So, when people talk to each other, there are at least two levels of communication going on. One is very direct: the words you're saying. But the other is implicit, and has to do with what the words imply, non-literal meanings that accrue because of cultural conventions or long usage. Linguists call this latter meaning "pragmatics," though I'm sure I've done a poor job of describing it.
So I'll give some examples. I have many to hand, because one of Raider's favorite things is to tease me by pretending he has no notion of pragmatics. So, for 17 years, I have almost-daily been subjected to little conversations like these:
Me: Raider, have you seen my shoes?
Raider: Many a time!
or
Me: Raider, I'd like a cup of tea.
Raider: And no wonder! Tea is both delicious and soothingly warm!
He likes to pretend he can only hear what I have literally said, so he doesn't know that "have you seen my shoes?" is a perfectly conventional construction meaning, "I cannot find my shoes. Do you know where they are right now?" Or that "I'd like a cup of tea" is more than a declarative statement about my appetite.
I'm thinking about this for a couple of reasons. One is that Eric is learning the difference between "statements" and "commands" in his Language Arts curriculum, and it's interesting to think about how often a statement can actually be a command ("I'm cold" can mean "turn the heat up," or "hand me that blanket"; "I'd like a cup of tea" can actually mean, "get me a cup of tea, please"; "I'm getting hungry" can mean, "please start cooking dinner.")
The other is that I've had several occasions recently to reflect on how very often people think they've said something, but they haven't. A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from an acquaintance about a conversation we'd had a few months ago. In the e-mail, she described herself as having been "very direct" in asking me to do something, and said that she felt I had just "blown her off." I apologized, because I am sorry I made her uncomfortable. But I remember the conversation, too, and at the time, I honestly did not realize she was asking me to take action. Why not? Because she phrased her request in the form of a factual statement. She didn't say, "Su, would you please?" or "Su, I'd like you to," or "Su, I wish you would..." Maybe I was a little too clueless ("Yes, I have seen your shoes many times! And admired their tasteful elegance!") but I was struck by her sense that she had been "very direct" with me when in fact she had not said a word about what she wanted me to do.
Another friend was telling me the other day about how hurt and offended she was by someone's failure to act in the face of her need. She had sent this person an e-mail saying that she was ill, and expected that the response would be an offer of help. But the offer of help did not come. Again, I noticed that she thought she had made a request, and that her request had been ignored, but she never said she needed help during her illness. Only that she was ill. And her friend took the information at face value: she was sorry to hear about the illness, but didn't realize she was being asked to help.
I wonder if that indirect form of making a request is partly cultural? Is it a form of Midwestern politeness and conflict-avoidance, or is it something that happens everywhere people talk to each other? Awhile ago, somebody on AskMetafilter described the difference between Ask vs. Guess Culture, and it resonated with a lot of people. I come from Guess Culture, for sure, but I think I've become an Ask Culture person because I like the clarity, and because, as the AskMetafilter comment said, Guess Culture behavior can seem passive-aggressive to me: you're mad at me because I didn't do something you didn't actually ask me to do? Really? It can feel like a set-up. (And realizing that you're disappointed because someone didn't do something they didn't know you wanted them to do can be both humbling and liberating.)
I wonder if another way to think about Ask vs. Guess is that people may have preferences about who they want to be mad: some people would rather be mad, and some people would rather somebody else be mad. If you'd rather be mad than have someone mad at you, you're going to make indirect statements instead of direct requests; you risk not getting what you want and need, but on the other hand, it's much less likely that the person will be upset with you. On the other hand, if you ask someone very directly, especially if your request might make them embarrassed or self-conscious or feel hurtful ("Can you please stop chewing with your mouth open?") they might be angry with you. I suppose there's a balance, a calculation people make, weighing how likely they are to end up in explicit conflict against how likely they are to get what they want.
That's all I've got. I've just been musing about this lately. I wonder if Raider found my shoes and made my tea yet?
Monday, January 31, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
January Reading: Three Book Reports
So, when the new year started, I was in a reading lull. I didn't have many books home from the library, and hardly any in my hold queue. I felt sort of tired of all the kinds of things I usually read, and like I'd just been thinking too much about too many things and needed to give my brain a break. So, I decided, I would devote my reading in the new year to genre fiction, and avoid reading anything else on certain worn-out topics, like politics, education, and parenting.
I have been half-successful. I've read some science fiction, including Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, which I just finished this morning and was very impressed by. It's one of those books that seems only OK--good in the gonzo, perfect-action-man tradition of Spider Robinson's Callahan books, John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and certain Heinlein. But then, about halfway in, the pieces start coming together in a very satisfying way, and it becomes a really good book, and you admire the author for having the patience to create a set-up 250 pages long. I was completely surprised by the twist around page 400, even though the twist suddenly made all these things that had nagged at me ("Why does he never talk about his parents?") make perfect sense. I picked up that something was off; I didn't figure out what it was. That's a good twist.
I have set aside The Gone-Away World for David, instead of putting it right into the library bag to be returned. Though, as I told him this morning, I'm not sure I want him to read it even though I am sure he'll like it. Because he is smarter than me in certain ways and he will figure out the twist in about 100 pages, and then I'll feel stupid.
Of course, I've forewarned him: he knows there's a twist. So he has an unfair advantage. In addition to the one where he's just smarter than me in certain ways, I mean.
But I have not been fully successful at focusing on genre fiction, because I have this reflex: if someone mentions a book in my hearing, or on a website or something, I order it from the library and read it. I think I have said before that it's a wonder my friends don't exploit this habit for their own amusement, sending me on wild goose chases after terrible novels and unreadable literary criticism and Tea Party memoirs and distasteful porn.
Anyway, I was on a website where some people were recommending books, and as a result I ended up reading two books about education and one about parenting this month. And now I will say a few things about these books.
School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School by Edward Humes.
Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, is one of the highest-ranked public high schools in America. 100% of its graduates go on to college, many of them in the Ivy League or at flagship schools in the California state university system. Edward Humes spent a year at the school interviewing teachers, parents, and students, in the interest of painting a picture of what high school is like at the kind of school that has a reputation so wide-spread that families move into the district from India and Japan in the hopes of enrolling their kids there.
I liked this book better than I expected to. Humes was less interested in an expose than in a description, so the book gives you a picture of what works in the school as well as what might make most of us cringe, like seventh graders pulling highly-caffeinated all-nighters before major tests, and parents who push kids into a very narrow range of options (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, conveniently abbreviated "HYP"; medicine, business, hard sciences) no matter what the kids' interests and aptitudes. Humes doesn't seem too interested in the big questions, but his book shows us what it takes to produce that student body, and invites us to wonder whether it's worth it. A pretty quick read; worth it if you're interested in that kind of thing. Not something I'd put on a list of "10 Books About Education You Must Read," were someone to ask me for such a list.
How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance by Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland.
This book is about the transformation of a failing Chicago public elementary school into a model school, and it is written by one of the mothers who drove the transformation, and the principal of the school. One of the book's flaws is that is is annoyingly self-congratulatory; the group of mothers who joined together to try to improve their neighborhood school is referred to throughout as the "supermoms," for instance. It's a bit grating.
There is no doubt that these moms worked hard. They conceived of their plan while hanging out at the playground with their preschoolers; overwhelmed by the process of trying to find places for their kids in one of the decent public elementary schools (which might get 600 applications for 57 places), or in one of the private elementary schools in Chicago (which might also get an overwhelming number of applications, and then cost $20,000 per year to boot), they decided to see if they could do something about their neighborhood school. It was failing academically; the physical plant was dingy and in need of repair; the building itself was so posted over with KEEP OUT signs that it was intimidating just to approach it.
But they did. The met with the principal and got her permission to transform the place. They set a timeline of one year, just long enough to figure out if they could make it decent enough for their kids to start kindergarten in, and to show enough progress to get other parents to choose it over the magnet-school/private-school lottery. In the second half of one summer, they collected nearly a half-million dollars worth of donated materials and labor, with which they improved the building's exterior, painted the interior, made much-needed repairs, and transformed an unused room into the school's first-ever library.
Yay for them! They certainly deserve some kudos for their vision and hard work, these "supermoms," and I would offer them some except that they are so busy kudos-ing themselves that it would be redundant.
Well, and I won't offer them too many kudos because their story has a much deeper problem than a little too much self-satisfaction: a shocking level of cluelessness about social class issues.
These women achieve something that goes so far beyond ordinary class-cluelessness that I was staggered. I have a friend who is very passionately concerned about social class issues; I kept thinking to myself, "Jeanne must never read this book. You could practically murder Jeanne with this book, just slip it into her bedside to-be-read pile and wait for the inevitable aneurysm..." I honestly did not want to believe that people this unaware existed, but here they are, damned by their own words. No wonder people like Jeanne are so passionate about social class issues.
It starts when they conceive the project, and deliberately decide to proceed without seeking input from anyone outside their group. Their reasons are pragmatic, and make sense to a point: they want to hit the ground running and accomplish a lot very fast, and they're concerned that if they start convening neighborhood meetings and listening to other people's concerns, they'll get bogged down in discussion and controversy and accomplish nothing. I don't think they're necessarily wrong about that; I've been in community meetings myself where action was stalled by nay-sayers, or by competing and incompatible aspirations.
But that decision speaks to a kind of persistent assumption that the Supermoms know best. Unfortunately, they have a very narrow vision: they want to create a school that their kids, and the kids of other people like them, can attend. They are not asking questions about how to best serve a diverse neighborhood, for instance. They are self-congratulatory about things that would have troubled me, such as the high number of professional degrees among their group. It's not that professional degrees are bad; I'd just have been concerned about the insularity of the group. They don't seem to be. The authors crow about a moment when, needing a special permit for something, they are able to get it quickly because one of the group members, an urban planner, has contacts at the city. I'm having trouble making my point. I mean to say that they don't seem to notice that they're not a very representative group. If anything, they revel in the very things that privilege them. They describe what they did as a "blueprint," but don't seem to notice that they have a formidable array of resources that may not be easy for another group to come by. Their driving force is not, "This school is failing the neighborhood children; what can we do to make it better serve its community?"; rather, it's "I want to opt out of this insane magnet school/private school race; how can I make this school good enough for my child?"
Two more examples: At one point, the group is accused of "elitism" for wanting to hold an expensive fundraiser at what they describe as a "posh wine bar." It is very telling that the authors' response is a combination of befuddlement and missing the point: "How can we be elitist?" they ask. "We're working so hard on this fundraiser, working into the night!" And then they smugly claim that the complaints disappeared once the money started rolling in, $17,000 in one night. Yet again, the Supermoms know best! Astonishing.
