Category: Uncategorized

Being naughty for the substitute

Posted on by Liz

“Our substitute teacher showed me a way to say something isn’t equal,” Moomin told me today as he did his homework. “See?” and with vast satisfaction he wrote ≠ on his worksheet.

When I asked him how the sub was, he said she was pretty good. “Mom, I have to tell you I’ve noticed something. In books, people are a *lot naughtier* with substitute teachers than they are in real life.”

We discussed this a while. Tacks on chairs! Elaborate tricks! And when have you ever seen this happen? I haven’t. It seemed so alluring, like midnight feasts in boarding school novels. Twins also have much better adventures in books when they switch places than they do in real life. Why do some people seem to think it’s a good idea to write books that are basically training manuals to teach kids how to be extremely naughty. I wonder if Moomin will think over that idea – the question of why you would write a whole book about kids being extremely naughty? Are they training you to be BAD? He found this hilarious, and appeared to be thinking it over.

What about books where horrible things happen to kids? A friend of mine recently claimed, there are just a lot of twisted people who want to write horrible books about horrible things happening to kids? I thought of her theory tonight at bedtime, as we began reading Harry Potter and I wondered how Moomin would react to the Series of Unfortunate Events. He is maybe not quite cynical enough to enjoy them.

Milo looking at Difference Engine

Well, back to the homework. Tonight’s homework took us less than half an hour. It was a bunch of not very exciting worksheets, which surprised me since this school is supposedly all about the non-worksheet-doing, but it may be an NCLB thing and they just *have to*.

I told Moomin I would be his “speed coach”. He faced this prospect with good cheer. At first he didn’t want me to say anything; “I know, I know, I can do it, I know how to do this!” but I asked him to pause and listen first. So, first, look it over and think what is on the whole page, and give a thought to how long it might take. It looked like a 2-minute worksheet to me, with some stuff about homophones and spelling words. So I set a little kitchen timer, an egg timer with a dial that ticks, and sat across the table reading a magazine a little while watching his progress. Whenever he got all stuck, I reminded him to skip it and move on. At just about the 2-minute mark I said he was doing well but that it was clearly a 3-minute worksheet, and dialed up another minute. Hey! Done! He is quite fast. I encouraged him to cross out finished answers (quickly without precison) and skip ones if he was not quite sure; and if he made a mistake and then catches it — for example writing an i instead of an e in a word – try to remember not to erase an entire word or line, but just write the e over the i a couple of times hard with the pencil.

It’s just like the authors who teach naughtiness! I have to encourage Moomin not to be perfectionist in his work, and not to mind being a bit of a slob. Lucky Moomin — there’s no one better to teach slovenly habits than his good old mom.

The next worksheet took 2 minutes. Then we did another one. Booooring! So much better to get it done quickly if it’s going to be that boring?

We moved on to math. More worksheets. They were things like (17 + 15) – (8 + 3) = ?? The problems were all crammed together with no room to do the working out. Moomin wanted to draw lines from each set of parentheses, one from the 17 and one from the 15, pointing together in a triangle, and then the minus sign, and then the other bit… I persuaded him it would be faster and less cluttered to jot the answer to 17+15 just above it. (Even though it was horribly crammed in.) And then the other bit, and put in the minus sign to remind yourself what you’re doing. Then the answer!

That went much faster.

There were a few unboring problems. One was: Glenn has 6 more books than Bob. Bob has 4 less books than Susan. Susan has 10 books. How many books does Glenn have? He worked it out very nicely with just a hint from me. Not for the first time, I thought to myself that he will really enjoy algebra and geometry.

After homework was done I showed him a book of math puzzles, which he enjoyed until he realized I was sort of tricking him into some kind of Learning Experiment when he would rather be reading his latest Dragonology book.

I think back to the times when I worked as a tutor. I was good at getting people quickly to the point where they realized they didn’t need a tutor, but could figure things out for themselves. It was mostly about teaching ways to think, or ways to approach a problem or a task, and of course, self-confidence.

