Thoughts on Health Care--In Between the Extremes

I haven’t been following the recent health care debate very closely, but I’m glad that Health Care Reform has passed. I find it disingenuous that so many staunch Republicans complain about “the way it was passed” considering their tactics, since the Clinton years, of filibustering everything...and then complaining about how things are not done with more consensus.

Living abroad, I am often treated to people’s uninformed opinions about the way “they”—we Americans--all are—overweight, ignorant, gun-toting, polluting, violators of other countries’ national sovereignty--extremists. What is most amusing, or distressing is the way people have of saying these things in front of you, as if you weren’t one of Them and might be insulted or disagree with your interlocutors. It’s not that there isn’t any truth in any of these assertions, it’s that such statements often reflect uninformed (or minimally informed) truth, issued from a very smug outsider perspective.

Let’s take the least polarizing and most personal accusation: “Americans are fat.” Maybe it’s our Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, but if we have something negative to say about other people, minimal good manners dictate not saying this until “They” are at least out of ear’s reach. I was once told by an otherwise educated-seeming, middle-class French person that “Americans do not eat vegetables.” “Really, I said, have you ever been in the PRODUCE section of a Publix or a Safeway because they happen to be loaded with vegetables, which would be surprising if there was no market for them…”

Sometimes when people do travel abroad, a very curious thing happens: they have preconceived stereotypes of the “other” place they will be visiting (preferably exotic and different from their place, otherwise what’s the interest of traveling), so the purpose of the trip is to confirm these preconceived notions. The international traveler, with such an agenda, can be surprisingly successful. The person who is convinced that the US is a violent and lawless place will inevitably walk into a random Burger King in Los Angeles and witness a shootout. Meanwhile I, the American, have been to Burger King and other fast food joints in my life (and no I don’t and didn’t eat this food on a regular basis) and have never witnessed one gun or shooting.

I don’t know where this foreign visitor went (I’m not familiar with LA), but I assume it was a bad neighborhood. It wouldn’t occur to me to wander around the rougher Parisian “banlieues” (suburbs) as a blithe tourist. And, if I did such a thing, I would be honest enough to qualify where I was instead of identifying this as the “quintessential French experience.” As for the weight issue, I do recognize and am saddened by the fact that, statistically Americans are overweight. However, the conversation is more interesting when people say something like—“weight and making healthy food choices are often a function of education and economics, and weight gain typically accompanies the rise of processed foods and the practice of working outside the house. Society-wide weight gain, while at a more advanced stage in the US, is a phenomenon currently affecting Most developed nations…”

Now back to social security and health care. I am always surprised to hear so many Americans proclaim: “We have the best health care system in the world.” Most of these people have never lived Anywhere Else in the world. They often rely on statistics and articles that support how bad it is Everywhere Else. This is no substitute for actually having lived Somewhere Else and being able to compare.

I am not a statistics person, and I don’t have any political agenda. These are some simple points that have impressed me living both in the US and abroad:

Spain—

We have private health care insurance here that was very easy to sign up for. The only reason its cost is comparable to private (non-employer affiliated) PPO health insurance in the US is because it is a world-wide policy and will reimburse us 80% of any health care expenses incurred elsewhere, but what makes it expensive is the US portion of the coverage….If this policy were limited to Spain, it would be a Whole Lot cheaper. To obtain this policy, I did not have to fill out any questionnaire on pre-existing conditions or list all the medical or hospital visits my family have had in the past five years.

When my children are sick and I go to the children’s emergency room, I give the receptionist my insurance card and my child’s name—punto y basta. I do not need to call up the insurance company to get any approvals if the emergency room doctor recommends the child stay in the hospital.

My children’s pediatrician gives me his cell phone number That He Will Answer and will visit our house (non-emergency house visits by non-network providers are reimbursed up to 80% by the health insurance) when the children are sick.

