Becoming a Swallowtail Butterfly (in pictures)

This is where it all started. An aquarium planted with fennel.
We located fennel in a community garden that had little golden
eggs of the Swallowtail.

A day or two before hatching the egg turns black.

little hatchling. (images photographed through jewelers loop)

Three days old.

About 5 days old.

9 days old, third skin.

12 days old. 4th skin.

spinning the rope that keeps it in place as it metamorphoses.

Still working. Day 15?

About day 16, comatose.

after sitting around a few days,the last skin falls away...

Its moving

And now a full chrysalis, good morning.

After nearly two weeks of no change, the wing patterns
appear through skin

Emergence

stretching the wings

Stayed with us about 24 hours before taking its new wings to air.

re-entry into life, rethinking the blog

As my crazy work schedule winds down, I find myself mired in the chaos of an unattended life. Not the good kind of chaos, the uncomfortable kind. The house in total disarray and me lacking the energy to do anything about it. The regret of missing the beginning of what seems to be the biggest social movement in my adult life. A feeling of estrangement from my daughter and fear of loosing our connection. A feeling of estrangement from society. The realization that in doing everything that I do, I can’t do anything well. Many things aren’t working, and as I reenter my life I see an opportunity to make some major decisions about it. I need to pair down.

I have started with the decision to forget working in public education. I can not meld into the professional world. I have spent too much time trying to fit into places that I don’t and I am done. And I hate the way that it has made me constantly want to correct people’s grammar (especially people’s tendency to use adjectives in place of adverbs). I loved the fluidity of the English language before it was netted in my standardization and Webster.


But outside education I am a writer, a videographer, and artist, a musician, a single parent, an activist, a “home educator,” an intellectual, a traveler and wanderer, a member of the working class, an urban homesteader…how do I manage? I want to spend time with people too!

I shall start with integration.

Video is a great tool. It is a job I feel comfortable doing. It is an outlet for creativity. It is something I can be paid for. It is a project I can do with my daughter, and help her learn. It is a way to document. Video is a tool for activism.

Writing is something I love. It keeps me sane. It is a form of activism for me. I recently stopped journaling after reading an article from someone I respect saying that in order to be a “famous “ writer, I should write for others, and not waste time journaling to myself. I took the advice and it had devastating effects. For me, writing is not only a mode of communication with the outside world, but a mode of communication with my inner self. I am an introvert and much of me is deeply buried. Writing is an exercise in digging. I am working on adding journaling back into my life. When I journaled regularly I liked my writing.

I am rethinking my blog. What is it here for? I liked it when more mothering was happening in my blogging. When my mothering looked like acts of rebellion. But really I guess it still is. I feel strong in my ideas about how to raise my daughter without regular schooling, at least for the short term. I have plans. I am determined to have a life that doesn’t revolve around my daughter as well. And integrated life is an act of rebellion.

I don’t feel like tackling the other stuff on my list right now…

We will see where all the sticks fall as I come out of super worker mode. 55 hour work weeks plus 6-7 hours of commute time is a lot, even for a hip mama. The cat is laying herself on my wrists as I type this.

I would rather gut fish in Alaska than teach an a "professional" bureaucracy.

The adult school called yesterday to let me know that they don’t have any classes for me to teach this year. I felt like the tethers were being cut. At the same time, the insecurity of my whole life situation was bumped up a few notches. Another piece of my life liberated into the dark unknown.

I am supposed to have a job, but I had been secretly dreading the call for me to return to work. The cheerful voice of my supervisor on the phone had me thinking my life was going to revert to last year’s program, which I was going to cheerfully accept, as I am a teacher after-all. Instead, she cheerfully told me that they had nothing for me. I am not sure if it was because funds were cut (as is in the yearly recipe) or if they just decided to give my class to someone that “fits.” I am pretty sure the latter was at least partially responsible. My class still exists and last month they advertised a position on the site, that no one mentioned to me. Did they see through my professional façade and discover the truth; that deep down I would rather gut fish in Alaska that teach in a “professional” bureaucracy? I could at least taste freedom working long hours for shit pay on a boat. Professionalism tends to own us, forcing us to not only pimp out our bodies, but our minds as well. And of course to be a professional these days just means you jump though hoops and log in hours in a classroom to get your piece of paper that says you are a professional, NOT that you are actually good at anything.

