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learning

Map Work

Saturday 4 February 2012

The Girl has been working on puzzle maps at school, learning, continent by content, states and countries — Europe, North America, and South America down, currently working on Africa.

Almost every day since then, we’ve gone over countries and states, an effort to remember what’s learned and add new states so she can finish a continent and bring home her hand-colored map.

In Poland this autumn, she drove everyone crazy showing all the maps she knew. Only Dziadek, a former geography teacher, could sit down and listen to her, time after time, catalogueÂ the shifting geography of an ever-changing world. “Many of those countries didn’t exist when I was born,” I think as she names them for me; as for Dzaidek, even Poland was a different country when he was born. Those nuances are lost on L as she points and names, proud of her memory.

As a reward, though, we agreed to buy the Leap Frog interactive maps for her when she completed Europe, and they arrived today.

Endless fun on the horizon.

The Games We Play

Wednesday 1 February 2012

The Girl simply loves playing games: Candy Land, checkers, Go Fish, “the memory game” (Never just “memory” for her), Curious George — you name it, she’ll play it.

The long-standing challenge for us as parents has always been teaching her to win with humility and lose with dignity. It’s tough to teach a child something you yourself are not good at, for it must be said that I don’t always lose with dignity myself. Chess is about the only game I play, and whileÂ I don’t pitch a fit, my pulse quickens at a loss, and I’m soon berating myself for my obvious mistakes.

Yet by their very nature, these games make excellent benchmarks for social skills development. There are countless metrics:

How far into the game does the first fuss appear?
How long does the first fuss last?
Once it subsides, does the first frustration return immediately?
Is the Girl capable of finishing the game or has she worked herself into an irreversible tizzy?
When it begins to look like a loss is inevitable, does she give up or continue playing?

Recent gaming adventures have shown that L is developing a tolerance for the inevitable eventual loss, an ability to recover quickly from initial frustrations, and the poise to win and lose well. It was, in short, truly a phase.

Thoughts on the Balcony

Thursday 19 January 2012

We all go into the classics of literature with certain preconceptions and assumptions. We grow up hearing about Romeo and Juliet, and knowing that it is considered a classic love story, we expect to find a valiant and noble Romeo. What we find, as the play develops, is a character that is entirely more human than we expected. In fact, early impressions of the young man sour quickly.

These are some of the impressions from my eighth graders after a two-day look at 2.2, the famous balcony scene.

I think Romeo is a little obsessive. Like when he was in love with Rosaline, he fell deeply in love, but he quickly moved on to Juliet. He didn’t even know who she was and he was already making out with her! I think nowadays he would be considered a player.
He’s a major creeper and totally a player. I wouldÂ neverÂ date him.
I think Romeo has good logistics but when it comes to love, he’s a bit tipsy! He is a star-crossed stalker.
I can’t believe he went to her balcony. That is mega-weird.
Romeo is a psycho-creepy stalker!
Romeo is very spontaneous. He lacks a lot of common sense that Juliet has.
Romeo is someone I would trust but would not fully trust.
I can see why Rosaline left [Romeo].
Even though he is a creeper, he seems romantic and sweet.
Boy is he a CREEPER! Come on now! You just met her!
Romeo is brave yet incredibly stupid.
I hope as we read on he will get back to the person I thought he might’ve been before, like charming and funny and bold.
[Romeo] is annoying and very stalkerish, but I don’t see him as mean.
I wish Romeo was more of a perfect gentleman, funny, daring.
Romeo is a creepy, weird person. I thought he was cool at first, but not anymore.
I feel like Romeo is being shallow.
Romeo is a creep.
[Juliet] seems like she would make smart decisions like not to smoke or drink.
I think Juliet would be a cool person (without the old English).
You’re telling me you wouldn’t risk life and limb for your belovÃ¨d? That’s not very gentlemanly. (In response to another student.)
I probably wouldn’t be friends with Romeo because he confuses me a lot of times.
[Juliet] has good views on love and is an independent girl. We will soon be BFFs :)
Romeo is a professional psycho. ‘Nuff said.
[Juliet is] NOT creepy, like Romeo!
The crazy part of it is that Juliet ends up killing herself for the psycho! See, she’s the one that needs to be checked into a mental institution for liking him!
Romeo is a stalking creep. Nope, we wouldn’t be friends. We’d be best friends. We’d go stalking together.
Romeo goes with his heart and blacks out his mind, which is not good at all!
Romeo falls in love a lot.
Romeo would be the kind of person that would be overprotective and call or text you every day, say “I love you” a lot. (Clingy.)
I’m not being friends with some mushy guy!
I’d be [Romeo’s] friend as long as he stays away from my window!
I wouldn’t want to listen to [Romeo] sob about love and girls all the time.
Romeo is a dreamer and a gal-pal and would be annoying.
Romeo is starting to turn out a little weird.
I think it’s pretty hardcore that Romeo lives in the present.
I’d keep a fair distance [from Romeo].
If Romeo says you can only love one person, then why does he love two?

