Phthursday Musings: Connection

I’m president of our school’s Parent Teacher Organization. This role comes with no crowns or robes; some days it seems to come primarily with emails from people who want to be our school supplies vendor. My two-year term began after the initial pandemic lockdown, so needless to say, it hasn’t been an ordinary couple of years for a PTO.

Last week I was on a district meeting via Zoom, and our subgroup was talking about the general topic of parent engagement. Now my style in a lot of these settings is to sit back and listen, and only weigh in if I’m really sure I’ve got something useful to say. This didn’t used to be my style, I used to be a lot more vocal up front. But I prefer to listen, think things over, offer observations.

Well, it never seems to work that way, because at some point, someone wants to know why I’m being so gosh darn quiet, don’t I have something to say?

What follows here is a modified form of my ensuing ramble from that meeting, intended more for a META-SPIEL type audience.

Our school, like many schools, like many other institutions, operates largely on something somewhere between tradition and deference to the people who have been around longest. What events do we hold? Same ones we’ve held for years. Why? That’s what people are used to. And this all makes a lot of sense; why would you trash things every year?

But for the last two years, parents mostly haven’t been allowed in the building, and don’t hang out after school dropoff chit-chatting, and just in general are not engaged in the everyday casual aspects of being part of this particular kind of community. Those of us parents who walk our kids to school, we walk there, and then we flee, maybe we wave at someone, but we’ve been trained not to stop and talk, because that violates social distancing, balbhfjjsalalbha;ahbhblajahblah.

Well, trying to pull off something like parental engagement in a setting like that just isn’t going to work that well. Worse, parents of kindergartners and first graders but not also older kids, they’re starting off with no familarity with the community norms.

And it goes beyond that. When my son turned 6 a month into kindergarten, we invited the entire class to his birthday party. That was the first time we’d met some of our fellow parents, and the first time they’d met each other. In first grade, he had no birthday party. In second grade, we did do something small, entirely outside, which happened to be at a major pandemic lull. But parents didn’t stay and chit-chat. Next time around, third grade, we’re beyond the point where that sort of thing would likely happen.

And it goes beyond even that. These people aren’t just in a cohort of fellow parents. They are literally our neighbors. The outright majority of his classmates seem to live within a five minute walk of school.

About a month into the pandemic - when school was fully remote, literally nobody was seeing anybody, we were all just hiding inside - was Dolphin Day. It’s a “real thing” - by which I mean that I didn’t make it up, it happens every year on April 14. Our school mascot is the dolphin, and I found this thing, and I pitched people over Facebook on the idea of having kids color in our school logo and put their drawings in the window and doing other little dolphin related things and what not. We can forget but back then things were so weird and scary and anything which seemed to unify people at all was kind of a big deal.

Well, a lot of kids did participate, and the weather was good, and some people actually got out of their house - in some cases for the first time doing this - and just walked around the neighborhood. They were all socially distant etc. but they were out and about in the same places as their neighbors. The whole thing required almost no planning, nobody staffing tables, and was essentially free. (It did have the drawback of happening more or less just over the Facebook group.)

If you want to engage people, if you want to include people who might not otherwise feel included, and you want to do all of this in a setting where people have been trained not to participate in anything, then it’s simply not going to work to talk in terms of how to get them to show up. You have to go to, you have to be, where they already are. Take it to them. Take it to their homes.

With more planning, with more centralized communication, something like Dolphin Day could be a bigger deal, maybe even something that a community could turn into an annual tradition. Instead of having to buy something, or having to show up for something, make it kind of like the neighborhood version of Halloween, where kids are coloring pictures or chalking sidewalks or just doing low key things whereby if you drove down a block, you’d see visible signs that schoolkids live there and they at least pretend to like their school.

