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.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
2010 Reading Report: The Highlights
I knew I wasn't reading as much as usual in 2010. Since 2006, when I began keeping my little Excel spreadsheet, I've averaged 300 books a year (give or take 10-20). With 10 days left in the year, I've "only" read 195 in 2010.
Why? A few reasons, I think. For the first time in my life, I've had stretches of days when I just didn't feel like reading. I caught up on some TV shows I missed when they first aired, or re-watched some series David hadn't seen before (The Wire, Buffy/Angel). I did a lot of magazine reading. I'm a big fan of longform.org and GiveMeSomethingToRead, which combined with InstaPaper has kept my iPad pretty well-stocked with long essays, a form I love. I probably read at least a few book-equivalents worth of essays and articles.
I also just hit a dry spell. I've read so much on topics I'm interested in (education, parenting, homeschooling, politics, economics, adoption, religion) that the law of diminishing returns has hit me hard. My log for this year includes 67 books I started and didn't finish, and the second-most common comment on them is, "nothing new here." (The most common? Variations on "bad writing." A sampler: Crap writing; crap writing; hated writing style; desperately needed competent editor; writing so very bad; ow ow two pages in wanted to gouge out my eyes; couldn't stand author's "random" use of "quotations"; overwritten; tedious, annoying.) There are a lot of books I did finish on which I also commented, "nothing new here for me." Heh, I see that on a book about mountain climbing I wrote, "think I've sucked the juice out of the stranded-on-a-mountain genre."
Feeling like I've sucked the juice out of a lot of genres. And haven't yet happened upon the new thing to get interested in.
So, what did I read and like?
Well, I gave a "4"--my highest rating--to 29 books. 19 of them were re-reads: the Aubrey-Maturin novels; the Clare Fergusson/ Russ Van Alstyne mysteries by Julie Spencer-Fleming, which I re-read in anticipation of the newest book in the series coming out in October, though its publication has been pushed back to April; and The Preaching Life, by Barbara Taylor Brown.
Of those, I would call the Aubrey-Maturin novels great books. The others? More like "great if you like that kind of thing." Which I do.
The other books I rated highly included The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which I've written about before, and Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which defied my expectations: I thought it was going to be a "nothing new here" adoption book, but it was excellent and thought-provoking. I wrote about it here and here.
I also gave a "4" to Connie Willis's two-volume novel, Blackout and All Clear. These two books are essentially a single 1100-page novel in Willis's time travelers universe, the same one that sent historians to the Black Plague in Doomsday Book and to Victorian England in To Say Nothing of the Dog. (That latter title is inspired by Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 book about boating on the Thames, Three Men in a Boat...To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is so very much worth a read on its own merits.)
Anyway: in Blackout and All Clear, historians from 2060 are stuck in London during the Blitz. The books could be tedious at that length--and some people certainly find them to be. This Amazon reviewer is not wrong:
And yet I found these books compulsively readable--and so did David; there were a couple of days when we were both reading the same copy of All Clear, and we devoted our lives to distracting each other so we could steal it back. I will probably read them again someday. And I would highly recommend them to anyone who isn't intimidated by 1100 pages in two volumes and who "likes that sort of thing." Also, I need all of you to read it so you can be in the joke when David and I mention that we think Yehva is like Alf and Binnie Hodbin rolled into one.
I think those of us who love genre literature learn to embrace its flaws. Yes, we all know it's ridiculous that Data can not use contractions, and agree that the whole "Western in Space" thing was the worst idea Joss Whedon ever had. Yes, I can see why people find the digressions in Cryptonomicon to be a self-indulgent bore (really? two whole pages on how to eat Captain Crunch?). Yet we love these things anyway; sometimes, their flaws are part of what we love about them.