Working the Puzzle

Tuesday 17 January 2012

The Girl has a little marble and maze puzzle (maybe “ball bearing and maze” is a better description) that involves manipulating the plane of the puzzle so that the ball bearing roles through the maze. Nothing new: we all had one growing up. She’s developed an unorthodox method of solving it, though: she simply shakes it until the bearing gradually crawls to the center.

K decided it was time to teach her how to do it properly.

The results were amusing for both.

The Bath

Wednesday 4 January 2012

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Tough Lessons

Tuesday 3 January 2012

Because one of my plugins broke with the upgrade to WordPress 3.3, I have to click over to Flickr and manually grab the code for each image I want to insert. In some ways, it would be easier simply to upload them directly to this site, but we use Flickr as a mastery back-up for our best photos — the ones we absolutely don’t want to lose — so in the long run, it’s worth the extra step. But it does mean some clicking: Click on the picture. Click on the “Share” button. Select the text and copy. Click to the new window — you get the point.

Still, as far as sharing goes, this is fairly painless, because one of the hardest things to learn is the gift of sharing. I say “gift of sharing” as if it’s something easy for me to do. It’s not. I doubt it’s easy for anyone in all situations. We all have this or that which we hang on to with clinched fists even when we aren’t aware of how are knuckles are turning white.

For the Girl, it’s Wawel’s candy, “Kasztanki.” L is simply obsessed with them. This is partially because of their rarity: they’re not readily available in the South. (One might find them in Polish stores up north, but not down here.) Babcia sends them to the Girl on a fairly regular basis, but from time to time, she does run out, and then it’s a period of slow heartbreak.

Tonight, we suggested that L share her favorite candy with Nana and Papa so they could see what all the fuss was about. Judging from her expression, one would think we’d asked her to give up a kidney or sacrifice her life. Eventually she relented, though not without a bit of persuasion.

I suppose we all take some persuading to share some things.

The Return to Reality

Monday 2 January 2012

The return after a long break is both nerve-wracking and refreshing. The former comes from the unpredictability of fourteen-year-olds. The latter is a simple function of having a long period away from each other. As much as I like my students, it’s good to be away from them from time to time — to be around adults more than kids. (Well, having a five-year-old daughter, I’m not sure how much that’s really possible.)

For everyone today — teachers and students — it seemed the “refreshing” won out. Far from being reluctant to return to studies, many students seemed positively eager to come back — at least that was the feeling I got in my classes.

It was a good Monday, and often can one say that, especially after a long break?

Scrabble

Tuesday 13 December 2011

We’ve been struggling to get the Girl speaking Polish on a regular basis. She’s resisted consistently until a recent trip to Poland: two weeks with Babcia, including a week with cousin S, and suddenly, she’s speaking Polish spontaneously — to her toys when she’s playing alone.

And so we’ve reached a point at which the Girl can play Polish games, like Scrabble. We play a modified version: a small marker indicates both where to start and what word to spell. We work through hulajnoga (scooter), kot (cat), dom (house/home), and of course mama (mom).

It might be no surprise that the Girl won the majority of the rounds: it’s tempting sometimes to let her win to keep her interest up. (And it’s equally tempting occasionally to arrange a loss or two in order to help her learn how to lose gracefully.) This evening, though, she wins fair and square.

Games

Saturday 9 July 2011

It’s a lifelong process, learning how to lose. I’m thirty-some years older than the Girl, but I still fight the frustration of loss just as much as she. I could contend that there is a difference: losing at games of chance doesn’t phase me because it’s a question of luck; losing at games of skill–read: chess–does bother me when I feel I made a stupid mistake. Such distinctions are lost on the Girl, though: losing is losing is losing. It all hurts.

We’ve been working with the learning how to lose (and to a lesser degree, how to win gracefully) with Candy Land for ages. We’ve seen some real improvement: the complete hysterical fits have disappeared, replaced by a temporarily pout and an extended lower lip. In fact, things are going so well that I’ve stopped my Machiavellian parenting technique of stacking the deck to make sure she loses at least once or, if needed, wins once.

