tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778748997337076852024-02-20T20:34:30.166-05:00Post-Industrial ParenthoodJeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.comBlogger115125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-91421402709975699962016-04-09T15:34:00.002-04:002016-04-09T15:34:28.250-04:00Piano Lesson Dilemma<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t
know why my mother decided that my sister and I should take piano lessons.
Unlike swimming – another thing we pay others to teach our children how to do –
playing the piano isn’t really a life skill. It’s more a pose, a boast, a
feather tucked squarely in the back of one’s cap to be pointed at every once in
a while and otherwise left to rot. I mean, how many people who took piano
lessons as a child still play the piano as they grow older? Not that many from
what I can tell (though maybe more than I think, maybe the secrecy of it all is
part of the allure). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While my
mom would probably say that her own inability to make a piano do anything but
cough and spit probably had much to do with her interest in our taking lessons,
I imagine that our family’s social class actually played the more significant
role. Our family occupied the upper end of the middle class spectrum in what
was at the time a small furniture and carpets town in southern Virginia and that
made piano lessons – one of those marks of achievement and social
sophistication towards which my mom often strived - something we could afford
to try. My sister and I, still young enough that we couldn’t really differentiate
between our parents’ interests and our own and not knowing what piano lessons
entailed until the decision was long past done, went along with things because
that’s what we were supposed to do. Plus, it was exciting to bring a piano into
the house. I still remember reading the name scrawled across the left-hand side
just above the keyboard – Baldwin Acrosonic – and feeling like it sounded
special. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Even though I didn’t like
practicing for the requisite thirty minutes each night – Mom had to resort to
setting a timer and even then with trips to the bathroom and various
meanderings away from the piano I found plenty of ways to cut things short – I eventually
learned to make my way through a respectable number of pieces. However, my heart
wasn’t into it enough to ever get really good. The only reason to push on when
a piece got dull or to repeat a measure again and again when I wasn’t getting
something was that my parents were paying someone to teach me to do this. While
that was all fine and dandy for a bit, it was not a particularly good motivator
when the pieces got harder. At some point the input-to-success ratio got low
enough that something had to give. Either I needed to find another reason to do
lessons or it was time to stop and look for something else to do. I, like most
kids, did the latter.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then
something unexpected happened. It turns out that the moment I stopped taking
lessons, the moment playing the piano could be something I did for me and not
for someone else, the moment the music became a means of expression instead of social
training, I started to really enjoy it. Dispensing with the lesson and recital
books, I took up a couple of New Age piano solo books, playing them cover to
cover, experimenting with how fast I could play the pieces or how dramatic I
could make them. Released from having to meet anyone’s expectations, I found playing
the piano could become an outlet, an opportunity to be loud or sharp or
mischievous or mean or sulky or ecstatic or inside my head, to scream and yell
or cry, to be something I was not for a few minutes at a time. I wound up
spending many a lonesome teenage evening banging out two or three of the pieces
that seemed to speak to me, calling forth thunderstorms or dreams or naked dances
in the moonlight. Sometimes, Mom and Dad would come and listen – taking a seat
in a velvety blue wingback chair that faced away from the piano, obscuring all
but their legs from my view - but it always felt a touch awkward. I didn’t mind
their presence, but I wasn’t playing for them. I was playing in spite of them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe
that’s what my mother was hoping for all along.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ironically,
it is because of my parents that my children may wind up learning to play the
piano as well. About three years ago they bought us a piano. They didn’t ask us
first. They found a used piano in good condition at a charity auction and
decided that it was something we should have; so they bought it. It was only
after the fact that they pretended to broach our interest before revealing the
fait accompli. At the time Ava, the kids, and I were living in a rental house
and contemplating a move to a new city. The last thing we needed was a five
hundred pound box of vibrating strings that only I knew or cared how play. And
yet, how can you say no to an idea your parents have invested so much in that
they are willing to rent a truck and drive the thing seven hours for you to
have it? We couldn’t, and so we wound up with a piano. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For the first six months it was in
our house, no one touched it. It sat in our dining room, a respectable upright
dust collector with some framed pictures on top crammed back into the corner so
we wouldn’t trip over it when we brought food out to the table. Eventually I
started playing for a few minutes before Pip came home from school just to see
what kind of chops I still had. It was a pleasant diversion, but in no way did
it feel essential. When we finally bought a house of our own two years ago, we
contemplated donating the piano to the owner of the rental house just so we
didn’t have to move it. However, it turned out to be less painful to move the
thing than try to explain to my folks why we left it behind. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the new
house, the piano once again occupied a spot in the dining room, but this time it
was centered on the back wall in the direct line of sight whenever you came in
from the living room, right where you could never quite put it out of your
mind. I continued to fiddle from time to time, playing Christmas songs and
seeing how much of my old recital pieces I could still play, and Pip started
plucking at it some too. After he expressed interest in learning how to play,
we tried a couple of lessons together. But the dynamic didn’t work. As long as
the pieces were easy, he was willing to let me teach him things, but the moment
he started having trouble, he didn’t want to do it anymore. He’d been less
interested in the music itself and more in seeing if he could do something that
I was doing. Remembering my own experience, I didn’t make an issue of it. We
closed up the books and put them away in the bench for safe keeping.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
However, I had liked listening to
him work on things; the plucking and plinking of the notes – even when they
weren’t doing anything much – was soothing and pleasant. The sound of a piano
with a child at the helm is not like what you get with a clarinet or a violin.
With those instruments the bad notes are so grating they make you want to fill
your ears with cement, but with the piano, the harmonies can be wrong and the
rhythms can be all over the place, and it still sounds inviting. There is
something timeless about the searching and stretching of a child feeling their
way along a keyboard. The music that comes from this is simple, primal,
tentative, murky, halting, repetitive and yet viscerally progressive; it’s like
a condensation of childhood itself and listening to it always made me feel both
hopeful and nostalgic at the same time. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Last year, it was our great good
fortune that Pip was invited to take lessons through his school and, with
someone else teaching him, he’s found some new interest in playing. In hopes of
nurturing this interest while not overdoing it, I’m constantly trying to thread
the needle. I remind Pip of times he could play the piano but never tell him he
has to. When he finishes after only ten minutes of practice, I want to tell him
to go back through his pieces again or find something new to work on, but I
keep my trap shut so that he can maintain control over his own progress. I ask
questions about things he’s learning and jump in to play with him whenever he
asks but otherwise try to let him do it on his own. This means that some weeks
he’s just not interested and when he winds up practicing only twice or three
times, I have to make my peace with that. However, there are some nights where
he’ll sit and play for thirty to forty minutes. We’ll be doing the dishes and
he’ll begin with something he knows and then continue to something new – a new
piece, sometimes a scale or a new chord. It captures him and he tinkers with it,
often asking us questions or running through a tricky measure repeatedly until
he gets it. On those evenings I take my sweet time cleaning up, stretching out
the tidying and the sweeping, hoping that if it seems like everyone else is
busy with their own things, he’ll just keep on playing right up until it’s time
to go to bed. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It doesn’t look like Polly is going
to get the same opportunity to take lessons through the school that Pip did and
this leaves me stuck in a dilemma. Polly’s interest in playing is furtive and
difficult to discern. Whenever I suggest we sit and play for a few minutes, she
puts up a half-hearted resistance before dragging herself glumly over to the
piano. Yet she has collected together all of the earliest exercises Pip brought
home from school and placed them in a folder with her name on it. Also once she
starts going she often wants me to find something more for her to play. She’ll
go for a good ten minutes without pause and seems genuinely interested in
learning about the various things she sees on a page of music. If she had
disavowed any intent in playing, I would respect that and leave it alone. But
she shows enough casual interest that I keep wondering if I should push a
little harder, give her enough of a start so she can see if she really likes it
or not. I feel as if she might.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is one example that I keep
coming back to as I ponder what to do about this. When Polly was four, I
decided it was time for her to dispense with the training wheels on her bicycle.
We were riding down to school with Pip every morning and the training wheels
were becoming dangerous. Not only were they wearing down but Polly could get
the bike going fast enough that one false bump in the wrong direction would
send her flying. She needed the maneuverability and nimbleness that comes when
the training wheels are gone. However, she wasn’t particularly interested in
this project. It wasn’t that she was against it necessarily, but whenever I
brought up the idea she preferred to do something else. She was comfortable
with her training wheels and the challenge of learning to go without them
didn’t excite her. So we came to an agreement: we would practice riding without
training wheels once a week for ten or fifteen minutes; just enough time for me
to teach her a little bit but not enough for her to feel trapped in something
that wasn’t fun for her. If after our time was up she wanted to do more, we
could. If not, we would stop for the day and pick it up again the following
week. This gave her a sense of control over the project allowing for her both
to plan for our lessons and shut them down when she was done for the day.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It took about four weeks of these short
lessons before Polly was interested in doing more. But once she got there she
really went after it. We would ride up and down the street together for up to
an hour at a time and even started going out multiple days of the week to
practice. The elderly couple who lived up the block began coming out to cheer
for her as she improved. Within three months she was riding on her own down to
the school and back. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I feel as if the same thing could
be true with playing the piano. We could do ten to fifteen minutes once or
twice a week, and she would gradually acquire a comfort with the instrument,
the kind of comfort that could lead to real enjoyment in playing. And yet, I’m
hesitant to even push that much. Riding a bike without training wheels was a
necessary skill for Polly to acquire. We move about our city on our bikes and
she needed to be able to keep up. Playing the piano is not. At what point am I
helping my child and at what point am I merely indulging my own self-interested
whims? It’s a dilemma that brings me back full circle to where I started. <o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-10688276098979545682016-01-29T11:01:00.004-05:002016-01-29T11:01:40.456-05:00The Power of Holding Hands<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One of the
things I try to do with my kids is make physical contact with them as often as I
can. When we walk places together we often hold hands. When Pip is standing
nearby, I usually pull him in to bump against me. When we brush our teeth
together, Polly sits on my lap. I give them kisses each morning before sending
them into school, hugs whenever they do something well, and piggy-back rides
when things around the house get particularly slow. </div>
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All of this contact is strategic. As
Pip and Polly go out into the world each day, I want them to feel connected to
me. I want them to feel my presence - my touch on their shoulders, my hand in
theirs – wherever they go. I want them to know that when they need support or
help or care, I will be there. I want them to feel it – in their skin, in their
skulls, in their bones. I can tell them these things in words all I want, but
there is something infinitely more convincing when that knowledge is more than
mental, when that knowledge is visceral as well. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On most
days we ride our bikes to school. We live about a mile from the school building
and it usually takes about ten minutes or so to get down there. Polly has a
pink bike she has named Taffy which she likes to pretend is a horse carrying
her swiftly through the fields. Pip has a red mountain with gears and
handbrakes that he got over the summer and he can really move when he puts his
mind to it. During the early fall and late spring the ride down to school is really
fun. The sun is rising. The birds chatter. The air is warm. We whip down the
sidewalks and cruise happily along, bouncing over curbs and racing along the
open stretches between streets. During the intervening months from late fall to
early spring the ride is more of a challenge. The mornings are significantly darker.
The air is significantly colder. Over time we’ve built up the proper equipment to
handle these conditions. Each of our bikes has its own light that flashes brightly
in three directions. Sometimes we look like a line of ambulances going down the
sidewalk. We’ve also evolved the proper assortment of clothing to keep the cold
at bay – hats that go under helmets and cover our ears, scarves to cover our
mouths, thick gloves to keep fingers from freezing, and good coats to push off
the chill. This allows us to ride almost every morning.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>However,
there are some mornings when it is just too cold to ride even with all of our
gear. Last year after too many frozen fingers and some collisions with
stationary objects – a trash can, a parked car - because hats were pulled down
almost over our eyes, we determined that when the temperature drops below fifteen
degrees Fahrenheit, we should bundle ourselves up in all our gear and walk to
school. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Last week
brought us two of those mornings. On Wednesday Polly in particular went all in,
putting on three layers of sweaters and fleeces before donning her heavy coat
then adding a thick scarf and a second hat over her first. This second hat was
shaped liked a horse’s head and with its eyes and mouth protruding from her
forehead she looked a good six to eight inches taller than she actually is.
Running down the street with her hands at her sides, her skinny legs clad only in
a pair of khakis and everything from her hips up layered in all that cloth, she
looked top-heavy and a bit unsteady like one of those sausages that race
between innings at baseball games. As Pip bounded up the sidewalk ahead of her she
kept up a solid pursuit catching him from time to time before he sprinted off
again. I walked briskly behind them, my gloved hands balled up in my pockets
and my nose tucked down tightly into my scarf.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>About
halfway down to school Polly stopped chasing Pip and asked me to hold her hand
instead. In the darkness and with her face almost completely covered with the
scarf I think she wanted to have me guide her along for a while, helping her
keep her balance and providing some moral support as the cold began to overcome
her initial burst into the dark. I was happy to do it. There’s a strength in
doing something like that together. It makes the cold less painful. It also helped
keep the two of us on pace, her moving forward and me from going too fast. It
was nice to be helping out each other.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was nice
for another reason as well. The previous week or so Polly had gotten in a
negative rut. She’d started whining and complaining about things, pouting
whenever something small didn’t go her way, finding something wrong in whatever
was going on around her. What was particularly frustrating in all of this was
that she wasn’t really sad or moody. It was more that she had gotten into the
habit of talking about things in this negative way and had literally forgotten any
other route through which to engage the world. At dinner she would want to
become part of the conversation and her go-to starter would be to complain
about something – the food, the cold, being tired. We’d ask her to try another
angle and she would have a hard time coming up with anything else.</div>
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This streak of negativity had a
very gendered feel to it. Polly was starting to sound like a prototypical whiny
girl - a caricature of one even – who shrieks at the slightest provocation and
groans whenever she’s asked to do something that doesn’t immediately interest
her. This made Ava and I think that much of this was coming from being back at
school with some of her friends after the holidays. For whatever reason, those
moments of reconnection tend to intensify Polly’s sensitivity to some of her
friends’ less admirable qualities. </div>
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After a week or so of eye rolling,
complaints about food, and a general unwillingness to say anything that wasn’t
negative in some way, Polly and I sat down and hashed out how these things were
making everyone feel. We grabbed some time on Saturday morning when she was
fresh and I was not yet frustrated over constant corrections and talked about
ways to change the general scope of our interactions. What we came up with was
an agreement that I would signal her anytime she made what I felt was a
negative comment. However, I would not try to correct it. In this way we could
make her aware of the things that were concerning us but avoid moving into the
patronizing lines that we were all more than tired of hearing. Only after she
had a better sense of what these things were would we then move towards finding
alternatives. It took about two days of this for Polly to begin catching
herself and by Wednesday it felt like things were on an upswing.</div>
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That she wanted to hold my hand that
morning as we walked down to school gave me extra confidence that we were all
going to be alright. The emotional bond between two people is never a permanent
thing. It’s always subject to the emotional swings of a given day or week, and
I’ve never been more aware of this than I have been as a parent. You have to
push your children to do things they don’t want to do, to fix things they’re
doing wrong, to learn lessons that no one wants to have to teach. These things
are not pleasant, and they test the connection between parent and child. You
want them to know that you love them even as you push or punish them. But it’s
easy to mix things up, to say one thing and do another, to undermine one’s
seriousness by switching too quickly to expressions of love, to bring your
expressions of love into question by dwelling too heavily on the serious. You break
the bond a little each time you have to disappoint them or punish them or point
out when something’s wrong. And you never know for sure if those breaks will heal
or eventually lead to a much bigger tear. So it was a relief to have Polly
reach out for me to help her. In doing so she gave us the chance to heal over the
smaller breaks between us and maybe even help make our bond grow a little
stronger.</div>
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We walked on towards her school
quietly and without speaking. This too felt right. Words would have been too
abrupt, too quick, too definite for the work that needed to be done. Words
would have required a rehashing, an articulation of feelings gone past, a
dredging up of the past week that would either revisit our frustrations or
minimize their importance. Without words in that moment we were able to keep
walking forward, leaning on one another, helping keep each other upright and
going in the right direction.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-87472369049887465532016-01-08T09:26:00.000-05:002016-01-08T09:26:01.723-05:00Doorways<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There are
plenty of times in life when your children can make you proud. They get a good
grade on a test. They finish a puzzle you’d thought they’d struggle to complete.
