Enchanted Winter

New URL

Em — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:24:48 +0000

I’ve transferred my blog to blogger. Feel free to update your bookmarks accordingly.

See you over there!

Mission originality: Fail.

Em — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:11:37 +0000

When I started my blog, I did a quick google search to ensure that no one else was blogging under this name, and at the time, didn’t see anything. Now, of course, when I google it, another blog comes up that looks like it’s been around for awhile. I don’t know if I missed it the first time, or if it was too far down the list for me to find. Either way, I’ll be looking to rename my blog.

Aaargh.

Spring Cleaning: The Master List

Em — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:59:54 +0000

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to massively spring clean our apartment. As you can imagine, this takes some time when you have a toddler running underfoot screaming, “Up! UP!!” so it’ll be a slow, steady thing.

Here’s my to-do list. I’ll cross things off as I do them and re-post periodically.

-Deep clean the living room rug (Note to self: Off-white rug V. V. BAD IDEA.)
-~~Organize shelf above coat nook~~
-Clean out huge storage closet
-Donate stuff we don’t need
-Finish painting the kitchen
-Clean out car
-Scrub down Edy’s stroller
-Clean the couch
-Dust everything with a horizontal surface
-Scrub fridge, inside and out
-Clean out cupboards, inside and out
-Wash windows (We live on the floor, so this is an inside-only thing.)
-Sort clothes and donate anything unused

Edy’s Lunch

Em — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:36:58 +0000

-Leftover roasted chicken that I made last night
-Green beans with butter
-Fresh strawberries
-French bread
-Orange/mango smoothie

Rude playground urchins.

Em — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:56:26 +0000

I took Edy to the playground today- the nice one by the lake- because running around picking up rocks and sliding and bringing Mama sticks makes her radiantly happy. Of course, we picked the same time to visit as thirty local elementary school kids attending a birthday party, which meant that the park had descended to levels of chaos I only thought were possible when the local thrift store has it’s huge clear-out-the-store sale.

Anyway, Edy was crawling happily through one of the tunnels, when a boy who looked to be about ten literally stampeded over her in his haste to get through the tunnel. No sorry, no how-do-you-do, just a storm of feet and kool-aid stained teeth and then he was gone, with Edy lying on her back looking dazed and a little rumpled.

She recovered, and so we resumed our play. Five minutes later, I was standing on a ladder, helping Edy get around, as she is wobbly and a bit afraid of heights. Now, the playground equipment has probably twenty ladders, stairs, and other methods of ascending to the slide platforms, so it wasn’t like I was blocking some critical access point. Nonetheless, Pamplona-boy ran up behind me and shrieked, “Hey, get out of my way!”

When I turned to see who was speaking, he shoved past me, climbed up the ladder, and nearly ran Edy over for the second time in several minutes.

What do you do about kids like this nowadays? I didn’t want to say anything, because heaven forbid I correct someone else’s little angelface. God knows they’d probably sue me for the emotional trauma that my saying, “You should say excuse me,” would have caused.

Seriously. What should I do about this next time? This kid seemed immune to the evil-mommy-death glare.

My thoughts on dumb educational trends.

Em — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:42:37 +0000

One of the posts over at the WTM forums today discusses dumb educational trends to which some of us have been subjected, and I found the post fascinating. I love anything to do with educational philosophy and the like, and so here’s my personal commentary on some of what was discussed.

Initial Training Alphabet
Wow. This looks like a horrible idea of megasuperepic proportions. Why on earth would you teach children a special alphabet in order to teach them the alphabet? Good lord, if you’re going to make a child learn more than one alphabet, at least make the second one the greek alphabet. Comes in handy in college.

Open Classrooms
I’ve never had the, um, privilege to, er, learn in one of these things, but it sounds torturous. The way people describe it, it’s basically a school with no walls between the classrooms so that you can hear what everyone else is doing over a square mile radius. Someone said that the idea was that happy little facts would just drift between classes, with kids absorbing them like sea sponges. Or something to that effect. Apparently, the schools just end up being noisy ADHD factories. And what’s worse is that schools today are still doing this.

