Music and history research

I'm sorry I've been so quiet lately. October has been just non-stop busy, busy, busy. I have been making revisions to my first book at the recommendation of another author who wants to introduce me to her agent (who sold her book to Random House), and that needs to be done by tomorrow. We've been hopping around trying to Do Everything with all of these free tickets that have been given to me so that I can Report On Everything on KidsOutAndAbout.com. I actually decided NOT to take the kids to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow outdoor play yesterday because we've just about reached our limit.

However, a lot of the work I've been doing has been--believe it or not--some research for my own pure pleasure. Actually, that's not entirely true, it started as some work to get the Bach Children's Chorus some historically interesting music, and that's still the main reason I'm working on it. Plus, I'm sure I'll use it in a book someday. But the sheer amount of effort I've put in has been motivated by the pleasure I'm taking in it moment to moment.

I have gone to some effort to interest the National Lincoln Bicentennial Commission in having the Bach Children's Chorus sing at the main celebration in D.C. in February, which has led to my working closely with the directors of the BCC to help them decide on a good repertoire that can be arranged for the kids in short order. Because you always need a "hook" -- a reason to have it be our kids be the ones singing--we've decided that a great one is to have our kids be "ambassadors from the city of Frederick Douglass" (and, it's true, saying that phrase has definitely made the organizers sit up and take notice). See, after Douglass left slavery, he made Rochester his home base. Rochester, as you can imagine, loves Frederick Douglass. And, it seems, no other performing group has a specific "Frederick Douglass repertoire." If the BCC develops one, it will pay off well into the future, as it's actually marketable.

But in what, exactly, should this Lincoln and Douglass (one should NOT make the mistake of saying Lincoln-Douglass, as that conjures up images of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in which the Douglas in question is Stephen Douglas, the anti-abolitionist) repertoire consist? Someone needed to find a good body of work for the director to review with the intent of arranging for a 4-part children's chorus. Because this project has been my baby, fundamentally, I'm the one who has been doing the historic research into the music enjoyed by Lincoln and Douglass, and into some of the music actually sung and played by Douglass, who, it turns out, was a gifted singer and violinist.

I've been at this for a couple of weeks, bringing the kids from library to library, calling and emailing historians and librarians all over the country, and charming the sellers of rare books into making photocopies of index pages of an 1827 version of the hymn book The Seraph (the 1836 edition of which Douglass carried up from Baltimore as he escaped slavery). It has been absolutely fascinating. I'm making connections that people have never made before, and informing people who have helped me and who care about this issue about those connections, making them excited. I even found a slight mistake that one Douglass historian made; I have his email address (in fact, he's one of the people who has helped me), and I'll be able to let him know the mistake once I've compiled this data a bit more formally.

Last week, I saw in one research book that the hymn that inspired Frederick Douglass to leave slavery was called "Run to Jesus." Douglass quotes from this hymn in his second autobiography:

Run to Jesus--shun the danger--
I don't expect to stay
Much longer here.

He points out that this was a thinly-veiled song about escaping to the North:

In the lips of some, it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but, in the lips of our company, it simply meant, a speedy pilgrimage toward a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery.

I didn't know where the historian had gotten the specific information that it was this song that first inspired Douglass to leave slavery, but in a way, it was good enough for me--it sounded like a perfect song for the kids to learn, with this story behind it. So I went looking for the sheet music in the Sibley Music Library here in Rochester. I had the librarians hunting through various index books, and they pointed me to a collection in their general stacks, a songbook published in 1887 for the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. To my shock, right there at the top of "Run to Jesus," it said:

RUN TO JESUS.

[This song was given to the Jubilee Singers by Hon. FREDERICK DOUGLASS, at Washington, D.C., with the interesting statement, that it first suggested to him the thought of escaping from slavery.]

We had our primary source!! I was able to tell this to the curator of the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in D.C.. She was extremely pleased to hear this; she hadn't known of that songbook, and I think she's going to try to acquire one for their collection. Then, in the same email, she told me something great: The Frederick Douglass NHS has Douglass's original copy of The Seraph (the book, various editions of which I have been chasing all over the country). Tomorrow, the curator is going to open the case and write out for me the list of hymns in it, so I can compare it with the index of the 1827 edition (emailed to me from Wilmington) and the index of the 1860 edition (sent to me from Harvard), AND so that we can choose some of the songs for the kids in the chorus to sing as part of the repertoire.

I had started the research on The Seraph based on the information in a history collection at the Rochester Museum & Science Center, so I've kept the historian there apprised of my progress. She's been so pleased that she asked me to give a talk on this adventure to a gathering there next month of people who support their archives. That should be fun.

In short, this has been an intensely pleasurable three weeks or so of gathering and integrating information, and lighting little fires of excitement in librarians and historians, and even a Presbyterian minister, in places as diverse as Harvard and D.C. and Hartford, CT, in Bridgeton, NJ and Atlanta and San Francisco and Wilmington, DE. Everyone, almost without exception, has been happy to help, photocopying things and sending them to me for free.

On Friday afternoon, I hosted a meeting here at my house with the BCC directors and a famous baritone who lives here in Rochester, and they worked out right there on my piano a beautiful rendition of "Run to Jesus," and talked about how they would arrange the parts for the BCC kids to weave in between what the baritone would sing. I felt moved by the private concert, and privileged to have been the person who had made it happen. The baritone is going to perform it at that November event at the RMSC that I mentioned above, at which I'll be talking. Well, that's not definite yet, but I'm pretty sure I can just tell the RMSC folks that he'll be doing it and he'll be welcomed with open arms. Important, too, because all of the people who are involved with Frederick Douglass's legacy here in Rochester will be at this event, and we'll be able to rub elbows with them.

One thing to mention here: Frederick Douglass was a really great guy. Brilliant, articulate, one of us. His autobiography, especially the second one, My Bondage and My Freedom, is a terrific read. Worthwhile. I have many thoughts on this, particularly concerning the extent to which it is important to make abstract arguments for individual liberty, and whether that is more or less valuable than making a specific case for the concrete ways in which slavery is cruel. But that's for another post, someday, if I feel like it.

You know, sometimes you do a lot of unpaid work for a project, and then feel terribly discouraged when it all slides down into a black hole. But here, yes, I've spent hours and hours on this, ostensibly to help the Bach Children's Chorus. But it's been so fulfilling, even if we don't end up getting asked to go to D.C. in February. There are still a few rare people out there who care about these things, who care about getting them right, and who get as jazzed as I do to think that they're adding to a body of knowledge, filling in holes in history. These small discoveries give me an immense amount of energy. Being in contact with people who care like I do gives me hope.

And the kids are getting an education, too--in music, and in history, and in watching me care about this so passionately. History matters, getting it right matters...and also, getting it right is possible and pleasurable with a little effort. Great lessons, I think.

Non-stop fall fun

Too much is going on to miss it, around here. Plus, I feel that I have this responsibility to report on as much as I can for my readers.

Saturday, after choir, we went apple picking. The empires were awesome.

Yesterday, we went to Holiday Hollow, the most awesome Halloween venue in the world. Someday soon I'm sure I will find the connector chord for my camera to the PC and then there will be good photos.

Today, we're going to Brown's Berry Patch -- they have a special day for Columbus Day -- that is, as long as the kids get their work done.

Tomorrow there is the kids' beloved nature class out at Genesee Country Nature Center. And Wednesday is a field trip to Ganondagan, an Iroquois longhouse in Victor, NY. Wednesday night we're seeing a dress rehearsal of Fiddler on the Roof being performed in Rochester.

Oh, and by the way, I'm getting busy making Halloween costumes. Madison is going to be a piano. An upright, in case you're wondering. We'll see if I can pull it off. We had gone for dinner at some friends' on Friday night, and they had just gotten a large flat-screen TV--with the perfect box to use for making a piano, at least the way I envision it.

Ella is going to be the piano player: She's going to wear David's tuxedo coat, a top hat if I can find one at the Dollar Store, Madison's tie and cummerbund from her choir uniform, a carnation, and white gloves.

It's David's job to rig the iPod and speakers inside the piano so they can blast Rachmaninoff or something.

Where does it end?