They share a toy with a friend without anyone having to suggest to them that
they should. While these are pretty standard moments in the course of raising a
child, they are still nice to have. But then there are the moments that really
mean something, the moments when you learn something specific about who your
child is and, just as important, what things really matter to you. We all want
our kids to do well and be happy, but what does that look like in everyday
practice? What skills, attitudes, or interests constitute at a fundamental
level what it means to be good? These vary from family to family, from parent
to parent, and it’s often not clear what they are until you see it in action.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One day before
school finished up for winter break, I went to Polly’s class to help out with
their holiday party. The party ran up to the end of the school day, and so we
decided to stay after and help clean things up. Just before the dismissal bell,
I stepped over to Pip’s classroom to let him know that he should come over to
Polly’s class to meet me instead of going outside like he usually would. When I
got there, Pip’s class was already lined up at the door. They had their
backpacks on and three boys were jostling playfully with each other at the
front of the line. One had his arms and legs spread across the door frame
blocking the way. The other two were squirming all around him – sticking their hands
through the gaps between his limbs and tugging back against his chest. They
were laughing and giggling as they struggled, periodically knocking back
against a pod of girls behind them. The girls regarded this jostling with a
combination of amusement and disgust. When the dismissal bell rang, all three
boys stumbled out into the hall and scurried off to their various points of
departure. They were followed by the pod of girls, a second clutch of boys who were
hopping up and down and jabbering excitedly, and a second collection of girls
who filed passed me in a secretive huddle. Then came Pip.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the last
six months Pip has undergone a regular and consistent stretch of rapid growth.
He has busted through shoes and outgrown pants in what feels like the blink of
an eye. Fortunately, this growth seems to be occurring in an even way. His arms
and legs haven’t gotten out of proportion to the rest of his body. His feet
seem to be about the proper size. And since he’s slender and wiry, he just doesn’t
look that big when he’s standing around on his own. As such I hadn’t realized
how tall he’d become until that moment when, as he walked out in the line of
kids, it was clear he could look out over every one of them. His eyes were
about level with everyone else’s skull.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Seeing me
standing on the other side of the doorway, he smiled. He’s been fighting off a
cold for a while now and there was an extra touch of pink in his cheeks. His
straw blond hair, still cut in a simple, neat-around the edges fashion by Ava,
was brushed straight forward and down with no part. The tips of the hairs
around his ears were darkened by a shadow of sweat leftover from playing tag on
the playground. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As he made
his way over, it struck me, not for the first time, that unlike everyone else
that had passed before him, Pip didn’t seem attached to anyone. He wasn’t part
of a group or palling around with a friend. Instead, he was moving in a kind of
quiet bubble, his head up and those sparkling marbled blue eyes that everyone
had said he’d lose as a newborn locked right in on me. I’ve wondered before at
this distance he seems to have from the ruckus around him. I’ve worried that he
doesn’t have a close friend or two in his class or that he doesn’t know exactly
how to connect with the other kids. I’ve worried that he might be lonely.
However, he doesn’t look it. The smile isn’t forced and his posture doesn’t
reveal any unnatural rigidity. Instead, he looks like a person who isn’t
fighting against things, isn’t hiding things, isn’t rushing to get away. He
looks like a person easing through the chaos, an ocean tanker gliding steadily along
regardless of the tide. He looks like someone who is exceedingly comfortable in
his own skin.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And I
really liked it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I don’t think this quality would
have made such an impression on me had I only seen it once that day. But later
that evening, I saw it again. On Wednesday and Friday evenings, Pip goes down
to the Episcopal cathedral downtown for choir practice. These rehearsals tend
to run ten to fifteen minutes longer than scheduled and instead of hanging out
in the car until he finishes, I usually park and go inside the vestibule to
wait. It’s usually empty in there – just me and the stony-faced kid who works
the front desk – but it’s a pleasant enough place to hang around. If there’s
something going on in the sanctuary or one of the chapels you can listen in to
the music and most of the time there is some small art exhibit displayed along
the halls. As I wait I usually pace slowly around perusing the church message
board to see what activities are coming up or examining this exquisite
recreation of an image from a medieval illuminated manuscript called the Book
of Kells which hangs on the wall. In the painting the gospel saints, Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John are depicted as an angel, a lion, an ox, and an eagle
respectively and colored in vibrant waxy reds, blues, and greens. They have a
cartoonish aspect that makes them appear almost satirical, like the work is
some weird postmodern cross between an Andy Warhol print, a Looney Toones
poster, and a sacramental banner. The quiet of the space is broken only by the
periodic arrival of members of the men’s choir who begin their practice after
Pip’s group is done. Some of them will say a muted “Hello” as they pass but
most just give a quick nod and smile.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Then the boys choir finishes
rehearsal. The choir practice room is down a hallway, around a corner, and up
some steps so you can’t hear them singing from the vestibule. However, the
moment they break out of the practice room door you can hear them coming. The
first three or four of them are usually moving quickly, bouncing against one
another and talking in loud voices. In their wake come the rest moving along in
various states of hurry. It’s easy to think of all this racket as disrespectful
or careless but mostly the boys are just oblivious. They spend enough time in
the church hallways that the place doesn’t seem any different to them than
their homes or schools. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Somewhere in the middle of this Pip
comes around the corner. Once again, he’s not walking with anyone and once
again this doesn’t seem to be a problem. His head is up and his eyes are wide.
Sometimes he smiles. Sometimes he doesn’t. He isn’t rushed by the speed of the
others around him. He doesn’t stare after one kid or try to talk to another.
He’s aloof in a happy, floating way, a way that seems absent of longing or
jealousy, a way that feels comfortable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
And I love it. I love the steady
calm. I love the happy distance, the sense of peace. I know this isn’t a
constant state for him. I know he worries about things and gets hurt by people
and feels uncertain about where he is and what he is doing. But the fact that
in these bustling moments he’s capable of catching an air of peaceful
self-assurance, even of delusional ignorance, that is something I love. He
doesn’t need to fill the place with his noise. He doesn’t need to be cool. He
doesn’t need someone else to give him confidence. He walks along. He smiles. He
takes my hand and we walk out the door together. It is a moment of quiet
strength that I didn’t realize was so important to me until I saw it firsthand.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I hope he can hold on to forever.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-46413729447582683142015-12-01T10:48:00.003-05:002015-12-01T10:48:56.099-05:00Ready for college?<div class="MsoNormal">
The
physical education teacher at Pip and Polly’s elementary school likes to play a
game where he lines up a class of students along the baseline in the gym and
then calls out a simple yes or no question. Students who answer ’yes’ run to
the other end of the gym and back. Students who answer ’no’ stay on the
baseline. The questions are sometimes silly like “Do you like pizza?” and other
times stray into how they view themselves. One of his favorites in this second strain
of questions is “Will you go to college?” Two days ago Pip was talking about
this game at the dinner table and commented that when that question comes along
he always runs. “In nine years,” he said, “I’ll be ready to go to college.” My
immediate reaction to this statement was that I’d prefer that he not be quite
so sure.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the
No-Child-Left-Behind era, everyone is expected to go to college. This is not
just a social expectation. It is an economic necessity. Virtually every entry
level job requires a college degree as one of the basic credentials. It is a
marker of rudimentary educational achievement and an easy way for filtering out
the first layer of applications from stack of resumes. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But college
was not designed to be like primary and secondary school. Attendance in
kindergarten through twelve grade is a legal requirement. As such schooling in
those levels is provided free of charge to all children. The quality of this
instruction certainly varies and what a student gets out of it depends greatly
on how much of themselves they invest in learning the material, but there is no
choice involved when it comes to taking part. The legal and structural
framework views an elementary or high school student as being too young to make
a decision about this for themselves. They are required to go.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At its
core, an institution of higher learning, however, presumes just the opposite.
The very nature of the college environment assumes that a student who is
attending college does so of their own free will. The most prominent indicator
of this basic assumption is that all colleges charge tuition. Students are
paying for the educational instruction, the skills training, the exposure that
colleges provide. Students are not taking part in a grand social project. They
are investing their own financial resources – sometimes delayed through the use
of loans - in a product. They are buying the services the college provides. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As such it
is ultimately the student, as customer, who decides how much of that product he
or she is interested in using. They can go to class or not. They can pay
attention and take notes or not. They can do the work or not. College instructors
have a responsibility to provide quality material and support for students to
learn that material but unlike primary and secondary school teachers they do
not have a responsibility to get all students to a certain level of competency.
In college, the final responsibility for learning things shifts heavily towards
the student.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This shift
in responsibility for learning – the shift from no will to free will when it
comes to one’s education – requires a readiness that goes beyond having the
ability to do college level work. This shift requires a student to understand
why they are doing the work and what it is supposed to be doing for them. This
is a tricky proposition. In my own case, when I entered college I didn’t have
particularly strong feelings about what I wanted to do after it was all done. I
chose to study electrical engineering because it was a challenge and I figured
I could get a good job with that degree. But that wasn’t enough to push me into
getting the most out of my college education. I did what people told me I
needed to do to get a good grade but I didn’t engage the material on my own
terms and for my own purposes. As such I struggled with motivation at various
points and rarely pushed myself to do the kind of extra work – reading ahead,
exploring a topic on my own, asking questions that branched off from the presented
material – that leads to something more than a degree. This did not make my
college education a complete waste of money, but it did mean I got much less
out of it than I could have.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With Polly
and Pip I hope to make the understanding of this shift in responsibility for
learning a part of their own evaluation with regards to when and where to
attend college. At this point the subtleties of a discussion about free will won’t
make sense to them but encouraging them to imagine what they might do when they
are older does. I want them to get into the habit of looking beyond college to
craft a vision of what they want to do with their lives then figuring out how
college can help them do that. I don’t want college to be a default next step
in the already programmed slate of education – a thirteenth grade if you will.
I want them to see college as a choice they have made for themselves to get
them started towards whatever it is they want to achieve. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To
accomplish this, I have made it a habit to regularly ask them about what they
want to do when they grow up. This seems like a simple and almost childish
question on the face of things but it is fundamentally important, not just
because it gives me a sense of what they like but because it forces them to
repeatedly articulate a vision of their future. The key to making this exercise
work is to get them to tell me why they want to do something. For example,
Polly has frequently said she wants to be a veterinarian and when I ask her why
she tells me that she wants to help sick animals feel better. For me the second
part of this vision is vital because there is plenty of boring administrative
work that goes into being a veterinarian and without having a strong sense of
why that work is important, of why she wants to do it, the administrative
aspects can grind her into the ground.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
All of
which brings me back to Pip. Unlike Polly, Pip doesn’t have a real missionary
view of what he wants to do in life. He’s curious about lots of things and
enjoys learning for the sake of learning. At various times he’s expressed an
interest in designing airplanes and rockets or building robots or experimenting
with chemicals. This week when I asked what he wanted to do when he was older
he said he might like being a chemist working to develop new medicines. All of
these are great ideas, and they indicate certain directions of interest that we
can explore. However, none of them yet qualifies as a strong vision for what he
wants to do and who he wants to be. This isn’t a problem now but it is
something we will have to help him develop before he will be actually ready for
college.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-63341233979956554312015-11-12T09:45:00.000-05:002015-11-12T09:45:27.816-05:00Trump<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Twenty
years ago this fall I started my first year of college. In the dorm room next
to mine there lived another freshman, let’s call him Rick. Rick was a
pugnacious kind of guy, short and muscular, a wrestler in high school. He could
be charming when he wanted to, but he also had a tendency to cross into the
territory of the obnoxious windbag. He wasn’t really sure what he was doing in
college – I think he was planning to major in business - and I always imagined
him eventually washing out and winding up selling cars or vacuum cleaners or
insurance. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What I
remember most clearly about Rick is that he loved to talk politics. He was the
first real, hardline conservative I ever met, an acolyte of Rush Limbaugh when
Rush’s act was still confined to AM radio. Rick would poke and prod at almost
anyone in an attempt to get them into a political discussion then overwhelm
with a bull rush of numbers, policy positions, and odes to the greatness of
Ronald Reagan. If you weren’t prepared for it, he could leave you speechless.
He’d answer every half-hearted objection to the free market’s distortion of
everyday life or uneasy defense of the role government in giving people a
chance to succeed with a torrent of sneering counters that came so quickly it
was hard to single out any one crack to push back against. He knew the contour
of the ideological positions on both sides and dared you to match yours against
his.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The thing
was, however, I never felt like Rick actually cared that much about the ideas
themselves. Where I was inclined to take a position and chew on it some,
tweaking the possibilities, looking for ways to make one group’s ideas work
toward the goals of another, Rick wasn’t looking to actually solve a problem.
He was looking for the confrontation that could be created by the problem. What
Rick really wanted was the fight. He wanted to draw you in, punch you down, and
walk away smirking. He wanted the power that came with winning. He liked
politics for the sport of it and taking up a position on the angry right allowed
him to come out firing at just about anyone. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When I see
Donald Trump on the campaign trail, I can’t help but think about Rick’s
approach to politics. Trump is showman, not a politician. His ideas about tax
policy, immigration, social issues, and various other topics often lack any cohesive
logic, are impossible to implement, or are just plain incoherent. He doesn’t
have any allegiance to the broader goals of the Republican Party nor does he
have a fine-tuned vision for what the future of America should look like. (I
think a Trump presidency would ultimately be a giant money grab for those who
have the right connections. He would actually make worse the very thing people
are looking for him to change.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What he
does have is a fighting attitude. His appeal to voters is mostly based on the
idea that as a rich guy he isn’t owned by anyone but himself and that gives him
the freedom to say what he really thinks. To prove this, he plays a
sensationalist game. He’s aggressive, mean, and rude. He’s a classic bully
stomping around the playground calling other kids names, making fun of their
clothes, and stealing their balls from them. He picks fights because he knows
the other candidates are not prepared to face his aggressiveness. He can
overwhelm them without having to know anything more than his chosen lines. It’s
Rick’s playbook writ large. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And because
of that, I can’t decide whether Rick would love Trump or hate him. Trump is
essentially playing Rick’s game on a national scale. As a candidate Trump is
the rhetorical spawn of Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the like -
conservative personalities who have built up identities where attitude is much
more important than thoughtfulness. Their political strategies are based on
taking the frustrations many people feel in their daily lives and giving those people
targets - liberals, women, gays, immigrants - for expressing that anger. They
seek to create an emotional blowtorch and keep feeding it with whatever they
think will generate more heat. It’s what drew Rick into political discussions
in the first place.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But I
wonder if Rick’s own sense of righteousness doesn’t go kick in when he actually
listens to what Trump says. It’s so far off from the lines Rick used to spout
that I wonder if Rick feels a disjuncture. Trump’s tone sounds right, but the policies
Trump proposes don’t. Does this bother Rick? Does it prick his instinct to
chomp down on anything that doesn’t align perfectly with his own? I don’t know.
The answer to that question, I think, will go a long way to determining how far
Trump will go in his presidential campaign.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-60374043127755434772015-11-03T09:29:00.002-05:002015-11-03T09:29:36.765-05:00Singing in the Choir<div class="MsoNormal">
Pip likes
to sing. Within two weeks of entering kindergarten, he was performing “This
Land is My Land” every chance he got. When the big winter show came along, he
put the songs on a loop in his head and constantly brought verses to the dinner
table. In the springtime, Eva cobbled together a soundtrack of the 1980’s pop
songs in that year’s end of the year show and we belted out “I Just Called to
Say ’I Love You’” and “Beat It” whenever we went anywhere in the car. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Interestingly to me, this
attraction to singing wasn’t something he talked about in specific terms. He
didn’t consciously identify himself as being good at singing and didn’t look to
show it off as something he knew a lot about. He just enjoyed doing it and
gravitated towards doing more when opportunities arose. He tried out for solo
parts when he could and when he didn’t get them, he didn’t go on to something
else. He kept coming back and trying again. Last spring, when the school did an
arts evening and invited kids who were interested to perform a short piece of
music, Pip signed up. He sang God Bless America and did so with a sweet joy
that made me smile.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Back at the
end of September a note came home from Pip’s music teacher at school. She and
her husband are the conductors for the music program at one of the churches in
town, and the note invited Pip to audition for the boys’ choir if he was
interested. We like the music teacher – she is one of those people who manages
to be serious without being mean – and were willing to let Pip check things
out. A strong musical education isn’t one of the priorities we had for our
children, but we liked the idea of Pip working in a situation where excellence
was expected and performances were taken seriously. For his part, he was very
interested in seeing what it was all about though it was hard to separate the
privilege of being invited from a true interest in the choir itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So a week ago he went to a trial practice. It
was a full one, starting at 4:30 and running past 7:00 with a short break for
dinner in between. It was a full exposure to the grind of a choir practice and
when I picked him up, he was ecstatic. He talked about the numbering system for
following the music and the psalm the choir was working on for that Sunday.
