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Kid Stuff

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

1) At the Saturday 2nd grader soccer games, there were of course all manner of kids wandering around, exploring the woods and creek near the field while siblings played or waited for their game to start. At one point, my wife told me that some of the other parents on the sideline were becoming concerned about a young boy who seemed to be a six-year old or so who was picking up large rocks and throwing them at other children with impressive force, as well as periodically swinging a substantial branch at them. I watched a bit and sure enough, it was kind of alarming, and it felt as if it wouldn’t be long before somebody got hurt. Some of the other parents had already tried to get the boy to lay down his rocks and sticks, and a few had moved on to sternly telling him to put them down, but he was doing his best Jimmy Cagney imitation and having none of it. Nobody knew where his parents were, though we guessed they were probably on the far field, a long way away.

This is one of those tricky situations. If it was your own kid, you wouldn’t hesitate to grab the kid forcefully and to have a serious talk about this stuff. But you really don’t want to do that to a complete stranger’s kid: all sorts of things can go very wrong from that moment onward. I think a lot of us were edging up to that decision, though: better that than another kid getting a sharp rock to the forehead.

And then another six-year old stepped up to the rock-thrower and shouted, “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! YOU ARE IN MY CLASS!” The rock-thrower paused. “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS!” The rock-thrower kept his big stick but seemed to change his mood a bit: he walked away onto the forest trail. I half expected the mediator kid to start an even more sophisticated line of psychological intervention. Then the game ended and as a lot of us were walking away, we noticed that the father had finally caught up with his wayward son and was bringing him to heel. There was just something kind of awesome about this kid stepping in like a hostage negotiator to defuse the situation.

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2) We went down to a local Philadelphia museum that was having a superhero-themed event this weekend as a way to get kids to come in and look at the exhibits (and, I suspect, to entice parents to buy memberships as a way to get around the long line). It was fun to see the kids, some adults and some staff members in costume while going around the museum. There were some good theme-related events for the kids as well as a couple of nice lectures by Penn faculty.

Still, I was struck by two things. One is just a basic issue that I see at a lot of events that are intended to attract or entertain small children. Event planners often don’t anticipate fully where the heaviest traffic flows are going to be (and how upset children can get when they don’t get to do something that looks like fun because of competition for places or spots), and they don’t break up events or activities into sufficiently bite-sized components. Planning a successful event for children is a really difficult art, far harder than for adults. You have to have a lot of fast-paced activities, a surplus of materials and adults to help children, and you have to think ahead about what most kids are most likely to want to do. One thing in particular: if you have an activity or entertainment where the kid gets to take away something (balloon animals, to use one example from this weekend), you can expect that to be intensely popular, and you need enough people assisting with that if you don’t want some upset kids (and parents) by the end of it all.

One other thing: event planners need to think carefully about lowest-common-denominator standards for what’s appropriate while also keeping a bit of fun and maybe even parent-tweaking trangression in the mix. In the case of this weekend, I have to say my jaw dropped a bit when it turned out that the prize for kids who completed a scavenger hunt involving clues from the exhibits was…Watchmen posters of Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl. As my daughter said, “I don’t think I’m allowed to see anything else about those characters, am I Daddy?”

Posted in Domestic Life | 2 Comments »

Practicalities

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

I like Laura’s list of to-do and not-to-do for young women at 11D. In the comments, Western Dave follows from this list to argue that a class like home economics has big and often neglected payoffs for high school students (male and female), presumably once that type of course leaves behind the heavy baggage of being an indoctrination center for female domesticity.

I totally agree. One of the best things my mom ever did to for me was to insist I take a typing class during the summer during high school. I hated it at the time but the value it returned goes well beyond almost any other course I’ve ever taken. I wish now that some of the other applied or practical courses I had to take hadn’t been so badly taught. I had metal shop when I was in 7th grade, but the teacher was a jerk: the class really should have been called “Asshole Masculinity for Guys The Teacher Thinks Have No Other Prospects In Life”. Same for the course I had to take in 9th grade on mechanical drawing: the teacher made no attempt to teach it for anyone who wasn’t going to be using the skill in an immediate vocational sense.

