King’s Corner

For those of you looking to buya house, the one on the corner of our street just went up for sale.

For $189,000, you can pick up this 976 square foot, 2 bedroom, 1-story Craftsman style bungalow built in 1920.  I haven’t seen the interior, but the listing says it’s newly remodeled, and the garage out back does have the capacity to handle four cars (or one car and a sizable workshop).  This little charmer looks to be well taken care of, a classic, cozy home.  And with a fridge stocked with beer and a fire pit out back, I promise to be a great neighbor.

And I know that I lost a good number of people’s interest when I put “$189K” and “976 suare feet” in the same sentence.  Why spend so much on such a small house when the same money will get you a house twice the size in Chaska that was built in 2002?  Isn’t that a lot of money for such a tiny, old house?

Let’s put things into perspective, though.  You’re not just buying a house, you’re buying a lifestyle.  This is the case every time you would purchase a home, though.  And so many times it seems that people base their choice of homes more on how much square footage they can get for their money than looking at the house holisticly.  Sure, a little bit of consideration is given to broad things like the quality of the local school district or just how long of a commute you’ll have, but does anyone look at the kind of life you’re purchasing?

A series of books that I recommend and adhere to are the Not So Big House books by Minneapolis architect Susan Susanka.  She follows one basic rule, which is put your money into quality and useability instead of sheer size.  Consider the modern monster suburban domicle.  In it you can find a formal livingroom, a den, a family room, and a media room.  All of them are big and impersonal, and all of them have vast swaths of blank walls and skinny woodwork.  These behemoths have little to no character of their own, and it’s up to the homeowner to try and fill these rooms with enough stuff to actually make the place seem homey.  Susanka’s idea is that you instead create two rooms, which she calls simply a livingroom and an away room.  The livingroom is for just that, living.  Use furniture to create smaller subdivisions in the room for certain things, like a cluster of couches for conversation on one end and a table for games or homework or whatever else on the other, then use smart storage to keep things out of sight when you’re not using them.  The away room is just that, a smaller room that’s just as functional but meant for one or two people to just be alone in.

She also applies this concept to other places in the home.  Why have a formal dining room, informal eating space int he kitchen, a breakfast nook, and a kitchen island with bar stools?  Why build a four-bedroom house for a couple of empty-nesters?  You can take a room, give it multiple functions, and then take all that money you would have spent on square footage and give your house some character.  Maybe a stained glass window, or nice trim work, or some architectural feature that says, “this home is special”.  By focusing on a house that is more human-scale and less impersonal, you can divert funds away from getting that huge, impersonal home.

Not only do you have to think about the quality and character of the house itself, you do have to consider the three most important things about real estate: Location, location, location.  The obvious topics of conversation would be the aforementioned commute to work or what the school district is like, or possibly the crime rate, or whatever else.  I would rather focus on two things: How straight are your streets and how often can you leave your car at home?

I have found that a person’s quality of life is surprisingly dependent upon the answer to those two.  In my own neighborhood, I am able to just walk to 2 grocery stores, 3 coffee shops, over a dozen restaurants, 2 specialty grocers (one Latino and one Polish/Russian), a library, antique stores, 2 baby boutiques (one high-end, one second-hand), 2 pharmacies, a hardware store, dentists, banks, clinics… The list goes on and on.  And with the good old straight street grid, as opposed to the winding, twisting suburban street layout seen nowadays, it’s easy to walk about town.  Not only do I have all of these amenities close by, whether I walk or drive or bike to them, but I’m more likely to engage in the healthy act of walking when I have reason to.  Plenty of neighborhoods, new and old, have sidewalks and paths for walking, but it seems easier to get people to exercise when there’s more purpose than just walking for the sake of walking.

As an aside, a good majority of these business are locally owned, something that I support in that a larger portion I spend at these places actually stays in my community.  Most newer suburban neighborhoods only seem to have the option for residents to drive to vast swaths of strip malls and parking lots chock full of national chains and big box stores.