Then we took him back on Friday for another practice, and he came out happy
once again. There was this whole new world of symbols and structures for him to
absorb. He spent the weekend asking what a perfect fourth meant and what were the
differences between major and minor scales. He was ready to keep going back as
much as he could. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
***<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m glad
he’s excited. Performing music is one of humanity’s more life-affirming acts.
It requires concentration, finely detailed workmanship, and persistence in the
face of failure. It can bring one a special awareness of the world’s myriad contours
and emotional striations. Plus, it’s expressive, energetic, and fun to turn
one’s body into an instrument of beautiful sound.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With all
that said, I’m not yet completely onboard with Pip doing choir. For one thing,
we’re suddenly trying to insert a three-to-four-time-a-week activity into an
established schedule of eating, sleeping, doing homework, and playing that has
been working quite well for us. Meals are getting out of whack. Schoolwork and
play expectations are not properly aligned. We are ferrying him back and forth
a lot while trying to figure out what to do during the time in between. While
there is nothing extraordinary about all of this in the grand scheme of things,
I just wasn’t ready for it yet. I’d had the idea that we’d gradually ease into
a busier schedule as Pip moved into middle school, and I don’t like having that
timeline blown to smithereens.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But, more
importantly, there is a growing up moment here for Pip that makes me irredeemably
and irrevocably sad. For almost nine years, Pip has been a constant presence in
my life. We did little situps together when he was an infant. We watched
construction equipment demolish and rebuild a school when he was two. I wrote a
large chunk of my dissertation with him sleeping in my lap. I mowed the yard
with him on my back. I taught him to read. I taught him to ride a bike. When
Polly was a baby we entertained her together with stories and stuffed animals
and silly games. All three of us went on runs together, me pushing a double
stroller while Pip and Polly pointed out wildlife along the way. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
After kindergarten started, our
time together was reduced, but we still have time to run around outside, play
ball-tag and hide-and-seek. Pip kicks balls around as I rake the leaves or the
two of them will play with the hose while I wash the car. The shouts, giggles,
thumps, and whirls of Pip and Polly’s play is the soundtrack of my working
life. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Now suddenly I’m losing another
large chunk of the time we have left together. On Wednesday and Fridays now it’s
come in from school, have a snack, do some homework and then go back out the
door. When Pip gets back he eats dinner and goes to bed. Sunday mornings will
be much the same. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And what
makes me even sadder is that he’s doing it without me. One of the things I
loved about having him do soccer is that I could be there with him, coaching
and playing. My favorite moments from soccer were always the ones where we had
a few minutes together to kick the ball or shoot before everyone else arrived
or after everyone else left. Choir doesn’t allow me to do that. I have to drop
him off and pick him up. I have to watch from out in the audience and let
someone else have the joy of helping him learn. I don’t like it. He’s my kid. Ava
and I worked hard to get him to be the kind of person we want to spend time
with and now that time is getting siphoned off by other people. It’s the way
life works, but it still sucks.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, I know
that just as with school, we’ll get used to the new patterns and find new joys
within what Pip learns and does. (In fact, it’s happening already. On Saturday
morning while Polly went to gymnastics, Pip sat down at the piano and played
for fun. Then we played some short duets together. He was focused on the
rhythms and cognizant of the various markings in the music in a way he had not
been a week before. It was a really wonderful hour.) But for all the good
things about school – and there are lots of them – I’m still tempted from time
to time to pull both kids out and teach them at home. At this point it isn’t
even about the speed or efficiency with which they could learn. I’d do it to
grab as much working time with them as I can. I like this time in our lives
together, and I can see it slipping away. Choir practice is only a symptom of a
much larger pathology. <o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-48506897326929578732015-10-22T11:09:00.002-04:002015-10-22T11:09:31.744-04:00Pollysaurus Rex<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For the
last several days, Polly has been in a tonal funk. Everything she says seems to
come out with an edge of shrillness, whininess, or disdain. Her attempts to be
funny come off as mean. Her patience for anything that does not go her way
exists somewhere in the range between very limited and non-existent. She has teared
up at not having as much pepperoni on her pizza as she might have liked and has
complained frequently about being tired or cold or hungry - though not for the
food that’s in front of her. And she’s been pushy about being right, making an
issue of silly things such as the time being 6:47 instead of 6:45. On the whole
it’s been a rather unpleasant week. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This kind
of harshness is symptomatic of a person who feels a bit off, and Polly has
certainly had her share of annoyances to manage. To start with, she has a tooth
in her bottom jaw that is exceptionally loose. For the past week, it’s been
flopping around in her mouth and jabbing into her gum whenever she tries to bite
into something. At least once at every meal she’s been giving a small yelp of
pain and having to swish blood out of her mouth. On top of that the
replacements for the two front teeth she lost a couple of weeks back have
started to push their way into view. While this kind of cutting doesn’t keep
her awake at night like it did when her baby teeth came in, it seems to be
enough of an irritant to disrupt her sleep from time to time. She got up in the
middle of the night last Thursday to use the bathroom, something that she never
ever does, and spent an hour or so after that rolling around trying to get back
to sleep. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On top of
the pain from teeth going out and teeth coming in, Polly is also dealing with a
case of the sniffles. She had a mild fever during the middle of the week and a
hacking cough towards the end that led us to keep her home from school on
Thursday. (We dealt with an extended cough this past spring and wanted to head
this off before it got too established in her lungs.) The cough hung on
throughout the weekend, and Polly still felt off enough on Saturday to skip out
on her gymnastics class. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Lastly,
amidst all the off-kilterness of being sick and having a mouth in pain, Pip had
his last two soccer games of the season. Polly enjoys the idea of going to
watch Pip play soccer, but I think she feels left out as well. It isn’t an immediate
or conscious reaction because she gets excited for him and asks to go to the
games. However, I think the waiting around and watching, the feeling of being
outside of the main action of the day, wears on her in subtle ways that wind up
making her feel unfulfilled and anxious. As a result she often gets snippy and short
towards the end of a soccer day. When you combine this with an already volatile
situation, it can make for a very unhappy child.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is not
the first time we’ve cycled through such a situation with either kid and in the
process we’ve found that the only real solution to all of this irritation is
patience. The loose teeth will fall out. The new teeth will come in. Her cough
will subside. Pip’s soccer games will end. Polly will get a couple of good
nights of sleep and she will return to being the happy, effervescent sprite who
draws animal pictures for friends and sprints joyfully out the doors of school
each day.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
challenge is what to do in the meantime. The habits of making mean faces and using
harsh words have a tendency to hang around long after the irritants that initially
triggered them are gone. If you’re not careful they can become normalized to
the point where no one in your immediate circle even realizes how ugly they are.
At the same time, we know that constant correction only grinds everyone down
and runs the risk of grounding in a child the idea that they just don’t do
things right. This latter result is the worst of all worlds in that the child may
stop even trying to do what you ask of them because at some level they’ve come
to believe they’re incapable of it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Being aware
of this balance Ava and I have made it a habit to frequently tell Polly that
she’s a “good kid” even in the midst of another line of whiny complaints. We work
with her to come up with non-inflammatory ways of correcting unwanted behavior
such as asking her to tell us what kind of signal we should use when she’s
doing something wrong. Her current choice – a single finger tap on our chin - is
a good one because it’s wordless and allows us to smile at her while also
providing the necessary reminder about how we want her to act. We’ve also used
taps to our noses and talked about throwing a hurtful phrase or negative
attitude “out the window.” She seems to particularly like this image.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How much of
this effort really matters in the long run is difficult to discern. As with any
parenting technique, we don’t have a control group against which to measure the
true effectiveness of any of these interventions. At the same time, it feels
better to be doing something positive than just sitting around waiting and
wondering when things are going to get better. Perhaps keeping ourselves from grinding down is what
really matters in the long run.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-42243227143731794692015-10-16T11:08:00.002-04:002015-10-16T11:08:33.993-04:00Not swinging for the fences<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’ve missed
writing an entry over the past couple of weeks because I’ve been working on a
short story for a journal. The deadline for the story was October 15, and I got
started on the story a bit late in the game. As such much of the time I would
usually dedicate to putting together a blog entry was turned over to developing
and refining the short story instead. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The reason
this particular story took on such importance for me is somewhat complicated. I
finished a novel this spring and over the summer began figuring out how to get
it out into the world. In the process I have come to understand what people
mean when they say the work of writing a book is only half finished when the
writing is done. After that you have to convince several layers of people that
what you have produced is interesting enough and marketable enough for them to
dedicate their resources towards publishing it. Not having any immediate
contacts, I went about trying to stir something up. I identified over one
hundred agents that were open to queries from new authors. I put together the
requisite materials to send to them along with a letter that was both
professional and inclusive of some individualized details. I mailed out the
queries ten at a time and then waited, hoping someone would take a flyer on me.
</div>
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After going through this cycle a
couple of times, I began to feel like I was playing the lottery. There is a big
prize out there and to get to it you have to play the game, but the numbers are
such that your odds of breaking through are ridiculously small. It’s not a
matter of quality. There are many stories out there. Some are great. Some are
horrible. Both types get through the process and into publication. But for a
person like me without any other contacts, credentials, or previously published
work, it’s mostly a matter of dumb luck.</div>
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This is a horrible position to be
in because you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again with the
hope that at some point it will produce different results. This creates a
feeling of powerlessness that leads people to consider all kinds of desperate
measures: phone calls to agent and publisher offices despite explicit
instructions not to call, ambushes on agents at writers’ conferences, repeated
spamming of agents and publishers in hopes of getting through. Some agents used
to exploit this desperation by charging fees for even reading a query and its
associated materials. While this practice has faded, it seems that they can
still get away with charging for face time at writers’ conferences (one in my
area was advertising fifteen minutes of one-on-one time with an agent for $25).</div>
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In September I began looking for
ways to change the balance of power. Agents and publishers need good material
from authors. They can’t make money without it. The question is how to become
known as someone who is producing good material and thus someone the agents and
publishers want to have working with them. The answer, I’ve decided, is to get material
out almost anywhere I can and then use those publications to leverage further
publications. It’s basically finding the bottom of the writing ladder and
methodically working my way up. One could also think of this in baseball terms as
going for singles and doubles instead of swinging for the proverbial home run. </div>
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What this means practically is that
I am backing away from my agent query efforts in favor of two other strategies.
The first is to find a smaller regional publisher for the novel I’ve already
completed. It isn’t doing me any good sitting around on my computer. Better to
get it out and have a few people in my area read it than have it grow stale
waiting for a big break. The second strategy is to try to publish short stories
in journals of increasing importance. This strategy is a long term effort, but
it has the upshot of getting me more practice at creating and crafting stories
and regularly engaging in the process of publication. Whether this will
ultimately get me where I want to go is uncertain. However, I like the idea of
working on something much more than sitting around hoping that someday somebody
will stumble upon me.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-10082416594965687322015-09-24T10:28:00.000-04:002015-09-24T10:28:00.172-04:00Quantum Leaps<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It seems
about every two weeks for the last couple of months I have found myself writing
about how Polly and Pip are aging right before our eyes. Much of this has to
with the new school year and the changing levels of expectations that occur as
they move up from one grade to the next. These moves create quantum leap
moments when the kids are suddenly asked to do things they haven’t before, and
we have to figure out how to make those things happen in ways that promote good
long-term habits. For Polly last year it was adjusting to kindergarten and
learning how to manage her feelings after a long day at school. For Pip, it was
shifting his expectations for doing homework from the ten minutes every other
day of first grade to the thirty minutes every day of second grade. Both
challenges were at the time overwhelming and fraught with their share of tears
but thankfully in time we all adjusted to these new realities.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This year
Polly’s leap involves spelling words. Polly watched for two years as Pip has
done his spelling words – writing them out on Mondays, putting them in
alphabetical order on Tuesdays, going through them with me on Wednesdays, and
doing a mock test on Thursdays. She hovered over his shoulder through it all
and took turns calling out words. She even created her own spelling lists from
time to time. So when her turn came around three weeks ago, she was close to
ecstatic. The moment she got home she whipped out her list of twelve words and
did all the assigned exercises for the week right then and there. Then she
brought the list over to me and had us run through them three times to make
sure she had them all right. The next day she had us do the same thing again.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While I was
thrilled by her enthusiasm, all of this spelling required me to do some balancing.
Pip still had his words to do as well and I needed to figure out how best to
split my time among the both of them. This was particularly true on Thursdays
when both wanted to do their mock tests at the same time. The first Thursday I
didn’t handle their competing pulls very well. In the middle of doing Polly’s
words Pip came in ready to do his. Polly got frustrated at the interruption,
and Pip got annoyed because I wasn’t ready when he was. This in turn made me
upset with both of them for having unreasonable expectations of what I could
actually do.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The next
Thursday, after establishing a schedule beforehand, things went much smoother.
We started with Pip and Polly reprised her roll of looking over my shoulder
while I called out his words. Once those were finished we flipped around on the
couch and did the same thing for Polly. The whole affair went so smoothly I
happily ran through Polly’s words a second time so she could organize them
according to their first letter. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was nice
having us all working together for a few minutes that day. It reminded me of
some of my favorite moments with them: the evenings in the winter when we
settle in on the couch and I read to them. Pip leans in at my shoulder to watch
the words go by on the page. Polly hangs out on my other side coloring or
fiddling with a stuffed animal. It has been a while since we’ve done that with
each other and it made me happy to have the spelling words bring that memory
back.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
***</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Pip’s
challenge this fall has been to take greater responsibility for organizing his
schoolwork. Every day he come home now with assignments in spelling, reading,
and math. At school his teacher expects him to write down his assignment off
the board each day, collect the proper classroom materials to bring home with
him, and get it all done and returned the next day. While he had the same
responsibility last year, the amount of material and the level of attention to
these details expected of him are significantly higher. The teacher doesn’t
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established for those who do<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>not get
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While Pip
is eight years old and it’s probably time for this shift in responsibility, the
change is still taking some getting used to. Pip’s already had to use a
homework pass after he left a worksheet at school and had to face one of the
consequences when he failed to write down his spelling words after he alphabetized
them. He’s never been punished at school for absentmindedness, and this new
regime is requiring him to recalculate what it means to be a good student. This
is all well and good but a touch frustrating for me to watch. I don’t mind
having consequences for failing to do what you need to get done. That’s a
necessary part of life. However, I like it much better when I’m in control of
those consequences instead of the teacher.</div>
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<br /></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-87569750950233827412015-09-17T10:51:00.002-04:002015-09-17T10:51:18.357-04:00The Lessons of Puzzles<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When I was
in elementary school I took part in a gifted and talented program at my school.
