The Elephant's Child

Fractions and Pancakes.

Train Wreck At the Library.

A patron at the library approached the front desk and asked if the library had "a globe or an atlas." 

The two library clerks, both teen girls, looked vaguely around the room (our library is essentially all one large room) and hemmed and hawed a bit.  Finally one said, "Umm, I don't think we do." 

Since I was standing directly adjacent to the circulation desk, I pointed to the reference shelf, just off to the right of the main card catalog computer.  "The library has to have an atlas.  Check the reference section." 

One of the clerks wandered over to the reference area, a wall that totals all of eight or ten linear feet of bookshelves in our small-town library, and started scanning the shelves.  After a moment, and apparently not processing that atlases tend to be oversized and thus shelved on the bottom shelves in libraries, she called back to the clerk at the circulation desk, "Hey, could you look up an atlas for me?"

She did, then ran downstairs to the children's library to retreive one from there. 

How poor does your basic ability to think have to be in order to answer, "I don't think we have one," to someone who requests an atlas at a library? And it wasn't just a momentary brain fart, because both clerks had no idea. 

I was telling this story to Mad Musician just now, sitting here in the office.  The heat vent, shared between this room and Sparkle Kitty's room, slid opened, and we heard her voice call through the vent.  "I don't mean to interrupt, but didn't you tell her that there's an atlas printed on the carpet in the children's library?" 

(I love my kid.) 

Judging The Writing in Children's Books.

One good rule of thumb to use when judging the quality of writing in a children's book is this:  If an adult can read the book in question and enjoy it, there's a good chance the book is well-written. 

Another good rule of thumb:  Can the book be read aloud easily?  If you trip over words, if the sentences fall like lead shot, it's not well-crafted writing.  But if it's easy to read aloud, it's likely very well written.  

Case in point?  The Magic Treehouse versus The Hobbit.  It's easy to read The Hobbit outloud, even though it's much more complicated in vocabulary and sentence structure than The Magic Treehouse books. 

 

Defensiveness.

Homeschooling methodology discussions are difficult.  But when someone homeschooling runs into a rough spot, discussions over which curriculum or educational philosophy is in use are bound to come up.

Sadly, discussions often go like this:

Newbie Homeschooler: I'm having this struggle.

Experienced HSer, Method A: We had that struggle, too.  Here's what worked for us.

Newbie Homeschooler: Ok, what about this aspect of Method A, how does that work? 

Experienced HSer, Method B: There's nothing wrong with the way I homeschool! 

I don't know why this is.  Homeschooling has wide sucess, despite huge variations in the methodology used by parents.  I don't understand why Group B of homeschoolers gets defensive when the methods of Group A of homeschoolers are under discussion.  In all the talk I've been a part of (and I have been involved in online homeschooling email lists and blogs for four years now), I have never heard criticism aimed at a particular method.  What I hear is "That doesn't work for my family", not "You're ruining your kids by making them do worksheets." 

It happens in all sorts of contexts, but it's especially noticeable when unschooling or child-led learning is being discussed.  An unschooling family talks about the free time their kids have or the extensive playing they do.  A more scheduled and bookish homeschooling mom reacts as if people are saying her kids have no free time or play time, even though no one said that. 

Why? Does the idea that a method other than ours may work just as well threaten to expose that our kids are growing up and turning out ok despite our ineptitude and not because we Did Things The Right Way? 

 

Homeschooling is about the fact that you homeschool, not about what methods you use, unless the children and Mom are miserable. If Mom's going crazy and the kids are miserable, then it's time to look at a different way of doing school.  But as long as Mom's not making a second martini at 10:30 am and the children are growing and thriving and learning of some kind is going on, there's no immediate need to change everything you're doing.  And there's certainly no need to feel like people are attacking what you're doing. 

 

 

 

Legacy.

For me, Jobs' greatest legacy is not that of astonishing innovator and creative capitalist extraordinaire, although those accomplishments are certainly of great note.

No, for me, Jobs' greatest legacy is the lie his life has given to the paradigm that one must get into a "good college" to have a successful and interesting life, or indeed, that one must go to college at all. 

 

But What About Socialization?

In my opinion, this is the last word on the interminable "socialization" question that homeschooling familes are always dealing with. 

In short, 

"...the social activities that [my kids have] been a part of have been family-oriented. They have been socialized by our family and friends. They have been socialized by adults who we like and admire and have chosen to spend time with. I firmly believe that one of the worst aspects of conventional schooling is the division by age and the imposition of barriers between child and family."

