general
The Boy and the Bed
Lately, the Boy has been making the oddest noise...
Nap
Arriving home, the Boy usually likes a little nap in his swing.
Hula Hoop
This summer, the Girl developed an interest in the hula hoop.
Laughing Boy
It turns out the Boy is quite ticklish.
Making Me Smile
I was out sick today: it's hard to teach when one can't talk, and that was indeed the case for me today. Still, duty calls, and I updated my school web site to reflect the fact that I wasn't there and therefore there is no homework.
I shortly got a couple of responses from students wishing me well. It did more for my spirits than all the meds I'm now taking.
Cartoons: A Father’s Perspective
It was a gradual change, so gradual that we really only noticed it when it became a frequent-enough occurrence to get K and me talking about how much time the Girl had been spending in time out.
"Where did she get that?" we asked each other after the Girl had mouthed of again after just coming out of time out. It was a sassy, arrogant, and cruel tone of voice.
"No one talks to her that way here," I said, "so there's only one place she could have learned it: television."
For years, whenever I was walking in some department store and a voice from a little kiosk beckoned me over to look at all the advantages of Direct TV, I could stop the conversation immediately by stating semi-truthfully, "We don't have a television." It wasn't the whole truth: we had Nana's and Papa's old television in the computer room hooked up to a buggy DVD player, but "We don't have a television" was more convenient (and close enough to the truth) than "We have a television, but it's only hooked up to a DVD player; we have no cable service, and we're not interested in it." Somewhat reluctantly, though, we bought a small home theater system a year or so ago, and now that it's wirelessly hooked up to our Netflix account, we can sort of watch television like "normal" people. It led the Girl into whole new realms of cartoon viewing.
Ay, there's the rub.
"Where could she have gotten it" was only a rhetorical question because we both knew that she had spent time only with family and one close friend -- not enough to explain the attitude, the sass, the trying to act like a grownup in five-year-old shorts. We sat and discussed the situation, narrowing it down quickly to two cartoons in particular: Horseland and the newest incarnation of My Little Pony that includes the deceptive subtitle, "Friendship is Magic."
I thought back to all the snippets of these shows I'd watched -- and a couple of episodes I'd watched almost entirely -- and realized that both shows have characters that behave in just this sassy, nasty manner. "Well fine. I never liked it in the first place!" Things like that. Sure, by the end of the episode, all has worked out (after all, "Friendship is Magic"), but the behavioral model was still there, and the Girl had picked up on it.
We sat down with the Girl and talked about what was going on. Informed of our decision to eliminate Horseland and My Little Pony as well as to curtail general television watching, the Girl sniffled a little, but seemed fine.
A couple of weeks passed. I'd even forgotten about the two offending shows. Then:Â "Have you noticed how much L has changed in the last two weeks? The snotty, sassy little brat has disappeared and our sweet girl has returned."
This brings up the obvious question: what affect do media have on children's behavior? In many ways, it's certainly a chicken/egg mystery: culture influences what is acceptable in the arts (and I use that term loosely with most television programming), and the arts in turn teach members of society (often unawares) what acceptable society members find interesting and amusing. I know for certain, though, that the behavior modeled in the cartoons showed up in our daughter. This might be a function of age: younger children are less critical of the influences that affect them. Yet once a model, always a model: it seems that the longer one watches television uncritically, the more of an unconscious influence it exerts. Certainly that's what advertisers count on, to some degree.
But was it always like this? Were cartoons always issues of concern with parents? I certainly remember comments from my parents about how violent some cartoons are. Episodes of Tom and Jerry, Roadrunner, and many others always involve seemingly countless instances of extreme violence, acts which children are supposed to laugh at -- and do laugh at. Yet it seems more likely that a child will take on the sarcastic, disrespectful tone of voice she hears in an episode of Horseland than, say, she will drop an anvil on a friend's head. Then again, tone down the severity of the violence to a slap and I suppose they're equally likely. Still, tone of voice is something that is not even necessarily regulated automatically in children, so it seems more influential. To see the changes since I was watching cartoons, though, one only has to look in an average classroom to see that the uptick in general disrespect is significant, whereas there was never a real corresponding increase in violence (though there has been a significant increase).
The change is most noticeable when comparing today's cartoons to some created in the 1950's and 1960's. Still more noticeable are the differences compared to cartoons from that era that rely totally on visuals. I'm thinking here of two shows in particular.
Koziołek Matołek
Originally a comic from the 1930's, Koziołek Matołek ("Matołek the Goat") follows the adventures of Matołek as he searches out a mythical city were goat shoes are made. Matołek is goofy, clumsy, and a bit silly, but always naive and pure.
Krtecek ("Krecik" in Polish)
An import from Czechoslovakia, Krecik was the product of the 1950's, and it shows. The first episode shows a certain kind of self-reliance common to the times but strangely foreign to most of us today, and it certainly illustrates a kind of innocence lacking in many of the cartoons the Girl is drawn to.