I’d even love to see a life-skills course at the college level in a liberal-arts environment. Why not? We have a swim test here, rather infamously. Here’s what would make my list of concrete skills that men and women will find useful to know as adults, some of which I’m still awkwardly trying to pick up now in mid-life, a few of which I’ve never picked up. The key thing here is to insist that both genders have to be exposed to all of this stuff, that nobody gets to opt out on the argument that it’s not manly or feminine. It’s ok if later on people divide these chores according to facility or preference.

I’m leaving aside intellectual skills that are more commonly taught, such as writing or numeracy. Also leaving aside child care, as that is more relevant if and when you have kids or have to take care of someone else’s kids.

Maybe this list is a bit biased towards suburban and rural life. Anybody think of important urban skillsets that are missing from this?

I mostly think that the way that social, emotional and psychological skills are taught in K-12 schools don’t belong on this list, partly because I’m skeptical that they are well-addressed by conventional pedagogy, which easily degrades into well-meaning jargon that has little to do with real-life. Most of the things on this list are concrete, though I think if they’re taught dully (see again my 7th grade metal shop), it’s hard to retain them.

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The insides and workings of a computer, and how to replace and add components to one.
How an operating system works. How to customize an operating system. File systems.
How Internet works. How to set up a router. Internet safety and virus protection. Online commerce.
How to operate important software applications: word processor, spreadsheet, image management, presentation software.
Best practices for searching for information online.
The basics of investment and personal finance.
How to file tax returns. How to read a paycheck.
Basics of how to start and manage a small business.
Price comparisons and management of monthly budgets.
Cover letters and resumes.
Basic first aid. Proper use of medicine. Common illnesses. When to call for expert medical assistance.
Basic cooking.
Basic evaluation of food quality in markets. Food safety, especially cross-contamination.
How to drive, including stick-shift. Basic auto maintenance.
How to read a map. Knowledge of mass transit systems.
Basic power and non-power tool operation. Safety training in tool use.
Care of plants. How to plant, including use of shovel and other garden implements.
How to paint interiors.
Basics of home mechanical and electric systems.
Basics of carpentry.
Basic self-defense, including watching for trouble signs from other people.
How to swim.
How to ride a bicycle.
Dealing with poisons, hazardous chemicals, insect bites, common irritants.
Sewing and clothing repair.
Legal rights, small claims courts, basic familiarity with civil and criminal provisions.
Condom use, safe sex, reproductive health.
Simple diagnostics and repair of appliances.
Cleaning of home environments, clothing.
Reuse and repurposing of household items.

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What would you add? Take away?

Posted in Domestic Life, Food, Miscellany | 20 Comments »

From the Gut

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

If you like, you can read my long intellectualized response to the struggle over intellectuals and culture below.

I also have a much more visceral, personal response to the kind of anti-intellectual populism that’s been more visibly present in American life over the last decade. This is the “gut reaction” that Robert Zimmerman talks about in the comments on my other thread. Intellectually, I understand why educated professionals should be regarded as a snobbish power elite. (Margaret Soltan sketches out quite a few of the reasons at her blog today.)

Personally, emotionally, there’s something that doesn’t add up, about how I got to where I am today, about the person I was and became.

By the time I was in third grade, back in the early 1970s, I had been a voracious reader for some time. I particularly liked natural history, biology, and science on one hand and fantasy and science fiction on the other. My sister was similarly voracious: the joke in our household was that rounding us up for dinner was a real chore because we were likely to be so deep into reading that we didn’t hear anyone calling.

I was completely innocent about what this habit meant in the larger world around me. So in third grade, if we had a lesson about hermit crabs and I happened to know the scientific name of several different species, the details of their life cycle, the ecology of intertidal zones, that was all good, as far as I could tell.

In fourth grade, that got my face shoved into the dirt or into fences, it got me kicked and spat upon, it got a ring of girls chanting “you’re a scientific martian” at me during recess. Rinse and repeat for the next four grades or so, welcome to the geek subculture. By high school, things changed a bit, the social hierarchies spread out and complicated somewhat, the recognition of where life was tending started to settle in. But in the years where I came home and cried most days after getting hit or bullied, I looked around at the world for some clues about my situation. I don’t think I had to look very hard for evidence that in mainstream American culture kids–and adults–who knew too much were mocked, marginalized, represented as effete, useless and weak.