When I need tutoring, it’s more or less the same. I get stuck on some bit of debugging and begin to doubt myself, or I need help breaking a big task down into stuff I can understand. It’s good to keep my own feelings in mind as I help out another person.

First day of fourth grade

Posted on by Liz

first day of fourth grade
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

“Mom, I like Mr. Rockclimber. He’s nice. But I am a little bit *suspicious*.”

“Oh really, how come, did he crash into your car or something?”***

“No. What? Actually, he did not TEACH. He just TALKED. Talk, talk, talk. All about what we were going to do. Talk, talk, talk, talk. I wonder if he is going to actually teach us anything.”

“Did he talk about anything interesting?”

“Well… maybe about himself. But he’s supposed to TEACH.”

How well I remember hating that first-day syllabus reading and policy declaration jawing from every first day of school all the way through college! Talk, talk, talk! OMG, give us a handout and get on with the job!

On the other hand, as a teacher of college freshmen I realized that only about two people in the class would read the handouts, so it was best to read everything out loud to them. Boring!!!

And as a student, did I keep those handouts and refer to them? NO! I lost them as promptly as possible. I was horrible. Even when I had them, and they were read out loud to me, did I follow their rules? We all know the answer to that one…

Moomin is very excited to think what he will learn this year. To me he seems more alert and interested in the world and in various subjects. His electives, or as they are creepily called here in the land of ultimate capitalism and anxiety about social class, “enrichment”, will be Dragons, Sailing, and Gardening. But first… a little brush up on the basic math facts as we seem to have drifted off into Arty Superhero Gamer Land and forgotten our 6 + 12s and our 4 x 9s. I say “we” on purpose. I am bad at remembering my basic math facts and sneakily use a calculator, write things down, or type “bc” at my Unix prompt to do the simplest arithmetic.

I was so proud of Moomin and felt all emotional as Rook and I stood there with our Parent Club donuts watching the kids file off into school. The mystery of what they do all day! Don’t you wish you could do a Freaky Friday and try out fourth grade for just a day or two?

***Mr. Rockclimber and I had a little fender bender in the parking lot last year… I sure hope his insurance didn’t go up from it.

Night terrors

Posted on by Liz

The past two nights Moomin had episodes of night terror or “pavor nocturnus”. He had them a lot when he was younger, from 2 or 3 to around age 5. Basically, it’s a sleep disorder like sleepwalking, but instead of walking around in a confused way, the sleeping person feels a very extreme emotion of fear; absolute terror.

With Moomin, it would start with some mild coughing, and gasping or sobbing, starting out slow. Always just around 11pm or midnight, right when we were about to go to sleep ourselves. When we were tired and a bit ill tempered at having to get up.

After a bit of coughing Moomin would sit up in bed. He’d start to howl and scream. His heart would race and pound, he’d break out into a sweat, he’d be shaking and clenching his fists like he was in horrible pain.

It was really scary!

There was no way to snap him out of it or talk him down. He doesn’t really wake up, but might answer a couple of questions or babble nonsense. When he was younger it was scarier because it was hard to tell if he was actually super sick or not. It’s hard to see him terrified and apparently in pain. He’d also sometimes talk so incoherently, that was scary in itself. Last night he was saying “No!!! NO ELECTRIC!” But night terrors apparently aren’t coherent nightmares — they’re not bad dreams you can remember.

We try to comfort him, though it doesn’t help. When he was younger and we didn’t know what was happening I know sometimes we tried to snap him out of it. We’d be begging him to tell us what was wrong, what hurt, what was happening, if he was okay. I wish we had known about night terror as a sleep disorder, but I didn’t realize it till he was around 4 or 5.

It may have worked sometimes to get him to either drink something, or go to the bathroom, like it helped to snap him back into reality. Mostly though, we have to hold him and comfort him for about 20 minutes. He’d become truly conscious for about 5 seconds and then fall deeply asleep, no longer fitful and sweating.

That’s a long time!

Sometimes he’d get up and walk, or struggle to get out of our attempts to be comforting.