I haven’t tried this, but my American friends have. You can also get a family practice doctor to visit you at your house if you are sick and don’t feel well enough to go outside. They said the cost of this was around 100 euros and also reimbursable at 80% by their insurance.

We are not eligible for Seguridad Social (social security) because we do not work for a salary in Spain. Illegal immigrants are, however, eligible for Seguridad Social. They are given a card and affiliated doctor and hospitals and can use the system for non-emergency related health-care. Most Spanish people I know, who can afford it, have private health care insurance, either through their employer or for which they pay, privately.

Yes, they all complain about Seguridad Social—the waits and the difficulty of seeing a specialist or getting very individualized attention, but the key point is that it is there. I am sympathetic to the Spaniards’ complaints about Seguridad Social, not so much to the complaints from illegal and recently legalized immigrants. I don’t say it, but what I am thinking is: “You come from a country that could care less if you die in the street like a dog. So no, I don’t give a damn if you had to wait a long time in line behind a bunch of old Spaniards to get your health care. Those people have been paying into this system for years…Suck it up and be grateful for what you get because in my country, nobody gives you shit for free.”

US

Most aspects of healthcare visits take place with the nurses. Any contact with the doctor is very brief. Some practices have an emergency call number where you will first talk with a call center employee or a nurse. If they deem it necessary, a doctor may call you back.

Any stay in the hospital involves and lengthy and often complex pre-approval process with the insurer. You want to make sure you correctly understood this process or you may get stuck with the bill.

If you are checking into the hospital or need to go to the emergency room and are not spewing blood on the spot (in which case the friend or family member who brought you will be doing this), expect to spend 45 minutes just filling out forms explaining who your Primary and Secondary insurers are and all their contact information and absolving the hospital and its personnel of all blame if they should accidentally feed you into a wood chipper and cut you to a million pieces. If you have insurance, expect a bill that can range from the hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on your co-pay and deductible. If you do not have insurance and should need emergency hospitalization and advanced medical care in the US, you can wind up with a bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. To add insult to injury, there is one last step. You must then interact with their “patient care consultant” to “make sure that your hospital processing is going as smoothly as possible.”


Getting Health Insurance when you are self-employed

If you do not have access to insurance through an employer or professional organization, expect to fill out a very lengthy questionnaire and answer questions about every doctor’s visit, hospital-visit and surgical procedure every person in your family has had in the past five years. If they deem that you are too high-risk, they can refuse to insure you and you will find yourself without insurance in the country with the highest cost of health care in the world (see above for the hundred thousand dollar bill).

When we were just starting JBoss, we had family health coverage through my former employer’s COBRA insurance (much higher than what we paid when this was subsidized by my employer—probably about $900 a month for two adults and a child). Three months away from end of the 18-month obligatory COBRA coverage period, I decided to shop around for a health plan that would cover our small company (just my husband and myself at that point). In the meantime, I became pregnant with twins (and no, this was not the result of any fertility treatments for you crack-pots that think that this was interfering with God’s Plan). I was not just a pregnant woman, I was a pregnant woman with twins, which put me into the High Risk pregnancy category because twins are very often born early and can require very expensive NICU (newborn intensive care unit) hospitalization for a few days to several weeks. The insurance broker was doubtful about finding anybody who would cover us.

At that point, I wondered where I had gone wrong in life. I had gotten a higher education; I worked hard. I considered myself a responsible person, I hadn’t even really waited to the last minute to obtain new insurance coverage and here I was--at risk for falling through the (in the US, practically non-existent) mattress that cushions your fall to the bottom of society—potentially with no health insurance or exorbitantly priced health insurance and the possibility of tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical debt. Things worked out for the best and we did find an HMO program that would accept us and the twins were born at a healthy 8 months, with only one of them requiring a two-day stay at NICU…but there were no guarantees things would turn out this way.

I consider the US to be a very favorable place to become an entrepreneur. Until recently, this did not apply to anybody who (they or their immediate family members) may have an existing medical condition that makes you undesirable to private health care insurers. I know talented people who could not ever work for small start-ups for this reason.