I'm going to get my weekly supply of vegetables this afternoon from the pick-up point of the CSA.

AND THEN I'M GOING TO RUTHLESSLY CHOP THEM ALL UP AND ROAST AND BOIL THEM!!! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Good thing I don't live in Switzerland.

(Thanks, Tony.)

Leaf blower

I was not surprised to discover today that there are few household tools that are more fun than a leaf blower. I was not surprised because I have been plotting to buy a leaf blower for more than two years.

David always made his skeptical face when I informed him that a leaf blower was in our future.

(Trust me, love, you'll be blown away.)

Frantically fall. Also, "Ella!"

It's the annual Frantic Fall here in Rochester. October. The time when everyone suddenly realizes that the snow is going to fall soon, so it's time to get the kids Out And About. I have the numbers to prove it; my KidsOutAndAbout.com readership spikes 30% as soon as October 1 hits. Mother Nature responds with harvest season, and all of the farms around here open their arms wide and welcome families with:

corn mazes



and strange activities




and crazy swings



and hayrides with friends to the pumpkin patch.



Of course, I'm the person with the master list of great things to do in fall around here, so we have to participate to the max. I have to report on them, after all! Friday we sat down and planned what we have to fit in, as there are only four weekends in October this year. Those photos above are from Stokoe Farms, a place out west of Rochester, where we spent several hours Saturday afternoon.

For me, three hours were taken yesterday morning on the telephone with my friend Amy Asch, a musical theater historian who has just published a book with Alfred A. Knopf (pronounced "K-nopf"--really) called The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II. If you are a person who likes to know everything about musical theater, buy this book.

After we talked last month about the book, Amy got an unsolicited earful from me about the need for authors to help market their work, and how a web site is a must. She bore up cheerfully, especially when I offered to hold her hand to get it done. (You know how sometimes things are just so hard to figure out when you have to do it alone, but all you need to get over the hump and push through is a friend taking the first steps with you? I figured that was the case, and I was right.) Amy is fairly non-techie but a quick study, and we set up a GoToMyPC.com connection and made her a free web site on Google Sites. She has to finish up the content this week, but soon you'll be able to go to AmyAsch.com and it will forward to a real web page that lists her book info, bio, selected talks, links to resources for other historians and students, and upcoming appearances. I was happy with our work. It's not often that you get to make such a difference in someone's life by taking three hours out of yours doing something you love anyway, and it felt to me like we got a lot done in that time. I felt, you know, productive.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, we had Homeschool Mother-Daughter Book Club (Willie the Squowse). And then, last evening, we took the girls to see a production called "Ella!" at Geva Theatre. It is a kind of combination play and Ella Fitzgerald retrospective. David and I were skeptical -- I mean, Ella Fitzgerald is incomparable, so much so that we named our Ella after her -- but the reviews from people we trust who had seen it were so positive that we figured we should see it as a matter of principle. I wanted to bring the girls, too -- Ella in particular, of course -- and so because I didn't think that we should spend $150 on a night out, I scouted out how to go for less. (I will also admit to having become spoiled by many theaters giving me free tickets to dress rehearsals or first night performances so I can report on the show.) My newsletter (which goes out to 7500 Rochesterians on Thursdays) proved handy here: I asked, and found out that the Pittsford Crew was selling coupon books as a fundraiser that have two-for-one coupons. So we went.

The show was actually really good. The girls were, as usual, the youngest people there. I am so pleased to say that we are now at the point where it's not just that they behave themselves when we push the envelope and bring them places not designed particularly for kids, but they actually enjoyed the show. I'm gradually finding myself relaxing at these things and becoming absorbed in the production rather than hyper-monitoring them to make sure they're behaving appropriately and seeing how they're experiencing the show. I'm not sure that other kids who were not familiar with Ella Fitzgerald's music would have been other than bored, but ours already understood enough about Ella and her music to have a place to put the new information.

It was also really cute a couple of times in the lobby, when there was an occasion for me to say Ella's name. People in the crowds saw me calling over to the little blonde girl in the sparkly dress, put two and two together, and smiled.

We're up one more good one, folks!

Hey! In an era of political gloom and doom, here is some news that will brighten the day for at least a few of you:

Donald Heath is now a U.S. citizen!

Sorry, Canada. Your loss is our gain.

And sorry, Donald, that I can offer you such a miserable landscape for your first vote. But now that you're officially one of us, I feel a mite bit more hopeful.

Mahna Mahna

Jim Hensen's birthday was the other day, or it would have been if he hadn't died suddenly in 1990. We watched a bunch of Muppets YouTubes, and the girls kind of became obsessed with the Mahna Mahna sketch. They've probably watched it a dozen times since Thursday. I think it's a wonderful celebration of jazz. But I may be the only person who thinks that. See it and judge for yourself:



All of us are finding ourselves bursting out into it at odd moments. It's impossible to hear someone say "mahna mahna" and not promptly respond with "Doo doo, doo doo doo."

Okay, so now that I'm on the Muppets kick I must post our very favorite Muppets sketch: Beaker doing Ode to Joy:



I shall torment you no more tonight.

Our girls' 12th anniversary present to us

David and I were married 12 years ago today. To celebrate, we thought we might go see the Ying Quartet, our favorite local orchestral group (which says a lot, considering how music-oriented Rochester is). The Ying Quartet is a young (late-20s-early-30s) group of three brothers and one sister who are awesome. We couldn't get a babysitter, so we decided to bring along the kids.

This was the girls' first real classical music concert, at least the first one that didn't have one of them performing somewhere in the show. They did very well; I was very proud of them for being so grown up. I sat us in the back row just in case they got squirmy, and I also very quietly whispered things for them to notice about the music and the way it was being played to keep them engaged. Ella was actually more interested than Madison in my suggestions, but that may be just because Madison is more entertained by her own thoughts than Ella.

So this new milestone means we can bring them to events like this that David and I so enjoy, and we can all do it together instead of necessarily getting a babysitter. At least, we'll do it for daytime shows. I don't think they would have stayed awake if it was an 8pm-10pm show. Beethoven is exciting as far as classical music goes, but it's not exactly a thrill a minute. Even David dozed during the second piece.

Typing and spelling

Ella is proving herself to be very good at spelling this semester. I am attributing it partly to my method of using the Writing Road to Reading.

Here's what we do: We go through that day's five words (although I'm upping it to 10, as I'm pretty sure they can manage 10 just fine). They go to their computers and open their Spelling document I've created. In the first part, they type that day's words in lower case. In the second section, they type that day's words in upper case. And then they print out the document and hand write that day's words in the lines that are already on the document.

They have really been remembering the spellings.

But more interesting than that, Ella spontaneously gave us some insight into her method using that spelling document:

First, I look at the end syllable of the word. Say it's "mother." I look through the word, and notice the "h-e-r" part. I put my fingers on the keyboard and see how I would type out the "h-e-r." Then I go back to the beginning of the word, and see the "m-o-t." Then, out loud as I type each letter, I say the letter as I'm typing it: "m-o-t-h-e-r."

Of course, I was even more impressed with the fact that she has identified her mental machinations here than with the fact that she has created this interesting method. But you can see where her method, of going to look at the end of the word first and making a little unit that both mentally represents the sound AND physically represents that in a pattern on the keyboard, can really help her remember the word.

Now, I know that in the case of "mother" (which was her example to us), having "h-e-r" as the end part isn't technically right because the sound of "th" is one sound, the second, voiced, sound that "th" makes, and she breaks apart the t and the h in her method.

But, I don't really care. It's not as though she pronounces the word "mot-her." She is noticing that the "th" makes the one sound, and is making the decision to force them apart for her method. Fine by me.

Talk Like a Pirate Day in Jamaica

What better way to reward a satisfying week of work than with a rousing game of JAMAICA on Talk Like a Pirate Day!



Thanks, Laura, for pointing me in the direction of Jamaica as a gift for Madison's birthday. By the way, ThoughtHammer, where I bought the game, is having a bunch of Talk Like A Pirate Day specials.

By the way, the whole "stickers-on-a-chart" idea that I had at the beginning of this week -- a nickel for each subject tackled with a good attitude -- has worked like a charm. It got off to a little rocky start, but I haven't had any problems in *days* -- and each girl has earned about fifty cents each day.