Yes, this was also the highwater mark of the authority of technocrats: see my other entry for more subtle histories. But the air around me felt poisoned. That’s what so much fantasy and science fiction, especially for children, fed upon, in fact, and why I grew even more attracted to it over time: its protagonists experienced grievance and marginality and usually had special compensatory powers and experiences conferred upon them as a result. But it wasn’t just speculative fiction. When I got to junior high, I started reading more conventional literary work, particularly short stories, and that felt just as much like an induction into a kind of secret garden, a hidden and despised fellowship of readers (adult and adolescent) who enjoyed literature or found history thrilling rather than disparaged it to join in the polite company of one’s peers.

Now since the 1970s, this sensibility, these themes, has moved from being a marginal literature to being the central engine of much American popular culture. How many stories and films have we seen about the marginalized smart and sensitive child who becomes a key player in the workings of destiny because they’re smart and sensitive? Hermione Granger and Harry Potter are only the latest in a long line of characters fitting this mold. The geek has become a heroic economic and cultural figure in American society, and a major driver of both cultural production and cultural consumption.

And yet here we are: not only listening to mockery and lashings of eggheads and intellectuals, but the eggheads and intellectuals are sometimes apologizing for being that way about as abjectly as I ever pleaded not to be hit one more time.

Time opens up perspectives. It’s possible to realize, many years later, that what you intended to say in all innocence, deeply wounded someone else because of their insecurities, their own baggage. One older male relative of mine who had done military service was once talking to some of the kids about it, and about how the enlisted weren’t treated all that well. I was about ten, I think, and I commented that it seemed like soldiers had always been treated badly by generals, all the way back to Sargon the Great. It was like I’d slapped him, and of course, in some sense I had. But it was all I had to bring to the conversation: I read a lot, I knew a lot about military history. I was trying to give a gift, but from his perspective, it was just a smelly little turd. He was telling me what he knew from life; I was saying what I knew from books, in a ten-year old’s way. I honestly had no sense that I was thinking I was better than him, or that my books told me more than his life told him.

You know, I want to say: it was ok. It was ok that I knew that. It was a helpful thing to know that. It helped me to understand what he was saying. If he was a more open kind of person himself, he could have done something good with that comment, used it himself. Rolled the ball of the conversation along rather than shut it down. Still, there’s a fundamental asymmetry. I could take what he said and add it to my knowledge, make use of it. He couldn’t take what I said unless he followed me into formal knowledge, or trusted me so much that what I said was in the books was as good as truth. (Not wise if you’re talking to a ten-year old.)

Who is most sinned against in that kind of moment?

It’s hard for me to pin the Scarlet Letter E for Egghead to my chest and beg apology for knowing things, or reading literature, or liking the heirloom tomatoes I grow in my backyard, or any of the things that compose my professional and personal being. It’s hard for me to see myself as some growling, powerful elite who daily intrudes upon the private lives of a humble family of church-goers in the heartland and forces them to watch pornography while I turn their children into Marxoislamicist transsexuals.

It’s not as if getting your face pushed into fences ever quite comes to an end, either. I was at a party a few years back where one guy, upon hearing I was a professor, immediately wanted to make sure I knew how to throw a football and put me through my paces. Yeah, I found that basically gentle and amusing, but it’s not as if I then got a chance to find out what he thought of Foucault, if you know what I mean.

So emotionally, I just can’t quite get my head around the idea that somewhere along the way, I magically became the swan and now it’s other people who suffer uglyducklinghood.

Posted in Academia, Domestic Life | 19 Comments »

Dog Days

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

House training a dog is a time-consuming hassle, but…

Posted in Domestic Life | 5 Comments »

Vindication

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Must remember to take my medicine tonight.

Posted in Domestic Life, Food | 1 Comment »

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

June’s arrived, which usually means that I’ve accomplished about as much as I can hope to with my garden for the year, except maintenance and any non-planting work I want to do.