 

Taking Kids Seriously.

Came across this by David Malki ! this morning.  He tells of buying a book for $1.99 written by a kid.  And he reviews the "book."  Quite seriously.   Awesome.  I'll bet that little girl will be excited for days over the fact that someone bought her book for real money.

Oftentimes adults don't realize what it means to a kid to be taken seriously by an adult.   As a former kid, I can tell you it's a huge deal.  

What if schools did a better job of the same thing?   What if kids could come up with projects and ideas for businesses, for concepts for books, fundraisers for beloved causes, or for machines they'd like to build, and the adults at the school not only took the kids seriously but acted in a supporting role to help the kids with their projects, ideas and dreams?  Why shouldn't a 12 year old need to learn how to write up a business plan?

Ah,  but the adults have already decided what it is that the children must learn and children have little say in the matter.  Kids' ideas aren't really that important, not now. Children must put aside all their really big ideas until they're done with gradeschool and highschool and college and maybe post-grad work, too.  By which time they'll have learned very well and throughly that what others want to teach them, whether it be teachers, bosses, or an advertisement, is much more important than any idea they have themselves. 

 

Angry Birds.

I finally switched from Firefox to Chrome this past week (had been thinking about it for a while, but just hadn't gotten around to it), and with Chrome comes plenty of extensions, add-ons and apps.  We chose Angry Birds and Tetris from the games available. 

Sparkle Kitty's quite good at Angry Birds.  She seems to be able to intuitively adjust her firing angles based on what happened with her last shot.  She played for about an hour this morning, then, when I kicked her off the computer so Mommy could do some work *cough* check Facebook, she decided she wanted to "play in real life."   She wanted stuffed, plush Angry Birds ($100 for a set of pigs and a set of birds.  Seriously?) but when I told her no way would we buy them, she changed her approach and headed downstairs with stuffed cats and wooden blocks to play "Angry Cats." 

Alas, she reported back a few minutes later that the blocks are too easy to knock over with the cats.  My suggestion to switch to her collection of Schleich-sized plastic cats instead of her Beanie-Baby sized cats was discarded.  Now she's decided to go play outside and create an Angry Birds version with things she finds outside. 

I left the video games are categorically bad for kids thinking behind about eighteen months ago. 

 

On Being a Man and Being a Grown Up.

Written by this commenter on this article,

". . .  (N)o success outside of the home will make up for failure within it."

Then, there's this, pulled from the same article:

"College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy." (Original source)

 

Thirty Years' Change.

An article from Slate on what constituted the skills needed for becoming a beginning first grader in 1979 has been making the rounds.

Much of the discussion over the article has focused around the societal changes we've seen in attitudes about letting children walk to school alone (or a distance of four to eight blocks).

But what struck me about the article (and the links to the original, source information) was how incredibly different expectations are for the other skills.

Can you imagine the furor and horror over "low expectations" if your local public school had, as a requirement for beginning first grade, that your child be able to ". . . draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored" or that she be able to ". . . repeat an eight- to ten-word sentence, if you say it once" ?

Although it is now expected that children be well on their way to reading by the end of kindergarten and it's not uncommon for first and second graders to have significant homework, my sense is that overall school achievement is not dramatically better than it was in 1979.  In the very early 70s Mad Musician's mom (very wisely, I believe) opted not to send her son to kindergarten at all but start his formal schooling with first grade. 

Kindergarten was considered completely optional as recently as thirty years ago.  But when Sparkle Kitty was three and four years old I would occasionally get stunned looks when I stated that she was not going to be attending a pre-school. 

A friend was told, sternly, by her child's school, that she would be compromising her child's chances for sucess by removing her child from four-year-old preschool.  Her child would not be ready for the academic rigors of Kindergarten.

When I was in kindergarten, we learned to cut paper in straight lines and in wavy lines.  We played circle games.  In first grade, those of us who were not already reading began to learn to read. (In a class of less than 20, four of us already were reading fluently after a kindergarten curriculum that would barely pass muster as a pre-school one today.)    Within just a couple months, most of the first grade class was reading at grade level.  The few stragglers got extra help from a reading specialist, the same specialist that worked with the four of us who were reading above grade level. 

It just doesn't add up, this push for earlier and earlier formal academics.