Please allow me to detour you to this site: www.WalkScore.com.  You can go ahead and enter your own address sometime, but right now let’s look at what information we can get on the two houses in question.  My block in Hopkins has a walk score of 80 out of 100, meaning it is highly walkable.  The house in Chaska? 10.  Sure, you can take a stroll around the neighborhood with no trouble, but if you’re out to enjoy the evening air and want a coffee or ice cream, well, grab your keys.  You can roll down the window if you want fresh air.

While I can just leave the car at home and walk quite often, I will admit that Hopkins does not have everything.  But, that’s what a suburb is.  It’s a smaller satellite city that crops up in the shadow of a much larger city with many more amenities, the local big city around here being Minneapolis.  Another thing to consider is multi-modal connectivity.  While I could just drive to places outside of Hopkins, I am also able to easily take a bus and, sometime in the foreseeable future, a light rail train line.  We are getting toward the fringe of the decent, frequent area of service out here in Hopkins, but it’s there.  I could go on about the environmental friendliness of busses and trains as opposed to cars, as well as other benefits such as not having to deal with what can be nightmarish traffic and parking, but I should/could save that for a different day.  Needless to say, if you head on out to purchase that house in Chaska then your only option for mass transit are the express busses from nearby park-and-ride lots during rush hours.

I did sort of write this with a specific audience in mind.  A friend of a friend (well, a couple) is looking to purchase a home right now, and they’re looking to move out to St. Michal, another far-flung exurb.  Right now, they rent a place in Minnetonka, and while they’re outside the 694/494 loop their proximity to the mass transit that reaches out there means that they can have jobs in two different places and still survive with just their one car.  Plus, they’re still in proximity to friends and places that they like to frequent.  The limited conversations I’ve had with them on this have led me to the conclusion that the only considerations they’ve made in their home search are biggest-home-for-your-dollar and the quality of school districts.  It seems that they haven’t considered that it will take an extra half hour to get to the places and friends they now see frequently, and that this seemingly less expensive home they’re looking at has the hidden cost of a need for a second car plus the extra gas needed to go the extra distances.  Sure, the house is nice, but in the end is the added disconnect and expense worth it?

Enter another couple that I know, a couple that did take the plunge and purchase that bigger, “better” home way out in the boonies.  Whereas visits to their previous apartment were fairly frequent, as traveling from one suburb to another is no problem, I have yet to stop by their house on a strictly social call since helping them move in.  Driving longer distances is indeed more of an inconvenience than people realize at first, and it takes just as long for me to get to their house as it does to get to my parents’ place in St. Cloud.  That’s a little over an hour of driving, and it seems that the people on either end aren’t too keen on making that effort.  The drive gets long, frequent visits tedious, and people get resentful that nobody wants to make the effort to get together anymore.  My wife and I have friends in far-flung suburbs that we just don’t get around to seeing because, as much as society says driving a car is the ultimate expression of American freedom, getting in the car and driving is actually a chore.

Being able to walk and take mass transit does make a positive difference in life.  Prioritizing the quality of your home over the size of your home also makes a positive difference.  So, as I said, come buy the house down the block.  I’ll offer you a beer and a seat by the fire pit out back, or we can walk down to the movie theater or the bar some night then stumble home without risking those pesky DUIs.  It’ll be a good time, I promise.

I had read Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn and written a paper on it for a college course in classroom management in 2001.  In lieu of posting a half-baked blog entry, I am resorting to regurgitating this old college paper that seems to have some relevance in my life now.  I’m not currently teaching a classroom, but I am teaching and raising my daughter.

Of course, now that I’ve re-read this paper (and might even pick up the book again), I’m starting to rethink how I’m teaching my daughter.  This may expand into me opening up all the old child psychology books.  Here I had dusted off this old thing to try and make my life easier…

Punished By Rewards

Okay, Matt, all you have to do is get through this first chapter and you can wind down with the television for a bit.

That was the first thing that ran through my head as I initially opened Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards.  Needless to say, I became very critical of my own educational practices and teaching strategies throughout the course of reading this book.  Kohn shakes up the very foundation of many deeply revered beliefs in American society, and I am inclined to shimmy along with.

