Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Funny

Discussing the Coppers (What Unschoolers Do Instead of School)

7 year-old No. One and I were eating dinner after I picked her up from art camp.  I’d been out of town on travel for the week, so we were catching up.  One filled me in on all of her art projects, then took a moment to quaff a little food—if you’ve ever eaten with a 7 year-old experiencing growth spurts, you know that quaff is in fact the correct word there. As One chewed I said, “So, I got caught jaywalking by the police this week.”  One and I frequently jaywalk, and I’ve mentioned before that it’s actually against the law.  Her eyes lit up.  “Really!?” “Yup.” “What Happened?” “Well, I was standing on the island in the middle of the road watching for cars like one does when they jaywalk when I heard a voice saying, ‘Why are you crossing the street like that?’ I looked behind me, and three cars back there was a cop on a motorcycle.” “What’d you do?” “I shrugged ‘I don’t know’ at him.” “Then what happened?” “He said ‘Come here!’” so I went bac...

Do Screens Hamper Socialization?

Screens in public… do kids need them?  I suppose a screen per kid could have led to a more blissful early childhood for my partner and I with us maybe having conversations at dinner, perhaps getting chores done more quickly, but I’ll never know.  We lucked out.  Early on, we had no way to provide the kids with screens.  We were poor grad students so buying the kids a screen of their own was out of the question.  In retrospect, our lack of screens provided more opportunities than it took away. Yeah, we did miss going out to eat for the first six months or so, (we couldn’t eat out all that much on our budget anyway).  Here’s the thing though.  As the first kid learned to sit up on her own and learned to crawl, all of our problems started to fade.  When we went out she involved herself with us, the condiments, her silverware, her napkin, her food, and ours.  She quit screaming.  Not all together, and not all alt once, but over time ...

“The G-Engines are Coming”, or How the Fringe Funded Higgs before Higgs Was Cool

"Sure," I hear you saying, "Michael Gladych is cool and all, but what does this have to do with the history of physics?" Read on and find out how Gladych reported on the events that would fund Higgs Particle research as well as the relativistic framework that inspired the Alcubierre drive. The same events that inspired Nick Cook's antigravity classic, "The Hunt for Zero Point" The article that brought Mike Gladych to the attention of fringe physics buffs everywhere, “The G-Engines are Coming”, appeared in its first incarnation in the pages of the November, 1956 issue of American Modeler.  The article begins with the bold assertion that nuclear airplanes will be made obsolete—by the artificial control of gravity—before they ever leave the design phase.  It then goes on to state that many aircraft companies were currently engaged in the study of the control of gravitation including: Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co., Convair, Bell Aircraft, Lear, Inc.,...

Unschooling Networks

It happened again.  The kid's network appeared on my radar.  Walking through our local art museum last week, I was stopped by a passerby who was leading a kids' art tour, "You're No. 1's dad aren't you?"  Then, this weekend, we went camping at a state park 20 or so miles away.  We hiked three miles into the nearby town of Stinson Beach where, while waiting in line at the local snack shack, 1 ran into one of her art teachers from last summer.  They took the time to catch up on the artsy things that had been going on in their worlds, and then they headed off their separate directions. Kids and networks.  It's a thing.  In my experience, unschooling kids tend to build networks for themselves and their families.  They build them the same way the rest of us do: by being outside, living life. It seems to be that simple.  Just by being out and about, interacting with the world that's around them, they network.  I frequently meet people on...

The Look

Every so often it happens, someone asks how unschooling is working while giving me the ‘surely they’re done with that by now’ look. Sometimes the look gets to me, and gives me pause to think about whether what we’re doing really does work or not. Then, I remember where the kids really are academically, almost universally ahead in my opinion, and I relax a bit. Annoying as it is the ‘look’ winds up being a positive force in general. It makes me re-evaluate my goals for unschooling in the first place. I just have two of them.  The first is  for the kids learn in a natural easy way that echoes the way I learned things growing up.   The second is for them to get out into the world to experience it, and to build the skills necessary to work with it. Sometimes when I review, I realize we could focus more on one or the other of those goals, and try to amplify my efforts accordingly.  For example, “No. 1 mentioned she wanted to learn to solder, we need to take ...

Always Watching

A few weeks back, Mom-person lost her wedding ring.  I was walking across the room one morning, and noticed her engagement ring laying on the rug, but the wedding ring was nowhere in sight.  She and I started a search for the errant ring.  We looked under the rug, then under the bed.  I emptied out the recycling bag, (Ick!), since we’d been cleaning house the night before.  We looked in all the places the ring should be.  It wasn’t in any of them.  Finally, we asked five year-old No. 2 if he happened to know where the ring was.  He’s frequently the moving force behind ‘misplaced’ items.  He earnestly told us he had no idea. Having assured ourselves that we weren’t shipping the ring to the recycling plant, we got on with life figuring the ring would turn up, and that we’d remount a more extensive search later.  Life, as it does around here, proceeded to trod rapidly along.  Before we knew it, a week passed before we’d even though...

