All this thinking about the school bus began when friends of ours, who happen to work as teachers in public schools, told us that they wanted to make sure that they allowed their children to ride the bus to school. Since one of these parents works in the school that their children attend, they could easily drive their children to school themselves. But they think the experience of riding the school bus is important and good for their children. I’ve heard other parents echo those same beliefs, even dangling the whole “exciting” idea of riding the school bus like a carrot in front of new kindergarten kids. I think they are crazy. Here’s why…

Starting when I was 5 years old, in kindergarten, my horrible school bus experiences began. It all started just a few weeks into the beginning of school. On our bus rides home, some of the older kids (3rd or 4th grade?) began pressuring a little kindergarten girl and boy to kiss each other. I was just a bystander in this situation, but it made me intensely uncomfortable. Going to school and riding a bus was intimidating enough, but being forced to watch this harassment was terrible. The little girl’s feelings were obvious – she did not want to participate. But the pressure from the older kids was intense. This was probably the first time I was exposed to a situation were I was aware of some kind of sexuality going on. And of course I was alone, without my parent’s guidance. The bus driver, by the way, seemed totally oblivious to it all. It went on for weeks. I never told my parents about it. I was too embarrassed.

Fast forward about 4 years. This Mean Girl rode the bus with me. I’m not sure why she seemed to dislike me so much. Looking back, I think she had a variety of emotional problems that I didn’t fully understand at the time. Lots of other kids would make fun of her, although I never did. I was very shy, quiet, nice. Maybe that made me a good victim? But regardless of the cause, she disliked me. I don’t think I ever expected it to get past the “dislike” phase. But out of the blue one day, she slid into my seat on the bus. I was against the window and she was seated on the aisle. We had a lot of privacy because the bus had very high seat-backs. I doubt the driver could have seen more than the top of our heads. I was wearing long earings, which Mean Girl complimented. I was surprised – maybe she liked me, after all! How naive I was. Before I even knew what has happening, she had yanked my long hair downward toward the floor, so my head was practically between my knees. In her other hand, she had a firm hold on one of my earings. She told me that if I moved, she would yank my earing out. I was scared. My head hurt from the hair pulling and I was afraid that she would rip my earlobe if I resisted. She had me trapped in the seat, and no one could see what was happening to me. I can’t remember exactly how long this went on, or what she said to me during this time. What I remember is being powerless. Eventually my stop came, and she let me go without hurting me physically. My head was sore, but I was OK. But I still remember how powerless I was in those moments.

Fast forward another year. It was 5th grade and I had just entered the Middle School in my district, which covered 5th to 8th grades. I was still very young. Puberty had not hit me yet. The 8th graders that I went to school with were huge compared to me. I rode on a pretty crowded bus. Since there were rarely many seats, I often had to sit near the back of the bus, where a bunch of rowdy 8th grade boys would sit. One day, on the way home from school, I was sitting near the back of the bus when one of the tallest of the 8th grade boys slid into the seat next to me. This boy was very big and looked more like a high school kid. As he slid into the seat, I saw that a bunch of his friends were getting into seats all around me. I was confused at first when I glanced up at the guy, but I was also worried. I felt trapped. He started sliding in closer and closer to me in this weird sexual way with a funny look on his face. His friends were all watching and quietly chuckling. Then he started taking his shirt off. At this point I was panicking. I had no idea how far this might go, but I was both embarrassed and repulsed. I sort of hunched down and got as close to the window as possible. The boy had his shirt completely off and was rubbing his chest against me as much as he was able to. I think he said some sexual things to me, but I’ve blocked that out. Nothing else happened. He finally put on his shirt and got up and all his friends laughed and eventually walked back to their seats. I was humiliated and scared. I wouldn’t say I was assaulted, and yet this experience colored my entire year. For one thing, I was petrified of sitting anywhere near the back of the bus for the entire year. I was also unable to walk through the “8th grade hallway” at school for the entire year. This was pretty hard for me since that hallway connected many of the places I needed to walk to in school. When I was walking with friends that year and we got to that hallway, I’d make little excuses about why I needed to take another route. I think all my friends thought I was crazy, but I was too embarrassed to tell them why. I’ve thought about this experience many times since then, and I can still feel that boy rubbing against me and feel the panic inside.

