COVID-Safe Schooling for Your Feral Child

Due to COVID-19 restrictions and the healthy limits you placed on screen time during quarantine, your children have likely spent several months playing in your suburban back yard, urban parks, or primeval woodlands -- where they may have acquired new habits that are counterproductive in a learning environment.  The following tips will allow for a smooth transition to the more structured environment of online learning or in-person schooling.

-- Remind your daughter that during Zoom meetings, inside voices are required.  Howling is frowned upon, even if it is a full moon.  Make sure she knows how to mute and unmute herself.  

-- Your son may become anxious if humans approach too closely.  Congratulations on instilling excellent pandemic safety training!   However, you may want to instruct him not to scamper up trees, screech, or throw spruce cones at teachers.

-- Wild berries and fresh Alaska salmon are part of a heart-healthy diet for adults and children alike, but excess consumption can lead to hibernation during class.

-- Many schools are offering outdoor sports.  If you have signed up your daughter for fall soccer practice, you may need to warn her not to growl and bare her teeth at teammates.  Save that for her opponents.  Those Laurelwood Lynxes are not to be trusted.

-- Remind your child that school rules prohibit sharpening fingernails and licking between toes during lessons on factoring polynomials.

-- Recess offers stress-relieving physical activities for children unused to long periods of focused attention.  Be aware, however, that the virus can be transmitted via activities such as tag, duck-duck-goose, grooming vermin from other students’ hair, and wrestling for alpha dominance in the pack.

-- If your child has spent his time in the wilds associating with ravens or other corvids – an easy mistake to make, depending on your autocorrect settings – you may find that he has taken to collecting shiny items such as earrings, coins, and Mr. Pumphrey’s gold teeth.  A guidance counselor will be calling you shortly.

-- Most schools are relaxing dress codes for distance education.  Be sure to check your district website for specifications regarding pajamas, spaghetti straps, fur, and feathers.  Antlers are to be discouraged, especially during the rutting season.

-- Good news: the school lunch program will still be offering meals during remote learning!  Vegetarian options are available, but no accommodations can be made for children who consume only raw voles.

-- Be sure to emphasize that although it is perfectly acceptable for your child to decorate her locker with personal items, she should refrain from marking her territory by spraying.

-- If your feral children have been fostered by halibut, trout, or sockeye, you have no cause for concern; fish do not exhale potentially infectious respiratory droplets.  Also, they take well to schools.

Go forth and multiply

“Six times eight?”  I asked.

I looked at Molly expectantly.  She didn’t look back at me – but that didn’t mean she wasn’t paying attention.  Her eyes roamed upward, then wandered left -- vast, blue, and unfocused as a summer sky.   Two seconds went by.  Five seconds.  Eight.  I could practically hear my kid’s synapses overheating. 

“Forty-eight!”

“Excellent!” I beamed at Molly with all the positive reinforcement that my bored, fidgety parent-self could muster.  But at the same time, I wondered – did my eight-year-old simply have a pathetically slow time-release on her powers of recall, or had she spent ten seconds actually calculating the answer?

On a math test, of course, it would only matter that ten seconds per answer is at least six seconds too long. Both my third-grade twins are required, by the end of the school year, to be able to answer (legibly and correctly!) fifty-six multiplication problems in under four minutes.  From the point of view of the unforgiving Speed Test clock, how they obtain the answers is immaterial.  From my point of view, however, the details of that invisible mental mystery make all the difference in the world.

(To the friend who has previously groaned, “Nancy, you’re mathing again” – yes.  Yes, I am.  My apologies.  Stop here, while you’re still safe.)

“So, Molly,” I asked casually.  “How did you know that six times eight is forty-eight?  Do you have that memorized?”

“No.”  She sighed.  Molly hates memorization.  Like, really, really hates it.  I try to push her on the things that matter – yes, you really do need to know your own address and how to spell “enough”– but when it comes to stuff like state capitals my heart isn’t in it.  I, too, suck at rote memorization.  Yeah, I’ll tell you where you can put all your state capitals.  You might think you want me on your Trivial Pursuit team, but, truly, you do not.  I will embarrass you.  I will embarrass myself.  I will not only fail to know anything about pro sports teams and soap operas (knowledge that I might snobbishly decry as plebeian), I will also fail to know anything about the Vietnam War, the Great Lakes, and any Vice President, ever.

“So, how did you figure it out?”

Molly’s answer was as rapid-fire as it was matter-of-fact. “Well, eight plus eight is sixteen.  Then I added another eight to make twenty four.  If three times eight is twenty-four, then six times eight is twice that much.  Twenty-four plus twenty-four is forty-eight.”

Yes.  Of course.  Because multiplication is not only commutative and transitive, but also distributive.  We all know that, right?  Right?

