chronicle

oh, california

by

as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.

how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?

maybe—but what other options are there?

considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?

Let’s consider a moment like this.

dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.

California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.

Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.

Let that sink in.

One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.

For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?

If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.

that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.

Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.

They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.

They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.

They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.

We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.

they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.

Leave no trace, indeed.

They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.

They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.

They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.

They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.

They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.

They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.

Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.

Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.

I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.

What is the alternative?

Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.

If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;

and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);

what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?

Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:

(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)

Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?

Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.

Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?

Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.

Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?

Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?

Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?

Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?

Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?

Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.

Shellmounds? Were these people even human?

Let’s pause, and reflect.

Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.

This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.

Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.

The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.

California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.

What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?

From where we are, in this present moment,

what would buddha do?

Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?

Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?

What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?

What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?

Practice, like your head is on fire.

know what you’re doing

by

there’s no decolonization without dismantling the gender binary.

the intersectional person is the one who binds community—because they actually understand and empathize with everyone.

countries and communities who stigmatize nonbinary identity and orientation are doing white colonizers’ work: one-drop purity tests don’t build you up—they prove you’re not good enough.

if you’re judging someone for their nonconformity, just know that you’re doing the white colonizers’ work. no reason not to say it out loud.

happy pride!

The Hidden School Day

by

How Life Outside of School Shapes Childhood Education

Part 2 in a series. In my study of what works in the effort to serve children’s needs and help them to become happy and healthy adults, I take copious notes. I find it helpful, occasionally, to compile and summarize these notes into a narrative. Why? Because my brain saves all of these notes, and my conversations are built from them, but sometimes the conversations don’t last long enough to articulate the internal narrative I’m working from. This series is an attempt to share my internal narrative, and open it to peer review. I take my notes from memory, and almost never cite sources. That being said, I invite the reader to connect any of the points made here to existing research and share their conclusions. This is a conversation, not a dissertation.

The history of American education is usually told through its institutions—the schoolhouse, the curriculum, the policy. But for most of the past two and a half centuries, the school day occupied only a fraction of a child’s waking hours. What happened in the remaining hours was not a blank space, and not the same for every child. It also counts as education—in labor, in play, in hunger or comfort, in the rhythms of a household shaped by class, race, and economic circumstance. The school day has always had a shadow: longer, less legible, and distributed with the same radical inequality as everything else. What follows is an attempt to describe that shadow in the same fifty-year intervals as the institutional history it runs alongside.

This is not original scholarship: it’s simply an overview in a legible timeline to point out patterns that have been documented in depth elsewhere. It’s a way of opening my working premises to a wider conversation. Let it be a springboard to deeper inquiry, rather than a document of record.

1750–1800: Childhood as Labor

For the vast majority of children in colonial America, the question of what happened outside school was easily answered: work. The agricultural economy ran on the labor of everyone in a household old enough to be useful. Children were useful early. By six or seven, they were tending animals, hauling water, carding wool, minding younger siblings, and helping with whatever the season demanded. The school day, where it existed at all, was short—often only a few hours in the morning—and seasonal, structured around planting and harvest rather than a fixed calendar. A child might attend for a few months in winter when farm labor slackened and be pulled back to the fields before spring.

The school day for a boy of the gentry class looked entirely different. It was longer, held in a dedicated space, and governed by a curriculum that assumed leisure time for further study. Tutors supplemented formal schooling. Books were available at home. The afternoon hours that a farming child spent at labor, a wealthy child might spend in supervised reading, music practice, or what passed for recreational activity—riding, games of skill, the cultivated pastimes of a class that had purchased the right to prepare its sons for a station rather than deploy them as laborers.

For enslaved children, education in anything other than farm labor was forbidden. Their hours belonged entirely to the labor economy of the plantation. Play existed—ethnographic and autobiographical accounts document the games children made in stolen moments—but it was unauthorized, shadowed by the constant proximity of surveillance and violence. Indigenous children in mission settlements were similarly subject to regimented labor under the guise of civilizational education.

The journey to school, where school existed, was almost always on foot. Distance was a real barrier: rural families might live miles from the nearest schoolhouse, and in winter those miles were genuine obstacles. The children most likely to attend were those who lived nearest—which in most communities meant children of the more established families, since the poor tended to live at the margins.

The baseline: Childhood is labor for the majority. The school day is short and seasonal, fitted around agricultural need. Time outside school means more work, not less — except for the children of families wealthy enough to have purchased their children’s time.