The most telling moment, though, comes when the authors discuss the decline in enrollment among poor children and African-American children, once the school's turnaround begins to succeed. They are very troubled by this, and the long, introspective passage where they consider the moral and ethical issues involved in "fixing" a school and in the process turning it into a magnet for the upper-middle-class, and where they consider soberly whether there are things they could have done to improve the school while retaining and serving the kids who used to be its core population, is one of the highlights of the book.
Just kidding! Ha ha ha ha ha. They are, in fact, troubled by the decline in enrollment of Black and poor kids...because it becomes a fund-raising challenge. It turns out that both government entities and private foundations prefer to give money where it can help the underprivileged. The authors note without irony that nobody seems to want to give money to help kids who already have everything they need, so once the population of the school reaches a certain percentage of white and middle-class kids, it becomes much harder to get outside money. The lesson they learn: how to find corporate partners.
These moms really are dedicated, hard-working, and high-energy, and they forged a very productive partnership with their local failing school. I just wish they'd done it without making privileged white people look so completely clueless and self-involved.
[Full disclosure: By about halfway through the book, I found the authors so insufferably smug that I started skimming. So it is possible that somewhere in the second half is a section I missed in which they make all this right. If you read it, and find that part, send me an e-mail with the page numbers and I'll post a sheepish and apologetic update.]
Finally, I read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (though not the updated version linked there, the original one). The original was published in 1998, though I thought it was more recent than that--I remember some book whose premise was "parents actually have very little influence over their kids" making a big splash a few years ago. Whatever book that was, I ignored it, as I had ignored this one, until someone called it a must-read and I decided to give it a look.
Harris's premise is indeed that parents have very little influence over their children. She is a big fan of genetics, and she also believes that peers have more influence than parents. Some pieces of her argument are quite persuasive, and I'll talk about some of the points I found worthwhile in a minute. But I didn't trust her. Aristotle identified something called the "ethical appeal" in argument, which is the ways that a person signals that they can be trusted: carrying oneself with authority, for instance, or speaking calmly. I didn't buy Harris's ethical appeal. For one thing, she is too self-consciously radical. She likes to say, "Nobody else is brave enough to say this, but I am," as if early childhood researchers are going to form a mob, storm her house, and burn her at the stake as a heretic.
She also recycles the same examples over and over. Certain pairs of identical twins reared apart show up in chapter after chapter. It's tiresome to read; somebody should really have helped her edit this thing more effectively. But it also made me wonder to what extent she was relying on a handful of studies that supported her claims, and what she was ignoring. I found myself suspecting that if I were to check her sources, I might find that they didn't say what she said they did. I'm not invested enough to do that, but I just didn't trust her. Too axe-grindy.
An aside on the identical twins: she is especially enamored of these twins, reared apart, who, when they met as adults for the first time, had similar haircuts, glasses with rectangular frames, and sons named James. They were also both wearing blue shirts. This is all supposed to point to the mysterious genetic component of behavior, but I was skeptical. I found myself thinking about how similar men's haircuts are in general; how little variation there is in eyeglass fashion (practically everybody I know is wearing rectangular frames right now--because they're the only thing you can get). How common a name was "James" when their sons were born? I remember getting all excited one time because David and I met another couple named Dave and Sue; David laughed at me. He reminded me that "David" and "Susan" were the #1 baby names when we were born; there must be thousands and thousands of couples our age with our names. And, finally, blue has got to be one of the two most popular colors for men's shirts.
I'd have been more impressed if the raised-apart identical twins had shown up for their first meeting wearing Hawaiian shirts, with fresh Mohawks, John Lennon glasses, and sons named Hubert. You see what I mean? I don't think "blue shirt, son named James" rises much beyond coincidence.
Anyway.
What did I find convincing about Harris's argument? Well, she points out that cause and effect can be hard to untangle. A study finds that children who are spanked are more aggressive; does the spanking cause the aggression, or is it true that aggressive children are more likely to be spanked? She says that our pre-existing assumption that parents create their children's behavior leads us to assume the cause-effect arrow goes spanking----> aggression. But she doesn't think the research that has been done establishes that very well.
She also disputes the idea that parents have a character that can be summed up once for all their children: "She's a permissive parent," or, "He's very strict." Most parenting studies look at a cohort of children--a first-grade class, say--and correlate the kids' characteristics with how their parents treat them. But, Harris points out, most people have more than one child, and they are often different with different children. This is certainly true in my experience; I recently blogged about how different I am with Yehva than with the boys. But I was already learning from Eric, when he was my only child, how children create their parents. Harris suggests that if researchers looked at complete families they would find parents' behaviors and attitudes varying depending on their kids' temperaments and challenges.
Here, while I agree with her, I also feel a caution she doesn't seem to. If other researchers are guilty of making "the nurture assumption" and interpreting all their findings in that light, it seems to me that Harris sees children's inborn tendencies as extremely robust; she gives tremendous weight to "child-parent effects." She forgets to be as careful about cause and effect as she wants researchers to be.
I do think she is right that it is very difficult to separate parenting effects from the effects of peers (which she sees as extremely influential, though she says children self-select peers who reinforce their inborn tendencies: a child who tends toward delinquent behavior might be more likely to choose a peer group with similar tendencies) and the wider community. She says that parents do their parenting while embedded in the effects of the genes they have passed down, and in the community of people mostly like them they have chosen. Given all that, she thinks that there is little evidence that the very modest differences between what happens in two houses--an hour of TV vs. two hours per day; a slightly-higher tendency toward harsh discipline in one house, and so on--has much influence on what kids do or how they turn out. And thus, she says, out cultural tendency to praise or blame parents is unfair and misplaced.
Harris has some thought-provoking arguments; the book could have been better.
I have been half-successful. I've read some science fiction, including Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, which I just finished this morning and was very impressed by. It's one of those books that seems only OK--good in the gonzo, perfect-action-man tradition of Spider Robinson's Callahan books, John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and certain Heinlein. But then, about halfway in, the pieces start coming together in a very satisfying way, and it becomes a really good book, and you admire the author for having the patience to create a set-up 250 pages long. I was completely surprised by the twist around page 400, even though the twist suddenly made all these things that had nagged at me ("Why does he never talk about his parents?") make perfect sense. I picked up that something was off; I didn't figure out what it was. That's a good twist.
I have set aside The Gone-Away World for David, instead of putting it right into the library bag to be returned. Though, as I told him this morning, I'm not sure I want him to read it even though I am sure he'll like it. Because he is smarter than me in certain ways and he will figure out the twist in about 100 pages, and then I'll feel stupid.
Of course, I've forewarned him: he knows there's a twist. So he has an unfair advantage. In addition to the one where he's just smarter than me in certain ways, I mean.
But I have not been fully successful at focusing on genre fiction, because I have this reflex: if someone mentions a book in my hearing, or on a website or something, I order it from the library and read it. I think I have said before that it's a wonder my friends don't exploit this habit for their own amusement, sending me on wild goose chases after terrible novels and unreadable literary criticism and Tea Party memoirs and distasteful porn.
Anyway, I was on a website where some people were recommending books, and as a result I ended up reading two books about education and one about parenting this month. And now I will say a few things about these books.
School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School by Edward Humes.
Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, is one of the highest-ranked public high schools in America. 100% of its graduates go on to college, many of them in the Ivy League or at flagship schools in the California state university system. Edward Humes spent a year at the school interviewing teachers, parents, and students, in the interest of painting a picture of what high school is like at the kind of school that has a reputation so wide-spread that families move into the district from India and Japan in the hopes of enrolling their kids there.
I liked this book better than I expected to. Humes was less interested in an expose than in a description, so the book gives you a picture of what works in the school as well as what might make most of us cringe, like seventh graders pulling highly-caffeinated all-nighters before major tests, and parents who push kids into a very narrow range of options (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, conveniently abbreviated "HYP"; medicine, business, hard sciences) no matter what the kids' interests and aptitudes. Humes doesn't seem too interested in the big questions, but his book shows us what it takes to produce that student body, and invites us to wonder whether it's worth it. A pretty quick read; worth it if you're interested in that kind of thing. Not something I'd put on a list of "10 Books About Education You Must Read," were someone to ask me for such a list.
How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance by Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland.
This book is about the transformation of a failing Chicago public elementary school into a model school, and it is written by one of the mothers who drove the transformation, and the principal of the school. One of the book's flaws is that is is annoyingly self-congratulatory; the group of mothers who joined together to try to improve their neighborhood school is referred to throughout as the "supermoms," for instance. It's a bit grating.
There is no doubt that these moms worked hard. They conceived of their plan while hanging out at the playground with their preschoolers; overwhelmed by the process of trying to find places for their kids in one of the decent public elementary schools (which might get 600 applications for 57 places), or in one of the private elementary schools in Chicago (which might also get an overwhelming number of applications, and then cost $20,000 per year to boot), they decided to see if they could do something about their neighborhood school. It was failing academically; the physical plant was dingy and in need of repair; the building itself was so posted over with KEEP OUT signs that it was intimidating just to approach it.
But they did. The met with the principal and got her permission to transform the place. They set a timeline of one year, just long enough to figure out if they could make it decent enough for their kids to start kindergarten in, and to show enough progress to get other parents to choose it over the magnet-school/private-school lottery. In the second half of one summer, they collected nearly a half-million dollars worth of donated materials and labor, with which they improved the building's exterior, painted the interior, made much-needed repairs, and transformed an unused room into the school's first-ever library.
Yay for them! They certainly deserve some kudos for their vision and hard work, these "supermoms," and I would offer them some except that they are so busy kudos-ing themselves that it would be redundant.
Well, and I won't offer them too many kudos because their story has a much deeper problem than a little too much self-satisfaction: a shocking level of cluelessness about social class issues.
These women achieve something that goes so far beyond ordinary class-cluelessness that I was staggered. I have a friend who is very passionately concerned about social class issues; I kept thinking to myself, "Jeanne must never read this book. You could practically murder Jeanne with this book, just slip it into her bedside to-be-read pile and wait for the inevitable aneurysm..." I honestly did not want to believe that people this unaware existed, but here they are, damned by their own words. No wonder people like Jeanne are so passionate about social class issues.
It starts when they conceive the project, and deliberately decide to proceed without seeking input from anyone outside their group. Their reasons are pragmatic, and make sense to a point: they want to hit the ground running and accomplish a lot very fast, and they're concerned that if they start convening neighborhood meetings and listening to other people's concerns, they'll get bogged down in discussion and controversy and accomplish nothing. I don't think they're necessarily wrong about that; I've been in community meetings myself where action was stalled by nay-sayers, or by competing and incompatible aspirations.