Molly’s line of reasoning seemed pretty good to me, as a ten-second effort by an eight-year-old – especially given the fact that math has been politely described by Molly’s teacher as “maybe not her best subject”.  Thus, I was moderately impressed.  But I was even more impressed with the math curriculum that got her there. 

I should pause here to admit that I know squat about curriculum development. I’m only a “teacher” in the way that many college professors are “teachers”: we earn a PhD in some esoteric subject such as “Species-Specific Effects on the Oxygen Isotope Ratio of Tree-Ring Cellulose,” and are then plopped down in front of a roomful of sleep-deprived teenagers and told to teach them Biology 101.  We have zero clue as to how to create the complex environment of excitement, engagement, and challenge necessary for learning.  We haven’t the faintest idea how to teach to different leaning styles, different skill levels, different majors, different genders, different socio-economic backgrounds, different shades of nail polish, whatever.  We’re also huge dorks, and the whole class knows it.  But I digress. 

In thinking about curricula, I can really only compare the way I was taught and the way my kids are being taught.  When I was in third grade, Mrs. Ricco tried to perk things up with cheerful bulletin-board displays depicting multiplication-airplanes flying across a colorful map.  None of us, however, were provided with any strategies for learning beyond rote memorization.  Purely as an avoidance strategy, I figured out ways to “cheat.” The nines and the fives were easy; I could multiply by ten and then either subtract, or divide the answer in half.  The twos and threes could be mastered via simple adding.  The fours were the twos doubled, and the ones and zeroes were obviously just silly.  The only facts I truly memorized were 6x6, 6x7, 6x8, 7x7, 7x8, and 8x8.  That I found it difficult to learn these six paltry problems shows just how dysfunctional I really am.  Nonetheless, I managed to be the first kid in the class to “fly my airplane across the map”.  I felt guilty about that achievement – because, secretly, I was cheating. 

A few months ago, Lizzy’s teacher sent an email to all us parents.  “Thanks for your concerns,” the message said. She explained that the school has a new math curriculum this year – EnVision Math, by Pearson Realize. “Yes, the bar has been raised. Kids' math grades are a direct reflection to the rigor asked for. They are learning....they surely are. It's just that we are so used to higher grades. . .”

“Okay, Lizzy, your turn.  Seven times nine?”

“Sixty-three.”  Two seconds.  “I did ten sevens minus one seven,” she offered.  Lizzy is a better memorizer than Molly, but it seemed that she, too, was using other strategies.

I answered that email.  I wanted that hard-working, dedicated teacher to know that I didn’t give a rat’s ass what my kid’s grade was, so long as her brain was being stretched.  (I didn’t use those precise words.  I’m, like, a PTA member and whatnot.)  As far as I was concerned, the new math curriculum – despite some laughably awkward problems pertaining to Grover Cleveland and/or the booking of conference rooms -- looked a hell of a lot less lame-o than the previous one. 

What impressed me about it?  Well, I liked the fact that the kids were offered a host of different strategies for rounding numbers and estimating answers.  Not calculating – estimating.  In other words, they were being taught the kind of math that you might do as you toss items into your grocery cart, if you’re on a tight budget and don’t want to humiliate yourself at the register.  “What is a reasonable answer?”   Holy shit.  My brain exploded.  Because, teaching at the college level, I’ve faced students who chugged through all manner of complex calculations, and then gave me answers like “-8.4335” when the units in question were “fish”.

Second, I noticed that the twins’ worksheets used a lot of story-problems.  Yes, yes, yes!  In the real world, when you need to decide whether you have enough time to drop off the library books between the end of swim practice and the start of your dental appointment, the relevant numbers don’t appear printed on your dashboard, complete with +, -, and = signs. To me, it seems obvious that a kid needs to really, really understand what multiplication is – and some of the many situations in which it might be useful – before settling down to practice and memorize.  But when curiosity drove me to look up online discussions and comments about various math curricula, use of story problems popped up as a common criticism.  “EnVision Math doesn’t make sure kids know the basics before moving on to word problems!”  The basics?  Real life IS basic.   

“All right, Molly.  How about seven times three?”

“Twenty-one.”  The delay was too long.  She was adding.  But, heck, at least she knew enough to add seven three times, rather than adding three seven times.  “It’s an array.  Of course it’s the same either way.  You could just turn it around.” 

Third, the new curriculum demanded that kids write answers in words.  I don’t just mean answers like, “Tommy has six blocks.”  I mean answers like, “Tommy is wrong when he says that he will have ten blocks left after Susie takes two of his eight blocks.  He added instead of subtracting.”  Dubbed “Writing to Explain,” this is pretty much on par with rocket science, to an eight-year-old.  It is not a particularly popular activity at homework-time at our house -- but I love it.  Because… logic.  Because, kiddo, for the rest of your life, people will try to fool you with math, with graphs, with statistics, with numbers.  But you WILL NOT BE FOOLED!