We're having a game day this afternoon to celebrate. Only an hour left, though, before we must go to karate. I kind of hate to yank them.

Harmony - literally

Today marks the first day that the girls have spontaneously sung in harmony together. It was to "Little Red Caboose" from the "Wee Sing Fun & Folk" album that was going in the car. Ella sang soprano and Madison sang alto. I had them try it a capella, too. It worked pretty well. They were tickled at having done it.

Laura would so not approve

So okay, the attitude at Mariposario has left a little to be desired lately. A lot of whining about getting things done. Stuff that can be done easily with a little focus.

Math is the worst. (Sorry, David.) It's just that we're not doing "fun math" right now, we're in a "make sure you can do the basics" phase. They don't like it. Oh, well.

So as of today their allowance is tied to their attitude. For each subject on each day that they approach with a good attitude, they don't just get a check on their chart, they get a sticker. And then, at the end of the week, we count up the stickers and for each one on the chart they get a nickel.

Because you know, I'm just tired of the attitude.

Today, Ella was delighted by my announcement and promptly earned 45 cents. Madison was less than pleased at the pressure of having to earn her allowance by her attitude, and she allowed herself to get overwrought during mathematics. (Still addition of fractions with larger non-common denominators.) But the other subjects went fine. Piano and choir practice were positively delightful to listen to.

We'll see. For the foreseeable future, the Long Arm of the Ma--and her pocketbook--rules.

I anticipate that Laura will come down on me politely like a lovely southern Ton of Bricks.

George Walsh would love it

Madison has always been interested in religion, and nowadays she's been talking with us a lot about philosophy and history. We've exhausted all the kids books on comparative religion that I've been able to find, so I thought it might be time to pull out George Walsh's book The Role of Religion in History.

I hunted high. I hunted low. But I couldn't find the book. We must have loaned it out sometime in the last five years, I thought. So I found a used copy at a reasonable price on Amazon and ordered it a couple of weeks ago.



It arrived last week, and we started reading it at bedtime. It's slow going, and the introduction, especially, requires pausing frequently for explanation. But Madison is enjoying it, and even Ella has gotten some value out of it, I think. She asks questions, at least.

I woke up yesterday morning and happened to look over at the night table where George's book has been living for the last week, and was astonished. There were two copies. They had multiplied in the night!

George would have loved the joke. He may be gone, but his book carries on his legacy.

9th birthday

"Just rip the darned paper!"

On Wednesday, Madison's 9th birthday, she decided that she wasn't going to open ANY gifts in the morning, despite them being all there and wrapped and tantalizing on the table. She wanted to do it with some ceremony, AFTER dinner. I don't think I could have stood it myself at the age of 9, but it didn't look as though she was having any trouble with self-control. It didn't seem to be a matter of self-control at all, frankly; she was really pleased with being able to direct that action exactly as she wanted it. More to the point, though, I think what really sustained her is that she was driving Ella NUTS with the refusal to open the presents until late. Ella was practically hopping up and down by the time dinner arrived. And Madison really enjoyed that. Sigh.

Here is a 5-second video that says it all.

Last day of being 8

Madison's last day of being 8 was celebrated by a trip to Wegmans.

Why Wegmans? Not just because it is the greatest grocery store in the universe. (I'm pleased to say we can go to Wegmans any old time because as Rochester is the Wegmans Capital of the World, we have seven stores within driving distance. But I digress.)

No, we went for three reasons:

An ice cream birthday cake for tomorrow evening

A box of whatever sugary cereal she likes, a tradition on our kids' and David's birthdays (she chose Yucky Charms...pardon me, Lucky Charms)

The last free cookie ever

Yes, Wegmans has free cookies for kids 8 and under. And so today we celebrated her last day being 8 with the last ever free cookie. She's not a little kid anymore! She bore it well, but as she is a sentimental soul, it twanged her heartstrings, I could tell. Mine, too.

Publisher offends Aborigines by encouraging girls to play didgeridoo

Apparently, the Australian version of the new Daring Book for Girls has advocated that girls learn to play the digeridoo.
Publisher offends Aborigines by encouraging girls to play didgeridoo

Some stupid "tradition"-bound people are offended, and the public taking of offense has worked: HarperCollins has caved, and the next edition of the book will have that chapter removed.

Mark Rose, head of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, said the publisher made "an extreme faux pas" by including a chapter on how to play the Aboriginal musical instrument in its Australian edition.

...
He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Tuesday afternoon that the offensive chapter was equal to "encouraging someone to play with razor blades."

The publisher said Wednesday that the chapter will be removed at the next printing.

"HarperCollins Publishers apologizes unreservedly to any aboriginal Australians who were offended by the inclusion of instructions on how to play the didgeridoo in the forthcoming publication 'The Daring Book For Girls,"' the publisher said in a statement.

Can you imagine? Where are the feminists NOW? Oh, I forgot, the Aborigines are a different color, they're an oppressed minority, so you know where the feminists will be hiding.

Like encouraging someone to play with RAZOR BLADES? Extremely loud snort.

The basics of math

I've discovered that although Madison loves to do complex math (solve for x and y with 2 equations and 2 unknowns, age problems, and the like) and even more complex logic problems, she can only do the complex math when the mechanics are fairly simple -- throw in a couple of two-digit denominators that have to be made common and everything falls to pieces. She can get it conceptually, but the multi-step mechanics are defeating her. So, it's back to the basics for us during school time. This week it's addition and subtraction and reducation of fractions, like 2/3 - 4/19.

David is taking care of the fun math at night.

She's not thrilled, but she's working at it.

Thoughts at the beginning of the school year

I wrote this article last year and darned if I don't feel exactly the same even though I'm a whole year older. Of course, it's not particularly relevant to home schoolers. It's basically advice for parents who send their kids to school, to help them help the child not have school absolutely suck.

I always get somewhat depressed this time of year, on behalf of young people everywhere. Despite it having been 20 years since I finished high school, the weekend before Labor Day always transports me back to that grinding feeling of having to report back to jail after my summer furlough, back to where there was pressure from within and pressure from without and the sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach as deadlines would approach or tests would be administered... where I was stuck yet again with the same small group of kids, day in and day out, from whom I couldn't escape. ....

Swings

I've noticed an interesting shift in Madison's personality as she approaches nine years old. She has always been extremely passionate, especially when her emotions are negative. She's rarely indifferent about anything. Her swings have usually ranged from the wildly negative and hystrionic to the relentless passionate pursuit of some idea or goal. In the last year or so, she's at equilibrium the majority of the time: calm and cheerful and engaged in life.

But lately, although Madison can swing into negativity very easily, she's been swinging just as far in the other direction: Sudden wild and exuberent love. In my direction, often! I can receive a "You ROCK, Mom!" arm-fling around the neck at the smallest thing, often when I show her something new, like something on the computer, that gives her a new power. She has gone into elaborate detail at a couple of recent occasions about HOW and WHY she thinks I'm the greatest.

I know this isn't startling, but it's a new milestone, and I'll take it.

Whiny aliens in my house

Who are these individuals and what have they done with my happy children?

What a day we have had, which was really not helped by a house checkup from the energy guys really freaking early, a dentist appointment, which Madison hates, smack in the middle of the day, and a couple of client calls.

Nothing major happened, aside from the dentist. Just a bunch of whiny fits! No one would do easy spelling or math on their own, and both threw fits about it even when I was on the phone with a client. I had to kick them both upstairs. Then, afterward, the only thing they could do when they whined their non-complaints at me was to laugh.

We got essentially nothing done.

It's not like I can really complain, though, I'm just nit-picking in the metaphorical way, whereas LB is doing it for real. So I count myself lucky.

I'm sure everyone has days like these.

She's losing it

By she, I mean Ella.

And by it, I mean her little British accent.

Not that Ella has ever visited Britain. But she's never said her ending Rs. She's always said them like David Attenborough. (Or like a little kid who can't say her Rs.)

So "birds" was always "behwds" and "warm" was always "wawhm" and "star" was always "stah" and "fork" was always "fawk."

True, it's always meant she sounded less articulate than Madison, but it's always been Oh. So. Cute.

Well, she's starting to say those Rs like an American and it's breaking me up like no other milestone has.

