I wish I was wrong

This past fall Pinkie Pie decided to try high school.  She missed what would have been her grade 9 year with the pandemic, but she wanted to try again.  I had thought it wouldn't work at all, but it is now almost four months in and it looks like she will get full credits for the term.  My parents set high standards for my marks and results in school, but Pinkie Pie has struggles that I never did - we will be happy if she passes.  

One thing that has been making school more challenging is an educational assessment.  It is a process where psychologists and learning experts evaluate kids for all kinds of things including behavioural problems, learning disabilities, etc.  It costs a few thousand dollars, which is the barrier for many people, but with some family help on that front we decided to try it as school started.

I was quite sure what the result would be.  Pinkie Pie has been through the mental health system for years now, and I knew this educational assessment would result in them saying "Pinkie Pie is a clever kid with high anxiety and executive function problems.  She needs extra help, flexibility, and time to complete her work."  However, we decided to go for it anyway in the hopes that I was somehow wrong.

The process was much more of a struggle than we had thought.  It involved numerous sessions of tough academics and doing it caused Pinkie Pie to miss a whole week of school due to exhausion.  Making school even worse is not was I was hoping for out of this.

Still, just maybe I will be wrong?

I was not wrong.

After several months of appointments they sat us down and told us in big words that my kid is bright but has big struggles with anxiety, energy, and organization.  They recommended doing exactly what the school was already doing anyway.

I was ready to write it off as a perfect prediction, but they added one thing at the end.  They told us we could go for parent coaching to try to help with this process.  If there is one thing I need at the end of paying people hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me stuff I already know it is a recommendation to pay someone else hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me *different* stuff I already know!  It would be great - I would describe my situation to them, and they would tell me that Pinkie Pie needs a good sleep schedule, healthy food, and for us to tell her to go to school in a firm voice.  Somehow they would imagine that I didn't get this advice from one thousand other sources.

It isn't as though I think these people are all incompetent.  Probably parent coaches mostly give good advice, and I am sure the people evaluating Pinkie Pie knew their stuff.  They just had absolutely nothing of value to give us at the end.

What I know for sure though is that I have read and listened to endless parenting advice when Pinkie Pie struggled and it was not helpful.  It was always stuff I already knew, had already tried, and which totally failed.  When I got this advice I always responded that I had tried that exact thing and it did not work.  Mostly they would give me blank stares, no doubt being sure that the advice was good, so clearly I had screwed it up.  

Fact is, you can be as good a parent as you want, and there are some things you can't fix.  No strategy will suffice, no route to victory can be found.

I wanted so much to be wrong, for them to find something, anything, that would give her an edge to deal with her current struggles.  Unfortunately I was right, and we will just have to continue to muddle through.

Facts, but not all the facts

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Facebook for books I should read.  I got a big stack of them from the library and I am tearing through them.  Yesterday I wrote a post about Factfulness, where I talked about what a good book it is.  Most of the books on my list will be much the same I am sure.  At the moment I am planning on writing a post about each of them, but we will see if that actually happens.

There is one book in that recommendation list that is not going to get a "This book is great!" post.  It is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  The blurb on the back is from someone whose claim to fame is "Commentator on Fox News".  Between the title and that blurb source you can guess that it is written to push a right wing agenda, and you would be right.

However, while I could just deride the book as a bunch of evil nonsense, that wouldn't be doing it justice.  It is a classic example of facts carefully chosen and presented to create a specific conclusion.  The conclusion the author is trying to lead you to is that the struggles of black people in the US today are almost entirely their own fault because of their culture.  He has done a huge amount of research in support of this thesis, and as far as I can tell his facts are accurate.  The trouble with the book is not that it lies, but rather that it doesn't tell you the whole truth.

If you look at the edges of right vs. left debate on racism you will see two extreme camps.  One side is dedicated to the idea that racism is over and that any problems that black people have now are their own fault.  The other side contends that racism is the only thing, and if opportunity were equal that black people would succeed just as much as anyone else because their culture has nothing to do with their success or lack thereof.

Both extreme positions are wrong.  Culture matters in success of groups - just look at the incredible dominance of Asian students in math and science.  That isn't genetic, it is a consequence of culture.

Racism also matters, and black people are discriminated against in a thousand ways, large and small.

The author contends that groups throughout history who have venerated learning, hard work, saving, and study tend to become more successful generation by generation.  He also contends that black culture in the US has values that impugne education and support a spendthrift lifestyle.  This is a trend, not universal, of course, but I think he is correct in these assertions.  Just like the trend of Asian parents pushing their kids to do more math isn't true for all, so are these generalizations about black people only true statistically.

Clearly spending recklessly and despising education and study are not black only things.  I know plenty of white people who spend rather than save, and when I was young I was on the wrong end of 'learning is for losers' by plenty of white kids.  In fact the author suggests that these things are common among redneck cultures regardless of race, and has theories that seem plausible about the American South having these traits in abudance among the white population during the times of slavery in the US.  Seeing the way right wing folks talk about scientists and academics it is obvious this is still alive and well today.

The trouble is that people seize on that simple admission that culture matters, and immediately leap to the conclusion that racism is over.  This is nonsense, but I have seen it in my personal life when someone said "There isn't any racism anymore except anti white racism, black people's problems are all just black culture." and pointed me to this book as proof.

One of the core elements of the book is the author telling us of various teaching methods and programs that produced black graduates that had high success rates in employment and earnings.  He waxes poetic about how if you just teach black people to speak properly, save and invest wisely, and value education, they will suddenly be more successful.

Note the presence of the word 'properly' in that last sentence.  What does he mean by speaking properly?  He doesn't define it.  

He means "like a rich white person who graduated from Harvard".

So yeah, if you teach black kids to speak like a rich white guy from Harvard, they will make more money.  But he completely fails to ask why that is, and if the best thing for society is to simply make black people act like white people.  Is that the goal of our educational system?  To force children to emulate the richest and most powerful so they can get jobs?

No, it is not.  If black people not speaking like rich whites from Harvard is preventing them getting jobs, maybe we ought to change that fact directly, rather than simply accepting it and trying to change black people!

(I do think that a cultural norm of supporting and encouraging study and learning is objectively good though, both for those in that culture and those outside it.)

If some black kids tell other black kids to stop studying because hitting the books is just acting white, then that will have negative effects on their long term educational and job prospects.  However, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.  What I can do is try to push for a society that doesn't disciminate against those black kids so they at least have equal opportunity from outside their own culture.  That is something I can actively work on, so I will.  Assigning blame isn't going to help anyone, no matter who the blame gets assigned to.  All I can do is try to fix the thing that is within my power to affect, so I will do that.