Blackout and All Clear are like that. Yes, Connie Willis went a little nuts, and maybe a strong editor could have helped her get this down to one hefty volume. Maybe we could have used two or three fewer trips around the "I'll take the train to where I think Mike is, but oh no, I just missed him, he's on his way to the theater to find Eileen, who was there until two minutes ago when she went to see if the relief ladies had a coat in her size" merry-go-round. But, as with Doomsday Book, I enjoyed the detailed immersion in the period, and was carried along very comfortably by the charms of the characters Willis populated the books with. If you like that sort of thing, you will really like these books.
I gave a "4" to Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl, which is, I suppose, obligatory for a book that won the National Book Award. I have written about Zarr before, here and here. I think I liked her better as a writer talking about writing than I did as simply a writer, but some of the flaws I see in her books come directly from her very well-thought-out and articulated ideas about what young adult novels should be doing, and how they should be treating their audience.
I'll stop there because this is long. But I might do a second post on books I flagged as "recommendable," books that didn't get my highest rating but that I thought might be worth mentioning to friends when they're looking for something to read.
Why? A few reasons, I think. For the first time in my life, I've had stretches of days when I just didn't feel like reading. I caught up on some TV shows I missed when they first aired, or re-watched some series David hadn't seen before (The Wire, Buffy/Angel). I did a lot of magazine reading. I'm a big fan of longform.org and GiveMeSomethingToRead, which combined with InstaPaper has kept my iPad pretty well-stocked with long essays, a form I love. I probably read at least a few book-equivalents worth of essays and articles.
I also just hit a dry spell. I've read so much on topics I'm interested in (education, parenting, homeschooling, politics, economics, adoption, religion) that the law of diminishing returns has hit me hard. My log for this year includes 67 books I started and didn't finish, and the second-most common comment on them is, "nothing new here." (The most common? Variations on "bad writing." A sampler: Crap writing; crap writing; hated writing style; desperately needed competent editor; writing so very bad; ow ow two pages in wanted to gouge out my eyes; couldn't stand author's "random" use of "quotations"; overwritten; tedious, annoying.) There are a lot of books I did finish on which I also commented, "nothing new here for me." Heh, I see that on a book about mountain climbing I wrote, "think I've sucked the juice out of the stranded-on-a-mountain genre."
Feeling like I've sucked the juice out of a lot of genres. And haven't yet happened upon the new thing to get interested in.
So, what did I read and like?
Well, I gave a "4"--my highest rating--to 29 books. 19 of them were re-reads: the Aubrey-Maturin novels; the Clare Fergusson/ Russ Van Alstyne mysteries by Julie Spencer-Fleming, which I re-read in anticipation of the newest book in the series coming out in October, though its publication has been pushed back to April; and The Preaching Life, by Barbara Taylor Brown.
Of those, I would call the Aubrey-Maturin novels great books. The others? More like "great if you like that kind of thing." Which I do.
The other books I rated highly included The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which I've written about before, and Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which defied my expectations: I thought it was going to be a "nothing new here" adoption book, but it was excellent and thought-provoking. I wrote about it here and here.
I also gave a "4" to Connie Willis's two-volume novel, Blackout and All Clear. These two books are essentially a single 1100-page novel in Willis's time travelers universe, the same one that sent historians to the Black Plague in Doomsday Book and to Victorian England in To Say Nothing of the Dog. (That latter title is inspired by Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 book about boating on the Thames, Three Men in a Boat...To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is so very much worth a read on its own merits.)
Anyway: in Blackout and All Clear, historians from 2060 are stuck in London during the Blitz. The books could be tedious at that length--and some people certainly find them to be. This Amazon reviewer is not wrong:
Essentially, this book is a classic example of what happens when you have a good setting but a poor plot. The setting is fantastic - a bunch of time travelers lost in WWII with bombs falling all around them, but the plot is absolute rubbish. Take the following two lines, copy and paste them until you run out of space in one book, and then continue through the end of a second book:
"Gasp! We might have changed the space-time continuum!"
"Oops, oh, no. Everything is fine."
Intersperse with too many repeated cliffhangers involving chapter ends with historians nearly dying (Will They SURVIVE?) and some slapstick involving nobody being able to get ahold of each other, ever, and you've basically got Blackout and All Clear.