But that decision speaks to a kind of persistent assumption that the Supermoms know best. Unfortunately, they have a very narrow vision: they want to create a school that their kids, and the kids of other people like them, can attend. They are not asking questions about how to best serve a diverse neighborhood, for instance. They are self-congratulatory about things that would have troubled me, such as the high number of professional degrees among their group. It's not that professional degrees are bad; I'd just have been concerned about the insularity of the group. They don't seem to be. The authors crow about a moment when, needing a special permit for something, they are able to get it quickly because one of the group members, an urban planner, has contacts at the city. I'm having trouble making my point. I mean to say that they don't seem to notice that they're not a very representative group. If anything, they revel in the very things that privilege them. They describe what they did as a "blueprint," but don't seem to notice that they have a formidable array of resources that may not be easy for another group to come by. Their driving force is not, "This school is failing the neighborhood children; what can we do to make it better serve its community?"; rather, it's "I want to opt out of this insane magnet school/private school race; how can I make this school good enough for my child?"
Two more examples: At one point, the group is accused of "elitism" for wanting to hold an expensive fundraiser at what they describe as a "posh wine bar." It is very telling that the authors' response is a combination of befuddlement and missing the point: "How can we be elitist?" they ask. "We're working so hard on this fundraiser, working into the night!" And then they smugly claim that the complaints disappeared once the money started rolling in, $17,000 in one night. Yet again, the Supermoms know best! Astonishing.
The most telling moment, though, comes when the authors discuss the decline in enrollment among poor children and African-American children, once the school's turnaround begins to succeed. They are very troubled by this, and the long, introspective passage where they consider the moral and ethical issues involved in "fixing" a school and in the process turning it into a magnet for the upper-middle-class, and where they consider soberly whether there are things they could have done to improve the school while retaining and serving the kids who used to be its core population, is one of the highlights of the book.
Just kidding! Ha ha ha ha ha. They are, in fact, troubled by the decline in enrollment of Black and poor kids...because it becomes a fund-raising challenge. It turns out that both government entities and private foundations prefer to give money where it can help the underprivileged. The authors note without irony that nobody seems to want to give money to help kids who already have everything they need, so once the population of the school reaches a certain percentage of white and middle-class kids, it becomes much harder to get outside money. The lesson they learn: how to find corporate partners.
These moms really are dedicated, hard-working, and high-energy, and they forged a very productive partnership with their local failing school. I just wish they'd done it without making privileged white people look so completely clueless and self-involved.
[Full disclosure: By about halfway through the book, I found the authors so insufferably smug that I started skimming. So it is possible that somewhere in the second half is a section I missed in which they make all this right. If you read it, and find that part, send me an e-mail with the page numbers and I'll post a sheepish and apologetic update.]
Finally, I read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (though not the updated version linked there, the original one). The original was published in 1998, though I thought it was more recent than that--I remember some book whose premise was "parents actually have very little influence over their kids" making a big splash a few years ago. Whatever book that was, I ignored it, as I had ignored this one, until someone called it a must-read and I decided to give it a look.
Harris's premise is indeed that parents have very little influence over their children. She is a big fan of genetics, and she also believes that peers have more influence than parents. Some pieces of her argument are quite persuasive, and I'll talk about some of the points I found worthwhile in a minute. But I didn't trust her. Aristotle identified something called the "ethical appeal" in argument, which is the ways that a person signals that they can be trusted: carrying oneself with authority, for instance, or speaking calmly. I didn't buy Harris's ethical appeal. For one thing, she is too self-consciously radical. She likes to say, "Nobody else is brave enough to say this, but I am," as if early childhood researchers are going to form a mob, storm her house, and burn her at the stake as a heretic.
She also recycles the same examples over and over. Certain pairs of identical twins reared apart show up in chapter after chapter. It's tiresome to read; somebody should really have helped her edit this thing more effectively. But it also made me wonder to what extent she was relying on a handful of studies that supported her claims, and what she was ignoring. I found myself suspecting that if I were to check her sources, I might find that they didn't say what she said they did. I'm not invested enough to do that, but I just didn't trust her. Too axe-grindy.
An aside on the identical twins: she is especially enamored of these twins, reared apart, who, when they met as adults for the first time, had similar haircuts, glasses with rectangular frames, and sons named James. They were also both wearing blue shirts. This is all supposed to point to the mysterious genetic component of behavior, but I was skeptical. I found myself thinking about how similar men's haircuts are in general; how little variation there is in eyeglass fashion (practically everybody I know is wearing rectangular frames right now--because they're the only thing you can get). How common a name was "James" when their sons were born? I remember getting all excited one time because David and I met another couple named Dave and Sue; David laughed at me. He reminded me that "David" and "Susan" were the #1 baby names when we were born; there must be thousands and thousands of couples our age with our names. And, finally, blue has got to be one of the two most popular colors for men's shirts.
I'd have been more impressed if the raised-apart identical twins had shown up for their first meeting wearing Hawaiian shirts, with fresh Mohawks, John Lennon glasses, and sons named Hubert. You see what I mean? I don't think "blue shirt, son named James" rises much beyond coincidence.
Anyway.
What did I find convincing about Harris's argument? Well, she points out that cause and effect can be hard to untangle. A study finds that children who are spanked are more aggressive; does the spanking cause the aggression, or is it true that aggressive children are more likely to be spanked? She says that our pre-existing assumption that parents create their children's behavior leads us to assume the cause-effect arrow goes spanking----> aggression. But she doesn't think the research that has been done establishes that very well.
She also disputes the idea that parents have a character that can be summed up once for all their children: "She's a permissive parent," or, "He's very strict." Most parenting studies look at a cohort of children--a first-grade class, say--and correlate the kids' characteristics with how their parents treat them. But, Harris points out, most people have more than one child, and they are often different with different children. This is certainly true in my experience; I recently blogged about how different I am with Yehva than with the boys. But I was already learning from Eric, when he was my only child, how children create their parents. Harris suggests that if researchers looked at complete families they would find parents' behaviors and attitudes varying depending on their kids' temperaments and challenges.
Here, while I agree with her, I also feel a caution she doesn't seem to. If other researchers are guilty of making "the nurture assumption" and interpreting all their findings in that light, it seems to me that Harris sees children's inborn tendencies as extremely robust; she gives tremendous weight to "child-parent effects." She forgets to be as careful about cause and effect as she wants researchers to be.
I do think she is right that it is very difficult to separate parenting effects from the effects of peers (which she sees as extremely influential, though she says children self-select peers who reinforce their inborn tendencies: a child who tends toward delinquent behavior might be more likely to choose a peer group with similar tendencies) and the wider community. She says that parents do their parenting while embedded in the effects of the genes they have passed down, and in the community of people mostly like them they have chosen. Given all that, she thinks that there is little evidence that the very modest differences between what happens in two houses--an hour of TV vs. two hours per day; a slightly-higher tendency toward harsh discipline in one house, and so on--has much influence on what kids do or how they turn out. And thus, she says, out cultural tendency to praise or blame parents is unfair and misplaced.
Harris has some thought-provoking arguments; the book could have been better.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Premature Curriculum Review: Lego Mindstorms NXT Mayan Adventure
One of the challenges for homeschooling parents trying to evaluate curriculum is that, whether at websites like homeschoolreviews.com or on people's own blogs, there is a tendency for moms to post reviews during the first few glowing days. So there are a lot of reviews that start, "I just got this in the mail and it looks great!" or, "We've been using this for two weeks and my kids love it!" It makes sense; everybody's enthusiasm is highest when things are new. But it's not all that helpful in terms of knowing how it really worked out. It's a nice treat when someone comes back a few months later to update their review, or someone who used a curriculum over a full year, or more, writes a detailed review.
I have resolved, myself, to try not to write about curriculum until we've really given it a shot.
And I am breaking that resolution now. Sorry.
One of Eric's Christmas presents was the Lego Mindstorms NXT: The Mayan Adventure homeschool pack, which includes the book and some extra parts you will need for some of the challenges. We haven't started it yet, but I read through it the other day and am--yes--very excited about it. We're going to work on it this afternoon, and I will certainly try to post more as we get into it.
The book sets up five robotics challenges in the context of a story about a boy with an NXT kit who goes on an archaeology expedition with his uncle. They find themselves at a pyramid that has, as one of its security features, tiny tunnels leading to hidden switches and doorways, designed to be navigated by trained spider monkeys. The team has no spider monkeys. But they do have an NXT kit! So the robots need to be designed to do the spider monkeys' jobs. For instance, the first challenge is to build and program a robot that can travel ten feet down an 10-foot tunnel, turn 90 degrees, travel 8 feet, turn 90 degrees again, travel 3 feet and press a switchplate, and then turn around and come back out again.
Each challenge is set up over four chapters: one that tells the story of the boy; one that I really like that uses a planning and design worksheet to think through the specific tasks the robot has to do and how they might be done, and what constraints exist (for instance, this first robot has to be pretty narrow to get around the corners, and it has to be able to turn, which means using two motors); and then one about building the robot, and one about programming and de-bugging it. I like that the chapters on building and programming present various options, like using either the optical sensor or the pressure sensor to tell the robot when it's reached a corner, and model a trial-and-error approach. For instance, the author writes that it took four tries for him to get his robot right, and he describes what he did for each try, what went wrong, and what he tried to fix it.
I don't know how much patience Eric will have with the design process part; he likes to jump into things. But I like the way the book is organized. We're going to take our first shot at it this afternoon; I'll let you know how it goes. If I can find the battery charger for my camera battery, maybe there will even be pictures of our robot.
UPDATE: This afternoon we read the first chapter of the story, and the chapter on the Design and Planning process. To my pleased surprise, Eric loved the Design and Planning part, which has pre-printed journal pages on which you name your robot, describe in a paragraph what it will do (he dictated to me), break its job into a numbered list of individual tasks, think about constraints ("it has to be small enough to turn the corners without bumping into the wall"), brainstorm ideas, and sketch robot ideas. He was really into it. He wants to try something different than the author; the author's robot turns around and goes forward out the tunnel, but Eric wants his robot to back up. He was also the one who then spotted the flaw in his plan: the robot will need a sensor on the back, then, to keep it from bumping the walls when going backwards, as well as one on the front. He still wants to try this plan even though it will make the robot a little bigger.