Spanish went great today

After a couple of years of flirting around with Spanish in the form of little "Spanish clubs" and the like, I decided it was time to get more serious about it for both the girls and me. (I can understand baby Spanish, or, at least, the Spanish that is spoken slowly to a hard-of-hearing 8-year-old, but I can't speak it to save my life. French, which I learned in high school, always gets in the way.) So, after weighing my wallet, I decided not to go for Rosetta Stone and instead ordered Visual Link Spanish for about half the price. It's not specifically for kids, but Madison and I had liked the free online lesson.

The bunch of CDs came yesterday. We installed them on my computer this morning.

And, actually, we did that lesson that was online. It's Lesson One.

I have to say, everyone liked it. Everyone paid attention. Everyone repeated after the instructor. Everyone seemed to learn. Everyone is looking forward to Lesson Two.

Everyone can now say, "I need to go to the bathroom."
("Necesito ir al baño.")

So far, a success.

Happy Birthday, Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan, the Father of the Modern Skyscraper, was born on Sept 3, 1856 in Massachusetts. We had a wonderful discussion of him at this morning's birthday. It led to all kinds of interesting things: the science of steel and load-bearing walls and the Chicago Fire of 1871, and Form Follows Function. The discussion culminated in the girls (led by Ella) turning over their daily printed schedules and drawing their ideal floor plan for a house, based on the idea of form following function.

This is what home schooling was meant to be.

And, we got in some great snuggles this morning before we started the day.

I live for days like this.

She's running for President of the House

Influenced, no doubt, by talk of the election, Madison has announced that she is running for President of the House. So far, she is delighted to be unopposed. But that hasn't presented her from having her alter-ego, Erstwhile Reporter Virginia Parker, interview Madison as the prospective President. Here is the "newspaper" article she distributed throughout the house this weekend:

Madison May Ross in a Position of Greater Power

Hello. Virginia Parker here, just back from a interview withh 39 year old mother of Madison May Ross. Debra Ross said that she thoght that Madison May Ross should have the position of greater power.
Ella Ross who happened to pass bye agrees.

Madison May Ross atempting a position of Even Greater Power

First day of school

The first day of school worked well. I think everyone had a good time. The girls had some homeschooling girlfriends over in the afternoon; those girls had started today, too. So it was nice to celebrate together. Madison and Ella always like having these girls over. These friends have serious dairy allergies, and Oreos are artificial enough that they contain no dairy. So we always serve Oreos when they come over. This, too, is a big deal.

(The leftovers are not calling me from the downstairs cupboard right now. They are not.)

Today, I realized anew how much more smoothly everything goes if I have the schedule and assignments written out ahead of time, one page per child per day. So I'll try to have that done the night before, each day. I've already printed out tomorrow's work schedule, which includes the things we didn't get to today (which was spelling). (In spelling, by the way, we're doing Writing Road to Reading in the following way: We're taking five words per day on the WRTR list. I'm going over them with the WRTR annotations. And then, the girls take the words to their computers. They open a document I've prepared, type the words five times in lower case, five times in upper case, and then print out the document and handwrite the words on the lines provided on the page.)

Our new Spanish program, Visual Link Spanish, arrived this afternoon. It's cheaper than Rosetta Stone. The girls and I did the free lesson online that week, and Madison liked it enough that I thought we'd give it a whirl. (Ella tuned out. Let's see what happens when it's part of school.)

Beginning of an era

I set Madison up with a blog today. She's in seventh heaven changing around all the settings and posting.

I'm not going to link to it, partly because I don't want there to be any public links to it, and partly because, really, it's not that interesting. I mean, what's an almost-9-year-old going to say. Here's her first post:

first post
Okay, I am new, this is my first post, but hey the fact is I stopped spinning round wondering what to write is good right? oh come on! do I really have to write worth writing about? okay fine
I will. well it might be a good idea. what did you have for lunch? hey! that is to worth writing about! well never mind my next post will be okay!

bye!

I think, though, that this will be an excellent motivator for getting her to write. I know it is for me.

Courtesy of Fiddler, I have a new song

Mess-maker, Mess-maker, make me a mess!

Tradition!

We've been watching the movie of Fiddler on the Roof after dinner the last couple of nights.

I am endlessly fascinated by having an adult experience of things I watched or read as a kid. Fiddler on the Roof is a good example.

We had the Zero Mostel record of the Broadway Show as a kid, and I know all the words to every song. I was in the show in a summer production when I was 16 (as Motel's mother, I had one line). I saw it on stage several times. So I knew that show.

I even thought I knew what it was about. Tradition, right? Sure. Now, the show is somewhat ambivalent about tradition, as are, I guess, a lot of people. But for sure, the show was about how letting the father choose the husband for the daughter was a tradition that was no longer useful in the early 20th century, and so would have to go.

Well, okay, fair enough. But the kid Me didn't understand at all about tradition. Well, my kids are in a really different position, with parents who are perfectly happy to Pause and Explain. In our house, Madison is the second biggest fan of the Pause button (David is the biggest fan). We do a lot of Explaining.

What doesn't get brought out in Fiddler is any real commentary on the issue of tradition per se. Yes, the girls end up marrying the man of their choice, even Chava, who marries the non-Jewish soldier...but that's where Tevye draws the line. I think the show is ambivalent about tradition (sometimes it sustains, and sometimes it gets in the way of real life), and that's about the only conclusion to draw.

What we here in the Ross house are thinking and talking about, though, is INTRINSICISM, the relevant issue vis-a-vis Tradition.

Now, don't get me wrong, we love traditions. Traditions, properly construed, are extremely valuable for a family, for kids. We do a Birthday of the Day. We pass the Oplotek at Christmas and give each other best wishes for the new year. We take the girls to the Highland Gathering in June and explore their Scottish heritage and listen to the bagpipes. We go to Brown's Berry Patch with our Cuban friends every Fourth of July to pick cherries and celebrate freedom.

Family traditions give kids a sense of security and confidence in what they can expect. They are soothing. They form a chain of memories, a solid base from which kids can extend themselves.

But! But.

Tradition simply for the sake of tradition is wrong. There must be a reason for any individual or family to adopt any particular tradition. Hear that? We don't make chrusciki simply because the girls are partly Polish, and that's what you're "supposed to do"--we make chrusciki because it's the most awesome pastry in the world, and we also enjoy the story about the girls' great-great grandmother Karolina that goes along with it. We don't eat pork on New Year's because the girls are Cuban -- in fact, they're NOT Cuban! But our dear friends are, and Tatiana's roast pork is delicious, and we think about what pork used to be able to mean to Cubans before the Revolution, and we think about the same things that Americans of Cuban descent think about when they eat their New Year's pork and mourn the fact that their families back in Cuba can no longer get meat.

So! Let's say it loudly:

SOME TRADITIONS ARE STUPID AND HORRIBLE AND SHOULD BE TOSSED OUT ON THEIR EAR!

And the ones that are empty or done for no reason are a waste of time and should be abandoned, too.

An unexamined life based mostly on tradition is not a life well-lived.

I am reminded of a talk I saw Marsha Enright give over 10 years ago, in which she advocated thinking about everything we do in daily life, down to the handshake, and having reasons for each thing. For most things, there IS a good reason; it's just important to be aware of it. It was a really good exercise.

So...examine your traditions, and make sure there's a good WHY for all of them.

You know you're busy when...

...you sigh with the sinful pleasure of taking two full hours to vacuum, Windex, wash, and Rain-X both cars. And take out all of the crap that's been accumulating in the glove compartment for years.

Maximum Ride

Madison's friend Max has enjoyed the Maximum Ride series of books by James Patterson, so last week I got Madison the first of the three that are out in paperback. She inhaled it, and so on Thursday we made a special trip to Barnes & Noble and got her the second and third. She read all day yesterday and finished both. Keep in mind that these are Young Adult books of 400 pages apiece.

She was in bed this morning rereading the end of the third book, and called to David as he passed her room.

"Hey, Dad!" she said. "Come here, I want to show you something."

She flipped to the back of the book where there was a sample chapter from the fourth book in the series, The Final Warning.

