Trying Again & Something Written for The Other Place in The Common Room

After waiting a week, I gave up and called the chosen pulmonologist with whom my PCP was to get me an appointment. Chosen pulmonologist is not taking any new patients. I don't know who was supposed to tell me this, but a week has been wasted.

Now I must look up more people and choose again - rather blindly this time as daughters had already proclaimed that the chosen one was the only decent pulmonologist in the area. (Daughters are an RN and a therapist who graduated Southwestern Medical School. )

Meantime, here's something written for that other place and cross posted here.

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Home Schooled Children

For a multitude of years I ran a computer facility at a community college. I dubbed it Harvard-in-the-Hole. It was a pretty good place for a lot of things.

Two semesters a year, I ran the lab in the daytime and taught computer languages and/or software use at night. In the summer, we did "community service" and I taught children all afternoon and evening, five days a week. For the most part, I taught the BASIC language and Creative Writing.

Among my students were two groups of home schooled children. Both groups were somewhat "faith based." One group was more liberal than the other.

In the more liberal group, the parents took turns teaching, according to their individual expertise. Several of them had been school teachers in public school. Each summer, the children were taken to classes at a library or other public place for subjects that required special equipment or in which the parents felt inadequate. They used Harvard-in-the-Hole for the science labs and the computer labs (This was about two decades ago, when not just everyone had a computer.) The children were inquisitive, imaginative and knowledgeable. Every day, one set of parents waited in the hallway, well within sight and hearing of the group of children. I often talked to them while the children worked on some project inside the lab. The were intelligent and well-mannered as were their children.

The more "fundamental" group were taught by one woman. Others of the parents helped with field trips and outings of a rather restricted genre. They came to us because the state would not approve their curriculum without outside sources for science - and they weren't about to allow outsiders to teach any kind of biology or earth science to their kids, a thought pattern with which the state of Texas is rather more sympathetic than seems sensible -- so computer science it was. The children spoke little and asked no questions. Teaching them "creative" writing was near impossible. The one teaching parent informed me that she would sit in the class and I informed her that she would not. She sat just outside the doorway like a lump every day and never spoke to me again - nor did she speak to the parents of the other group.

It was a little strange, as a college prof, to be hugged and kissed at each meeting and parting, but both groups of children did it and I came to enjoy it a little. Some of the other children, observing the custom, took it as proper and did so too. The home schooled children had simply never had a teacher who was not a trusted friend.

As time went by - I taught them each summer for about five years - I observed, more and more, that both groups lacked something that I would call a natural sense of danger. They trusted too absolutely and were not prepared to deal with a person who did not have their best interests at heart.

I was reading this to Husband and he said"They didn't know how to raise their shields." He's right, except that I don't think they HAD shields.

By the time they left me, I didn't know who I worried about most. The liberal group knew about business and money and many other things, but the "love on another" business was extended to everyone and made them a real target. I just knew that they had been been set up for a brutal fall, if only psychologically. The fundamentalist group did not know much about anything. Their education was extremely low caliber. The "love one another" had grown to be "love those like you and hate everyone else." I was privileged to be "in the group" but classmates were not. They could get a little ugly and I dreaded what would become of them.

Through all of this, I also had, in the same classes, other children - smart ones, lazy ones, loud ones, quiet ones, popular ones and the lonely ones.

Across the years, it has seemed to me that children simply need to be well-educated,. By whom seems the lesser requirement. The larger requirement seems to be that they need to rub up against many different kinds of people. Of course, one does not wish to expose one's children to ugliness of any sort. Nonetheless, ugliness exists and they must learn to recognize it in order to avoid it when they can and deal with it when they must.

I look back in memory and see some of their faces. I know what became of only a few. I wish I knew more.