How Unschooling Kids Learn: Environment as Classroom: Part 1 of the soldering series

Lots of people ask how unschoolers learn without classrooms or teachers.  The perhaps paradoxical answer is that they have classrooms and teachers, just not in the traditional sense.  The kids' (7 y.o. No. 1, 5 y.o. No. 2, and 3 y.o. No. 3), teachers are whoever they happen to be around when they're curious about something.  Their classrooms tend to be anywhere but our house, where we all typically decompress for a few hours around dinnertime before we head off to bed.  We do have haunts form time to time where we spend more time learning.  When the kids were younger, we had a favorite coffee shop with a grass lawn and an upstairs.  We'd hang out upstairs practicing numbers and division.  Since we've come to San Francisco, our favorite learning haunt has changed.  Google came the closest to what we use for a classroom when they implemented rolling study halls: More times that not, the gang and I find ourselves discussing 'school' subjects...

San Francisco Spring Break Pointers from an Unschooling Perspective

So, I have it on good authority that Washington public schools are on Spring Break this coming week.  Perhaps this is the last week of Spring Break for the country in general.  I don't know.  Like every year since we've moved here, I have noticed that the population of San Francisco has been augmented over the last few weeks with interested families excited to be here.  The gang, (seven y.o. No. 1, five y.o. No. 2, and 3 y.o. No. 3), get out and about in San Francisco all the time.  Consequently, we've picked up some San Francisco travel tips I'd like to share. First though, the obligatory shoo off.  You may want to go somewhere else for Spring Break, and if so we're all for that.  Lines will be shorter here, and we'll get to get out and do a few more things during the Spring Break weeks.  If you'd rather go somewhere else, that'd be OK.  Still coming?  OK, here's what works for us. Getting Around We don't drive here.  Ever....

What Would Tatum Do? (Don't Fret just; Fix It!)

And We Went the Other Way My life has been punctuated of late with various utterances of “No,” and “That’s not allowed,” regarding our day to day unschooling activities.  These admonishments have touched on topics including sitting on bar-stools, participating in museum classes, and  even helping out at volunteer soup kitchens.  It’s been kind of exasperating to say the least.  For the longest time I found myself sinking into a pit of embitterment.  I almost wrote about my negative feelings a time or two, but then narrowly talked myself out of it after jotting down a few notes.  Each time I’d giggle, and admonish myself with one of our local idioms, “What would Tatum do?”  If you’ve never heard of JB Tatum, he’s a physicist from Vancouver, Canada who may have never impolitely uttered a negative word, as especially illustrated by this, his most vehement of scientific diatribes. I wondered and wondered how Tatum would handle these situations. ...

The Farmers' Market Goes Cerebal

4:30 AM "Get up.  It's time to get ready to go." Every weekend, seven year-old No. 1, and five year-old No. 2 get up with me at midnight.  That's what they call it: Midnight.  Since it's the middle of the  night, it's clearly midnight!  We bundle up if we need to and we feel like it; we find out which by stepping out the front door to check.  Then we head out on the mile long trek to the bus stop with our backpacks and shopping bags.  Usually our walk down the hill to Lisbon and Silver where we catch the 44 involves skipping, running, skunk-spotting, and racing down the last block. Today though, with the clouds blowing across the starry sky in air so chill that my fingers aren't quite awake typing this, today, things took a more academic turn.  I spotted the Big Dipper so we took a moment to look at that.  2, who I didn't think knew the word dipper, but who's visual acuity is through the roof, looked at it, and said, "Oh yeah, it looks...

Our Screen Time: Paper

I've seen a lot of discussions about how much screen time is healthy for kids lately, and to be frank, I kinda drew a blank for each and every one of them.  For historical reasons--we were grad students when each of the gang was born--we couldn't afford 'screens'. It wasn't a hardship, it just never even occurred to us that we needed them.  So, the gang here doesn't really use screens to speak of.  Seven year old No. 1 can read and write, so she occasionally asks to make addenda to texts to Mom-person, or our Director of Tactical Ops, but that's about it. So, I found myself wondering, "What do the kids do when we go to talks or other occasions where they might eventually lose interest?"  This morning, while looking for contact info for some of our museum docent friends we haven't seen in awhile, the answer flashed before my eyes, literally.  The gang uses paper in place of screens! I haul around little 3x5 notebooks in my back pocket ...

3's Newfound Love of Cooking: Kids Cooking Squids

Three-year-old No. 3 got to drop in on a cooking class a few weeks back.  I love San Francisco and the fact that kids can 'pick up' a cooking class thanks to our spectacular Parks & Rec department.  When we ate dinner that night, she beamed, and said she'd had a blast, and also really enjoyed her friends helping her.  To me , this was awesome!  Not only had 3 made friends in a pick up class, she'd worked with them!  This led to two really cool thing!  First, less than ten days later, 3 made her first friend all by herself at our local branch library!  They drew pictures, sang and quietly talked with each other! The second thing that happened was that 3 wanted to make squid!  She'd seen me, along with seven year-old No. 1 and five-year-old No. 2 make it before.  She wanted in on the game.  That weekend, when she and I went to the 'redhat' market, one of our treasured local markets, for our weekly meat, fish and egg run, she asked...