I normally close with a recommendation to read the book I am reviewing.  I won't give that here.  There are some parts of the book that aren't about black culture at all that are interesting and informative, and even if you totally disagree with the author's conclusions like I do, there are a lot of facts you might find useful.  I view it much like my reading of the Bible years ago - I am glad to have these facts in my head now, because it will make me much better at refuting the arguments of people I disagree with.  I read the Bible in part to better argue with religious people, and I read this book to better argue with racist people.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals has plenty of facts.  Unfortunately, it is light on truth.

Wrong measurements

Pinkie Pie has been talking about going back to school in the fall.  She is eager to try this out, largely because she wants to spend time with her friends.  She has enjoyed a great many books and shows about high school in her time, and I wonder if she has the wrong idea about what high school entails.

I have grave doubts.  Some of those doubts surround her ability to cope with high school and the workload, as her mental health struggles have made it extremely difficult for her to do the education we are doing at home, and I can't see how she could cope with a full courseload.

My other doubts surround the way school operates in general, particularly the way grades work.  I found a youtube video talking about many of the problems with grades and educational structures and it resonated strongly with me.

The youtuber in question leads off with a story about a kid who gets straight As but who is crushed by the school system because it encourages them to focus entirely on grades instead of learning and inquiry.  That is a negative consequence of our system to be sure, but kids that get straight As but are bored aren't the biggest trouble with the system.  The kids that can't cope with the structure and end up falling through the cracks are much more of a concern.

Still, the main point that grading takes over everything certainly stands.  We are stuck in a situation where parents and governments demand to have education measured.  It is extremely difficult to measure learning, so we rely on test scores as a stand in.  As is so often the case, we end up building the whole system to maximize our results on the metrics we made up, so we end up trying to raise test scores instead of trying to teach more effectively.

Some people will of course argue that we need test scores for university admissions.  There are schools that don't give marks and mature students that don't have standard marks and we make that work, so I don't think we need marks at all.  Still, if we had a bunch of tests for university admission at the end of grade 12 I would be fine with it.  However, numeric marks for younger kids is just a plague with no redeeming value.

We don't need to carefully rank children's learning.  We need to spend our time teaching them more, not working on giving them a number that isn't useful.

All this makes me not want to send Pinkie Pie to high school at all.  Sure, there are lots of things she will learn, but she will also spend way too much time grinding out pointless crap just so the high school can give her a number at the end.  I don't need any damn numbers, and neither does she.  She needs to learn, and to feel like the things she is doing are relevant.

Just like I did in high school, Pinkie Pie sees marks as pointless, and that will sour the entire experience.

Schools have been designed as a training ground for obedient cogs, setting them up to take their place in the machine.  Education is part of the mandate, but the structure is primarily designed to keep them under control and rigidly evaluated.  We are slowly changing this over time, and Ontario is gradually making progress, but it is at a glacial pace.

This shouldn't be taken as an attack on teachers - naturally, there are terrible teachers, but the vast majority I have encountered in my life or through Pinkie Pie have been dedicated to education and wished they could stop wasting so much time on standardized tests and marking.  Unfortunately when you work within the system, there is only so much you can do.

We need a huge rethink of what schools are for.  Unfortunately it will come too late for Pinkie Pie in any case, but if we want a society of creative problem solvers we need to stop spending their entire childhood telling them the thing we want from them is precise regurgitation of particular facts on one particular day.

I don't want a boss, employee, friend, or citizen to be ranked by their ability to score highly on a test, so let's remove that nonsense from our schools.

The Prime Directive

Star Trek's Prime Directive is a law that forces the Federation to not interfere in societies that are starting up and have not achieved some specific level of technology yet.  I have a similar sort of thing with Pinkie Pie where I won't directly interfere with her friendships and social groups.  I want to give her general advice and then let her figure stuff out on her own.

This came up recently when she was involved in a Minecraft group.  There are tons of Minecraft servers out there, and they seem to come paired with voice chat groups where people chat constantly while playing the game.  Minecraft seems like a fine thing for Pinkie Pie to be doing as entertainment as it involves a lot of creativity and thinking, but sometimes the social scene is not ideal.

Pinkie Pie was in voice chat and I was near her doing some chores, overhearing only her side of the conversation.  Initially it was innocuous, but she began to get more and more upset and agitated, eventually starting to plead for the people in her chat to stop fighting.  She began to have an extreme emotional reaction, crying over and over that they were upsetting her, that they needed to stop, begging them to cease their fighting.

Listening to her be so upset that she was wailing and grovelling in an attempt to get other people to stop their conflict was so upsetting for me. 

My emotions were swirling and I struggled to stay out of the mess.  I wanted to just grab the mic away from her and yell at them to shut the hell up, and I wanted to yell at her to leave the damn server if it is making her so upset.

You don't have to put up with friends screaming at each other all day.  You can move on!  MOVE ON!

I didn't yell at anybody, but I knew this had to stop.  Even if she could cope with it, I can't, and for her sake I hope she never feels like this is the sort of 'friendship' she needs to accept.

I totally understand why this is a struggle for her.  She is making friends online, and when you find people you like it is tough to just drop them when the situation turns toxic.  This is a good lesson though - begging people to stop being awful to each other isn't productive.  If that is the environment, you need to find the people you like, tell them you would like to continue playing with them but this environment has got to go, and then leave without a backward glance.  There are places in the world that aren't full of this sort of aggravation and you need to find them.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie eventually figured it out on her own, as I had hoped.  She told her friends on the server she was leaving, and they left together to find someplace else to play.  They ditched the people they hated, and while the new place has its own struggles, they have never resulted in the mess I saw in the first one.

I suppose I should be glad that my technique (assuming you think 'do nothing' is a technique) worked.  She moved on, and she learned.

But DAMN sitting there listening to my kid beg for other people to stop hurting her was hard to do without leaping in to stop it.  Having your emotions be so easily wound up by someone else's issues is the cost of being a parent, I guess.

Learning about the world for real

Pinkie Pie is continuing to work away at her online learning course to get her first high school credit.  I had big hopes for the course at the outset, even though it led off with a bunch of stuff leaning on Learning Styles, which is actually just a thing people made up.

Unfortunately it isn't getting much better.  We finished the section on Learning Styles and then spent a bunch of time on the theory of multiple intelligences.  It is presented as some kind of serious thing, but it lists 8 intelligences and then tells us that there are many more and we should feel free to add any we think of to the list.

'Just add on more stuff if you feel like it' does not have the ring of well researched material.

It seems like the course may be trying to teach us that people have many ways to learn and excel, and hoping to get us to accept all these various ways.  That goal works for me, and if they said that explicitly I would be behind it.  Unfortunately they dress it up in all these half baked theories that are supported by conjecture and guesswork, and I don't much like trying to teach that to kids as though it is settled fact.

I don't want to try to force feed Pinkie Pie theories that aren't solid.  I won't try to lie to her and tell her that it is actually super important that she determine what her best intelligences are.  Unfortunately the way the course is structured the marks are largely based around questions like

"What is your strongest intelligence, and how can that help you in your career?"