The procedure

This is how the free-market health care system works. Two years ago, I had to have a medically necessary procedure. I had private PPO insurance for which we paid quite a bit, I was sure this wasn’t going to be a problem. The first thing I learned is that Those Doctors Who Can Afford It—which is often to say the good ones—do not choose to affiliate with Cigna or Aetna or Blue Cross or whoever your “premium” health insurance provider is. These doctors may not necessarily have gone to medical school and become surgeons just so they could be driving Maseratis and living in multi-million dollar houses. On the other hand, they want do not want a health insurance bureaucrat, who is not a doctor, telling them how much they can charge or dictating what kind of treatment they should be giving to their patients.

The procedure was quite expensive and Cigna paid for far less than 80% of it. When you sign a contract with a US health insurance provider, what that “80% out of network coverage” really means is that they will pay "80% of what they think your procedure should have cost” out of network. Expect to get lots of bills later down the road from the doctor and hospital when they get lesser reimbursement. What I learned? Cigna and I’m sure they are not the only health insurance company that does this, automatically doesn’t pay a chunk of your bill—on principle. I don’t know what the statistics are on this, but I’m sure 50 to 60% people will stop there and not appeal. If you are successful in your appeal, as I was, at that point they will pay half of what they didn’t pay before, but still a lot less than the 80% you were counting on. Maybe more intrepid people successfully go on to a second appeal; I stopped there.

If you think that a lot of doctors don’t want to affiliate with your health insurance carrier, guess what? Many of the good ones, or at least the ones who seemed to have taken the “bedside manner” course in medical school—Really don’t want to affiliate with Medicare…which you will find out if you happen to have parents.

If you need private health insurance and have had any surgery in the past few years for something they considered a risk, even if whatever they operated for turned out to be benign—expect to automatically be denied health coverage.

So don’t tell me that health care reform is going to “break” our marvelous system. As far as I’m concerned—it isn’t exactly that marvelous and it’s already broken….Yes, I know that other systems aren’t perfect and have their faults as well and that there are a million different technical points you can argue. However, considering that the current free-market American system does not provide all my family members with health coverage, and, for most of my life, I was in the position of this being a Major Problem, I’m going to suck it up pay for this.

For all of you people whingeing about the way this bill was passed, you know what? The rest of us are stuck paying for the Iraq war, which we entered under false pretenses, and the ongoing Afghanistan war, which looks like it’s going to be another Vietnam. We’re stuck paying for the bail-out of the financial system, when most of us had nothing to do with the abuses or obscene payouts going on there…so welcome to our world.

The Reluctant Skiier--Part II "Le Club"

So many of our friends raved about their vacations at Le Club, that we had to try it out. First of all, an important distinction: there are two kinds of Club Meds. The swinging singles type—“Gala Swinga” memorialized in the cult French movies “Les Bronzes” (the tan ones) and “Les Bronzes font du Ski” (The Tan ones go skiing) and the family club med (basically like an all-in-one-vacation with built-in day-camp for your children). Note: Family Club Med is Not the place to meet somebody unless you are a GO, a GM in the market for nice divorcé/es with two or three children, or the teenage children of a GM.

Both versions of Le Club have their own lingo, which seems contrived to my American sensibilities (and hey, we’re the people who gave the world Disney)…or maybe it’s because interacting with complete strangers in a vacation camp environment is not my experience of what the French generally like to do; however, considering Le Club is a cultural phenomenon in France, it must respond to some something they like. The main vocabulary you need to know is that the members are called GM (“gentil membres”, nice members) and the counselors (for lack of better translation) are called GO (gentils organisateurs). The head of the vacation village is called the “Chef de Village”—village chief. The club features dress theme nights and a musical every night after dinner (performed by the GOs). At Family Club, the musical the last evening stars Your Kids.