"Look, it says here: 'Now available in hardcover.' And, you know, they didn't just slap a title page on a hardcover book and sell that, there's an actual book."


(It loses something in the retelling, I'm afraid.)

The Final Warning is mostly checked out in the Monroe County Library system, but I've found a copy at a library in the city and we can hop in to get it this morning.

Just ugly naked people

Today's Birthday of the Day is the neoclassical French Painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who was born in 1780.

This is his famous painting "La Grande Odalisque," from 1814. I remember it particularly from my freshman Art History class at college; apparently, Ingres loved a long, elegant back and neck, and would often lengthen the finished work with an extra vertebra or two.

David was talking about his subject matter being beautiful. "That's not beautiful, that's ugly!" proclaimed Madison.

"Ugly? Really?" David asked.

"It's a naked woman, Dad," she replied with heavily scornful emphasis, as though that should be obvious to everyone.

David -- who, I might point out, is a man -- just blinked in response.

I predicted it

I said on the phone to David as I was finally on my way home last week, "The girls have been so good that I really wouldn't be surprised if they relax a bit and start fighting with each other and complaining and fussing a bit when we're home."

Yep.

They spent the weekend kind of sniping at each other. Throwing (albeit minor) fits over nothing.

But I'm taking my observations last week to heart, and I'm not worrying about it. Managing things, of course, but without worrying about it. My kids are still the best.

Actually, Ella's whining may have been because she was coming down with a cold. She was up for hours last night and she and I are both really under the weather today.

If we have to be sick, it's so good to be home.

When I consider how actually bad things actually happen to some people, it's quite easy to maintain equilibrium, even when minor frustrations appear and kick at my shins. And no, it's not the ex-Catholic rising up in me and admonishing me that I have no right to be miserable when so-and-so has had it so much worse. Really, it's not that. Because I have known and loved people who have had actual tragedies and survived them, I draw on their strength and examples, and decide how I should be in the face of trouble. It has the effect of helping me maintain perspective.

Corn

Since Madison was born, I have had a (sometimes violently uncomfortable) sensitivity to raw corn. It took a while to figure out what was causing the problem, but we eventually narrowed it down.

Every summer or two, when corn season was at its height, I couldn't resist trying just a nibble to test whether it still made me sick.

It always did, even last year. Even the baby corn in Chinese food sent my digestive system into a hissy fit.

But this year, my problem seems miraculously to have disappeared. I tried a few bites about three weeks ago and I was fine. So, two weeks ago, I ate half an ear, because, you know, I couldn't resist, 'tis the season. Again, no problem. And then last week I had actual whole ears of corn on three separate occasions, because everyone served it to us while we were away friend- and relative-hopping, and lo and behold, no reaction whatsoever.

I had some again last night. I'm fine today. Go figure. It's almost as if parts of my anatomy were saying, "Gosh, she's turning 40 soon. Let's console her a bit and give her back the corn."

I wish medical science would catch up and explain the vicissitudes of the human body, but I'm not holding my breath.

Home

I'm...home. Yes.

We did have two days at the Jersey shore, though, last weekend, in the middle of our adventure. And just to show that actual fun was actually had, here is a photo of the girls with their cousins on my cousin's boat in Bayville.



We had lots of lovely dogs on this trip. Needless to say, it only inflamed the girls' desire for one of their own. That's Brandi, the dog that wears a life jacket on the boat and rides on a boogie board.



I will say this: I do love that Subaru. So I'm glad I got it fixed and we have a few more years out of it. Especially because as expensive as another motor was, it was a small fraction of the cost of a new Subaru. I will take better care of it than I have been doing, because I think that I had skimped a little on maintenance, and the mechanic could tell.

On the other hand, right now I want to take that Subaru exactly nowhere. It's still too full, anyhow. I must unpack. Unpacking is easier than packing. And you're not worried that you're forgetting anything.

Staying positive here in the Super 8 Motel

We're here in Kingston for one more night.

I hope.

The mechanic thinks he can finish the car tomorrow. Which is good because I returned my rental car this afternoon.

The kids have been SOOOOO good. I bought the little goddesses books this morning at Barnes & Noble. If there is one thing I have learned from this trip, it is that I have two kids who, when the chips are down, will go with the flow and stay cheerful and flexible--they'll just follow my lead. So what if they occasionally get a little crabby and whiny when they're at home? I no longer have to worry that somehow they'll turn out to be whiny adults. Because, already, at 7 and 8, they can do it right when it's important.

In the past, some of the force of my insistence that they not act like whiny kids has come from my determination not to raise whiny adults. People who give in to their kids' whining are doing them no service, certainly. I loathe whiny adults. But now, really, I know that I don't have to worry about Madison and Ella. This week has been great proof that they've already got this pretty much under control. It's not that I won't point it out in the future when they are whiny...of course I will...but I can do it with a more relaxed attitude, and a smile. What a load off my mind!

Still stuck

I'm still stuck downstate. I got a cryptic email from the mechanic which included the phrase "talk to you in a few days." But my rental car is up today. My plan for this afternoon is to plop myself and the kids in the mechanic's place and have the girls make sad sheep's eyes at them and talk about how much they miss their daddy and how they wish they could finally go hoooome.

Well, I predicted an adventure

It has been some adventure. We are still in the middle of our trip, but I hope the adventure aspects are over.

Monday: Whacking at rocks with hammers in the rain to try to discover Herkimer Diamonds. Kind of fun in a muddy, physical, futile sort of way. You have to be in a certain mood to spend a lot of time hitting rocks in a search for tiny clear crystals.



I left my driver's license there, though, by mistake taking along three hammers. Didn't realize it until that night when I was camping, two hours away. I called them Tuesday and got my driver's license number just in case I was stopped by a cop. The significance (and prescience) of this move will be clear below.

Monday night to Wednesday morning: Imagine the three of us in a in a leaky tent meant for two people at 41 degrees in the rainy, rainy Adirondack Mountains. The nights were kind of hellish.



It was a tiny pup tent; Madison bagged the idea of sleeping in her own tent, which was the orange one, so we crowded into the green tent together for security and warmth. The girls bore up well. I had a hard time sleeping, what with simultaneous claustrophobia (not really able to turn over for fear of bumping into wet tent or sleeping child) and agoraphobia...just me and the girls out in a tent in the middle of nowhere, where there might be bears. I didn't tell them about the bears, then or ever.

The first night it rained so hard I put them in the car for a while and turned on the DVD player, for a Night at the Movies with David Attenborough's Life in the Freezer. It seemed that cold.

The days were fun, with friends...we went canoeing during a sunny intermission on Tuesday, which was great.



Consensus is: More camping? Sure! As long as there is a nice dry cabin somewhere with indoor plumbing, they're all for it. Especially if we're with Max and Henry again. And, preferably, Daddy. Mommy prefers to have Daddy along, too. Daddy would have come in handy. Though not in that tent.

Wednesday afternoon: On the way down the NYS Thruway to visit my friend Anne, the car engine died, violently. No accident or anything, but a sudden giving way with loud noises when I was traveling 65 mph. Got over to the side, girls safe, got car towed. Engine deader than vaudeville. I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture of the car, because I was too busy charming the rental car people to take my BJ's photo card and the driver's license number I'd scrawled on a piece of paper the day before, in lieu of an actual driver's license. It WORKED. I think it was because I was a cheerful confident lady far from home with two little kids and a dead car and it was a young, not-yet-cynical guy. I smiled and smiled at him.

Wednesday and Thursday, some relatively blissful camping out in the living room of my friend Anne's house, seeing her wonderful kids and generally getting absorbed into her busy, happy family. They're always so welcoming. Most of this time was spent on the phone with AAA, various car towing agencies, mechanics, etc. trying to find out what was up with my car, two hours north. Thursday, they found a used engine that would work with my Subaru Outback. Good thing, because I love that car and I would vastly prefer not to have to get a new one right now. Even with the 132,000 miles. The idea of never getting in that car again sent Madison on the edge of hysterics, she hates getting rid of anything. It looks like the car will be saved. But not until NEXT WEDNESDAY.

So I've been cooling my heels at various friends'. Tomorrow is my cousin's beach house for (I hope) a couple of days. Maybe some actually good photos where I'm actually relaxed. Then back up north. Fingers crossed that the car is actually ready on Wednesday, but of course who knows. Meantime, work will be piling up.