Pinkie Pie sees this question and just stares at it.  She struggles with perfectionism and she simply doesn't know what to say to this.  She hasn't settled on a career, and the tool to help her figure out what her strongest intelligence is was pretty much just 'pick your strongest intelligence from a list' form.  I know this is a waste of time, and so does she, without me having to tell her anything.

So she is learning sketchy science in order to make up stuff about herself so she can get marks.

It is tricky for me to navigate.  On one hand there is something I can teach her here - I can teach her how to give bullshit answers to bullshit questions.  After making up some stuff about her strongest intelligence, I got her to think about what her second place intelligence might be, and talk about how that might also influence her career.  I was sure that even though the question didn't even hint at this, that the teacher marking it would love it.

They loved it.  I am good at figuring out how to get marks.  I just have to work on the 'caring about marks' thing.

I don't quite know what to do.  Figuring out how to get marks is actually a hugely powerful skill in the world.  It can take you places!  Of course it is worthless and silly, but if you want more opportunities or just a bigger slice of the pie, knowing how to get marks is a good way to start.  I have tremendous reservations about spending a lot of time and effort teaching Pinkie Pie this skill though.  Do I want to spend time teaching her how to work the system?  That isn't the parent I want to be.

The more I see about high school through my kid the more I remember why I was so disenchanted with education by the time I finished it myself.  It seemed like a small amount of actual learning sprinkled into a giant vat of pointless busywork dressed up as something important.  I think my teachers were divided between those who truly tried to do the best they could, and those who just put in the time, doing what they were told they had to.  No matter how dedicated they were though, they were stuck teaching a standardized curriculum to a ton of kids in order to generate vast quantities of marks.  I think the learning itself is important, and marks are a way to serve businesses in order to facilitate employee training and sorting.  That isn't a thing I had respect for back when I was a teen, and my attitude certainly hasn't shifted now.

The internet is not for learning

Pinkie Pie has been doing a lot of homschooling these past months.  She is doing a lot better these days than in the past, though unfortunately she still isn't doing much in the way of getting any official accreditation.  It turns out that a teacher doing things in person is a vast improvement over online learning.

Right now Pinkie Pie is doing math and french with Wendy, and I am teaching her pretty much everything else.  She enjoys my random forays into a vareity of subjects, and she is progressing well in both the more structured learning Wendy is providing and the mishmash I am responsible for.

She is also taking an Learning Strategies course online for high school credit, and that isn't going nearly so well.  I struggle to figure out how to apportion blame for this.  On one hand, teaching a course through a website is hard.  Even if it were perfect, that is not an easy thing to do, and when you add in the requirement to produce documented work and marks it makes things much worse.

If only we had a learning system devoted to learning instead of a system devoted to producing marks!

Regardless of the challenge level though, this course has some issues with the way it is written.  It taught us about learning styles (Kinesthetic, Auditory, Visual) even though the theory about those learning styles is mostly made up.  It tried to use a quiz to tell Pinkie Pie what her learning style is, and the quiz was laughably bad.  Even if learning styles was a real thing the quiz would have totally failed to evaluate it.

The course also has issues with being unclear on what your answers are supposed to look like.  About half of the time Pinkie Pie asks me what the answer is supposed to look like, and much of the time I have absolutely no idea.  I understand the topic, but I cannot fathom what we are supposed to be writing in the answer box.  We end up looking at the sample answers, but then her responses end up looking just like the samples.

I just don't think that this is actually teaching her a lot.  Again, part of that is the format - you can't just let people be creative and do their own thing when you are trying to mark their responses en masse.  We are paying $40 for a course, and therefore I cannot expect much in the way of teacher oversight.  Filling in boxes and getting a mark at the end is the best they can offer at that price.  Still, they could be doing much better with what they have available.

The last section we did had her learning about scheduling.  They provided an app to help with this, and the app let you build a weekly schedule.  Unfortunately it would only take entries in single block hours, would not permit overlaps, and the interface was extremely clunky.  What Pinkie Pie learned from this was that scheduling apps are useless, hard to interface with, and much worse than just keeping it all in your head.

Not what they were aiming for, I am sure.

Learning from a website just isn't going to be good.  Websites can provide direction and facts for a dedicated learner, but they aren't even close to the standard set by a good teacher.  

I wonder if online math would be better.  Learning about something as wide ranging as learning strategies seems tough online, and perhaps math with its right/wrong answers and more linear teaching would work better.  I don't know, but the more I see the way online teaching goes the more I lean towards never subjecting Pinkie Pie to official schooling again.

Linking it up

Part of teaching Pinkie Pie is basic school stuff everyone recognizes and most people hate.  We do math workbooks and french workbooks and grind through a lot of the rough stuff as we teach her and her friend.

However, it isn't all grind and solve.  I have been spending a lot of time watching random educational youtube videos trying to find interesting topics to show to the kids.  Sometimes I just show them some cool astronomy thing, but sometimes I manage to tie stuff together in ways that make me feel clever.

The other day I sat them down to watch a video about how life transfers and uses energy.  It talked about ATP and all the systems life has evolved to make use of it, starting from single celled organisms right up to humans.  Then I showed them a video about the Kardashev scale for civilizations, ranking them based on the amount of energy they have access to.  For example, humanity is currently at .75 on the scale, where 1 is using all of the energy that earth has to offer, 2 is using the entire sun, and 3 is the entire galaxy.

The common thread?  The laws of thermodynamics of course!

Body heat is one result of the use of energy by our systems.  This is due, in part at least, to entropy.  You always get waste heat when you transfer energy around.  This waste heat is also an issue if humanity ever achieves type 1 civilization status because we will rapidly boil ourselves to death using that amount of energy on the Earth itself.  Going further than that and building megastructures like Dyson spheres also must account for this problem - dissipating heat is a huge issue when you talk about far future technology like this.

For kids struggling in grade nine science teaching about thermodynamics may be a bit ambitious.  Still, I quite enjoy the challenge of finding disparate subjects that I can link together in some ingenious way, so I take whatever opportunities are available to me.  

The videos typically are only about 10 minutes in length but it usually takes me a solid half hour to get through them.  I constantly stop and check to see if the kids understand the language or concepts being used, and then talk about stuff until they are up to speed.  I don't know if they have noticed that I use youtube as a way to keep them interested in an endless set of mini lectures, but that certainly seems to be what I am doing.  I do like to have graphics and guidance for my teaching, and using videos to give me things to talk about and places to go works well for me.

I don't think I can keep my two pupils on track to learn all the stuff the school expects them to learn.  On the other hand they are going to know a little bit about all kinds of stuff, and there is some merit in that.

