The alligator hole

Yesterday I dug an alligator hole with my children. It all started with a book from the library. Charlie likes gators, so he saw a book with a picture of one on the cover, and we had to get it. It was called, What Lives in an Alligator Hole? My snide response: an alligator, duh. Not so simple, apparently. I learned from reading to my children that the alligator is a "keystone species" that enables many other species to survive in the wetland environment by providing them with relatively fresh water. The alligator wallows in the soft mud, digging a nice big hole, and the hole fills with water, from under the mud, that is less brackish than the water that typically sits around in marshes. And contrary to popular belief, alligators don't eat everything in sight. In fact, they eat less than you might expect. During the winter months, when the cold-blooded gators essentially hibernate in their muddy holes, they only eat once a month on average. Usually, birds, turtles, and other animals are pretty safe in an alligator hole. (Hibernating all winter and only having to fix myself a meal once a month doesn't sound like a bad life to me right now, but that's neither here nor there.)

So, we got to the end of this fascinating little book, and when I saw the last page, I quickly snapped it shut. "What was that, Mommy?" Charlie asked. Now, Charlie can't exactly read yet, but he knows enough that you can't fool him by skipping pages. "Uh, nothing, darling." I knew I wasn't getting away with this. I'd been caught, and it was only a matter of time. Charlie can wheedle, off and on, for weeks if necessary. I relented. "A science activity," I conceded warily, knowing I ought to be more excited about this. Predictably enough, Charlie and Kristianna were both interested and insisted I read the skipped page.

The activity was simple enough: fill two bowls with the same amount of dirt, add the same amount of water to both, then pat the dirt in one bowl down flat, while digging a hole in the other bowl. The "alligator hole" is supposed to fill with nice, clean-ish water for your toddlers to drink. Okay, so I made up that last part.

However, nothing is simple in our family. First, we had to find a toy alligator, because Charlie insisted that WE could not be the ones to dig the gator hole; it had to be dug by an actual (toy) alligator. It took a couple of weeks (no, I'm not kidding) for us to find time to go shopping for an alligator, and the window of opportunity finally opened while Charlie was at school on Tuesday. So I took the girls to A.C. Moore, where I was pretty sure I'd seen cheap plastic animals, and we started rummaging through the various species. I'd been feeling pretty guilty about the whole thing, since we try not to buy lots of junky toys, we don't have much money anyway, and then there's the business of plastic (especially the ubiquitous painted "Made in China" variety) not exactly being good for you, according to more and more studies. But I had a 50% off coupon, the little plastic animals didn't cost THAT much, and while they were in fact made in China, they also sported a tag reading "Phthalate-free." Whatever that means. Anyway, it sounded good.

The problem was that they didn't have an alligator, only a crocodile. Now, I knew that Charlie knew that alligators and crocodiles are not the same thing. (One of my nephews once conveniently combined the species, excitedly telling my sister that he had seen the "crocogator" at the zoo.) But I thought I could get away with it. How would he know the difference? No such luck. When we got to Charlie's school to pick him up, Kristianna strolled into the classroom still carrying the crocodile, which she had refused to part with except briefly so it could be scanned by the cashier (during which time she looked daggers at the clerk). Charlie's teacher asked, "Ooh, do you have an alligator?" See, SHE was fooled! But not Kristianna, who must have heard me muttering to myself at the store about the lack of a proper alligator. "No, a 'dile," she proclaimed, and the secret was out. For the rest of the day, I had to listen to Charlie's comments on the matter: "Mommy, I TOLD you to get an alligator, so why did you get me a crocodile?" "Why would you go to a store that sells only crocodiles?" "A crocodile cannot dig an alligator hole." And so on. By the next day, he had finally concluded that it would be acceptable to pretend the toy was an alligator, just for the duration of the activity.

We still had to find dirt. This isn't a problem for those of you who live in houses; just go to the backyard. But we live in an apartment complex, and a very well-landscaped one at that. After I had watched the landscapers work all fall on the beds, it didn't seem right to dig for dirt under the bushes right outside our apartment. So yesterday afternoon we loaded up the stroller, bundled up the baby, and trekked over to the pond (where the real gator has his real gator hole) to find some dirt. There were a few bare patches that I didn't think the rental office would mind if we raided for a measly three cups of the stuff. As I kept a guilty lookout for any suspicious landscaping personnel, the children spooned dirt into Gladware containers. Then of course we had to go by the playground "on the way back," and before we knew it, suppertime was upon us and another day had gone by without doing that one, extremely simple activity. (We even had to take the library book back earlier in the week. Good grief.)

Yesterday morning, the time was finally right. Personally, I don't mind getting dirty. But I didn't relish the idea of mud all over the carpet, so I contained the children in the kitchen and nervously watched their feet and clothing. It is so hard to give up control, to just let them enjoy something and not constantly be barking, "Don't scratch your foot; your hand is muddy!" and "Don't splash; it's getting under the stove!" I compared myself to the mother I'm not - the mother who would sit back and watch the children get the whole house muddy, smiling peacefully to herself at the joy of youth, and then patiently put them down for naps and clean the whole house again before they awakened.