And, I miss David.

I wrote this in my weekly email out to the KidsOutAndAbout.com list:

Have you ever noticed that sometimes, it's all in how you tell the story, both to your kids and to yourself?

Approaching a stream of bad luck as an adventure, a challenge that you can cheerfully work through together and talk about later really beats letting your kids see you frustrated or dejected. Like, yesterday...

I realized what a difference it makes to a situation to focus on the positive, especially while we were waiting on the side of the Thruway (BEHIND the car on the other side of the guard rail, not in front of it...really important tip, in case someone hits you). We were LUCKY, I told the girls. It was a beautiful sunny day in August rather than a snowy midnight in February, we had just come back into cell phone range, and the Thruway Authority came within half an hour. We read Calvin & Hobbes on the side of the road. I was able to rent a Kia nearby and load in our camping stuff. An adventure, truly. If I can find a replacement motor, so they say, they can fix it...next Wednesday. We shall see. In the meantime, we are getting by on sheer cheerfulness fumes, and the generous hospitality of an old friend--seven hours away from Rochester--and the fact that no one is sick or hurt, so nothing can be that bad.

I'm not sure when I'll have internet access again until Thursday. I will probably post an update...after I sleep, sometime near the end of the week.

It should be...an adventure...yeah, that's it!

Starting tomorrow morning, I'm off for a couple of days camping in the Adirondacks with the girls, and some good friends who have kids the girls' age. Tents. Two small pup tents. And, rain is forecast all three days, with highs in the 60s.

Rain. In a tent.

Good fishing weather, right? So I bought a couple of fishing rods (our friends are bringing theirs), and I really do hope that if actual fish are caught, that an actual grownup other than I would be okay with doing the actual removal from the hook and tossing them back in. I know, I'm an actual wimp.

We're starting off tomorrow going to the Herkimer Diamond Mines (if I write it up, trip is tax-deductible!) and seeing if we can dig some up. Then up north to the Adirondacks.

Then several days of meandering through the northeast visiting friends and my newly rediscovered family, who as it happens have a house at the Jersey shore.

I am so not packed. Why is packing so hard? I hate packing.

In other news, I am two chapters in to my next Frontier Team book, and a fair amount into the first round of editing the first book. When I get back from the trip, that's when I'll start querying publishers.

It's 9:30. Better get cracking. I mean, packing.

Dave Barry

Dave Barry is in China for the Olympics, writing columns so that the trip is tax-deductible.

Here is his first:

Dave Barry: Is this wall great or what?

Pretty much classic Dave Barry.

Happy Birthday, Amazing Randi

James Randi, champion of all things rational, turns 80 today. He is most famous for offering a (still standing) $1 million reward for anyone who can prove psychic ability, paranormal activity, or the existence of a supernatural.

Happy birthday, Amazing Randi. Madison really, really wants to meet you.

Actual camp, actual quiet

It's a week of actual camp for both girls, and actual quiet for me. Kind of blissful, although I feel guilty to admit it. I'm getting a lot done, although, let's be fair, I could do about 3/4 of this work even when they're around, as long as my head is down and they're doing things reasonably on their own. And, I only get until 2pm, when I have to leave to pick them up.

I'm glad Ella opted to go to camp, and not just because of the time this gives me. She's been having such a hard time doing classes and things that don't involve me since January ("I have that feeling in my belly, Mom"). I had originally decided not to send her, just Madison, to this terrific nature day camp this year that they've gone to every year, but she said in June that she'd like to go. So, good. And both girls have a lot of fun. (The people who run this camp are really great, they're naturalists who promote science, not politics -- this camp has less of an environmentalist focus than Madison's engineering camp did at the beginning of the summer.)

So why does it annoy me so much that every single morning this week, Ella asks me in that whining way if she HAS to go? It shouldn't, it really shouldn't, given that this is difficult for her and I'm the Extraordinarily Understanding Mommy. I swallow my annoyance and cheerfully say, "Yep! What are you going to wear today?" while thinking to myself, "Isn't it about time that you stop whining at me, you 7-year-old, you?"

Okay, back to work.

Pride in math illiteracy

Erin O'Connor, a professor in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania -- boy, I wish she'd been there in 1990 when I was scandalizing that department with my refusal to bow and scrape before the PC literary theorists and my insistence on publicizing this fact -- ponders the detrimental effect of the pride many humanities scholars take in their math illiteracy. From her blog:

Someone somewhere--perhaps even on this blog!--is going to say that Orzel is a self-important catastrophist and that it really does not make sense to blame those poor math-challenged, absent-minded humanists for a problem that might better be pinned on the usual suspects, the leaders academics love to hate. So let's just skip that step and talk about how it is the duty of college professors to embody an ideal of intellectual inquiry, awareness, curiosity, and ongoing learning; about how that requires a humbleness about what one does not know as well as a sober firmness about what one does know; and about how, within that obligation, a grandiose dismissal of entire fields of knowledge--as too hard, or too obscure, or whatever--such that the person doing the dismissing somehow elevates his or her academic cred with disciplinary colleagues, is way, way, way wrong. It sets a devastating example for students--and it does have an effect on the intellectual viability of our nation.

She said it better than I could.

MV

And the bestest picture of all from Martha's Vineyard...



This is from the ferry coming home.

They really are mostly that way, those two.

God, I love them.

Update: Oops, no, wait, maybe I like this one best:

No problem, I'll just use a little physics here and...

...get Ella's surprise new armoire up our front steps?...



No, sadly, this will have to wait for David to come home from work.

I had planned for the whole thing to be a fait accompli while the girls were at a friend's house and David was at work. You know, to get that in there and totally reorganize Ella's clothes and room. (She's had my grandfather's cheap old smallish particleboard dresser with the drawers whose bottoms are coming out, for far too long.) It fit perfectly in the back of the Subaru wagon. But I was just too cocky to think I could figure out how to get it up the front steps alone. Actual muscles turned out to be necessary for the whole enterprise. So my fait accompli is still a big fat non-accompli sitting in the driveway.

Yeah, I had some sense that wrapping 2/3 of it up in a tarp would help, somehow. Don't ask.

It wasn't the bird references that caught me, though

More people should read

John Enright's beautiful poem that he posted yesterday.

I don't think John would mind if you were to print it out and thumb-tack it to the wall beside your desk, as I did.

Cool bird stuff

Early last month, I wrote about how I won this cool iPod full of bird songs in a contest from 10,000 Birds. And then, HarperCollins, who sponsored the contest, by mistake sent me the book I hadn't won instead of the iPod I had won: The Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America. I let them know that they'd made the error, but I was so happy that they'd sent me the book that it barely mattered. Because the book is awesome. I took it to Martha's Vineyard with us, and as the kids can attest, I kind of went a little nuts. And I wrote about it in last week's KOA newsletter, thusly:

I'm having a new experience with my kids this summer, one I mentioned a few weeks ago: We received the awesome Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America book from a contest at 10,000 Birds, and have been going gangbusters with it. Okay, well, I have, and Madison and Ella are being swept along happily (as though they had a choice!).

Interesting to me is that my new experience of constantly trying to identify birds is remarkably like my experience of first learning physics as a teenager. (I know that sounds odd, but bear with me.) When I first started understanding physics, it was as though my eyes had suddenly been opened to a whole new world that had been all around me all the time: I saw everything in terms of motion, mass, and objects' relationships to each other. It was as though a new layer of mental life was suddenly available to me. My brain was busier, and happier.

Well, it's the same thing with birding. I'm still a total novice, but I (and the girls, to some extent) suddenly see a new dimension to the world. Before, we'd see something flying by, and our minds would barely register "bird." If we were lucky, we might identify "robin," "cardinal," "sparrow," and "starling." But now, something flies by, and we see beak shape, and wing span, and breast color, and flight pattern. Our brains are starting automatically to run through our list of what we know and what we don't know, comparing what we just saw with those birds we have identified as a result of this book. "Quick!" someone will say (and not always me). "Get the book before I lose the colors in my mind...let's see if we can identify what it is." Yesterday, Ella and I saw a towhee. I'd never heard of a towhee before we looked it up and determined that this was the bird. The point is, before a few weeks ago, I wouldn't even have noticed much beyond "bird." Now, the whole world is a-flying, and our brains are now attuned and enjoying it.