Murder school

Wendy and I have been homeschooling Pinkie Pie for a month now.  We didn't want to risk sending her to school in person, and the virtual school would be a nightmare for her.  She can't learn by watching a teacher on a screen for hours and hours.  We aren't sticking to any kind of fixed curriculum though, because it works much better if we just teach whatever comes up.  Of course we find things to bring up during lessons, but at least half of any given lesson is just answering odd questions that Pinkie Pie asks.

For example, during a history lesson the housing crisis of 2007 came up.  Then questions about the Great Depression got asked.  By the time the tangent was resolved I had talked about mortgages, the stock market, erosion, housing, banking regulation, and a bunch of other things.  Pinkie Pie isn't going to get the kind of focused education you get in school, but she sure is going to learn all kinds of stuff.

The best question so far though came up during a Math Walk on Friday.  (Math Walks are where she and I take a half hour walk and practice math as we go.)  Pinkie Pie asked "So, where would you stab someone if you wanted them to die really fast?"

This is the kind of parenting question I live for.

She clarified that she wasn't planning on murdering anyone.  She had a story in mind and wanted a character to be some sort of assassin or something, and to write a character that knows how to efficiently kill someone, the author needs to know how to efficiently kill someone!

My teaching fu was strong that day.  I lead off with the general observation that many wounds can be eventually fatal, but is it the brain, heart, and lungs that will kill you extremely rapidly if they are damaged.  I talked about the way the lungs take in oxygen, covered the gas composition of air, touched on photosynthesis, discussed blood flow and heartbeat, explained the heart - lungs - heart - body system, and explained the defensive purpose of the skull and ribcage.

In the end I summed up by telling her that any large amount of trauma to the centre torso is likely fatal, but that if you want to kill someone easily you can just stab them in the neck.  Necks are easier to attack than brains are, most of the time.

She seemed quite happy with the detail of my response, and presumably spent a bunch of time over the last few days writing scenes of mayhem and murder in her newest fictional world.

Either that, or she is going to stab me in my sleep someday soon.  

Probably in the neck.

Bribing me with my own money

The Ontario government is trying to bribe me to hate teachers.  Recently the government decided to slash education funding in high school, aiming to increase class sizes up to 45 kids in some instances, and start a big trend towards mandatory online learning.  Right when Pinkie Pie is about to head off to high school... great.  When elementary teachers decided to strike in protest, the government offered to give money to parents to offset childcare costs.  They are all about not spending money on educating kids, but when it comes to tossing it around randomly at parents who vote, well, there is money for that!

I have seen arguments that these changes actually aren't so bad.  After all, in university courses often have more than 100 students, and much learning takes place online.

This is true, of course.  For people like me for whom school was easy neither of these things is all that bad.  I could have easily done high school by reading websites or in huge classrooms.  No problem.

But I am not the only student, nor am I the average student.  I am one of the top people out there in terms of finding school easy.  You could teach me that content in any pants-on-head stupid way and I would get it.  Other students will not.

Our focus should not be on whether the top students can survive, it should be on whether the struggling students can thrive.  This is the metric where the new changes are a disaster.  Kids who struggle with terrible home situations, learning disabilities, poverty, or other challenges need teachers who have the time to spare to help them.  They need educators who can see their difficulties and step in to help them.  "Here is a website" is a nightmare for those kids, and they will learn nothing. 

I have also seen arguments that online learning will be good because it can introduce competition into the school system.  This is foolishness incarnate.  Competition just means that we will find some way to score students and then we will pay companies to raise student scores.  There won't be measurements for emotional regulation, no allowances for outside challenges will be made, and the end result will be companies producing content designed explicitly to get higher grades on a standardized test.  The ability to get a high score on a specific high school test is worthless to employers and terrible for general education. 

For kids that are struggling we need teachers who can help them, and we need those teachers to be managing 20-25 kids, not 40+.  Trashing education is exactly the sort of thing that sends countries spiralling downward.

Right now my government has decided to torch the future, and their response to criticisms is to blame the teachers or tell people to go to private school.  They are trying to bribe parents to support their actions, and it is reprehensible.

I am glad that the teachers are taking a stand to push back against this awful nonsense.  Taking money from children's education to pump it into stock portfolios is foolish governance based on the Conservative philosophy of taking a dump on those who are poor or struggling to give to the rich.  It must not stand.

Run, a teenager!

Pinkie Pie is 13 as of this week.  I know what this means - she will become withdrawn, sullen, and bitter, believing her parents to be insufferable idiots.  She will begin dressing in ways that offend my sensibilities, consorting with individuals I am suspicious of, and rebelling against the social order I work so hard to defend.

That is the usual story, at any rate.

I don't think that is going to happen, especially the social order part.  The consorting with individuals I am suspicious of is probably true, because I naturally have high standards for the people she hangs out with.  However, her friends are vastly more progressive and aware than my friends were at her age, so on many fronts she is doing far better than I did when I was young.

They are still a bunch of clueless teenagers, of course.

I am biased though, to be happy about these times.  Pinkie Pie was struggling mightily for a couple of years with serious mental health challenges, and things have gotten dramatically better in the last few months.  She is back at school, and although it isn't perfect, it is basically working.  She is learning things, has a variety of friends and activities, and her teachers say that she is improving rapidly.  There is still a long way to go yet, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

This is in stark contrast to a year ago where things were a total disaster.  We were trying homeschooling, but she wasn't able to cope with it at all.  Pinkie Pie's life was a mess, and my life was a mess as a consequence.  There is still much work to do these days, but this year it feels like a lot of work to do whereas last year it felt like drowning with no hope of rescue.  That is a big improvement, no doubt at all about that.

I am not dancing in the streets quite yet.  There are still many years to go, many tragedies to cope with, many challenges to navigate.  But I can see that the dark times of recent past are receding, and better times are coming.  These experiences do make me laugh at other parents at times though, when they complain about their struggles with their children and the challenges they have had to navigate.  The contrast between various children's difficulties is so stark.

One parent I talked to recently was bemoaning parent teacher interview night, because his kid gets straight As and every interview is "Well, the kid is great, so I have nothing to say".  The parent was grumpy about having to attend interviews when they were so pointless.  I was tempted to say that I was so glad that my kid is still alive, and straight Ds would be a huge improvement over last year, so how about shut the hell up, but managed to keep that to myself.

But I try not to get too uptight about this, because when I visit Sick Kids Hospital, I am reminded that my kid being alive isn't a given, and others have more struggles than I do.  Plus Pinkie Pie is kind, generous, and hopeful.  I would rather parent her than a straight A student who is an asshole, and there are plenty of those.  I suppose by that measure I am doing pretty well... though that doesn't stop me from wishing I had it all.

Back to it

Today Pinkie Pie went back to school.  For the past year she has been home with me, attempting to do the homeschooling thing.  It hasn't gone great, largely because her struggles at school were not fixed by being at home.  But now we are testing out the being at school thing once again to find out if we can make it work.