Who benefited: Children of the gentry and merchant classes, whose non-school hours were structured around cultivation and leisure. Their childhoods had room in them.

Who was excluded: Farm children, working poor children, enslaved children, and Indigenous children under mission control, for whom the hours outside school were simply more hours of work, or were not theirs to direct at all.

1800–1850: The Mill Child and the Country Child

The early industrial period splits the picture further. In the expanding cities and mill towns of the Northeast, children as young as seven or eight entered factory work—the textile mills of Lowell and Lawrence, the print shops, the glass factories. The school day competed directly with the work day. Many families could not afford to send children to school at all; a child’s wages were a structural part of household budgets. Where children did attend school, they arrived already tired, often having worked early morning shifts before the schoolhouse opened, and left to work again in the afternoon.

The common school movement of this era, championed by Horace Mann and others, was partly a response to this reality—an argument that children needed time set aside for learning. But the reformers were also motivated by anxieties about what unsupervised working-class children did with unstructured time: they played in streets, joined gangs, and generally failed to develop the habits of industry and deference that a properly ordered republic required. The common school was partly a moral intervention into children’s time—a way of filling hours that might otherwise be filled unproductively.

For rural children across the country, childhood outside school still meant the farm. The school day remained short—typically four to six hours—and the school year, even where compulsory attendance laws were beginning to appear, was rarely more than a few months. Play was largely unstructured and took place outdoors: sledding, swimming, fishing, musical ring plays, games of chase and capture that children organized themselves without adult direction. This was not ‘organized unstructured time’ as we think of it today; it was simply that adults were busy and children were left to occupy themselves within the bounds of the property.

For children of wealthy families, the period outside school was increasingly formalized. Music lessons, dancing lessons, and supervised social occasions were the architecture of upper-class childhood. Summer was spent at a second property or a resort. The journey to school might involve a private carriage. Physical distance from school was not an obstacle; it was a marker of social status.

The baseline: The school day is lengthening slightly in urban areas but remains short and seasonally compressed. For working-class and mill children, hours outside school are working hours. For rural children, unstructured outdoor play is the norm. For the wealthy, non-school time is a curriculum of its own.

Who benefited: Children of comfortable rural and merchant families, who had access to unstructured play time, modest material comfort, and a household economy that didn’t depend on their labor.

Who was excluded: Mill and factory children, whose time outside the schoolhouse was largely absorbed by wage labor. Enslaved children. Indigenous children. The urban poor, whose street play was viewed with suspicion and increasingly subject to institutional intervention.

1850–1900: Streets, Fields, and the Factory Floor

By the second half of the nineteenth century, child labor is at its historical peak. The 1900 census—counting at the end of this period—found nearly two million children between ten and fifteen engaged in paid labor, a figure that undercounts younger workers and those in agriculture. In cities, children sold newspapers, shined shoes, worked in canneries and textile mills and coal mines. The school day, now more standardized at roughly six hours in urban public schools, sat in the middle of a much longer day that began before dawn and ended after dark for many working children.

Recess as a formal institution begins to appear in this period, but unevenly. Urban public schools in wealthier districts might have a paved yard and a structured break. Schools in poor neighborhoods had whatever outdoor space happened to be available, if any.

The physical journey to school was almost always on foot, often considerable distances. In rural areas, children might walk two to four miles each way. In cities, the walk passed through neighborhoods where the density of poverty was itself a lesson—in precarity, in the reality of disease, in the density of adult labor.

For the children of the wealthy, this period introduces something new: organized sport and supervised leisure as a class institution. The private school sporting culture—crew, baseball, track—begins to take shape at the prep school level, and trickles into the recreation of upper-class children generally. Summer camps begin to appear in the 1880s, initially as health retreats for urban children of means. The concept of a childhood structured around physical development and wholesome outdoor recreation is being invented—but invented specifically for and by the affluent.

The baseline: Child labor is at its peak. For millions of children, the school day is bracketed on both sides by paid work. Recess exists in wealthier schools; outdoor play is an improvised affair for the poor. The wealthy are inventing organized recreational childhood.

Who benefited: Children of the professional and owning classes, whose non-school hours are increasingly structured around health, sport, and social formation. Their childhood is being designed.

