Confession time. I listen to talk radio. And I like it. There was a time when I thought this signaled the death of one’s youth and confirmation of some old lady status. I remember the summer I worked at Bible Camp and there was this guy on staff, who was one of the most incredible people, but he loved talk radio. And whenever we would travel somewhere in all the camp vans and cars, like to take kids rafting or something cool like that, we would always wince if we ended up in this guy’s car. Not because we did not love him, but because it totally meant we would have to listen to talk radio for 3 hours while the rest of our counselor buddies listened to Pearl Jam or some other 90’s angst band.

So anyway, sometime over the last year I have made a shift. I think I gave up trying to be cool and knowing anything about music. For example, I still think I am cool because I have The Fray on my iPod. I am most definitely a white, suburban mom in her 30’s. I used to sneak in an occasional listen to NPR or our local news station. Now I unashamedly blare them at intersections to drown out the sound of my children fighting. 

So last night I was running an errand and listening to our local news station. They were doing an interview with Arne Duncan, the Superintendent of Chicago’s Public Schools. Arne was talking about the merits of a year round school calendar that offered kids several shorter breaks during a 12 month school year rather than a 9 month year and a 3 month break. It actually sounded cool to me, but this is not my point.

There was a teacher who called in to lament the idea of this program. I love teachers, I have several friends who are teachers and I happen to think that being a teacher is one of the most important and difficult job that a person can have. I believe in them. But this woman was a complete ditz and if she was the teacher for one of my children I might actually consider home schooling. After a string of dippy comments she then lamented the length of the school day an how 7 hours was way too long to keep the attention of a high school student. She commented on the fact that by the end of the day the students are either completely lethargic or totally wired. About how they cannot focus. About how the last period of school is a waste and about how horrible it is to try and keep their attention. She was frustrated and I don’t blame her. So Arne went off on a tangent talking about something loosely related to this and basically skipped this comment. Her final plea was this “so what can we be expected to do with them?”

And as I thought about this I was wondering what the answer was. The comment was made in response to the fact that kids in Japan have a longer school day and year and they seem to do just fine with it so why can’t American kids do the same? My thought is this: Did anyone bother to think about what our kids eat? Did anyone bother to consider the fact that American kids are hopped up on high-fructose corn syrup, caffeine, sugar, processed food, and SoBe Energy drinks the size of their heads? Did anyone take into account the fact that they camp out in front of the television set for hours on end, where everything blinks and shines and giltters and moves faster than their minds can?

How can we expect them to focus? How can we expect them to grow their brains while we are filling them with junk? As I type this my kids are eating fruit snacks so clearly I have not arrived at the ultimate conclusion here. But when we talk about education and attention spans and all that academic jazz, I think we should connect it to the conversation about what we feed them. High-fructose corn syrup actually gets metabolized FASTER than straight sugar. It gets sucked into their systems immediately. Their hearts are racing, their heads are spinning, and we expect them go focus when this all crashes.

It was just a curios thought. I know I am not the first to think it, but I could not help but wonder if we are asking the wrong questions. It’s not “how long should the educational day be?” but perhaps it is “how do we best prepare them to focus for that day?” 

Maybe this is why I am finally arriving at talk radio, I am also trying to stop eating corn syrup (an impossible task by the way, but that’s for another blog entry).

I am a raving fan of my mother-in-law. So much so that I actually prefer to call her “my husband’s mom,” because people always sort of sneer when they say “mother-in-law.” She’s smart and funny and gracious and simply a wonderful woman to be around. And she has no idea that I was going to blog about her for a short bit here, and I promise you she’s not the type that needs me to brown nose her with those compliments. She’s cool.

Well, my husband and his two sisters always poke fun at her about what they call “bogus answers.” Bogus answers are the things that we tell our kids when we don’t know (or don’t have the energy) for the proper answer. Apparently as they were growing up my husband’s mom would offer some pretty impressive bogus answers for anything from why the sky is blue to why we need gas to make our cars work. The stuff we sort of know but cannot really answer because who has the ability to explain an internal combustion engine to a third grader. Whatever it was, she had an answer. These answers were so good that all three of the children from this family still remember her bogus answers to this day. So my husband and his sisters poke fun at her. Poor woman, if she even dares to answer a question that they don’t know the answer to they say “now mom, is that one of your bogus answers?”