I can't figure out how I feel.  I am oscillating rapidly back and forth between worry that this year will fall apart and we will end up right back where we were, and relief that she is out the door, doing the thing, and it might all work.  I can feel the tension in my shoulders tighten and loosen, wax and wane, and I don't know where it is all going to end up.

It isn't particularly important that she gets high grades in school.  Ideally, of course, she would find school easy and smash all expectations, but realistically I am just pinning my hopes on her staying there, passing her courses, and being mostly content.

Kind of funny how the things we hope for shift so radically from what we had thought they would be in times past.  My parents expected straight As from me, because they knew I could manage that if I bothered to try.  When Pinkie Pie was young I had figured I would end up in the same parenting situation; turns out that life doesn't much give a crap about where you expect to end up.

I so desperately want this to work.  Homeschooling has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, and it has worn me down in so many ways.  I am not suited to it in the best of cases, and this isn't the best of cases.  I want these hours where it is just me here without the constant sense that I should be forever pushing Pinkie Pie onward and nearly always failing.  I want the time to myself to play, to work, to think.

But there isn't a lot I can do to make it happen.

So I will wait and see.  Sit and hope.

You gotta waste money to get elected

Ontario is doing something really stupid right now.  The Conservative government has decided that we shouldn't take part in the carbon tax plan that the Canadian government is going with, so Ontario is being flooded with ads bashing the plan.  The ads basically talk about how the carbon tax is taking money away from families, and that Ontario has a better plan.  Spoiler:  Ontario does not have a better plan and the money is paid back to people anyway because the carbon plan is revenue neutral.

The TV ads have pictures of people doing normal things when out of nowhere money starts falling out of their pockets, showering the ground with coins.  The hapless people look on in dismay as their wealth rolls away, helpless before the power of taxation.  Naturally the ads don't show the money flowing back into their pockets later, even though that is what will happen.

It makes me so bitter to see this.  It should be absolutely illegal for the government to spend public funds to bash other political parties, but that is what is happening.  The Liberals are in charge federally, so the provincial Conservatives waste money advertising that the Liberal carbon tax plan is hurting families.  They don't *say* the word Liberal, or Conservative, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that what is going on here, and even if there were doubt, the idea that it is appropriate for the provincial government to buy advertising time to complain about federal policy is ludicrous.

This is what we get for voting in a buffoon with no policy platform.  We get idiotic moves to 'save money' that are implemented foolishly and end up costing more money than they save.  We have a premier who simply does not understand anything that he is doing, but is so convinced of his right to rule that he thinks he doesn't *need* to understand.

Just do whatever dumbass thing you want, and ignore the consequences.  It is all about the show, after all, not about careful consideration of the results.  Like, for example, the gutting of public education and massive increases in classroom size - it saves a few bucks now, but results in a serious reduction in educational quality.  We know that long term good public education is an amazing investment that pays for itself many times over, but that isn't relevant to the current government - they need that money to give to big companies, you see. 

Wealthy investors need their payouts now, and the consequences of a less educated population are years away, and that is apparently all you need to know.

This is a classic example of a position I have held for years now about 'small government' and 'responsible budgeting' platforms.  They are all bullshit.  Every government will spend money, often foolishly.  You *cannot* choose responsible financial policy, no one offers that.

What you can choose is *how* they waste money.  And the Conservatives want to waste it by giving it to the rich and buying ads to talk about how we shouldn't try to prevent climate change.  Anything would be better.

From scratch

Since this September I have been homeschooling Pinkie Pie.  It is a challenging process, in large part because the struggles that she had with school are only partially solved by being at home.  She still does not deal well with mandatory routines, or producing work, or mornings.  Homeschooling is better than regular schooling for her so we are continuing on this track.

It is better than I had thought though, especially as my mental health goes.  I had real worries that this was going to be a disaster for me leaving me miserable and trapped.  Being home with my kid all day every day isn't my ideal, no doubt, but it hasn't been as rough as I anticipated.

We have iterated through a few different ways of teaching math and the current one is a hit.  Pinkie Pie is playing Prodigy, an online RPG where you play a wizard wandering about the world doing standard fantasy type quests.  The trick is that you have to correctly solve a math problem every time you want to cast a spell at the enemies.  Prodigy covers a huge range of different math types and seems like it is carefully engineered to test the entire standard school math curriculum.  An advantage of using this sort of program is that it doesn't have to stick to a fixed grade level.  It adjusts constantly based on how many wrong answers the user inputs and it has already moved Pinkie Pie up to grade 8 math.  This was a real surprise to me because she missed half of grade 6 math with her problems in school but she is learning at a tremendous rate.  Prodigy does need me to step in and teach her how things work rather than just how to get the correct answers but it is an amazing tool; far superior to the other systems we have tried.

We have also recently signed her up for an outdoor nature recreation type program once a week.  They focus on environmental stewardship, survival skills, learning about nature, and playing games outdoors.  If nothing else it is a good way to get her a lot of exercise, and I think she will get a lot more out of it than that.

This process has certainly made me appreciate my financial position.  We aren't wealthy by any means but we are in a position to sign Pinkie Pie up for extra programs when she shows interest.  We have enough money to keep me at home to teach her, rather than just sending her to school to be miserable in a heap.  That is a degree of monetary stability a lot of people don't have, and doing this is giving me an appreciation for it.

It isn't perfect.  I still need more alone time and more of a break than I am getting.  I am still not doing a nearly good enough job and I have to pour more energy into structure and keeping Pinkie Pie on track.  These things are at odds though, which is hard.  Doing all the normal homemaker stuff, educating, doing fun things, workout time, and getting my introvert time just doesn't leave sufficient hours in the day for things like sleep.

I feel stretched.  Not as stretched as I thought I would be at the outset though, so that is a good thing.  Hopefully with more practice at it I will get better and we will both find a way through our troubles.

Sexy education

Homeschooling requires you to teach all kinds of things.  With so many subjects and so many topics, what to do first?

Why, sex ed, of course.  Otherwise I wouldn't be me.

This year I am teaching Pinkie Pie at home.  It is a difficult transition for us, but we are slowly getting geared up.  Since sex ed was the first thing on the agenda I decided I should split it into two parts:  Sex for making babies, and sex for fun.  You have to have both things, I think, and the school system currently swings way too far towards sex ed as being reproductive biology and attempts to scare kids into never having sex.

I talked about all the basic biology stuff in day 1, covering menstruation and puberty and how babies grow from conception to birth.  Pinkie Pie was fascinated and *horrified* at the videos of sperm I showed her on Youtube.  The idea that she might someday have such tiny creatures thrashing and swarming inside her was nothing short of terrifying.

Which honestly is a pretty reasonable response.  I mean, if I wasn't completely used to the idea by now it strikes me as the sort of thing that would give me shudders.  