Recently my sister told me about some things that have been happening to my nephews on the school bus. It seems that last year they had an abusive bus driver. The bus driver would get so angry at the kids that he would stop the bus and walk back and tell the kids he would hit them if they didn’t behave. Then he’d say things like, “Shut the fuck up!” to them. And he told several of them later that if they told on him that he’d, “fucking kill them”. The next day he would bring all the kids donuts. Then the cycle would repeat. He never actually hit any of them, but he did verbally terrorize them. None of the kids ever told on him. NONE. For months this went on. I can’t remember now how my sister ended up finding out about it. But she did. When she complained to the district, they interviewed the kids and eventually had the driver on that route replaced. But was the driver actually fired? NO! It seems the district has no power to have him fired because they get their drivers from a bus company. No one at the district seemed to care that the driver might very well be working at another school district tomorrow. This all took place last school year. This school year, my nephews went out to the school bus just like they always do for the first day of school in September. Guess who the driver was. The same guy!!

And just to be sure I’ve painted a full picture, the school district that all these things happened in wasn’t some “bad district” or anything (whatever that means). This district is known as a great school district. Not too large, in a pretty affluent area, excellent test scores, excellent graduation rate, excellent rate going on to colleges, excellent rates going on to Ivy League schools. The reason I mention this is that I sometimes think that parents in this lovely suburbia where I live like to delude themselves. They like to think that these kind of things don’t happen in their “good district”. After all, this is why they’ve paid an extra 100K for their house, right? These kinds of things happen on school buses everywhere, I am sure. And it’s not going to be taken care of by doing better background checks on bus drivers, or by putting larger mirrors or video imaging in the hands of the driver.

Look, I don’t plan to ever send my kids to school if I can help it, and my main reasons generally have nothing to do with the school bus. But when I hear parents harping about how exciting it is that their kids get to ride a school bus, I cringe. There is nothing particularly safe and exciting about letting your 5-year old child get on a bus with a bunch of strangers and have basically no supervision. It can be dangerous.

Now I was quick to be clear with my old friends – if ever M or J genuinely asked me if they could join a sport, I would certainly consider doing it. But otherwise, I don’t see any reason to go in that direction voluntarily.

Here are some of the reasons why I don’t plan to enroll M or J in a competitive team sport anytime soon:

I don’t want to have to watch the games. I know, totally selfish of me. But I’ll admit it anyway. In our family, we don’t watch sports games. I went to a Yankee game once as a child and was totally bored except for the moment a ball came flying into the audience and the idiot in the row in front of me stole the ball from the air 6 inches before it would have been caught by me. A 40 year old man stealing a ball practically from the hands of a 7 year old. I also attended many swim meets in high school, but that was just in devotion to a boyfriend who dumped me a year or two later. I could have been learning how to accomplish time travel, but instead I wasted hours sitting in chlorine-saturated air, watching people swim back and forth a million times, for some guy.

Competitive sports don’t fit into our lives. Part of the reason why we are homeschooling is that I want M and J to live their lives, and be a part of our lives, all the time. I don’t want to jump on the soccer-mom bandwagon and start carting them around to a million extra-curricular activities every day. Considering our “curricula” is our life, I’d be carting them around to something that is totally outside of normal life. Not that doing something outside of the normal isn’t sometimes fun, but driving back and forth to soccer practice doesn’t really seem like it would be fun for anyone right now. Which doesn’t mean that some day, soccer might be a part of M or J’s life. It just isn’t now. Again, if my kids someday have a love of sports games, I suppose that will become a part of our life. But I see no reason to usher it in right now, unprompted by us or our children.