After we did that part, we took a few minutes and sorted all his Mindstorms pieces into their proper places in his storage bin, and then he was ready to stop for the day. He's excited to build and test his robot tomorrow, and to show his dad his Design and Planning journal this evening. Fun!
I have resolved, myself, to try not to write about curriculum until we've really given it a shot.
And I am breaking that resolution now. Sorry.
One of Eric's Christmas presents was the Lego Mindstorms NXT: The Mayan Adventure homeschool pack, which includes the book and some extra parts you will need for some of the challenges. We haven't started it yet, but I read through it the other day and am--yes--very excited about it. We're going to work on it this afternoon, and I will certainly try to post more as we get into it.
The book sets up five robotics challenges in the context of a story about a boy with an NXT kit who goes on an archaeology expedition with his uncle. They find themselves at a pyramid that has, as one of its security features, tiny tunnels leading to hidden switches and doorways, designed to be navigated by trained spider monkeys. The team has no spider monkeys. But they do have an NXT kit! So the robots need to be designed to do the spider monkeys' jobs. For instance, the first challenge is to build and program a robot that can travel ten feet down an 10-foot tunnel, turn 90 degrees, travel 8 feet, turn 90 degrees again, travel 3 feet and press a switchplate, and then turn around and come back out again.
Each challenge is set up over four chapters: one that tells the story of the boy; one that I really like that uses a planning and design worksheet to think through the specific tasks the robot has to do and how they might be done, and what constraints exist (for instance, this first robot has to be pretty narrow to get around the corners, and it has to be able to turn, which means using two motors); and then one about building the robot, and one about programming and de-bugging it. I like that the chapters on building and programming present various options, like using either the optical sensor or the pressure sensor to tell the robot when it's reached a corner, and model a trial-and-error approach. For instance, the author writes that it took four tries for him to get his robot right, and he describes what he did for each try, what went wrong, and what he tried to fix it.
I don't know how much patience Eric will have with the design process part; he likes to jump into things. But I like the way the book is organized. We're going to take our first shot at it this afternoon; I'll let you know how it goes. If I can find the battery charger for my camera battery, maybe there will even be pictures of our robot.
UPDATE: This afternoon we read the first chapter of the story, and the chapter on the Design and Planning process. To my pleased surprise, Eric loved the Design and Planning part, which has pre-printed journal pages on which you name your robot, describe in a paragraph what it will do (he dictated to me), break its job into a numbered list of individual tasks, think about constraints ("it has to be small enough to turn the corners without bumping into the wall"), brainstorm ideas, and sketch robot ideas. He was really into it. He wants to try something different than the author; the author's robot turns around and goes forward out the tunnel, but Eric wants his robot to back up. He was also the one who then spotted the flaw in his plan: the robot will need a sensor on the back, then, to keep it from bumping the walls when going backwards, as well as one on the front. He still wants to try this plan even though it will make the robot a little bigger.
After we did that part, we took a few minutes and sorted all his Mindstorms pieces into their proper places in his storage bin, and then he was ready to stop for the day. He's excited to build and test his robot tomorrow, and to show his dad his Design and Planning journal this evening. Fun!
90 Minute Film Class
Why am I up writing at 1:30 a.m.? Because last week I had a crown prep on Tooth 14, and it never stopped hurting but just kept getting worse and worse, so this morning I saw my dentist and he adjusted my temporary crown and then prescribed me a one-day course of steroids to reduce inflammation and help my nerve chill out. Steroids! Sleep not!
I have used the time wisely. I did some dishes, and then I watched a thing I've been meaning to watch for a few weeks, and now I'm going to write about it, and then I'm going to go lie down and stare, wide-eyed, into the darkness for awhile (steroids always make me feel like my eyelids are propped open with toothpicks), and then I'm going to get up again and make myself a cup of tea and watch an episode of Dollhouse via streaming Netflix, and then I'm going to lie down and stare wide-eyed into the dark again and just as I doze off Yehva is going to say, "Mama?" and I'm going to jerk awake and tuck her in again because she has kicked the covers off. And then I'm going to lie staring into the dark for awhile, and eventually I'll doze off but Yehva will need to be tucked in again, and I will repeat this two or three times and then just as the sky is beginning to get gray in the east, I will finally fall into a real sleep that will last until David pops his head in the door and says, "Su? Sweetie? It's 8:45. Don't you have an eye doctor appointment at 9?"
I've taken steroids before.
So, what did I watch?
Well, some guy named Plinkett makes video film reviews that are as long as movies themselves; his reviews of the Star Wars prequels run about 90 minutes each, in 3 30-minutes sections. There are actually two Plinketts: the real Plinkett, about whom we know very little except that he knows a lot about film and can talk about it in a very articulate and listen-able way; and the Plinkett Persona of the reviews, who speaks in a grating monotone that some people find off-putting, and lives in a filthy, dingy little house, where he seems to live on pizza rolls, Twinkies, and beer. Persona Plinkett is extremely profane; he has carnal relations with the aforementioned Twinkies, and with his cat; and he is a serial killer. Once or twice in each review, the camera accidentally reveals bones, or his latest victim tied up in the background. You can imagine that this is also very off-putting to some people; it's a kind of humor that offends, and some folks won't watch his reviews because of it. You can see people having a conversation about it over at MetaFilter earlier this month, when his review of Revenge of the Sith was released. You'll see the whole range of reactions there, from folks who won't watch him, to folks who think he's brilliant and those other folks are killjoys, to folks like me who'd prefer not to have the jarring little serial-killer moments but are willing to fast-forward through them because they're uncommon and brief and what he has to say about movies is knowledgeable, insightful, and educational.
If you were to watch his review of Sith, you would learn so much about why and how a film can be bad. He teaches you to recognize bad dialogue, and how it can ruin even a good actor. He explains why green screen work can take a viewer out of the world of the film even if it's technically very good, by dissecting the making of the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confronts General Grievous. He does a wicked comparison of Sith with Citizen Kane, which even he admits is unfair, but as he lays out similar scenes from the two movies side-by-side, in about five minutes he teaches you some ways that a film can be great, and some ways that a film can fail. The first half of the third section of the review, where he describes Lucas's habit of filming all dialogue scenes in the same two ways over and over, is brilliant and devastating. Characters either walk, slowly, no matter how urgent things are, because if they walk fast or run they'll get to the end of the studio's green screen space too quickly, or they walk to a couch and sit on it for the rest of the scene, except at the moments when one character stands, walks three steps away, and then turns back.
Perhaps you do not have children who love all things Star Wars, and have not been forced to watch these movies over and over. In that case, these reviews may not mean as much to you. Yet, truly, I say to you that it is worth suffering through the prequels in order to better appreciate Plinkett's reviews; he knows his stuff. Things you've sort of vaguely noticed, a sense of confusion you maybe had, or a feeling that you were watching a bad movie but couldn't quite put your finger on why it was bad: Plinkett will bring those things into sharp relief, give you a vocabulary for them, and show you things that, once seen, you will never un-see again. Really: I took a film course in college, and I swear I learned more from Plinkett's 90 minutes on Sith than I did earning 3 semester credits.
You have to be careful, though: I'm not kidding about not being able to un-see what is seen. (And I'm not just talking about the tasteless serial killer running joke--though the Sith review doesn't show us any victims, instead treating us to a Buffy-style hot ass-kicking babe who shows up at Plinkett's house with a battle axe to take revenge, which, hey, a big improvement.)
No, I mean: it's not always a good thing in your life to recognize badness. Here I will tell you a story that many people have heard before, but it so very illustrates what I'm talking about. Many years ago, before we had children, my good friends Adrianne and Carla invited me and some other friends to go camping on South Manitou Island. Camping on SMI is rugged. I think there's a cold-water standpipe, but otherwise there are no amenities. You hike, and hang out in the woods, and we took our kayaks over on the ferry with us. Overall it wasn't really my thing; I'm glad I went, but I like room-service type vacations, and I didn't stay as long as everybody else did.
Anyway, Carla's friend Kate also came, and she was a coffee connoisseur. I remember sitting by the fire one morning watching Kate grind her coffee and brew it in a French-press pot she had brought with her. Battery-powered coffee grinder (I'm pretty sure, though memory may be embellishing here) and French press on the no-amenities island. I suppose I wasn't as subtle with the eye-rolling as I might have been, because Kate decided to explain to me why she was willing to go to so much trouble to have a decent cup of coffee even when she hadn't showered in two days and had to haul the water half a mile and heat it over an open fire. It had to do with good coffee having texture, and more than one flavor tone, and layers, and she described all these things to me in detail. "Jeez," I said to myself, "what a pretentious snob."
The next day, on my way home, I stopped for lunch at a diner-type family restaurant, and I had coffee. Because I really liked coffee. I took one sip--I remember this sip, I will remember it always--and said to myself, "Gah! Kate was right! This coffee is terrible!"
Kate had taught me two things: how to recognize and appreciate good coffee, and how to recognize and depreciate the bad stuff. It's both a gift and a curse, because before my South Manitou Island coffee-appreciation seminar, I liked bad coffee just fine. Cheap coffee, easy to make, and you can get it anywhere. I was happy.
Now I have become a person who values good coffee so much that when I travel, I take my own beans, grinder, and coffee pot.*
Kate ejected me from my innocent coffee Eden.
This is my go-to story about this phenomenon, but I could give so many examples: books my friends devour gleefully that I can't get through because I'm too good at recognizing too many varieties of bad writing. Or how I recently noticed in a dialogue scene in an episode of Buffy that when a certain actor wasn't facing the camera full-on, his mouth wasn't moving even though the sound track was his voice speaking, and now I see that happening all the time. Or how, many years ago, David and I studied design and typography together. This means that, if we make a flyer for your event, it will look a lot better than most people's amateur flyers. It also means that we are always distracted by bad design on menus, and the signs on businesses, and crappy kerning in headlines and logos. In some ways, life was better when we just didn't see those things. Though critiquing the contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity on the table tents does always give us something to talk about on date night.
So, on the one hand, I want to encourage you to watch a Plinkett review--perhaps especially his Sith review, if you're squeamish about the whole serial-killer thing, because there are no tied-up women in his basement in this one (though there is a thing with a cat that is not funny but at least is so obviously fake that, for me at least, it was also not disturbing--just eye-rolling). To me, two minutes of gross-out unfunny humor is a price worth paying for 90 minutes of really worthwhile insight into film, and if you're willing to risk it, and can put up with a lot of profanity (watching a few HBO shows over the last few years should perhaps be a prerequisite; it trains the ear), you will learn a lot, especially if you haven't had a film course or thought much about how movies are written, filmed, and edited. When you are watching a good movie, you may well find yourself appreciating the framing of shots, or the editing of key scenes, or the deft handling of expository dialogue, in a way you never have before.