An Unschooling Curriculum: Backwards in Time

Unschoolers love to say they don't follow curricula.  I've noticed though, that you can define an unschooling curriculum backwards in time by what the gang, (three year-old No. 3, five year-old No. 2, and seven year-old No. 1), has accomplished in the last week.  It's kind of awesome, going in, we had no goals, nor any idea any of this would happen! 3 developed a love of cooking! 3 asked to attend a pick-up cooking class for kids at the Noe Valley Rec Center.   (I love that San Francisco kids can drop into Parks & Rec classes if there's room.)    She had a blast!  About four days later, when she and I went to the red-hat for our weekly meat and egg shopping, she insisted that we get squid.  She asked to hold the bag while I levered the squid into it.  (This led to an amusing confusion.;  unable to see 3 below the seafood ice tray, one of the workers was concerned I was dumping squid onto the floor.)  When I was ready to...

Independence in Another Light: Utility or Grab the Cheese Please!

I had a great remembering a few days ago.  For me, it was a breakthrough moment, for the kids, well, the kids just did what they were capable of doing long before my 'awakening'.  We've tried to set things up so that the gang, 7 year-old No. 1, five year-old No. 2, and three year-old No. 3 are always encouraged to be independent.  When we were grad students, that meant hanging out at campus quads where the kids could wander a hundred yards away or more exploring the area and interacting with people.  As they grew, this emphasis on independence meant trusting that they could successfully and safely range further and further ahead of me.  The whole thing involved  learning to focus on each other, and mutually trust each other.  As the kids learned to listen for me to occasionally holler directions, they got to range out further and further, and explore more and more.  Ironically, (with respect to my 'awakening'), we started this in the somewhat c...

On the Value of Speaking Respectfully

Mom-person bolted across the street for the train.  If she got her foot in the door, we'd all get in.  If not, we'd stand out in the cold for another 20 minutes or so.   No. 1, our five year old, bolted with her.  She's big enough to keep up now, and did so admirably.  Her more frequent strides matched her mom's; she stayed right beside her; she was safe.  I'd picked up No.3, our youngest.  She was OK with the development, more bemused than anything else, but also safe.  Then, there was No. 2.  At three years old, he couldn't quite keep up with Mom-person.  She was three quarters of the way across the street before he thought to move.  I cringed.  We'd done this before.  I knew from experience that a few seconds delay could radically change the traffic situation. Whereas there were no cars when mom-person leaped, there very well might be now.  For slow-twitch participants, like No. 2 and myself, the whole ...

Shoes for Shooing

As No. 1 and I were walking down the sidewalk, I said, "So, if a noun is a thing, and a verb is a word about doing something, then what kind of word is run?" "A verb!" "OK, what kind of a word is boot?" "A noun!  It's a thing." "Cool, so what kind of a word is shoe?" I asked. "A verb!" "Really?" "Yes!" I thought perhaps No. 1 was confusing an action with the thing she did it with, so I asked, "Verbs are actions right, so how do you figure?" To which No 1 responded with a furrowed brow, in all seriousness, "Well, like when you want us to leave a room, you say, "Shoo!" and we leave.  So, shooing is doing something."

History, Ham Radio, and Touch

My dad and both of my grandfathers are masons. Consequently, as a kid, I could always find a copy of Albert Pike's, "Morals and Dogma", or a lodge monitor, full of geometric diagrams, on the bookshelf. My dad and I would talk about geometry problems like Euclid's 47th problem, the Pythagorean Theorem. Dad told a story that Euclid had proposed this problem to his student Pythagoras by sketching it in the sand while walking along the beach. Then, by drawing out a right triangle and making squares of the sides, Dd would show that the squares in the Pythagorean formula had geometric as well as mathematical meaning. The areas of squares made from the short legs of the triangle will add up to the area of the square made from the long leg of the triangle. Geometry presented as a story instead of a dry rigorous science is what held my interest as a kid and is what has piqued my recent interest in the new series "Touch" and " Daybreak " with their ...

Daybreak Chapter 4, Wardenclyffe and Real Physicists

Chapter 4 of Daybreak premiered yesterday! It was a little mushy and a little short for my taste, but it had another great physics quote delivered by Charles: "oceanic overturn followed by a series of mega-tsunamis and hyper-hurricanes" Oh the alliteration! There were also some interesting references to Wardenclyffe, Tesla's last laboratory. Which brings up the question, do real physicists hang out around Wardenclyffe? Although the transmitting tower was torn down and sold for scrap to pay Tesla's hotel bills, the laboratory building behind the tower is still there, and yes, yours truly got to hang out at Wardenclyffe for a day. A group on Long Islan, the Tesla Science Center, is working to restore Tesla's last lab into a working science museum and makers space. In support of the efforts to restore the lab, I worked with Jeff Murray, K1NSS, ham radio cartoonist extraordinaire, Diana Eng , Make magazine contributor, fashion designer, and NYC ham ra...