You can learn the same lessons in real life that sports supposedly teach you, and you’d probably learn them better, and in a less artificial way, if you learned them in a real-life endeavor. Let’s take “teamwork”, for example. I don’t think you need sports to learn the value in teamwork. Why not join Habitat For Humanity instead? Or work, alongside your family, at a homeless shelter perhaps. Those activities teach you teamwork, and they also give you the satisfaction of knowing you did something real to make the world a better place. And building a house can be just as fun as kicking a ball around. Heck, we engage in teamwork every day just at home. It takes the cooperation of the whole family to keep the house running, and M and J learn that every day in a thousand little lessons, none of which I plan. I think it goes along with our whole homeschooling philosophy that M and J will learn those lessons much more meaningfully if they are not doing it in some institution that functions outside of life. And sports teams often resemble institutions, just like school does. And they are often filled with kids that go to school and believe in school. Kids that look to a teacher or coach to tell them what to do. Kids that follow the rules and believe that pink isn’t for boys. Kids that believe that it is important to win. Are these beliefs catching? If so, please forgive me if I don’t choose to sign my 4-year-old up to be bombarded by it just yet.

Competitive sports don’t give you lifelong opportunities. Most of the people that I know that participate in organized competitive sports are high school students, or sometimes college students. It is an activity that is very much associated with school. After school is over for these kids, not many of them continue to do competitive sports. I was talking to an acquaintance recently who is a member of the military and who works at a military academy. He was telling me that even in the military, they are seeing the value in other, non-competitive physical activities that will give recruits hobbies for the rest of their lives. Hobbies like bicycling for fun, hiking, mountain climbing, jogging, etc. These are activities that adults can readily do for fun, and will more likely be carried through people’s lives. So why should my homeschooled child be unduly concerned with participating in an activity that is mostly associated with schooling and will cease to be an issue for him once the “school years” are over? I sincerely doubt that my son, at the age of 40, will curse me because I didn’t cart him around to soccer once a week when he was 5. And yes, I do know a few adults that participate in competitive sports. But they are few and far between.

Competitive Sports = rewards and punishments. People cheer when you make a goal. They say, “Good Job!” When you missed the goal, people sigh, they show their disappointment. No matter how you cut it, there are winners and losers. Now, I know there are a lot of sports teams for kids that claim that they don’t focus on winning, but I basically don’t buy it. You can throw a party for both teams and pretend that there are no winners, but when it comes down to it, one team made more goals than the other. And isn’t making the goal the whole point? I believe that’s why they call it a “goal”. And obviously some fall short of that goal. I don’t like it. As a family, we don’t use rewards and punishments. (See Alfie Kohn).

We do athletic activities that the whole family can participate in. We do things as a family. We hike together. We go camping together. We run around the house and chase each other. We garden. We take walks in the evenings. We swim. Why would I want to voluntarily drop off my 4-year-old and surrender responsibility for him to a stranger? I believe that it’s important, especially in the early years, to keep your children continually close to you, at least as much as you are able to. M and J are rarely away from me and I like it that way. I believe M needs to know that his parents are right there when he needs them. Drop-off programs are not for us. (see Hold On to Your Kids).

I’m attuned to my kids, and I don’t see an interest. I suppose if I happened to have a kid that wanted to spend whole days kicking around a ball, I might consider asking someone to teach him more about something like soccer. Maybe. But I don’t see M being drawn to it. I’m not convinced that many 4-year-olds are naturally drawn to competitive sports. Yes, they love to play with balls and run around and climb. I do, however, see plenty of parents around who are practically programming their kids to be competitive and do sports. Parents that start teaching their 2-year-olds to hit a ball with a bat, or parents that start cheering the minute their baby gets a ball in a basket. No wonder the kids are so interested in organized sports – they are pandering to their parents’ cheers and learning to please practically from birth. There are some kids who are genuinely kinesthetic learners. But I suspect the parents of those kids often misconstrue their child’s need for learning through motion as a need for competition. I believe you can learn just as well through yoga as you can through soccer. And nobody loses in yoga.