On the other hand: if you have not thought about these things before, there are probably a whole lot of movies you have liked just fine that will now be ruined, to a greater or lesser extent, once you have learned to see this stuff. Sometimes, I think it can be argued, it is better just not to know. Only you can make this call.
==================
*And people make fun of me for it. But come to my room for coffee. Although, actually, right now neither Kate nor I drink coffee. She lost her taste for it during her last pregnancy, and I gave up caffeine a few months ago, and then a couple of weeks ago gave up even my morning decaf because of acid reflux issues. I'm so middle-aged. But I appreciated my coffee while I could. Now I drink many cups of decaf Lipton tea every day, and am actively resisting any efforts anyone might make to teach me to appreciate good tea. Decaf Lipton tastes good to me, it's cheap, and you can buy it anywhere. I'm not planning to mess with that any time soon.
I have used the time wisely. I did some dishes, and then I watched a thing I've been meaning to watch for a few weeks, and now I'm going to write about it, and then I'm going to go lie down and stare, wide-eyed, into the darkness for awhile (steroids always make me feel like my eyelids are propped open with toothpicks), and then I'm going to get up again and make myself a cup of tea and watch an episode of Dollhouse via streaming Netflix, and then I'm going to lie down and stare wide-eyed into the dark again and just as I doze off Yehva is going to say, "Mama?" and I'm going to jerk awake and tuck her in again because she has kicked the covers off. And then I'm going to lie staring into the dark for awhile, and eventually I'll doze off but Yehva will need to be tucked in again, and I will repeat this two or three times and then just as the sky is beginning to get gray in the east, I will finally fall into a real sleep that will last until David pops his head in the door and says, "Su? Sweetie? It's 8:45. Don't you have an eye doctor appointment at 9?"
I've taken steroids before.
So, what did I watch?
Well, some guy named Plinkett makes video film reviews that are as long as movies themselves; his reviews of the Star Wars prequels run about 90 minutes each, in 3 30-minutes sections. There are actually two Plinketts: the real Plinkett, about whom we know very little except that he knows a lot about film and can talk about it in a very articulate and listen-able way; and the Plinkett Persona of the reviews, who speaks in a grating monotone that some people find off-putting, and lives in a filthy, dingy little house, where he seems to live on pizza rolls, Twinkies, and beer. Persona Plinkett is extremely profane; he has carnal relations with the aforementioned Twinkies, and with his cat; and he is a serial killer. Once or twice in each review, the camera accidentally reveals bones, or his latest victim tied up in the background. You can imagine that this is also very off-putting to some people; it's a kind of humor that offends, and some folks won't watch his reviews because of it. You can see people having a conversation about it over at MetaFilter earlier this month, when his review of Revenge of the Sith was released. You'll see the whole range of reactions there, from folks who won't watch him, to folks who think he's brilliant and those other folks are killjoys, to folks like me who'd prefer not to have the jarring little serial-killer moments but are willing to fast-forward through them because they're uncommon and brief and what he has to say about movies is knowledgeable, insightful, and educational.
If you were to watch his review of Sith, you would learn so much about why and how a film can be bad. He teaches you to recognize bad dialogue, and how it can ruin even a good actor. He explains why green screen work can take a viewer out of the world of the film even if it's technically very good, by dissecting the making of the scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi confronts General Grievous. He does a wicked comparison of Sith with Citizen Kane, which even he admits is unfair, but as he lays out similar scenes from the two movies side-by-side, in about five minutes he teaches you some ways that a film can be great, and some ways that a film can fail. The first half of the third section of the review, where he describes Lucas's habit of filming all dialogue scenes in the same two ways over and over, is brilliant and devastating. Characters either walk, slowly, no matter how urgent things are, because if they walk fast or run they'll get to the end of the studio's green screen space too quickly, or they walk to a couch and sit on it for the rest of the scene, except at the moments when one character stands, walks three steps away, and then turns back.
Perhaps you do not have children who love all things Star Wars, and have not been forced to watch these movies over and over. In that case, these reviews may not mean as much to you. Yet, truly, I say to you that it is worth suffering through the prequels in order to better appreciate Plinkett's reviews; he knows his stuff. Things you've sort of vaguely noticed, a sense of confusion you maybe had, or a feeling that you were watching a bad movie but couldn't quite put your finger on why it was bad: Plinkett will bring those things into sharp relief, give you a vocabulary for them, and show you things that, once seen, you will never un-see again. Really: I took a film course in college, and I swear I learned more from Plinkett's 90 minutes on Sith than I did earning 3 semester credits.
You have to be careful, though: I'm not kidding about not being able to un-see what is seen. (And I'm not just talking about the tasteless serial killer running joke--though the Sith review doesn't show us any victims, instead treating us to a Buffy-style hot ass-kicking babe who shows up at Plinkett's house with a battle axe to take revenge, which, hey, a big improvement.)
No, I mean: it's not always a good thing in your life to recognize badness. Here I will tell you a story that many people have heard before, but it so very illustrates what I'm talking about. Many years ago, before we had children, my good friends Adrianne and Carla invited me and some other friends to go camping on South Manitou Island. Camping on SMI is rugged. I think there's a cold-water standpipe, but otherwise there are no amenities. You hike, and hang out in the woods, and we took our kayaks over on the ferry with us. Overall it wasn't really my thing; I'm glad I went, but I like room-service type vacations, and I didn't stay as long as everybody else did.
Anyway, Carla's friend Kate also came, and she was a coffee connoisseur. I remember sitting by the fire one morning watching Kate grind her coffee and brew it in a French-press pot she had brought with her. Battery-powered coffee grinder (I'm pretty sure, though memory may be embellishing here) and French press on the no-amenities island. I suppose I wasn't as subtle with the eye-rolling as I might have been, because Kate decided to explain to me why she was willing to go to so much trouble to have a decent cup of coffee even when she hadn't showered in two days and had to haul the water half a mile and heat it over an open fire. It had to do with good coffee having texture, and more than one flavor tone, and layers, and she described all these things to me in detail. "Jeez," I said to myself, "what a pretentious snob."
The next day, on my way home, I stopped for lunch at a diner-type family restaurant, and I had coffee. Because I really liked coffee. I took one sip--I remember this sip, I will remember it always--and said to myself, "Gah! Kate was right! This coffee is terrible!"
Kate had taught me two things: how to recognize and appreciate good coffee, and how to recognize and depreciate the bad stuff. It's both a gift and a curse, because before my South Manitou Island coffee-appreciation seminar, I liked bad coffee just fine. Cheap coffee, easy to make, and you can get it anywhere. I was happy.
Now I have become a person who values good coffee so much that when I travel, I take my own beans, grinder, and coffee pot.*
Kate ejected me from my innocent coffee Eden.
This is my go-to story about this phenomenon, but I could give so many examples: books my friends devour gleefully that I can't get through because I'm too good at recognizing too many varieties of bad writing. Or how I recently noticed in a dialogue scene in an episode of Buffy that when a certain actor wasn't facing the camera full-on, his mouth wasn't moving even though the sound track was his voice speaking, and now I see that happening all the time. Or how, many years ago, David and I studied design and typography together. This means that, if we make a flyer for your event, it will look a lot better than most people's amateur flyers. It also means that we are always distracted by bad design on menus, and the signs on businesses, and crappy kerning in headlines and logos. In some ways, life was better when we just didn't see those things. Though critiquing the contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity on the table tents does always give us something to talk about on date night.
So, on the one hand, I want to encourage you to watch a Plinkett review--perhaps especially his Sith review, if you're squeamish about the whole serial-killer thing, because there are no tied-up women in his basement in this one (though there is a thing with a cat that is not funny but at least is so obviously fake that, for me at least, it was also not disturbing--just eye-rolling). To me, two minutes of gross-out unfunny humor is a price worth paying for 90 minutes of really worthwhile insight into film, and if you're willing to risk it, and can put up with a lot of profanity (watching a few HBO shows over the last few years should perhaps be a prerequisite; it trains the ear), you will learn a lot, especially if you haven't had a film course or thought much about how movies are written, filmed, and edited. When you are watching a good movie, you may well find yourself appreciating the framing of shots, or the editing of key scenes, or the deft handling of expository dialogue, in a way you never have before.
On the other hand: if you have not thought about these things before, there are probably a whole lot of movies you have liked just fine that will now be ruined, to a greater or lesser extent, once you have learned to see this stuff. Sometimes, I think it can be argued, it is better just not to know. Only you can make this call.
==================
*And people make fun of me for it. But come to my room for coffee. Although, actually, right now neither Kate nor I drink coffee. She lost her taste for it during her last pregnancy, and I gave up caffeine a few months ago, and then a couple of weeks ago gave up even my morning decaf because of acid reflux issues. I'm so middle-aged. But I appreciated my coffee while I could. Now I drink many cups of decaf Lipton tea every day, and am actively resisting any efforts anyone might make to teach me to appreciate good tea. Decaf Lipton tastes good to me, it's cheap, and you can buy it anywhere. I'm not planning to mess with that any time soon.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Our Experiment In Structured Homeschooling
I am sick today; bad headache, dizzy, a little sick to my stomach, and not at my best, brain-wise. I'm so distractible I just set an alarm to remind me to pick up Yehva from preschool at noon. So maybe it's not the best day to try to write something, but I've had this rattling around in my head for awhile, and a few people have actually asked me about why we're doing more structured homeschooling this year and how it's going, so I'll give it a try.
My kids are 9, 6, and 3, just to remind people. And with Eric, my oldest, especially, we haven't done very much organized academics. One reason is that he wasn't ready for it until just a little while ago. It's kind of a gift to have Carl, who is really into schooly stuff, because having a six-year-old who is not only ready for academic work but likes it has given me a picture of what that kind of six-year-old looks like. And Eric really wasn't it.
The other reason we haven't done structured homeschooling is that I really like radical unschooling and many of the people who practice it. I've spent a lot of time in discussions with radical unschoolers, and their deep respect for, and faith in, their children has inspired me, and shaped my parenting for the better. For a long time, I really wanted radical unschooling to be the way we lived our lives.
But we're not doing that right now. The boys and I are doing a pretty conventional assortment of schoolwork five mornings a week: reading, math, language arts, handwriting, science, a daily non-fiction read-aloud. We're adding history soon. I'm teaching Eric some piano basics, and if he likes it, will encourage him to take lessons with a real teacher.
So, the two questions I've gotten are: Why? and How's it going?
