culture, even in birth centers and homebirths. Two factors that disturb birth in all mammals are firstly being in an unfamiliar place and secondly the presence of an observer. Feelings of safety and privacy thus seem to be fundamental. Yet the entire system of Western obstetrics is devoted to observation of pregnant and birthing women, by both people and machines; when birth isn’t going smoothly, obstetricians respond with yet more intense observation. It is indeed amazing that any woman can give birth under such conditions. Some writers have observed that, for a woman, having a baby has a lot of parallels with making a baby: same hormones, same parts of the body, same sounds, and the same needs for feelings of safety and privacy. How would it be to attempt to make love in the conditions under which we expect women to give birth?

Michel Odent wrote of her, “Sarah Buckley is precious, because she is bilingual. She can speak the language of a mother who gave birth to her four children at home. She can also speak like a medical doctor. By intermingling the language of the heart and the scientific language she is driving the history of childbirth towards a radical and inspiring new direction.”

There are some understandings I’ve come to in the past year:

-There are dysfunctions and abuses of the body and mind that will result in both dangerous thinness and dangerous fatness.

-There is between those extremes a very wide range of normal fat/lean ratio.

-Medical guidelines of healthy weight have changed to reflect cultural aesthetic bias and not scientific evidence. Hence the sudden “obesity epidemic.”

-Being slightly underweight (defined by current BMI guidelines) correlates to a higher rate of disease than being very overweight, and fat is thought to be actually protective against certain diseases.

-Different bodies respond to the same environment (energy input and energy output) in different ways. This means that the calories-in/calories-out theory of weight loss is impractically simplistic, and that fat and thin people don’t necessarily behave differently from each other. Put differently: Some people eat non-nourishing foods and some eat nourishing foods, some people eat a lot and some eat very little, and some people move their bodies a lot and some people move their bodies very little, and none of it is necessarily a guarantee of a certain size body.

-Diet and activity level do matter. But the results of ideal diet and body movement for health will not match our cultural aesthetic ideal for all people. Not even for most.

-The tendency to store fat is not a dysfunction of the body, it is an evolved strategy for survival.

-Diets don’t work long-term, unless weight gain was due to binging and the “diet” consists simply of a return to normal eating. I should say instead that starvation diets don’t work, unless they are maintained until death. What dieting does is put the body into starvation mode. The body attempts to protect itself by lowering metabolism and upping fat storage after normal eating is resumed. Dieting nontheless puts a huge stress on the body and is responsible for much of the bodily dysfunction commonly associated with obesity, including the obesity itself. Also, Weight Watchers is a diet. It can be a lifestyle too (see “maintained until death”, above) but it is still a diet. Sorry.

-All people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, even if they are disabled by something that most people perceive to be their fault.

Links:

My fat story: about my experience of growing up fat and coming to terms with it.

Shapely Prose Commentary and links to a plethora of articles and studies on obesity, you have to go back through the archives to find them, but it’s well worth it as the discussions are fantastic. A few of my favorite SP blog posts and comment threads are common objections to fat activism and self-acceptance and conformity and caveman nostalgia. Also don’t miss Don’t You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy? and her excellent fatosphere blogroll on the right-hand sidebar.

Paul Campos is author of The Obesity Myth, in which he takes on the belief that our culture’s obsession with thinness is justified by health concerns. You can get a taste of him in his article Don’t Feed the Humans! He also had several great comments in this round table discussion (the whole thing is interesting if you have time, but if you just want to hear his comments you can let the whole thing load and then use the slide bar to find the several instances where he comes on the screen.)

Why do some people never seem to get fat?

Genes Take Charge, Diets Fall By the Wayside: The Rockefeller University experiments. 1. Dieting has the same unhealthy physical and pyschological affects of starvation, and must be perpetual for long-term success. 2. The tendency of a body to be fat or thin has much to do with genetics.

Linda Bacon, nutrition researcher at UC Davis, advocate of Health At Every Size. video (”End the War on Obesity”) and article (”Stop That Diet!”) and her website.

Junk Food Science, particularly her obesity paradox series, and more in the sidebar. I don’t agree with everything on her site, but when it comes to clinical studies, they are what they are. And the interesting thing is that there are so many of them that seem to contradict the belief of most people and doctors that having more adipose tissue than is absolutely necessary for survival is dangerous.

A little levity (with a message): Joy Nash’s Confessions of the Compulsive.

Men In Full is a lovely on-going tribute to fat men.

And finally, more of my thoughts on fat issues on my new blog where I feel free to rant and swear to my heart’s content.