Once a week several of us were pulled out of our regular classrooms to come
together and work on things that we might not normally get a chance to do. This
program was by nature experimental. The whole point was not so much to push
kids further forward through the standard curriculum but to stretch their
thinking wider within that curriculum. Exactly what that stretching meant depended
both on what the students could handle and what the teacher could imagine. </div>
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My memories of the classes
themselves are fragmentary. I know that at some point we did a unit on
archaeology that I really enjoyed. In second grade, I remember trying to record
notes in my notebook with my left hand after breaking the wrist on my right. I
remember the location of the classroom – right off the gym in the back right
corner just before you went behind the stage. For one of the projects my group filmed
a war movie in my backyard. In another I tried to construct a working model of
a maglev train. For her class, my younger sister created a fake episode of the
nightly news to talk about what she’d learned in a unit about Australia. It
included headlines from the day, a weather report, and even a commercial for
Vegemite, a dark, yeasty spread that Australians use on breads and sandwiches. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
strongest memory from this program, however, came from an exercise that didn’t
work. During one unit on puzzles that we did in the fourth or fifth grade, the
teacher read us a set of stories in which something mysterious happened, and we
were supposed to piece together a solution to the mystery from the clues buried
in the story. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t do them. There was a leap of
imagination or a trick of logic in them that was beyond our capabilities. The
story I remember most clearly involved a man who had hung himself from the
highest rafter of an empty room, and no one could figure out how he got up
there. The only clue was the presence of a puddle of water underneath him. We
conjured all kinds of ways this man might have gotten up there – a pulley, a
secret trapdoor in the ceiling, climbing the rope. Our teacher kept leading us
back towards the water, clearly annoyed that we weren’t getting it. She kept
telling us to think about the water, that the water had to have something to do
with it, but we couldn’t think what that might be and thus kept spinning off in
other directions. Finally with time running out and all of us tired and
frustrated, the teacher gave us the answer: ice. The water had been a tall
block of ice that the man had used it to get up to the rafters. After a while
the ice melted leaving behind the puddle of water. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I always
thought the teacher could have done that exercise better. There had to be a
halfway point somewhere along the way where she could have told us something
more than to just look at the water. It was clear this wasn’t enough. It was
clear that we needed another step, not just to help solve the problem but also
to give us ideas about how to solve such problems in the future. Perhaps if
she’d taken us into a further discussion of the properties of water or maybe
helped us organize our thoughts in a different way we would have gotten there.
Regardless, there was a moment there for teaching something else, for teaching
ways to attack a problem when the answer isn’t immediately obvious, but the
teacher failed to grab it.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Polly
brought home an exercise from her weekly gifted and talented session at school
last Wednesday. The exercise contained three challenges, each of which involved
taking a shape made from toothpicks and moving a couple of sticks around to
make a new shape. They had done the first two problems at school and after
showing them to me and having me try them out, Polly proudly told me their
solutions, one of which she had come up with all on her own. The third problem
was intended for her to work on at home. Feeling confident, she dove in and
fiddled with the toothpicks, moving them in and out and around for a good ten
to fifteen minutes without success. Eventually she got frustrated and walked
away. She said that she’d try it again tomorrow, but I wasn’t sure she actually
would. She was stuck and couldn’t see a way forward. I had a flashback to a man
hanging from the rafters with a puddle of water beneath his feet.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The next
day after school, I asked Polly if she wanted to try the puzzle again. When she
demurred, I knew what would happen. She wouldn’t touch the puzzle again until the
following week when the teacher or some other student would present the
solution. Then Polly would bring it home to us, and happily show us how it’s
done, having learned from the exercise that if you wait long enough, someone
else will give you the answer. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That was
not the lesson I wanted her to have, so I had her sit down with me and together
we worked through the problem. While I knew what the answer was, I wasn’t that
concerned with getting her immediately to it. I wanted to walk her through the
process of thinking, to give her some directions about how to map out a
systematic breakdown of the problem when her first brainstorming stabs did not
meet with success. Ultimately, she already knew what she needed to do – take
each stick in turn and move it around until she found the one that made the
shape work – but she needed me to help keep her focused on doing that process
one complete step at a time. </div>
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Eventually we found the right stick.
The moment she slid that toothpick into place Polly could see the shape emerge
in front of her, and she jumped up from the table to do a little dance. She was
so proud of what she’d accomplished, proud that after being frustrated by the
problem the day before she came back to it and was able to find the solution,
proud of the idea that she was a person who could solve these kinds of
problems. </div>
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I don’t know whether in that moment
of exaltation she consciously remembered exactly how she’d gotten to the
solution, that it wasn’t an act of magic but one of systematic elimination that
had finally gotten her there. She’s six years old and even for adults such
distinctions can vanish very quickly. However, it gladdened my heart to find
her working a jigsaw puzzle later on that weekend and filling in the pieces
line by line. </div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-84600208169742250632015-09-10T10:28:00.001-04:002015-09-10T10:28:01.085-04:00Being Part of the Family<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My sister
lives out west with her boyfriend (let’s call him Michael). They’ve been
together for a couple of years now and bought a house together last Christmas,
but as they are on the front-end of the millennial generation no one was quite
sure whether they would bother with the whole wedding thing or not. The
question had been floating around the holidays and summer visits for a while
though I was never privy to a moment when it was brought out into the open.
Instead, we discussed it in quiet, gossipy undertones that always felt weirdly
hysterical. It wasn’t so much that we cared one way or the other whether they
officially got married. It was that we were plagued by the uncertainty of not
knowing what to expect from them. We couldn’t put them into our categorical box
and move on to other things because we didn’t know which box to put them in.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
resolution to all of this came last week with the news that Michael had finally
“popped the question.” This set off a flurry of text messages back and forth,
some phone calls, and a good bit of preliminary planning with regards to dates
and places and styles. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All the
fuss has made Pip and Polly a bit confused. They have met Michael during each
of the past two Christmases at my folk’s house and have found him to be fun in
a tentative, supplemental way. My mother tends to swarm the kids during this
time so it’s hard for anyone else to do much with them, but Michael has shared
his guitar with them and shown Pip some card tricks and let Polly try taking
some pictures with his camera. To them, he is an amusing side character,
someone who is there but not someone that they have particularly strong
feelings about. However, in the wake of his engagement to my sister, my mother
has told them both individually that Michael “is going to be part of our family
now.” She did this, I imagine, as a way of trying to explain what it means to
get married but all this did was make Polly and Pip more confused. “Being part
of the family” is an abstract concept. They are not abstract beings. So, they
turned to Ava and me to find out what this all means in practice.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The answer
is that Michael’s now “being part of the family” means practically nothing new.
We will not be seeing any more of him than before. Our knowledge (and trust or
lack thereof) of him will not suddenly change. He will still be subject to the
same positionality during family holidays and the same gradual processes of
incorporation that have been going on previously. He will become a more
familiar and more comfortable person to them over time (or he won’t). His now
being married to my sister will not change any of that. The biggest change I
can possibly see at this point is that the kids may call him Uncle Michael
instead of just Michael.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In thinking
about this question of what it means to be part of a family, particularly in an
era where so many families are like ours – spread broadly across the country –
I keep coming back to this idea: that family is much more about one’s history
together than one’s biological and legal ties. I have been thinking about this
along two distinct tracks. The first is that I have a couple of friends with
whom I keep in pretty regular contact. I’ve known them for close to two
decades. I went to college with them, saw them get their first jobs, watched
them get married, have kids, lose parents, get divorced. I’ve called them to
celebrate my own triumphs and to get advice on how to handle my own trials. I
trust them with thoughts I wouldn’t share with anyone else. I rely on them
almost as much as I rely on Ava. They are not blood. They are not family. But
as thick as we are together, they might as well be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My second
track of thinking has to do with biological parentage and adoption. In the last
decade or so, reproductive technologies have become a huge business for couples
who want to have children and are having trouble doing so. Ava and I were
fortunate enough to not have to endure this kind of struggle, so I obviously do
not know how it feels. However, given the cost and the effort involved with
these various procedures, I don’t quite understand why people are so ready to
undergo them. Is adoption really that difficult an option? Is there something
about the notion of a child not being really yours if it doesn’t share your
blood? This second thought strikes me as incredibly ridiculous. Having now
spent almost nine years with my children, I can say with authority that who
they are has little to nothing to do with their biology. Their thoughts, their
feelings, their reactions to situations, their likes, their dislikes – all of
it comes from what they’ve learned by being around Ava and me. They are our
children because we raised them. We are a family because of the time and effort
we expend on each other. We are a family because of our history, not our
biology.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And so,
Michael is going to be part of our family now, except that he’s really not. Not
yet anyway. For that we’ll still need a little more time.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-67351186374120465862015-09-04T11:46:00.001-04:002015-09-04T11:46:31.567-04:00The Rise of the Locavore Economy<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One of the
noticeable economic developments of the last couple of years in our area has
been the explosion of what I will call ’locavore goods,’ products made and sold
locally usually by small and startup producers. One strand of this explosion represents
a kind of local boosterism: t-shirts and bumper stickers displaying outlines of
our state or slogans such as ;our state kicks ass; There are also a share of
inside jokes such as the dark blue shirt with the word Y’ALL spelled out in bold
white letters. Many of these strike me as the hipster equivalent of college or
professional sports paraphernalia. </div>
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Another vein of this development is
the emergence of various cottage industries experimenting with all kinds of
different twists on everyday products. Beer is the most obvious example of
this. We have at least three significant craft brewing operations now in town,
each one offering its own takes on a certain genre of the larger beer market
(German beers, American wheat beers, flavored beers). But we also have folks
creating their own barbeques, ice creams, soaps, truffles, dog treats, sodas,
and more.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In many
respects this cottage production is very attractive. People are imagining
creative projects and finding opportunities to sell them. They are
experimenting with and synthesizing various flavors, textures, colors, and the
like and coming out with a whole range of new and intriguing things to buy. Few
if any of these things will spread into markets beyond our city, but that’s not
really the point of all of this. These folks are not looking for a multi-million
dollar business idea. They are trying things out, experimenting, playing, creating
and in the process fulfilling some of the more salutary impulses of our human
condition.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The rise of
these local producers has gone hand in hand in our city with the emergence of
the ’market’ as a social event. Our city has had a lively downtown farmers’
market now for at least a decade, and over time this event has become a common
place for cottage producers to shop their wares. The setup costs are low –
often a table, table cloth, and some samples – and a critical mass is already
at hand: the people who are willing to pay a little extra to buy produce
directly from local farmers are also the same people who are more likely to try
locally made pasta, gourmet popcorn, or an array of salsas and beer cheeses. It
is a fortuitous convergence of interests amplified by a certain level of
discretionary income and the sense that buying such locavore goods has some
vaguely beneficial effect on our community.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Looking to
build on this convergence, groups in other parts of the city have started
organizing night markets on various weekend evenings. Offering music, local
beer, and tables or booths filled with locavore goods, these markets have been
very successful in drawing herds of upwardly mobile singles and young families
out to browse and mingle in the fading sunlight of a warm summer evening. These
markets have become a kind of see-and-be-seen event and, by bringing people
into parts of the city they might otherwise have never have seen, have created
a new process of micro-scale tourism within the city itself.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
About this time every summer, one
of the streets in our neighborhood hosts a big party. The organizers typically
block off one of the streets, rent an inflatable waterslide for the kids, have
the local firefighters come and show off a truck, put on a series of dog, kid,
and parent footraces, and finish the evening off with a low-rent band playing underneath
a makeshift tent on someone’s lawn. It is a cool, laid back scene where
everyone brings a dish to share, old neighbors introduce themselves to new
ones, and kids run up and down the street in packs, weaving in and out of
parental knots and reveling in the freedom to jump around in the middle of the
road. For several years it has been one of the highlights of our summer.</div>
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This year on the weekend that the
neighborhood street party usually occurs, the development behind our
neighborhood – an old warehouse area that has been recently outfitted with art
studios, a yoga place, a cabinetry shop, a pottery maker, and a French bakery
among other things – decided to have a night market of its own. Posters and
flyers went up around the city, and people came flocking in. It seemed to be a
big hit: a bluegrass band played throughout up on a temporary stage, the local
ballet company gave a short performance, one of the local breweries poured beer
as fast as they could, and all the shops brought out things on to the sidewalks
for people to browse. I imagine the developers and shop owners were immensely
pleased.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
We were not. In the midst of all
the market activity our neighborhood street party never happened. I don’t know
if the folks who usually organize the party decided to help out with the night
market instead or if the timing was just such that no other good weekend was
available. Whatever it was, we kept looking out for notices about the party for
the two weeks after the night market and were disappointed that nothing came
along. Our locality, our community event had been run over.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There are
two things I will take away from this experience. The first is that tourism as
an engine of economic growth has more costs than we often acknowledge. Walking
through the night market that weekend, I found myself cast in the role of
unhappy native. All of these strangers had flooded into my world to eat, drink,
and shop with my neighborhood as an exotic backdrop. This was supposed to be
good for us. It was supposed to be bringing in money and making our area more
attractive, lifting the property values of our homes and making our lives
richer. But all I could think was that this invasion was not to my liking. I’m
quite happy with our neighborhood as it is (or was) and these ’improvements’
feel more like things people tell me I should want instead of things that will actually
make my life better. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The second
thing I came away with is that business – whether it’s giant corporations or
small-time cottage producers – has its own logic. For business, the big crowds of
a night market are good. Not only does it mean there are lots of potential
customers, but the noise of the music and the flow of people prevent one from
stopping in the middle of things to really talk with somebody. I saw several of
my neighbors that evening at the night market. If we’d been at our street party
we’d have stood around in the middle of the street and talked about the world
for ten minutes or an hour. I would have lost track of much that was going on
around me and never felt bothered or pushed or in the way. But at the night
market there was no such space for that kind of indulgence. Instead, we waved
or exchanged a cursory greeting before going our separate ways. The only places
to really pause were in front of the shops and tables and even then it was loud
enough that a real conversation wasn’t truly possible. Instead, you wound up
looking at the goods displayed around you. The night market may have been
promoted as a place to come and hang out with friends and be part of a
community, but its structure made it difficult to do anything but shop. </div>
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The logic of business possesses its
own values, and we should always be careful about thinking otherwise. This is
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to the community. It is great that the revenue they generate remains in place
and furthers the development of businesses in our city. But we shouldn’t lose
sight of the fact that buying and selling are not the same thing as creating
community, and we must always be careful lest the former completely overwhelms the
latter.</div>
<br /><br />
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-90482499005638486052015-08-28T10:27:00.000-04:002015-08-28T10:27:07.458-04:00Forty-Six<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For reasons
that will remain obscure for now, Ava measured Polly’s height yesterday. This
is not something we’ve done on a regular basis except at doctors visits, and
those numbers go flying out of our minds by the time the doctor moves on to
looking in their ears. They have always appeared to be growing at appropriate
rates. They’re about average among their peers, maybe even a bit taller though
only if you look really closely. Their clothing sizes have progressed as we’d
expect as well. Pip’s wearing 8-10’s. Polly’s wearing 6-8’s. With all of these
other markers giving us positive returns, there’s been no impetus to keep a
close eye on their actual heights. If you’d asked me before yesterday how tall
each child is, I’d probably have guessed that Polly clocks in at a little over
three feet, and Pip somewhere around four.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
estimate would have been wrong. According to Ava, Polly is now forty-six inches
tall. Forty-six inches; as in only two inches below the four foot barrier.