No teaching job. What does that mean? I am no longer a “teacher?” Everyone always said I would make a great teacher. Don’t I need a teaching “job” to be a teacher? Am I a hack if I just share knowledge, skills, experience, insight? Luckily, I have been blessed to have friends divulge, unsolicited, what it is that I have taught them just by being what I am, doing what I do and saying what I say. The greatest teachers in my life have just been curious learners and researchers that liked to share and listen; and that strive to constantly change and grow. Free Skools have always been a source of inspiration to me.

Teachy teachers drive me nuts. In the group of teachers with whom I most recently worked, the unsolicited advice ran thick as pea soup. And god forbid if one (me) were to tell the teachy teachers that their advice is unneeded… ”Oh, of course it is (even if you don’t know it, we all know I am more competent/experienced than you are)” or “I was just trying to help (miss know-it-all).”

Not being called back to teach removes me from my current profession. Amazingly, that sounds nice to me…being removed from my profession. But how to survive? For now I get my unemployment. Truth is that, right now, I couldn’t survive within this capitalist socio-economic system without government “handouts” or a bread-winning head-of-household man. The elite and upper class create and perpetuate this system that benefits themselves not the rest of us. Welfare programs are not about charity or social welfare, but are used, along with the middle-class buffer (which hasn’t existed throughout much of history) in order to avoid social upheaval and class war (brace yourself). A look into Western history, clearly demonstrates that when social welfare programs are decimated and the middle-class shrinks, the upper-classes have a tussle on their hands. Where the poor and dispossessed are able to eek out the basic necessities of life and the middle-class is a good healthy size, the rich always have an easier time usurping the societies and natures resources. Unfortunately our social and environmental resources are disappearing but greed is not.

Am I getting off track? The thing is that I can’t hold down a regular job. I couldn’t do it when it was only me, and I definitely can’t do it now that I am the sole caretaker of a young child. I used to think I could do anything if I put my mind to it. Once upon a time, I was considered incapacitated, for emotional and mental reasons, but I did believe I could work if I really wanted to. I am no longer considered incapacitated, but I can tell you I am now very sanely sure that I can not hold a regular job. I can not accept the rat race in lieu of meaningful work. And it isn’t because I am lazy; I work all the time. For example, yesterday I did some writing, I practiced the bass AND guitar, I cleaned the house, I dug up all the blackberry bushes from the backyard, I minded a friends child, I researched the cultivation of cherry trees, planned a garden bed, mothered, and even got a little bit of paid work done.

So I use the tools I have at my disposal to live a bearable, meaningful, and even joyful life. I don’t get straight up welfare, but benefit from other programs that help me circumvent the need for money. If I don’t judge my friends who work in finance and own stocks, I don’t see how anyone could judge me for using our tax dollars to live a full creative life.

I just say no to school

I was starting to get on board and just accept that I would be sending my daughter to school.  All her friends that are older than two are planning to go to school.  I hadn’t connected much with any parents in the Homeschooling Association here. And what single parent in their right mind, who has no help with this child raising fiasco, would forgo all that free childcare provided by the public school system?  Me?

Though I had planned from the beginning not to send my daughter to school, over the last months of chaos and pain, I had determined that Ramona would do just fine there.  I would have more time/freedom to research and create in solitary peace.  Ramona’s education and socialization needs will be handed to us on a silver platter.  And, well, what  makes us so special, that school isn’t good enough…but…every time I would meet someone who was ditching school permanently, my throat would tighten and my heart sink. Jealousy.  Compromising my ideals, yuck! I want the freedom they have and the guts to go through with it…I have that, don’t I? 

