Like Dorothea's.
Yesterday's mail brought an anonymous note from "a neighbor" complaining about the appearance of our backyard. Seems likely it came from the people directly behind us, whom we don't know well. The neighbors on our street all know us by name, and would have no problem either signing such a letter or--more likely--knocking on our door to ask politely for us to clean something up.
It's made me extremely grumpy this morning, for two reasons. First, I know we've let the area behind the pool get messy (the kids use it as their "fort" and I've tried to ignore it entirely), so I feel guilty about the appearance, which of course makes me defensive. Second, and more importantly, I hate this kind of cowardly anonymous approach. I'm pretty sure it comes from the same people who regularly prance around naked with their curtains open, providing visuals not much more appealing to us than our backyard is to them.
The "grunchy" part of me wants to make a big sign for the backyard inviting anyone who has a problem with it to show their cowardly face at our front door, because we don't respond to anonymous letters. But the fact that I feel sheepish about letting the kids see that response means that it probably isn't a wise idea, and I should wait 'til I cool off before deciding whether to respond directly.
Yes, of course we should clean that area up (not a pleasant thought given the sub-freezing temps and healthy coating of snow out there). But I so don't want to give them the idea that this kind of un-neighborly approach is effective. <sigh>
Tonight Lane and I had a long talk about the way he's sometimes teased at school. It's hard to be a smart, sensitive kid--he gets pegged as "weird" by kids with a small-sized worldview, and it stings. There's enough he likes about school and his friends that we haven't pushed the homeschooling option (he doesn't want to do it now), but it worries me.
And it worries me even more when I read articles like this one from a Portland newspaper: Slam site an eye-opening look at cruelty of middle-schoolers:
The rumors. The name-calling. The cruelty. The profanity. The threats. The humiliation.It was all there, right on the computer screen, on what school kids call a secret slam site. Leigh could not believe what she was seeing. "I was appalled," she says. "The first thing I saw was about a girl my son had known in grade school. She was a neat kid, and they were talking about wanting her to be raped and shot. And they used her name."
I can't help but wonder if the kinds of kids who start and post to sites like the one described in this article have the kinds of parents who send nastily worded anonymous letters to their neighbors.
George Siemens has a two part article on blogging online, the first part of which is a nice summary of many other bloggers-on-blogging, along with useful discussion of blogging in educational context. The second part addresses "how to" aspects of blogging.
The Art of Blogging - Part 1, and The Art of Blogging - Part 2.
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