The genius of Singles Club Med hardly merits explaining. It is perfectly captured in the Gala Swinga theme song from “Les Bronzes” (“Bienvenue a Gala Swinga, il ya du soleil et des nanas, on va s’en fourrer jusque la…” Welcome to Gala Swinga, there is sun and there are chicks, we’re going to stuff ourselves up to here…” This is a parody of the actual club med theme song, which the GMs are invited to sing and line dance to in the evenings after the musical or in the disco. You wouldn’t think grown adults, perfect strangers up until a few days earlier, would want to break into a hokey camp-type song and dance, but a couple of potent “free” cocktails at the club Med bar, and the ambiance of the Club Med Disco can change your perspective there.

The genius of Family Club Med is the realization that vacation with Your Kids, is not always a vacation. This is even more true with a family ski vacation, where the convenience of an all-included formula for ski lift tickets, hotel, meals, entertainment, adult- and kids-group ski classes and onsite equipment rental are a real selling point. You drop your kids off at Le Mini-Club at 8:30 am and don’t need to pick them up until 5 in the evening. Two hours later, you can also drop them off for dinner and after-dinner activities with their friends.

La Bouffe

There is a hierarchy of Club Meds, ranging from 3 to 5 tridents and the meals are all served buffet style, with many options to choose from (including a hamburger, fries, pizza and pasta kids buffet). The French habitués complain that the quality of the food has declined in recent years. The quality does vary according to the individual dishes. I'm not a big fan of their sushi or the buttered??? bacon at breakfast - habitually undercooked slabs of congealed fat. However to your Anglo-Saxon palate (see kids’ buffet), an après-ski snack of oysters and champagne, and foie gras at dinner is a tremendous improvement over cheesy fries. The cheese, for that matter, tends to be melting slabs of Raclette. To the uninitiated, this might smell like fermented gym sock; however after a long day skiing, accompanying potatoes and viande des grisons, it tastes like Heaven. Another note: Unless your are gifted with super-human self-control, reminiscent of Jane Fonda in her anorexic period, Le Club is not the place to go to lose weight.

Another word about dinner: as an American, packing for a ski trip, features two types of clothing—items made with lycra and items made with polartec. At Le Club, French women still dress for dinner, so unless you want to be stuck recycling your one good blouse and sweater over yoga pants like I did every night, pack a few nicer things.

Les Francais

The biggest shock, as an American in French ski resorts, is the different cultural perception about waiting in line. For the American, the ability to form an orderly line and wait your turn is a Basic Underpinning of Society. The French very simply don’t like to do this and don’t consider it rude to cut in front of you. This seems to cut across all social classes. A good friend of mine, whom I consider the epitome of BCBG (bon chic bon genre) manners and elegance told me that from an early age she was socialized into this practice by her very proper mother: “Now you go ahead of me and cut. Nobody will say anything because you’re a child, and then I’ll slip in.” This can only end in frustration. Since Anglo-Saxon good manners consist in being pathologically non-confrontational, I was reduced to seething in silence as everybody nonchalantly cut in front of me to drop off their children at Mini-Club or in the ski line.

My half-French, half-Spanish husband has no such compunctions. When women cut in front of him at the Mini-Club, he tapped them on the shoulder and pointed out: “Excuse me, Madam, but I am in front of you, as is this gentleman over here and that woman over there.” He even got into an altercation with an elderly, handicapped woman. The Anglo-Saxon perspective would be that advanced age and physical infirmity automatically confer a halo of goodness, worthy of respect. The French aren’t past admitting that these conditions occasionally coincide with your basic cantankerous, trouble-making old acid-vat.

Marc at Club Med

Grandmother-aged woman on crutches cuts in front of Marc in the après-ski buffet line.

Marc: Excuse me, Madam, but I was in front of you.
Older Woman: I’m handicapped.
Marc: Well, I have four children

Woman watches in horror as Marc starts to generously fill his plate with the remaining merguez sausages.

Older Woman: Il y en a qui se servent comme des porcs. (Some people help themselves like pigs.)