Sex for fun was actually harder for her though, I think.  She gets the idea of needing to know about biology and reproduction, but she isn't the least bit interested in sex or love or relationships.  It surely made her twitch to see her dear ole dad talking about masturbation and sex as a way to bond and express love and even *ewww* talking about the various ways that people have sex.

Parents are supposed to be sexless, passionless automatons, who somehow received children through a sterile, scientific process!  This whole mess of emotions and bodily fluids, yuck.

It went well, I think.

One thing I read recently on the topic of sex ed really depressed me.  It was talking about how people study sex ed and what sorts of science we have done on the topic.  The takeaway is this:  People want to understand what sex ed is good and bad and how we should approach it, but the only thing we have studied is how effective various sex ed types are at preventing STIs, babies, and sexual frequency.  The entire thing we are doing with science presupposes that our only goal is to keep teenagers from bangin' each other.

That shouldn't be the only goal!  Preventing STI transmission and teenage pregnancy are fine goals, sure, but the real thing we should be aiming for is how to promote healthy relationships and satisfying sex lives.  We should try to make sure kids grow up with the tools they need to have the sex the want, and avoid the sex they don't want.  Big picture, we want them to be happy, not celibate.

But it is hard to measure happiness like that.  It is easy to measure number of sex partners or STI treatments or abortions, so we go and measure that.  Unfortunately people then try to pretend that this stuff we are measuring is a perfect representation of the success of sex ed, when they should instead acknowledge that a big part of what we are trying to do can't be easily measured.

Using what we can measure as a metric for success is a problem all over, but I think it is acute in the case of sex ed.  Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of easy solutions.

An education

Pinkie Pie and I are beginning a new phase of life together.  She has been struggling with mental illness for all of 2018 so far, and school has become completely untenable.  She struggles with much of regular life too, but school is the thing that has fallen totally apart.  It is tough to hear from teachers that your kid is polite and gentle and kind and great in all the ways... but she doesn't do anything in school, and if this were the good ole days she would fail grade 6.  Not because she isn't clever enough, but simply because she doesn't do things.

This isn't laziness.  Hell, I don't even know if laziness really exists.  Read this article if you want to see where I am coming from.  This is a huge struggle Pinkie Pie has with herself and the world and grinding out assignments in school to get grades just isn't something she can do right now.

The best solution available to us now is homeschooling.  This certainly isn't a thing I thought I would do and quite frankly the prospect is intimidating and even terrifying.  Strangely being a teacher isn't scary in the same way because that at least is a structured environment where my duties are monitored by others.  I could be a teacher just fine.

But homeschooling is different.  It is like entrepreneurship for education and entrepreneurship has always terrified me.  I want a company to set my pay, give me a job, and expect a good 40 hours a week.  Same thing here.  The trouble is that there isn't any bar I can set where my teaching is enough.  I could always do more, always make it better, and I think this is going to leave me constantly anxious that I am not doing enough.  Elli's particular struggles exacerbate this because she isn't up to the kind or amount of teaching that a school would supply so I will never, ever measure up.  I can't just finish my official day and then clock out and walk away, and that separation is important for me.

As long as I am doing this I will be failing.

Rationally I know that when your kid has troubles you should judge their progress by their own standards, not ones imposed from outside.  You need to help them do their own best, not measure them against benchmarks created for 'the average child'.

But knowing that and managing to make myself believe it viscerally are two very different things.  I know I am going to constantly struggle with finding the right line to walk between letting her slack off too much and getting nowhere, and pushing too hard on her to do things she just can't do right now.  There simply won't be some easy way, some correct decision, that will lead me to the results I hope for.  I will always fall short in my own eyes.

This was a hard decision because it was so clear to me that homeschooling is the best thing for her, but by far the hardest for me.  It isn't something I ever thought I would do, or a thing I think I am suited to.  I can see myself doing that thing people do when their job is something they can't handle and they just long for the time when they can grab a drink and let alcohol take their angst and sadness away.  I had to balance that sense that this my future with the certainty that school is making Pinkie Pie miserable and offering her nothing in return.

It is easy, in my head, to come up with scenarios where I defend Pinkie Pie from some kind of danger.  If she were threatened by an attacker, a fire, or a storm, I would fling myself into mortal danger to protect her without hesitation.  But this thing is so much harder than any of that because it lasts, and it will grind me down.  It isn't temporary bravery that I need, because this might well last six years, and I don't know that I have the strength for that.

It isn't as though homeschooling is a horror for most people.  Lots of people would enjoy it, or at the very least wouldn't mind it.  It is a hard thing for me though, and it is a challenge I had never thought would be mine to face.

In writing this I am not looking for advice.  If you happen to desperately need to give that advice, fine, but respect that you have no idea about the details of my situation and as such your advice will almost certainly be ignored.  I am writing this to get my feelings out, not seeking opinions.

To Mars!

Wendy and I like explaining things to Pinkie Pie.  We both take great joy in doing our best to make incredibly complicated scientific topics just simple enough that she can grasp them.  The other day Wendy was trying to teach Pinkie Pie about the behaviour of fundamental particles and how quantum mechanics works.  The thing Wendy was talking about was the fact that you don't actually know where a particle is exactly, and it could at any time just decide to be somewhere else.  The example Wendy used to illustrate this is the idea that a person *could* theoretically teleport to Mars if all of their constituent particles did that at once.

It is unlikely.  Like, really unlikely.  Unlikely enough that nothing that unlikely will occur in the entire history of the universe... most likely.

But there is nothing theoretically stopping all the particles in your body from simultaneously teleporting to Mars.

The best part of this was that a few months ago when I was explaining similar concepts I also talked about particles teleporting and I used the exact same example.  I could have talked about teleporting to Grandma's house, or Texas, or Jupiter, or just to the bathroom, but I used the example of teleporting to the surface of Mars.

I wonder if perhaps Wendy and I learned this concept from the same source, and that source used teleporting to Mars as an example to illustrate this very strange part of physics.

In any case I don't know that Pinkie Pie really has any better understanding of physics.  But she does know that she could just teleport to Mars.  Maybe.  Probably not.  Really, really probably not.

But if she *does* teleport to Mars, now she can be sure that it wasn't magic, but in fact an extremely likely event that is totally admissible in physics.

Presumably while she suffocates or freezes to death, I suppose, since Mars isn't exactly a nice place to live.

(The true odds on bet in the situation of appearing to be on Mars is clearly that she is hallucinating and she isn't really on Mars.  That is considerably more likely than spontaneous teleportation, by about 100,000 orders of magnitude or so.)

Won't somebody please think of the children

Ontario is in a bad situation right now.  The Liberals are currently in charge, and they are beset by scandal and have been in power long enough to have the public wanting to give them the heave ho.  The issue isn't that the Liberals are on the way out - it is that the polling suggests that the Conservatives are headed into power in the election that is coming up soon.

