San Francisco visit

We have now firmly established the wonderful tradition of flying to San Francisco on December 25 and staying until New Years or later, depending on when school starts. It's pretty great.

(Dale usually takes the pictures... we are grateful for that although sorry he's not visible.) The boys love spending all this time together, both with the family and just with each other. They get along fantastically well and provide a lot of mutual entertainment.

We do approximately one major touristy thing a day, and eat out a lot. So far we have been to the new Exploratorium and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (which had the best pastrami and corned beef I think I've ever had), and seen a terrific little production of A Year with Frog and Toad. Dad and Dale and I saw the second Hobbit movie while the children had a sleepover at Jes and Deena's. In between we read books and build legos. It's delightful and easy.

I was especially interested in visiting the Exploratorium, because I worked there as an Explainer in high school, and it had a huge influence on me. It's what got me started in physics. It's also what got me started in physics education: I spent the first semester of my first physics class (senior year) waiting for the class to get to the Exploratorium kind of stuff, and it never happened, and I was disappointed but dug into the challenge of applying apparently arbitrary formulas. It was not until I got to graduate school that I felt like I was seeing the Exploratorium spirit in Physics by Inquiry, and in physics education research more broadly. I loved that place. I felt like it was teaching us all that we could open our eyes to the wonder of the phenomena surrounding us, and figure out how things work.

The Exploratorium has enthusiastically moved from its historic location at the Palace of Fine Arts to a new home on the Embarcadero, and the new site is terrific. The boys could have stayed there all day. Jordan explored exhibits about light and magnetism; Aaron got particularly engaged with a table of circuit elements. Both of them loved the gyroid play structure, which is based on a shape defined by a NASA scientist looking for structurally sound forms.

Spelling stories

Jordan's writing therapy is moving fast. He has a new pencil grip that he uses consistently when doing writing exercises, and also uses voluntarily a good fraction of the time when he is at school or at home. He has revised his letter formation for almost every letter, with only some relapses on n, m, r, and p when he's writing quickly. After lessons in grip and letters, he had a few weeks of useful guidelines for spelling, and is now into composition.

The spelling was fascinating. Apparently, those of us who can spell reasonably well know a lot of rules for spelling that we do not know that we know. It's not just that we have memorized how to spell a lot of words: I can tell because I can make up non-words that you will know the right way to spell. For example, piff: You know it ought to have two F's. You can say "Well, it's like cliff," but it's also a lot like pin, and pin only has one N. Without being consciously aware of it, many of us know what Jordan's writing therapist calls the flsz rule, pronounced "falls": The letters f, l, s, and z are doubled when they follow a short vowel in a one-syllable word. Piff has two F's because F is a flzs letter; pin has one N because N is not a flsz letter. How about that? Jazz, clip, boss, shell, run: not jaz, clipp, etc. Isn't that something?

Some of the spelling guidelines come with stories that make them more memorable. Clarence, I have learned, is the name of the letter C. Clarence makes two sounds, /s/ and /k/. Clarence would like to make the /k/ sound more because he thinks it's cool. But the letter K is in charge of the /k/ sound. So Clarence asks the letter K if he can make the /k/ sound sometimes. Now K, it turns out, is a bit shy. She especially does not like to go first. So she offers to make a deal with Clarence: "If the /k/ sound comes at the beginning of a word, Clarence, you can go first and make the /k/ sound instead of me." Clarence says, "That's great; I'd love to do that. But I have already made a deal with I, E, and Y that anytime I come before one of them, I will make the /s/ sound. So sometimes you will still have to go first." K agrees to this. Therefore, cool, carry, cut; cell, cider, cyan; keep, kick. Isn't that great? Who knew? Me, apparently, but I didn't know I knew.

C and K also have another deal, for which you have to know that short vowels are also called "baby vowels." This is for two reasons: 1. they make kind of babyish sounds, and 2. they are never left alone. They always need a babysitter to come after them. ("Teenage vowels," on the other hand, say their own names, and prefer to be alone, as in he, hi, and no.) Some letters are very good babysitters, like T and P: they take good care of a baby by helping it say its proper sound. Sit, pot, nap. Other letters are terrible babysitters, like crazy R, who lets the baby do something unpredictable: her, war, far, fir. K, it turns out, because she is a little bit shy, likes to ask C to help her when she has to babysit. Thus back, sick, lock, tuck, peck.