The first time this device is used, it's interesting and tense. The 47th time the historians wonder if they altered events (and they didn't) you just sort of roll your eyes and hope for more details about parachute bombs or V1 wrangling.
And yet I found these books compulsively readable--and so did David; there were a couple of days when we were both reading the same copy of All Clear, and we devoted our lives to distracting each other so we could steal it back. I will probably read them again someday. And I would highly recommend them to anyone who isn't intimidated by 1100 pages in two volumes and who "likes that sort of thing." Also, I need all of you to read it so you can be in the joke when David and I mention that we think Yehva is like Alf and Binnie Hodbin rolled into one.
I think those of us who love genre literature learn to embrace its flaws. Yes, we all know it's ridiculous that Data can not use contractions, and agree that the whole "Western in Space" thing was the worst idea Joss Whedon ever had. Yes, I can see why people find the digressions in Cryptonomicon to be a self-indulgent bore (really? two whole pages on how to eat Captain Crunch?). Yet we love these things anyway; sometimes, their flaws are part of what we love about them.
Blackout and All Clear are like that. Yes, Connie Willis went a little nuts, and maybe a strong editor could have helped her get this down to one hefty volume. Maybe we could have used two or three fewer trips around the "I'll take the train to where I think Mike is, but oh no, I just missed him, he's on his way to the theater to find Eileen, who was there until two minutes ago when she went to see if the relief ladies had a coat in her size" merry-go-round. But, as with Doomsday Book, I enjoyed the detailed immersion in the period, and was carried along very comfortably by the charms of the characters Willis populated the books with. If you like that sort of thing, you will really like these books.
I gave a "4" to Sara Zarr's Story of a Girl, which is, I suppose, obligatory for a book that won the National Book Award. I have written about Zarr before, here and here. I think I liked her better as a writer talking about writing than I did as simply a writer, but some of the flaws I see in her books come directly from her very well-thought-out and articulated ideas about what young adult novels should be doing, and how they should be treating their audience.
I'll stop there because this is long. But I might do a second post on books I flagged as "recommendable," books that didn't get my highest rating but that I thought might be worth mentioning to friends when they're looking for something to read.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty
Over the last few years, I have found myself increasingly interested in issues of social class, perhaps especially as I have seen them playing out in my Quaker meeting. Because my reaction to any random thought or question I have is to read twenty or thirty books about it, I have, well, ready twenty or thirty or more books on social class in the last few years. One of the first I read was Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which I found very useful. Payne's premise, as I recall it, is that people from different social classes have different ways of seeing the world; of relating to authority, time, and money; and of solving problems.
You'll notice what I wrote isn't even remotely a defense of Payne's work. But the author of piece, Paul Gorski, responded and told me, in so many words, that--well, I'll show you. He said:
Which, as insults and dismissals go, is pretty erudite. I liked Payne's work because of my failure to overcome my socialization, and my lack of awareness that "the social sciences" rejected her paradigm forty years ago. OK! This is not the first time--and probably won't be the last--that I have said to someone, sometimes indirectly as here, and sometimes directly--"tell me more about why you see that way"--and been told that my failure to already see it their way was proof of my classism or cluelessness or insularity. Oddly enough, I don't find this helpful.
In other words, Payne's work does not challenge the status quo. At best--and Gorski and others question the accuracy with which she does this--she merely describes it. At worst, she helps to perpetuate it.
When I read the book, I felt like all sorts of things that had confused and vexed me about my family of origin, about certain friends and lovers, about many of my students when I was teaching at the community college, became coherent and intelligible. Behaviors that seemed dysfunctional or mistaken came into focus as adaptive ways of dealing with challenges and conflict; choices that I simply could not understand or view without judgment were revealed in a context that helped me make sense of them. I found the book tremendously helpful, and it has stayed with me for a long time, which is really saying something. I read about 300 books a year, most of them non-fiction, and since most of them are only OK, I forget a lot. So when a book keeps feeling resonant to me after over the years, when it teaches me something or changes my mind in a way that stays with me, I pay attention to that.