When we moved in to our current home, most of the yard was in pretty shabby condition. A lot of it still is, because I can only handle one major area of improvement each season, both in terms of the energy and labor-time I can spare and in terms of the cost of materials and plants.

My first target was an area on one side of the front lawn where there was a single lonely pine tree and some scruffy grass that eventually gave way to some pachysandra, English ivy and a chaotic jumble of forsythia underneath a big maple and a magnolia. All of our trees were in bad shape, with some dangerous limbs, so we had a big trimming right when we moved in. I had both of the big pines cut down: I’ve never liked them much as isolated trees mixed in with maple, oak and ash in Eastern woodlands.

Over three years, I’ve done a lot of planting where the smaller pine in the front had been. First off, right where the pine had been, I planted three dwarf peach trees and three butterfly bushes in a circle around a birdhouse on a pole, with a few container plants scattered around that area. Everything has grown in fairly well.

The next spring I built a raised bed on the north side of the peach trees and planted a lot of lavender with a bit of tickseed and sedum mixed in. On the south side of the circle of peaches and butterfly bushes, I planted a mix of ornamental grasses and dogwoods (yellow-twig and red-twig), with a cheap bench overlooking the area. All of this has grown in pretty well, with the exception of some Japanese bloodgrass.

Late last summer, I began to build a rock border around the raised bed of lavender, and that’s where I planted this spring: thyme, lemon balm, heliotrope, rosemary, several types of mint, blanket flowers, beardstongue. Mostly that’s doing ok, though I’m having some problems with drainage and weeds. If I can afford the stone, I’ll finish building the small border wall later this summer, which I mean to take all the way down the property line into the shaded area where the maples and magnolia are.

I also plant a vegetable garden each year. For once I managed to get some peas in: March is usually so busy, and often there isn’t a good day to plant on the weekends where I have the time and the energy.

The main point is to get tomatoes and beans, though. For once this year I also got some sunflowers to germinate, though some kind of insect destroyed about half of them after they’d popped up above ground.

I had to replant a lot of the lawn on the west side of the house, as some kind of grass-like weed pretty much destroyed that whole area late last summer. I don’t really like dealing with lawns. They’re a hassle. On the other hand, I like the open green space they provide.

I’ve got a dead dogwood to take down myself later this summer, and a lot of fallen limbs to break down into firewood at some point. Another long-term goal I have is to get a good chipper/shredder so I can make my own mulch each year (I have a huge pile of deadwood in the most neglected corner of the backyard).

Our sour cherries and high-bush blueberries are coming along nicely, though we usually only get about one picking of blueberries before the birds strip the plants bare. (Nets don’t help: they just get under the nets, eat their fill and then freak out and panic because they’ve forgotten how to get out.)

The ambitious goal, if I can finish the wall, is to prepare the area in heavy shade for ferns, hostas and some other shade plants, and to build a treehouse in the same area, on one of our stronger maples. Getting rid of the English ivy and forsythia in this area promises to be an ordeal, though.

Obviously, I enjoy gardening. I don’t have that romantic sense that it brings me closer to nature, or any of that kind of thing. In fact, it mostly makes me grateful to live in a late-industrial civilization, because it teaches me more potently than any scholarly study might about the hard limits faced by any preindustrial agrarian society. We have so much tree cover in our yard that there are only a few patches where I can grow vegetables. I think that next year I will have to leave the best area for our vegetable garden largely fallow, as I’ve seen declining yields in the current patch, even with some mineral amendments and a lot of the compost from my own piles tilled in before planting. If I had to live off my own land, I’d be lucky to achieve subsistence even if I cut down all my trees and converted all of my yard to food production.

I do like having herbs and vegetables close at hand all summer, though.

It’s sobering to see how capricious any vegetable is, and how difficult it is to get many to germinate. Moreover, I’ve largely settled for growing vegetables that taste distinctly better from a home garden (tomatoes, beans) but that also don’t seem too interesting to squirrels, woodchucks and deer. I learned the hard way that whatever they want, they get, no matter what you do to stop them.