That’s incredible. She’s six years old. I didn’t think she’d hit that level
until she was at least eight. She’s huge.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Except that
she’s not. My expectations were obviously out-of-whack, and that ignorance left
me open to being dumbfounded. Again Polly is about the same height as most of
her classmates. Four feet must be about average for a six-year-old girl. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All the
same that number, forty-six, was a shock. I don’t know how old I was when I
passed four feet as a kid, but I remember feeling like it was a milestone. I
remember looking in the mirror and trying to imagine what I’d be like when I
passed five feet. I must have felt pretty old because in my mind crossing that
barrier seemed like a big step towards growing up. To have Polly already
approaching that line was something for which I was completely unprepared. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Kids grow
up fast. It’s a horrible cliché, and every time I use it (which, with the start
of school last week, has been awfully frequent) my stomach churns a bit. But
every once in a while something makes me feel that way all the same. I think
what’s really at work in this are two discrepancies between the way the kids
are actually growing and the way I perceive them to be growing. The first is
that when the kids were babies there were obvious developmental milestones:
rolling over, crawling, pulling up, saying words, saying sentences, eating
solid food, using a spoon, using a toilet, sleeping through the night, running,
reading, riding a bicycle. As we ticked through these we always had a sense of
what the next one should be, what the next thing we should be looking for. It
was a regular check-in for growth. We could anticipate them and look out for
them and be excited when they arrived. Growing up was a process of almost daily
change, one filled with hurdles to overcome and successes to celebrate. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Now the milestones are more subtle
and ambiguous. The kids read a little better than they did several months
before. They speak a little clearer. They run a little faster. None of these
things are marked by a definitive shift of any sort. None of them contain the
same celebratory, “we made it,” kind of sense of achievement. Instead, they’re
all sort of impressionistic. We guess that something has changed from one month
to the next, but it’s hard to be sure until one of these random markers come
along. Last week it was <a href="http://postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-challenges-of-growing-older.html">Pip trying out the role of facilitator in a game ofMastermind</a>. This week Polly clocked in at forty-six inches in height. Next week
it may be something else. Or nothing at all. We may go several months before
something else strikes me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
And this is where the second difference
comes into play. It’s largely a corollary to the first, but it’s worth
elucidating all the same. For the last two years or so, we’ve been doing mostly
the same kinds of things. What I mean by this is that we’ve been getting up at
about the same times, eating the same kind of foods, riding bikes places, going
to school, doing homework, playing in the yard, etc. The general scope of our
activities has followed a regular pattern. The kids like to go to the library
and the park. They enjoy swimming and hiking in the summer and going sledding
in the winter. They add a few new wrinkles and games to the patterns from time
to time and both are both doing things at increasing levels of sophistication
but all these things are still fit within a general frame of likes and dislikes
that has remained largely unchanged over the past couple of years. This
consistency lends itself to a feeling of stasis, even timelessness to a certain
extent, as if we can and will keep doing these things this way for eternity
(which would be okay by me). Then a reminder comes around – forty-six inches! –
that such timelessness is an illusion, and sometimes it takes a few moments to
recover my senses. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I’m glad Polly and Pip are growing
tall and smart and strong, but, my goodness, what I wouldn’t give to have it all
happen just a tiny bit slower.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-13900732390549590102015-08-19T12:05:00.000-04:002015-08-19T12:05:19.942-04:00The Challenges of Growing Older<div class="MsoNormal">
This summer
Polly and Pip have started looking older to me. It’s been about two years since
this last happened. When they were four and six respectively, they started
losing the softness around their stomachs and growing longer limbs. Now, those
limbs are becoming more and more muscular. Polly’s arms slope outward at the
shoulder, and Pips legs have gotten tautly bunched above and below the knees.
Their faces have changed, too. They’re more engaged and articulate, more
complex. They’re no longer cute. I look into their eyes, and I expect a level
of sophistication from them that I never had expected before.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is not a
coincidence that as Pip and Polly have come to look increasingly older, Ava and
I have come to expect a greater level of responsibility from them. We’ve
started asking them to take on more aspects of household maintenance – helping
with dishes, making beds, laying out clothes for school the next day, cleaning
bathrooms. We haven’t made any big speeches about these things or tried to tie
them to particular ideas like “being older” or “being in first/third grade.”
Instead, we’ve just started asking them more often to do things to help us out
around the house. Right now it’s actually kind of fun because things like
filling the water jugs or cracking eggs or tearing up lettuce for salad are new
activities for the kids. They get to figure out how to do them and what these
previously unknown experiences feel like. Plus, Polly and Pip both like feeling
useful and we make a big deal out of how helpful they are being. I imagine all
of this will get harder once the novelty has worn off.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This
gradually emerging sense of being older is bringing with it some bittersweet
moments for the kids as well. A couple of mornings ago just before school
started up again, I was making lunch in the kitchen while Pip and Polly were
hanging out together in the living room. They were playing a kids’ version of
the classic game Mastermind in which each player has a secret stack of
different animals and the opponent has to deduce the order of the stack by
asking questions such as “Is the lion above the giraffe?” or “is the penguin
below the monkey?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, we’ve
been playing games like Memory, Go Fish, Bingo, and Chutes and Ladders for
several years, and usually Polly’s interest in these games trends towards being
silly with them rather than trying to win them. She likes messing around with
patterns, making goofy faces, laughing at odd coincidences that come along. It
isn’t that she doesn’t like to win, but she’s never gotten particularly
invested in winning as a measure of whether something was fun or not.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But that
morning was different. Whether it was because the game came from Grandma or
because it involved animals – her self-proclaimed area of expertise – or
because it was just her time, that morning Polly decided winning was important.
She was going to be the Mastermind champion or the world was going to end.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This
development wasn’t terribly surprising. When Pip was six years old, we started
playing Checkers together, and it was one of the more tortured experiences of
his life. Because he had never played a game through to the end, he couldn’t
see past the immediate visceral emotion of each and every move. He would gloat
over every successful jump and get teary every time he lost a checker. I was
constantly having to coax him along by making silly mistakes that gave him a
jump or by offering obvious hints about where he might best move to get closer
to getting kinged. This coaxing I found to be especially hard because I wanted
to try out some of my own strategies to see how they would work. I wanted to be
able to win. But I also wanted to keep playing. I was enjoying thinking through
things and talking with Pip over the game board, and if I always pounced on
Pips mistakes he’d get so frustrated he never come back to the game again. I
struggled constantly with finding the balance and often finished an evening
feeling like I’d done more harm than good.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Listening
in from the kitchen while I flipped grilled cheeses in the skillet, I heard the
sound of Polly celebrating as she won the first two games. She was jumping up
and down happily while Pip clicked the animal tiles back into the pile. A few
minutes later as I went to pull some bananas from the fruit bowl, I was
surprised to hear Pip bellow like an elephant and subsequently give a gentle
lion’s roar. Following another celebratory dance by Polly things seemed to get quieter
and more serious. I put some corn on the stove to cook and tried to listen in to
the background of their game but all I could hear was the volley of questions –
“Is your hippo above your peacock?”, “No. Is your snake below your alligator?”
Then while the corn was finishing up, there came this huge wail from Polly. A
moment later, Pip came around the corner with tears in his eyes, saying “I just
wanted to win once Daddy and now she won’t play anymore.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
He had held back for three full
games, coaxing Polly along, giving her hints, watching her celebrate when she
won. He had played my role and had done it well. They were having fun together,
talking and playing, but there was this little bug in the back of his mind. He wanted
his chance to win, too. He wanted to be able to turn it all lose and just play
the game and not worry about the larger picture for a few minutes. And so he
did. And he won. And now he was feeling hollow and horrible because Polly’s
aura of invincibility had been shattered and she didn’t want to play anymore
while all he really wanted was to go back to the genial back and forth they’d
had going while she was winning. He was miserable because this is exactly what
he knew would happen and yet he couldn’t quite rein himself in and let her keep
winning.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pip and
Polly haven’t played Mastermind again since that morning. I don’t know whether
that’s because of how things ended that day or because they got distracted by
other games (we’ve been playing a lot of Uno recently). Whichever the case,
they’re both a bit older now. Polly got an exposure to handling sudden
reversals of fortune which will hopefully make the next one easier to deal
with. Pip began to figure out a new complication when it comes to playing
games. In both cases I think they are getting another step closer to the kind
of people we ultimately want them to be. <o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-39940309500433456672015-08-01T20:29:00.001-04:002015-08-01T20:29:49.767-04:00The Nana Cannonball<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This past
weekend Ava, Polly, Pip, and I made a surprise trip to visit my parents in
order to celebrate my dad’s seventieth birthday. I’m not a big fan of surprises
– they tend to require a lot of extra effort for a relatively small amount of
extra return – but my mom wanted to do things this way, and she got the
reaction she was hoping for. Dad was happily befuddled when he came home from
playing nine holes of golf to find us all gleefully splashing around in the
lake along which they live. He was even more surprised when my sister arrived a
couple of hours later, having flown in from out west for the weekend. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Between the
birthday celebrations and all the time available to swim and play in water, it
turned out to be a very fun weekend. Mom and Dad stayed up late on Thursday
night drinking wine and hanging out with friends. Pip got to paddle all about
the cove on Mom and Dad’s newly acquired paddleboard. Polly experimented with
jumping from the dock and letting her head go under water. Ava and I bounced
around in the middle of the water on a large purple inner tube.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
But the image I’ll remember the
most from those couple of days is the Nana cannonball.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Nana, as
Pip and Polly call my mom, likes to play with the kids. She splashes in the
water with them. She creates daily scavenger hunts for them that end with silly
dollar-store prizes. She chases them around the yard with water squirters. She
fills up water balloons for them to throw at her and each other. Part of this
represents the engagement of a former kindergarten teacher with her
grandchildren, but much of it is also her personality: playing with the kids
allows her to be silly in a way that playing with adults never does.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So it
wasn’t that surprising on Friday afternoon when she decided to join Pip in doing
a series of jumps off the dock. Now Pip had been periodically hurling himself
off the dock all day, doing cannonballs, karate kicks, long jumps, spins, and
several other falls that defy quick description. I’d gone with him from time to
time because there’s something infinitely fun about flinging yourself out into
the air and flying for a moment before crashing down in a massive splatter of
water. I think Nana had been watching and wanted in on the fun, too.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She started
off with a placid hop, just kind of jumping off the edge and dropping down into
the water feet first while covering her face with her hands. This prim little
jump was treated as a pretty big deal by several of the neighbors and friends who
were hanging out and floating around the dock at the time. It’s unusual for any
of that group to jump into the water at all, much less get their hair wet. Nana
made this point herself several times as she climbed back out of the water and
pondered whether to do it again. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Fortunately, the exhilaration of
that first leap had gotten into her, and she soon walked back around to do
another jump. The second time she followed Pip and I into the water, Nana
stretched herself a little and did a toothpick, hopping out and straightening
her body while again covering her face then plunging sharply down through the
surface with barely a splash. Pip was quite enamored with this and scurried out
to try it for himself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then, after
doing a second toothpick, Nana announced that she was ready to go whole hog;
she was going to do a cannonball. This earned a cheer from the assembled
neighbors as she set herself up a couple of steps back from the edge of the
dock. Then, she took two or three jogging steps forward and hopped up into the
air. It was something to see, this sixty-five year old woman, wiry and tan,
hair dyed a blondish brown to hide the gray, who just the night before was the
gracious hostess for a party of upper middle class country clubbers, curling
her legs in against her chest, pulling her arms around them, and rolling her
shoulders into a ball to plunk through the surface and send big fat drops of
water showering into the air. When her head popped back above the surface, a
goofy smile growing on her face, she received another full round of cheers from
us all.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>After the
cannonball Nana turned it all loose. She did crazy spider jumps. She did long
jumps. She did another cannonball. She came back the next afternoon and did
some more. Pip was thrilled to see her go, and I think Nana had way more fun
than even she would have imagined at the start.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
When I was a teenager I had a poster
hanging over my bed with the image of a mansion and a garage filled with exotic
sports cars. The caption across the top read <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">’</span>Motivation for Higher Education.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">’</span>
It was silly and ridiculous, but it served an important function all the same. By
giving me an image of who I might become, by giving me a target if you will,
that poster became a touchstone for making choices about my life. It served in
many ways as a measuring stick to help me decide which opportunities were worth
going for and which ones to let slide on by. Over time my ideas about what’s
important have changed and that poster no longer hangs on my wall. All the
same, the importance of having an image to look forward to, having an image around
which to crystallize a certain concept of my future self remains strong. When I
saw my mom pull off that cannonball, I knew immediately that’s the kind of
person I wanted to be: the kind of person who is interested in doing silly
things with the kids, the kind of person who is playful without being
obnoxious, the kind of person who is willing to get their hair wet because the
fun of the moment is absolutely worth the clean-up later on. These were not new
revelations. These were things I’ve known about myself for a very long time.
But still, I hadn’t had a good image to bring them all together, to remind
myself in moments of indecision who I really want to be. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Now, I do.</div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-58026735620468719542015-07-17T10:13:00.002-04:002015-07-17T10:13:37.209-04:00Fields of Joy<div class="MsoNormal">
Last
weekend we went blackberry picking in former pasture land that has been turned
into an ecological research area by Ava’s university. The area is usually
closed to people not doing some kind of research in it but for two weeks or so
each summer the overseers open up the trails for folks like us who want to
harvest blackberries from the various patches that dot the open meadow. Picking
the berries is something of an adventure as they grow on stalks full of thorns
that grab at your hands and clothing as you try to get at their fruit. It can
be quite painful if they get stuck in your skin. In addition, as the area is
being allowed to regrow from pasture into forest and brushland, wild things
abound. You have to be smart about how far into the brush you’re willing to reach
to get at a berry. Last year we went in a bit too far and suffered the
consequences. Pip, in particular, acquired a distinct arcing trail of chigger
bites all the way across his back. This year we were more cautious about
stepping off the trail and managed to stay largely free of bites. We did,
however, collect our share of ticks along our pant legs and were warned off
from going down one branch of the trail by the agitated huffing of what we now
think was a wild boar.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite all
of that we managed to fill a gallon sized Ziploc bag with berries after about
90 minutes of picking. Ava and Pip took the lead on this, plunging ahead along
the path and grabbing most of the ripe berries within reach. Polly, dressed in
a long sleeved shirt and red stretchy pants with little pandas on them, was a
touch overwhelmed by the heat and hung back with me as I gleaned through
whatever was left. The two of us had a nice time of things casually strolling
through the meadow, Polly pointing out dark, plump clusters for me to pick, and
the both of us stopping to examine anything interesting that caught our eye. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was
particularly nice because as Ava and Pip rounded the bend and eased out of
sight, Polly and I had some one on one time together. Moving by ourselves we
found numerous June bugs, a brown, leaf-eating insect tucked under a briar, and
a silvery green grasshopper that was smaller than a peanut. We listened to cows
mooing and a donkey braying in a field across the way. We watched as red-winged
blackbirds swooped low across the head-tall growth around us and finches rode
back and forth on the stalks of purple flowered thistle. Polly was particularly
intrigued by the numerous strands of Queen Anne’s Lace that lined the path and
we found opportunities to compare its various stages of growth from fibrous stalk
to hairy bud to delicate bouquet of croqueted white flowers. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For half an
hour or so, it was just the two of us together, and she was perfectly content
going along with me. Her normal impulse is to stay close to Pip so as to make
sure she doesn’t miss out on anything he might be doing. However, for that
time, being with me was interesting enough or attractive enough to override
that impulse, a fact that gave me an endless feeling of joy. At one level it’s
always nice to feel engaged with someone in a process of mutually exchanged
attentions. This is especially true when it comes to parents and children as I
usually find myself being either the giver or demander of attention. It is the
rare time that my kids and I come to a truly collaborative moment that hasn’t
been engineered by Ava or me for some larger purpose. At another level, I’m
always a slight bit unsure about what to expect from Polly in those kind of
moments. With Pip, I’m his best friend. We talk. We play. We work together. He
always wants me to do something with him. With Polly, there’s a touch of
distance. I’m much more conscious of being her parent than I am with Pip. I’m
always aware that she has a lifeworld that is distinctly separate from mine. She
doesn’t automatically jump at the opportunity to go run errands with me or play
in the yard together. She enjoys playing with me but sometimes she’d rather do
something else with Ava or play on her own. This feeling of separation doesn’t
create problems between us, but it does make me feel as if I have to earn
things a bit more with her. I tend to coax her more when it comes to things
like learning how to read or figuring out how to ride a bicycle. I’m less
certain about what games she might and might not enjoy. I’ve let her do things
like climb up a ladder with me that I would not have done for Pip. In this way
we probably re-enact a fairly typical father-daughter relationship.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
And so, to get a half-hour with
Polly and to get it right, to not be overbearing or too eager, to find our
rhythm together, make me feel like our time in the berry field was time well
spent. Polly and I didn’t leave that field with many berries in our bucket but
that’s not really why we were out there anyway. Picking berries, going on
vacations, playing in the park, these are things we do in order to spend real,
decent time with our kids. It doesn’t always come together in the way that we
want, but happily on this trip it did.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-90879587816381600652015-07-08T09:32:00.000-04:002015-07-08T09:32:23.030-04:00Growth, both personal and communal<div class="MsoNormal">
Over the
last two weeks we were mostly on the road visiting my parents. They’re living
the retirement dream on a lake with a dock, a boat, and a jetski, and it means
that whenever we visit them water plays a large role in whatever we do. For me
this is great. I love swimming and water skiing and messing around on the
jetski. I’ve done those things for over half my life. For the kids it’s a more
fraught proposition, as we are constantly having to balance what different adults
– me, Ava, my parents – want them to do and what they’re capable of enjoying.