In the beginning I liked school sort of, but not particularly.  I complained about school starting so early from the first day.  I hated how people were so uptight and mean because I wasn’t like they were (actually was really painful).  I felt like I was wasting my time at school. By the time I was a teen and I realized that the person the designed the school I went to also designed the local prison I REALLY despised school. I hated that when I didn’t go to school, they would send the police over to escort me and threaten to send my mom to jail.  Whoa, fascists!  Compulsory public schooling to me looks like a lot of compulsory conditioning…first invented in Prussia in order to create good soldiers and citizens.  While some parents want their children conditioned to support and carry on the current social structure that happens to be coming unraveled at the seams, I see friends of mine spending a lot of time undoing the damage that the experiences of school creates for their children. 

I dropped out before the age of legality, to live my rebellious life.  Five years later, I took my GED and went to college .  That’s when I got even angrier at school.  I realized how much of what I learned was superficial as well as completely wrong.  In college I reconnected with my innate drive to learn, the one that nearly everyone is born with,  the one that school had wrung out of me.  In college I was treated with respect rather than a subject to be “taught” (conditioned) to some weird standard that was created by some shmucks who think they know what my child needs to live her future adult life. 

I know that school has changed some in some places since I was a child. I guess I just haven’t seen good results with reform, so I’m not a reformist. Some people like school…and it isn’t so much that there aren’t alternatives to the lame status quo mainstream classroom, especially here in Liberal Northern California.  My objections to school run much deeper than that.  They spring from the center of my being, which is where my activism, creative  energy and way of life also spring. Where once my activism emerged from resentment and rebellion…now it emerges from rebellion, hope and dedication to a better future.  Some magical experiences I have had involving Mexico, research and alternative schools; a collage of Zapatismo, Oaxacan rebellions and Gustavo Esteva’s writing and work brought me to this place. “Imagine the future you are dreaming of and fighting for in vivid detail. Now, build that future, in everyway that you can, miniscule and humongous, in the here and now.  Let every action be an action towards realizing your utopia. Live the future now.” The ideas snuggled in these words have salvaged me.  They have given direction to my creative and political energy and a voice and contentment to my innate self. 

If you crush it, smash it, tear this “white racist, homophobic, patriarchal bullshit paradigm” down, what have you but a power vacuum followed by more power grabbing and the “join me, join me” propaganda war? How can we change if we aren’t creating something to change into. How can we fight “power over”  without  cultivating personal power?  After spending years fighting and dying and screaming and crying I realized I had been ignoring the other side or more likely I didn’t feel the power to think outside the paradigm…but the Zapatistas have been trying it (they were a bit farther from our western controled paradigm already).  Gustvo Esteva has been working on it as well.  Two years ago I had the opportunity to study for a month at the so-called university that Esteva co-founded called Universidad de la Tierra. It’s about building.  Building connections, building alternatives,  building whole lives…defragmenting and decentralizing EVERYTHING. 

So as my life fell apart this winter and my inspiration stagnated, so did my desire and ability to build the new paradigm that is being built in a million tiny pieces and places all over the world and growing and growing (seriously, but much of what is going on ISN’T in the USA).  I want to struggle against fragmentation and centralization and for self-empowered people and communities.  Power from above centralizes as people power and self-sufficiency dwindles.  The power that we give to the government is the power that we give to the government.  Our relationship with our work, our food, our educations, our children, our health, out water, our environment, our lives are fragmented and we become helpless and dependent on centralized power to give us everything.  We know that this isn’t sustainable. The struggle for sustainability should be the struggle for self-sufficiency.

Schooling is synonymous with conditioning.  I want my daughter to learn in freedom.  I want her to learn from the real world, not about it.  I want her to know that (outside of math) there is always more than one answer, that are always more than two sides of a story and the truth isn’t always somewhere in the middle. To know that what is impossible to solve in one paradigm may be simple in another.  I want her ability to follow her bliss to stay intact. 

Funny thing is that while I often hear parents worried that their children aren’t being stimulated enough, I see children being over-stimulated.  So-called “stimulation” actually looks a lot like distraction to me.  Distraction from listening to the self and learning to deal withit. When my daughter is in preschool, she expects adults to always give her something to do; to keep her busy.  When summer comes, she goes crazy for a couple weeks (driving me crazy), and then when she realizes I am not going to give her everything to do, she will start being creative.  Finding her own things to do. She becomes amazingly focused and creates her best work.  Following her own passion, or at least discovering it.  If this is already obvious to me in preschool, I am afraid what happens in the higher grades. 