However, since reading Framework I have become aware that Payne is not just an author but the head of a training network that goes into schools and leads faculty and staff in workshops based on her work, and that both her writing and her work in schools are very controversial. Many people see Payne as buying into and promoting a stereotyped but untrue view of poverty, and of encouraging educators to see poor students as deficient and in need of fixing. The strength of the opposition to her is in proportion with her influence: by one measure I recently saw cited, she and her trainers have been in over 70% of school districts in the United States. She is seen as having tremendous, but detrimental, influence.
I have found this very interesting. I read Framework as proposing a model which recognizes both the strengths and deficiencies of different class-based cultural norms. But others--who are certainly more familiar, overall, with Payne's work than I am--see it as promoting middle-class ways at the expense of poor children. What did I miss?
I can see a number of possibilities for our different views of the book. It's been a few years, maybe as many as five, since I read the book. It's possible that I was relatively new to thinking about social class and did not recognize problems that would jump out at me if I were to read it now. It's possible that I have overlooked, or forgotten, the book's weaknesses while remembering its strengths. It's possible that the book itself is not horrible, but the uses it's put to in schools are.
A year or so ago, I went looking for some of the critiques of Payne, and I found a number of writers on-line who criticized her without being concrete. The accusations were repeated again and again, as if they were simply true, but without specific reference to her work. Again and again, I saw her accused of not being an academic, not being a Ph.D, [edited: my mistake. Payne actually is a Ph.D., so clearly whatever people actually have said about her, it's not this.] not giving enough attention or respect to the work of scholars who study education and social class. Now, God knows I am as big a fan of the peer-reviewed journal article as anybody, but it was very interesting to me to see people who set themselves up as experts on classism wielding their academic credentials like a sword and shield.
Yesterday, my friend Jeanne, who does a lot of reading, writing, thinking, and educating about social class (she blogs, along with others, at Class Action) linked to this very critical article about Payne. And I said pretty much what I just wrote here, a bit more briefly:
It's interesting to me how critical people are of Payne's in-school training, which I don't know much about, because that book was so helpful to me. Maybe I read it wrong, but what I took away from it felt like a better understanding of both strengths and deficits of the different ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. It made sense of some things about my family, about some of my friends and lovers, and it felt like it challenged me (a middle/upper-middle class person with a lot of education) to be more resilient and accepting when people communicate in ways that challenge me.
But what I hear over and over is that the book and training are used in schools as a way to encourage working-class and poor kids to adapt to middle-class ways of doing things, something I think ought not to be undertaken uncritically--what about training middle-class teachers, bosses, co-workers to accept more than one style of dealing with conflict, or with authority, for instance? So that the work of bridging a gap isn't always piled on the shoulders of people who are already swimming upstream.
Su -- you may, indeed, have felt that Payne's book helped you better understand ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. The question is, did she help you understand accurately. A lot of people connect with what she says because we're already socialized into the deficit model. But just the way you put your own point demonstrates one of the serious liabilities of Payne's work and mainstream thinking on poverty in general. There is no "way" poor people communicate and solve problems. The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it. So if it helped you with what you say it helped you with, then it appears as though it only cemented simplifications and stereotypes.
One review of Payne's work found literally hundreds of examples of misinformation in it -- points she makes that directly contradict decades of research. So you might feel that she helped you better understand something, but that doesn't mean your understanding is accurate even if you could relate it to experiences with this or that person from your life... This is why it's not important only for us to be critical of the information we take in, but also to be critical of the lenses with which we've been socialized and the way they filter the information we're taking in. That Payne's work rings true for you says less about her work than it does about how strongly we're socialized to see things in stereotyped and deficit-laden ways... After all, what rang true for you (and for many, many others) has been shown to be completely and wholly inaccurate. It's based on a paradigm (the culture of poverty) that was rejected forty years ago in the social sciences.