There are several reasons why. The first is that I was very sick for the better part of two years (finally better now, thanks for asking--almost back to normal!). Last year, I had really drifted into what RU parents call "unparenting," neither doing structured homeschooling nor creating the kind of enriched life an engaged unschooling parent strives for. I just didn't have the energy to do anything else; I couldn't stay awake for more than about five hours at a time, and even when I was awake, I was exhausted. It wore me out just to stand for five minutes to cook lunch, or to climb one flight of stairs, or to walk from one end of the house to the other.
The boys are both very introverted, so they were not at all unhappy to be left to their own devices. But I was unhappy; I wanted them to have more than that. And I couldn't give it to them. I knew that if things didn't improve, they would be better off in school than at home with a mom who was that sick.
The problem? Eric, at 9, couldn't read, couldn't do formal math, couldn't tell time. Although he is very bright and knows a lot, he was way behind grade level in every academic subject. Traditionally, I had pooh-poohed the idea that homeschoolers should pay attention to what the local schools are doing. "If I wanted my kids to do what school kids do," I would say, "I'd send them to school."
But, faced with the possibility that my kids would have to go to school, I simply could not imagine how Eric would make that transition. And I realized that my decision not to do formal academics limited our, and his, options. (Carl, on the other hand, would have no problem, academically, sliding right into a first-grade classroom. He's been doing phonics and math workbooks since he was 4. He likes that kind of thing.)
I'm finally doing better, and I expect the boys to keep homeschooling. But the future is not predictable. I could get sick again, or one of the kids could choose to go to school. I think we need that option to be available to us.
Another reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I have decided to be honest about who I am. I like academics; I always have. (This is separate from liking school, which I didn't, until I got to college. At least after I grew out of the teacher's-pet elementary school years.) Perhaps the boys would, too, and I was denying them that chance. Also, I never really quite bought some of the RU arguments. "Kids pick up all the math they need by living their lives," people would say. "They learn fractions from measuring ingredients, geometry from laying out garden plots." Sure. But there's a big difference between being able to do the practical part of something, and understanding the concepts that underly it. I have always liked to understand the concepts, and I wanted my kids to have that, too. And finally: I'm a planner, and a checker-off of items on lists. I like knowing where we're at, where we're going, and what steps we have to take to get there. I like routines. This is how I've always been, and it's a challenge (though not impossible) to express that side of me in radical unschooling. I felt adrift.
Finally, the most important reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I think Eric needs it right now. Carl likes it; that's a different thing. Carl is so cheerfully enthusiastic about everything, so generally easy-going, that I think he would do fine in school, fine with structured homeschooling, fine with unschooling.
Eric, though: Eric is easily frustrated, and he will not stick with something if it's frustrating him (there are exceptions; he can also get kind of fixated on finishing something and will bang his head against a wall even if it would probably be better to take a break and come back to it fresh. But for our purposes here: easily frustrated). And he doesn't like to try something unless he knows he'll be successful. He also has trouble with transitions, and he does not like new things. Our parrots see any new person or thing that comes through the door as a predator that might decide to eat them; Eric's outlook on life has a bit of that, as well.
I wanted to stretch Eric, expose him to new things, and give him the experience of sticking with something regularly, to see how that kind of sustained effort can be fruitful, to feel what it's like to be stuck and keep at it and then have the breakthrough. And he is having this experience, and he likes it.
I know that radical unschoolers will say that there's nothing I'm looking for (except possibly being on-track to go to school if needed) that we couldn't get some other way. And I'm sure they're right--or right, at least, that some other family could find a different way to get the same benefits. But this is what we're doing now.
How's it going? Not always perfectly. Eric had a rough time in November and December and was very resistant and rude to me. We took a long break, and then had a Serious Talk about his options. He told David, spontaneously, that he felt like he had gotten older during the break and would be more able to cooperate. He told me he was bored during the break and wanted to do more; he asked for my help, and he asked me to push him if he resisted me. Since we started up again, he's been into everything we've been doing. He likes his math, he's making big progress in reading, he loves anything science-y, especially if there's a messy experiment to do. We just started language arts, and Eric was surprised to discover he really likes learning about how sentences work and what their parts are. Carl is not sorry when we have a day off, but he simply loves everything. If I tend to talk about Eric more than about Carl, it's because I think about Eric more, because with Eric, there's always some problem I'm trying to solve. Carl? Not so much. I told some friends recently that if Carl were our only child, and didn't have siblings to sometimes annoy him to the point of explosion, people would hate me for the perfection of my life.
I find that we all like having a structure to the day--we start school work when David leaves for work, and it takes us between an hour and three hours depending on the day, how much we're trying to do, whether Yehva's at preschool or here, getting into things. I try to do something with the kids in the afternoon as well: work on Eric's Mindstorms or Carl's Lego WeDo robotics, build something with the snap circuits, bake something, play a board game. Carl, Eric, and I all seem to respond well to having a routine. The rest of the day goes better.
One of the best things that has happened is that Eric, especially, keeps discovering things he didn't know he could do. The other day, I asked him to try to read a paragraph in his science workbook; I wasn't sure he could do it, and normally would have read it aloud to him, but I decided to let him see how he could do. To his delight, he was able to read it, except for the unusually-spelled name of a scientist. Yesterday, his language arts curriculum asked him to write two sentences including adjectives. He has never done much writing--I think it falls into that category of things he can't try because he doesn't already know how to do them. I told him to give it a try, to not worry about spelling things correctly, just to do his best. He wrote two sentences about one of our parrots: "Vito is hapy He is red and green." He asked me to check his spelling of "red" and I helped him sound out "green." And he read Vito's name off the nameplate on his cage. But still!
He was astonished and thrilled. He simply had no idea he could write a sentence. He wanted to cut it out of his workbook and hang it on the wall (I should have just said yes, but my orderly mind said, "But we haven't done the other side of the page yet!" *sigh* I wonder where Eric gets his tendency to inflexibility?)
I know that there are other ways that all of this could be accomplished. But, given who we are and what we need and what we enjoy, I think this is right for us. Things will probably look different in six months, or next year, but for now we're getting a lot of good out of what we're doing. I'm not at all sorry we waited to do formal academics with Eric; he's bright, but he just wasn't ready. In the last six months, he has really "caught up" developmentally (and even surged ahead in some interesting ways). Now he's ready, and I think it's good.
My kids are 9, 6, and 3, just to remind people. And with Eric, my oldest, especially, we haven't done very much organized academics. One reason is that he wasn't ready for it until just a little while ago. It's kind of a gift to have Carl, who is really into schooly stuff, because having a six-year-old who is not only ready for academic work but likes it has given me a picture of what that kind of six-year-old looks like. And Eric really wasn't it.
The other reason we haven't done structured homeschooling is that I really like radical unschooling and many of the people who practice it. I've spent a lot of time in discussions with radical unschoolers, and their deep respect for, and faith in, their children has inspired me, and shaped my parenting for the better. For a long time, I really wanted radical unschooling to be the way we lived our lives.
But we're not doing that right now. The boys and I are doing a pretty conventional assortment of schoolwork five mornings a week: reading, math, language arts, handwriting, science, a daily non-fiction read-aloud. We're adding history soon. I'm teaching Eric some piano basics, and if he likes it, will encourage him to take lessons with a real teacher.
So, the two questions I've gotten are: Why? and How's it going?
There are several reasons why. The first is that I was very sick for the better part of two years (finally better now, thanks for asking--almost back to normal!). Last year, I had really drifted into what RU parents call "unparenting," neither doing structured homeschooling nor creating the kind of enriched life an engaged unschooling parent strives for. I just didn't have the energy to do anything else; I couldn't stay awake for more than about five hours at a time, and even when I was awake, I was exhausted. It wore me out just to stand for five minutes to cook lunch, or to climb one flight of stairs, or to walk from one end of the house to the other.
The boys are both very introverted, so they were not at all unhappy to be left to their own devices. But I was unhappy; I wanted them to have more than that. And I couldn't give it to them. I knew that if things didn't improve, they would be better off in school than at home with a mom who was that sick.
The problem? Eric, at 9, couldn't read, couldn't do formal math, couldn't tell time. Although he is very bright and knows a lot, he was way behind grade level in every academic subject. Traditionally, I had pooh-poohed the idea that homeschoolers should pay attention to what the local schools are doing. "If I wanted my kids to do what school kids do," I would say, "I'd send them to school."
But, faced with the possibility that my kids would have to go to school, I simply could not imagine how Eric would make that transition. And I realized that my decision not to do formal academics limited our, and his, options. (Carl, on the other hand, would have no problem, academically, sliding right into a first-grade classroom. He's been doing phonics and math workbooks since he was 4. He likes that kind of thing.)
I'm finally doing better, and I expect the boys to keep homeschooling. But the future is not predictable. I could get sick again, or one of the kids could choose to go to school. I think we need that option to be available to us.
Another reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I have decided to be honest about who I am. I like academics; I always have. (This is separate from liking school, which I didn't, until I got to college. At least after I grew out of the teacher's-pet elementary school years.) Perhaps the boys would, too, and I was denying them that chance. Also, I never really quite bought some of the RU arguments. "Kids pick up all the math they need by living their lives," people would say. "They learn fractions from measuring ingredients, geometry from laying out garden plots." Sure. But there's a big difference between being able to do the practical part of something, and understanding the concepts that underly it. I have always liked to understand the concepts, and I wanted my kids to have that, too. And finally: I'm a planner, and a checker-off of items on lists. I like knowing where we're at, where we're going, and what steps we have to take to get there. I like routines. This is how I've always been, and it's a challenge (though not impossible) to express that side of me in radical unschooling. I felt adrift.
Finally, the most important reason we're doing structured homeschooling is that I think Eric needs it right now. Carl likes it; that's a different thing. Carl is so cheerfully enthusiastic about everything, so generally easy-going, that I think he would do fine in school, fine with structured homeschooling, fine with unschooling.
Eric, though: Eric is easily frustrated, and he will not stick with something if it's frustrating him (there are exceptions; he can also get kind of fixated on finishing something and will bang his head against a wall even if it would probably be better to take a break and come back to it fresh. But for our purposes here: easily frustrated). And he doesn't like to try something unless he knows he'll be successful. He also has trouble with transitions, and he does not like new things. Our parrots see any new person or thing that comes through the door as a predator that might decide to eat them; Eric's outlook on life has a bit of that, as well.
I wanted to stretch Eric, expose him to new things, and give him the experience of sticking with something regularly, to see how that kind of sustained effort can be fruitful, to feel what it's like to be stuck and keep at it and then have the breakthrough. And he is having this experience, and he likes it.
