Interruptus

I was trying to read aloud a story about Joseph (not me, the fellow from the Biblical Genesis). A 5-year old chose this time to begin pulling out the noisiest marble toy possible from the living corner, and began playing with it. I paused and pulled up this video (see below). Nothing sums up how I feel oftentimes about teaching, parenting, or trying to be taken seriously in these roles than this clip from Penguins of Madagascar.

You start, you get interrupted.
You start, you get interrupted.
You start, you get interrupted.
Ad nauseam.

Geography

We talked about the city of Rome and the country of Ireland. I realized with the former that I was doing them a disservice by not gracing them with my heightened ability to mimic dialects from around the world. They acknowledged my ability in the highest praise possible, which is to say they almost fell off their food-strewn seats laughing.

That gave me a segue, once my rage was depleted, to demand that they respond in kind with their best Irish brogues, which of course were far inferior to my own. So I laughed at theirs as well, laughed in my best Colin Farrell laugh.

He’d be proud.

Aside : my five favorite Colin Farrell Movies

Minority Report
The Lobster
The Gentlemen
Tigerland
Ava
Note: I have not yet seen In Bruges

So we practiced teaching each other Irish.

Thinking, logic, reason, rhetoric

Fallacy fallacy

A fallacy fallacy is when Person A claims that the conclusion of Person B’s argument is false because their logic is incorrect. Here’s the important part: sometimes the logic (or fact pertaining to something) might be wrong, yet the conclusion or end result is still correct. Therefore, calling the end result of a fallacious argument a fallacy is in itself a fallacy. And thereby, a fallacy fallacy. Short version: be careful about calling an argument fallacious. The conclusion might be true, even if the reasoning used to get there is faulty. So be careful about pointing fingers. Just might be you who wins the battle, loses, the war, and ends up a dummy head for calling someone else what you actually are yourself. A fallacious fallacer. Hmm. That sounds wrong…

Straw man fallacy

This is a favourite of conspiracy theorists, alongside ad hoc reasoning and ad hominem attacks. A straw man/strawman fallacy is when the other’s argument is misrepresented, exaggerated, or made up in order to make it easier to attack. It’s masterful, in a simple and primitive way because you’re pitching yourself the question you want to respond to with the correct answer.

Our kids are super good at this one, and it’s often hilarious. For example, one will say:

Hey, can we watch World War Z before bed?
I’ll say No, not tonight.
And they’ll say: Oh, I thought you wanted us to learn about how to think logically in high-stress situations and you said Brad Pitt’s character reflects that well. Do you not care about us learning effective survival techniques if we’re ever dealing with zombies?
And I just have to agree with them and say Yeah, I guess you nailed it, now go to bed.

They’re good.

Straw man arguments are tough because they put you on the defensive; they take a part of your own position, but weaken it by taking out of context, by exaggerating certain portions, by mixing in straight-up fabrication, or by misrepresenting or misquoting your own words back to you…but in their own words. So you have to be vigilant in not only summarizing what they’re saying, but synthesizing with just how they’re misrepresenting your position. Because if you respond to their misrepresentation of your words, then you’ve taken the bait. That’s why you must not stay silent when your own words or ideas are misrepresented.

The easy way to identify a straw man attack is by asking this simple question: is my position being distorted?

If you articulate your position, and then right next to it, you place the other person’s articulation of your position, what have they distorted?

It’s a good reminder to state your position clearly, and to charitably try and understand another’s position accurately and clearly as well, so you can either come to agreement, or at least be on the same page about the nature of your argument.

Exchanges

What are doing? I asked.

He looked up from his tiny book resting on the blue shirt of his mum’s he was wearing.
I’m reading about Jesus, he said,
and pointed his two-year old face down at his Bible again,

and my heart smiled.

Thinking & thoughts - Hegel

We talked about how Art is similar to Advertising, in the sense that it’s showcasing ideas in life worth thinking about, like Beauty, Kindness, Uniqueness, Childhood, or any number of feelings, emotions, and thoughts. Art can be effective at reminding us of what’s important to think about and prioritize. When we look at art, we might think: what trait or feeling is this presenting to me?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heigl was a German social and political philosopher (late 1700s-early 1800s) who was very influential on 20th century thought. He developed his dialectic scheme, which suggests that history moves forward in an ongoing cycle of Thesis, then Antithesis, and finally, Synthesis, as opposing ideas are in conflict and then reconciled, over and over.

He believed we are defined by our relationships with others and how we are interconnected, and therefore, relatively unimportant on some level, except in the context of the rest of the world - and the rest of the world needs to recognize you in order to be defined. Lot of circular stuff going on with him, lot of bouncing between big universal nation-country stuff and individual, your mind can access everything anyone else can kind of stuff. I understand very little of Hegel, aside from summaries of his dense ideas and his influence on modern philosophy. But saying “Hegelian” sounds good. Try it.

Latin

Unus - “one”

Also, we reviewed our complete Latin phrases. It got competitive.

Games

There was Candy Land, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Mancala. All were played with cutthroat fury and Gold Medal ambition, and often peacefully segued into Greco-Roman-Icelandic Wrestling, or working on the gentle and respectful debate techniques I have championed in place of Name-calling (see: Straw Man arguments above).

Some days I wonder what I am arming them with. Teach a person to fish, and they’ll always have food (unless they’re vegetarian). Teach a child to argue well, and they’ll always be able to face you down in infuriating fashion.

Block rocking

For a decade, I have been cutting, sanding, and then drawing illustrations, letters and words on scrap blocks of woods with paint markers. Everything from barnyard animals and mythical creatures to Latin phrases and historical periods, from random verbs to names of composers I think everyone oughta know. But really, they’re for building and stacking up and making Seussian structures.

The kids go through phases of disinterest, and then occasionally, intense focus. This was one such day, as two of them pulled out 497 of them and built towers to the heavens. Or almost to the ceiling. I was happy.

Drum kit

I set up our 2-year old on a drum machine. I include percussion in a huge category of Education I call: “Teaching Things I Know Nothing About But Teach Anyway.”

Prisoners

I don’t really know how to explain this, except like this: an 11-year old invents a game where he ties up his younger brothers’ feet - and occasionally hands - with a corded rope of fabric, and orders them to stay confined. And they beg him to keep doing it. I try to step in to ensure all are happy and feel an appropriate sense of freedom.

But I am waved off, again and again, by all parties involved. I do not know what this recreation is called, and I do not know what I think of it, but there appears to be something involving rules and protocols and codes of conduct, and perhaps something about learning knots and how to escape from them. And they are happy.

So I guess I will do something that is hard for me to do sometimes: recuse myself and stay on the outskirts of the fun.

Reading

An 11-year old boy reading Roald Dahl’s Boy on our bed, sunlight shafts raying through on an early March early afternoon.

The deep dark forest

We marched through marshy bogs and thick woods to check on the water flow of The Secret Creek, an underground water source we’ve been channeling. There were few attacks upon us, but danger lurked everywhere, and there were many noises I didn’t recognize. But then again, I’m no ornithologist.

Meal

I volunteered two boys, ages 2 and 5, to help with supper, and thus with lightened load, I took what might have been a 20-minute incursion into culinary experimentation and turned it into 60. Nobody can wash rice like those two, or bathe a kitchen floor in water quite like them. Their involvement was unquestionably a presence and a variable in both the length of preparation and the quality of final product, and I would change little.

It was a Wednesday, a day of days.

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