Early morning

Daily summary-Conflict resolution, letting go of credit, tick...tick...BOOM!, Rube Goldberg, James Joyce's 'Eveline,' pranks gone right

She called me from the road. Bad traffic. At least she had five kittens happy to see her before leaving.

Mathematics

There is something that feels good about seeing your 12-year old doing math on his own at 6.56 in the morning.

Later, I worked with him on scales, proportions, ratios, and setting up equations.

This is such an interesting shift in thinking at this point in formal education: the point in math where the focus really starts the turn from running numbers in some form (addition, division, etc.) and the mechanics of it, to understanding the why; how to use variables and extrapolate information when you’re given a limited amount.

It’s exciting.

Conflict resolution

I walked into the room to see Child A grab a pencil from Child B’s hand and hurl it across the room. Child B retaliated with a punch. I watched this.

We walked down to the bedroom, where I deposited their bodies and went to text my youngest sister. This is what I sent:

Sometimes the best thing I can do for them is be the villain in their story and allow them to find confidence and solace in one another. But it does get tiring.

See, their initial conflict was with each other. But there is nothing to unite a duo in dispute like providing a common enemy.

That enemy is me. The one with the authority and power to confine and refine and imprison and deliver captive monologues to.

I left them in there, a two-person Lord of the Flies setup on a lower bunk bed, to work things out. One wore a bathrobe reminiscent - aside from baby blue color - of one The Dude from The Big Lebowski might have in his closet on standby.

Eventually, after much important dialog and messaging on my part that was thoroughly and deeply received and will likely be remembered for eternity, they hugged each other, laughed at me, and ran off somewhere. I don’t know where.

Science

He worked on a Science project about cells. His notes are copious and thorough.

One of the harder things for me at this point is letting go of credit. For example, we spent portions of three different school years talking and discussing Biology 101. I am not an expert on any level. If you were to converse with any of our children about Biology, I don’t think you’d necessarily decide their knowledge or understanding was extraordinary or precocious (within the field). But there are many ideas, concepts, and vocabulary tucked away, dormant, hibernating, and primed.

So when he comes back from a Science class talking about cell structure and functions and the role they play in all organic life…I get excited, and a little part of me hopes that some of that dormant, hibernating knowledge and thoughts about Biology, and Science at large, will spring forth; an infinite geyser of questions and enthusiasm that builds on what they already know.

But the reality is more humdrum. What I have learned about learning is that if you’re a teacher, you have to divorce yourself of caring about credit or acknowledgment. At least you have to try. Otherwise, it’s more about you then them. The reality is that if you do your job well,

…you are helping them learn how to learn and how to love learning and how to keep learning.

So when they encounter things that they treat as new, but you know are not…you have to be okay with it. You have to rejoice that some of it’s coming easily, and that you secretly know why they’re absorbing and learning some of these ‘new’ concepts. Because they’re not new. They’re vaguely familiar, and sometimes vague familiarity is what makes learning something new just a teensy-tiny bit easier.

Early reading

I worked with a 5-year old on BOB books 5,6,7. He is slowly building confidence, as is his younger brother, hanging onto every syllable, word, and punctuation mark.

Hey, am I helping?!

Per her request, I took a run though of paper she’s writing. It’s an examination of how connotative and figurative language, and meta narrative tie are reflected in the play Rent and the film …tick, tick, BOOM!

It is a thrill to see her writing and ability to make connections; to not just summarize but to synthesize, evolve. It is a beautiful thing.

Very strong paper. But I still found a few areas to improve. Perhaps I retain relevance?

Recess

I took a break to speak to my brother and discuss an image he sent me. In this image, there is a small person. This person is wearing a diaper. She is trying to remove the diaper. The diaper is full, and I can tell this, because the contents of the diaper are being distributed down the person’s leg, and onto the rug, and onto the kitchen floor surrounding. It is evident that this person is self-sufficient and has been too occupied living a full life to be troubled by such matters as wasting time on a toilet for certain business. This image fills me with mirth and affection. I discuss it with my brother, and we conjecture how this might have happened to this anonymous person.

Literature, 3-5

A teenager reads Mo Willems books to her younger brothers. My heart is filled with affection.