Who was excluded: Working children in mines, mills, canneries, and streets, for whom the hours outside school were the hours that fulfilled the family budget. Rural children who walked hours daily to attend school for a fraction of the year.

1900–1950: The Playground Movement and the Leisure Gap

The progressive era produces the first serious institutional attention to children’s time outside the classroom. The playground movement—led by reformers like Jane Addams and Joseph Lee—argues that unstructured street play is dangerous and that structured outdoor recreation is a democratic necessity. Cities begin building public playgrounds in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, partly out of genuine concern for child welfare and partly as a form of social control: get children off the streets and into supervised spaces where their energies can be directed appropriately.

Compulsory attendance laws, now on the books in most states, extend the school day and the school year. By the 1920s, a six-to-seven hour school day with a fixed academic calendar is becoming the norm in urban schools. The school day is getting longer; the hours outside it are shrinking, at least in theory. In practice, poor and working-class children remained heavily engaged in household labor—caring for younger siblings, helping with domestic work, working in family businesses—while attending school in the time that remained.

The radio arrives in the 1920s and the after-school hours begin to take a new shape for middle-class families: a domestic, supervised, commercial leisure. Children’s programming fills the late afternoon. Consumption begins to organize childhood time in ways it never had before. This is largely a middle-class phenomenon; the poor listen where they can, but the new consumer childhood—snacks, toys, entertainment—belongs primarily to those with money to spend on it.

For Black children in the segregated South, the school year was often dramatically shorter than for white children—sometimes only three or four months—and the hours outside it were dominated by agricultural labor on a seasonal schedule that white landowners controlled. The gap between the childhood available to a white child in a northern suburb and a Black child in the rural South created a gap in what childhood itself meant to integration into society.

The baseline: The school day standardizes at six to seven hours. Playgrounds appear as institutional interventions into children’s time. Consumer leisure begins organizing middle-class childhood. For poor and Black children, time outside school remains dominated by labor, with wide regional disparities.

Who benefited: Middle-class white children in northern cities, who gain access to supervised playgrounds, consumer entertainment, and a lengthening period of structured childhood. Their afternoons are beginning to look like what we think of as childhood.

Who was excluded: Black children in the rural South, subject to truncated school years and heavy agricultural labor; immigrant and working-class children whose household economies still depended on their labor; children in overcrowded urban tenements with no access to outdoor play space.

1950–2000: The Suburban Afternoon and the Forgotten Child

The postwar period produces what many Americans still imagine when they picture a normal childhood: the suburban afternoon. School ends at three o’clock. Children walk or are driven home. The neighborhood is safe enough for unsupervised play; someone’s mother is usually around. Dinner at six. Television in the evening. This is the dominant image of mid-century American childhood—and it is the childhood of white suburban families, made possible by the GI Bill, federally subsidized highways, and housing policies that systematically excluded Black families from the neighborhoods where that afternoon was happening.

In cities, the picture is different. Urban public schools often lack the outdoor space of suburban ones. After-school hours in dense neighborhoods are spent on stoops, in streets, in apartments where multiple families share small units. For children of working mothers—a category growing rapidly through this period—the after-school hours can mean latchkey solitude, or the informal supervision of older siblings, or the streets.

The length of the school day remains roughly stable—six to seven hours—but what surrounds it begins to diverge sharply by class. Affluent families begin investing in after-school enrichment: music lessons, sports leagues, tutoring, summer programs. The infrastructure of organized childhood expands enormously in the 1970s and 1980s for families with money. Youth soccer leagues, swim teams, private music instruction, SAT prep courses—the non-school hours of wealthy children become as intentionally structured as the school hours, sometimes more so.

For poor children, the after-school hours are increasingly unsupervised and under-resourced. Public recreation programs are cut during the fiscal crises of the 1970s. Community centers close. The street remains, but the organized infrastructure of working-class neighborhood life—the settlement house, the church league, the union-sponsored recreation program—is fraying. The gap between what a wealthy child does from 3–6pm and what a poor child does in those same hours begins to compound into measurable outcome differences by high school.

Children arrive at school by bus, by car, and on foot—but increasingly, in wealthy districts, by car in the exclusive sense. The school run as a daily parental ritual is a product of this period. In poorer districts, the school bus (or public transit, or walking) remains the norm. The physical experience of getting to school—comfortable, supervised, door-to-door versus exposed, crowded, long—is itself a daily index of the broader divergence.