How desperately do we need these skills?  Well, a New York Times article, succinctly titled, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html?_r=0 gets into all the grim details of our comparative international patheticness.  At the core of the problem is the difference between doing math problems and understanding math. 

It wasn’t until I was in high school -- and a proud T-shirt-wearing member of the Metropolitan New York All-Stars Math Team -- that I started to have an inkling that maybe I’d been doing it exactly right, all along.  These ideas gelled when I was called upon to step up to my first paid teaching job.  I was sixteen.  My long-time neighborhood buddy – who far outshone me in social skills, creativity, knowledge of pop culture, and ability to get the damned basketball through the hoop – had bombed the math section on the practice SAT.  Her parents, pragmatically, decided to hire the cheapest tutor available:  the Insanely Nerdy Friend.  Sitting at my neighbor’s kitchen table, I soon realized that my smart and vibrant friend could do any problem she was asked to do – but only if she was told precisely what kind of problem it was.  This was how she’d been taught.  It was utterly useless.

Newsflash:  in the real world, figuring out how to set up the problem is not just important, it’s everything.   Want to bake only 2/3 of this gingerbread recipe?  Want to know whether you can afford monthly payments on the house, the car, AND that sweet new snowmachine?  Need to understand the relative risk of vaccinating your child versus letting them get polio, for chrissake?  We have computers for any really serious numerical grunt-work -- but if you don’t understand the question you’re asking, you have NO HOPE of understanding the answer.

It’s not like I’m the only person who knows this.  As noted in that NY Times article, Americans have so poor a grasp on what fractions actually are that when A&W released a 1/3-pound hamburger to out-compete the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, people didn’t buy it.  They thought it was a bad deal – because it was, like, smaller.  “Focusing only on procedures… turns school math into a sort of arbitrary process wholly divorced from the real world of numbers. ..  Instead of trying to convey, say, the essence of what it means to subtract fractions, teachers tell students to draw butterflies and multiply along the diagonal wings, add the antennas and finally reduce and simplify as needed.” 

I cringe.  I mean, consuming more cheap ground beef is probably not the solution to America’s problems, but… death to the butterflies. 

I highly doubt that the new math curriculum at University Park Elementary School is perfect.  (Seriously, what was with the problem about Grover Cleveland?)  The teachers are struggling with it.  Some of the kids are struggling with it.  Clearly, many of the parents are also struggling.  I’m sure we could all fault it.  But if I do pick holes in it, it certainly won’t be for its valiant efforts to teach kids to understand, to think, to look at everything in more than one way, and to relate everything back to the real world.

Last week, when the twins bounced off the school bus in the afternoon, Lizzy immediately chirped, “Guess what?”  That’s how kids set up dramatic tension in a conversation.  “Guess what, Mom?  I passed the Speed Test!”

I congratulated her with genuine enthusiasm.  She’d memorized a bunch of math-facts to get there, and those facts are useful enough to be well worth the effort.  We do, indeed, all need to be capable of answering 56 multiplication problems in under four minutes. 

“Good job!  Nicely done!”

Then I looked over at Molly, who appeared to be examining her boots.  She can answer 56 multiplication  problems, too – but not in four minutes.  Maybe in eight. 

“Don’t worry, you’ll get there too.  You just need a little more practice.  Let’s see, what’s eight times nine?”

[Boot-crunch on packed snow.  Rumble of a distant truck.  Rustle of snowpants.]

 “Seventy-two.”

Think on, America.  Think on.

Whole-grain friendship

“She doesn’t watch TV…” said Lizzy.  “She’s a really good reader… and she isn’t into stuff like pink and princesses all the time…  she likes riding bikes and being outside… “   She thought for a moment longer.  “One thing I like about her is she doesn’t eat just a white-bread sandwich.  She has a real lunch.”

Well, that clinches it: this isn’t just any old friendship -- it’s a liberal, outdoorsy, intellectual, WHOLE GRAIN friendship!

Is it possible for half of my brain to giggle gleefully while the other half cringes?

On one hand, what parent wouldn’t be pleased that her twins had managed to find an official Best Friend with delightful manners, precocious academic prowess, and a penchant for consuming fresh, locally grown organic produce?  On the other hand…  Oh my god.  I’ve totally brainwashed my kids. And on the third hand (yes, parenting requires growing a third hand) -- do I really have a better grip than my second-graders do on what true friendship actually entails? Should I be surprised, given my own selective proclivities, that they are choosing to hang out with bookish, intellectual, middle-class [knee-high] liberals?