The first thing to crumble the walls of my previous ideals was the enormous amount of proof against the use of rewards.  First, it’s insulting to think that the entire system of using rewards as motivation is based on research with animals and mentally imbalanced people.  Second, it’s eye-opening to see that those were the only cases in which the results were even mildly successful and that any research done with normally functioning human beings showed just how damaging rewards are.

It makes sense that Kohn’s arguments against rewards include such things as the lack of a relationship between rewards and the behavior or action that they are intended to enforce and that using rewards only works for so many instances.  What surprised me was that the use of rewards killed people’s interest in the rewarded actions.  To think that offering a reward would make a person eventually less interested in the desired action seemed ludicrous.

But the proof is there, as I now see in my own recreational writing.  As a freshman in high school I started a ‘zine by the title of The Non-Conforming Conformists’ News.  While the contents are hardly newsworthy and seldom of any value except entertainment, it is something that I have happily labored over during the past eight years of my life.  Unfortunately the act of writing and presenting my work in an appealing manner has lost its charm, as the current issue has been in a state of incompleteness for a year now.  Plus, much of what has gone into this issue seems forced.  Writing to a reward has taken from the joy of writing for the sake of writing.

At this point I will interject with a few thoughts that came to mind often while writing this paper: How many pages am I up to?  Is the length sufficient enough to appease my professor?  If I use this word instead of this other one, will I sound more intellectual and therefore more deserving of a good grade?  Despite my acceptance of Kohn’s views, I am still getting hung up on all the extrinsic motivators.  Worse still, I know that once this paper is graded and returned, I will go over it again and pick out just where I could have done a much more satisfactory job.  Only after the pressure is gone will I produce a better, more well-thought result.

Perhaps the part that hit home the most was Kohn’s words on page 80: “Some people, for a variety of reasons, grow to depend on an externally imposed structure to the point that they wait until the last possible minute before starting a task.”  Indeed, I did not pick up Kohn’s book until a few days before this paper was due, and I finally sat down to type this paper shortly before 2:00, giving me three hours to complete it.  But I’ve played the game long enough to know that I can get away with this, and 99.9% of the time I do.  By eliminating the hand-written first draft and editing as I go along, often stopping in the middle of paragraphs to review earlier ones, I can condense the entire process of writing into one single burst of frenzied typing to a deadline.  It’s not a proud thing to admit, but I feel that it’s something that I will have to own up to in order to change.

I am living proof to myself that rewards are harmful.  I just needed something to point the proof out to me.

Something else that came to mind during the course of reading Kohn’s text was the essay that I have to write for my application to the student teaching program.  The entire paper is to revolve around my own beliefs and abilities as an educator.  Already it has gone through several revisions since my original final draft from a year ago.  This book has perhaps made the largest impact on it, causing me to make modifications of my methods of teaching, evaluation, and classroom management.  I’ve also heaved a sigh of relief for the various factors that caused me to delay my student teaching.  This essay is essentially all these schools have to go on to decide if I am worthy of being accepted into their community to be fostered into a full-fledged teacher.  What if I had sent the now erroneous original version?  What would the school officials say when SCSU sent them a student teacher whose values differ, sometimes drastically, from what they expected to get?

And just what are these changes?  I think I may have already determined that it’s far too late in the game to change my strategy as far as my own education goes.  I must endure this punishment of rewards, more so in some classes than others, in order to make it out of college.  Indeed, I often find myself saying that.  “I’m just at this university (or job, as is the case with my menial part-time work) to get a degree and get on with real life.”  There is my mistake: My education is my real life.  I treat my education as a hoop to jump through to become an educator.  The irony is almost painful.

I have resolved to change my methods of teaching, as I said earlier.  I am partial to Kohn’s suggestion of offering only two options for grading: A and Incomplete.  I find this to be a novel idea, and I’m eager to see its effectiveness.  The thought that just telling students that the teacher sees their work as either on par with their capabilities, and only their capabilities, or not seems like just the thing to foster, or rekindle, a desire to learn.  Also, I think that the largest thing that I have to watch is my language.  I don’t think that, at any point in my life up until now, did I think that “Good work!” and “I see why you’re a straight-A student!” were swear words.  Mental note: I must edit my “101 Ways to Praise Children” card.