The baseline: The suburban afternoon becomes the idealized image of American childhood—and the reality for white middle-class families. Enrichment infrastructure expands dramatically for the affluent. Public recreation resources contract for the poor. The after-school hours become a second site of compounding inequality.

Who benefited: White suburban children, whose afternoons are safe, supervised, and increasingly enriched by organized extracurricular activity. Their non-school hours are an extension of their educational advantage.

Who was excluded: Urban and rural poor children, whose after-school hours are unsupervised and under-resourced; Black families systematically excluded from the suburban neighborhoods where the postwar childhood was being built; working-class children whose mothers’ labor left them alone after three o’clock.

With Change Comes Resistance: The Leisure Gap Widens (1970s–1990s and beyond)

As the institutional history of education produces its backlash—against busing, against equity funding, against the framing of school as a site of redistribution—the same dynamic plays out in the texture of children’s daily lives. When public recreation programs are cut, they are cut in the name of fiscal responsibility. When after-school programs lose funding, the loss is framed as an unfortunate necessity. The cumulative effect is that the public infrastructure of childhood—the commons of play, the shared recreational space, the after-school program that any child could attend—quietly contracts, and the private infrastructure of childhood expands to fill the gap, accessible only to those who can pay for it.

This is not accidental. The same political grammar that converts equity funding in schools into an unfair advantage converts public investment in children’s time into government overreach. The playground, the public pool, the after-school program—these are all, in the backlash framing, things that responsible families provide for themselves. Public provision is for families who failed to provide. The logic individualizes what is structurally produced, and then blames the individual for the structural outcome.

By the 1990s, the research literature on out-of-school time is documenting what is already obvious to anyone paying attention: children in poverty spend their after-school hours very differently from children with resources, and those differences compound across years into significant gaps in academic preparation, social-emotional development, and college readiness. The response is a wave of after-school program funding—21st Century Community Learning Centers, extended day initiatives—that partially addresses the gap while leaving the underlying inequality untouched.

2000–Present: Scheduled Childhood and the Unsupervised Hours

The contemporary period produces two childhoods in increasingly sharp relief. The first is the fully scheduled childhood of affluent families: school, then sports practice, then music lesson, then homework, then sleep—every hour accounted for, every activity selected for its developmental and resumé value. This childhood is exhausting and productive and deeply anxious. It is also, on the other hand, very good preparation for competitive college admission and the professional-managerial economy that follows.

The second childhood has no such schedule. It is the childhood of children whose families lack the money, time, or stability to organize their non-school hours. It is spent on phones, in front of screens, in apartments, or in neighborhoods where the outdoor infrastructure of play has been allowed to deteriorate. It is not necessarily an unhappy childhood—children are resourceful—but it is not building toward the same outcomes. The difference between these two childhoods, played out across millions of families, is one of the primary mechanisms by which inequality reproduces itself across generations while appearing to result from individual choices.

The school day has lengthened in many districts—particularly those serving high-poverty populations, where extended day programs have been implemented as an equity intervention. The journey to school has shifted: in urban areas, a growing number of children are driven rather than walking, reversing the pedestrian norm of earlier eras and further sorting children by the access their families have to a car and flexible time. Remote learning during COVID collapsed the boundary between school time and home time entirely—with consequences that followed the same distributional lines as everything else. Children with quiet space, adult supervision, and reliable broadband managed. Children without those things largely did not.

Play, as an unstructured and self-directed activity, is declining across class lines—but most sharply for the children who have historically relied on it most. Recess is being cut in schools under academic pressure. Outdoor play in neighborhoods is declining due to parental safety concerns that are partly real and partly a function of media-amplified fear. The physical and developmental consequences of this decline are well-documented and not evenly distributed.

The baseline: Two divergent childhoods separated by money. The affluent child’s non-school hours are maximally structured and developmentally intentional. The poor child’s hours are under-resourced and unsupervised. The school day is lengthening in high-poverty districts as a compensatory measure. Unstructured play is declining everywhere.

Who benefited: Children of wealthy families, whose after-school hours function as a second, private educational system. Their non-school time compounds their advantage.

Who was excluded: Children in poverty, whose unstructured hours are the most visible symptom of everything the public system declined to provide. Children in under-resourced neighborhoods where the infrastructure of play—the park, the pool, the after-school program—has been allowed to deteriorate.

