I’ve decided not to keep up marie.org any more. The domain name is good for another year or so, but I’m going to blog on Blogger.com instead.
So come over there to hear more about the family:
http://macmadame.blogspot.com
I had an idea at work and the patent committee thought it was good enough to patent. So I did. They filed it last Wednesday and now I’m going to get $1500 extra in my next paycheck and a spiffy “desk decoration” for my desk. If it gets approved, I get even more. They used to give out leather jackets. I hope they still do!
I had asked Matthew not to have his party the weekend after my surgery, but he and his girlfriend were insistent that this was the best weekend. They weren’t exactly wrong so I told them that they’d have to run the party (with Dad’s help) completely by themselves and they’d be lucky if I put in an appearance. It also couldn’t be at the house and ABSOLUTELY NO SLEEPOVERS.
So the night before the party, I had two teenaged boys sleeping over. How did that happen? They were pretty quiet so I was okay with it in the end, but not happy that my wishes were ignored.
The day of the party I didn’t lift a finger just as I told them and I actually had enough energy to go sit with them for a few hours. But then I had to take a nap.
However, as it got dark, the party moved to my house — in spite of my insistence on no party at the house — and I found myself with three different teenaged boys sleeping over. Plus Dan got mad because I said it was okay but never told him. Oops. I plead Vicodin High.
Dan was mad at one point too because he did a LOT more work than he wanted to. He did get the kids to finish up dragging everything from the park back to the house, but he had to yell to do it.
But there is food I can’t eat all over my house and a big mess too. I hope Matt realizes that he is cleaning that up and not me. I know he’ll say “but it’s my birthday”. I guess this is year that he’ll learn that, as you get older, your birthday isn’t a free pass day like it is when you are younger and, if you want a party, you probably have to do it yourself.
One thing I have to say, as the kids get older, they are a lot less noisy and they do more for themselves and that helps a lot. The kids from school all came down from Concord on BART with no parental chauffeuring. They are getting themselves home too. On the other hand, they respect your authority less and so you have to take a lot more stands or let a lot more slide.
Oh, everyone had a great time.
It’s that time of year and I got a nice raise this time. Plus a good bonus. I’m so happy. Now all I need is my promotion and I’ll be all set!
I have two kids. They both started out in “regular” school — the local public elementary school that is located a few blocks from our house and consistently gets top ratings on all those test and measures people use to judge schools. From there my oldest went to the local Jr. High which was a disastrous experience and then on to an “independent study” Charter School. The Charter School uses the state curriculum, but you have a lot of freedom in how and where you study what you study. It’s basically state-sponsored homeschooling.
While both approaches worked for us, at least for a while, I am not sure they are “working” in the sense of getting my kids to where they need to be in life. That is why Matt is now going to Diablo Valley and Maggie will be joining him next year. Diablo Valley is a Sudbury School. That means it’s run democratically — yes, the kids have as much say in how the school is run as the staff. It also means there are no formal classes that people are required to go to and no grades. There are classes but they are organized by a combination of staff and kids and taught by staff, kids and parents and they are completely optional.
I know that a lot of people I tell this to think Dan and I are nuts to send our kids there. These are the sorts of responses we get:
How will your kid get a well rounded education?
How will they get into college?
Won’t they just play video games all day?
But the teachers really do make them learn something, right?
In my opinion, people don’t trust their kids enough and that’s where most of these questions are coming from.
Kids learn so much without anyone teaching them when they are little. No one teaches kids to crawl or walk or talk. But people believe if you don’t send your kid to a school with a challenging, but standardized, curriculum that they won’t learn anything. I think that sells kids short. My youngest came home from school the other day and said “There is so much I want to know!” Most kids are like that. But instead of letting them explore their interests, we send them off to a school where they have to learn math from 9:15 am to 10:00 am and Reading from 10:10 am to 10:55 am. Then, we spend two weeks out of the year testing them to make sure they’ve learned whatever it is that we’ve decided that kids their age should know that year … and only that year, not earlier and not later.
I was a good student who got good grades. I loved academics. But 30 years later, most of the facts that I learned have been forgotten. The important things haven’t been forgotten though. I still love to learn. I still know how to do research. I can still write grammatically correct sentences that the average person can understand. The only areas where I’ve retained any knowledge are areas that interest me enough to continue learning about them today.
Am I well rounded? Yes, because that was important to me and everything interests me. On the other hand, do I know a lot more about programming C++ than I do about gardening? Do I know enough about figure skating to be a judge but nothing about cricket? Absolutely. Programming is my profession and gardening is something I rarely do. Figure skating is my passion, while I find cricket to be even more boring than baseball (and that’s pretty boring).
Adults are allowed to have specialized interests, but kids are not. Kids are exposed to everything in small and shallow doses rather than being allowed to explore a burning interest in depth. The rationale is that kids don’t know all that is out there and you have to expose them to it all so they can decide what they like. But you can’t really expose them to it all. So learning about ‘everything’ becomes learning about a few select things that we’ve decided are important for various reasons, some good and some not so good.