It isn’t that I don’t believe in the public good, or public education, it has more to do with schooling and conditioning of children. Ordering 25 seven-year-olds to a room for most of the day, day after day, accompanied by one adult and pressuring the teacher to teach to some Government standards based on making our country competitive in the global factory is not a good way to learn; it isn’t even safe (this is why so much of Teacher Training programs are focused on “classroom management.”) The structure of school requires hierarchical power structures and carrot/stick punishment and reward tactics to keep the peace and encourage students to fulfill government mandates.  What our children learn as children will profoundly affect the way they exist as adults. I know there are better, less costly ways to learn.  Ivan Illich had some good ideas about this.  His book “Deschooling Society,” touches on a lot of the problems with schooling, that I haven’t even began to go into in this blog, as well as a few ideas and solutions.  I also know that present day school is the better option for many children whose parents don’t have the capacity to put them anywhere better or even make educational decisions for them.  But I hope for everyone to one day have better options.  The more people say “no” and take a step out, the easier it is for others to do the same.  And as people find popular-based and local-based solutions, the humongo, centralized,  misguided federal government solution becomes less desirable.  Maybe I am a pioneer.  I hope I am a pioneer. I can’t do this alone.  I see more parent cooperative, community schools and free skools on the horizon.  At least for my daughter’s and my sake.

I recently started a homeschool/unschool Park Day in my town.  I think it was a hit.  I find more and more families are turning towards, “No More School” by the week.   And they mostly aren’t rich or religious.  Look at me.  The Crazy Anarchist.

If you have actually made it through that long post, and your still interested, well, I would like to share a couple links.  Here is a link to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society online with notes and commentary…it is posted as a reading group on Wikiversity. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society

And here is the text of a speech Gustavo Esteva gave to some college students around commencement, that talks about some of his amazing life, thinking, meeting of Ivan and most importantly the thinking and actions that gave birth to the bad ass learning space in Oaxaca, Universidad de la Tierra. http://www.gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_future.htm

Also, this is an awesome awesome  awesome movement  in India, I really dig the “Walk-Out” campaign.  http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/

Please check the correct box...standardizing our lives

Yesterday I was talking to someone I know about schools. It was funny cause I felt all out of practice. My life situations and fears of the unknown were renting so much space in my head that I haven’t been contemplating my philosophies of life. The friend had started to send her toddler to a school a Montessori) that is one of the few schools I might send my child (if she wanted to go). She thought it was good, but was very concerned that they don’t test. She started talking about another mother who couldn’t get her child into some private school because when the school tested the child she had not done well. Also, she was concerned that you would never know if your child was learning what it needed to learn. It had been a long time since I had discussed testing with someone who was pro-testing and it sort of threw me off because a non-testing school is a plus in my book.

So, do you mind if I step up here on this soap box? I mean, I don’t think testing to find out how much you have retained about a subject you are learning about is anything to worry about, though I would hope that the child has been empowered to take the test or not. However, testing to see how much a child knows about a subject that adults have pushed on the child based on the child’s age is nonsensical to me. Sure kids need to know how to read and write (or do they?), but does it really matter if they are 16 or 21 when they have finished the doldrums of high school curriculum, or if they are 4 or 6 when they learn the ABCs? When there are so many things to know and learn, and when any one of us will only know a fraction of one percent of everything there is to know, is it really necessary to pit kids and adults against each other while learning the so-called “basics” at as early an age as possible? Hasn’t anyone noticed that the average middle-class suburban kid hot-boxed through school and then straight into college usually (I know exceptions) have very little common sense and very little sense of self these days? So many college students are NOT there because they want to be. Those students learn very little in college.