The Through-Line

The history of what children do outside school is not separate from the history of school. It is the same history, told from the other side of the door. In every era, children who benefited most inside the school building also had the most outside it: more time, more space, more safety, more supervision, more materials, more adult attention, more room to be children rather than workers or caretakers or simply left alone. The children who benefited least inside the building had the least outside it. The gap between the two was not a gap in effort or aptitude—it was a gap in what the society was willing to organize and provide.

What the school can do is always bounded by what it cannot reach. The child who arrives hungry, exhausted from an unsafe commute, responsible for younger siblings, carrying the anxiety of household instability—that child is not starting from the same place as the child who arrives rested, fed, driven by a parent, and free from adult responsibility for the next seven hours. The school day measures from bell to bell. The field of education begins much earlier, and runs much later, and is shaped by forces the school rarely controls and almost never names.

A genuine alternative to this history would have to account for what happens outside the building—not as a supplementary concern, but as a structural one. The hours between 3—6pm are not separate from the school day. They are its extension.

adulting and its opposite

by

here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:

as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,

growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:

walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.

the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.

we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.

instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.

what. the. fuck. happened?

and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?

do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?

help me here.

to a young person questioning themselves

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I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.

I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.

I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.

I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.

With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.

But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).

Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.

The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.

I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.

Happy pride!

Living wage: probably not

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We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.

When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.

Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.

Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.

We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.

About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.

Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.

I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.

Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.

Parts Is Parts: When Common Sense Misses the Mark

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A Mechanic’s Case for Equity in Education

I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.

Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.

Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.

You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.

At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.

A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.

The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.

At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.

There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.

A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.

The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.

They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.

Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.

Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.

Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).

The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.

Providing shop manuals that resulted in every child achieving at their best ability was directly disruptive to their factory model. (Sound spicy? Check the recipe: The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing, Born of Eugenics: Can Standardized Testing Escape Its Past?, The Racist Origins of Standardized Testing Still Matter)

Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.

The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.

Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:

  • Provo, Utah
  • Bismarck, North Dakota
  • Owensboro, Kentucky
  • Eau Claire, Wisconsin
  • Rutland, Vermont
  • Southlake, Texas
  • Findlay, Ohio
  • Florence, Alabama
  • Altoona, Pennsylvania
  • Medford, Oregon

Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:

  • Dearborn, Michigan
  • Flushing, Queens, New York
  • Lowell, Massachusetts
  • Anchorage, Alaska
  • Houston, Texas
  • Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
  • Oakland, California
  • Clarkston, Georgia
  • Garden City, Kansas
  • Miami, Florida

Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.

This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.

The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.

Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?

too late for tears

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In the early 90s (in my mid 20s), I was studying guitar at Musicians Institute in L.A. Our improvisation class was taught by a fusion guy with the obligatory curly mullet—nice enough, but also kind of a doofus. Our assignment was to bring in a recording of a guitar improvisation to listen to and analyze.

I was trying to understand free improvisation at the time, and I brought in this track by eastbay stalwarts (this was before I moved to the eastbay) Henry Kaiser, Hilary & John Hanes, with John Abercrombie. I thought it was ‘fusiony’ enough that the instructor would find some way to talk about the logic of the thing.

He cued up the CD and the sound came over the speakers. I could see his face trying to figure out what to make of it.

About halfway through, he turned the volume down, gave kind of a dopey smile to let us know he was kind of kidding, but mostly not, and said,

“You call that music?”

My (unknown to me at the time) autistic brain went into analysis-and-resolution mode, which can chew through a moment like this in milliseconds. Without missing a beat, my unconsidered response was,

“You call that a haircut?”

By which I meant no ill will whatsoever. I was just pointing out that one’s musical choices are not unlike one’s tonsorial decisions. But, of course, there wasn’t time to give the backstory of the decision-making process that caused my response.

There was a long pause. Then suddenly, the tension was broken as everyone in the room, besides the instructor and myself, erupted into laughter. The instructor and I just looked at one another with curiosity, awe, and a sense that we would be laughing as well if we were just witnesses, and not protagonists.

After that, thankfully, there were no hard feelings, at least that I was aware of. There was a quiet peace between us, even when I would ask overly complex (unknown to me at the time) autistic questions.