They’ve had a gradual introduction first to the dock then the next year to the
boat and last year to the jetski. This year it was time to go all in. We
strapped lifevests on them both and let them hop into the water to swim around
with relative freedom. And they loved it. In fact, they could not get enough of
the water. We had to drag them out each day to get food into them. We spent
almost four full days at my parents and never got into our cars to go anywhere.
Every time we asked either child what they wanted to do the answer was, “Swim
in the lake.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wasn’t
surprised that they liked it. It just caught me off guard how much they did. I
guess I’d forgotten how much fun it is to splash and jump and paddle and kick
and bob in the water. Polly in particular was giddy. She would bob up and down
and do circles in the water over and over again. She blew bubbles and dunked
her face. She practiced her doggie-paddle and even stretched her arms out for a
couple strokes of freestyle. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I’d been a bit worried coming into
the summer about getting them both into swim lessons because we had not had
much water time last year and being 6 and 8 years old the window for getting
comfortable in the water is wide open. It turns out that all we needed was a
full week of hot weather and a body of water close at hand. By the end of our
visit with my folks – which included a three day jaunt down to the glorious
beaches of South Carolina – Pip was jumping in deep water and treading with the
calm of one who knows he can keep his head above the surface and Polly was
leaping from the wall and willingly letting her head go underwater before I
caught her. They were both experimenting with what they could do, inching along
a little further without us having to push or cajole. It was the kind of
learning one hopes for, the kind of learning that really sticks, perhaps the
only kind of learning that really works in the end. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The one
non-water related event of interest for us that came out of our visit to my
parents was the opportunity to watch a couple of games of the Womens World Cup.
At home our television is not hooked up to any outside source of programming so
we don’t have the ability to watch sporting events as they happen or even tape
them for later. My folks have both and so we took the opportunity to watch the
US-Australia game on tape and the France-Germany game as it happened. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It was hard for me to watch these
games and not view them through the lens of the last time I’d really paid attention
to women’s soccer: 1999 Women’s World Cup. In 1999 the discourse around women’s
soccer was something along the lines of, “Hey, women can play exciting soccer,
too.” It was a kind of defensive posture that indicated that this idea was
something of a novelty. As we watched the games this past week, I was reminded
of this a couple of times when my father – not a caveman but prone to
occasionally making a socially dated remark – made a big deal out of one of the
German players spitting on the field and then later asked if everyone was
wearing shin guards. It was as if he was surprised that what we were watching
was a hard-fought athletic endeavor and not some kabuki theater presentation
put on for the sake of gender equity. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Now I don’t believe that this was his
actually thought process. His words came out of habitual reflex more than
intent. And my immediate feelings of defensiveness were just the same. I wasn’t
just watching some games. I was purposefully giving my attention to these teams
as part of a larger social project. It was politics as much as it was entertainment.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Fortunately, Polly and Pip have no
such habits. They haven’t watched enough sports to care whether the players on
the field are men or women. They don’t hear the title “Women’s World Cup” and
think of that as some lesser version of the “real” World Cup. They got to watch
the games and enjoy them for the entertainment they are and not the politics
they represent. They got to watch France play Germany and get attached to their
attacking style and feel crushed when the final French shooter missed her
penalty kick all without the baggage of wondering how it compared to a men’s
game. They got to cheer when Megan Rapinoe scored that first goal for the
United States against Australia and ooh and aah when Hope Solo made a couple of
diving saves early on. And while we didn’t watch the final on Sunday night,
they’ll get to see highlights of Carli Lloyds spectacular hat-trick and revel
in the pure stunning amazement that sports can bring without being bothered by
any of the old questions. Frankly, it makes me jealous.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-82734037170275192512015-06-19T10:06:00.003-04:002015-06-19T10:06:47.301-04:00Lessons in What I Really Think<div class="MsoNormal">
The kids
got out of school three weeks ago. Since then we’ve taken them to one
grandmother, I spent a long weekend in Pittsburgh with my friends, and we are
now preparing to take them to visit more grandparents. Put all this in
combination with the reduced amount of time available to write and I haven’t
been able to get anything together for a while now. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Of course that doesn’t mean things
haven’t been happening that are worth talking about. We’ve been to museums. We’ve
played on the playground with school friends and hashed over the dynamics of
who got in to the accelerated program and who didn’t. We’ve been to hipster
festivals and faced the contradictions of being old and being cool. We’ve had
dinner with friends and come home wondering when we’ll ever let our children go
to someone else’s house without one of us coming along. We’ve changed our
naptime to rest time and have reaped the benefits of a happier afternoon Polly.
Each of these was worth more than one sentence and maybe in a quieter time I’ll
come back to them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Today, however, I wanted to write
about the challenges that having kids constantly presents to what we know about
ourselves. As a person, I have a well-established sense of what I believe about
the world and what values should - in general - guide my choices. Until I had
children I didn’t have to think about these things too much because I moved
within worlds that only challenged my values sporadically. Now, however, I feel
as if Pip and Polly bring such challenges to me almost every day, from deciding
how much candy I’m willing to let them have to what clothes they should wear to
how much roughhousing is too much. In the process I’m constantly surprised
about which choices I actually make and the unrealized assumptions that
underlie them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In the last three weeks I have stumbled
into two moments in particular where this dynamic between what I thought I knew
about myself and what I actually do has been brought into contrast. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The first came during a hike the
kids and I took two weekends ago. We went out to a gorge about an hour outside
of town that has a wonderful array of sandstone arches, rock shelters, and
little creeks and spent a full morning going working our way across a
ridgeline, down to a creek, along the gorge floor, and then back up past a huge
arch. The whole loop was about three and half miles long and to keep the kids
interested I gave them a pretty free rein to run up ahead and explore. When the
path made it down to the little rocky creek it did so in this beautiful spot
where the creek curved in a large arc and the space between was filled with
large old-growth trees and soft beds of pine needles. The kids wanted to play
in the creek, hopping along its banks and pulling up rocks to throw into the
deeper pools, but I hesitated. When out in the woods we try to practice Leave
No Trace hiking. We stay on established trails. We pack out our trash. We don’t
bring rocks home with us. By doing this we hope to preserve the wild spaces we
travel through for others to enjoy as we did. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Certainly, tearing up rocks from a
creek bed qualifies as leaving a trace. Not only that, if every group that came
through that spot tore up rocks and splashed them in the pools it would
distinctly change, if not ultimately destroy, the very thing about that spot
that made it wonderful. At the same time, I want Polly and Pip to enjoy being
out in the woods. I want them to see it as a living place where they can
explore and learn about the world and themselves. If we treat the woods as a
pristine place where things cannot be touched and moved around, where we can
only walk and look then they become as sterile and distant as a museum. Loving
the woods is as much about getting dirty, feeling the wind in one’s hair,
experiencing the rain on your skin, hearing the crunch of things around you,
feeling mud between your fingers. To not fear the woods you have to touch it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
So I let them play and splash and
run and laugh. They wound up with wet shoes and mud stained clothes and very
large smiles. I’m not sure it was the right decision in the grand scheme of
public preservation, but I know it was the right decision for our family’s
further interest in going out into the woods.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The second moment of political
difficulty involves playing soccer. Polly enjoyed playing soccer this spring
and is interested in continuing to play this fall. The league in which she
would play has a co-ed division and an all-girls division posing an interesting
gender dilemma. Ava is inclined towards the former arguing that she (and the
boys) would benefit from having her in there working and battling side-by-side.
She would conceivably have to fight more for her place in this environment, but
Ava felt like this was an important aspect of the world for her to learn to
handle. By the end of the spring season I was leaning the other way. In joining
an all girls league I felt as if Polly will get more time to handle the ball
during games and will probably find more immediate success. I felt as if this
would lead to her enjoying the game more in general and might incline her to
continue playing longer. Throughout the season I felt as if the girls on the
team deferred to the boys or waited for them to do something on the field
before following along.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
While we haven’t yet made a final
decision (Polly has raised the possibility of doing gymnastics but hasn’t yet
indicated which shed select), I have come to the realization that Ava is right.
Polly should be in the co-ed league. More importantly, I am finding that my
observations about the girls’ experiences on our team may have been more
colored by certain mistaken assumptions than I understood. The two older girls
on the team were a year younger than the oldest boys. When I think back over
the season and compare those girls to the boys who were their same age instead
of too all the boys, the picture that emerges looks different that I originally
thought. The younger players, boys and girls, were always having to claw the
ball away from the older ones. Age was the great divider, not gender. The seven
year old girls were doing all the same things as the seven year old boys. Their
skill levels and strength levels were equivalent. Their successes and failures
were all very similar. Even their relations to the kids who were older and
younger were largely the same. I was just seeing the girls’ frustrations with
the older players through the wrong lens. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Raising children is eternally
humbling. It is forever revealing things about me that I never fully understood.
Some of these things are wonderful and some of these things are roundly
disappointing. Either way, it’s quite an education in itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-83111475112139412192015-05-27T13:27:00.001-04:002015-05-27T13:27:31.623-04:00Imagining new parenting metrics<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sometimes an idea needs to germinate. Last week I mused
about the perpetual uncertainty that parents face in understanding what things
matter when it comes to raising their children. Unfortunately, I feel like I
didn’t get any farther than saying that successes and failures come from some
mix of biological capacity and cultural training and that it’s hard to know
which matters more in a given situation. I did start to talk about the
emergence of advanced metrics in the NBA but only used that to whine that no
such metrics are possible for parents. What I really should have done was to build
on the comparison and imagine what such a system might look like anyway. So,
that’s what I want to do now.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To start
with let me back up and talk briefly again about the NBA system. Owned and run
by a company called STATS, LLC, <a href="http://theairspace.net/technology-2/bigger-than-lebron-how-sportvu-will-change-basketball/">SportVU is a system of motion tracking cameras and data collection software that was fully installed in all NBA arenas for the 2013-2014 season.</a> It creates a data set 25 times a second, allowing for a host
of experimentation and development in the analysis of player activity on the
court. While the development of new metrics in baseball – where each play can be
broken down into discrete moments of individual input-output measures - took
off back in the 1990s, it wasn’t until the development of this technology
enabled an analysis of holistic secondary and tertiary effects that such
metrics began emerging in basketball. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What I’ve
been playfully imagining over the past several days is something akin to
ParentVU wherein the secondary and tertiary effects of parenting activity could
be analyzed and accounted for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
plenty of studies have attempted to correlate discrete parental actions with
various measures of child success – for example, time spent reading to children
or meals eaten together – much like the rough measures of points scored and
rebounds gained, these measures don’t really tell us much about how these
things happen and consequently can only give us rough feedback about what
parenting strategies are most effective. A good player scores a lot of points
and grabs a lot of rebounds but that doesn’t give a team a good sense of how
that player fits together with other teammates most effectively. Similarly, a
good parent reads a lot to their children and eats meals with them but that
doesn’t amount to much of a strategic guide when it comes to the full array of
challenges that come with being a parent. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What one
would hypothetically want to do instead is, like an NBA team, record every move
made by a parent and child over time and look for ways to correlate parental
inputs with filial outputs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This, of
course, would require a level of surveillance that feels downright terrifying
on the face of it, but for the sake of this post I’m going to skip past the privacy/ethical/logistical
quandaries for now and imagine what kind of metrics we might be able to develop
from it. I’ve come up with several from my own experience that I’d love to
track. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>- “Do as I
say” ratio – tracks the consistency between what parents ask children to do and
the things parents do themselves</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>- Eye
contact percentage – tracks quantity of eye contact during time parents and
children are around each other. Would be a proxy for how attentive parents are
to children in various contexts – the playground, the dinner table, etc</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>- Touch
matrix – tracks the number and types of physical contact between parents and
children as well as categorizing them into negative and positive groups. The
number would be some kind of ratio per hour and positive/negative ratio.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>-
Consistency index – tracks similar situations over time and determines the
consistency of parental response. This would make no value judgments about the
quality or nature of these responses. It is merely looking for whether
responses are the same or different over time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>-
Conversational exchange rate – tracks number of conversational exchanges versus
other exchanges such as corrections, instructions, punishments, etc.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
As I put this list together a
couple of caveats came to mind. One is that I am imagining metrics from a
parental experience point of view and not a quantitative measures point of
view. There are probably all kinds of interesting twists to be measured by
someone better versed in the math of these things than I am. Second, this list
reflects a very particular, very personal version of what makes a good parent.
There are no metrics listed above for ‘one hit wonders’ such as buying
spectacular presents or undertaking big displays of affection. To me these
things smack of parental self-aggrandizement and I don’t think statistical
tracking of such things isn’t going to lead to any great revelations about
parenting strategy. Third, the metrics also reflect the current age of my
children (6 and 8) and might be somewhat different if they were much younger or
older. Fourth, I’m favoring percentage and ratio measures over cumulative ones.
While something like number of diapers changed or soccer games attended could
tell a good deal about the time a parent spends with a child, such measures
would also get skewed by the different roles parents have in the household and could
also tend to mistake quantity for quality. I’m less interested in how much time
a parent spends around their children and more curious about what they’re doing
with the time they do spend.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another
interesting challenge – and one that I’ve thought less about – is how to
measure results and draw correlations between them. This requires its own set
of value choices regarding what kinds of personalities one wants their children
to have, which strengths one values, which weaknesses one can live with. Then
too, parenting is so much about investing ahead of time to produce results down
the road that connecting the dots between input and output would be especially
difficult. With all of that said, here are a few possible output metrics that I
would love to connect to my parental input variables:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>- self
confidence</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>- respect
for others</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>-
willingness to listen and incorporate the ideas of others</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
- ability to follow directions</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The data provided by SportVU has
changed a great deal about the strategies NBA teams employ in this day and age.
After analyzing shot percentages and per possession scoring data, teams now
work especially hard to create shots within 8 feet of the basket and beyond the
three point line, disdaining longer two point jumpers as inefficient and less
likely to produce positive results. Fluid passing and the management of court
space have become more important than ever as teams look to get defenses
scrambling around before they dump the ball down low or out to high percentage
spots around the three point line. In turn, defenders who can quickly drop into
the paint and then jump back out at shooters have become high valued as well. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While a
comparative ParentVU system would be complex beyond measure, it’s fun to
speculate on what new strategies for improvement might come from them,
particularly if the data could be collectively analyzed and shared across a
large population. Would parents check their stats the way they do their Fitbits
to see how well they’re doing on the various metrics? Would they compete to see
who had the best touch matrix for the month? Would such a system spawn a whole
new approach to parenting akin to the NBA’s embrace of ‘pace and space?’ Would
that actually give parents a better sense of which things they can do to
positively mold their kids? </div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-72700382125606979712015-05-22T12:20:00.000-04:002015-05-22T12:20:00.836-04:00What really matters?<div class="MsoNormal">
This
Saturday we wrapped up the spring soccer season with a game played in an
intermittent downpour. The first quarter and the third quarter were so wet I
had to repeatedly wring out my shirt. Polly’s favorite moments in the entire
game were the two quarters she got to hang out with a couple other players in
the cave of umbrellas we created on the sideline. Fortunately, the team played
well enough to win, 5-3, and even had a couple of pretty soccer plays to boot.
My favorite of the day was a perfect pass off a kick-off by Pip to the forward
on the left wing. The forward was able to receive the ball in the space between
the midfielders and the defense, dribble twice, and successfully pop a shot
passed the goalkeeper. It was the exact play I’d been hoping we’d pull off for
several weeks. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the end
of the game, the rain backed off enough for us to comfortably hand out trophies
and say a couple of quick words to wrap up a surprisingly delightful 3-5-2
season. That record doesn’t look particularly spectacular but within it was a
final eight game run during which we went 3-3-2 and only felt really out of
things really. When compared to the winless streak of last fall, this was a
significant improvement and people seemed genuinely pleased with how their kids
had improved. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a coach
this was great to hear, but it also made me wonder which of the things we did
really mattered. At one level much of the improvement came from things I had no
influence over: the addition of one stronger player and the physical growth of
a couple of others may have been enough to tip the balance on a couple of days. I know that the goal kicks were better.
That was something we explicitly worked on and it showed during the last couple
of games. I feel like we defended one on one better as well, which was also
something we talked about and worked on. Beyond those two things – and some
improved goalkeeping work – it’s difficult for me to pin down exactly what we
did right this time around that added up to five fewer losses than last fall.
