TL;DR Kakooma, Krypto and KenKen

So, hey! A few nights ago, in the shower*, I came up with a bunch of ideas that I wanted to write about and I actually wrote them down. This is a small miracle in and of itself, so I'm not going to harp on the fact that one of the topics on the list is a total mystery to me. With luck I'll remember what it was I wanted to say.

I do remember this one, though, so I thought I'd start here. Uh, this is turning out longer than I thought, so if you'd like to just skip to the games, scroll down a bit. I won't be offended†.

It starts with a common complaint I hear from parents and from teachers, too: kids don't memorize their math facts anymore! They don't do flash cards or mad minutes or "around the world" (which is a dreadful game) and it's all about just "feeling good about doing math!" Sheesh. What a bunch of whiny snowflake children. When we were kids, we had to memorize our math facts! And walk uphill both ways to school.

I will kindly request that you stop it. Please. Memorizing without understanding is pretty much useless. If you don't get how math works, or how to apply it, all that memorization isn't going to help you. If you're like a lot of people, you've forgotten a lot of it by now anyway. And even though, yes, you DO have a calculator with you all the time, if you don't know what numbers to put in, and what operations to choose, math facts aren't going to help you.

Common Core, despite its detractors (who I'm not going to link to because they don't deserve any more traffic than they get) is a pretty good way to teach math**. It's slower than the way we learned, but taught well with the time kids need to understand it, it's a better way. Common Core focuses on understanding how numbers work, what patterns exist in numbers and operations, and figuring out the relationships between all kinds of numbers. The plan is that developing this understanding and being immersed in math will lead students to knowing math facts.

This is where it kind of falls apart. With Common Core, students do seem to come out with this deeper understanding, and they have multiple strategies for solving problems (which is incredibly important) but many are still pretty slow on just knowing their math facts. And after a point, around grade 5, this starts to really become a problem.

Kids who have not internalized the patterns inherent in times and addition tables start to struggle, a lot, to understand fractions and later, algebra. If an equation has a 84 and a 7, a child who has a real understanding of how times tables work should immediately figure out that there is a 12 in that problem somewhere. Students who don't take much longer, tediously pounding out guesses or trying to apply an algorithm they don't really understand (and thus can't fix if they bungle the formula.)

You could think of it like this: my daughter knows how to spell and is familiar with a QWERTY keyboard. She mostly sorta knows where the keys are. But to sit and type out her ideas is tediously slow because the positions of the letters aren't just part of her. She still has to hunt and peck, which makes creative writing, a task she enjoys, into a slog. She understands how to make the words, but she lacks fluency.

That's where the games come in. Fluency games.

GAMES. Not flashcards or speed races that pit kids against each other (Hey! Let's all give kids more reasons to hate the gifted girl and pity the slow thinker! No.)

All three of these games improve mental-math fluency, are level-able and most of all, are fun. I encourage students to challenge themselves, not their neighbor, and focus on their own improvement.

Kakooma: 18 levels each with +, x, negative numbers, and fractions. Played solo. Timed. I don't recommend the app or the "pretty" version of the game, because it crashes.

Starting with addition: In each box (or hex, octagon, etc.) there are several numbers. Two will add up to a 3rd number. Click on it. Once you've solved all the puzzles at the edges, the answers will create a 2nd-level Kakooma, and you need to find which two of those add up to a 3rd.

Multiplication is similar, except that two numbers will multiply to a 3rd. For the 2nd level, it becomes an addition Kakooma.

Negatives is just addition, but it throws negative numbers into the mix. Fractions is also addition, but with mixed fractions.

KRYPTO: Level-able by increasing or decreasing the number values available, eg. 1 - 10, 1- 18, 1 - 25. Playable solo or with an entire class.

You can play this with a deck of cards, a set of "everything math" cards, or with a traditional krypto deck. If you'd like to print your own, here's a set.  You lay out 5 cards in a row, and then a 6th card as the "target." Players use all 5 numbers with +, - x and / to create an equation to reach the target.