Further Information
Saturday Break
We woke up to rain today. "We probably won't be going for soccer," I think as I poured my first cup of coffee. And the thought didn't break my heart. Still, knowing the Girl had the second game of the day, I decided to drive over to the field, only four or five miles from out house, to see if there were indeed games. I'd heard somewhere that the general rule for determining whether or not to play a soccer game is if the ball bounces when dropped from the waist. If it bounces, the game begins. But I wasn't sure what it would be like for four- and five-year-olds. I arrived at the field in a drizzle to find everyone playing as if nothing were happening. Still, the Girl has a way of getting a nasty cough very easily, so K and I decided it would be best not to go.
We were fairly certain the Girl would be a little disappointed. I saw the patch of dry pavement on the road and thought L would surely see that and certainly use that as justification. "See? It's drying." And so I was a little surprised when the reaction to "Sweetie, we're not going to be able to go play soccer today" was "Yippeee!"
We ended up staying home most of the morning, with Nana and Papa coming for a visit and then L going to spend the afternoon at their place -- after a math lesson in the kitchen.
For E, there were very few changes in the routine. Eating, giggling, pooping, sleeping. Repeat.
After some weeks, such a Saturday is just fine.
Punctuation
As a teacher, I see all kinds of creative use of punctuation. Some of it makes me smile at its novelty; some of it makes me groan. Each punctuation mark has its own difficulties.
The semicolon is something mysterious: students are a little in awe with its presence and slightly intimidated. The more ambitious students want to use it, and indeed try to use it, to varying degrees of proficiency. "It's a bit like a super-comma," I sometimes explain, "and kind of like a weak period." We do some work with it every now and then, but it's a little like taking young divers to the 10 meter platform when they're still nervous at 3 meters.
The comma is exhausted. It pops up in places where one never expects it. Sometimes, it appears after a form of be, lingering there to reflect the writer's reflective pause: "The problem is, I don't know what to say." And in between "is" and "I," the tell-tale comma lets us know what went through the writer's mind: "What is the problem? I'm not quite sure how to express it, or I'm not even sure what it might actually be."
The period is unreliable. Sometimes it goes AWOL for thought after thought, with a comma occasionally taking up the slack. Often it disappears without a trace. Every now and then, it gets over eager, jumping in at the end of prepositional phrases or subordinate clauses to create fragments.
The colon really is a phantom, a boogie man only rumored to exist and used to scare children into grammatical submission. "It's like a big arrow, a big pointer," I sometimes try to explain.
Quotation marks occasionally hang around, apostrophes are overly possessive, em- and en-dashes run about, and silly jokes abound. But most days a properly placed punctuation mark can make my day.
Over the Shoulder
It used to be something of an obsession. “What was I doing around this time X years ago?” I’d ask before opening up my journal for that month some years earlier and reading to see what happened. Yet what if I’d had a way to thumb through pictures the way I thumbed through my journal entries? For most of my life, I had about as much interest in photography as I had in basket weaving. Then I moved to Poland. And a couple of years after returning to the States, I moved back to Poland, then armed with a digital camera. And so I can open up a photo viewer and easily look over my shoulder.
September 2001: I’d just moved back, and I was still taking daily walks in the fields behind the house where I rented a room. Such pictures now seem almost unreal: did I really live there?
September 2002: The fascination remained. I was still talking almost daily walks in the fields, heading up to a small patch of trees known to locals as “Cats’ Castle”, watching the sunset from various locations, impressed that the church was visible from almost every point in the central part of the village.
And then an empty year. Did my computer crash? Did I not take many pictures? Whatever the cause, September 2003 is void of pictures.
September 2004: K and I had just gotten married. We’d brought all our lovely wedding gifts — the glass paintings and various prints — to my apartment which was then our apartment. We looked through pictures of our wedding and spent lovely afternoons creating photo albums.
September 2005: Back to the States, to Asheville. “This is where I want to live,” K said the moment she saw the small town surrounded by mountains. It was understandable: it looked so much like her own home. And have a few lovely parks about didn’t hurt either.
September 2006: The Girl was just a few months away. We’d heard all the stories, but who can really prepare for how a child is going to change one’s life?
September 2007: The Girl was with us, and already showing her precocious nature. She sat only to roll; she crawled only to crash; she lived only to giggle and fuss.
September 2008: L, able to walk, began asserting her independence. The innocence would surely linger?
September 2009: Independence increased.
September 2010: We learned quickly that owning a house is owning a project. A never-ending, always-bank-account-draining, eternally-exhausting project.
September 2011: Where did that baby go? Certainly she’s somewhere around here?
September 2012: If I could have glanced forward in time from 2001, surely a wife, two children, a house, and a cat on a tired Wednesday night would seem just as unrealistic as the fields of Lipnica Wielka seem to me now?