I asked if he had a link to the article he mentions, and Jeanne sent me a link to one of his articles on Payne, which you can find here. I found it really helpful; after reading it I feel I have a much better understanding of the criticism of Payne and her work. Gorski does the kind of specific critique I had not found before, looking in some detail at the content of Framework.
I didn't plan to write about it, so I didn't take notes. But it has stuck with me overnight and this morning, so here I am writing about it. So far since I've started, I've had to help a kid on the potty, I've had to stop to feed someone, I've had to mediate a dispute, I've had to answer about 20 questions, and I've had to take a phone call from the hospital about my surgery on Monday. My point is that I am squeezing this writing into a morning in which I don't really have time to write, so I'm not going to do what I should do and do a second reading of the article. I'm going to work from memory. Which means I'll probably make a mistake or two. And I'll certainly end up focusing on what most stayed with me, which means I'll probably overlook some things. But there you have it.
First, Gorski makes the same complaint I've seen others make: she is not a social scientist, and she does not pay attention to the scholarly work being done on social class. I'm of two minds about this criticism; on the one hand, I am a big fan of scholarly work. I appreciate that social scientists think carefully about methodology, are aware of potential biases and work to design studies that overcome or avoid them--that the work of social scientists is a tremendously useful tool for helping us see beyond our own limited circle. On the other hand: do we require that everyone either be a social scientist or be conversant with the work of academics before they can speak publicly about social class? Because that's a pretty high bar, and even I, who have failed to overcome my socialization, can see who it excludes.
Admittedly, Payne is a special case: she's not just any old writer on social class. She and her minions are in, apparently, the majority of school districts in America, telling teachers how to understand and relate to their students who are poor and working class. To the extent that's true, she wields tremendous influence and should be held to a very high standard. But "she ignores me and my friends and our very important work" feels a little dicey.
Of course, that's not Gorski's only criticism. One of his complaints about Frameworks is that the hypothetical families Payne creates to illustrate her points are all stereotypes of poverty: single mothers of children whose fathers are in prison; families that include alcohol or drug abuse; and so on (Oops, that's actually in a different article: page 137 of this one). I don't have either a copy of the book or a clear memory of this, but Gorski provides such a long list of Payne's case study families that it wouldn't surprise me if he had named them all. And in that case, I agree with Gorski: that sucks. And Payne should have known better.
Eventually a couple of things rose up to me as central issues. One is that Payne is perceived as buying into and promoting the idea that there is a "culture of poverty," which is an idea that has been used as a way to blame the poor for their continued poverty. The other, very related criticism, is that Payne does not pay attention to the systemic forces that create poverty and trap people in it. I think this quote puts it nicely:
I believe the Ruby Payne phenomenon illustrates the temptation of the path of least resistance. Her work allows us to content ourselves by learning a set of cultural rules and helping a dominated group fit into a dominating system. She never insists that we secure social justice or eliminate educational inequities. She never challenges us to confront classism. In today’s anxiety-ridden education milieu, many of us may experience A Framework as a reprieve from the difficult reflective and transformative work called for by Kozol (1992), hooks (2000), and others. Their work challenges us to be part of institutional reform. Payne’s demands shallow awareness and no commitment to authentic reform. In other words, if I am from the upper or middle socioeconomic classes, Payne protects my privilege and gives me permission to do the same.
As I read, one of my reactions was that Gorski and others were criticizing Payne for not writing a different book--they wanted theory. He quotes Payne, responding to one of his critiques, as saying, “Gorski states that his lens is critical social theory. My theoretical lens is economic pragmatism. The two theoretical frames are almost polar opposites.” So, for a bit, one of my reactions to Gorski was that he and Payne were talking past each other.
As I read more, though, I began to feel like there was a question Gorski wasn't addressing that feels important to me: just what exactly are classroom teachers supposed to be doing? I wanted him to acknowledge how challenging it is for a teacher in the classroom to navigate the mess of resource distribution, home and neighborhood influences, academic expectations, administrator pressure. Teachers and their students are at the center of a big complicated mess, and it is not at all clear how best to behave within that mess.