From other conversations with Molly and Lizzy, it has become clear that the nascent social partitioning among the seven-year-old set is amusingly – and horrifyingly – advanced. The kids are figuring out the religious beliefs of their peers, their environmental commitment (or lack thereof), and their politics.  That’s right: although my children have trouble remembering whether Alaska is a town, a state, or a nation, they are attempting to parse the nuances of the political spectrum.  And, apparently, they are also bread snobs.

This social parsimony seems particularly startling, given that neither twin has ever been what you might call extroverted -- or, to be honest, socially skilled.  The two of them have played with each other since they were old enough to toddle, but they’ve always tended to hang around the edges of playgrounds.  One twin in particular received preschool reports full of kindly, euphemistic phrases such as, “Does not initiate play with others.”

Thus, I was thrilled when, back in kindergarten, Lizzy told me that maybe (just maybe) there was a girl in her class she liked.  What?  You’re actually interacting?  Hooray!  A birthday party invitation was issued.  Playing took place.  The little girl’s family seemed delightful.  In fact, they seemed like people I might have sought out as friends without the helpful aid of my small children.  That is… um… bookish, intellectual, middle-class liberals.  She has a real lunch.

The following year, the same child – I’ll call her “E” – was in Molly’s class, and the triumvirate Best Friendship was cemented. 

But what, exactly, does friendship entail in second grade?

Well, it seems that in addition to appropriate bread choices, literary discussion is important.  A few weeks ago, I swung by E’s house at the end of a playdate, and found that the kids had attempted to dress themselves as characters from The Mysterious Benedict Society.  Moreover, they had been busy with letter magnets belonging to E’s little brother.  They were spelling out the names of their favorite authors.

BEVER Y   C EARY? 

Well… close enough.  The little brother (given the spelling of his name) was not willing to budge on the issue of L-sharing.

I loaded all three girls in the car to head back to our place for the ensuing sleepover.  Our guest’s mother offered a fond farewell and a classic reminder to her daughter: “Don’t forget your manners.” 

As we pulled out of E’s driveway, there was silence from the back seat.  At last, Molly spoke up.  In cheerful, confident tones, she told E, “You know, at our house, you don’t actually have to have manners.”

Come on over, eat with your hands, and make fart jokes!  Yup.  Best Friendship, second-grade style. They’re a trio of solidarity, for sure.

 It might not have been this way, though.  It almost wasn’t.  At the beginning of second grade, E was missing.  Her family had moved to a bigger home.  The move placed her in a different local public school.  The twins missed her sorely.  Every day.

“You’ll make other friends!” I chirped.  “There are lots of nice kids in your classes!”  But Molly and Lizzy bemoaned her absence.

E attended that new school for about a week.  And then she came home with this poster:

Although the two schools were academically equal by all accounts, her parents shifted her back.  They committed themselves to driving her to and from school, every single day -- to be with her friends.

I was touched.  But, at first, I was also taken aback.  Really?  Someone is going to haul their second-grader across town?  Just to be with my kids?  Haven’t they noticed that my delightful little angels tell fart jokes?

I felt a little odd, and a little guilty about the whole thing.  Is it really worth it?  The three children – Molly, Lizzy, and E – ended up in three different classes, thus covering all of the second grade teachers in the school.  They only saw each other at recess and in reading group.  How important, and how permanent, I asked myself, is a friendship between kids whose biggest concerns in life include tooth fairy earnings and who can build the coolest Lego structure?  How meaningful is a friendship based on lunch choices, Beverly Cleary, and bikes?

Then again… books and bikes are kinda high on my list of friend-attributes, too.  I’ve got my very own set of outdoorsy, nerdy, non-princessy buddies (well, okay, maybe some are a little bit princessy).  I have WHOLE GRAIN friendships! 

I found myself squirming a little, mentally.  Yeah, my own choices are so adult, so diverse, so darned nuanced!  Just how thrillingly deep do I think I am, compared to my second-graders?  What is friendship supposed to be about?  And what, over my almost 42 years of existence, has friendship actually entailed?

I found a Best Friend when I was seven, too.  Like my kids’ Best Friend, mine was (and still is) a lot like me: bookish, intellectual, and middle-class-liberal.  Together, we created complicated treasure-hunts full of cryptic clues.  Together, we built obstacle courses in the back yard.  Together, we studied for Advanced Placement exams.  We went off to Ivy league schools.  We both eventually became professors. 

But in other ways, we weren’t so alike after all, my Best Friend and I.  I was the scabby, grubby, always-up-in-a-tree one.  She was cleaner, quieter, shyer, and definitely sweeter.  Her family put up a menorah when mine (somewhat arbitrarily) put up a Christmas tree.  As adults, she settled in suburban New York and became a swing-dancing expert, and I went to live in an unplumbed cabin in Alaska and took up odd hobbies such as hundred-mile wilderness racing on skis or snow-bike. 