The fact is, all learning can be like this. No matter what new thing you decide to learn about, it will open up a whole new way of looking at the world. It can be birds. Or math, or anatomy, or politics, or training for a marathon, or orienteering, or jazz music, or WHATEVER. There is a real joy in applying oneself to something new, a joy that may leave many of us after we leave school (or even before we leave school). So I encourage you to find that something new to learn about with your kids, and show them not just that learning goes on forever, but that it adds rich layers to our lives.

Interestingly enough, now the 10,000 Birds folks want to publish this as a guest essay on 10,000 Birds! I just got the request from Mike, one of the editors, who coincidentally just moved to Rochester last month.

And, the iPod arrived today. It's amazing. But the weird thing is, it arrived with ANOTHER copy of the book. So I'm giving the new book away on KidsOutAndAbout.com. The HarperCollins publicity folks thought that was pretty cool.

Now I just have to find someone to send me an awesome binocular-camera, and I'll be all set. :-)

Happy Birthday, J.K. Rowling

Ms. Rowling, you have provided my daughter Madison with much joy, and me with a writing standard I can't hope to match. Happy 43rd birthday. I hope you're living the happy life you deserve.

A perfect day yesterday

With an unfinished book no longer hanging over my head, it was a perfect day at the beach yesterday. 81 degrees, low humidity, not a cloud in the sky, perfect surf.



Well, it was almost perfect: I applied the girls' sunscreen somewhat imperfectly (should have applied a third time), and so they're still groaning a bit this morning.

The water was awesome: Warm and welcoming and just surfy enough. I spent quite some time out in it, swimming around and floating. I marveled at how much easier it is to float in salt water. It seemed even easier than it has in the past, somehow...and then I remembered that the more fat cells you have, the more floaty you are...so I dispelled that thought quickly and just concentrated on the lovely up and down feeling. Up...and down...and up...and down...and OH MY GOD can it be true? Yes, it is...I've made myself seasick floating in the ocean! I had to swim frantically to shore, flop down on the nonundulating sand, and take some deep breaths to avoid barfing in front of all of the proper people on the beach.

That's one thing about Martha's Vineyard...people are so proper that going to the beach is quite a different experience than in, say, New Jersey. No swearing, no inappropriate behavior, that's just the way the people are. Didn't even see anyone smoking.

Oh, and we saw a SEAL about 40 yards off the shore. So cool. Wish I'd gotten a picture. But we did get photos of other unusual marine life:

Dance the samba with me, folks

The book is done. A Perfect First Draft.

(According to Anne LaMott, all first drafts are perfect first drafts.)

The Frontier Team. Midgrade novel. Eighteen chapters, 150 pages, 39,000 words. And hey, its protagonists are home-schooled, although that's not really the focus of the book.

Of course, now the work really begins. A month or so of editing, and then goodness knows how long to find a publisher.

But it's done. And fortunately, I love editing. It's the writing that's like bleeding. Editing is more like using Starfleet Medical gizmos to heal a scrape on the kneee.

Vigorously relaxing

Despite the clouds and rain here on Martha's Vineyard this week, we've been getting in birdwatching and beach time every day. I have gone a little nuts with bird identification thanks to my great new Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America book. I wrote in my KidsOutAndAbout.com newsletter yesterday that beginning birdwatching feels very like when I learned physics as a teenager; it opens up a rich new layer of the world around me that I hadn't known existed. Then, I suddenly saw everything in terms of motion, mass, and objects' relationships to each other. Now, I see the whole flying world in terms of beak shape, and wing span, and breast color, and flight pattern, and we all rush to open the book to figure out what it is. Ella and I saw an eastern towhee on Wednesday. I got a pair of binoculars with a digital camera in honor of having won the bird stuff, but it takes miserable photos, as you can see from this one, which is the best of them:



What can you expect, though, from a $29.99 pair of binocular cameras from CVS. That's a female pileated woodpecker, I think.

Anyway, we are relaxing with our customary vigor:

Investigating what gets into our snorkel masks:



Running away from the waves as the surf gets stronger:



Whining when the surf knocks us over:



Mugging the Ross Scowl into the camera:



Dashing frantically after our floaties when they get away from us in the wind:



And we don't let no stinkin' rain get us down when we want to walk through the cute little Victorian Methodist camp in Oak Bluffs:

Vining away...

We made it to Martha's Vineyard yesterday.

I was a packing goddess. I had lists. I checked things off. I got the car "vacation serviced" last week. I had all bits of clothing we own washed by Sunday afternoon. I "shopped at home first" to get together a box of food and staples in a way that would have made Cindy proud and which saved me having to pay Island prices for things I already had. I packed the car Sunday afternoon by referring to mental rules of geometry, fitting this into that seamlessly. All we had to do Monday morning was put in those last bags and get out of town.

Except we couldn't get out of town. I happened to suggest that we stop for bagels on the way out, and the car died, right there in the parking lot of the Bruegger's. The AAA guy used Sprite to dissolve some of the crystals fountaining out of our battery enough that he got us jumped and on our way to the mechanic. The mechanic was so embarrassed that he hadn't noticed the battery problem last week that he got us in and out of there pronto with a new battery. So, I am lucky I was craving a little carb action on the way out of Rochester, or we'd have been stranded somewhere on the Thruway until we got someone to install a new battery.

And then, today, our first full day at the Vineyard, we were all set to go to the beach. No matter that it was foggy, we were excited to get out there in the sand and surf. The girls had new noodles and snorkels packed very carefully in the pool bag. We had our beach towels and books. The camera was charged. We were ready.

Except that the Packing Goddess had forgotten to pack my bathing suit.

More on the Math Wars, from David

The following is from my husband David, industrial mathematician and professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, as a follow-up to my post below on the Math Wars article as addressed recently by CNN. He was, needless to say, less than pleased with the way the article addressed how New Math is being taught in American schools. Here are his thoughts on the matter:


Deb asked me to write a few comments on CNN's recent article on the Math Wars.

A few years ago, I argued against the recent trends in mathematics education in an article called The Math Wars, in which I present the thorough case against the approach promoted by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Please feel free to read that article, as I'm not going to rehearse the whole argument here.

I'll just summarize my thoughts on the CNN piece, which offers a "black-and-white" summary of the Math Wars:

They call it the Math Wars: The debate, at times acrimonious, over which way is best to teach kids math. In its most black-and-white form, it pits schools hoping to prepare kids for a new world against reluctant parents who feel that the traditional way is best and that their kids are being shortchanged.

The kids are being shortchanged. I say this as someone whose job it is to teach calculus to young adults who've just finished high school and are studying to become engineers or scientists, and as someone who has spent 20 years as an industrial scientist and an applied mathematician. High school graduates these days do not know the math that they need to know. The reason that they don't know it is that those who were responsible for teaching it to them didn't teach it to them.

The claim that schools that have done away with traditional mathematics instruction have done so because they want "to prepare kids for a new world" is ridiculous for many reasons. The most important is that the job of math educators is to get students to understand math, and the best way to understand math is to master the traditional algorithms.

That is: The best way to get students to understand math--the best way to get them to grasp the conceptual structure of mathematics, the best way to get them to integrate the whole structure of modern mathematics at the abstract level--is to have them learn, apply, master, and come to love precisely the traditional methods that the modern NCTM approach abhors. The position supported by Pat Cooney and Hank Kepner in the CNN article is not merely mistaken; it is diametrically opposed to the proper method for teaching students mathematical concepts.

My wife and are home schooling our daughters in large part to avoid their wasting time on this sort of nonsense.

The traditional approach has the wonderful, and useful, feature that students who have mastered the algorithms can actually do calculations. But its most important feature is that it provides the tools that students need in order to get inside the abstract structure of mathematics. For a detailed argument for my claim here, please see my Math Wars article. The CNN article discusses an admirable parent, Ms. Morey, who's teaching her son traditional math. She, bless her,

...feels no guilt. She says her son was relieved to learn long division. "He wants a quick and easy way to get the right answer,"

What this responsible parent probably doesn't know is that her son can not only divide numbers better than his teachers, he will probably grasp the nature of ratios and the operation of division and the structure of decimals--and, in the end, perhaps, how the solutions of certain differential equations reflect the quantitative facts of polymerization--because she taught him long division.