Pretty much everything I do in the garden is done “organically”, save for whatever the nurseries I buy from might do to grow the plants, but again, that’s not because of some profound philosophical commitment on my part. I do it this way because it’s less money and makes good sense, and because I have a phobia about hiring people to mess around with my own stuff. Why not stockpile deadwood and have compost? It seems much weirder to me to haul all the stuff to the front yard and call someone to cart it away. I don’t want a lawn service because I’m cheap, because I don’t want strangers all over my lawn once a week, because I don’t like the look of heavily treated lawns. So yes, my lawn has more weeds, is often overgrown, and has patchy areas. I’m ok with that. I’m going to run into some long-term problems with my most ambitious plans: I want to eventually build another rock garden with a water element in the backyard, but this time I want to use rocks that I couldn’t handle with my own muscles to build part of it. It should tell you something about my monomania that I’d almost rather rent a little bearcat to get the bigger rocks in place myself and dig the area for the liner.

Posted in Domestic Life, Miscellany | 14 Comments »

Grubeus Shagrid, At Your Service

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Low-energy day today: I spent a good part of yesterday playing the part of Shagrid, distant cousin to Hagrid of Harry Potter fame, convening an American expansion of the famous Hogwarts School. This was the consequence of my daughter’s request for a themed birthday party. One thing I discovered: it’s hard to find a fake beard in the middle of January. Another thing I discovered: if you spray-paint a grey wig brown, it will smell so toxic even after drying for three days that you won’t be able to wear it. A third thing: magic potions made from vinegar and baking soda are surprisingly sticky when they overflow and then dry on the dining room floor. But it was good fun.

My mom happened to bring along some of my old schoolwork from first through third grades. Reading through a stapled-together volume of “Monster Stories” I wrote from when I was nine, I came across the following, in between various stories about monsters robbing banks, pushing other monsters off cliffs, and getting into arguments with witches. See if you can guess what year it was.

——————–

Monster News

MONSTERGATE

President Monster has tapes!
They could be the answer.

Posted in Domestic Life | 3 Comments »

Footnote From the Peanut Gallery

Monday, July 9th, 2007

Regarding violence, media and childhood.

My daughter’s comment about the first day of art camp, in which it was revealed that the theme for this summer’s creative work would be “peace”:

“Peace is boring”.

Posted in Domestic Life | 2 Comments »

Wild Things

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

So apparently you don’t have to go to rural Vermont to see some interesting animals. In late May, we heard the absolutely blood-curdling vocalization of an animal of some kind prowling around in our front yard late at night. I had never heard anything quite like it. It wasn’t an owl: the sound was quite low to the ground. It was very loud. It was almost like an injured human in some respects, but in other ways very unlike any noise a person could make. I got a quick look at something darting across the neighbor’s yard that night: all I could see clearly is that it was a small mammal, a bit bigger than a cat, fast and low-slung.

So last night our mystery animal was back, right by our front door. I don’t think I’m easily rattled by such things, but this sound really does make the hair on the back of your neck rise. It goes straight to the primal part of your brain, like you’re a cro-magnon who hears some dangerous animal just beyond the periphery of the campfire. My wife opened the door and whatever it was actually growled at her and made a little intimidating semi-rush towards the door. I got a much better look at it this time from a window.

I’m pretty sure it was a fisher. It was far too big for a weasel. The fur was dark, it had a long tail, and the basic physiognomy of a mustelid. Now this seems a little unlikely, I know, as Pennsylvania reintroduced the fisher in 1994, and mostly at sites in northcentral Pennsylvania. Moreover, a lot of the older literature on fishers suggests that their habitat is limited to coniferous old-growth forests. But poking around a bit, I see that elsewhere in the Northeast, fishers have been aggressively moving into suburban areas where there are mixed-wood forests nearby–and in some cases, making a good meal out of the local cats. I also see that there’s a population that was reintroduced in West Virginia in 1969 that is thought to have spread into southern Pennsylvania.

