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Look, it's a non-grumpy post!
Just wanted to post something real quick so those few of you who actually read this thing don't think I've forgotten about you already. And I wasn't happy with the fact that all of the previous posts here were of a somewhat pissy, negative nature. So here goes:
The family and I went to see my fourteen-year-old niece graduate from her middle school tonight. The drive from here to there, which normally takes an hour-and-a-half tops, took almost three hours tonight. St00pid rush-hour Boston traffic.
Anyway, my niece went to a charter school. All of forty kids in her graduating class (in comparison, my eighth-grade class had somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 kids). And from what I could tell from this fairly limited exposure to her classmates (the ceremony itself and a bit of party at the school afterwards), these all seemed to be good kids. They seemed smart and respectful and kind, and they seemed very close. I know it's not fair or accurate to judge a group of people like that based on such a small sample, especially in out-of-the-norm circumstances like a graduation--I'm sure there had to have been a couple of real pains-in-the-ass in the group--but that's my Gladwellian thin-slice impression.
Between tonight's look at these kids from this small charter school and last week's discovery of a Unitarian Universalist church (and doctrine, or lack thereof) we liked, I'm finally beginning to see a framework I want to use for raising my kids. A framework that I think can help me allow them to be loving, tolerant, open-minded and respectful of others and themselves. A fremework that will help them be, I sincerely hope, good people.
And they'll need all the help they can get with that, of course, since the wife and I are such incredibly hateful bigots. ;)
The family and I went to see my fourteen-year-old niece graduate from her middle school tonight. The drive from here to there, which normally takes an hour-and-a-half tops, took almost three hours tonight. St00pid rush-hour Boston traffic.
Anyway, my niece went to a charter school. All of forty kids in her graduating class (in comparison, my eighth-grade class had somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 kids). And from what I could tell from this fairly limited exposure to her classmates (the ceremony itself and a bit of party at the school afterwards), these all seemed to be good kids. They seemed smart and respectful and kind, and they seemed very close. I know it's not fair or accurate to judge a group of people like that based on such a small sample, especially in out-of-the-norm circumstances like a graduation--I'm sure there had to have been a couple of real pains-in-the-ass in the group--but that's my Gladwellian thin-slice impression.
Between tonight's look at these kids from this small charter school and last week's discovery of a Unitarian Universalist church (and doctrine, or lack thereof) we liked, I'm finally beginning to see a framework I want to use for raising my kids. A framework that I think can help me allow them to be loving, tolerant, open-minded and respectful of others and themselves. A fremework that will help them be, I sincerely hope, good people.
And they'll need all the help they can get with that, of course, since the wife and I are such incredibly hateful bigots. ;)
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