In the meantime, if a kid has a real interest in a certain subject area, they are often thwarted in their efforts to pursue it. They are told to wait until that subject is scheduled to be taught, be that later in the day, later in the school year or several grades later. Then, they are only allowed to study the subject as much as we’ve decided is the right amount. If they are less interested, they need to grit their teeth and suffer through until something more interesting is being taught. If they are more interested, oh well. It’s time to move on to something else because we have to cover “everything”.
The sad thing is that most of what is being taught in schools is crap. It’s over-simplified. It’s the fad lesson of the moment. It’s something that no one cares about any more, but everyone has always studied it. It’s busy work designed to teach something else. It’s something important and interesting in theory but the way it is taught all the life gets sucked out of it.
Most of it will be forgotten even a few weeks after the test, let alone a few years.
Both my children have excellent reading comprehension skills. Maggie decided at eight to read the entire Harry Potter series. I know she comprehended it because we talked about what she was reading. She asked intelligent questions and she was enthralled by what she was reading. But she’ll never read Harry Potter in school. First of all, The Powers That Be have decided that Harry Potter is too advanced for eight year olds. But even once kids get to the “right” age, it’s too controversial.
Instead they read stories that an “expert” selected as having the “right” degree of difficulty in terms of word choice. If the kids are lucky, whoever wrote the story has an interesting writing style and they didn’t mess up the details too badly in an attempt to make it “grade appropriate”. But even if the story is reasonably well written and interesting, it may not be interesting to your kid. But they have to read it because that’s the assignment and that’s how the school choses to teach “reading comprehension.” And if you are unlucky and reading these assignments convinces your child that reading is boring and something they never want to do again once they leave school, it’s too bad.
Part of the problem that a lot of people have with alternative schooling is that they think of a traditional school as the norm. This style of schooling is actually relatively new. If you look back until the beginning of time, most people learned what they needed to know from a combination of their parents and the community. There was a lot of on-the-job training and the only people learning for learning’s sake were the rich folks — most of whom hired private tutors for their kids and only sent them off to school for the last couple of years to finish them off and make sure they knew what they needed to fit into society and pursue a career (guys) or be a mom (girls).
As the world changed, people began to see the value of an education beyond learning just the minimum you needed to perform your alloted duties in life. They also saw it as a way to rise above the station you were born to. Eventually, it became compulsory. This is a good thing.
With a big demand for education, schools were created as the most efficient way to educate large populations. They weren’t really designed to give each kids a quality education, but to give all the kids a “good enough” education. For some kids, that’s better than what they would have gotten if they’d been born a peasant a few centuries ago. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best education possible.
Sudbury schools allow kids to learn in the ways that people naturally learn. Students pursue interests with as much depth as they want. Some kids concentrate on one or two subjects to the exclusion of all else. Others flit from subject to subject because everything interests them. But no matter what their approach, at the end of their school years, they are kids who are ready to be adults and know what they want to do next. They can also write a decent paper and know how to find out information about any subject.
Which means they will be lifetime learners — which is more than most people get out of school.
So they had layoffs at work. Even though we just had the best quarter ever. Business is so weird.. we made extra money so let’s use it to lay people off! Sure, makes sense to me.
I’m not too worried about it from a personal level. I’m sure I’ll be okay at least for a while. But it reminds me too much of the last time I was at Intuit with layoffs every year around this time, at least in my group. Plus it’s clear that the future is off-shoring more jobs to India. I love the food, but I don’t speak the language and I don’t want to live there.
My group is also working crazy hours. I am frequently at work until midnight. We’re going to get a killer feature out of it but the long hours are taking a toll.
I hope things start to get better soon. I’m definitely taking a long vacation when this is all over.
So I’ve decided to get weight loss surgery in the Fall. I started a blog just about that. I figured I’d be having lots of adventures and setbacks and weird medical appointments and it might be fun to keep a running record.
So come visit my new blog at:
Sometimes I think I was born without the “girlie” gene. Women are supposed to love to shop, right? Especially clothes shopping. Well I hate it.
Here are my complaints:
Will that be on your X card? No? Do you want a X card? No? Are you SURE? You can save 10%? You don’t want one? But you save 10%!
Lane Bryant was THE WORST. I had three different employees try to get me to sign up for their stupid card and they were really pushy and obnoxious about it. They shut up when I told them I had a strict “cash-only” policy and whipped out the debit card. But they still gave me the “crazy bitch” look.
Read the rest of this entry »
Maggie’s class has been doing poetry all year. Here are three more she wrote that she will be performing at Peet’s with the rest of the Third Grade classes:
I am a gold angel flying in Africa
Watching over children
I am a white goddess protecting animals
All over the world
I am a blonde cat catching a mouse
In the night
I am a green sea turtle swimming in the
Blue sea to catch my prey
I am a gray spider in a den
spinning a silky web
I am a pink poncho giving
warmth to a child
My daughter is learning to write poetry in school and for Mother’s Day this year, she wrote me this great poem that I just have to share with everyone!
Here it is:
You are the sweet dandyloin in the meadow of our family
You are the bumble bee kissing me, the flower
Read the rest of this entry »