For younger students, you can also level it by having students create an equation out of 3 or 4 of the cards. For older students, require them to correctly write out the single equation that uses all 5 numbers to reach the target. (requires an understanding of PEMDAS.)

KenKen: This game is a little different because it requires both fact fluency and logic. Think sudoku with math facts thrown in. It's a lot to explain, and the website does it better than I do, so just check out the link. There are a multitude of good apps, too. Goes from super-easy 3x3 to fiendishly difficult 9x9. For a gazillion printable ones, look here: Crazy Dad Inky Puzzles.

Try the games. They're fun! And if you're feeling brave, challenge your kid to beat you at them.

*Yeah, you probably didn't need to know that, but whatever, I already wrote about it, so there it is.
**It's not perfect, but that's another post.
† I'm well aware that this entire post could have been 10 words long. But I like to write, too, and I do know where all the letters are.

It's NaNoWriMo (NotGonHapNo)

While showering I remembered that it's going to be November in an hour and I still don't have a Great American Novel in my head to write for NaNoWriMo. Long ago* I thought that might be a cool goal for myself but now I'd settle for remembering to write down the cool ideas I think of while in the shower. Seriously, I need to start keeping handy those bathtub crayons they have to amuse kids during baths. There should be adult versions of those things, like they have adult footie pajamas now. Not that I want those. Those make your feet all sweaty, if you ask me**.
I digress.
So I'm not writing a novel, and likely never will have that as an actual goal. I'm okay with that, though, partly because I read this excellent post not too long ago about a better way to think about goal setting and, well, it's resonated with me. I don't know that I'm any better at achieving things because of it, but I've been less frustrated. Maybe.
So instead of creating a goal I know I'm not going to achieve, maybe this month I'll just set out to write in my blog a few days a week.
Here's what I want to write about:***

3 math games teachers should be playing with their students every day
10 reasons not to do improv in your classroom, and 1 reason you should
The goal of education is growth, not getting the kids to hit a target
DIY Nanofictionary
Common Core in English
Giving the "Personal Narrative" a rest for Pete's sake. (You're making my kid a worse writer and boring everybody to death.)
Drabbles and the art of being a Scottish writer
Why your student can tell you a 20 minute story but only write one sentence (and an illegible one at that.)
Choosing positive
Quit expecting miracles: I didn't learn how to write a real paragraph till 10th grade
Now that you've got that out of your system, how do you plan to solve the problem?
It's all about the love of learning. Everything else is secondary.
It's all about the love, but the process is a close second.
Reaching kids where they are: Experimenting (science), storytelling (language), solving puzzles (math) and playing games (all of the above)

I never intended this to be a blog about education, and I still don't, but this is what I want to write about now, so I will. If it turns into something great, I can port it into a more education-y sounding blog.
As I write these posts, I'll try to remember to come back an hotlink them, so they're easy to find. And it'll help me keep track of how many I've actually done.
If any of my 3 followers want to suggest topics, feel free. Even better, write your own post and I'll link to it.
Happy November, y'all.

*before I had children, or a career. Yes, I know there are women who have both children and a busy career and still write great novels, but I am never going to be one of them.
**If you do like them, then go you! It's cool to like different things.
***And yes, I thought of these in the shower. As soon as I got out, I wrapped up in a towel and wandered around till I could find pen and paper. (My phone was dead, so dictating it into Keep wasn't an option.)