The time is now 4:00.  I am going to save this paper to my disk and take it home to print it, as well as take care of my weekly rituals before arriving for class in an hour.  I doubt that I will do much more than scan the paper for grammatical errors, being as I tend to see them better when they’re on paper instead of the computer screen.  I will hand it in and wait for its return next week, and some back burner in my mind will ponder the grade it will receive.  Old habits die hard.  But, for the benefit of the students I will have in the future, die they must.

I am a father that stays home to take care of his daughter while my wife goes off to work each day. I am proud to be able to do this, and yet I need to defend being a career father on a regular basis. Yes, I realize the supposed abnormality of our situation, but still… Why should I have to explain why I’ve walked away from the workplace to raise my child? And why do I get the impression from people that I’m explaining this to that I should feel ashamed of doing so?

My wife and I were both fortunate to have a parent stay home and raise us, and for both of us it was our mothers. We both had parents that saw the importance of raising children themselves instead of farming out the work to daycare centers. I don’t wish to knock daycare providers, but there is no substitute to having at least one parent actively involved with their children for the better part of the day. So, not only are we raising our daughter as we see fit because we’re not sending them off to daycare where she would be forced to conform to some other person’s ideals and values, we always have at least one of us on hand when she does something special or has a “first”.

At some point between the Baby Boomers and our generation (X? Y? What is my generation called, anyway?), it became socially acceptable for women to be in the workplace. The unfortunate thing was that not only did that not seem to reciprocate to men staying at home, but it was deemed necessary that both fathers and mothers leave the family and join the workplace. Starting with America’s post-WWII boom the middle class lifestyle has been determined to be the sprawling suburban home, two cars, and a bunch of expensive toys to impress your friends and family. Somewhere along the way that life became unsustainable on one income, and part of accepting women into the workplace seems to be in small part to bring in more money so we can all sustain our consumer culture and keep that money flowing up the ladder to the pockets of the owners of the corporations promoting and selling all the crap. You can find some side rant on the current economic mess to insert here, but I’m more looking at a moral side of it.

The in and out of it is that in our want for a bigger, better house with all the trimmings we’ve given up the opportunity to actually parent our children. It’s like we’re inching toward the world set out in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where all children go straight into daycare from the day they’re born and everyone needs to work so they can afford to cover every wall in their livingroom with a television screen so we can have our shows and (more so) advertisements enveloping us in glorious three dimensions from all sides. It seems ridiculous to me that people define good parenting and good living as the ability to buy stuff instead of the ability to physically be there for your child.

When my daughter was born, we realized that what we wanted as parents was to be there. And we knew that in order to make this happen we would have to look at where we were with our careers and see what sacrifices we would have to make. That’s right, to raise your children right you have to make sacrifices in your own life. And it seemed apparent that myself, a substitute teacher at the time, would be the one to walk away from my career for a time while my wife, who has her dream job at a major international corporation, was in a better position to be the breadwinner.

Other things had to go, had to change. Our rental townhome in Eden Prairie? For not much more a month we could own a house to raise our child in. Our two cars? We could manage with one. Nights out on the town? We’d have to cut back. The latest, greatest stuff? If we really need something, there’s avenues for which we can get the equivalent for less or free.

We found a house in an urban location not just because of the amenities offered to us as adults (we have bars, restaurants, and entertainment within walking distance) but as parents. Within easy walking distance of our house there are two community schools (the closer one unfortunately is closed, but hopefully the district gets in a better financial position so they can reopen it within the next five years), four playgrounds and parks, the library, and a children’s theater company. It’s not a huge, modern home, and there’s been a number of questionable design choices in remodeling over the years and abuse from uncaring renters that left us with some cosmetic cleanup to take care of over the years. We don’t have a great room, television room, and formal parlor, we have a livingroom that functions as all three. It’s called a livingroom because that’s where we live. We don’t have four bathrooms, and we’re lucky that this old house came with two. Our house has just two useable bedrooms right now, with one huge room upstairs and an unfinished basement both reeking of potential for when we decide one child isn’t enough. And what we lack in unnecessary square footage we gain in comfortable coziness. Vaulted ceilings are for office lobbies, not livingrooms.