I was a teacher for 13 years; I taught freshmen at community colleges, a course that every incoming student was required to take, so I dealt with students with every level of preparation for college work (though "well-prepared" was vanishingly rare) and a spectrum of class backgrounds.
I believe in theory, and I believe in understanding the systemic reasons why poverty persists and the institutional barriers that prevent individuals (except in rare cases) from getting out of poverty. But I'm not sure how helpful that theory is in the classroom. As a teacher, I might be inclined to say, "You want me to help dismantle structures of inequality? Great, I can do that with you on the weekend. But Monday through Friday, I am in the classroom with students who are already victims of those structures. All the critical social theory in the world is not going to help these kids right now. What do I do?"
Payne has an answer to that. Maybe it's the wrong answer--her critics say that the answer she's peddling is that poor and working-class kids should become more like middle-class kids, should buy into the existing structure to the extent they're able, in the hope of moving themselves to a more comfortable and secure place within it (I don't know how accurate this is, as I am not at all familiar with her teacher trainings or her writings other than Framework). Gorski et al are right that this solution does nothing to dismantle the structure. But what else is a teacher to do?
I have faced this myself, teaching students whose home language was a dialect of Black English. Yes, it's a language. Yes, it has a coherent (and complex) grammatical structure. But in my students' lifetime, writing that uses the vocabulary and grammar of that dialect will not be accepted in an academic setting. What am I to tell my students? Am I not supposed to teach them to code-switch, to write in the voice that will let them stay in school? If I do help them develop an "academic" writing voice, am I helping to support the system? Am I doubly burdening those who already bear the brunt of inequality, making it their job, their responsibility, to learn to fit into a system that denigrates them? But if I don't teach them to write that way, am I helping to trap them in marginal economic circumstances?
Gorski creates a list of what authentic anti-povery education would include. He mentions eliminating tracking, creating integrated school districts, using vouchers. Most of these kinds of changes are things that classroom teachers have little or no control over. He also mentions things like, "transcend[ing] identity politics and examin[ing] the ways in which these sorts of policies and practices help to concentrate power in the hands of the corporate elite" and "[a]cknowledg[ing] the interconnectedness of poverty, classism, racism, sexism, linguicism, ableism, and other forms of oppression" (pp 145-146 here). OK!
(To be fair, he ends with a list of practical things that can be done immediately, that includes things like "Assign work requiring computer and Internet access or other costly resources only when we can provide in-school time and materials for such work to be completed," and that I mostly applaud.)
It seems like the core of the problem is that Payne embraces a model in which there are class-based cultural differences, and Gorski rejects that notion. He is, I think, very conscious of a history in which the idea of a "culture of poverty" has been used to blame the victims of poverty and to absolve the rest of us of responsibility, and he fears that Payne's work perpetuates this. I fear that denying class-based cultural differences can deprive of us of tools we can use both to reach that high-falutin' glittering dream of a world in which we have "transcended" and "overcome" and "acknowledged," and also to improve things in the little slice of the world we live in.
For instance, my friend Jeanne sees class-based differences in how people deal with conflict. She writes about it here, for instance. If, as Gorski says, "There is no 'way' poor people communicate.... The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it," then Jeanne is wrong. And if Jeanne is wrong, then when I am dealing with that person who makes me uncomfortable by being very direct and using language that sometimes strikes me as rude or crass, we don't have a social-class problem. We don't have a problem in which I was raised to a (dominant) middle-class model of suppressing emotion and avoiding conflict, while that other person was raised to a working-class model of direct confrontation. And I don't have a responsibility to think about my class position, or to challenge myself to accept a different way of communicating. No, if it's just human variation, then I get to say, "That person is behaving inappropriately." And since my mode of discourse (if you will) is the dominant one in most places, other people there, and people in authority, will agree with me and conspire with me to silence her or drive her out.
I'm trying to say that, to my mind, denying class-based cultural differences carries its own set of dangers. I get that talking about these differences is a risky business, but nothing I have yet seen or read has convinced me that these differences don't exist.