The testing conversation started to make me feel pulled back into that logic of competitive child rearing. The logic that says if kids aren’t learning algebra in 8th grade we should start teaching them algebra in 7th grade (at the same time brain scientists, not to mention teachers, say that most 7th graders are not developmentally ready to understand algebraic equations in 6th grade). The logic that assumes that the government knows what our kids are going to have to know in 15 or 30 years, even though the world is changing faster than we can keep up, and that they know at the precise age a child must learn each concept. The logic of competitive child-rearing dictates what every child needs to know according to how many years that the child has existed on this planet and assumes that all children, no matter what culture they are from, needs to know the same thing as every other child on the planet of similar age. We preach diversity and then push conformity. The status quo of educating doesn’t respect or honor the child’s interests or curiosity. It would rather waste large swathes of time teaching kids what they can’t or don’t want to learn instead of providing the tools that a child needs, in the here and now, in be successful in what he or she is driven to learn and do. Concerned adults tell the child what to learn under the pretense that we are preparing the child to live in a world that no one can actually predict. Believe me, it isn’t gonna look much like this one.

Unfortunately in this culture of competition, children often end up being ego extensions of their parents. As experts create developmental boxes while simultaneously presenting us with “studies” showing that children’s success and intelligence is a mixture or genes and environment, everything that the child does becomes a reflection of the parents; their genes and their ability to parent. A “bad” child, or one that doesn’t fit in, is an embarrassment to the family it comes from. Any time there is a psychopathic murderer, the press runs straight to the parents.

Children who don’t fit into the developmental boxes are pathologized. If your child develops well behind “schedule,” you receive sympathy and pity from other parents and interventions from “experts”, if your child develops well ahead of “schedule” you receive suspicion and hostility from other parents and intervention from “experts.” If you don’t pay attention to your child’s development you are ignorant and you are the one in need of intervention (parenting classes). When are children going to be respected and honored as complete human beings, today, with their own interests and dreams and talents and inner lives. They are not future human beings.

What is important for “power” is that we, the people, are competitive in the world of the Global Thieves and that we perpetuate the status quo that is currently running our world full speed into a brick wall while concentrating power into power and poverty into poverty…

My dream is that my child grows up in a world where she can be happy and can be herself, not one where over half of the population systematically takes drugs so that they can function in this warped reality we call normalcy.

We can do so much better for our children. I humbly step down. (To worry some more about things like where I am going to live next week.)

I just can't say..."how did I come to unschooling"

 I would have written earlier if I weren’t trying to respond to a recent challenge at “Unschoolers Emporium” (www.theunschoolersemporium.com/) to write a blog entry and post it on their site about Unschooling. There are several topics to choose from, but I thought I would start at the beginning and chose, “What brought you to unschooling.” I have been wasting hours and days filing pages. All I have done is irritate myself by forcing something I have so much to say about without knowing where or when or if or how I should say it.

What I can do is post links. What I can say is that unschooling is definitely up for interpretation. One thing I notice is that some people seem to interpret child led learning, to mean that the child directs the adults lives. “ I personally don’t like guns, but I buy my kid toy guns because I am taking my child’s lead.” I guess if I were an unschooler in that train of thought, I should spend $150 a month so my kid can watch cable TV. Give me a break, let’s put ourselves through the perils of the rat race so we can spend our money on things we are morally against? Well, I guess we are all used to it, since we fund wars with our tax dollars all the time…So after day of writing why I came to unschooling, all I have to say is an insult?!

Unschooling to me is about change. Social Change doesn’t happen if people don’t change. The education system has been a site of struggle for years and it has only gotten worse; more standardized and more under the control of non-educators. Schooling is a form of coercion. The culture of school is about jumping through hoops, sorting children into haves and have-nots, manipulating people, working the system, and learning to conform and please others (non-conformists are skewered in high school). Otherwise we would only need knowledge and expertise to get jobs, not degrees. School says you learn in school, not the world.

Unschooling is a term that fit my philosophy on life. I hope that after this disjointed post I can go on with my blogging and leave this difficult time behind (sarcasm).

Or maybe I resent writing about unschooling because I am jealous of those who have the time and resources and connections that let them live their lives exactly how their ideals dictate...or maybe I'm just afraid I won't be able to pull it off.  