After he falls into normal sleep, he doesn’t remember what happened. If he woke up for a minute or two in the bathroom or living room he’d be confused and disoriented.

We had to warn people who were babysitting him. Just wait it out, hold him or reassure him he’s asleep (though that doesn’t help, it feels horrible to do nothing.)

For the last few years, his night terror episodes have been rare. A few times a year, maybe.

These episodes became somewhat less scary for me after Moomin had his appendix burst! Now *that* was scary! On the other hand, now when he has these midnight episodes, I am spared the worry that he might be dying of appendicitis. His appendix is gone already. Whew.

Anyway, if you’re a relatively new parent and your toddler or young child wakes up and screams in terror, don’t read “nightmares” into it or necessarily think they are having a severe health crisis. Also don’t assume they’re misbehaving or in hysterics. It might be night terrors — and isn’t their fault, or your fault.

It is scary and… I have to say… exasperating.

I wonder if tiny babies have this happen too, but people assume it’s colic or general infant fussiness? Surely it’s been studied.

Here’s a good description of http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/sleep/terrors.html

>pavor nocturnus from kidshealth.org:

Night terrors typically occur about 2 or 3 hours after a child falls asleep, when sleep transitions from the deepest stage of non-REM sleep to lighter REM sleep, a stage where dreams occur. Usually this transition is a smooth one. But rarely, a child becomes agitated and frightened — and that fear reaction is a night terror.

During a night terror, a child might suddenly sit upright in bed and shout out or scream in distress. The child’s breathing and heartbeat might be faster, he or she might sweat, thrash around, and act upset and scared. After a few minutes, or sometimes longer, a child simply calms down and returns to sleep.

That’s exactly what we experience with Moomin. How comforting it was to find out that nothing serious was wrong, even if it does seem horrible for him to go through.

In the morning he never remembers that it happened.

Moomin goes to snack camp

Posted on by Liz

M. at camp
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

Moomin: This camp is GREAT! This is the best camp ever! They had Honey Nut Cheerios!!
Me: Hahahaha! Awesome! Hahahaahah!
Moomin: AND they had raisins.
Me: No way. Hahahaha. Raisins!
Moomin: Yes! At the first snack time before the aftercare they also had Cheezits!
Me: *DIES LAUGHING*
Moomin: Oh! I get it.
Me: Heehehehehehe
Moomin: You’re laughing because I sort of should be talking about the Marine Science part of the camp. And not the snacks.
Me: You are correct, my son. I do love good snacks. On the other hand did not pay freaking four hundred bucks for you to attend Snack Camp.
Moomin: Well, let me tell you about the sort of British things. They’re very tiny and live in salt ponds. I think, sort of British, but not really…
Me: Brine shrimp?
Moomin: YES! Sea monkeys! I learned about the ecology of estuaries! There’s this very, very bad thing, called acid rain. I petted a shark. And, we made a model of pollution, and then we smashed it!
Me: Oh well okay then, definitely $400 well spent.

That's what Grandmas are for, I guess

Posted on by Liz

My mom just gave Moomin an earful of stories from her childhood. I tried to get my great-grandma to tell me about her childhood once. “Come on, Nana, what was it like, what was different? What was it like being a little girl in 190-whatever?” She couldn’t think of anything to say but finally said that she missed the fun of chasing the iceman’s horse-drawn wagon and begging for chips of ice. Since she got so embarrassed and her story made it sound like her childhood utterly sucked, I never asked again!

Not so with my mom. She regaled Moomin with stories of how her sisters and she would brutally gang up on each other for elbow and kick fights. Usually she wasn’t the one ganged up on, because she was the middle sister. She always tried to be the goody goody.

Life was incredibly unfair. She had eczema, so she couldn’t wash the dishes. Instead, one sister would wash the dishes one night. (Mime a sister daintily doing the dishes, nose stuck in the air, lording it over Tiny Grandma-to-Be and then flouncing off.) And the other sister would do the dishes on the other night. But *every night* my mom had to set the table, clear the table, dry the dishes and put them away, take out the trash, burn the trash! “Now I ask you, is that fair? Why didn’t they just buy me some fucking rubber gloves and let me take my turn washing the dishes!” (By this time Moomin is on the floor laughing, rolling around and holding his stomach.) Never mind the part about having to leave off watching Perry Mason 5 minutes early to set the table. How is THAT fair. Why didn’t they just have dinner 10 minutes later?