One problem, Cooney says in the CNN article, is that parents remember math as offering only one way to solve a problem.

"We're saying that there's more than one way," Cooney said. "The outcome will be the same, but how we get there will be different."

This what we call a straw man argument. The traditional approach to mathematics never involved the claim, implicitly or explicitly, that there is only one way to solve a problem. Everyone understands that there are special ways to solve special problems, quirky methods of multiplying by nine using that finger trick, multiplying 199 by 7 quickly by doing 200x7 then subtracting 7, and on and on and on and on.

But, in a serious sense, there is only one "way to solve a problem." That is, there is, e.g., exactly one universally applicable, perfectly reliable, optimally efficient, method for dividing one number by another: long division. And these qualities--universal applicability, reliability, efficiency--are precisely the qualities of good conceptual thought: They characterize what effective abstract thought is all about.

The author of the CNN article was provided with a typical sitting-duck example for the anti-traditional-algorithm approach:

Thus, when a parent is asked to multiply 88 by 5, we'll do it with pen and paper, multiplying 8 by 5 and carrying over the 4, etc. But a child today might reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440 - poof, no pen, no paper.

This, of course, is like the 199x7 example that I mentioned above. It's a special example. The propaganda for the NCTM approach is full of such examples. Let's amend it a smidgen:

Thus, when a parent is asked to multiply 838 by 37, we'll do it by multiplying 8 by 7, put down the 6 and carry the 5, and so on. But a child today might reason that...er...um...well...I'd better check with Ms. Cooney about this.

In the article, Pat Cooney is quoted as saying:

"The traditional way is really a shortcut,"..."We want kids to be so confident with numbers that it becomes intuitive."

Well, yes indeed. It's a shortcut. That's what conceptual thinking is all about. That's it! That's the reason that humans live the pleasant easy lives that we do and animals live, well, like animals: We have the cognitive shortcuts of conceptual thought, and they don't. If education isn't about shortcuts, that is, about cognitive efficiency, about effective abstraction, about methods of organizing our awareness of the world into manageable units, what is it about?

Is it about, as Ms. Cooney suggests...intuition!? Please note carefully what Ms. Cooney is saying. The traditional method, because it's a shortcut--by which she seems to mean that it's a reliable, efficient, universally applicable method for solving a large class of problems--is bad. Intuition, whatever that is, is better.

In fairness, I want to recognize that math folks often use the term "intuitive" to refer to methods and facts that have become thoroughly automatic; effortless. And, this automatic quality is an important feature of conceptual thought. But such automatic, effortless, awareness can only follow from thorough mastery of the traditional methods.

********************

Please feel free to send questions or comments to me at dsrsma@rit.edu.
___________________________________
David S. Ross, PhD
Professor, School of Mathematical Science
Rochester Institute of Technology

Guess I'm a renegade parent

CNN just posted a story about "renegade" parents teaching their kids "old math." (HT to Melissa Wiley.)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/07/18/renegade.math.parents.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest

One problem with the article, of course, is that there is no mention of whether the New Math works, and as my mathematician husband David can tell you from the college professor's standpoint, it most certainly does not.

David and the chair of his department at the Rochester Institute of Technology started a brand-new Summer Math Institute which they hosted for local high school math teachers (public and private) a few weeks ago. It's been obvious to the folks at RIT for a while that the math that kids need to succeed in math and science in college is not what kids are currently being taught by the New York State Standards. Interestingly, teachers understand this and are extremely frustrated by it. So this seminar, which RIT designed through lots of conversations and meetings with high school math teachers during this past year, showed teachers what kinds of math students are learning in college, how engineers and other scientist use math in their jobs, and what kids need to know before they get to RIT. RIT is a second-tier engineering school, not the top tier, so its students--while they may differ from others in that incoming students actually want to be scientists--are more representative of B-average students that public schools are turning out. And, they don't know math.

The seminar was a resounding success. I was pleased to hear that high school teachers care about this stuff, enough that they gave up a week of their vacation to learn about it. And, David says, they were very willing to integrate their new knowledge into how they teach their kids and what they emphasize, even though, of course, they can't change the New York State Standards. Of course, I was not pleased enough about this actually to send my kids to school. But it illuminates how very bad it is for mathematics to be run by a small committee at the top of a government structure.

I have been trying to persuade David and the department that they should be going further with this. Yes, the SMI has started and is already very successful. But they should also be establishing the RIT Mathematics Standards tutorials and exams for high school and incoming college students, which should be developed independently of the public school system, for subjects going back to algebra. They could be marketed to those high school students and homeschoolers who want to ensure that they know what they need to know in order to succeed in college science and math. They can market them like the Achievement Tests, to give students a commonly-accepted certification that they have attained a certain level of knowledge, for business and colleges to review as part of interviews/entrance exams.

I believe, of course, that home schoolers would generally wipe the floor with the public school students, like they do on the spelling bees. But I mostly think that it's an awesome way to draw attention to general educational deficiency in the U.S. without RIT having explicitly to point fingers at public schools. People will draw their own conclusions, and this may help state departments of education sit up and take notice.

UPDATE: David has just posted a more detailed analysis on another post here on this blog, entitled More on the Math Wars.

Say howdy!

Hi! It looks as though readership of this blog has recently doubled...from the longstanding ~five readers to TEN WHOLE READERS. I installed the free SiteMeter functionality to this blog, and was fascinated to see readers from a couple of locations that I don't recognize. So...Do I know you? Phoenix? Michigan? California? Anyway, welcome!

This blog mostly provides a way for me to record Madison and Ella's progress through life. Since they were born, David and I have been writing a Book of Madison and a Book of Ella. I copy the posts to separate files periodically, and David writes privately. We'll combine our observations and bind it into books for each of their 18th birthdays. So, you may not find everything you read here to be interesting or relevant. I never particularly intended this to be insightful public commentary or anything--those who regularly read what I write publicly on KidsOutAndAbout might find themselves shocked, and that wouldn't be too good for business. On the other hand, if you find what I write pithy or inspiring, well, great!

If you unknown readers care to drop me a line just to introduce yourselves, send it to ross@axton.com.

Beginning of the end of an era

Ella, who is 7, breastfed until she was 2 1/2. She's always loved sleeping with us, and I attribute the remarkable closeness she and I have partly to these two facts. She is snuggly, oh my how that child is snuggly. And it's always been nice how she likes to sleep with us. She sometimes starts out there and stays all night, and if she starts out in her own bed, or if at any time we move her to her own bed, back she comes at some point in the middle of the night. This habit was solidified when David had moved back up here to Rochester in late 2006 and I stayed behind in Virginia to sell the house. Three months of blissful sleeping with Mommy, for Ella.

I have a daily snuggling quotient, it seems, and Ella fulfills that, with much joy all around.

But. The girl has been in a growth spurt lately. Couple that with the fact that it's summer, and Ella (unlike Madison) radiates body heat. And also the fact that in her sleep she will fling her arms around you, or twine her legs through yours. Nice, but not very restful.

So. It's time.

She has chosen the prize she will get (four plastic coconut cups she's been coveting at Target) when she makes it to 7 nights in her own bed. She got the concession from us that if she comes in, in the middle of the night, we'll walk her back to her room and tuck her back in. (Not so restful as letting her cuddle in, but necessary.) She's on Day 5 and last night she made it all the way through in her own bed without coming in. Only 2 more days.

My baby! :-( Very bittersweet, for me.

On the other hand, last night I got great sleep and today I'm working like heck to finish my book this week, before we go on vacation.

Ella in 2002:



Ella in 2003:


Ella in 2008:

Worthwhile to post the poem, too

Here is a translation of the poem "Stream of Life," by Rabindranath Tagore, which Siddique adapted for "Dancing."

Stream of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.



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You can see the lyrics of the song in Bengali, as adapted by Garry Schyman and Palbasha Siddique for the song "Praan" (which you can download from Amazon.com or iTunes) on this YouTube.

I hope they're getting rich.