I always expect Conservatives to come into power with visions of doling out money to the rich and stomping on the poor.  They will try to fill the prisons with people who are harmless and encourage cars as the default mode of transport.  That is all awful but I know it is coming every time the pendulum swings to the Conservative side.

I just saw that the newly minted Conservative leader Doug Ford (Yes, he is the brother of the famous crack smoking mayor of Toronto) has some new talking points, and they include his desire to roll back the public school curriculum to the 'good ole days'.  He wants to get rid of the updated sex ed curriculum to go back to the old style where children are taught that sex is bad, queer people don't exist, and the only thing we should be teaching is making babies.  Ontario's new curriculum is a huge improvement over the 'good ole days' because it openly talks about all kinds of different people and addresses consent even with young children.  Unfortunately religious groups don't like children having information and don't want them taught that being gay is ok, so they campaign against it under the guise of wanting more consultation.

"I want more consultation" is, as always, code for "I want things my way".  No matter who is saying it.

Ford also wants to go back to old style mathematics.  Rote learning and drills are the way of the future, he thinks.  The fact that endless drills don't provide the best learning for anyone doesn't seem to dissuade him.  Neither does the fact that inflexible styles are terrible for many students who don't fit neatly into a factory teaching style.  Usually the pitch is that drills make students more prepared for the real world, but there aren't employers out there desperately clamoring for workers who can sit at a desk and fill out worksheets full of arithmetic problems.  There are employers out there who want workers who can tackle problems creatively though, but that isn't Ford's concern.  Let's be frank:  This is about conformity and obedience, a desire to have children who do as they are fucking told and are convenient.  It has nothing to do with effective education.

These potential changes to education are really getting to me.  I know all the economic insanity the Conservatives will get up to if they win, but knowing that they intend to step in and trash education makes me so ANGRY. 

This election the Conservatives are openly and brazenly appealing to people's desires for conformity and obedience.  They are making it clear they want everyone to be religious, straight, and deliver shareholder value.  We can do better than that, and we should.

The Liberals have screwed up big time in plenty of ways.  The Conservatives are actively campaigning for dystopia.  I am going to support the NDP in this upcoming election as they are the party that closest aligns with my values, and if you are in Ontario I hope you do the same.

Schoolhouse blues

When I was young I responded pretty well to school.  The other kids were awful but the education system itself worked well for me.  I was generally a compliant kid, I wanted to do well in school, and academics are easy for me so all of that worked nicely.

By the time I was in university that had ended.  I didn't care about marks, I didn't care about degrees, and the idea that I needed to prove my worth by doing a bunch of completely unnecessary stuff seemed ridiculous.  Why do assignments on things everybody already knows? 

Pinkie Pie has reached this point too, but she did it a lot younger than me.  She struggles because she understands the fundamental pointlessness of most of the tasks she is assigned at school.  She doesn't get why she should care about working to the marking scheme and turning things in on time.

Part of me thinks that to be a good parent I need to convince her that school is super important and getting good marks is a big deal.  It is hard to convince her of that though because I don't agree with those statements and I won't lie like that.

You know who cares about your marks in grade six once you are an adult?  Nobody.  At some point you have to care about doing the stuff for your own reasons or be the sort of person that just accepts society pointing you in a particular direction.  Pinkie Pie doesn't do either of those things and never has.

I hate the idea of sending her to a place she hates to do stuff she despises for reasons she doesn't accept.  I spend a lot of my life giving the finger to society's norms and demands so it feels gross to try to push her to just fit in and do as she is told.

This has all led to us considering homeschooling.  I have often said that I couldn't do homeschooling, and indeed I don't know if it will work at all.  Staying around a kid, any kid, for 23 hours a day is the sort of thing that fills me with existential horror.  But right now school is being terrible for her and is effectively just warehousing for my child.  I find myself in the bizarre position of having to decide to do what society suggests is normal and leave my kid miserable in a place that does not work for her, or taking it all upon myself instead and likely making myself unhappy. 

It is especially difficult because there is no one to blame.  Her teachers have all worked hard to try to make things in the classroom work for her and the school administration have done everything reasonable to try to help.  It just hasn't been enough.  I have nothing against schools and nothing against homeschooling - it is just that schools don't work for Pinkie Pie and I am pretty sure homeschooling won't work for me.  But we need to choose one of these things.

I don't quite know what to think.  It would be easier if Pinkie Pie just wanted to obey and do what other people tell her.  I don't know that it would be *good*, but it would be easier.  I guess I want her to be independent and find her own way, just not this way exactly.  I suppose that is a core part of what parenting is - accepting that your kids will ask for things you don't want to give and you have to give them anyway.

Keeping my eye on the prize

My post about answering a question from Pinkie Pie "Daddy, why do we clean up so much for guests?" got an interesting response on Facebook.  Someone I don't know waded in and opined that mine was an example of the disaster that is permissive parenting.  His basis thesis was that children raised in permissive households do terribly in school, both having emotional problems and testing poorly.  I want to break this down into parts to address each of them separately because I think that will be most revealing.

The assumption is that permissive parenting creates huge problems in school, and the conclusion is that children should be raised to be obedient in a more authoritarian style in order to avoid this.

I don't actually buy the assumption but the person writing it claims many years of experience teaching children, so I would be pitting my opinion against the opinion of a presumably better informed person.  I would greatly appreciate it if any of my teacher friends or family members could shed light on this issue from a more informed or even scientific standpoint.  Does permissive parenting truly make school much more difficult for children?

Let us allow the assumption to hold for a moment.  Assume that children raised in permissive households where they are allowed to ask questions and their opinions are given substantial weight have a difficult time in school and make it hard on themselves and their teachers.  Does it then follow that I should raise my child in a more authoritarian fashion?

It does not.

The problem is that the conclusion rests on an unstated assumption that the most important thing I can do is raise a child that will fit into a structured, hierarchical system like our schools are.  Not only do I completely reject that assumption, in fact I think I should be doing the opposite.  I don't want teachers to have a difficult time but beating my child into being the round peg that the system demands is exactly what I don't want.

I want my child to be curious.  I want her to feel that she has the right to guide her own life.  I want her to feel that she can and should confidently ask for reasons for the things she is asked to do.  I want her to be independent in action and thought and to question the dogma and common assumptions that are made all around her all the time.

When the school asks her to stand and sing the national anthem I want her to question why we sing a song that references God in a country that should respect all religions and those who do not subscribe to one.  I want her to have the courage to say no if she wants to, and know that I will back her up all the way.

I want a child who knows that when an elderly relative demands physical affection that she can say no, and that her decision will be supported and respected.  I want her to push past the boundaries of what everyone expects to find her own path.