Yet sometimes that dimension of untinkered-with chance provides some amusement: three candy cards within four turns for me resulted in some whiplash-inducing jumps around the board and laughs for the Girl — even when I was surging ahead. Perhaps she knew the next card would bring me back to Earth.

Independent Hands

Sunday 10 April 2011

It’s only expected that a four-year-old grows more independent daily. Lately, that independence has moved out of the normal realms of the everyday, personal actions — bathing, brushing hair, cleaning teeth — and into more wide-ranging spheres: cooking and buying.

She wanted aÂ quesadilla the other day, so I asked if she’d like to help make it.

When it was done, she ate it with more relish than I’d seen her eat anything in recent memory.

During our first spring zoo outing today, we stopped for an ice cream. L needed to pay by herself — it was imperative.

The “I can do it!” phase is thankfully far from over.

The Artist, Redux

Sunday 27 March 2011

The Girl likes to refer to herself as an artist. Just a few days ago, she was proclaiming that she’s an artist but that it’s a secret.

This morning, as I was planning some lessons, she came into the study from downstairs, picture in hand.

“Here Tata. I’m an artist.”

I glanced at the picture, saying the obligatory, “I know honey,” then stopped what I was doing to take a closer look.

“Did you help her with this?” I called out to K downstairs.

“No,” came the reply.

“Not even a little bit?”

I think I can be forgiven my initial skepticism.

The Artist

Wednesday 16 March 2011

“I’m an artist,” L declares as she’s drawing on the driveway. “No one knows I’m an artist at school, and I have to keep it a secret,” she continues. “If anyone finds out, they’ll tell the teacher. Then the teacher will come to me and ask if I’m an artist.” She pauses for a moment, inspecting her work, then continues the creation and the explanation.

“If they ask that, I’ll have to tell them that I am but that it was supposed to be a secret.” She looks up, holds her hands out to her sides, palms up, lowers one eyebrow, and does her best to look adult: “That’s why I have to keep it a secret.”

Bibo, ergo…

Sunday 6 February 2011

The Girl, tucked in bed, is trying to convince me that, despite having trekked down the hall just six minutes ago, she has to go again.

“Tata, I’m lying in bed,” she begins, thrusting her right fist out in front of her. “I’ve been drinking juice,” she continues, thrusting her left fist out as well. They float there, swaying back and forth as if she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with them.

She claps them together, providing an apt conclusion: “When the two halves meet…”

Slip Sliding Away

Saturday 29 January 2011

Stepping onto the ice for the first time in probably twenty-five years can be a bit of a stressful experience. My mind turns back to the last time I ice skated: I recall being fairly confident; I remember the importance of having tightly-laced boots; I think about how I was finally able to skate backwards the last time I ever went as a kid. Or was I? I did go only a handful of times, after all, and most of those times my attention was not on the ice but on those on the ice around me — usually on specific person.

Maybe I only imagined I could skate, because the instant I step onto the ice, I’m fairly certain this is the first time I’ve ever ice skated.

Yet I watch the Girl, who truly is on the ice for the first time, and I realize that perhaps I haven’t forgotten everything. I push off and begin to glide — I realize I have.

Perhaps because I have more experience and a more developed sense of balance, I’m not as bad as the Girl: her feet are slipping this way and that, forward, backwards, left right. She looks like she could have been the model for some cartoon about a character’s first time on ice.

By the end of the hour, though, she’s able to skate glide by herself from me to K and back again. A few more times and she’ll be asking when she can try her first jump.

One Semester in One Month

Friday 28 January 2011

I just finished up a course on diagnosing and correcting reading deficiencies in middle and high school students. One of the most useful courses I’ve ever taken — especially the book: Kylene Beers’ When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. It’s my new classroom Bible.

The course was a one-semester course crammed into one month, what my school calls, appropriately enough, “January term.”

Which is finally over. And which explains how we could take the Girl ice skating for the first time and it receive nary a mention here…

Maybe over the weekend…

Puzzles and Dolls

Wednesday 29 December 2010

“Do you dream of being a princess?” coos one of L’s Christmas gifts before offering game-play options.

Why does L have such an obsession with princesses? It’s not like we initiated it, though we’ve done very little to encourage or to discourage it. (Relatives are a different story!)

Granted, L has watched the films several times: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, and several other princess films. She has a few princess books — usually thick books we refer to as “the princess collection” and “the other princess collection.”

“Do you dream of being a princess?”

My concern is not necessarily the notion of being a princess; it’s the notion of being a twenty-first century princess, a highly sexualized image that encourages girls to flirt in grade school and has teen fashion magazines offering advice on the cover for how to have a “sexy beach” hair do.