(As I write this, I think now that I need to do more specifics next time around
– giving players individual things to work on and progress with in addition to
drilling specific situations with the team as a whole. There were too many
times when kids just didn’t know what else to do with the ball than to try to
run forward with it.) As a parent, I’m happy the kids had fun and found some
success. As a coach, I have no idea whether I did a good job or a crappy one.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I raise
this question because it is also a fundamental question of parenting: am I do a
good job or are my children’s successes largely the result of their own growth
and development. At one level, there are some obvious things we do that matter
– the kids have enough to eat, we make sure they get plenty of sleep each
night, we make sure they do their homework and provide them with help when they
need it. But after those basics, the investments are harder to directly
correlate with their successes. Kids generally learn to walk and talk
regardless of their parentage. In a decent school they learn to read, write,
and do math as well. How much of the effort we put in matters? Where are we
wasting our time? Where should we be doing more?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For
example, take Pip’s test from earlier in the year. I spent a good deal of time
putting together sample questions, talking about different problems, and
working out strategies with him. He ultimately scored in the 99<sup>th</sup>
percentile on that test, and I felt like all the work had been justified. But
perhaps he would have done that well anyway. Perhaps those kinds of questions
make sense to him and he would have scored just fine without all the extra
work. There’s no way to really know. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m
thinking about this in another way as well. With the NBA playoffs in full swing
I’ve been reading a good deal about all the new analytic possibilities that
come with the massive amount of data being collected during a game. Every
second of action is being recorded and broken down and statistics nerds are
having an orgy trying to create new and better metrics from all of this data.
They are looking away from the ball to see how one player’s movement helps or
harms a given possession. They are looking at defensive matchups with
increasing specification. All of this calculation is giving scouts, general
managers, and player evaluators a whole new perspective on the value of
different players, particularly when it comes to what have previously been
known as the ‘intangibles.’<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
In
parenting it feels like the intangibles are everything. There are a few
definite metrics that we know matter – reading to a child every day for example
– but just about everything else is vague. Part of this comes from the large variety
of ideals about what it means to “do well.” Different goals require different
strategies and different evaluations. However, another part of this comes from
a general lack of context specific data. There are no SportsVU cameras tracking
our parental moves and producing numbers that can be quantified and tracked
(not that I’d want this). As such there’s lots of room for overconfidence and
underconfidence when comes to one’s understanding of how one stacks up as a
parent. And for those who are striving to be the best parents we can – however
each one of us would like to define that – the absence of metrics about what
really matters, the absence of direction beyond social trends, mom and pop
practices, and by the gut feelings leaves a lot to be desired.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-79948456726506538052015-05-13T13:44:00.000-04:002015-05-13T13:44:08.326-04:00Chipotle and the Logic of an Anti-GMO position<div class="MsoNormal">
About two
weeks ago, Chipotle – a fast-food burrito chain which appeals strongly to
millenials and others as a quick food shop without the tacky cheapness of a
fastfood restaurant – announced that it would make all its offerings free of
genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This announcement was followed by
skeptical editorials in various newspapers including the two that I regularly
peruse, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/burrito-bunkum/2015/04/29/a4cd8382-ed18-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html">The Washington Post</a> and <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/common-sense-free-1430177546">The Wall Street Journal</a>. While this move by
Chipotle is certainly more about branding and continuing to bolster the chain’s
identity as something more than just fast-food than it is about customer’s
health, I found it interesting that the newspaper editorials were not more
sensitive to the reasons why this move might appeal to a great many people. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Wall Street Journal in
particular essentially called Chipotle’s decision a piece of self-righteous
stupidity. The paper’s editors argued that those who disdain GMO products when
genetic intervention can feed more people at lower costs are little more than whining
prima donnas. They also pointed out that after two decades of GMO production
there are no definitive examples of harm to human health. As such, the
editorial concluded, the anti-GMO crowd (in the WSJ context this means squishy, tree-hugging Liberals) celebrating Chipotle’s decision is just taking part in another round
of “moral posturing.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Well, the editors at the Wall
Street Journal are, of course, free to have their opinion. However, in their
blunt dismissal of anti-GMO concerns, they are failing to see how this one
particular issue is indicative of a much larger nervousness about what is being
done to our food by the industrialized food system. As a father of two and
someone who pays close attention to the ingredients in our food, I am uneasy
about the proliferation of GMOs into our food supply because this brings with
it a tremendous number of unknowns in exchange for what feels like a rather
dubious benefit. The unknowns fall into three general categories. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The first is a question of health.
For a very long time food producers received the benefit of the doubt when it
came to putting extra stuff into our food. They added various preservatives to
make things last longer on our shelves. They added extra sweeteners like high
fructose corn syrup to jazz up the taste of sodas, juices, teas, even
applesauce, peanut butter, and bread (and enable them to use cheaper
ingredients in the process). They developed a method of infusing fats with gas
– i.e. partially hydrogenated oils - to enable the creation of shelf-stable,
powdered dishes that only required hot water to cook. None of these on their
own were directly linked to immediate health problems during their first couple
of decades of use. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
However, thanks to these various
additives and alterations to the food we consume – especially in the
cheapest/most affordable foods – the United States and many other countries
that consume industrialized food are now facing epidemic levels of obesity and
diabetes. Human bodies are bloating and breaking down from a constant infusion
of things they were never intended to consume. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
And it’s not just that people are
eating the wrong stuff. It’s that the food we have come to eat over the last
couple of decades has been manipulated in so many ways that our bodies have a
difficult time figuring out what they need to keep us healthy. A couple of
weeks ago there was an essay in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-flavor-drives-nutrition-1428596326">The Wall Street Journal about the loss of flavor in food</a> and in that essay there was a description of an
experiment undertaken in the 1939 in which toddlers were given free rein to
select their own foods over an extended period of time. It turned out that what
tasted good to those toddlers at various points in time reflected what their
bodies needed at that stage in their development. Some days it was blueberries.
Other days it was spinach. Other days they just wanted meat. Taste mattered not
just as a source of joy but as an indicator of nutrients and bodily needs.
Today however, with strawberry flavored popsicles and cheese-flavored chips
that connection between flavor and bodily needs is much more difficult to
maintain. Our bodies still know what they need. However, when something tastes
like applesauce but also contains a substantial serving of corn, the body’s
various feedback mechanisms get confused. When potatoes taste like cheese how’s
a body to know when it’s gotten what it needs?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In light of these experiences, is
it unreasonable to worry that genetically modifying more of our food will only
make things worse?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
The second reason I’m skeptical about GMOs is that the
argument put forth by companies for their use reflects a simplistic supply and
demand logic that ignores the reality of how moves around the world. The Wall
Street Journal editorial touts the ability of genetically modifying foods to
increase crop yields, consequently lowering prices for food in the poorest
areas of the world. This bothers me for two reasons. First, businesses in
general are not altruistic endeavors. Whenever one of their voices – and the
Wall Street Journal is certainly a business voice – starts to make appeals to
alleviating poverty red-flags go up all over my brain. The business interest in
GMOs has nothing to do with making food cheaper for consumers. Sure, genetic
modification can increase crop yields but more importantly for the companies
that engage in this modification is the possibility of patenting the GMO and
gaining greater financial control over the seeds and subsidiary products like
pesticides and fertilizers. In this light corn – the plant – no longer exists.
Instead there is ‘Roundup Ready Corn’, owned by Monsanto and one cannot plant
the seeds that come from a previous crop without paying Monsanto for usage
rights. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
Second, there is more than enough food currently grown to
feed “the worlds growing population.” The causes of hunger and/or steep food
prices are more often than not political and structural not agricultural.
Government programs in the United States will at times pay farmers not to plant
certain crops in order to keep prices stable. The infamous famine in Ethiopia
in the 1980s was caused by a local drought and a political war that prevented
outside food from getting to people who needed it. The increased crop yields
provided by GMOs are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Whenever
people bring up a Malthusian kind of food shortage apocalypse, they are simply
engaging in scare tactics. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
Finally, the last reason I’m skeptical about the whole value
of GMO production is that I can’t see what I as a consumer will get out of it. Every
alteration we make in our food requires some kind of trade-off. There’s no
magic button that allows for us to keep everything we want and get rid of all
the things we don’t. While we figured out how to make produce that is bigger
and stays fresh longer we also now have red delicious apples that taste like
tennis balls and gigantic strawberries with barely any flavor at all. The ‘fresh’
lettuce I get in a clamshell at the store is bland and rubbery when compared
with the greens I get from my local community garden. Increasing crop yields
are all well and good, but that seems like a benefit for the companies and not
for me. If I’m paying a few dollars less per week for food that contains fewer
nutrients or just doesn’t taste that good, I’m not better off. Cheaper is not
necessarily better and nobody has given me any other reason to think that a
genetically modified ingredient improves my life. Until that changes, I will
continue to be highly skeptical of the value of GMOs. <o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-49132240198993281362015-05-06T14:11:00.000-04:002015-05-06T14:11:39.519-04:00A List of Growing Moments<div class="MsoNormal">
There is no
better feeling as a parent than when your child surprises you by doing
something wonderful or doing something more and better than you’d ever realized
they could. This spring I’ve had a couple of moments like this with both Polly
and Pip. These are simple, powerful moments, ones when I notice them growing,
expanding, becoming more capable of things than ever before. It seems like
these moments would come with a bittersweet flavor, a wistful nostalgia for
parts of their lives that have now passed. But, it doesn’t seem to work that
way. As they do these new things, as they show off their new capacities, I never
find myself thinking, “<i>When did you get
so old?</i>” Instead, I feel like a child with a new toy. Suddenly a whole new world of possibilities emerges and I can't wait to see how they come to work themselves out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the
spirit of that I want to list a few of the things they’ve done recently. There
isn’t really a theme to this list beyond capturing these moments before they
get buried by the others that will ultimately come. As such this is mostly a
list for me to brag and for me to hold on to, a way to draw lines on the back
side of the closet door to mark their heights as they grow.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
-
Earlier this year, I wrote about<a href="http://postindustrialparenthood.blogspot.com/2015/02/weeksago-i-wrote-about-pip-and-letter.html"> preparing Pip for the final ‘general intelligence’ test that would determine who gets invited to his school’s accelerated program and who does not.</a> Well, it turns out Pip did quite well on
the test. We got the results back a month ago, and he scored in the 99<sup>th</sup>
percentile. This was something of a relief, though it also left plenty of
questions unanswered. How many others scored just as well? Did the school
district have a test number that wasn’t shared with us that would determine the
final rankings? Were there other evaluative mechanisms at work that we didn’t
know about? Well, we never got any answers to those questions, but Pip did
receive an invitation to join the program this week. He was pleased, if not too
worked up about it one way or the other. He would have been fine with things
either way. In retrospect, I would have been too. We had done what we could.
The rest of the process was outside our control. (Now, I have to start getting
Polly ready)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
- For the spring show at Pip and
Polly’s elementary school, Polly tried out for and made it into the dance
number for the kindergartners and first graders. This try-out took place a
month or so ago, and she has been practicing with her cohort a couple of times
a week ever since. In contrast to the way she approached the dance number for
the winter show, Polly has been relatively guarded about what they are actually
doing this time around. She has said that the music for it is Elton John’s <i>Crocodile Rock</i> and that she will be
wearing a tutu. But she hasn’t shown us any of the dance itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
However, this past week after a
rain-shortened soccer practice left her with energy to spare she broke out her
own impromptu dance performance – a one-to-two minute composition of improvised
moves complete with pointed toes, elegant hands, and a nice array of leaps and flourishes.
There was no music, just the pats and squeaks of her bare feet on the floor and
the determined puffs of her breath. And it was not playful. Her moves were
deliberate and balanced. Her focus was tight. She carried herself like a
gymnast doing a floor routine. She spun and glided and lunged and twirled,
holding Ava and I in place through it all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The whole production caught me by
surprise as minutes before she had been running in and out of our back mudroom making
animal noises and chanting “Jinx, Jinx, Jinx, Jinx” with her brother.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
- Speaking of soccer practice, Pip
and Polly have both had their moments on the field this spring. For Pip, it’s
been mostly the development of his goalkeeping prowess. At the start of the
season he had said he was not interested in playing goalie, but after the first
weekend of games he started fiddling around with one of his friends and decided
to give it a try. After a couple weeks of practice and five more games, he now
looks very comfortable back there. He’s alert. He’s aggressive. He moves well.
And he has developed a very effective method redistributing the ball once he
makes a stop. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Most of the goalies in our league
try to punt the ball down the field. The strong kids send it flying like a
cannonball. The weak ones often only knock it ten yards or so. In both cases,
there’s no real control over where the ball actually lands between the
sidelines nor any good way to advance it when it does. What Pip and his friend
have learned from one of our coaches is to use a catapult motion to throw the
ball down the field. The upshot of this method is that they can get the ball
out to their own players in positions that allow them to effectively move the
ball up the field. Pip has gotten particularly good at this. This past weekend
he was able to regularly fling the ball up to half field and land it right in
front of one of his forwards. And he looks comfortable doing it. There is
nothing awkward or uncertain about his throws. They come out in a smooth, fluid
motion that shows he knows what he’s doing. The catapult throw has become a
real tool.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Polly is also feeling more and more
comfortable on the soccer field. After spending much of the first couple of
games hanging to the side and watching the action go past she is now standing
firm in her position – often as the last line of defense before the goalie –
and taking on dribblers coming into her space. Even though she can’t boot the
ball very far, she is willing to stand in, stop the ball, and dribble it out
away from the goal. This is great because it means I can trust her to be where
she needs to be in the defensive scheme and to make an effort when the ball
comes her way. This is not something I can do with everyone. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
She is also taking on a more
assertive role on the field. This past weekend she was playing midfield when it
was time for our team to kick off. The referee called for one of our players to
come up to the ball and get things going. When the others around her hesitated
for a moment, she seized the opportunity and made a good pass to one of the
wings. It was so good, in fact, that the next time we had a kick-off, I had her
do it again. This turned out to be the highlight of her day and a moment I’ll
remember for quite a while longer.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
- Lastly, Pip had his school piano
recital last week. He and about ten other kids take short piano lessons once a
week with a school music teacher, and this was their end of the year
performance. The lessons are simple and basic, requiring little more than five
to ten minutes a day of practice to master. Thus in a year he’s only progressed
from rhythmic doodling to playing quarter notes up and down the five keys on
either side of middle C. But he’s reading music now, has developed the dexterity
to jump between ring finger and thumb without hesitation, and has a good enough
sense of what it means to play the piano should he want to pursue it more
intensely at a later time. We have even gotten the chance to play some short
duets together which has been very fun for me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For his recital, Pip played a piece
called ‘I Love Parades.’ At school, his lessons take place on an electronic
keyboard which has a range of instrument sounds and background rhythms to add
in as you play. He and his teacher decided he should play the piece using the
trumpet sound and on the second time through add in a marching rhythm to give
the piece some extra pizzazz. He was very excited about this and spent the two
weeks leading up to the recital running the music over and over until he could
play it smoothly from start to finish. This involved a great deal of groaning
and starting over whenever he missed a note, but he was determined to do it right.
For once I stayed out of this and let him follow his own inclinations.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
On the day of the recital Pip was the
fifth or sixth kid to play a piece. The ones who came before him were all
second graders like him. Their pieces were short – probably no more than thirty
seconds long – and when they played they tended to push down the keys only far
enough to make a sound. This gave everything a very tentative quality. Also, none
of them used a background rhythm. So, when Pip dove into his piece, it sounded
different from everything that had come before. As he worked through the first measures,
he struck the keys with confidence, pushing them down to their stops just as he
would on the piano at home. He probably went a touch fast but the notes were
clean and on rhythm. Then he fired up the march accompaniment. This caught
everyone’s attention and I think Pip could sense the extra energy in the room
as he headed for his second round. The rhythm of the accompaniment was a touch
slower than the tempo he had just played, so Pip had an extra microsecond to
make sure each note was in place. With this realization, I could see his
confidence bloom. By the end of the piece, he was bopping his head to the beat
and completely focused on the sheet of music in front of him. He was playing
music, not just the notes, and trusting his fingers to go to the correct
places. He was into it. As he played the last chords, he looked up from his
stand and smiled. It wasn’t a smile of surprise or relief. It was a smile of
confidence and joy. He’d played well, and it had been fun. I couldn’t have wanted
anything more for him.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-13965597519523338662015-04-29T12:39:00.002-04:002015-04-29T12:39:44.752-04:00The Business of Change<div class="MsoNormal">
As I
believe I’ve mentioned before Ava has a particular interest in things related
to Walt Disney World. Her family made numerous trips down to Orlando during her
teenage years and in the process of figuring out the best ways to do everything,
they learned a tremendous amount about the operations and logistics of all the
resorts and theme parks encompassed within the Disney World territory. Over the
last twenty-five years, she has watched rides, hotels, and parks come and go.