We were alike.  We were different.  We stuck by each other through some horrible teenage crap that I’m no-way-in-heck going into in this blog post.  We grew up together.

In college, I found a Best Friend who was, again, bookish, intellectual, and middle-class liberal.  Together, we made a valiant – and inexplicable -- attempt to learn Esperanto; we sweated over multi-variable Calculus; we imprudently decided to climb down a fire escape and explore the steam tunnels; and we made loud jokes about phalli. 

Again, my Best Friend was so terribly, achingly like me – and yet not like me.  I spent summers wielding an axe and heaving rocks about, while he did research projects.  He was publically exuberant and affectionate, and I didn’t know what to do with a hug.  He reveled in geographic trivia; I barely knew my lats from my longs.  He faced the desperate struggle of a being teenage boy coming out as gay to friends and family, while I’d barely considered what life would have been like had I not been conveniently straight. 

We were alike.  We were different.  We stuck by each other.  We thought we were already grownups, but of course we weren’t – so we grew up together, too.

Of course, no one is ever all the way grown up –or, if they are, I’m crossing them off my list RIGHT NOW.  We still – and always – need people to keep on growing up with us.  To me, a true friend – a Best Friend, if you will -- is someone who does that growing in concert and in synergy with me, but also in a state of constant challenge – stretching me, pushing me, extending me.  A best friend is someone who can get me to ski a hundred miles or write a novel, not by goading or nagging me, but simply by believing I can.  He or she is the keeper of a lost piece of my brain – someone who makes the inside of my head a less lonely cavern, someone with whom to share not only thoughts and adventures, but also hidden shames and peculiar joys.  You feel that way too!? Holy crap, I thought no one else ever felt that way in the whole history of the universe.

That friend and I can run our brains sometimes in parallel and sometimes in series.  We can create a devil's-advocate spark, and set alight an intelligence, humor, and joy greater than the sum of its parts: friendship as emergent property.  We can go on a six-hour hike, talking non-stop, laughing about everything, from profound to profane.  We can share obscure, nerdy jokes predicated on Latin roots or imaginary numbers.  We can wax lyrical about physics, in the next breath quote Beowulf, and in the breath after that make some kind of pun so filthy that it would make a nun's hair fall out in an instant.  Or we can be silent together – comfortably, slowly, deeply silent.   

Maybe my connection with my own close friends isn’t any more cosmic than my little girls’ connection with theirs.  Life, after all, is mostly built of small moments, not Epic Events (although I manufacture a few of those, to keep myself feeling important). A true friend is the person who knows too much about me, and judges too little.  She’s the one who eats the other half of the box of Girl Scout cookies at midnight, helping me to drop crumbs into my textbooks.  He’s the one who swings by for a game of Scrabble even though I’m not very good at shuffling my tiles while nursing twins.  She’s the one who knows which book I’d like, and leaves it in my mailbox, and never asks for it back. He’s the one who drives to the airport in the middle of the night to whisk me – and my horribly jet-lagged kids – to a nearby Chinese restaurant, so we can catch up, and reminisce, and laugh together over our trumped-up fortunes.

True friendships last.  Nonetheless, old friends scatter, and are seen only rarely -- and new Best Friendship is harder to find, for middle-aged individuals such as the person that I have somehow unexpectedly become.  Sociologists note that development of true friendship requires frequent unplanned interactions and a relaxed setting.  In addition, although kids (and adults) should all learn to foster empathy, respect, and affability across even the most yawning gulfs of diversity, close friendship requires a sense of commonality – shared interests, shared beliefs, a shared quirky twist on this screwy thing we call life.  It also requires a significant and continued investment of time.

Proximity.  Commonality.  Time. 

One day a few weeks ago, I picked up the kids from school.  This is rare for me (Buses!  Public Transportation!  Yay!), but we had a dental appointment scheduled.  I loitered uncharacteristically by the neighboring doorways of Molly’s and Lizzy’s classes.  When they emerged amidst a welter of bouncy little bodies, I accompanied them down the hall toward the exit.  A few doors down, we passed E’s classroom.  It had already emptied out.  But one tall, dark-haired girl was standing there, waiting.  She fell into step beside her friends.  For the hectic two or three minutes that it took us all to reach the snowy curb, the three of them quickly caught each other up on Important Stuff.  We’re going to the dentist!  And I realized that, unseen by me, this happened every day.

Proximity.  Commonality.  Time.  She’s a really good reader…  She likes riding bikes and being outside… she isn’t into stuff like pink and princesses all the time. E is not the same race/ethnicity as the twins.  She prefers scarier books than the ones they choose.  She plays hockey and soccer, while they eschew team sports. But… She doesn’t watch TV.  She has a real lunch. At that moment, I understood.  They are alike.  They are different.  They stick by each other.  Maybe they will grow up together, and maybe they won’t.  But they are in the same school again.  With our two families, they hiked over thirty miles together, and skied many more, this second-grade year.  They wait for one another, to catch those tiny moments in the hallway.  They are being given the chance.