English being what it is, most of these guidelines have exceptions. But still, they are very useful. The goal is to never have to say to Jordan, "You spelled that wrong, it's like this, memorize that," because it doesn't help him learn how spelling works. Instead, we can say "Oh, that's a flsz word," or "Remember Clarence," which cues some organizing principles.

Rehearsal

Jordan is performing at Benaroya Hall tonight as part of LENS, a fundraiser for Children's Hospital. The featured guests are the indie rock duo Pomplamoose and the pop-electronica-ambient-something performer Imogen Heap; the boychoir is singing backup vocals for each of them. Last night there was an extra rehearsal downtown. I didn't know why we had to schlep all the way to some club room at the football stadium for a rehearsal, but whatever, I do what I'm told. During warmups the choir director explained to the kids that the next room they would go to would be a lot like this one except bigger and maybe a little chaotic because of all the instruments. Oh, I thought, the band, of course they are rehearsing with the band, and that's why we're here. Great.

Imagine my surprise when we went to the next room and there was a full 100-piece orchestra! And the rock stars too! I had forgotten that they are all performing with the Northwest Symphony Orchestra. It was pretty stunning. It was also a lot of work. There were something like six leaders for any one song (the rock stars, the orchestra conductor, the boychoir directors, and the composer responsible for the whole event, who was also playing drums). They had a lot to work out, in the "do you want us to come in on the second one of these? shall we hold this note a little longer? I need more strings here" vein. The boychoir had to stand at performance attention for a long, long time, sometimes singing and often just waiting.

For me, it was so darned exciting I was out of my skin. What an incredible experience, to be part of such a production, to see how much work real musicians have to do to make an event happen! I had planned to get a bunch of work done while Jordan rehearsed, and instead I was just so pumped up I ran around taking pictures and movies and kvelling with other parents the whole time. It was not actually a photogenic venue at all - it was very crowded, and there was no way to get everything in a frame. But here is a picture in which I have circled Jordan on the far left, the composer (Mateo Massini) on the drums in front of him, and then from left to right Maria and Ben the choir directors, the orchestra conductor, and Nataly Dawn, the singer of Pomplamoose (the instrumentalist Jack Conte is in the blue hoodie next to her). I also took a video of them all practicing a fun 70s hit.

After this event Jordan was exhausted. He had not been able to hear himself at all over the orchestra and the miked singers, so he had been working like a dog the whole time to be as loud as possible while also staying in tune, and when he wasn't singing he still had to stand at attention and be ready to sing on cue. He did this for 2.5 hours with no break. As soon as he was released he drank a quart of water in giant gulps. When we got home he went straight from the car to bed and slept for 11 hours. But he is also excited, and presumably tonight he will be able to hear himself.

Science project

Jordan gave a presentation today about his fourth-grade science project. It was great! He did the experiments with Dale and created the presentation with me.


At his presentation today, he was very poised and comfortable, and got a lot of fun comments and questions. "Where did you get those rocks?" "Did you come up with this question yourself?" "Was this a fun science project?" Jordan seemed to enjoy the whole thing very much. I did too.

Handwriting exercises

Jordan's handwriting homework involves a lot of fun equipment. First he uses these chopsticks to move beads from place to place, using a careful thumb-and-index-finger grip. He likes to sort them into color groups, or stack them.

Then he uses stiff tongs to do the same thing. Pinch to grab the bead, lift up by bending the wrist back, and let go to set the bead down. These tongs are challenging even for me.

Next he is supposed to pull these linked beads apart with his fingertips. This is so difficult as to be a little maddening. Yanking them apart with your closed fist is not allowed.

From there we move on to the fun therapy putty. The first exercise is just to massage it around to warm it up, but only with the fingers, not with the palms or the tabletop. Next he makes it into a snake and pinches it hard between thumb and index finger, sequentially all along its length, three times.

The last strengthening exercise is to hold the putty in one hand and push the thumb down into it. This is also very tiring. Dale has learned that his thumb hardly bends that way at all.

Then he does a little writing. These are the "frog jump letters": you start on the green dot (the lily pad), go straight down (into the pond), then frog jump back up to the green dot for the next move. I notice that when Jordan is doing this exercise, he uses a proper pencil grip. (Then he goes right back to his usual grip when we're done, but that is to be expected.) 

I also quiz him on how to make the letters. These letters are made out of just four shapes of "legos": a long straight line, a short straight line, a big curved line, and a small curved line. I say, "How do you make a P?" and his job is to say, "Long straight line, frog jump, small curved line." A B is "long straight line, frog jump, two small curved lines."