Every time she said “We were BRATS!” it was the funniest thing in the universe.

We ended up with some 50 year old resentment from the middle sister that she had to wear her (taller) younger sister’s hand me downs and constantly endure people’s surprise that she was the older one because she was so short. Then, a grim tale.

“And one day we were waiting for the bus after school and I got SO FED UP. I pushed her off the steps, and a teacher saw me. She said “K—!!!! You go right inside and tell your teacher what you did!” (Look of disbelief and deep consideration-of-not-doing-it.)

Moomin was hanging on every word… he completely understood…

“And I thought, what the hell! I’m going to feel like an asshole! So I went in (miming it) and told her (high little voice) “Teacher I pushed my sister down the steps.” And my teacher said “Did she get hurt?” and I said “No!” and she said “Why did you do it?” and I was like “Because she’s a little bitch! She’s a 5 year old bitch!”

Moomin was in physical pain from laughing so hard at his hilarious grandma. I followed him to his room where he kept trying to unfurl himself from laughing-too-hard-position. “OH MY GOD I can’t believe she SAID that” he screeched. “Please help me stop laughing!”

“Do you really think she said that when she was so little?”

“No!!! Why I can’t I stop laughing?”

I think of the bit in Louise Fitzhugh’s book “The Long Secret” where the grandmother tells Beth Ellen, “Shy people are angry people.” Certainly true for both my mom and Moomin. I think her stories are awesome, because little kids like Moomin don’t really hear enough about the actual feelings of people and instead a bit too much about what we want them to feel or think they should feel.

I’m not sure what he will conclude about the olden days. Maybe that little kids in crinolines swore a lot and went around brutally elbowing each other over rolls of Lifesavers.

The Clean Up Message and the I Message

Posted on by Liz

I’m reading a school handbook for new Kindergarten students and came across a page on the “I Message”. That, I know what it is. It’s when you go “I FEEL… BLAH… WHEN YOU… BLAH.” That prevents you from blaming the other person and makes you take responsibility for your own feelings. For example, “I feel like you’re being a jerk when you’re acting so jerky.”

Just kidding!

So, I’d never heard of the Clean-Up statement before, but it looks very useful and good.

The Clean-Up
1) I KNOW that I …
2) I APOLOGIZE.
3) What can I do to MAKE IT RIGHT?
4) I will DO MY BEST to…
5) (Optional) Will you FORGIVE me?

I know quite a few grownups who could stand to learn that basic formula! It’s something I’ve learned from listening to meetings and thinking about group dynamics, and from feminist and anti-racist activist stuff.

I should remember it more often myself, and make less explanations & excuses.

I think it’s great that schools are teaching this kind of skill and such a range of emotional vocabulary.

Secret texting at the school talent show!

Posted on by Liz

Here’s the video of the 3rd grade dance act in the school talent show! An eighth grade girl choreographed it and coached all the 3rd graders through many practices. They dance to the James Bond theme, Soulja Boy, and then What Is the Sun? by They Might Be Giants.

I giggled a lot during it because it was SO AWESOME. Especially at the bits where the kids are all sneaking around like they’re James Bond spies with finger guns.