If You're Not Interested in Gifted Ed, This Will Probably Be Boring

It's 1 AM and I'm not sleeping, even though it's summer and I'm officially "off," and should have no worries whatsoever.
You know that isn't true.
Tomorrow I need to be up at 7 so that I can drop DD at a friend's house while J drops DS at day camp so that I can go to professional development where I will learn how to create online classes for my students.
Teachers have it so easy.
This post isn't about that. It really isn't. It's about students. For the past 17 years I've taught gifted kids and I absolutely love them. I love how their brains work, I love how they don't work, too, sometimes and I love how they are interested and interesting. Maybe all kids are like that. I don't know. I've only truly worked with the gifted ones.*
I've been teaching in a "pull out" program for many years, where the gifted kids come to my class one day a week and we work on things like Thinking Skills, and learning how to research and present, how to solve problems and how to create new ones and how to work together as a team (for the love of all that is holy will you stop arguing already?!) and a variety of other skills that aren't really delineated at any particular grade level, but they really ought to be at every grade level.
Those are the skills that every other discrete skill set should be focused on improving, but we tend to lose sight of the big picture when we're all focused on test questions that, by the nature of testing, have to focus on the little, easily measurable things.
But this post isn't about testing, either.
It's about how our model for teaching gifted kids has changed and I'm now going to be "supporting" students and their teachers in the regular classroom, with the aim of having those students be challenged every day. We're following this model that seems to be working well out in Arizona, and checking out how it works in other districts and doing our best to figure it out as we go, but all of us are getting the question: what exactly are we supposed to do?
This is what this post is about and why I'm awake after 1:00 in the morning.
I took a shower to see if maybe that would make me sleepy and that was probably where I went wrong. I do a lot of thinking in the shower, and what I started to think about is the number of times I've been asked if I'm supposed to be helping challenge kids just in math, or is it just math and reading or...what is our focus, really?
That's a good question. What is our focus?
I've had multiple answers from multiple sources but I think, bizarrely, that just maybe our department needs to sit down and do something I truly detest doing and usually find a phenomenal waste of time: Define our mission, and our goals.
No, really.
Way back when I started in my district, we had four broad, overarching goals for our department. I recently stumbled across it and recycled it and now I wish I hadn't because they were elegantly crafted by some amazingly smart and dedicated women who Knew. Their. Stuff. when it came to gifted education. These goals spoke to not just striving to develop deep thinkers and problem solvers, but to bringing students to the realization that there is a big, big world out there and an even bigger one inside of them and they need to learn how to unlock all of it if they are going to suck the marrow out of life.  A subsequent leader discarded these goals in favor of more "curricularly aligned" goals, which could still include problem solving, but the larger picture started to get lost.
Now we're down to wondering if we're here to support just math and reading only.†
Our model has changed, our jobs have changed, the technology is changing by the minute and not one of us can say "This is the big picture. This is what I'm here to help you do."
As a "big picture," whole-to-part thinker, this is keeping me up at night.
As much as I hate to say it, we need a mission statement.
Our district has one, and I think, if we all took it to heart and really honestly tried to follow it, we'd tell the State of Ohio Board of Education and our Legislature to take their "value-added" tests** and stick them where the sun don't shine because we are too damn busy teaching our students how to be prepared for a world not one of us can imagine and ain't nobody got time for teaching to the damn tests.††
It's time we sat down as a department and asked ourselves what is the big picture, and what our mission should be. Is it challenging kids in math and reading, or is it helping them figure out how to be successful as gifted people in a world that is often not built for them? Is it all of the above?

There's a lot more to unpack here, like "why should gifted kids get all this stuff and not everyone else?" and "are gifted kids really that different from other kids? Why should they get something special?" and "do gifted kids really exist?" and....well, lots of other things I'm not going to write about here because this is long enough already.

It's almost 2 now, and I have to be up in 5 hours. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll spend some of it sleeping.

Goodnight.

*that's not entirely true. I have taught non-gifted kids, and found them, in general, so be less intriguing for me than gifted ones. I'm sure I'm equally puzzling to them.
†as if that's even possible. Show me a science, social studies or problem solving lesson that involves neither math nor language skills and I'll show you a blank piece of paper.
**based on a model for agriculture. Seriously. Agriculture. (if the link doesn't work, try loading it up in an "incognito" browser.)
††ok, so this post is sorta about testing, too. I lied. Sue me.

Teaching the Fundamentals Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does

I keep seeing memes float about on Facebook about how the damn libruls have kicked God out of schools, or how the ACLU beats children for praying in school or most recently, how a conservative think tank is proposing to a very welcoming administration the idea the public funds should be going towards religious schools and "bringing God back into the classroom."

