Dads, Kids, Kitchen Cleaning, Executive Function, and Social Emotional Learning

This is a story from back in February.

I wanted to share a cool moment in time that Mota, Tawnse, and I had on Monday. Daize had gone off
to attend College Algebra, and I was working from the house. I walked into the kitchen and it looked like a portion of the recent bomb cyclone had landed in there. I had 25 minutes to kill, so I called Motaand Tawnse. When they arrived, I was already taking the recycling bag out to the garage. I asked them to empty the dishwasher and they got to work. When I returned, I moved everything off the stove into one sink. I asked them to load the dishwasher back up. While they were doing that, I got to work on scrubbing pans. As I did, I looked around the kitchen. I noticed a few dishes they’d missed, pointed it out, and they plopped those in as well. I asked them to check the rest of the house for dishes. While they were checking, I finished the pans, and got to work on cleaning the stove top. When they returned, I asked the two of them to get all the food and other debris off the counters, and then asked them to 409 the countertops when they were done. Finally, I asked them to sweep as I was wrapping up the stove top. Some of the things we did definitely took more than one try, but 20 minutes later, we had a really clean kitchen.

Here’s the point. This was all very pleasant for all of us. We’ve pursued an SEL approach that I found in three books that I”ll reference below, and it’s worked really nicely! I’ve always worked with and treated the kids more like we’re roommates than any other way. This started when they were little. They’ve helped with construction and cooking projects since they were big enough to handle whatever tools (knives, screwdrivers, hammers, etc…) They built the desk I'm writing this on when they were six, four, and two. The ages for this pretty much from the time they learned to walk till the present day, (an example of something they don’t help with yet is cleaning the toilet and tub because the prospect of accidents with Comet freak me out… Anyway.) At those ages, they were excited to be helping as part of the family. That seemed to help build it into part of their personal culture. They’ve also always carried their own stuff while we were out and about. On a few occasions, we’ve all had conversations about us all living in the house and enjoying it, and that part of enjoying it is keeping it nice. When I ask them to do something, I say please… Every time. The whole thing’s been approached on a team of equals level, and it’s worked pretty nicely!

Have I had to ask a bunch of times for one of the gang to move their dishes the additional one foot from the sink to the dishwasher? Yup. Will I have to another 2,000 times or so over the next several years? Oh yeah! But lots of times, (most of the time), the dishes wind up where they should be. To answer a perhaps unasked question about the all ages thing, “Do I think it’s ok for kids to climb on top of and stand on the counter to unload the dishwasher?” Totes! “Do I frequently leave the room while they do this because I can’t bear to watch?” Also totes! :)

Another note to make is that we don’t, generally, have schedules and routines. Definitely not for this kind of stuff. For us, things just kind of percolating along is fine. Which bring us to, “Do I think this would/could/should work for everyone?”

Nope.

There are folks that need schedules. There are folks that are as freaked out about knives as I am about Comet. There’s all sorts of different people… Of course.

But, I wanted to share the coolness we’ve had with this SEL approach just because it was pleasant.

The books that I’ve referenced in this pursuit have been

Home Grown by Ben Hewitt

The Child in the City by Colin Ward

(Kind of hard to get a hold of at the moment, but lots of libraries have a copy.)

and

Hunter, Gather, Parent, by Michaeleen Doucleff

(I haven’t read the book yet, but I did read the authors pieces in the NYT (I think) and The Atlantic.)

Also? The little bitty San Francisco kitchen looked just gorgeous when we were done!

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog