Matching Tracksuits

Month: November 2020

Testing, Again

Monday 30 November 2020

I guess it could be worse. Shoot, it was worse just a few years ago. We had MAP testing and Iowa Basic Skills testing and some other test that I can’t remember, all piled up in the first half of the year, with the MAP test repeated in the spring along with state-mandated testing. Now we’ve lost the MAP testing (the only really useful test for me) and the Iowa Basic Skills (Is that what it was called? I could look it up, but I don’t care enough about it to check), but in their place, we have district-mandated benchmark testing every quarter and two practice TDA tests.

What is a TDA test, you might ask? Text Dependent Analysis. An essay question based on a text, in other words. That’s how we spent today, working on this essay question:

“Inventor Martha Coston” focuses on Martha Coston’s night signal invention. The author claims that it was Coston’s “desire to provide for her family and her determination to succeed [that] made the Coston night signals a great success.” Write an essay analyzing how the author develops and supports the claim. Use evidence from the text to support your response.

If you read that carefully, you’ll see that it’s really just asking students to summarize the argument in the piece. Today, I helped students see that; I’ll do the same tomorrow, as I have to do this in person, and we’re only meeting a given student every other day. Is that teaching to the test? Or rather teaching the test? I don’t know. I don’t care. But I wasn’t about to just toss the test at them and say, “Here, do this.” And I was also not about to let the know, through implication, that I really didn’t want to spend time with this test. “Now, as you look at this district-mandated test…” “If you look at the prompt for the district-mandated test…” “Do you have any questions about the district-mandated test?”

Trying Coffee

Sunday 29 November 2020

The Boy is often eager to try new things.

Today, he tried a sip from my coffee.

It wasn’t a hit.

Forbidden Island

Saturday 28 November 2020

Out of the blue this evening, the kids decided they wanted to play Forbidden Island. At least that’s how I understood it by the time they made it down to the livingroom with the game. I’d wager it was more L’s initiative than the Boy’s, but they were both excited about it when they came down.

I was less excited. About playing the game, that is. I don’t understand the game. It just seems to be a bunch of randomness pawned off as a prize-winning game. “How many drugs did they do before coming up with the arbitrary rules that make up that game?” I laughed with K once the Boy was in bed and the Girl had retreated to her friends on Facetime.

But none of that really mattered — here we were spending time together without any fussing, without any arguments. The kids are at a tough age: E is young enough to derive joy from irritating people and the Girl is not quite old enough to be patient with it all. These moments, while increasing in frequency as the kids grow up, still feel relatively rare some days. So we make the most of them when they are here.

Family Game

The Day After

Friday 27 November 2020

“Friday, it’s going to be beautiful — warm, sunny, inviting,” K proclaimed earlier this week. “We are going on either a hike or a bike ride.” We headed to Dupont State Forest, which has 40 miles of cycling trails. Off-road trails. I currently have 25mm tires on my bike for commuting (ask me how many times I’ve ridden this year…), which can make any offroading a bit of a challenge, to say the least. What I’ve found is that it’s not a problem going uphill: I can power through most things, and the tires are not that slick (even though they would appear to be so), so keeping up is not a problem. Going downhill is a different story, though. Our nearly-fourteen-year-old leaves K and me behind; our eight-year-old does the same.

I blame it on the tires.

The Day Before Thanksgiving

Wednesday 25 November 2020

The day before the big day, which will be a small big day this year, started off with a little bit of a change: flu shots. I’ve never really been one for getting a flu shot, not because I don’t believe in their efficacy but because I just never took the time. And I so rarely get sick that I think I’d lulled myself into a likely-false sense of security. But no more. Covid changes many things, my sense of security among them.

The rest of the day went by in a relative flash — butternut squash soup, playing with the kids and the dog on the trampoline, a quick shopping trip to pick up last-minute items and a cigar for tomorrow evening (what’s Thanksgiving without a cigar to put a bow on the day?), dinner, and then some family baking.

As we made pumpkin spice baklava, the Boy regaled us with select passages from Fox in Socks.

The Unknown

Tuesday 24 November 2020

I first heard the rumor when the Monday night phone call from E’s school’s principal came through. He began explaining how it is theoretically possible that we might not be back in school next week and might instead go back to 100% elearning for everyone through Christmas break. Then today, the teacher in the room next to mine said that there’s a rumor bouncing around Hillcrest High that everyone should take all their materials home for the weekend because it might last until after Christmas break. In the afternoon, no word from the principal about that, and he’s always very good about communicating things like that to us. No word from the district, who is often not the best about communicating things like this. (They should address the fact that there are so many rumors roiling around like this. And I would think if an elementary school principal were to include such a comment in his weekly phone blast that there is some legitimate basis for it.)

So we all go home in uncertainty…

One Art

Monday 23 November 2020

Today, we finish up our poetry unit, going over my all-time favorite poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art.”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Every year I teach this, after we read it and define the unknown words (“vaster” is always in that list; “fluster” and “realm” are there from time to time), I have the kids jot down questions at the bottom of the page. “What strikes you as odd about this poem? In some ways it seems really simple, but there a few things that just seem out of place. What are those things?” The same questions appear every year — the same questions I want to appear:

  1. Does she mean she really lost houses? How are we to understand that?
  2. What does she mean, she lost cities? And a continent? What does that mean?
  3. What’s up with that parenthesis in the last line?
  4. And why is “Write” in italics?
  5. Why does she begin that final stanza with a — what is that? A hyphen?

I get them working in groups after I point out a few more things:

  • I give a brief refresher on imperative voice and the implied “you” subject they contain.
  • I suggest they might want to consider who this “you” is.
  • I point out that there is a “you” in the poem later and ask them to consider if it’s the same “you” as earlier in the imperative mood sentences.
  • I help them see that there is another imperative in the final line. “Do you think it’s the same implied ‘you’ as the first imperative passages?”
  • I remind them that there are often patterns in poetry. “I’m not just talking about rhyme schemes,” I clarify. “There’s a pattern in the meaning of the poem.”

They break into groups to work. Soon enough, someone notices the pattern: “Everything she loses keeps getting bigger and more significant.” Exactly.

At this point, I add a new twist I saw in the poem. (Great poetry is always revealing something new about itself.) The first word of the final stanza is deceptively ordinary. “Even.”

“Think about how you use ‘even’,” I suggest. “You might say something like this. ‘We’ve all finished the test. Even Steve is done.’ What does that mean?”

“That we’re surprised Steve finished,” someone answers.

“Why?”

“Because we don’t expect it.”

With some more group work, they figure it out. And then someone always states the obvious: “Oh, I see, Mr. Scott. It’s a break-up poem.”

Exactly. But such an exquisite break-up poem…

Murder Mystery

Sunday 22 November 2020

E and I were heading back down the driveway Wednesday night after taking the garbage cans out to the side of the room for morning pickup when we heard the most awful screaming coming from the woods behind our neighbor’s house. We thought it might be a cat fight, but it quickly became clear that it was only one animal screeching. I remembered when Clover encountered a raccoon on the other side of the fence this summer and the sounds it was making, and I told E, “It’s most likely a raccoon.”

Clearing out the leaves to improve water flow

Today, we decided to go out for a little adventuring in the creek behind our house. We hadn’t been for quite some time. I guess we just overdid it this summer, and the Boy was just tired of it. Still, today I talked him into it. We didn’t get very far before we found out what happened to the raccoon:

“There’s a dead raccoon in the creek!” E exclaimed with a mix of fascination and disgust in his voice. We talked about what could have killed it. “We’ve seen blue herons in the creek, but I don’t think one of them would attack a raccoon,” he reasoned.

“No, they’re not going to do anything like that, especially at night,” I confirmed.

“Perhaps it was a … ” His voice trailed off. He really didn’t know what to think. “It’s the second one we’ve found,” he recalled, and then remembered what we’d reasoned about that raccoon: “Maybe it was a copperhead! Or maybe a snapping turtle.”

“I don’t think it would be either of them,” I explained. “They’re both cold-blooded, and it’s cold these days. They’ll be tucked away somewhere hibernating.”

“But Dad, we’re wearing shorts today — it’s not that cold.”

A View

Saturday 21 November 2020

From 19 years ago.

Clover

Friday 20 November 2020

Always ready to play.

Carving

Wednesday 18 November 2020

One of the skills the Boy is supposed to be learning as he works toward his Bear badge in cub scouts is whittling. We were supposed to be working in soap this week.

It’s really a perfect hobby for the Boy: it requires patience, patience, patience, and we’re finding as he gets older, the less patient he’s becoming.

Meter

Tuesday 17 November 2020

Today we finished up a quick day-and-a-half overview of meter after spending about a week on Shakespearean sonnets. I wanted kids really to understand the level of Shakespeare’s achievement, how much he wrote in iambic pentameter.

“Remember, kiddos,” I said, “he was not only choosing words based on the ideas he wanted to express; he was also having to take into account their length and rhythm.”

In the evening, during L’s club volleyball signing and uniform fitting, I ran into two of my students who are playing on L’s team. They’re having a test tomorrow on sonnets but not on meter. It’s not in the standards in any sense, so I couldn’t justify testing them on it, and I could just barely justify to myself spending almost two days on it. It’s just on interpreting, on picking up on some of the rudimentary differences between modern and Elizabethan English. I reminded one of the girls to keep preparing for the test.

“We were going over it in the car,” said her father.

Warship

Monday 16 November 2020

I was reading The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism this evening, a frightening look at some Evangelicals’ attempt (and often more than just an attempt) to inject religion into government; K was working on documents for a listing she’s preparing; L was Facetiming a friend; E was drawing and writing a story about clowns. I realized it was seven already and I hadn’t done much of anything with the kids other than talk to them at dinner. I headed to E’s room and suggested we play with Legos.

“Yes!”

We’ve built a number of things with blocks over the years. A church. A school. A prison. Multiple boats. Countless wheeled vehicles. A bridge. A few houses.

Today, we took the remnants of the bridge, destroyed part of a prison watchtower, and broke apart the remains of some cars and other nonsense to create a battleship. The ultimate battleship. Complete with gigantic booms coming off the side that can smash any vessel that comes too close, a number of guns, fore and aft, that could take out a small armada, and a newly-invented weapon:

The head canon — a forward-leaning Lego man whose head can be launched at will toward any enemy.

Cutting

Sunday 15 November 2020

Tonight, I spent a fair amount of time going through photos from the last year to create our yearbook. It’s a simple process: go to Lightroom; create a new collection with all flagged pictures from the year; begin deleting pictures. I started out with 1800; I’m down to 330 now.

It’s a good way to get an overview of the year. We had dozens of pictures of the family playing games (Sorry, Monopoly, hearts, etc.); we had dozens of pictures in the park going for walks; we had dozens of pictures of E and me exploring in our creek. How many nearly-identical pictures does one need?

Random Thoughts About Today’s Mass Reading

Today’s gospel reading was the famous parable of the talents:

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “A man going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents; to another, two; to a third, one–to each according to his ability. Then he went away. Immediately the one who received five talents went and traded with them, and made another five. Likewise, the one who received two made another two. But the man who received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and buried his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants came back and settled accounts with them. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing the additional five. He said, ‘Master, you gave me five talents. See, I have made five more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received two talents also came forward and said, ‘Master, you gave me two talents. See, I have made two more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received the one talent came forward and said, ‘Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.’ His master said to him in reply, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant and gather where I did not scatter? Should you not then have put my money in the bank so that I could have got it back with interest on my return? Now then! Take the talent from him and give it to the one with ten. For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.'”

I noticed a few things about this parable that I’d never seen before: first, the master leaves all these things and then “he went away.” There’s nothing in the text that indicates the master expected the servants to do anything with the money. Perhaps that’s implied, but it’s not explicitly stated that the master expected any growth on his investment or that it even is an investment.

Second, I find it entirely reasonable that the third servant hides the money. What if he invested it and lost it? Wouldn’t the master be even angrier then?

Third, what’s all this stuff about “harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter”? Just what are the master’s expectations? What kind of a man is this? He doesn’t seem very reasonable at all.

Finally, there’s the disturbing ending: why the severe punishment?

I know, I know — it’s a parable. It’s not really about the money at all but it’s about an individual’s talents. At least that’s how everyone has always interpreted it. That leads to a realization I’ve had recently: why did Jesus speak in parables? If his goal is to transmit information, metaphor and parable are not the most effective, efficient means of doing that.

Politics, As Always

Confirmation Bias

Thursday 12 November 2020

What does it take to change a “Stop the Steal” Trump supporter’s mind about the election? What about an outside opinion, reported in the Wall Street Journal?

A team of international observers invited by the Trump administration has issued a preliminary report giving high marks to the conduct of last week’s elections–and it criticizes President Trump for making baseless allegations that the outcome resulted from systematic fraud. (Source)

But see, it’s not so easy for Trump supporters who reject the election results. They’re predominately Evangelicals. They read the Left Behind series as history written in advance. They believe in an antichrist — probably the pope — who will literally perform miracles. They think that all the world will bow down and worship this man. They won’t see this as confirmation that the election is fair; they’ll see this as proof that it’s an international conspiracy. This culminates, they believe, in the creation of a one-world government that will strip America of its sovereignty as part of the coming tribulation.

They won’t see this as confirmation that the election is fair; they’ll see this as proof that it’s an international conspiracy. They will see this as part of the grand prophetic end of the world.

You can’t reason with that. It’s a faith as strong as any other, as strong as their faith that God will somehow deal with the coronavirus (those who believe it’s real, that is) and pray for it despite evidence to the contrary. Nothing counts against that faith. If someone goes through the pandemic without falling ill, it was through God’s grace. If someone falls ill but doesn’t become overly sick, it’s due to God’s mercy. If someone falls deathly ill and has lasting complications, it’s God’s grace that he didn’t die. And if someone falls ill and dies, it’s God’s mercy because he’s gone home to the Lord. Nothing counts as evidence against that kind of faith. If nothing counts against it, if there is no way to falsify it, it’s not a rational belief but merely a warm feeling.

Transfer that to the election: these Evangelicals see conspiracy everywhere. It’s in the DNA of their religion. To forsake that is to forsake their very faith.

The Girl, 2010

Wednesday 11 November 2020

Ten years later and games with balls still hold a central spot in her orbit.

I look at three-year-old L and remember thinking, “What’s she going to be like in ten years? How will this young face develop? How will her personality develop?” Now we know, and we see all the seeds were already sprouting in the three-year-old L.