I usually post short responses to these statements, but I've grown tired of typing the same thing over and over. So I thought I'd write a blog post and just link to it instead. It'll save wear and tear on my fingers.

The real question isn't: Should God be allowed in school? 

It's: Should the government be allowed to force your child to worship the god(s) of its choice?

Because that's what we're talking about.

Stay with me a moment. If you are mad because some liberal kicked God out of your child's classroom, tell me, how did they do that? Does the teacher stand at the door and tell your kid "No believing in God in here!" or "If I catch you praying, you'll be sent to the office!"

Of course not. 

Every child with a belief in God brings that belief with her. As the joke goes, as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school. 

Imagine for a moment that the State mandates prayer in school. Great, right? A win for conservatives! Except, they decide to mandate Buddhist prayer. Or Islamic prayer. Or Satanic prayer. Or Jewish prayer. Or Catholic prayer. Or Presbyterian prayer. Or an Atheist moment of silent reflection. And your child is none of those things. What then? 

Well, says the State, your child can just sit respectfully. Or leave the room. Or do something else that marks him as different from his peers.

Life's hard enough without the teacher being the one calling our your kid as the "weirdo," don't you think?

Prayer and belief in God has always been in public classrooms across America. Always will be. It just isn't lead by the government. It's there because your children bring it with them, not because the teacher forces it on them.

Think about it. Or pray on it. Or meditate or whatever else you choose to do, and not because the government told you to. If you are an American, that's one of your fundamental rights.

It's a right I want for my children, too.

Don't you?

To Governor Kasich, About His Latest Brainstorm for Teachers

Dear Governor Kasich ,

Recently you put forth a budget containing a requirement that all teachers spend part of their professional development time at an "on-site work experience" with a local business or chamber of commerce. (If you'd like to read up on it, check here.) I'm sure you realize it is being poorly received by teachers across the state. I thought perhaps some clarifying questions might be in order, to help you understand our concerns.

First, what are the objective and goals of this professional development? You see, when teachers create plans for students, we always have to have the goal of the lesson in mind. Otherwise, how could we possibly know what we're trying to accomplish? It isn't very clear at all what you're trying to achieve.
Second, I'd like to know exactly when you'd like these experiences to happen? During the school day, so I have to have to charge the district for a sub? How about during one of my professional development days, which means I'd have to forego PD that is actually relevant to my teaching? Maybe you'd prefer I do it on my own time? Between work, lesson planning, grading and everything else I need to do, my own time is pretty precious, so you'd better have a very compelling reason that these "on-site work experiences" are necessary.
Third, I'm interested to know how, exactly, our already overworked professional development staff is going to secure these experiences with local businesses? Our district alone has over 1000 teachers. Do you really believe that the local banking call center, quick oil change station or dental office really wants to have a teacher who has no background, interest or skills in that area sitting around their office, garage or factory floor for a day?
I'm sorry, Governor Kasich, but this entire plan is poorly laid out, without the necessary goals established, needed materials provided or any provisions whatsoever for measuring the effectiveness of plan.

Still, don't ever let it be said that I'm not game to try something new, even if it's not well thought out. So, I have a proposal for you. A fair swap. I'll go spend my professional development time at a local business if you and every other elected official in the state of Ohio must go spend an entire day at an "on site work experience" at a local school. Mind you, this isn't a dignitary's visit, or a walk-though where you're guided through classrooms by the Superintendent. This is a WORK EXPERIENCE. Each of you will create, teach and evaluate the effectiveness of lessons you conduct throughout a school day. You'll come on time for duty and not leave till everything is graded and you're caught up on any correspondence from parents, colleagues and administrators. An on-site work experience as a teacher.

We'll be happy to provide you copious weblinks to curriculum, resources and activities to help you plan. But you'll have to put it all together yourself.  In case you were wondering, the goal of the experience would be to help you understand what it is you seem so hell-bent on destroying, and to show you the difficulty (and the joy) of the work we do every single day.