The whole show was impressive. A crew of middle school kids organized everything and ran the show, including practices, planning, stage crew, sound and lighting, getting the auditorium, and selling tickets. I enjoyed the piano solos, the many middle school girls doing solo dance routines, the group dances, the heartfelt songs sometimes sung a bit softly & deer-in-the-headlights. My mom friend who shall remain mercifully nameless kept texting me naughtily during the show and together we invented the camera-flask, perfect for all PTA type of school events so you could video your child’s song AND discreetly take a nip of soul-restoring tequila. It went sort of like this, (heavily fictionalized)

6:35 omg need drink
6:36 where iz flask
6:37 flask camera!
6:38 aaaaaagh
6:45 not my fault i do not allow hannah montana in teh house
6:46 bwahaha sucka
6:47 KILL ME
6:48 hahaha killing would be too slow
6:50 you have to admit they are sweet
6:50 no i dont
6:51 cynicism melting halp snif

Meanwhile the little kid next to me was all like “I know breakdancing. Why do you have a wheelchair? Can you do tricks? I think breakdancing is really cool. I know that girl! I know that girl too! I know her brother! Oh I can’t believe they’re going to do this, why, why why!” (said for anything mushy & sentimental) I think for him the show needed more explosions.

I remembered how I used to watch my friends make up dances and create mildly too-sexy outfits for our middle school talent shows. I could not fathom how to keep up with their dance moves and would not even try. They danced one year to “Jukebox Hero” and the next to “Controversy” which I couldn’t believe they got away with.

The other things I gleaned from the talent show experience were fashion-related. I really really really wanted the one guitar duet kid’s outfit with its vest, buttons, baggy pants, and ska-ish tie. Oh wait I have that outfit already, it’s just that I’m not 13 or 6 feet tall, and can’t play the guitar or stand in that sort of guitar player attitude. Oh well! (Their guitar solos were smoking!!!) The other fashion insight was that the 80s have come again in mutated form in a somewhat hideous way. Of course they were all cute as bugs and YET… the mutant halter-top-vest thing, over the long tank top, please god make it stop! But, finally now I understand all the teenage girls’ outfits as described in super bad Harry Potter fanfiction. So, I felt old and detached from things that girls wear in junior high, which is probably a good sign of almost-maturity, or that other thing where I am stuck in my decade, the way certain women in the 70s and 80s were stuck in 1945.

Oh also? Kids are awesome and I get all teary eyed and sentimental at the thought of how much nerve it takes them to get up on stage and sing a rock song or play the flute or dance around with everyone watching. I thought they all were amazingly cool. As a bonus, some of them had massive amounts of performing talent, the ability to connect to the audience and belt out a song — like this girl singing a country and western song with perfect self possession, or these girls dancing:

But the performances were good no matter what the level of ability was. I thought about karaoke bars and Rock Band and how we are more willing these days, maybe, than at some points in recent history, to stand up and perform for the fun of it and as a social activity rather than as perfect experts.

*UPDATE* And now I’m listening to the Langley School Project album. Trust me… go listen to it… at least to Space Oddity and Desperado.

Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do a fandango?

Posted on by Liz

Moomin’s school choir sings Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Ambitious of them!

If I didn’t totally love his choir director already, this would have done it. I’m taking suggestions for what they should put on their repertoire for next year. “Nevermind” would be just perfect.

The kids have worked incredibly hard this year. Every Monday and Friday, they got up and went to school an hour early for choir practice. I’m so impressed even with the difference since Christmas, in their timing and harmony.

Oh and… a sneak preview of next Monday’s talent show. I caught the 3rd grade at their dance practice, with an older kid as their choreographer and coach. They’re doing a dance to Soulja Boy.

Here’s the instructional video if you want to learn the dance. I can’t wait for this show!

Pledge for our Mathathon!

Posted on by Liz

Through his school, Moomin is participating in the St. Jude’s Hospital Mathathon. He will have a workbook of math problems, and will have 1 week to do up to 250 problems. I pledged him 50 cents per problem!

playing "multiplication madness"

If you’d like to pledge, please send me an email and let us know how much you’ll donate per completed math problem. I think we would also need your full name. The sponsor form asks for 5 cents per problem as a mininum. You would have to then snail mail us a check for the amount in mid-April, with the check made out to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Moomin says:

You should pledge for my Mathathon because the school wants to raise money for the hospital for kids who have cancer. I pretty much really like to do all kinds of math problems, and I’m pretty much hoping that there will actually be some challenging ones. Like some challenging multiplication. I’d like that!

very nice park guy took our picture