Marc: You’re rude. Calm down, there’ll be enough for everyone.

The next day, Marc is having lunch with his ski group and tells them the story of his altercation with the “vielle peau” (old acid vat). One of the women says. That sounds like my mother.

Marc replies: That’s impossible.
Ski group companion: Oh no, it’s not. She’s handicapped. Oh look, there she is.

The acid vat approaches the lunch table and smiles wickedly at Marc.

Lessons Learned with a different kind of ski instructor

When I was seventeen, I spent a lot of time with a very dear great aunt and great uncle. The bonds of kinship--beginning with the return of Rene Madec to France from his illustrious and profitable career as a mercenary in 18th century India--in Brittany, like the American South, would take several minutes to explain. Suffice it to say that these Breton relations were “cousins a la mode de Bretagne” and referred to as Mon Oncle and Ma Tante—My Uncle and My Aunt.

Mon Oncle, while retired from his job as a lawyer, spent a lot of time traveling to Paris for various post-professional and non-profit activities. He explained to me that occasional separation was the secret to a long and happy marriage. “Otherwise, you shall have nothing to talk about but the fact that the dog is losing his hairs and Le Service is getting insolent and senile…” Mon Oncle also cautioned against the vice of gambling. “I view it this way. If I spent all my money gambling, how would I be able to afford to see les danseuses (exotic dancers)?”

Ever since my husband and I have decided to spend most our time skiing with groups or friends who share our level of ability (see The Reluctant Skiier Part One l), ski vacations have worked out a lot better for us.

Group 2’s ski instructor was definitely older, but in very good physical condition so I assumed he must be in his early sixties. As opposed to previous group ski lessons with a modus operandi of “keep up and make it down the next slope alive,” Paul spent a lot of time on calisthenics and technique. He had us balancing on one ski, hopping in the air and skiing (waltz-style) in circles with a partner, holding each other’s poles as we went down some of the easier slopes. Paul executed these pirouettes, pliés, relevés and little leaps with grace. While we barely approximated these movements, the inconceivable happened, we started to get better.

Paul also enjoyed logic (math and verbal) puzzles and complex “jeux de mots” (puns) that he would share with us as we waited in line or as he downed one of multiple glasses of wine at our one-hour lunch break. He had also recently discovered the joys of being on the receiving end of a group humor list, facilitated by the new and marvelous invention of the Internet. He shared these stories with us, as well as his opinion of the Swiss, from the point of view of a French-man who has lived there for many years (“a nation of denouncers”).

When Paul learned I was American. He said. “Oh les Americains! I remember the GIs well. They taught me to drive. I was only fourteen, but I accompanied them and they let me drive the jeeps as they were advancing through France.”

At this point, the group and I calculate, with amazement, that Paul must be 80 years old.

He has one son, of whom he is very proud, who brings him some of the finer vintages from Nestle’s private dining room for higher level executives—Chateau Petrus, Cheval Blanc, Haut Brion…

I asked Paul if he has any other children. “No, only one,” he replied. “But I have many siblings. I’m one of thirteen children.”

“Wow, that’s a lot.”

“Well they had to repopulate France after the First World War.”

I remark that I can’t imagine how his mother did it. I find myself exhausted and over-whelmed with four children.

“Oh, it wasn’t that hard. Children weren’t as needy back then as they are today. We had a farm (can’t remember the region, somewhere in Eastern France near Nancy). When we got home from school, we all had our chores. I was in charge of the chickens, another brother was in charge of the cows, another one took care of the rabbits…”

We discuss diet. Paul is a vegetarian. He explains that growing up on a French farm in the 30s, you only ate meat once a week, the rest of the time it was legumes and vegetables. I complain of the difficulty of losing weight. Paul mentions that he managed to lose 40 kilos in the last year. I ask how he did it.