Because right now, I think you haven't got a clue.

Sincerely Yours,
Disapproving Kitty

TL;DR: Disabled People Deserve Independence, Too.

Many years ago I had a student named Justin. He was a uniquely talented writer and poet, with a sense of humor and sensitivity that were far beyond his years. Also, he had cerebral palsy. He was the first student I'd ever had who used a wheelchair.
While I'm hopeful that he learned a thing or two from me, I know for certain that *I* learned a ton. I learned that the world is not very kind to kids as different as Justin. Crippled and gifted? Whaaaaaa?
I'm afraid that a lot of us failed him then, to give him all he deserved, and as it turns out, we still are. Failing him, I mean.
Every couple of years, apparently, it's necessary for him to go speak on behalf of all the people who need aides to help them do all those things the rest of us take 100% for granted, like, say, using the toilet alone. I wanted to join him as he went to testify, along with 20 of his friends (whom he never would have met if it weren't for aides that allow him to go to college.)

I can't go, but I can write some testimony for the hearing.

In case you're wondering, it's for rule 5123:2-9-03 (Home and Community-Based Services Waivers - Limit on Number of Hours an Independent Provider May Provide Home and Community-Based Services in a Work Week).  You can read about it here: http://bit.ly/2k5qhLt. It's pretty dry and reasonable sounding until you imagine: what if I had to live only where I could find 5 people who were reliable and capable and willing to be my aide for not all that much money? And if I can't do that, then I have to rely on my family to do it for free? Still sound good?
Yeah.
Didn't think so.

Here's what I wrote.

Dear Ms. Phillips and Members of the Hearing Committee,

My name is Rachel Nelli, and I am a public school teacher of 18 years, all of it in the great state of Ohio. One of my most memorable students was a young man named Justin Martin, who has CP. Recently, he brought to my attention that the Federal government has mandated that aides for the disabled must be paid overtime. Ohio’s Department of Developmental Disabilities, in response, is creating a new rule to mandate that overtime for aides be illegal, so that we won’t have to foot the bill.
Tell me then, please, how much would it cost for you to give up some of your freedoms that you take for granted every day?
How much to be able to get dressed in the morning? Make your breakfast?
Tie your shoes?
Use the bathroom by yourself?
How much is your independence worth to you?
How much is it worth to you to travel for more than 8 hours so you could do your job, visit your family or take a vacation?
How much is it worth to you to be able to get out of bed at night to use the bathroom on your own?
A dollar?
Ten?
A hundred?
What would you do if you could never again choose to live somewhere where providers
weren’t easy to come by? Or if you wished to travel or work or have any kind of independence at all where you wanted to have it, just like everybody else?
How much do you deserve your independence?
I shouldn’t have to ask you that question. You should be appalled that I would even question your right to live your life the way you wish to live it.
I also shouldn’t have to ask you why you think that another law-abiding, hard-working (and he works harder than anybody I know) American should not have the same rights and independence you take for granted.
If you would not give up any of those freedoms I mentioned above, then you have no right whatsover to deny them to a disabled person. We are either a society where all men are created equal, or we are a society content to have second-class citizens. The latter is unacceptable.
And please, don’t talk to me of money.
You are fortunate enough to be addressed today by one of the finest minds I ever had privilege to teach. I cannot imagine what his life would have been if our nation hadn’t decided that children with disabilities had the same right to an education that every other child had. When I went to school, and likely when you did, too, kids in wheelchairs didn’t go to regular school. Kids with cerebral palsy went to a special school where they and all the differently-abled were warehoused and locked away with no independence and few freedoms. IDEA meant that not only did Justin go to regular school, he got into the gifted program. He. Is. Brilliant.