Culinary systems

The children accuse me of making the same thing for certain meals on certain days. That is not entirely true. In fact, it is largely not true. The truth is, that I have handed over lunch-making duties to the children on this day for this meal. Is it my fault that mac & cheese coupled with frozen peas seems the perfect Wednesday lunch for early autumn days?

Rube Goldberg

Several times a year, our oldest son gets big into building Rube Goldberg contraptions. You know, you push a domino and start a chain reaction and a bunch of stuff starts happening? Watch an OK Go music video if you need a refresher.

Today he started teaching his younger brothers how to do so with dominos. Mixed results. Perhaps I should say: mixed results as far as successful completion.

In terms of time spent and education invested in practicing patience, focus, following directions, teaching effectively, encouraging, and helping, to say nothing of fine motor skill development…complete success.

More books

I cozied up and read The Hello, Goodbye Book by Norton Juster and Chris Raschka with our youngest. Since 2009, I have had a bit of a fixation on working my way through all the Caldecott Medal and Caldecott Honor books with our kids. This is another beautiful one. Occasionally I blog about them here.

I love both the illustrations and the idea of this book.

Art

We smock up, I throw a drop cloth over the table, and the paint starts flying. I try to keep it from flying. Several years ago I introduced our oldest son to Jackson Pollock, and he’s since developed his own style of action painting…outside. I sometimes have to remind our Youngers that this particular type of splatter painting is an outdoor one. For now.

Short Stories : James Joyce

The beauty of short stories is not only the form and condensed narrative itself. They’re also an excellent introduction to the works of an author whose works you might someday want to read (or teach). In this case, I didn’t feel like reading James Joyce’s Ulysses with our Olders; it is a work that truth be told, I have not yet been able to finish in my lifetime, despite trying several times, and being unable to slog through, despite it consistently sitting high on the pile of Great Literature of the Twentieth Century stack. So we started with Eveline, his 1904 story of the eponymous protagonist.

Eveline a 19-year old Irish woman with a lousy life in Dublin. She lives with an abusive father in an ongoing state of poverty. Her mum’s long gone, but made her promise long ago to keep the family united. Life is lousy. But there’s hope: her man Frank wants her to move with him to Buenos Aires. Will she go?

[ spoiler alert : I’m going to give away the end below ]

She considers, over the course of the story, the people in her life and how they’ve disappeared; dead, gone. She knows she’s heading down the same dead-end road as her mother. Does she have the courage to find escape, to break the cycle?

No. She doesn’t. In the end, she can’t overcome her paralysis and inability to choose happiness for herself. Joyce uses dust as a metaphor for monotony and the sea a stand-in for escape and the unknown..

…and in the end, she chooses dust. She stays with the familiar. Even though it’s not a happy existence, it’s a familiar and safe one.

You can see Joyce playing with symbols and setting and plumbing the inner depths of a person’s mind as she struggles with the right choice. It’s a cascade, a cavalcade of of inner thoughts, observations, memories, feelings, flooding her psyche. He describes in detail, heavily relying on descriptions of setting and symbolism, to bake in ideas about escape, choice, emotional paralysis, and responsibility.

Is it a great story? It’s not an especially enjoyable one. It’s also difficult (for me, a hundred-plus years later) to completely understand how groundbreaking James Joyce’s style was; I feel a sadness about it. When you’re an early influencer, then at a certain point what was once innovative and new becomes mainstream and monotonous. I value history and find benefit in digging back to beginnings. So I can appreciate this story as an early example of his style, influence, and literary experimentations.

The Olders, to their credit, stayed with it the whole way and did their best to deconstruct and understand his significance. But I don’t think Evelyn is going on their Top 100 Short Stories of All Time lists.

Huh?

Some, or most, or all of our children have gone through phases of being really into…tying. Not just tying shoelaces. Tying each other up. For fun. I think there’s something educational and dangerous about it. Perhaps that’s a good combo. Perhaps.

Writing

A boy writes something on one of our typewriters. His shadow is beautiful on the wall as the setting sun throws its silhouette on the white texture.

Incredibly well-cut jack 'o lantern sitting in a house waiting to terrify children

The shrieks are worth it

How do we use the moments we have? Sometimes, we drop what is necessary and try to find a higher calling beyond. For me, that means sometimes doing things like waiting until it’s dark, sticking a candle inside a hollowed out jack ‘o lantern, going outside, and holding it up just outside the window to terrify all inhabitants within.

That was a Wednesday.

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