I can’t think of any other possibility. Definitely not a skunk or a raccoon: I’ve seen plenty of both in my life, and heard all the sounds that raccoons can make at night. From my sighting, I’d say it was definitely not a fox, though we do have a red fox in this neighborhood that we’ve seen from time to time. The animal runs, moves and is built in a way very different from a fox. Not a coyote: I’ve also seen and heard many, many coyote. Not out of the question that it could be a bobcat, but the body was too elongated and low-slung for that, I think.

I notice that the wildlife specialists quoted in the NY Times article about possible fisher sightings in New Jersey are skeptical, and in a way that kind of annoys me. Partly because other species have turned out to have surprising adaptability to suburban conditions while supposed experts claimed that they couldn’t have until the evidence became too overwhelming. Partly because both of the people cited in the NY Times article say that they’ve never heard of fishers or martens vocalizing, but I’ve found a goodly number of sources just this morning that describe a wide range of vocalizations, including something that sounds rather like what we heard. I know people have a tendency to exaggerate, and so wildlife control specialists tend towards skepticism. Trust me on this one: it’s not anything I’ve encountered before. It might be that a fox could make a noise like this, but I got a very good look at this animal from the window, and it was not a fox.

Posted in Domestic Life | 6 Comments »

Back South

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Back from a long stay in Vermont.

This is the first time as a family that we’ve rented a house for a long-term vacation. We’ve been thinking about trying to find a place to go in the summers for three weeks or a month, and northern New England has been high on our list of preferences. I don’t really like Mid-Atlantic beaches in part because of the hassle involved (traffic to and back plus crowds when you get there). I’d love to spend three or four weeks every summer in the high mountains of the American West but I don’t want to get on a plane more often than I have to at this point in my life.

So we thought we’d try the northeastern part of Vermont for our first go, and we picked a farmhouse along a quiet gravel road near to the town of Craftsbury. The house was great, the result of about 15 years of steady work by the owner. He has a small herd of beef cattle in the 35 acres around the house, and while we were there he added two young goats, which my delighted daughter was happy to goatherd around. (Also some geese who took a few days to settle in and find the pond in the pasture.) Fantastic southern exposure and view all the way down to Mount Mansfield, about 50 miles south. There was also a great barn that was set up as a workshop. (The house is for sale: if I had the money, I’d seriously consider it.)

At night, you couldn’t see any lights at all. If we turned off all the lights in the house, it was completely dark everywhere, in all directions. No planes overhead. During the day, there might be one car on the road outside about every 90 minutes or so. At dusk, we heard screech owls calling bloodcurdingly to each other at the tree line. Lots of local lakes with good swimming, and supposedly good fishing in the area, though my own experience with several highly recommended rivers was pretty disappointing.

There isn’t as much of an artisanal food scene in this part of Vermont as there is in southern Vermont and western Massachusetts. This is not to say that people aren’t producing great produce, meat and such for regional consumption, but it’s mostly flowing south and eastward of the area itself. (Reminded me a bit of how you couldn’t get really good coffee in some coffee-producing parts of Africa I’ve been in: it’s all packaged for export, because there’s hardly anyone nearby who will pay a comparable price for it.) The owner of our house was a really interesting, smart guy and we talked quite a bit about the local economics of farming. Upshot: not much, if any, profit in it unless you’re doing it at a large scale. (Though the profit on grass-fed organic cattle seemed a bit better.) If you’re not working for the government or for one of the few local businesses, you basically have to have a bunch of different small entrepreneurial ventures going at once.

It was also fun to take the dog along on the trip, another first for me. He particularly liked Stephen Huneck’s Dog Chapel. After reading the numerous moving eulogies of beloved dogs (and a few cats) put up on the wall by visitors, I thought of Chris Clarke for some reason–his dog Zeke belongs up on that wall, I think.

Our dog’s a little less happy now as he got a bad wound on his eyeball from a cat when we stopped overnight in Western Massachusetts on the way back. (He was just trying to have a friendly sniff of the cat, but the cat didn’t see it that way.) So he has to wear a cone around his head for a while. I’m cautiously optimistic but he may end up losing the eye.

Posted in Domestic Life, Food | 6 Comments »

Easily Distracted