Educating “those kids” costs a fortune. So does caring for “those people” when they grow up. We do that because we are ALL created equal and endowed with the right to pursue happiness, and nowhere in our laws or in our moral code should we say “except when it’s not convenient.”
Because we know it is right to spend money to afford the disabled the same opportunities we take for granted is how I got to meet Justin. I had the privilege of teaching him, and learning from him how unequal we still are. Access to aides 24/7 is what he needs to come close to having the kind of life you and I expect for ourselves, and for our own children.
If you vote today to deny Justin the caregivers he needs, then you are denying him the very freedoms you grant to yourself. Is the amount you are saving worth his freedom? Would it be worth yours? Would you give up your independence, or that of your own child to save that money? I suspect the answer is a resounding “no.”
Before Justin was my student, I was blissfully and shamefully unaware of what it is like to be disabled in this world. How you can work for the DoDD and not already know this I do not know, but I ask you to listen and learn. As a teacher, I tell you this man has information you need, because without it you are going to fail this test. Fortunately for you there is only one question: Does Justin deserve to have the same independence as you?

Please, don’t fail.

Sincerely,
Disapproving Kitty

For a Friend, and She Knows Why

I don't blog often on political issues. Gun control is one, especially when it crops up involving schools, which it does far more often than I find acceptable, but that's another post all together. In general, gun control isn't a hill I intend to die upon, though I'm heartsick over the number of people who are dying because we lack it. It's a debate that is without solution given our current technology and willingness to compromise. Perhaps in my lifetime that will change. But like I said, that's a debate for another time.

What sparked this post was a short video posted by Bill Nye, regarding the abortion debate. If you'd like to see it, check here. I'll wait.

If you didn't feel like checking it (or if I forgot to hotlink it) the gist was this: no one likes abortion, but trying to stop it by making it illegal has and never will work. You might as well try to get people to stop having sex. That's never worked in the history of humankind, either. We have some kind of twisted nostalgia for times that never existed when men and women never had sex before getting married, when everyone was straight, when all marriages were for life and no one ever had sex with anyone but their wedded spouse. That time in human history only exists in our fantasies of some Puritanical past. It's about time we got over it before sitting down to debate an issue that is driving a wedge between otherwise smart and friendly people to the point of electing a raving lunatic for the highest office in the land because some on his team feel that the other side, if in power, would be forcing women by the busload to terminate their pregnancies against their will.

This is nonsense, and we need to cut it out. We need to realize that we are far closer in our goals than those who benefit from our fight would like us to think. We would both like to reduce the number of abortions in our country. In the world, even. We want living babies who go on to live healthy, happy, productive lives.

Yes, I really do want that. I suspect you do, too.

Democrats need to take back this issue. We lose so many single issue voters because Republicans have painted us as abortion-lovers.

We aren't.

What we are, are people who support abortion-reduction* ideas that actually work. (And are cost-effective in the bargain.) I think it is time we stopped framing the debate as "People who value unborn life more than the value of personal decision" VS "People who do not value unborn life more than personal decision." Which is how we have all framed it for as long as I have been aware of the argument.

It's a false argument, at least for me. I do not actually value personal decisions more than I value human life, and I'm not sure any of the other Pro-Choice people I know do either. I believe that life is more important than most personal choices I might make.† Like Bill Nye says: Nobody likes abortion.

As he further noted, "Abstinence, closing abortion clinics and denying women birth control do not lead to a healthier society." I am a liberal democrat and I want to reduce the incidence of abortion. Closing clinics, making abortion illegal, teaching abstinence only in schools (and at home) and preventing women from having access to birth control - common tactics of the "Pro-Life" campaign - do not reduce abortion. The facts support this. Anyone who claims to be against abortion and supports reducing it through these methods supports ideas that simply do not work very well. A person is not "Pro-Life" if they do not support policies that actually work to reduce abortion. Especially so if they respond with death-threats and prayers for the death of women who disagree with them. I'm not sure what label they should have, but it isn't "Pro-Life." If you are Pro-Anything, I ask you this: If you have a goal, and the methods you use to reach it are proven not to work well, why do you keep using those methods?