Actually, now that I’m remembering, he told me once after that that he had a dream where I was reaching my arms out to him, and pleading, “Daddy! Daddy!” I remember masking heavily (before I knew that was a thing), and trying to hear his dream in a neutral way, and not hear it as creepy, but to respect his experience, and not react.

Thankfully, that was pretty much the end of that episode of that story.

Branes.🧠

a living wage: a guide for artists and gig workers in the bay area

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What Are You Charging?

Three conversations happen regularly in our community.

A colleague texts: “what are you charging for lessons?”

Another sends an email: “a school offered me this schedule and this salary—is that reasonable?”

A third says, in person, something harder to articulate: “I feel like I need to charge more for a private gig, but I don’t know how to explain why.”

These are not three different questions. They are the same conversation, framed in different contexts—and the reason it keeps coming up is that most of us learned to price our work by looking sideways at what others were charging, or by accepting what we were offered, rather than starting from what we actually need to live.

Our starting point needs to be what an artist (or other part-time gig workers) needs to live—not what any particular institution, context, or tradition has decided an artist’s time is worth.

Start with the number

A living wage in the Bay Area—meaning housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and modest participation in ordinary life—runs roughly $100,000 per year for a single adult. That number will be uncomfortable for some. Sit with the discomfort for a moment before moving on, because the discomfort itself is information.

The numbers bear this out. A one-bedroom apartment in Oakland or Berkeley—the most affordable corners of the inner East Bay—currently runs between $2,000 and $2,300 per month, with Berkeley averaging around $2,270 and Oakland around $1,980 for a one-bedroom. That is before utilities, renters insurance, or the reality that many working artists need a dedicated space for practice or instrument storage that a standard one-bedroom does not accommodate. In San Francisco proper, a one-bedroom averages $3,790—a number that effectively removes the city from consideration for an artist building a career from scratch.

Food for a single adult cooking most meals runs $450 to $600 per month in groceries, with monthly grocery bills for a single adult ranging from $400 to $600 depending on shopping habits and dietary preferences—and that figure assumes discipline and time, two things a fractured freelance schedule does not reliably provide. Add modest dining out and the occasional meal grabbed between gigs, and a realistic food budget lands closer to $650.

Healthcare is where the arithmetic becomes genuinely alarming for independent workers. The enhanced federal subsidies that had made Covered California plans affordable for freelancers expired at the end of 2025 and were not renewed. For those earning above 400% of the federal poverty level—roughly $58,320 for a single adult—the full unsubsidized premium now applies, which in many Bay Area metro plans exceeds $700 to $900 per month for a single adult on a mid-tier plan. An artist earning $100,000 gross is above that threshold. Health insurance alone, at the lower end of that range, costs $8,400 per year before a single co-pay or prescription.

Transportation compounds everything. An artist who carries instruments—a cello, a keyboard, percussion equipment, a sound system—cannot reliably depend on BART and a bicycle. A car means insurance, registration, gas, and maintenance: conservatively $400 to $500 per month. Going car-free is possible, but transit gaps are real—and the rideshare charges that fill them have a way of arriving all at once, on the weeks you can least afford them.

Then there is the tax structure of self-employment itself. A freelance artist earning $100,000 gross pays self-employment tax of approximately $14,130—the employer and employee share of Social Security and Medicare combined—before federal and California income taxes. Total tax liability at that income level runs roughly $30,000 to $34,000 annually depending on deductions. Take-home is closer to $66,000 to $70,000.

Run the budget: $2,200 rent, $650 food, $800 healthcare, $450 transportation, $200 utilities and phone, $150 in professional expenses—instrument maintenance, strings, reeds, music, scores—and $25 in renters insurance. That is $4,475 per month, or $53,700 per year, before a dollar of savings, before an emergency, before a plane ticket to see family, before anything goes wrong. At $66,000 take-home, what remains is $12,300—just over $1,000 per month—for everything else a life requires.

$100,000 gross is not wealth in the Bay Area. It is the arithmetic floor of a life that does not require choosing between healthcare and rent.

We are going to work backward from $100,000.

A sustainable working year for an artist looks something like this: forty working weeks, thirty hours of paid work per week. That is 1,200 billable hours annually—not the hours you spend preparing, maintaining your instruments, traveling between gigs, managing your schedule, or recovering from an intensive week. Just the hours a client is present and paying.