“It’s a long way off,” some might say. “She’s only four.” When I hear stories of six-year-olds getting cell phones, though, I realize the pressure begins shortly.

Or perhaps it’s already begun, the pressure to meet society’s standards of what a “Real Girl” is like. Perhaps that’s what the princess obsession is all about.

Perhaps. It’s somewhat depressing to think that we’re entering a period during which peer pressure is as influential as — if not more than — parental influence. There’s a balance there that we are just beginning to feel out. Its contours are still nebulous because the actual relationships and ratios are still unclear. In the end, it’s all about awareness.

If only it were that simple.

Stacking the Deck, Redux

Tuesday 14 December 2010

L and I are playing Candy Land. It’s a dry, boring game, to be honest, but I’m not doing it for my own entertainment: that comes from watching her.

Still, I’ve been trying lately to make it a learning experience, as a way to help her deal with her frustration. It’s a simple premise: stack the deck occasionally, placing the Candy Cane Forest card for the next drawing when she’s seventy-five percent complete.

“Oh, rats!” she declares, retreating almost to the beginning of the game board.

I try to make it a little more frustrating, dropping the ice cream cone card into place for my next drawing. Will she get frustrated that she “obviously” has no chance to win? Will she want to stop? Will she complain?

No — nothing but a laugh.

There’s only one thing left to do: make sure she gets a few doubles to catch up — not win, but catch up.

The game takes longer than it would have if we’d just drawn and let chance decide the winner. But the girl has uncanny luck and wins more often than not. A loss or two does the spirit good.

Other Side of the Desk

Tuesday 31 August 2010

I sit quietly, looking at the long list of assignments upon which the professor will be basing our grade. Thinking of all my other obligations, I find myself wondering if I’ll survive the next few months.

And I am pleased with that.

Being a teacher without being a student on a regular basis is about like being a mechanic who never drives. It’s one thing to “dish it out.” It’s another to take it.

To see the classroom from both sides of the desk is to ensure reasonable expectations from one’s own students.

Learning Space

Friday 16 July 2010

Do much course work in education and you’ll soon find yourself covering some of the same names in various classes: Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, Binet, Skinner, Kohlberg, and the list goes on.

It’s frustrating to cover the same material in course after course, but the advantage is that it sits solidly in your head, and you find yourself thinking about it at the oddest times.

For example, L and I sit down to play chess. Our chess is usually random motions of random pieces, but instructive all the same: she learns that we take turns, and that the object of the game is to defeat your opponent by taking pieces. It’s fun, but her attention span usually only last a few minutes before it’s time to have “tea” or feed her baby or any number of other priorities.

Today, we try something new. I tell her I’m going to set up pieces on my end of the board, and she needs to try to copy them on her end. A real challenge, to be sure. It is quite taxing on her spacial intelligence, for I am asking her to create a mirror image, which requires quite a bit of mental spacial manipulation.

I think of Piaget and Erikson — does she have the mental development for the task at hand. Technically, those gentlemen would probably say, “No.”

“She’s still at the very beginning of the preoperational state,” Piaget says.

Forget ed psych — let’s have some challenging fun.

The beginning is slow, and it takes her a good ten minutes to figure out that she’s supposed to be mirroring my pieces. But she puts everything together slowly, and it’s obvious she can do it.

More importantly, Â she loves it. And I figure it must be in her “zone of proximal development,” for she’s having great difficulty, but slowly she’s mastering it.

“Let’s do it again!”

And so we do it many times. Each time, I alter the order in which I put the pieces on the board. First one pawn, then the other, then a knight and bishop beside each other before moving to the other side. Sometimes a mix of major pieces and pawns.

Toward the end, I give her the real challenge: most of the major pieces and some of the pawns are on the board when I tell her, “Figure it out.”

She looks at my pieces, looks at her own, back at mine, and suddenly, in a flash, her side of the board is perfect.

Once we get the piece positioning down, we’ll start learning how the pawns move.

You Might Have To

Saturday 10 April 2010

I go home to learn about life from my daughter. I learn what goes on in her school, what her teacher says, how her teacher teaches.

L, like any good story teller, doesn’t simply tell us, though, she shows: she begins incorporating various phrases from school into her own speech.

“You might have to” becomes the key phrase. “You might have to do this.” “You might have to move that.” I can imagine L’s teacher helping her with this or that task, explaining, “You might have to try it a different way, like turning it the other direction.” “You might have to wait. I believe someone else is using those crayons.”

“That’s okay” is another. I spill a little milk and mutter “Shoot” under my breath. L consoles me: “That’s okay.”

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