And it is this sort of thing, in turn, which I would aruge is missing not just for the kids, or the parents, or the schools, but indeed for the country writ large. No, you’re not going to get everybody to participate in something like this. But you can get a cross-section of people. The very young can participate. The very old can participate. You can participate regardless of who you did or didn’t vote for. You can engage in something that is simply positive, not competitive, just meant to be an uplift to the spirit, importantly with a local focus. And this is a way you can get people who may not be native language speakers to participate. And this is a way you can get parents who work at night to participate. And on and on and on. You just make a collective big deal about it, and then, guess what, it’s a big deal.

Now I might not have the best ideas for the specific tactics. Maybe crayons and sidewalk chalk aren’t implements of grand unification. Maybe it would work better if somebody did spend a little money and send all the kids home with a yard sign or a spinning dolphin on a tall plastic stake or who knows what. I feel though like the lynchpin to the whole thing is to have a community, have a place where when ideas are tossed around and you need just a little minimal involvement that people are happy to engage in such things. What if what this would really take is to order 1,000 $0.10 dolphin buttons and hand-deliver them to every place in the school’s main attendance footprint? Well, I’ll bet we could pull that off without it having to be just two people having to slog everything around.

There are two mentalities which I find can shut something like this down very quickly. The first one is Hey, it’s your idea, why don’t you run with it? I don’t mean here people who don’t really like the idea and are just saying something like that as a passive aggressive way of making it go away; I mean people who for whatever reason fail to grasp that the whole point is that they too have to own it. If you’re not personally interested in engaging in something like this, then don’t say out loud that you think it’s a good idea, because if it’s not good enough for you to find an hour to print something off and color with your kids, then you don’t think it’s a good idea. False politeness is not neighborliness!

The other mentality, while well-intentioned, which I think can be even more disruptive is Hey, why don’t we make this even bigger? At some point it’s no longer clear who you’re trying to bring together and under what auspices. You’re no longer able to articulate what you want individual people to engage in. There’s a reason people have block parties instead of neighborhood parties - a person can manage to wrangle one bouncy house, one visit from a fire truck, etc. Turn it into something much bigger and then it requires a much different level of planning. Now, maybe that could be a great event! But it would likely have to be run by a larger organization, require a lot more volunteer hours, etc. It could be bigger, better, greater… but also not exactly the same. And the kind of person who might be able to run a block party might not be able to run something larger. You might lose some of the very people you’re hoping to include. Be ambitious! But be realistic. Prove you can do something small before aiming larger.

Now, the point of going through all of this is not that I have all the answers. Far from it. But I do think I’m asking more of the right questions. People really do feel disengaged from one another. How can we bring people together? Well, what if that’s not the right question? What if “bring together” connotes a kind of centralization that’s not quite what we need? What if, instead, we try to figure out how to imbue people with a sense of being together right where they are?

This week’s subject was going to be “There’s Snow Where To Go”, about how we can’t do a lot, and then there’s eight inches of snow on the ground on top of it, and while I thought that was kind of funny… eh, I didn’t want to go there.

Whatever I’m feeling, I know there are people feeling it much worse. And what I think a lot of us are missing are small connections. And I think some people are missing those more than I am.

For me at least the pandemic has also coincided with not wanting my connections with people to be defined by Facebook or Twitter algorithms, or at least, not like they were before. Set aside whatever contempt I might have for the companies… I was already getting to that place where I wanted something of a different kind (i.e. not merely “better algorithms”), and I think I was just beginning to find some of those small connections at the local level.

My hope is that someone - that means you, fair reader - can take what all I’ve written here and bake it, compress it, distill it, I mean, crikey, just VERB all this already, into something much better.

VERB IT ALREADY.

While on the subject of connection, I would be remiss if I didn’t revisit the mid-90s. Take your pick of the original video, complete with a room full of naked men (plus Spanish subtitles!), or what I believe must have been the replacement “safe” video, though it was definitely the first one which aired on MTV back in the day:

Last week some time the thought occurred to me: What did ever happen to Elastica? And I looked it up, and it seems that Elastica made just one more album in the late ‘90s, and then Justine Frischmann gave up music, took up art, married a climate scientist, and moved to California. As the man on the radio used to say: Now you know the rest of the story.