$100,000 divided by 1,200 hours is $83.33.

We’ll call it $85. The extra $1.67 per hour is not generosity—it is a small buffer against the gap between a clean calculation and a life that does not run on clean calculations. Instruments need repair. Gigs fall through. A student cancels the week you needed them not to. The $85 baseline assumes that a working artist’s year will be, in some measure, imperfect—and builds that assumption into the rate rather than leaving the artist to absorb it after the fact.

That is your baseline hourly rate. Not your asking price for everything—as we will see, some work warrants more—but the floor below which a straight hourly arrangement stops supporting a dignified life.

Not all hours are equal

Here is what the baseline assumes: that you work a relatively clean thirty hours per week during working weeks, with predictable scheduling, minimal dead time between commitments, and enough calendar continuity that you can plan your life.

Most of us do not work under those conditions. And the gap between the baseline assumption and the actual texture of freelance arts work is where the money disappears.

Consider three types of client relationships, and what each one actually costs you.

The single-hour client wants one hour, at a time that works for them, possibly in a location that requires travel, possibly with an instrument you have to transport. That hour does not exist in isolation. It brackets dead time on either side. It may strand you somewhere between other commitments. It requires the same preparation as a longer session. And if it falls in the middle of your day, it fractures the working block that might otherwise have generated two or three additional hours of income. A single-hour commitment carries a real cost beyond the hour itself, and your rate should reflect that. A reasonable premium is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent above your baseline—not punitive, but honest.

The contiguous block client offers two or more consecutive hours in the same location, without travel between. This is the condition under which the baseline rate makes sense. The overhead is amortized across the block. Your preparation serves multiple hours. Your day remains legible. This client is not doing you a favor—they are simply meeting the basic condition that makes the baseline viable. The baseline rate is appropriate here. It is also the floor. Volume alone is not a reason to discount.

The multi-block client—a school, a program, a recurring institutional relationship—offers the most, and should be asked for the most in one specific sense: not a lower rate, but a more useful schedule. An institution that can offer you Tuesday and Thursday mornings, consistently, across a full session, is giving you something more valuable than money alone. They are giving you a scaffold on which to build the rest of your calendar. Adjacent blocks from other clients can attach to that scaffold. Your week becomes a coherent structure rather than a collection of isolated obligations. When negotiating with institutions, the scheduling ask is as important as the rate conversation.

One of the most powerful things an artist can do for their own calendar is to stop building it around individual client availability and start building it around their own working architecture. This means choosing your times first—the blocks that fit your energy, your transit patterns, your instrument load, your recovery needs—and then inviting clients into those times, rather than the reverse. A client who asks “when are you available?” is asking a reasonable question. The answer that serves you is not a list of every open hour in your week. It is an offer: I teach Tuesday and Thursday mornings, in this location, at these times. Here is what is open. That framing is not inflexibility. It is the structure that makes a sustainable practice possible.

Group instruction fits naturally into this architecture, and it is worth saying plainly to prospective clients why. A group lesson is not a compromised version of a private lesson—it is a different and in many respects richer learning environment. Students in a shared setting learn not just from the instructor but from one another. A beginner watching an intermediate student work through a passage learns something about the path ahead. An advanced student asked to demonstrate or explain consolidates their own understanding. Mixed-age and mixed-skill groupings, far from being logistically inconvenient, replicate the way musical knowledge has always actually traveled—through communities, through listening, through proximity to people at different stages of the same journey. Peer-to-peer learning is not a pedagogical concession. It is a feature.

For the artist, the case is also straightforwardly economic. Three students in a ninety-minute block, each paying a group rate, generate more income per hour than one student in the same time—while requiring a single preparation, a single location, and a single slot in the calendar. The efficiencies are real and they compound across a well-structured week. When you share this with prospective clients, you are not upselling them or managing them. You are inviting them into a model that works better for everyone: for the artist who needs a coherent schedule, for the student who benefits from a learning community, and for the parent or patron who is, whether they know it yet or not, investing in something more durable than a transaction between two people in a room.

This framing belongs in your intake language from the beginning. Before the first lesson, before the first invoice, a prospective client should understand how you work—not as a disclaimer, but as part of what makes working with you worth it. Something as simple as: My teaching is organized around group and paired sessions, which I find produce better outcomes for students and allow me to maintain a sustainable practice. I’d love to talk about how that might work for your situation. That sentence does several things at once. It positions group learning as a pedagogical choice, not a scheduling workaround. It signals that you have a practice with a structure, not a collection of available hours. And it opens a conversation rather than closing one.