I know that radical unschoolers will say that there's nothing I'm looking for (except possibly being on-track to go to school if needed) that we couldn't get some other way. And I'm sure they're right--or right, at least, that some other family could find a different way to get the same benefits. But this is what we're doing now.
How's it going? Not always perfectly. Eric had a rough time in November and December and was very resistant and rude to me. We took a long break, and then had a Serious Talk about his options. He told David, spontaneously, that he felt like he had gotten older during the break and would be more able to cooperate. He told me he was bored during the break and wanted to do more; he asked for my help, and he asked me to push him if he resisted me. Since we started up again, he's been into everything we've been doing. He likes his math, he's making big progress in reading, he loves anything science-y, especially if there's a messy experiment to do. We just started language arts, and Eric was surprised to discover he really likes learning about how sentences work and what their parts are. Carl is not sorry when we have a day off, but he simply loves everything. If I tend to talk about Eric more than about Carl, it's because I think about Eric more, because with Eric, there's always some problem I'm trying to solve. Carl? Not so much. I told some friends recently that if Carl were our only child, and didn't have siblings to sometimes annoy him to the point of explosion, people would hate me for the perfection of my life.
I find that we all like having a structure to the day--we start school work when David leaves for work, and it takes us between an hour and three hours depending on the day, how much we're trying to do, whether Yehva's at preschool or here, getting into things. I try to do something with the kids in the afternoon as well: work on Eric's Mindstorms or Carl's Lego WeDo robotics, build something with the snap circuits, bake something, play a board game. Carl, Eric, and I all seem to respond well to having a routine. The rest of the day goes better.
One of the best things that has happened is that Eric, especially, keeps discovering things he didn't know he could do. The other day, I asked him to try to read a paragraph in his science workbook; I wasn't sure he could do it, and normally would have read it aloud to him, but I decided to let him see how he could do. To his delight, he was able to read it, except for the unusually-spelled name of a scientist. Yesterday, his language arts curriculum asked him to write two sentences including adjectives. He has never done much writing--I think it falls into that category of things he can't try because he doesn't already know how to do them. I told him to give it a try, to not worry about spelling things correctly, just to do his best. He wrote two sentences about one of our parrots: "Vito is hapy He is red and green." He asked me to check his spelling of "red" and I helped him sound out "green." And he read Vito's name off the nameplate on his cage. But still!
He was astonished and thrilled. He simply had no idea he could write a sentence. He wanted to cut it out of his workbook and hang it on the wall (I should have just said yes, but my orderly mind said, "But we haven't done the other side of the page yet!" *sigh* I wonder where Eric gets his tendency to inflexibility?)
I know that there are other ways that all of this could be accomplished. But, given who we are and what we need and what we enjoy, I think this is right for us. Things will probably look different in six months, or next year, but for now we're getting a lot of good out of what we're doing. I'm not at all sorry we waited to do formal academics with Eric; he's bright, but he just wasn't ready. In the last six months, he has really "caught up" developmentally (and even surged ahead in some interesting ways). Now he's ready, and I think it's good.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
That was a nice thing to do on a Saturday
Yesterday my friend Kri and I went to our fiend Joann's with our quilts-in-progress. Kri and I are both beginners, but Joann has made many beautiful quilts, and she had offered to look at ours and help us move forward with them. We had a great time; I always like seeing the things people make, so there was a fair bit of just hanging out gazing at things in admiration. I like seeing people's different approaches, the ways they use color that I'd never think of, the wonderful ideas they have. I'm as structured in my quilting as in everything else I do; the quilts I've made have all been very symmetrical, repeating patterns. So I love to see crazy quilts, or quilts where the blocks aren't all the same, or quilts where someone launched the project without necessarily knowing what it was going to look like or what it was going to end up being. Other people's boldness inspires me.
I also have a tendency to think I have to figure everything out for myself, so it was good for me to reach out to someone more experienced. For one thing, Joann was undaunted by mistakes. She always knew right away what could be done to fix them, or how they could be worked around, or she'd say cheerfully, "That will work out in the quilting," or "oh, that will leave a little pucker, but that won't matter." If I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that this was not the first time she'd dealt with uneven seams, or blocks that didn't quite turn out the size they were supposed to.
Last year, I took my quilt top to Quaker meeting with me to show Joann, because things that were supposed to line up weren't lining up. Joann isn't the only quilter in meeting, so after worship I had a couple of really talented people looking on as I laid my quilt top out on one of the tables in the social hall. I was nervous. To my amazement, not one of them thought that it was a big problem that things weren't lining up; instead, these women who've created beautiful, perfect works of art all jumped in cheerfully suggesting various ways I might proceed to make a perfectly nice quilt-top in which things did not line up on purpose. And they treated this kind of mid-stream course change as a perfectly ordinary and expected thing.
It's not always like that; Kri and I have both had experiences in the past with more-experienced quilters being less than kind about our early efforts. So it was lovely yesterday to be with someone who seemed really happy with what we'd done, and who wanted us to continue with it, whatever the flaws that had crept in. I felt encouraged and appreciated, and inspired by admiring some of Joann's quilt-tops to imagine what I might be able to do someday, with enough practice.
My quilt-top isn't quite done; I need to put a border around it (not the border I planned; we decided we liked something else better). Joann has offered to come over during Yehva's nap one day to help with my quilt sandwich, and I might take her up on that, not only because I could use the help, but because it was so much fun doing this kind of work with friends.
I also have a tendency to think I have to figure everything out for myself, so it was good for me to reach out to someone more experienced. For one thing, Joann was undaunted by mistakes. She always knew right away what could be done to fix them, or how they could be worked around, or she'd say cheerfully, "That will work out in the quilting," or "oh, that will leave a little pucker, but that won't matter." If I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that this was not the first time she'd dealt with uneven seams, or blocks that didn't quite turn out the size they were supposed to.
Last year, I took my quilt top to Quaker meeting with me to show Joann, because things that were supposed to line up weren't lining up. Joann isn't the only quilter in meeting, so after worship I had a couple of really talented people looking on as I laid my quilt top out on one of the tables in the social hall. I was nervous. To my amazement, not one of them thought that it was a big problem that things weren't lining up; instead, these women who've created beautiful, perfect works of art all jumped in cheerfully suggesting various ways I might proceed to make a perfectly nice quilt-top in which things did not line up on purpose. And they treated this kind of mid-stream course change as a perfectly ordinary and expected thing.
It's not always like that; Kri and I have both had experiences in the past with more-experienced quilters being less than kind about our early efforts. So it was lovely yesterday to be with someone who seemed really happy with what we'd done, and who wanted us to continue with it, whatever the flaws that had crept in. I felt encouraged and appreciated, and inspired by admiring some of Joann's quilt-tops to imagine what I might be able to do someday, with enough practice.
My quilt-top isn't quite done; I need to put a border around it (not the border I planned; we decided we liked something else better). Joann has offered to come over during Yehva's nap one day to help with my quilt sandwich, and I might take her up on that, not only because I could use the help, but because it was so much fun doing this kind of work with friends.
Friday, January 7, 2011
They Build Things
Back when I was in literary studies, we used to use the term "overdetermination" to mean that a text was making too much of something, asking us so excessively to believe something that we became inclined to believe the opposite. Shakespeare understood the notion; he wrote, "the lady doth protest too much," meaning that only someone in love would feel the need to say so very many times and in so very many ways that she was not in love.
It's also possible to overdetermine something in such a way that only one outcome is possible. So you get English grad students sitting around with a book written by someone twice as smart as they will ever be, sneering, "I don't know, I thought the climactic saber fight was a little overdetermined, you know what I mean?"
Sometimes I think we have overdetermined our children.
I come from families of men who work with their hands. My dad built the house I grew up in, literally; my brother has built a dune buggy from scratch, and a race car out of a car that had not previously been a race car. When my brother wanted a minibike as a kid, nobody bought him one. My dad and grandpa built him one out of old lawnmower motors and steel bars they had lying around, which they welded into a frame. My extended family on both sides is full of people who fix their own cars, and make their living repairing or maintaining machines or structures.
David is not that kind of guy, and wasn't raised by that kind of guy. His dad was a surveyor, but for recreation, he played competitive bridge. David was not raised to think it's a moral failing to hire someone to do a job you could just as well do yourself, like replacing an engine block or adding a porch to the front of the house or re-wiring the guest bathroom.
Still, David's a very smart guy, and an engineer in his way: he is a software engineer. So when we needed donor sperm to have our first two kids, we looked for somebody smart and with a logical mind. There weren't any software engineers in the catalog, but there was a guy who was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a 3.85 gpa. "Smart!" we said. "A logical thinker!" we said, and ordered three little vials.
Imagine our surprise when our firstborn turned out to be the kind of person who can make anything out of anything--put him in front of any material that can be manipulated in three dimensions, whether Lego, modeling clay, or leftover forks, and he'll build something amazing. All those three-dimensional-thinking and doing-stuff-with-your-hands genes are just a little overdetermined, I sometimes think. Like we doomed him to a career in engineering or the skilled trades, like we left him with not really all that many choices. "Maybe we should have chosen a sensitive poet," we joke sometimes.
It's not really like that, though--Carl seems to have gotten the ear-for-language genes that also run in my family; while Eric was amazing us at 4 with his fork sculptures, Carl was astonishing us with his observations and questions about language. Why was one word used, and not another? "I think you meant to say both, not all," he'll tell us. Or he'll point out that two lines in a picture book don't really quite rhyme.
And yet Carl is also a builder. I know that having Lego-obsessed boys is about as common as breathing, but both of my boys have the bug pretty bad, even so.
But many of my friends have heard me talk about this before. What has me thinking about it again is seeing how Yehva fits in. And she does. She loves to do Lego with the boys, and the other day produced something so cool I made the classic parenting blunder of saying, "That's really great! Did somebody help you with it?" (She was offended, as she should have been.) When we toured her preschool last fall, the director commented on Yehva's tendency to gravitate toward technology in every classroom or storage room we entered: the computer, the toy cash-register, the tool bench. It feels like a little spark I want to nurture in her, though really the boys are doing that job for me. I find myself glad she has them, and that they let her tag along sometimes when they've got a project going.
She's only three. Anything could happen. I'm just having fun watching it unfold.
It's also possible to overdetermine something in such a way that only one outcome is possible. So you get English grad students sitting around with a book written by someone twice as smart as they will ever be, sneering, "I don't know, I thought the climactic saber fight was a little overdetermined, you know what I mean?"