“Oh, it’s not difficult. You just stop eating for a while (ensues a description of some fast of biblical proportions and the importance of slowly returning to eating, just an apple the first day), “but make sure you continue to exercise. It’s always important to exercise, regardless of what you do.” It’s clear, that at 80, Paul is in better physical shape than anybody in our group.

After the second day of skiing I feel like hell. All the muscles in my legs hurt. I can only go down the stairs sideways.

I go to meet Paul at the start of ski group and tell him I won’t be making it that day. He looks disappointed.

“Just give it a try, your muscles will warm up.”

Sheepishly, I explain that I’m out of my medicine. I have ibuprofen (for arthritis in my hands) but can’t take it at the recommended doses unless I also buy my omeprazol stomach protector.

He looks at me in amazement. “You have to take a pill to take another pill? No wonder the pharmacists are so rich!”

He feels sorry for me. Clearly, I come from weaker stock.

Some thoughts on European vs. American attitudes towards childrearing

In Spain or France, it is perfectly acceptable to outsource your children. In the US, it’s not even acceptable to admit you might (occasionally) “want” to outsource your child. In fact, if you are an American mother and haven’t breast fed your child until age three and home-schooled them for the duration of their secondary education, and aren’t out there driving yourself ragged taking your children to all kinds of enriching extra-curricular activities and tutors, muffins for mom, doughnuts for dad, volunteering to be class parent, field trip parent, co-ordinating class parties, birthday parties and playdates, completely terrorized by the possibility that you are failing to give them every advantage in life and Your Child Might Fall Behind…you’re probably falling short as a parent.

When I sent my children to an International school, I learned of such old-fashioned and quaint practices as “cocktail play-dates” -- your children play, while you nurse a drinky-poo and chat with your friends. At the end of such playdates, it might be acceptable to briefly lose your children and wonder out-loud: “I wonder where the little horrors are now?”

Then I realized I could go one step further and live Abroad and send my children to foreign schools. The first thing I noticed about school in Spain was the schools’ failure to send me a directory with the names of my children’s classmates and the contact information for their parents. Somebody explained that this would be considered an un-acceptable breach of privacy here.

When my then 6-yr old sons each made two best friends, being an intrepid American sort, I went and bought some nice “I am not a psycho” stationary and set out to writing:

“Hello, I am X’s mother. X and Y are friends. My son would be very happy to invite Y over to play some day at your convenience. Here is my contact information.”

Some of the mothers responded relatively quickly and graciously. However, others took weeks to respond and gently re-buffed me. I was crushed. I had gone out of my way to make an overture to these people and they made it clear that I was wasting their time. I did not understand. I wasn’t asking for their friendship or any real social interaction with them, I was simply looking for a way for our children (who were already friends) to play together outside school. Another friend explained to me that the idea of a play-date was completely non-existent in Spanish culture and the idea of going out of one’s way to drive across town to facilitate your child’s social life was simply preposterous.

Well my move and the lack of need to co-ordinate playdates left me with more free time. I didn’t have a job. Meanwhile, the children’s schools hadn’t sent me any notices about muffins for mom or doughnuts for dad, reminders about bringing food for friendship salads or snack weeks, or asked to help with science day or field day, so I figured I might as well do the civic thing and volunteer. Once again I sent a hand-written note to my children’s teachers in their correspondence folder…and never heard back. Only later, did a woman who had grown up in the US, and understood my confusion, explain. She told me “Oh the schools are afraid if the parents get too involved they will start telling them how to run things, so they don’t want the parents around.”

No need to worry about school fund-raising auctions, either. My sons’ school is a for-profit entity and my daughter’s school is a joint effort of France’s Education Nationale and Foreign Affairs. Her teachers have been wonderful but you can forget trying to communicate with the administration or (more likely) the secretaries in the administration. My experience of the Lycee Francais administration’s attitude towards the parents is: “The parent has the right to fuck off at any time.”

And, you know what? I’m getting used to it. I take Pilates now, I have a museum-visiting group, I take more lunches with my friends.

We hope they're good at Math...