She has read travel guides and insider accounts. She can see all the trends and
management decisions both good and bad written into the materiality of the
resort. For her Disney World is less a playground than a grand cultural text
whose dynamics reflect the mood of our times.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In this
spirit we both read with interest<a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-reinventing-happiness"> an article from the May issue of Fast Company</a>
about the creation and implementation of a new organizing technology within the
Disney World resort. Called the Next Generation Experience (NGE) in the text,
this revolution in how visitors experienced the parks and hotels of Disney World
was supposed to be built around an electronic wristband that would serve as a
catch-all tool for everything one might want to do. It would open hotel room
doors, generate FastPass times, purchase merchandise, order food, and more. It
would also enable Disney to track park attendees and manage crowds more
effectively, thus improving visitor experiences and boosting the numbers of
people each theme park could reasonably handle. It was going to be the thing
that brought the Disney World experience into the twenty-first century.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What comes
out of the Fast Company article is that the NGE project underwent a fairly
ordinary trajectory wherein a huge, innovative idea gets watered down to a
rather pedestrian set of final results. The article touches on some of the
numerous conflicts that emerged between different groups during the company’s
attempts to imagine what was possible and ultimately assemble what was needed
to bring those ideas to fruition. While the article doesn’t claim that the
project was doomed from the beginning, there is a sense throughout the piece
that this kind of whittling away at the concept as a whole was kind of
inevitable. It’s what happens when big companies try to fundamentally change
the way they do things. There’s lots of tension and lots of trouble, and the
final result never lives up to its original hype.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I
found interesting in this piece and the reason I wanted to write about it is
that it seems to be that there was one fundamental flaw in the whole
re-invention process. In 2008 a team of five executives was given the charge of
outlining what NGE was going to be. It was to be their responsibility to “reinvent
the vacation experience” at Disney World. This charge was given in strict
secrecy and much of the conceptual brainstorming appears to have taken place in
conjunction with consultants outside of Disney. But, as the author wryly notes
later in the article, “It’s impossible, of course, for such a big project to
remain secret.” When the word got out, the pushback came fast and furious.
People were fighting to protect their creative visions. People were fighting to
protect their jobs. There was constant conflict between outside contractors and
internal departments. There was bickering back and forth over who should get
what monies and which groups should control various aspects of the new plan. A
classic tussle broke out between entrenched interests and new ideas, insiders
and outsiders, the winners and the losers in the process of change. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But it
didn’t have to be that way. Or at the very least there was something that could
have been done at the very beginning to head off a great deal of the pushback:
get rid of the secrecy. People get upset when they feel as if the rug is
getting pulled out from under them. People fight back when they don’t feel like
they are part of the process. People resist change if they feel like it’s
happening without their input. The biggest mistake the executives at Disney
made in trying to re-invent the way they run the Disney World resort was to try
and keep that goal a secret from the very people who knew the resort the best:
their own employees. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For an
example of how Disney executives (and any other organization looking to
undertake a significant change) might have better pursued this kind of
revolutionary change in their business practice, they would not have had to
look very far. In his book <u>Creativity, Inc.</u> about his experiences as the
president of Pixar Animation – now a division of Disney itself, Ed Catmull
discussed a situation in which the company needed to significantly rework its
operating processes in order to meet certain budget requirements. After some
deliberation, the executive team decided that instead of mandating cuts in
various departments they would take the problem itself to the company as a
whole. They organized what came to be called Notes Day where all the company’s
employees came together to brainstorm and discuss various ideas for enhancing
efficiency and smoothing out the different operational systems within the
company. This effort required a tremendous amount of organizational dedication
in order to sift through the various ideas, gather them into different groups,
put people together to talk through them and come up with a list of legitimate
possibilities and priorities to pursue. However, in Catmull’s opinion this
investment was incalculably useful. Not only did it produce numerous ideas that
the executive team had not considered, it enhanced personal contacts across the
company and gave the employees an intellectual stake in the future of their
workplace. It also gave the company’s leaders a better sense of what things
mattered most to their employees and how they might work with those values as
they sought to achieve the necessary budgetary alignments. All of this reduced
the amount and vehemence of pushback against the changes that were to come and
made people better aware of the issues involved in the difficult choices that
had to be made.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wonder
what would have happened if Disney had done the same.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p>****</o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a parent
I think there are at least two big messages in the contrast between these approaches
to large-scale change. The first is the concept of leadership. People often
view a leader as the person who tells everyone else what to do. Our cultural
image of a leader is someone who has a vision and organizes others to bring
that vision to life. This general-on-the-battlefield version of leadership is
how the executives at Disney saw their role in developing the NGE. But what
Catmull and the folks at Pixar showed is that really good leadership, the kind
necessary to successfully make dramatic change happen, is a matter of tapping
into the breadth of knowledge around you and giving people an intellectual
stake in projects that will affect them. The leader’s role is to facilitate
these interactions and provide the necessary direction to turn the ideas they
produce into material results. The difference is subtle but one worth
remembering whether we’re talking about big companies or small families.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The second
message is about investment in people. Investing in people is hard,
time-consuming, and difficult to quantify. There’s no graph you can make to
show a specific correlation between the amount of resources invested in a
person and the output one receives from that investment. Instead it has to be taken
as an article of faith. But that investment matters. I think about this
constantly as Ava and I work with Polly and Pip. So much of what they are
capable of doing now – their reading and math skills, their respect for others,
their work ethic, their sensitivity to the feelings of those around them, their
kindness, their responsiveness to our instructions – are the result of years of
patient guidance and training. This time invested in them also means that we
all have good understandings of what to expect from each other and what things
matter to each other. The kids know we will listen to them and take their
thoughts into account and that we expect them to do the same for us. This means
we know how to approach a problem when something has to change, and there is
less pushback when something doesn’t go their way. It seems to me that this is
what Pixar managed to do well and something at which the executives at Disney,
despite all their claims to a collaborative work environment, failed miserably.<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-80921948969839698562015-04-22T14:15:00.000-04:002015-04-22T14:15:29.359-04:00The Fallibility of Words<div class="MsoNormal">
Words are
funny things. They purport to clarity, to providing us with a better sense of
understanding. They allow us to formulate complicated thoughts, feelings,
ideas, and transfer those to another person. Of all the things that make humans
a distinct group in the animal world – the creation and use of tools, the
control of fire, strategic planning on extended time scales – the ability to
use words to communicate complex and nuanced thoughts is probably the most
essential.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet
words fail us all the time. This is in part because they are in no way perfect.
Words are variable and shaded with all kinds of meanings. Communication
requires both the speaker and the audience to have an overlapping understanding
of what is being said. At a simple level this requires them to speak the same
language. Because I don’t know Mandarin, words spoken in that language
communicate nothing to me and are not distinctly different than the various chirps
and pops of dolphins. But even within the same language and the same dialect,
the meanings of the words we use and the thoughts they are supposed to transfer
from one to another are never as clear as we generally assume. Maybe the
intonation doesn’t match or maybe one person doesn’t understand the full
implications of what another is saying. Sometimes it’s just a matter of a
difference in the images that are brought to people’s minds. Communication is
never a perfect transfer of thought from one brain to another. Something always
gets altered in translation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It’s quite possible you saw the
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/apr/13/how-to-solve-albert-bernard-and-cheryls-birthday-maths-problem">Cheryl-Albert-Bernard logic problem</a> on the internet this past week. Ava printed
it out and brought it home for me to try. The basic premise of the challenge is
that Albert and Bernard don’t know Cheryl’s birthday, and instead of telling
them she has them guess from among ten possible dates. Then she tells Albert
the month and Bernard the day. After a couple of comments from each the two
boys figure out the answer and you are supposed to be able to determine what it
is by using their comments and making logical deductions. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This problem came from a
standardized test used in Singapore, and I think it went viral because while it
is a fun game there is also something fundamentally unclear about it. The absence
of clarity is subtle and I think people shared it with one another because they
weren’t sure whether it was them or a fundamental problem with the challenge
itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
solution to the problem hinges on Albert’s first comment which is “I don’t know
the answer and I know that Bernard doesn’t either.” This is supposed to tell
you that Albert knows that he doesn’t
have enough information to answer the problem and that he knows that Bernard
doesn’t have enough either. Recognizing this sets the logical deductions in
motion. However, when I read the problem, I imagined the three people having a
conversation. In this conversation, Albert learns that Bernard doesn’t know the
answer either, however one cannot make the same logical deductions from that
situation that you can if you understand the statement to mean that Albert
knows without talking to Bernard that Bernard doesn’t know the answer either.
It is a subtle difference and not on the face of things particularly problematic.
But, my inability to correctly comprehend the question led me to not having any
chance of answering it correctly. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the logical
steps, it was that I couldn’t see the problem in the way it was intended to be
seen. In my case, there was a disjuncture in communication. The speaker and the
audience were not hearing the same thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Pip encountered a similar
conceptual difficulty this week with some of his homework. The teacher gave him
a simple measurement sheet where he was directed to use the ruler on the page
to indicate the length of different lines to the nearest ¼ of an inch. Now Pip’s
smart and studious. He listens in class and he takes care when he does his
work. And he got five out of the eight measures wrong.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know this
because Pip’s teacher sends home all student work on Fridays and permits them
to correct any errors and resubmit the work on Monday. Pip usually comes in and
plows through this in a matter of five minutes, but with this sheet he was
having lots of trouble. He just couldn’t figure out why he had gotten so many
of these problems wrong. He called me for help and when I came over to look at
things I could see what was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why he had
answered the questions the way he did. For example, for one line that was
clearly 2 ½ inches long, he had written 2 ¼. On another that was 5 inches long,
he’d written 4 ¾. At first I thought he was reading the ruler wrong and so I
just told him to look at them again. When he came back just as confused as
before, I went through every problem to see if I could determine how he was
approaching them. It turns out that the only two he got right were lines that
measured 1 ¾ and 3 ¼. It also turned out that all of his answers contained
either ¼ or ¾. Pip had taken the instructions to mean find the measurement to
the nearest ruler mark that contained a 4 in the denominator (i.e. ¼ or ¾), so
he had rounded down all the measurements to reach one of those two choices.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After I
realized this it took a surprisingly long time to explain to him that the
nearest quarter of an inch means every quarter inch increment including whole
number marks and ½ inch marks. It was something that had not clicked
intuitively in his mind and thus was something that he had a tricky time
fitting together. For him ½ inch was ½ inch, and he had to work to see it as
being 2/4 inch (Interestingly, my word processor has the same problem. It
automatically shifts ¼ and ¾ to fraction forms but leaves 2/4 unchanged).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The point
of this is that while Pip could very easily perform the skill, the language of
the problem didn’t fit with what he knew. Now whether that’s his responsibility
to learn or the test maker’s responsibility to clarify is always going to be a
negotiable thing, but it is a reminder to me of one of the constants of
parenting – and human interaction in general – words are not neutral. Words are
not standard. They have meaning because we have each learned them in certain
ways and those ways are all unique in subtle and unknowable ways. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It also reminds me that when you
think the problem is with someone else’s understanding, the problem probably
also has something to do with you. <o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-577874899733707685.post-4483719383636468792015-04-15T13:47:00.000-04:002015-04-15T13:47:31.254-04:00Counter-programming on the soccer field<div class="MsoNormal">
This past
weekend brought Pip and Polly’s first two soccer games for the spring season. It
was a full weekend for us all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pip had a
very good weekend. Not only did he score his first ever (and the team’s only)
goal, but he also began figuring out how to deploy his energies on the field.
In the defensive box he used a combination of confidence and assertiveness to
thwart oncoming attacks. During his quarters upfield, he moved well, largely
avoiding getting sucked in to ball chasing and instead playing his position and
moving into open spaces. It was this movement that enabled him to score the goal
as he and one other player on his team were spread across the top of the box
when the ball squirted along the line towards them. Pip stayed a touch wider
and when his teammate’s shot bounced off the goal keeper, he was able to gather
the carom and lift the ball over the keeper and into the goal. It was not a
very graceful play but more often than not that’s how goals are scored. Pip was
in the right place and was rewarded for it. He also spent a quarter playing
goal during the second game, stopped a couple of shots, re-distributed the ball
well by throwing instead of kicking it, and took command of the defense. The
general success of playing well made the weekend as a whole very fun for him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Polly also
had a good weekend, though she did not have as many definable moments of
success as Pip. She spent most of her time on the field staying out of the way
of others, moving around but largely sliding to the side before too many people
got around her. Later she told me that she was scared of getting into the scrum
of kids. As the youngest player on the field and someone who has only seen
three to four soccer games in her life, I can’t fault her for feeling that way.
It was the first time she’s been surrounded by such an environment and amidst
the swirling chaos it’s hard to understand the underlying order much less what
one should do to try and shape it. In the Saturday game she had a couple of
chances to stop a ball in the open field and she did well handling it and
sending it back in the correct direction. This leads me to believe that in time
she’ll be more willing to get into the middle of things and work to clear the
ball away. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
****<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I find
myself needing to do with Polly now to make her into a better player is to undo
some of the half-decade’s worth of behavioral training she’s undergone thus
far. In other words, I have to encourage her to become more aggressive. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This goes against everything we’ve
done with her since she was a baby. Our family’s general approach to living is
one of exercising patience, calm, and respect for others. These qualities
obviously doesn’t come naturally to children (or us to be honest), and Polly
has been known to jump on Pip’s back for no particular reason or slam down a
LEGO in frustration when it doesn’t go together the way she wants it to. Ava
and I have worked steadily and consistently to replace those impulses with ones
that lead Polly to stop, take a step back, and collect herself when faced with
a problem. And this has largely worked. She’s a kind and considerate friend to
her peers and – when not tired and cranky – a conscientious and respectful kid
with adults. She still gets upset when her LEGOs fall apart, but she doesn’t
slam them about the way she used to when she was younger. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, as I
had to do with Pip, I have to figure out how to undo some of this training to
get Polly in the right mindset for the soccer field. In Pip’s case, an
increased familiarity with the dynamics of a game did most of the work. In the
fall he was reluctant to bump into any one because he didn’t want to make them
upset or violate the spirit of the rules. He understands better now the
dynamics of when contact is necessary and useful after getting banged around
some towards the end of the fall season. He came into the spring looking to
make an impact, and he has learned take the ball away from people through them
with determination and persistence. This requires a touch of meanness, a touch
of fury that wills one to keep banging away at things even when the ball doesn’t
immediately do what you want. It also requires finding a touch of darkness
inside yourself that for a brief moment hates the person with the ball and
wants only to exert your power over them. This seemed to crystalize for Pip
during a defensive series during Sunday’s game when it took four tries to
finally dislodge a ball from the box. He went after it each time with a focused
and furious determination that was exactly what he needed in that situation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Polly
possesses that kind of spirit as well, but it may be some time before she’s
ready to channel it. She loved being able to bounce around on the field and
celebrate when her teammates did something well. She was a happy pixie with a
long pony tail, smiling and laughing and having fun. In some ways I’d rather
her just stay that way, but that’s not going to do her much good as a soccer
player.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> At the same time, she’s not yet big
enough to crash into people effectively and not yet strong enough to exert her
will physically in a scrum. What I’ll really need to do with her is get her
comfortable with staring down another player in the open field and sticking her
foot in his way. I guess that will come as long as I’m patient with her. I can’t
let my own aggression undermine the aggression I want to emerge in her. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13911644689635534904noreply@blogger.com0