Sometimes I think we have overdetermined our children.
I come from families of men who work with their hands. My dad built the house I grew up in, literally; my brother has built a dune buggy from scratch, and a race car out of a car that had not previously been a race car. When my brother wanted a minibike as a kid, nobody bought him one. My dad and grandpa built him one out of old lawnmower motors and steel bars they had lying around, which they welded into a frame. My extended family on both sides is full of people who fix their own cars, and make their living repairing or maintaining machines or structures.
David is not that kind of guy, and wasn't raised by that kind of guy. His dad was a surveyor, but for recreation, he played competitive bridge. David was not raised to think it's a moral failing to hire someone to do a job you could just as well do yourself, like replacing an engine block or adding a porch to the front of the house or re-wiring the guest bathroom.
Still, David's a very smart guy, and an engineer in his way: he is a software engineer. So when we needed donor sperm to have our first two kids, we looked for somebody smart and with a logical mind. There weren't any software engineers in the catalog, but there was a guy who was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a 3.85 gpa. "Smart!" we said. "A logical thinker!" we said, and ordered three little vials.
Imagine our surprise when our firstborn turned out to be the kind of person who can make anything out of anything--put him in front of any material that can be manipulated in three dimensions, whether Lego, modeling clay, or leftover forks, and he'll build something amazing. All those three-dimensional-thinking and doing-stuff-with-your-hands genes are just a little overdetermined, I sometimes think. Like we doomed him to a career in engineering or the skilled trades, like we left him with not really all that many choices. "Maybe we should have chosen a sensitive poet," we joke sometimes.
It's not really like that, though--Carl seems to have gotten the ear-for-language genes that also run in my family; while Eric was amazing us at 4 with his fork sculptures, Carl was astonishing us with his observations and questions about language. Why was one word used, and not another? "I think you meant to say both, not all," he'll tell us. Or he'll point out that two lines in a picture book don't really quite rhyme.
And yet Carl is also a builder. I know that having Lego-obsessed boys is about as common as breathing, but both of my boys have the bug pretty bad, even so.
But many of my friends have heard me talk about this before. What has me thinking about it again is seeing how Yehva fits in. And she does. She loves to do Lego with the boys, and the other day produced something so cool I made the classic parenting blunder of saying, "That's really great! Did somebody help you with it?" (She was offended, as she should have been.) When we toured her preschool last fall, the director commented on Yehva's tendency to gravitate toward technology in every classroom or storage room we entered: the computer, the toy cash-register, the tool bench. It feels like a little spark I want to nurture in her, though really the boys are doing that job for me. I find myself glad she has them, and that they let her tag along sometimes when they've got a project going.
She's only three. Anything could happen. I'm just having fun watching it unfold.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Lego WeDo review
So, Eric likes to make Lego Mindstorms robots. And Carl, who is 6, enjoys noodling around with them, too, but it's a little over his head. So, for Christmas, I got him a Lego WeDo robotics set. We finally got it out to mess around with yesterday (our computer was out of commission for over a week because of a hard drive failure, but we're up and running and measuring our storage in terabytes now, so it's all good). And we are thrilled with it.
WeDo comes with software; a collection of bricks, motors, and sensors in a reusable storage bin; and a big notebook full of information and instructions. There is also a set of four booklets, each with building instructions for three robots. I remember when we first got Mindstorms, how overwhelmed I felt--I just didn't know how to get started. WeDo, on the other hand, is made for schools, and I joked on Facebook yesterday that they're written like the subtext is, "Dear Elementary School Teacher, we realize it's possible that you just found out that in one hour you have to teach robotics to 27 second-graders, so we're going to make this easy on you." There are simple instructions and handy flowcharts about what to do first and what to do next. I love it.
The WeDo robots are powered by the computer's USB port, so they're always tethered; you're not going to be building a self-playing chess set or a robot that climbs a tree out of this thing. The building style is traditional brick based, so the things you make have that angular old-skool Lego look. (As opposed to Mindstorms, which uses a girder-and-connector style based on Lego Technics. I realize this will be technical blah blah for most of you. But I read a blog post about it recently and am trying to sound like I know more than I do.) But the things you build--two little birds that spin and dance, a sailboat that is tossed on a stormy sea, a clapping monkey--are very cute.
The programming interface is very bright and simple. WeDo has an icon-based graphical programming interface like Mindstorms, but much simplified (GeekDad has a screenshot here). Carl found it very easy to understand and use: you lay down a "start" block, then you can add blocks that run the motor, that play sounds, that act as a timer, and so on. You can have more than one program laid out on the screen at a time, and when you run a program, the block that is running lights up so you can easily connect what the robot is doing to what's in the program.
With Mindstorms, you have to write the program, compile it and download it to the robot's brick, and run it. If it doesn't work, you're back to the computer. It can make the de-bugging stage a bit lengthy. The WeDo interface makes trial-and-error quick and easy; you can write a program, run it, change it, find a bug, fix it, try something else, write a new program, and run it, all in about two minutes.
The trade-off, of course, is that the robots are very limited. You get a USB hub (kind of a little power brick), a motor, a tilt sensor, and a motion sensor. The designers have done a lot with a handful of gears and pulleys, but this is more like a tasty appetizer than a full robotics meal. With Mindstorms, there are a great many idea books, blogs, and websites, but not so with WeDo; at least not that I've found yet. I don't think it's leaked out of the schools market much. I'll be interested to see what Carl does when he's worked through the Activity Pack robots.
The WeDo activities are clearly designed to get kids thinking about how the gears, pulleys, and levers are operating. The interface for each activity starts with a short animated movie about the robot you're going to build, and then, before the building instructions, will say something like, "Our robot uses a motor to turn a small gear. The small gear turns a large gear, which operates a lever." I read it to Carl and he listens politely, but he really wants to get to the part where he can program the funny noises.
I paid an extra $50 or so for the Activity Pack, which has both building and programming instructions for a dozen projects, so the whole schmoo cost about $180, which is pricey (it's actually sold together as a "homeschool" pack now). I agree with some quibbles in GeekDad's review: if the computer didn't have dual monitors, I don't know how I'd have gotten out of the full-screen programming interface, and I still haven't quite figured out how saving programs and re-opening them works. The notebook could use a Quick Reference section; there was no easy way for me to look up how to save a program, for instance.
Still, I feel like we got our money's worth, and Carl has declared it the best Christmas present he ever got. The robots are simple to build and putting together programs is a snap. GeekDad says that you should consider whether you have younger relatives to hand it down to when deciding about the investment, and I admit I have already found myself wondering who among my homeschool pals might like to borrow it when Carl's done.
This is the second time I've bought something from Lego Education, and I've been pleased both times (the first time I got a set of Simple Machines activity kits), not least because of the little plastic bins everything comes in. Sometimes I browse the Lego Education catalog and think I could build my kids' whole curriculum out of it.
WeDo comes with software; a collection of bricks, motors, and sensors in a reusable storage bin; and a big notebook full of information and instructions. There is also a set of four booklets, each with building instructions for three robots. I remember when we first got Mindstorms, how overwhelmed I felt--I just didn't know how to get started. WeDo, on the other hand, is made for schools, and I joked on Facebook yesterday that they're written like the subtext is, "Dear Elementary School Teacher, we realize it's possible that you just found out that in one hour you have to teach robotics to 27 second-graders, so we're going to make this easy on you." There are simple instructions and handy flowcharts about what to do first and what to do next. I love it.
The WeDo robots are powered by the computer's USB port, so they're always tethered; you're not going to be building a self-playing chess set or a robot that climbs a tree out of this thing. The building style is traditional brick based, so the things you make have that angular old-skool Lego look. (As opposed to Mindstorms, which uses a girder-and-connector style based on Lego Technics. I realize this will be technical blah blah for most of you. But I read a blog post about it recently and am trying to sound like I know more than I do.) But the things you build--two little birds that spin and dance, a sailboat that is tossed on a stormy sea, a clapping monkey--are very cute.
The programming interface is very bright and simple. WeDo has an icon-based graphical programming interface like Mindstorms, but much simplified (GeekDad has a screenshot here). Carl found it very easy to understand and use: you lay down a "start" block, then you can add blocks that run the motor, that play sounds, that act as a timer, and so on. You can have more than one program laid out on the screen at a time, and when you run a program, the block that is running lights up so you can easily connect what the robot is doing to what's in the program.
With Mindstorms, you have to write the program, compile it and download it to the robot's brick, and run it. If it doesn't work, you're back to the computer. It can make the de-bugging stage a bit lengthy. The WeDo interface makes trial-and-error quick and easy; you can write a program, run it, change it, find a bug, fix it, try something else, write a new program, and run it, all in about two minutes.
The trade-off, of course, is that the robots are very limited. You get a USB hub (kind of a little power brick), a motor, a tilt sensor, and a motion sensor. The designers have done a lot with a handful of gears and pulleys, but this is more like a tasty appetizer than a full robotics meal. With Mindstorms, there are a great many idea books, blogs, and websites, but not so with WeDo; at least not that I've found yet. I don't think it's leaked out of the schools market much. I'll be interested to see what Carl does when he's worked through the Activity Pack robots.
The WeDo activities are clearly designed to get kids thinking about how the gears, pulleys, and levers are operating. The interface for each activity starts with a short animated movie about the robot you're going to build, and then, before the building instructions, will say something like, "Our robot uses a motor to turn a small gear. The small gear turns a large gear, which operates a lever." I read it to Carl and he listens politely, but he really wants to get to the part where he can program the funny noises.
I paid an extra $50 or so for the Activity Pack, which has both building and programming instructions for a dozen projects, so the whole schmoo cost about $180, which is pricey (it's actually sold together as a "homeschool" pack now). I agree with some quibbles in GeekDad's review: if the computer didn't have dual monitors, I don't know how I'd have gotten out of the full-screen programming interface, and I still haven't quite figured out how saving programs and re-opening them works. The notebook could use a Quick Reference section; there was no easy way for me to look up how to save a program, for instance.
Still, I feel like we got our money's worth, and Carl has declared it the best Christmas present he ever got. The robots are simple to build and putting together programs is a snap. GeekDad says that you should consider whether you have younger relatives to hand it down to when deciding about the investment, and I admit I have already found myself wondering who among my homeschool pals might like to borrow it when Carl's done.
This is the second time I've bought something from Lego Education, and I've been pleased both times (the first time I got a set of Simple Machines activity kits), not least because of the little plastic bins everything comes in. Sometimes I browse the Lego Education catalog and think I could build my kids' whole curriculum out of it.