Matching Tracksuits

Month: January 2018

Counting Costs

Sunday 7 January 2018

How much does it cost to have a puppy? There are the upfront costs — the puppy itself, shots, sterilization, etc. There are the hidden costs — a new fence, multiple harnesses to find the right one, etc. Then there are the destructive costs — shoes chewed, furniture chewed, etc. We’ve been lucky in the latter, perhaps because we’ve been unlucky in the former two. We’ve managed to keep Clover from destroying much of anything of value. She’s learned more or less to ignore shoes. More or less. She went through a gnawing on furniture legs phase, but that seems to have passed as well. However, there’s a chair in the living room that she enjoys chewing the bottom of, which probably won’t make it through her puppyhood.

So I guess we should be thankful…

(A random thought to keep my post-every-day-for-a-month goal going even though I’m not 100% and slept most of the day…)

Memory

Saturday 6 January 2018

The Boy gets on a kick and stays on it for some time. For the last few weeks, it’s been Go Fish. Now it seems to be shifting to Memory.

We have an animal-themed version we brought back from Poland, and it has a ridiculous number of pairs. I haven’t counted them, but I’d say it’s close to forty. I can say this because we were organizing them for a morning game and E wanted more than the fifteen pairs we played with yesterday. I pulled out twenty pairs and there seemed to be just as many still in the stack.

“Why can’t we play with all of them?”

I thought of how playing with fifteen went. It was a surreal experience. I wasn’t really trying to remember anything, to be honest; I was turning up cards, letting the Boy see them, then turning them back over. But somehow, as if by instinct, I was turning over cards to make pairs. It’s not that I didn’t want the pairs; it’s not that I was trying to let the Boy win. I just wasn’t putting forth much effort myself, or so I thought.

We compromised on twenty, but it was a bit overwhelming for the Boy: after several minutes, he’d only found one pair, and I’d found two.

Hard and Soft

Friday 5 January 2018

We were at Nana’s and Papa’s this afternoon, and I asked the Boy who he wanted to ride back with.

Learning dominoes

“Mama!”

“That’s right — no one loves Tata!” I laughed.

Helping the Boy set up

Later in the evening, as the Boy was nestling into his covers for the night and I lay beside him, he stroked my cheek and said, “Daddy, you’re the best daddy. And I always love you no matter who I ride home with.”

Final game of Memory before bed — just after the snack

He paused for a moment, then added, “It’s just that Mommy is soft, and you’re a hard chunk.”

Scientific Go Fish

Thursday 4 January 2018

The Go Fish obsession continues. Someone plays with the kids every night, and they occasionally play together by themselves. We’ve yet to tackle a four-player game, though I’m not sure why. The kids don’t seem to eager for whatever reason, and so perhaps that’s why we haven’t tried.

Go Fish last night

Tonight, as I was playing with them, I stood to get something from the other side of the room, and I accidentally glanced at the Boy’s cards. (He has them spread out in a chair beside him, so the natural gesture to avoid seeing someone’s cards — looking down when passing — doesn’t work.) I did notice that he had a yo-yo (we play with a picture-based card set), and since I had a yo-yo, I thought I’d do a little experiment.

“L, do you have a yo-yo?” I asked during my next turn. E was set to go next, and I was ready for him to ask me if I had a yo-yo. He had been a little distracted, though, and asked instead, “L, do you have a yo-yo?”

L looked at me; I smiled back at her.

Afternoon reading

“E, I just asked her that,” I laughed. “You should have asked me that just then. Now, I’m going to ask you for it next turn.”

Playing with dough after dinner

He just smiled.

In Praise of Return

Wednesday 3 January 2018

Coming back to school can be a relief for many of our students. They come from less than stable home lives, and the predictability of school is a comfort for them. These are often the kids that most often exhibit problematic behavior. Our principal sent us all an email to this effect. It read, in part, “Many of our students have experienced unrest over the break. Without their normal routines, meals, and social interactions found at school, they may need a readjustment period (and your grace) when returning.”