And none of that comes from teaching her to obey without question.  My job isn't to raise a person who does what she is told.  My job is to raise a person who forges paths nobody else even thought of, who does things people say you can't do, and who builds things that were thought impossible.  I don't get to that point by telling her that she has to obey because I said so and I pay the bills.

I don't subscribe to some Permissive Parent Philsophy, if there even is such a thing.  Children are almost universally given more responsibility and autonomy as they grow, and I know I give her more autonomy at a given age than most parents do their own children.  I tailor her freedom to her abilities and desires as well as my own sense of safety.

I don't want to create difficulties in school for my child, but if raising her to think, to question, to seek to understand, and to resist orders that she thinks are wrong makes school difficult... then school is going to be difficult.  That is a price worth paying.

Showdown at the playground

This past Saturday I helped run the Fun Fair for Elli's school.  I was the volunteer coordinator, which means I was the one panicking when half of my volunteers either didn't show or showed up late.

On a related note, damn teenagers.  I had eight of them signed up to help for the whole day to get their volunteer hours to graduate high school.  They all confirmed they would be there from 8 until 2.  Now, being the realistic person that I am, I assumed they would be late.  An hour late, say.  At 8:30 the first teenager rolled in, a couple more arrived at 10:30, and several didn't get there until 12:30.  Then they acted like nothing was wrong, and said "Oh... but I didn't know when it started....."

Yes.  You did.  Because I got you to confirm specifically that you were going to be there from 8 until 2.  I have it in writing!  ARGHERKHGH.

Anyway, despite teenagers being incredibly unreliable we got great weather and had enough people to make the thing work and overall it was a successful endeavour.  The children got to spend a ton of time standing in lines in the hot sun for bouncy castles and fair food, and for some reason they liked this.

All that stuff was predictable.  Obviously scheduling volunteers for an event like this will be a disaster, and obviously teenagers will sleep in and be unreliable.

What surprised me is how close I got to getting in a fistfight.

Fistfights, for the record, are not usually a feature of elementary school Fun Fairs.  Although if they were we could rope them off and probably bring in a lot more people... <scribbles notes furiously>

During the Fair one of the people running the bouncy castles for us who worked for the bouncy castle company came up to me and asked for my help.  He was scared, he said, because one of the people at the Fair was getting aggressive and shouting at him.  He wanted me to help.

I wandered over to the man he pointed to, and instantly I realized that the man was kind of drunk.  Drunk Guy looked at me in a way that made it clear he knew I was there to fuss at him and he was immediately defensive.  He was sitting down so I crouched down to talk to him in the hopes of keeping him calm, but Drunk Guy quickly stood up and launched into a tirade about how terrible the bouncy castle person was.  The basic story came out that children were trying to leap over the edge of the bouncy castle, the employee told them to stop, and the Drunk Guy was angry about this.  He demanded of the bouncy castle person "Do you work here?" which is actually kind of a tricky question in this circumstance, and the bouncy castle worker walked away, which enraged Drunk Guy.

Drunk Guy then proceeded to yell at me about how terrible it was that someone walked away from him.  He yelled it at me several times to make sure that I knew that it was terrible.  He was obviously worried about being kicked out and had nothing useful to say in his defence.  He got really agitated and started demanding that I agree with him that the bouncy castle person was way out of line.

I wasn't at all sure what to do.  Obviously Drunk Guy was being a shithead and it was all his fault, but it wasn't clear to me how I should handle the situation.  Should I tell him he had to leave?  Would that result in him taking a swing at me?  Should I yell at him and hope to intimidate him into shutting up and leaving?

In this sort of situation size and intimidation are key pieces of information.  Drunk Guy was close to a foot shorter than me and lightly built, so barring him having combat training I rate to be able to toss him out physically without any trouble.  But obviously I don't want to actually fight anyone if I don't have to.  Being that much bigger than another man in a showdown tends to make them defensive and keyed up, but it does mean that they are afraid of actually throwing a punch.

I decided to do what I normally do in this sort of situation, which is to just stand there and listen but adamantly refuse to get excited or angry.  I let him spew his nonsense at me for awhile until he had repeated it all a couple of times and I never really engaged with it.  Eventually my refusal to escalate at all seemed to wear him out and he stopped telling his story and demanded to know if I was going to kick him out.  I hadn't even had a chance to answer that when he said "Hah, I knew you couldn't kick me out!" and turned and wandered away from me.

Something deep inside me *really* wanted to yell "Buddy, not only do I have the authority to kick you out, but if you don't do as I say I will toss your ass over the fence myself!"

But that probably isn't a good idea.  Deeply satisfying in the moment, makes a good story to tell the grandkids, but not a good idea nonetheless.

So I just stood there and watched him wander off.  I kept a really close eye on him for quite awhile, figuring that if he gave anybody any more trouble I would have to make a scene, but Drunk Guy seemed determined to behave himself after that.

I think what happened was he realized that he was in a terrible bind.  If he escalated the conflict with me he stood to 1.  Look like an asshole in front of hundreds of people.  2.  Lose a fight.  3.  Get arrested.  But he desperately didn't want to back down and apologize, so he settled for pretending that he won the argument.

Everybody knows that when you are in a staredown with someone as part of a yelling argument and you mumble quietly about how you won and walk away while the other guy glares at you... you lost.  But by fussing about how I couldn't kick him out anyway he clasped his tattered dignity to his chest and got out of there.  Shortly thereafter he left the Fair, so the problem went away on its own.

I am glad it was me that had to deal with that.  All the other people running the event were women of much more moderate size than me and I don't know what he would have done if they had shown up to chastise him.  It might have gone better potentially as maybe he got more aggressive because I am a man, but he might well have decided that he could just trample all over them and/or threaten them.  I am quite sure that I was the one who would be least upset about that sort of confrontation, in large part because of the lack of fear of what would happen if he decided to get physical, so I am glad I was there and that I was the one who got the call to deal with it.

I do wish I knew if I dealt with it correctly.  Hell, I don't even know if me going over to him at all was productive.  I know that I don't want to let people be assholes like that, especially because of the possibility that this had a racial bigotry element to it.  (The Bouncy castle worker was a person of colour, and Drunk Guy was white.)  However, it might well be that me going over to him was really what got him wound up, and I escalated just by being there.

My suspicion is that an intimidating stare combined with the stubborn refusal to get angry or excited was the right way to handle the situation, but again I don't know.  Sometimes people really want other people to share their emotions and they get angry when that doesn't happen.

Delivering a lecture on his drunkenness, his entitlement, or his aggressiveness would have been satisfying, but probably counterproductive.  And yet I really want him to understand why he fucked up... though likely that is impossible in the state he was in.

I can say for sure though that I am glad for the training I got in sales surrounding these situations.  The more times you have to practice coping with someone who is frothing mad while maintaining professionalism the easier it gets and the less scary it is.