Whole Language
Thankfully, I was taught the finer points of reading through phonics. My mom swears that I taught myself to read simple books at home, and just worked on the details at school, but I digress. If I had learned to read by memorizing words off of flashcards, or however they do this, there is no way I would have been able to stumble through the genetics paper I read earlier today. I think I sounded out three-quarters of the words. If I would have had to look up every unfamiliar word in the dictionary, I’d still be at it this very minute.

Feelings > Facts
What is it with schools lately teaching that your feelings trump everything else, including important literary criticism and historical fact? It doesn’t matter why the War of 1812 was actually fought- what matters now is how you feel about it. Nice, in a get-in-touch-with-your-inner-self sort of way, but academically useless.

Edy’s Lunch

Em — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:20:08 +0000

-Lentils
-Fresh strawberries
-Banana
-Organic milk

Giftedness… pffffft.

Em — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:54:47 +0000

Honestly, if I read about one more mother who claims to have a “gifted” one-year-old, I may scream.

(And, just for the record, I’ve been saying this for months now, and contrary to the opinion of some snarky women, it has nothing to do with “jealousy” that Edy isn’t reading untranslated Russian literature before the age of two or whatever.)

I’m terribly sorry, but the fact that your 18-month-old recognizes a few letters or letter sounds does not mean they are gifted. Yes, there are gifted children out there, but the whole idea of “giftedness” is just a label for the upper percentages of the IQ spectrum. And as a child that young couldn’t possibly have taken an IQ test, it simply isn’t possible for them to have that particular label, not to mention that normal development at this age is amazingly uneven, and being temporarily ahead in one area is no indicator of future intellectual and academic success.

The entire reason I have such an eye-rolling, annoyed reaction to the term is people like this. People who think that, because their child is mastering basic concepts at an appropriate or slightly advanced age level, he or she must be a budding genius. If you look at what children were expected to learn and when one hundred years ago, the vast majority of children today are anything but geniuses. Most of our kids would have failed spectacularly back then because they’ve grown up with so little expected of them.

Aside from the increasingly broad use of the term, I also have a problem with the term itself. It makes it sound as if kids who did happen to win the genetic lottery were hand-picked by some magical deity to be extra-smart, while the rest of them, well, not so much. I mean, if we call smart kids “gifted,” should we be calling children with mental retardation “cursed”?

And as a person with an IQ that places me squarely in the “highly gifted” range, I can tell you that in today’s society, being a smarty is anything but a gift. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wished that my IQ was twenty or thirty points lower. In a culture that values wealth and consumerism far above anything else, being highly intelligent is just a recipe for mental health issues.

If you have one of the many, many children that fall into the average range, do yourself a favor and don’t try to label them as gifted because they can do division a grade-level ahead or whatever. If your child is average, that’s fine. That doesn’t mean they aren’t going to grow up to be a smart, successful, passionate, creative person, and trying desperately to figure out a way to fit them into the “gifted” box because you base your worth as a human being on how quickly they master literary analysis isn’t doing anyone any favors.

Edy’s Lunch

Em — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:26:37 +0000

-Organic creamy tomato soup
-Grilled cheese sandwich
-Mandarin orange slices
-Organic milk

Autism thing vs. toddler thing?

Em — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 20:25:05 +0000

So I had to make the rounds today at Edy’s toddler class, telling everyone who needed to know about her newly diagnosed genetic disorder (her teacher, her speech therapist, etc.). I asked her speech therapist if she’s observed anything that could be a potential sign of autism. She said, “Well, when I ask her to do things, a lot of the time she doesn’t do them.”

???

Perhaps I’m blinded by the fact that this is my daughter, but I was under the impression that’s a toddler thing, not an autism thing. From what I’ve seen with other kids in Edy’s toddler class, a 22-month-old not doing what you ask them isn’t exactly shockingly strange.