'When we all request education and institutions where our children and young people can stay and learn, we close our eyes to the tragic social desert in which we live. They have no access to real opportunities to learn in freedom. In many cases, they can no longer learn with parents, uncles, grandparents—just talking to them, listening to their stories or observing them in their daily trade. Everybody is busy, going from one place to another. No one seems to have the patience any more to share with the new generation the wisdom accumulated in a culture. Instead of education, what we really need is conditions for decent living, a community.


“True learning,” Ivan Illich once said, “can only be the leisurely practice of free people.” '

Reclaiming Our Freedom to Learn
by Gustavo Esteva

“Why stress about preschool?” Or “Preschool for Homeschoolers”

I don’t want to ever send my daughter to school. But it’s not that simple. For one, I lean towards the unschooling philosophy, where the child is in control of his or her own learning. If the child decides to go to school, my stopping her would not be letting her have control of her own learning. Ramona likes the idea of school, mostly because she likes people, lots and lots of people.

Preschool is different from regular school anyway. My mother convinced me to give preschool a try last year, and Ramona was always begging for more time with more kids. I gave it a try, but there were issues that bugged both Ramona and I, which I won’t go into in this blog other than much of it stemmed from age segregation and gender segregation issues. She does however want to go to preschool again. She has a daycare, which she loves to death, but there are only a handful of kids there half of which are infants or new walkers. She wants a larger group of kids closer to her age.

Because of our bad feeling around the issues we had at her school last year Preschool, we decided to look into the Parent Participation school. Ramona really liked it, and after talking about it for a day or so, flip flopping back and forth, we chose the new school. I thought I would be like “Great, I am glad she made her decision.” But instead I got nervous and scared. Her decision actually involves me very much. Parent participation meant I would be working in the school as well! My life isn’t only about Ramona. I have so many things going on. Am I ready to make this commitment for up to two years?

I assume this school would be a great opportunity to really be a part of Ramona’s education, and the children really do lead in this school. It would also be an opportunity for me to get some experience working in cooperative schooling situations with other parents. As a single parent with a super social daughter, the only way I could conceive of homeschooling is within a homeschooling cooperative.

On the other hand, my idea of a cooperative was not under the umbrella of the public school system. The new school is run through the Adult School and we are expected to attend parenting classes twice a month and to be on a committee. This school requires 3 days attendance, and then 4 days next year while the other school only requires 2 days and then three next year. What if I don’t like the school? What if I get a job that conflicts (not that I am looking for a 9-5 M-F job)? I don’t want to switch around schools. And if we decide we liked the old school better and went back, I would have lost my coop position (for reduced tuition) there. I need my own time, as I am taking new strides in my life, working to forge my own path…do I want to learn about child development? Isn’t my parenting style intuitive and empathic, rather then learned from the “experts.” Ahhhhhhhh! What to do.

Then I get a call from the 4Cs, the organization that offers childcare subsidies. They tell me I qualify, but that they couldn’t pay for childcare while I was working in the classroom because I would not be working for money. Well that settles it, back to the old School. But then I get a letter from the Parent Participation school talking about how much the parents add to the class, with songs, and scientific presentations…and I am confused and stressed AGAIN.

In all this I start to feel trivial and fanatical for thinking and stressing so much about preschools. It is just preschool, isn’t it? My amazing, active, successful friends don’t sit and obsess about preschools, they worry about more important things like the concentration camp called Palestine, or racist laws in Arizona, or assassinations and disappearances of Mayan resisters in Chiapas, or their art, or their jobs…

But preschools are important. The lives of our children are important. The experiences of the first years of their lives affect them for a lifetime. They dominate their unconscious minds and dictate how they relate to the world.  Social change comes from within people.  Schools are more important than the job I am looking into right now. Schools are important…Or the absence of them…they affect us our entire lives…Jeez I wish Ramona didn’t want to go.

Truth is Ramona will be going to good school that she likes.  It is walking distance. Kids love it. No worksheets or anything like that.  Lots of choice for the kids.  And she is in the afternoon class, where there is less age segregation.  But, I miss out on the cooperative experience. Maybe some day I will have another chance, a cooperative experience that is organic and evolves from community members that want something new and different for their kids, that isn’t part of this big centralized government with all its rules, regulations, bureaucracy, taxes and “proof.”