In all likelihood, my kids don’t yet fully understand what a Best Friend really is.  Maybe their bonds and their memories won’t last.   Then again, maybe thirty years from now their childhood friend will be strong-armed into playing Monopoly with their own kids -- or editing their blog posts for them (um, thanks, Childhood Friend).  But, regardless of the outcome of this particular friendship, learning to make those individual, quirky, hard-won, joyful ties is as important as all the other skills they are learning and practicing in second grade (reading, subtraction, fart jokes).  No, it’s not just important – it’s crucial.  Even for the most independent or introverted among us, what would a life be like, without strong, meaningful human connections?  

I can only offer my kids the same thing that – I now realize – I owe to myself: time for friendships (carved out of the packed strata of life) and proximity to a wide range of potentially mind-meldingly, challengingly, hilariously, brilliantly, fabulous friends.  From there, it’s up to each of us to find the connection, the bond, the spark, the glorious commonality.  And if, for my seven-year-olds, that means a whole grain friendship… well… I can count myself lucky to have some of the same.

Omnibus

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich ride public transportation.” – Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá

“When is your flight home?” my coworker asked, watching my feeble attempts to stuff a half-dozen brochures, a pair of shoes, and a dirty gas-station coffee mug into a too-small backpack – all while maintaining some semblance of decorum behind our conference-booth table at the Alaska Forum on the Environment.  I saw her mentally calculating whether anyone could be spared to drive me to the airport, so I quickly explained that there was no problem; I was planning to take the bus.

“There’s a bus to the airport?”  She looked astonished -- and I, as usual, felt slightly deflated by that astonishment.  My depression had nothing to do with my coworker, who is charming – and, moreover, tolerates me with a remarkable degree of equanimity.  It’s just that… well… anyone who has known me for more than four minutes already knows I have a bit of an obsession with bikes -- but now I have to admit that I also have a chip on my shoulder about buses.

More generally, I’ve always been perplexed and frustrated by the gap between what we think we believe and what we actually DO with regard to public transportation in this country.  Those of us who are liberal, progressive, environmental types all say we want it.  Oh, boy!  Buses!  Light rail!  Subway systems!  How efficient! How green!  But when push comes to shove, we hardly ever seem to USE public transportation – especially not buses.   America’s relationship with buses is like Roxanne’s relationship with Cyrano: somewhere between disparaging, patronizing, and oblivious.

Ok, maybe it was reasonable that my coworkers didn’t know anything about Anchorage buses; after all, we live in Fairbanks.  But it’s no better here at home.  Most people in Fairbanks seem unaware that we even have a bus system, and if they know it exists, they don’t know where it goes, or when.   We have a grim problem with air pollution around here, and cars are big contributors.  Moreover, getting a car started – and keeping it running – in temperatures that plummet as low as -50F is neither fun nor cheap.  And yet I know exactly one person who uses the Fairbanks public bus as his primary means of commuting.  One. 

Part of the problem, of course, is a chicken-and-egg thing.  Despite efforts to expand the system, Fairbanks buses have limited schedules and routes.  Trying to take a bus is pretty darn frustrating if it doesn’t go where you want, or arrives only once an hour, or both.  And the bus isn’t too likely to go where you want it to, because we Fairbanksans are horrendously guilty of sprawl.  We spread ourselves across the landscape like syrup oozing across a pancake.  The bus doesn’t reach people’s homes because we’re building our homes way the heck out on Gold Hill, Cripple Creek, Two Rivers, Moose Mountain, and other fancifully named locales.

In other towns and cities – cities with denser populations and less ridiculous climates – the story is of course a bit better.  My sister’s family, in Cambridge/Boston MA, uses the bus and subway system (the T) regularly.  My good friends in Seattle are well acquainted with both light rail and bus routes. But even in those locations, where routes are regular and frequent, most people seem to still be driving most places.  Why?  Well, I’ve heard a lot of reasons.  Convenience (see chicken-and-egg, above).  Speed (Maybe -- but put enough cars on the road, and no one is moving).  Autonomy (I’m biased here, because I kind of hate driving, but on a bus you can relax and read a book!).  And… niceness.

Niceness?  Yeah.  Apparently it’s a biggie.

My coworkers and I had all arrived in Anchorage by plane, and the Downtown Transit Center was diagonally across the street from the conference center where we’d spent the past three days.  It might as well have been in another world.  A poorer world.  A world in which the smell of extraordinarily bad pizza and extraordinarily cheap alcohol hung heavy on the air.  A world in which a terribly young-looking mom with twins in a stroller could not get them to stop crying; a teenage guy was trying to buy a cigarette from a group of strangers; a whole lot of young men were amicably and loudly swearing at each other;  and someone in the corner was talking to himself, quietly. 