Parochial School PE and Mardi Gras in the 80s

Among my worst memories growing up, PE (physical education) at Christ the King parochial school features prominently. I am naturally clumsy with poor eye-hand coordination (and this is not in an endearing Bella Swan of Twilight kind of way). PE in the 1980s featured lots of team sports involving throwing, catching and dodging balls as well as the (now) incomprehensible practice of letting the kids pick the teams. Needless to say the team captains were always the most popular and athletic boys and girls. I remember listening to them go down the names of my classmates hoping to avoid the impossible--the humiliation of being picked last or (occasionally) second to last. By fifth grade, I discovered an escape hatch from the disapproving screams of "Way to Go Mason!" as they rolled the ball towards me in kickball...and I tripped over it, or my prayers went unanswered and the baseball came my way in the outfield. I volunteered to be the teacher's grading assistant. I couldn't believe my luck. As my class-mates tromped off to the hated PE, I stayed in the cloistered quiet of the class-room, in the all-powerful role of grader.

By high school, I attended a different school and PE had expanded to include something I was actually good at that required little grace or eye-hand coordination--running. My torment took another form--Mardi Gras--an annual play, dance and float competition among the four years of Girls High School. If you had no discernible dramatic talents and didn't happen to be pretty or popular enough to be elected float queen, you automatically got shuffled into one of the three class dances. Did I mention these dances involved costumes, usually not very flattering ones? With the exception of my Junior Year (where I escaped by going Abroad) I danced as a bat to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," a chipmunk to Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" and an "Egyptian" (I think this was to the Bangle's "Walk like an Egyptian"). Inevitably the dance captain was some bossy little girl who had been taking ballet or tap since she was two, who did not appreciate my poor execution of her steps and inability to stay on beat, thus interfering with her moment to shine.

You would think this experience would have made me sympathetic to my own children's potential to have inherited this lack of athletic ability. My husband requests that I point out that this defect does not come his side of the gene pool and that he was a very respectable athlete in his day. Nevertheless, I have decided that part of the children's education in Spain should involve their participation in a locally popular extra-curricular activity.

The Royal Conservatory

As a resourceful American woman with access to the Internet, and ideas about her daughter learning grace, deportment and discipline. I found about something called the Conservatory. Note: my daughter also took karate for many years. This was in my "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" phase when I decided "I will have a girl with skin as fair as snow, hair like spun gold, who can kick butt" (alas no Asian ancestry since Gatins' forebear Rene Madec left Quimper as a cabin boy with the French East India Company in the 18th century, had many adventures, became a Nabob and eventually married a descendant of Genghis Khan). "This girl-child will excel at school, dance like an angel and, if necessary, deliver blows like a killer." My daughter actually has rhythm and grace. She passed the auditions and now we're sucking off the teat of socialism as she learns classical ballet, Spanish dance and music theory for 6 hours a week (the hours go up after the first year), at the ridiculous cost of 120 euros a year--roughly one months's tuition, plus the cost of the recital costume in the US. One thing that is nice about state sponsorhip of the arts is that while ballet is a cliche of the aspirant middle and upper-middle class in the US, my daughter's companions at Spanish conservatory come from all walks of life. This program turns professional after 4 years and, for many of these children, it's their ticket to a career as a dancer.

Fundacion Real Madrid Futbol

Meanwhile, what could be more Spanish or even more international than "futbol" (soccer for you Americans). Nothing less than a Real Madrid youth team (haven't noticed that any girls play in the league, but didn't ask either) in a working class suburb would do for my boys' "education." My boys are average height and, while they have respectable gross motor skills, they are up against boys who started playing a lot earlier than they did. The US soccer team for their age was run by a church-league and usually coached by a parent or grand-parent, with one hour-long practice and one game a week, played at a local park or elementary school. On the other hand, the pre-benjamin (7 and under) futbol team for Fundacion Real Madrid has one and a half hour practices twice a week, professional coaches and a ginormous brand-new 10-field stadium near Barajas airport. Oh, and did I mention that they don't cancel games for weather here. Madrid is at 800 meters altitude can get quite cold and wet in the winter. I, wrongly, assumed they could wear their team sweatpants and jacket during the game, but instead they had to strip down to thin nylon shirts and shorts to play in sleet. Recently, their team got beat 8-2 by a bunch of 5 and 6 year-old boys from another Madrid barrio where they take futbol even more seriously.

