Raising Future Adults

There's a movie called At First Sight  based on or inspired by real world events. A blind man who lost his sight in early childhood gets his eyesight surgically restored as an adult and it doesn't go like people imagined. At one point, he walks into a glass wall and breaks it because he's never learned how to see. Physically functional eyes aren't sufficient. There's more to it than that. Sight involves two functional eyes and substantial training of the brain over years to figure out how to interpret the imagery being fed to the brain. We have stereoscopic vision where we have two eyes next to each other on the front of our face and that's a predator arrangement.  We triangulate what we see. One eye sees it from this angle, one eye sees it from that angle and it tells us important information about how far away it is but limits our field of vision.  And that triangulation happens in the brain, not the eyes. So there's a substantial mental piece to seeing an...

I'm not super familiar with the actual usage of this term. There is a short Wikipedia entry explaining that it's an educational approach that is being compared to the concept of forcing vegetables to mature quickly.  We place a high value on achievement for bright kids. We frequently do so at the expense of their welfare. Placing younger kids in with older ones frequently gets them picked on and may get them sexually assaulted. This isn't really an approach that fosters a healthy, thriving society. Real education teaches people to think for themselves and function as a citizen. Training teaches you how to work , not how to think, and in the information economy, we increasingly treat college like job training and this is a problem.  I declined my National Merit Scholarship.  I allowed my son to decline college at age thirteen though he had been accepted.  I think we do this garbage because of heternormative culture and the red queen effect it fosters where everyone n...

When I pulled my sons from school, they both tested above grade level in some subjects and below grade level in others. They were both below grade level in writing and phonics. I bought a phonics program which they didn't like. I told them they had to do it anyway.  When they tested at grade level for phonics, I had them ceremoniously box it all up and I mailed it to a younger cousin. They hadn't "finished" the program but had met their goal. I wanted them to have closure. With homeschooling, you sometimes have to intentionally create that. With public school, you get to the end of the school year and if you didn't flunk but didn't learn everything, welp, you're done with it and know it. They were thrilled to box it up one last time knowing I was getting rid of it and they would never see it again. I bought grade level educational programs and these typically had a progress section. I would print it off and stick it in their portfolio. They each had their ...

I don't sew. My mother sewed beautifully and I've already talked a little about her sewing matching shorts to go under all my dresses so I could be a prim, proper girly girl who wore dresses and didn't show my panties while being allowed to do cartwheels and climb the monkey bars at school.  Some of the drawings in my comic November West include a little girl in purple and white striped pants. That's based on an actual pair of pants my mother sewed me as a little girl. They were my favorite pair of pants and as I got taller, they began looking like high waters but still otherwise fit me. So my mother added a few inches of the same cloth but had the stripes go horizontal instead of vertical so it looked intentionally decorative rather than like a patch job. That was an extremely memorable experience for me and really made the lesson stick that during a certain period, children tend to get taller without getting bigger around in girth. I also moved the buttons on a cute...

When my oldest was two years old and I was pregnant, a friend with three kids under age five informed me she was taking my kid home so I could sleep. She didn't ASK. She TOLD me he was going home with her. I was EXHAUSTED. I didn't argue it. I slept until noon and got about twelve hours of sleep that night. The whole rest of my pregnancy was easier because of it. I was short of sleep the first 7 years of his life and I didn't have a paid job. I was a full-time mom.  When my sister came to visit me and her child was an infant, the last night there her baby was not going to sleep. I'm good at getting kids to sleep and also had experience with a baby with respiratory issues. I soon realized breathing issues were keeping her awake. I told my sister "She can't sleep because she can't breathe. You're flying back tomorrow. We could spend your last night in Urgent Care or I could feed her cola so the caffeine opens up her lungs." She opted for the caffein...

I recently rewatched the movie Stand and Deliver  which inspired me to write Math is a Universal Language because in the movie Jaime Escalante tells his Latino students that the Romans and Greeks lacked the concept of zero but the Maya -- " your ancestors" -- had this important advanced mathematical concept.  The movie also shows him politely standing up to gang members, threatening them, physically restraining one of them to prevent him from joining a fight and running to try to catch a few young guys behaving badly. Escalante was born in 1930 and the movie is set in 1982. He would have been 51 or 52 years old and the actor who won an award for the role doesn't quite sell those bits of the story for me. Escalante was originally from Bolivia and of Aymara heritage. The internet suggests the actor who played him was around 5'9" or 5'10" and a photo of them together suggests Escalante was a little shorter but stockier. He looks vaguely like a shorter ve...

In the US, children are typically expected to memorize the times table from 1×1 up to 12x12 before leaving elementary school. I learned them in 4th grade. Reality: There's a small number of answers you need to memorize. Most can be easily and quickly found via tricks. For starters, since it doesn't matter what order you multiply in, about half the chart is a duplicate of the other half of the chart. If you know the answer for 6x8 you also know the answer for 8x6: 48. 1. 1 times anything is the number you multiplied by one. There's nothing you need to memorize.  2. Any whole number multiplied by 2 will result in an even number.   5. All whole numbers multiplied by 5 will end in a 5 or a 0. If it's an odd number, it ends in 5. If it's an even number, it ends in zero. It's typically easier to multiply by 10 then divide by 2. This can work for quite large figures, especially if it's a round number like 1000 or 1500. 1000x5 doesn't really require that. 1×5=5,...