Yelp and Foursquare offer online info on the Downtown Transit Center in particular, and the Anchorage People Mover bus system in general.  The comments don’t pull any punches.  “There are a ridiculous amount of drunk and disgusting people here,” says someone named Shauna.  Crystal P. adds, “Try and get a car if at all possible. Buses stink and are slow. Plus there are tons of creepy people down here.”

Creepy people?  Maybe.  Are you a creepy person, Crystal P.? 

Poor people?  Yeah.  Of course.  The bus station is heated, and Anchorage is not tropical.  Plus, there are seats in the station, and friends to hang out with, if you happen to have creepy friends, or drunken friends, or not-at-all-creepy not-at-all-drunken friends, who may or may not be planning to actually ride a bus any time soon.  Our nation is woefully short of places where one can comfortably and freely sit with friends and strangers and enjoy a sense of community, and our nation also has woefully inadequate resources to alleviate poverty.  But that is a subject for another blog post… or ten. 

The idea that people who ride buses are creepy, dangerous, and just plain nasty is not a new one.  When I was in college in the Boston area, I needed to visit my parents on Long Island a few times a year.  I took the bus.  This always surprised people, especially all-the-way-grown-up white-collar people.  But, honey, why don’t you fly?  Or take the train?  While these other options were slightly faster, there weren’t markedly so; the New York area cannot be traversed quickly by any means short of teleportation. But, honey, the train is so much more… comfortable.  So much… nicer. 

Was it?  Well, the aisles were wider, and the bathroom was larger, although not necessarily cleaner.  The train was often, but not always, less crowded.  On the bus, I sometimes ended up sitting next to strangers.  Some of them were marginally annoying.  Some fell asleep.  Some fell asleep on me.  Some were interesting.  I learned about Pakistani culture and the five tenets of Islam from an international gem merchant, and he learned a lot about American culture and feminism from me. 

In any case, the bus was cheaper – way cheaper – than the train, and I was nineteen, and a student.  I was scraping together what income I had by delivering newspapers before class.  In the summer, my employment was wallowing in mud and black flies while moving rocks using only a crowbar and pick.  Seriously.  In any case, as far as I could tell, the biggest difference between the bus and the train was that on the train, the other passengers were almost all white, and middle-class.  On the bus, it was a mixed crowd, with every possible ethnicity and a lot of different flavors of poor.  I took the bus.

Even before college, I’d been on Greyhounds, of course.  In junior high, the special enrichment program that I was lucky enough to be part of involved a lot of extended field trips.  Twenty-five twelve-year-olds drove our teachers batshit crazy all the way from Long Island to Washington D.C., and I’m pretty sure we loved every minute of it.  And in high school, some of my most treasured memories are from the three times in which I managed to qualify for the New York Metropolitan All Stars Mathletes team.  Twenty-nine boys.  Two male teachers.  And me.  On a coach bus headed to Penn State.  It’s a long, long drive.  What did we do?  We played bridge, of course.  The year that the bus’s exhaust system caught fire on the way home and we all had to be evacuated to a rural fire station -- to the confused amusement of the volunteer firefighters -- was just added excitement in an already perfect sojourn.   We were a joke so good that it didn’t even require a punchline: thirty pimply little math geeks escape from a burning bus...

Of course, city buses and Greyhounds were not the first buses I knew.  That honor was reserved for a big, impressive yellow bus with flashing lights.  I can recall LONGING to climb onto that bus -- just as soon as I reached the exalted age of five – so that I could join my big sister in all her glory.   But my remembered excitement runs counter to what seems to be the common middle-class wisdom these days.  Recently, I’ve heard an unsettling number of half-spoken implications to the (vague) effect that schoolbuses are just “not nice”.

The yellow behemoths, circa 1980, were sometimes a trace Lord of the Flies, there’s no denying it.  Drivers who are concentrating on the road are hard pressed to deal with ten-year-olds who have come up with new engineering marvels relating to increasing the velocity of spitballs.  Nonetheless, I have a lot of great schoolbus memories.  Not long after I attained the lofty goal of riding to kindergarten, I achieved the additional self-perceived honor of sitting in the front seat, my legs dangling, giving directions to a substitute bus driver.  I think he was relieved to find that I not only knew the way to Huntington Elementary School but also reliably knew left from right. 

I recall the little boy who had a crush on my sister, and who thought that he might impress her by giving me rocks to add to my rock collection.  Practically every bus ride, I got another rock. I really liked rocks. 