One of my boys actually likes the game, has a sense of defense and is competitive. The other one couldn't care less. He's the kind that does flips on the goal during practice or looks for four leaf clover while the action passes him by. Both boys get shouted at and made fun of by their more advanced Spanish team-mates. The only saving grace is that they get some popularity points for being exotic twin, Americans. One day at practice, when the less-motivated twin wasn't paying attention and let the goal in, a bulky team-mate kicked his butt. When the little one showed some backbone, ran after the bully and kicked him in the tail-bone, my husband was so proud. The kids all laughed. This was the sort of "education" I was hoping for when I signed them up.

Mathletics

This brings me to my children's latest passion--Mathletics. We discovered this when the boys' school sent home a note saying that all the children would be participating in something called World Maths Day on March 2nd, and gave us their logon and password so they could practice at home. Mathletics educational software, by Australian company 3P Learning, does a very clever job of promoting themselves and successfully bridging the gap between the free, often-school-sponsored competition, World Math Day, and their subscription, for-pay product.

Now for a note of reassurance. The Fleury children are completely normal kids, which is to say that they would rather be watching cartoons and playing video games than doing anything remotely education-related in their free time. In fact it takes a kick in the butt to make sure they do their homework in their free time. We have tried other things to "trick" our children into thinking math was a game, but it never works--they always realize that math is work.

The genius of World Math Day is it flies in the face of current educational trends--don't stress the child out, don't give them time trials, teach them that "we are all winners"--and takes a page out of the book of Game Theory (how can I convince people to play hours of an online or video game, not the Math and Econ Nobel prize-winning kind). I haven't read this, but my husband, who has spent many an hour playing video games, says that the successful games involve competition, time-trials, levels, and "rewards." In World Math Day and Mathletics the children compete in 1-minute speed challenges to answer the greatest number of math questions (addition, subtraction, multipication and division) against children across the world. World Math Day truly was international--in any random game, depending on world time zones my children might be competing against "Jill" from Great Britain, "Mohammed" from Qatar and "Jesus" from Guatemala. Predictably, given the subscription cost, the players in the for-pay game seem to come mostly from Great Britain, the US, Canada and Australia. The child's first name, last initial, country flag, country and school name (if the school participates) will show up when they compete in both games. The children can see how they measure up real-time as a horizontal bar graph tracks the number of questions answered correctly by each child. In Mathletics, the children use the points to go shopping for virtual crap on the Mathletics site. One of my sons learned a lesson about spending his "money" when he lost 200 hard-earned points, accidentally purchasing a hair upgrade for his avatar, he thought he was just trying out. It's amazing how feverishly hard my children are working to purchase things that don't even exist! This business model is genius.

The children's new hero, is World Maths Day Champion Kaya G, a scrawny 11-year old from Australia. One child is an outright admirer and two of them are haterz, who complain that Kaya G was allowed to compete again 2010 and win again, thinking he should have been forced to give other people a turn and share the glory. They watch his video, note that he can go faster because he has a special numeric keypad, and that his avatar "has the most expensive background" on Mathletics.

The interesting lesson in this game is that 1) math is truly an international language and 2) no matter how good you think you are, there is some kid half-way around the world waiting to kick your butt. For some reason, this makes me think of the French News Parody show with puppets, "Les Guignols de L'info". They used to have this parody of a multinational company called "La World Company" with a Sylvester Stallone/Rambo type executive who used to always spout the pompous truism "Le Monde est Mondial": The World is Worldwide. Get used to it baby.