We did succeed in getting messy, but the demonstration of the benefits of alligator holes was a complete wash. Maybe the dirt was too wet to begin with, or maybe the measurements in the book weren't right, or maybe I remembered them wrong. In any event, both bowls simply flooded with muddy water. There was no clean drinking water for the toy birds and beasts that the children had gathered for the grand experiment, and the hole was barely discernible. I tried to explain how it should have worked (and why it didn't), but they weren't listening. They were piling mud on the "alligator," making their other toy animals dive into the bowls, making muddy handprints on the kitchen floor, trying to construct a beach for a toy penguin, and of course pushing each other with muddy hands while giggling.

As I was watching them and then cleaning up the kitchen, I found myself both envying professional teachers (who would know better than I how to conduct such an activity) and pitying them. They are assailed from both sides - by a society and a government that often expects them to stand in loco parentis for children whose parents are, for whatever reason, barely involved in their lives, and then by parents who ARE intimately involved in their children's lives and would like schools to stick to teaching academic subjects and not try to parent them or teach them values. I'm in the middle of watching a documentary called Corridor of Shame, about eight rural South Carolina districts, all clustered along I-95, that sued the state of South Carolina for additional funding, claiming that they were unable to provide a "minimally adequate" education for their children with the meager revenue they gleaned from property taxes. The film depicts crumbling buildings and libraries with few new books; it also features interviews with teachers and principals who say they have to be parents to many of their pupils. They talk about first-graders who don't know their birthdays or addresses, or how to spell their names. They talk about children who come to school hungry because there is no food in the house for breakfast, and who will go to sleep hungry unless their teacher sends them home with some food. In the film, one young male teacher (he didn't look much over 25) says with tears in his eyes that he can't bring himself to leave the district, despite the poor pay, because many of his high school students call him "Dad."

I am extremely blessed. We aren't rich, but Jonathan makes enough that I can stay home with the children. I don't want to ignite the "Mommy Wars" with this post, because I know there are many working moms who do an excellent job of raising their children and are quite involved in their children's lives, helping them with their homework and passing on their values and beliefs to them. And sometime soon I would like to have a career outside the home; I don't see staying home as my final destination or something I am morally obligated to do. But the point is that I have the opportunity to choose. Many parents don't. Some of the moms and dads described in Corridor of Shame were alcoholics or in prison. But most couldn't be there for their children because they were working two or three jobs to make ends meet. And in today's economy, that's necessary for more and more couples and single parents. Increasingly, schools will need to step in to teach not just the three R's, but how to get along with others, what to wear, self-care and nutrition, civic responsibility, and yes, some sort of value system.

Parents who can afford to be very hands-on in raising their children, as Jonathan and I can, have often objected to the comprehensive nature of public education. "Why can't they stick to teaching the basics," they say, "and let us handle things like conflict resolution, sex education, how to approach other religions and other lifestyles, etc.?" A frequently heard argument for home schooling is that it takes so much less time than school in a traditional setting, because class time is taken up only with purely academic work; all the other stuff is taught in the process of living life as a family. Yet the government (really, the voting public) puts an enormous amount of pressure on public schools (and now, through voucher programs, some private schools) to serve as the final barricade separating troubled youths from the juvenile detention center and an adult life of poverty and hopelessness. Schools are expected to take children whose parents are so busy trying to survive that they can't read to them or teach them their colors, and make productive, decent, moral adults out of them. That's a very tall order, and it's one that involves much more than reading, math, science, and history.

I've been trying to think of solutions, and I haven't been very successful. Parents could be given the opportunity to opt their children out of all but strictly academic activities, but that would in effect segregate public schools into two groups of students, which would probably be mostly differentiated by socio-economic class. My worry about such a system is much the same as my worry about "school choice" - that it would help the students who already have the great advantage of involved parents who don't have to work all the time, and leave behind those who are already at a disadvantage. I also fear that it would undermine democracy by causing some students to feel superior to others, mostly by virtue of their family income and background, and as though they had been given the "privilege" of not having to spend as much time with the "other group" of children. Aside from that, I'm out of ideas and would appreciate any you have. After all, segregation (of all sorts, not just racial) in education is endemic, as a result of private schools, charter schools, tracking and gifted programs, and just plain human nature. We want to make sure that exposing diverse groups of children to each other doesn't result in gifted (or better-prepared) children getting bored and learning nothing, while academic standards are adapted to the lowest common denominator. At the same time, we want to make sure students of all backgrounds have the same opportunities.

Meanwhile, as I was thinking these things, I realized my alligator hole disaster was not quite over yet. I still had to get rid of all that dirt. Putting it down the kitchen sink would probably stop up the plumbing; ditto the toilet. It didn't make any sense to put good, clean dirt in the trashcan. So, making sure the children were clean and occupied with a coloring book, I left with the container of dirt. Again, I looked for landscapers. I found the edge of a bed where the bare dirt was exposed and, squatting, scooped the dirt out with my hands and smoothed it over the ground in an attempt to disguise its addition. Unfortunately, it still looked a little too much like dog poop, which the property manager has rightly banned from the premises. I put some pinestraw over it and hoped for the best. Back to the apartment to wash all the containers and the spoons. Back to trying to figure out what's best for my children and all the other children, too.

- KPE