The walkability of our neighborhood and its connectivity to the rest of the Twin Cities Metro Area via mass transit has made the decision to become a one-car family a lot easier. We weren’t making car payments, but we have saved a lot on car insurance, gas, and maintenance by only having to pay for one car. All I had to do was make two adjustments. One was to start shopping more locally (something I try to advocate anyway), and with a plethora of mom-and-pop shops in walking or biking distance I’ve been able to keep more of our money in the community instead of sending it off to some big company headquarters elsewhere. The other is to adjust to taking mass transit when I need to extend my range, something that takes a bit of a different mindset to do after years of automobile use (mostly I had to buy a watch and learn the ins and outs of the schedules). Any travel I need to do by car can either wait until my wife is home from work or I take her to work to use the car during the day. There is maybe one time every other month where we look at where we need to go and when and wonder how we’ll manage to go separate ways with just one car. But when one looks at the cost of insuring the extra car and realizes it’s the same cost as diapering our child, the cost of feeding the gas tank is the cost of feeding the kid, and that regular trip for an oil change is every three months, just like the co-pays for doctor visits and vaccinations every three months, well, I’d rather pay to provide for the twenty pounds of live, growing human than the ton of dead metal. The slight inconvenience is bearable.

We’ve also had to cut back on our recreational spending, but that’s expected when one has to divert funds to diapers and formula.  And I’ve really wanted to go to Gusto lately, but can’t justify spending near a hundred bucks on dinner for my wife and I.

All of this was stuff we would have had to do whether it was myself or my wife staying home with the kid. That’s what happens when you bring a child into the world and go down to one income. A family has to eschew frivolities that eat up money, something that’s not too tough when one adjusts to finding enjoyment in experiences instead of purchases. But not only are we not living up to the so-called “American Dream” as it’s defined today, we’ve got this abnormality in that it’s my wife that brings home the bacon whereas I am the one that stays home and cooks it, which is where I had started off.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s tough. You have to do things like start blogging just to make sure you still know how to put ideas together and commit them to paper (or the screen, what have you). You seek out playgroups so that you have the company of other fathers that have made the leap into the realm of full-time caretakers of their children. You take odd night jobs here and there for the dual purpose of making ends meet and having real, adult conversations with coworkers. You have to put up with the stereotype of the inept father. Remember such gems as “Mr. Mom” and “Three Men and a Baby”? And then there’s the good old traditional “Me Provider, Her Nurturer” roles of yore that dictate that I need to be the one out in the workplace while my wife is home caring for child and home.

If you read this out loud, be sure to scratch yourself and do your best Neanderthal grunting when you say, “Me Provider, Her Nurturer.”

Maybe there’s some perception that I’m less of a man for being the one to stick around the house for my daughter.  As if playing with her and her dolls, changing her diapers, preparing her food, and everything else implies that I’m more June than Ward.  Or perhaps people look at me and think that I was a failure at my career, or maybe I was laid off and I spend my time babysitting and sending off resumes and eventually I’ll be right back on track and in my rightful place at some job.  Very few people ever seem to consider that I am doing this by choice.

Let me make one thing clear: No matter how much I would love to have more regular adult contact, no matter how much I would love to contribute more to our bank account, nothing is more important and rewarding than being here for my daughter. Nothing. I have been here to see her grow, to teach her basic skills, to get her interested in books and building toys, to take her outside and let her explore, to make sure she’s eating right, to kiss her owies and hold her when she goes beyond her capabilities and falls in the process, to be the parent that she needs right now. The sacrifices are worth it.

And my wife and I believe we’re raising our child to be a better person because of it.  It’s what our parents did for us, and it’s one of the best lessons about parenting that they could have ever taught us.