People who support comprehensive free, reliable birth control for all women, comprehensive sex education, and research into male birth control are the ones actually advocating strategies that will and do reduce abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

I know that for some, providing a free IUD for any woman who wants one is tantamount to a holocaust. I know this, and I'm sorry you feel that way. The argument as to when life begins exactly is an unwinnable one. The most ardent adherents of the anti-abortion cause claim it's at the moment the sperm meets the egg that a fully-legal person begins, endowed with the same rights that I have. I can't argue with that. There is no science that can tell us if that is truly right or wrong. There may never be. The scientific definition is that it has the potential to eventually be alive when the zygote implants itself in the uterine wall. Up until that point it's like a seed that has been cast upon solid rock. All the genes are there, but you're not going to get a tree. Still others hold that viability outside the womb is the marking point. Even the Puritans had a definition -- when the woman could feel kicking inside of her. Only at "quickening" was the baby considered an actual life. It's estimated that 1/3 of all fertilized eggs do not implant, for their own reasons, and simply leave a woman along with the rest of her period. Perhaps some Pro-Lifers mourn this as well, but it has nothing to do with what man has wrought. It's just nature, and if it grieves you, again, I'm sorry.

This is a quandry rooted in religion, so the best I can offer to them is this: trust in your God to do what is right by those lives. Making abortion and birth control illegal will not save them. The best we can work towards is for the conception to not happen in the first place. You cannot, no matter how hard you legislate, stop human beings from having sex. So you need to let that go.

Maybe my Mirena has resulted in over 100 lives started in my fallopian tubes that found nothing to implant in. Or maybe it prevented the sperm from getting to where they wanted to go and no conceptions happened. We will never know any more than we will know if the millions of "late periods" each year were zygotes that shook loose, or failed to implant or any number of things. If you need to personally grieve that, then grieve.** I want to work with you to do what we can to reduce abortions the most that we can. Stop the sperm from getting out there in the first place. Stop the egg from being released at all. Use the methods that lead us to not knowing at all what happens inside a woman's body. Think of it as Schrödinger's fertilized egg. We can still work together on this.

I may not know (and neither do you) at what moment "life" begins. But I do know that if every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy, then there is a very, very small need for abortion.††

This is something we can work together on. No more unwanted pregnancies. It's possible. We have the technology. All we need is the will to do it.

Pro-Life Liberal Democrats***. Striving to reduce abortions across the nation.

It's a radical notion, no?


*Yes, reduction.We are never going to get it to zero. If your goal is zero, then you're going to have to start killing a lot of women in the name of preventing them from having an abortion, and then all you have is a dead woman who cannot carry life inside of her. So let's aim to getting as close as we can to zero, without going overboard, shall we? To quote the inimitable Molly Ivins, "You cannot save the life of an unborn child by driving its mother to suicide."


†For the record, I think this is where the Pro-Choice argument usually goes off the rails by insisting that what I would choose for me, I cannot insist that someone else choose, too, for that is the foundation of our movement. No. It's not. Most of the Pro-Life crowd truly believe that an embryo is just as alive as I am, and killing that person is not a choice other people are allowed to make. I'm not allowed to choose kill a toddler or adult because they're making my life terribly, terribly hard, so why should I be allowed to kill an embryo? That's another trip down the rabbit hole of "when does life begin" and "when does the needs of that life trump the needs of my life" and it's just not an effective argument. Pro-Choicers need to quit arguing ineffectively, too.


**And can we stop with the sending of used tampons to legislators? It's counter-productive, makes Pro-Choice women seem crazy and dangerous, and it doesn't affect the people we want to affect anyway.

††No, I'm not getting into right now why someone might want to end a wanted pregnancy. All I'll say is that I know it happens, it's gut-wrenching, psyche-destroying, hellish awfulness I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and it is never done on a whim.


***for another bit of something ironic sounding, I found this study cited by a website that used it as evidence that birth control does not reduce the incidence of abortion. I found it ironic that they would use a study whose conclusions were that more comprehensive education was necessary, and that more emergency contraception would reduce abortion rates as well. Well, that, and the overwhelming need for foolproof contraception.