The Bay Area layer

Everything above assumes a relatively frictionless working life. The Bay Area adds friction at every point.

Housing costs are the most visible part. At $100,000 gross, after taxes, a Bay Area artist is navigating one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. The living wage figure is not generous—it is the minimum required to remain housed and functional.

Transportation compounds this. Getting from one gig to another takes longer here, costs more, and frequently involves carrying instruments or materials that make transit difficult. A lesson in someone’s home in the hills is not the same as a lesson in a studio two blocks from your house. The travel is real work, and it belongs in your rate calculation.

Space is the hidden variable most artists underestimate. When a client invites you into their home or their school, they are providing infrastructure—a room, a piano, a floor. When they do not, and you are expected to provide or rent space, the math changes dramatically. Studio rental in the Bay Area can run $40-60 per hour or more. That cost does not disappear because it is inconvenient to discuss. An hourly rate that does not account for space rental is subsidizing the client’s infrastructure out of your own pocket.

Finally, schedule density. The Bay Area’s geography and the complexity of people’s lives means that filling a room—building a class, a cohort, a consistent group—is genuinely hard. When you find a time and place where people can reliably show up, that configuration has real value. Protecting it is not rigidity. It is asset management.

A note on scheduling as access

Many artists in our community are neurodivergent—autistic, ADHD, or both. The overlap between neurodivergence and a life in the arts is not coincidental. The same pattern-recognition, intensity of focus, and sensitivity that makes the work possible also shapes what sustainable working conditions look like.

For autistic artists, regular schedules and replicable routines are not preferences—they are the infrastructure of functional work. Unpredictable scheduling is not merely inconvenient; it carries a cognitive load that accumulates across the week and affects the quality of the work itself.

For artists with ADHD, intense focus periods need protection on both ends. A schedule that allows for deep immersion followed by genuine recovery is not indulgence—it is the condition under which the best work happens. A scattered calendar of single-hour commitments spread across the week is, in this light, not just financially inefficient. It is architecturally hostile to the work.

This is worth naming not as a disclosure but as a design principle. A schedule built around predictable blocks, protected recovery time, and calendar adjacency is better for neurodivergent artists. It is also, it turns out, better for everyone. The neurodivergent case just makes the logic visible.

Bringing it back to the three conversations

Your colleague who texted asking what you charge: now you have a number to start from, and a way to explain it. $85 is the floor for a contiguous block. Single-hour work, travel, space, and schedule friction each adjust it upward.

Your colleague evaluating a school’s offer: the salary question cannot be answered without knowing the schedule. How many hours per week? Are they contiguous? Is travel involved? Does the schedule allow for adjacent income? A number that looks reasonable in isolation may not survive contact with those questions.

Your colleague who felt she needed to charge more for a private gig but couldn’t explain why: she was right. She was absorbing travel, instrument transport, space provision, and schedule fragmentation—and pricing none of it. The discomfort was her knowledge of the real cost, looking for language.

The discomfort was understandable. The words just needed to catch up. What follows is the language our community has been reaching for—a framework built not from what the market offers, but from what we actually need to live, work, and keep showing up.

Know your value. Price accordingly.

what’s the deal with literacy these days?

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Let’s take a moment to say something out loud:
there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world;
and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons
many of our kids are not excited

to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent
lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows
of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper
or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,

someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not
important enough to take the time to craft.
Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to:
Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;

Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics
are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find
a rhyme, if they know that one is coming:
(you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when

the person reading leaves out the last
word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?)
(If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend).
When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad

were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms
and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited
memory to do the work of storytelling,
passed from tongue to tongue for about as long

as Europeans have occupied the Americas–
you might start to wonder which skills we should be
focusing on, when passing information
along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.

You can do the human math–(I’ve done it,
and with confidence can say what I’m going
to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most
of the poets and writers of ages past were people

who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent;
for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm
was just the way they knew their brain would remember it;
and in doing so, made the event accessible

to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen,
you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow;
the calming force of human expectation,
and satisfaction of expectation, over,

and over, and over, and over, and over again,
like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders,
that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount
of time. (who has time for that, these days?)