A few years later, when we moved to a new house and I was thus on an unfamiliar bus, being joined in my seat by another fourth-grader who confided that she had just switched into public school from Catholic school, and was thus new, too.  We became fast friends almost immediately.  She patiently taught me to shoot baskets and ride my bike with no hands, and I tutored her in math.  Thirty years later, and she and her wife have twins – just as Jay and I do.

These days, my own twins and I walk up to the school bus stop every morning.  It’s a half-mile jaunt, because we live way the heck down a dirt road in the bottom of a swamp.  We’re not helping Fairbanks’ above-mentioned problem with low-density development by living here.  However, in our defense, we chose this piece of land in part because it’s close enough to town and to our jobs at the university to allow us to be car-free much of the time. 

I don’t mind the fifteen-minute morning hike.  It serves as the start to my morning run-or-bike-commute, and it guarantees that the kids get at least a bit of exercise, even on days when the mercury is below -20F, and recess is cancelled.  It also doubles as time to eat a portable breakfast (usually toast, but sometimes a more ambitious foray into pancakes, fruit, muffins, oatmeal, or yogurt).  We chat about what’s coming up in the day ahead, note the phase of the moon or the configuration of the constellations,  kick snowballs along the icy road,  or say hi to the neighbors’ neurotically excitable dogs.  Sometimes we catch a little aurora, startle a few grouse, or even pause to make way for a moose.  We have our timing down to the minute; when we reach the stop sign on Gold Hill, we can almost always see red safety lights blinking in the dark, a quarter mile down the road, at the next bus stop.  The driver pulls up for my two little people, I kiss the tops of their puffy jacket hoods, and they carefully wait to cross the road.

In the afternoons, we complete the same journey in reverse, but usually with higher energy and more chatter.  Afternoon snacks are clutched in mittened hands – the kids are really stellar at eating with mittens on – and there is more hopping, skipping, slipping, and sliding than mere walking.  Did Coach Davis set up the Indiana Jones obstacle course in gym class?  Do you actually know the meanings of all the words in the Star Spangled Banner?   Did you spell ‘maniac’ correctly? 

A few days ago, during one such session of afternoon conversation, one of the kids remarked (with her mouth full of honey-roasted peanuts) that, “Not very many kids take the bus.” 

I probed.  More than half, I asked?  No, both twins agreed.  Less than half.  Maybe a third, if that. More like a quarter.  Yay, fractions!  Molly and Lizzy weren’t objecting to riding the bus, merely stating a fact: most kids are driven to school.  Which of your friends ride the bus?  Reading between the lines, I began to guess that the economic breakdown among pint-sized bus-riders might not be so different from that among full-sized bus riders.  Buses are not “nice”.

Granted, the twins’ estimates may be off, and granted, some kids walk to school.  But still, there are clearly hundreds of kids being driven to University Park Elementary, every day.  This means a huge, tangled lineup of cars trailing exhaust in the parking lot, which – despite excellent efforts on the part of school administrators – was clearly was not designed for so much traffic. 

So, adults are not riding buses… and neither are kids.  And… I think that’s a shame. 

It’s a shame for the obvious reasons, of course: environmentalism, efficiency, fuel use, road crowding, economy, air quality, and so on.  But (as I’ve bored you all with my circuitous bus-reminiscing) I’ve come to realize that it’s a shame for a host of other reasons, too.  Buses are good places for people-watching, for social mixing, for letting go of road rage, and for doing all the things that people like to do while driving (texting, putting on makeup, eating a four-course-meal) without creating a deadly hazard.  Buses can be slow, but slow isn’t always bad.  Slowness offers the opportunity to read a good book, to learn to spell ‘maniac’, to experience a little parent-free teacher-free subversive conversation, to finish your homework in bumpy-hurried handwriting, to explain everything you know about women’s rights to someone you’ve never met before, to take a nap, or to play bridge with the most heart-stoppingly nerdy boys you have ever met.

I don’t know how to make buses more popular.  I don’t know how to get rich people to ride them.  I don’t know how to argue with the logic of fellow-parents who tell me, quite reasonably, that it’s quicker and simpler and easier to drop off their kids on the way to and from work than to stand at a school bus stop when the mercury is at -40.  I don’t know how to address the fears of parents who think that the schoolbus is somehow dangerous or “not nice”; people tend to dance around the subject rather than face it head-on.  But I do have my suspicions that if kids aren’t riding the school bus when they are seven, they will be less likely – and less willing – to hop on a Greyhound or a city bus when they are twenty-seven, thirty-seven, or forty-seven. 

The bus from downtown Anchorage to the airport cost exactly two dollars.  My bills were a bit rumpled, but the driver helped me get them into the slot.  The ride was relaxing: perhaps ten percent slower than a taxi would have been, because of the stops, but at least 90% cheaper, and no less comfortable.  I enjoyed it.  And I’d do it again, every time – unless, of course, the option of riding a bike were available.