I could probably come up with more reasons, but I don’t think I have to go on.  I know my kids might ask to be a part of a competitive team some day.  But right now, we’re going to continue having fun, tossing around a ball whenever the urge hits, and not playing the winner and loser game.  And someday, if my child is truly interested in a team sport, I suspect I’ll watch the game with at least some interest because I love my kids, and I’ll know it is an interest they are truly drawn to.  I promise. (and if I can’t summon the interest myself, I’ll at least pretend )

I like trying out food, especially if I’ve heard of them enough to wonder what the hell they might be. Case in point: the crumpet.

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate some things British – Monty Python, jacket potatoes (baked potatoes with toppings) and beer top on the list. Rasher sandwiches (butter, bacon & tomato – YUM) are also good and so is having tea 10 times a day. After college I spent one summer as a camp counselor and made a great friend over there named Scottie, who I had the joy of visiting later that year. His mother introduced me to one of the best-named dishes ever – ‘toad in a hole.’ While she was a proudly awful cook, they all took great joy in telling me of another fine British food – ‘spotted dick.’

But I digress.

I’d heard of the term ‘tea & crumpets’ sometime over the years, and when I saw it in my local grocery store, I had to try it. It looked interesting while in the package and kinda reminded me a of holier variant of the English muffin. I hoped this would be a bit of an adventure for my palate and hurried home.

Once home, I opened the package and found out is was weird & spongy, like a cross between a pancake and jello. I really mean spongy too – I can’ think of anything I’ve ever eaten of that texture before. I’m pretty sure if I threw it at a wall it would bounce back at least 1-2 feet.

The bottom was smooth and the top was chock full of holes. Not bothering to read up on it, I stuck two into the toaster, one for me and one for M, who was also excited by this bizarre bit of leavened protoplasm. His was to be a cheese toasty and was thus laden with – surprise – cheese. When the toaster was done, aside from being hot they seemed almost the same as before, except the bottom was a tad stiffer. I loaded mine up with butter & jam as that seemed to be the most traditional British option and we sat down to experience the culinary sensation that is the crumpet.

I would say that it tasted about as appealing as the picture above looks. M lasted one bite before he said he was full and left the rest of his for me. It was like eating a sponge, except it looked like Freddie Krueger’s cheek. It didn’t seem like food created by a human at all. I couldn’t really detect that it was any sort of baked good. It looked like some sort of leper flesh (no doubt assisted by my fine choice of strawberry jam). Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll ever eat a crumpet again, unless I happen to be hanging with Prince Charles and want to be polite, just like the peeps on the ‘Lonely Planet’ shows who eat beef testicles with a smile. I really wanted to like it, but it was just unappealing.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,â€? sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. …Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.â€? The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so … one-dimensional.

Why is it that these so-called parents don’t see the problem with this? What do they want their daughters to grow up to be? I’ve felt out of touch with the mainstream for awhile – the natural birthing / extended breastfeeding / cosleeping / homeschooling / unconditional parenting / ecologically conscious / non-CAFO-meat-eating / non-TV watching / finding Bratz repelling / house music listening demographic is rather small, after all . But every so often, I hear about something like this that makes me feel REALLY out of sync with mainstream society.

I don’t think I’m old and crotchety (yet) but this makes me wonder how much worse can things get? Are there more and more parents who just don’t think anymore? Is anything that’s popular and on tv automatically acceptable to the masses? Granted, this is a single example but it’s not a revelation (at least not since the Spur Posse stuff came to light years ago). I recall an article some time back that stated that oral sex in middle school was not unusual. I’ve heard of one school where some 8th-grade boys who are reputed to be sexually active wear pink t-shirts on Fridays. There seem to be enough parents who are either uncaring and/or ineffective. This socialization sounds like it’s laying the foundation for a future society that will probably make my skin crawl. However, the editorial is good from the view that there are others who won’t condone this kind of parenting.

I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.

But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem.

OK – the title over-dramatizes our life without mindless tv watching, but it was coincidental that our current subscription started the day I cancelled the satellite tv. They seemed to have paused a bit after cashing our check (a sweet $10 subscription that came out of nowhere) and sent 3 at once. I think we last had a subscription maybe 3 years ago, and it’s like welcoming an old friend back into the house. Except this friend never runs out of cool stories and let’s us decide which vacation slides to skip.