Well today I had my most prized bogus answer of them all. We were of course on our way to school. We were late because as I was piling all my kids into the car my neighbor stopped to say hello. He’s really nice but very direct. He asked me if I had voted yet (mayoral election today in our town). This I thought was funny since it was 8:00 am and I was both trying to get to school on time as well as to a class I was teaching that morning. I was sweating as I shoved my kids into the car. I tried to manage that chaos and yell at my son who was on his scooter instead of in the car while chatting politely with my cool neighbor. “What about me looks like I made it to the polls early today?” I thought. 

My 5 year old heard the conversation and when I got into the car he asked who was running for mayor. He’s all politically savvy now since he learned all about elections this past November. Well, at least I thought he was. While he understood that someone was running for something today he had no clue what a mayor was. So his curious little mind starts rolling out the questions . . . what is a mayor, why do we need a mayor, does my best friend have a mayor in his town. On and on this went. Meanwhile my 2 year old is having his own conversation with himself and the baby is just moaning and whining. I do not have it in me to answer all these questions. I did good with the first two and then started to freak out. At this moment a train passed by. He asked who was the mayor of the railroad. “Sir Topham Hat is” I answered. Where would we be without Thomas the Train.

Of course he is smart and laughed at that. “No really mama, who is the mayor of our town and the railroad?” Now I was on the hook for two answers. At that moment I blanked on the actual name of the current mayor and as the new mayor was not yet elected I did not know what to say. Then the train triggered this random line of thought. “My husband once considered a job with GE in their locomotive division. I know that GE builds and repairs locomotives like the one that just passed by. GE is also the owner of NBC. The show 30 Rock is on NBC. I love this show. Tina Fey is brilliant. Alec Baldwin the wanna-be president (or CEO) of NBC on this show. I’ll tell him Alec Baldwin is our mayor.” I paused for a second as this sounded absurd at best. But the baby kept moaning, the 2 year old was yammering on and on, and I needed this line of questioning to end. “Alec Baldwin is our mayor and he is the mayor of the railroad honey.” Bogus answer. “Okay,” he replied. “Thanks.” Yessssssssss.

Most of the time it takes bogus answers to survive the day. And I hope that someday, when my kids are grown adults, that they will laugh with me in the kitchen about my bogus answers the way my my husband and his sisters do with their mom. But, I am finding myself increasingly interested in providing better answers for my kids when it comes to things in the natural world. My standby bogus answer for questions like “why is it raining,” or “why is the grass green” is this. “Because God wants it that way.” To which they say “well, why does God want it that way?” and on it goes.

The reality is that I struggle to find answers for most of the “how does the garden grow” type stuff because I never learned the answers. I don’t know how the garden grows. I don’t know how weather patterns form. I cannot point out anything beyond Orion’s Belt and the Big and Little Dippers in the night sky. I am not sure which spiders eat which mosquitos. I don’t know why sand is soft in some places and clumpy and rocky in others. I have good guesses that come from what I remember from Freshman Biology and my ACT’s, but this is about it.

And so when I get to the part of my life that has my kids asking the sorts of questions that I dream they will ask. Questions about trees and lakes and life as we know it, I find that I don’t want to give them bogus answers. I want to tell them all the marvels of creation. I want to take a magnifying glass and track some bugs as they march along the driveway and I want to know the names of those bugs and which plants they eat and why. I think that our kids will start to want to preserve our world if they have a passion and a love for it. Why preserve what you don’t understand or even care about?

So this whole green thing is starting to mean that I have to learn a whole lot. Like how to plant things and garden and understand that the high whispy clouds come before the cumulus clouds that turn into rain (I think). I need to learn what I can about the world so that I can pass it along and teach them the art of living well on this planet.

I hope when Alec Baldwin is mayor of my town that he will further fund green education in our local schools.