One of the things I’d decided to change in my class was to provide a mechanism for regular praise of students, both individual and group. The individual is easier: it’s just one person praising another. The group praise, though — lots of kids focusing on the good actions of one student. That was a tough one.

In developing the lesson, I thought we should spend some time writing and thinking about praise, so I prepared a Pear Deck for the kids (which allows them to respond to given prompts and see their and others’ responses projected anonymously. It’s a great way to have a real-time anonymous discussion), asking questions about when they were last praised, how it felt, when they last praised someone else, how that felt.

Some of the answers were telling, echoing the ideas in the principal’s email.

I asked students when they last remembered being praised. One student’s response was memorable:

The last time I remember being praise was when I manage to talk to people because I can’t really socialize with people. Another time I was praised was when I was working on something for a story and the person read it, and they said it was an amazing idea!

This young lady is one of the best students I’ve ever had: hard-working, kind, very intelligent, but painfully shy.

When I asked “How does it feel when you’re praised,” some of the answers really stood out:

  • It made me feel special and proud of my work that I have done. I barely get noticed on things so it like amazing to be praised.
  • I felt nothing because I didn’t care.

Finally, I asked students to consider why praise might be important, given all the responses they’d given and read. One showed that at least one student understand how much impact something positive can have: “For example, it could be one compliment that could save someone’s life…… They could be depressed and just needed someone to be nice to them and show them that people care about them.”

Contrast this awareness with how students so often treat each other, with insults and snide comments that are meant to build themselves up by tearing others down. I wonder if anyone else saw the irony. Smart kids — I’m sure they did.

Last Day of Break

Tuesday 2 January 2018

“Daddy, I don’t understand. On Sid the Science Kid, the teacher calls all of the children scientists.” The Boy paused for a moment: he’s learned how to pause to heighten the moment just a bit. “That can’t be right! They can’t be scientists!”

We were on our way home from shopping, leaving the girls at home this last day of break. K stayed home because of a lingering illness, so we were together for the morning, but the Boy and I headed out after lunch to do the week’s grocery shopping.

“Why can’t they be scientists?” I asked, wondering what he had in mind.

“They’re just kids!”

“So?”

“To be a scientist, you have to have a job. That’s your job. A scientist,” he explained still frustrated, though sometimes with him it’s hard to tell if the frustration is real or just pretend, as if he’s trying it on for size.

I thought about his definition and reasoning for a few moments, thought about why the teacher would be calling children scientists — obvious for an adult, not so much for a child.

“Well, E, it’s a question of scientific thinking. She’s calling them scientists because they’re behaving like scientists. They’re thinking like scientists.” This satisfied him for a few moments, but it didn’t satisfy me. I was wondering if he would ask what it means to think scientifically, hoping he would ask. He didn’t, so I prompted him. “Do you know what that means, to think like a scientist?”

“No.”

“It’s a process. You observe. You think about why things happen. You make predictions about why things happen; you check those predictions…”

I fear a lot of Americans really have no clue what it means to think like a scientist.

The other night, while on a walk, I was listening to an old sermon by a religious leader, and he was railing against “intellectualism.” He never really defined it. He never really explained why it was so bad other than to say it was vanity. He was upset about how some Biblical scholars will spend so much time picking at the smallest little detail, and as he said that it occurred to me that he really didn’t have a firm grasp of what those scholars were doing, how they were examining the text, their methodology and the justification for it.

I think this is a common thread in America, this anti-intellectual position, and it’s directed at all sciences. People dismiss all sorts of things they, were they taught like Sid the Science Kid to think scientifically, they likely wouldn’t dismiss, and they accept things that, were they taught like Sid the Science Kid to think scientifically, they would dismiss out of hand.

So I was very pleased when E later spoke of thinking scientifically. And as he played Go Fish with the girls, it occurred to me that here is a perfect opportunity for some basic critical thinking: observe (listen to what others are asking for); test (ask for a few things in a systematic way); repeat.