This is all fun and takes ten minutes if we're snappy. Aaron does it too, why not?

Hand writing

Jordan and I saw a writing therapist. She conducted new assessments, gave initial observations and opinions, and is now in the process of writing up a report and a treatment plan. I've interviewed many over the phone, so I knew something about what to expect, but I was still amazed by the specifics.

Imagine drawing three overlapping circles, each the size of a quarter. How many hand movements is that? For most of us, three: one for each circle. And all the movement is in the index finger and thumb. For Jordan she stopped counting at 22 separate hand movements. Whoa. The reason is that his pencil grip is almost entirely rigid, so where we move our fingers he moves his wrist, his whole arm (curling and twisting to get into position), his entire BODY (leaving his seat), or rotates the paper itself. She looked at him, looked at me, and said: "What he's doing is exhausting." She asked him to sit straight and keep his paper still while he drew, and he immediately said, "This is so hard! How does anybody do this?!"

Whenever there are issues with reading and writing it is important to be really sure what is going on with a kid's vision, so she quizzed me about his glasses and his history of possible amblyopia. She said, "Which is his good eye? Oh - never mind. I can tell." It turns out that when he writes, he turns his body and cocks his head to favor his good eye, putting the paper in the center of the good eye's field of view. Thus his depth perception is poor, which impacts writing, since for accurate writing a pencil point has to contact a plane of paper just so. He also lets his glasses slide down his nose and looks over the top of them, in which case he is necessarily using only the good eye. 

At home I took some photos and a little movie of him drawing for fun at his desk. You can see the body positioning, the head tilt, the pencil grip that doesn't involve his fingers really at all, and the way he moves his paper around to give his hand access to the different parts of the drawing. On his own, he uses that sketching motion that he is using here, with repeated short hand movements: the motion for those comes from the wrist, not the fingers. In the writing therapist's session, she asked him to just draw solid lines, and he started moving his whole arm and body around.

This is huge news! This means that Jordan has a significant physical impairment with writing. Every time he sits down to write anything he's like whoever that artist was who lost the use of his hands and just tied the brush on to paint. The basic theory is that the way he writes now is so taxing, it takes all his working memory and physical stamina to do it, leaving hardly any for things like spelling and sentence formation, much less essay organization. Not only can he not do these things in the moment, he has probably not benefited much from the schooling he has gotten in these things, because he was just not able to do them when they were taught. In therapy the goal is for him to learn writing that is fast, easy, and beautiful, and that will free up a wealth of resources.

The first part of the therapy will be a complete overhaul of his pencil grip, which will also overhaul his handwriting. But you don't start this with the pencil grip; that's just impossible and insanely frustrating for the kid (can you imagine being asked to do that yourself? wouldn't work). First his hands need to be strengthened in the ways that will actually enable him to hold a pencil well -- and specific hand weaknesses may be part of why he developed his grip in the first place. That will take some weeks. During that time she will also be working on assessing, and then addressing, all the other components of writing that we need to know more about: his phoneme discrimination, what he knows about how to spell all the different phonemes, and so on. When the new pencil grip starts, it will be used only with her and only with drawing, not letters. Gradually as both the mental ingredients of writing (like spelling) and the physical aspects (like grip) become more confident, they can be brought together. There may be things like special pens and special paper that help him do what he's trying to do. Those will eventually be brought to school, but school is the last place that the changes get enacted. It's the most high-stakes and the least supportive, so the kid only brings their new techniques to school when they totally own them. When they can say, "This is my stuff. This is how I use it." and need no teacher support (in fact they will probably be educating the teacher), then they take it to school. The whole process will probably take 4-5 months.

I am so excited! Because now someone actually understands (some of) what is going on for him! We have now been through years of having no idea what his trouble is, or even if he really has any trouble beyond just being stubborn or spacey or something else. Years of teachers recognizing that he is not succeeding, but beyond that really just shrugging, having no idea how to help him improve. And now this person in one hour has figured out so much. Now I can really see him as having a writing disability -- possibly a temporary one? or maybe there are things he will never do fluently. Either way, as far as I'm concerned he has the writing equivalent of a broken leg. He needs therapy to get better. He has a therapist who knows exactly what is going on and what to do about it. Maybe he will get all the way better and maybe not; maybe (probably!) he has other obstacles too, which we will find out more about as we go forward. But now we understand one of the major impediments that he has been dealing with. It is a something that can get better. We have the resources to make that happen. And while he is getting better, he needs accommodations, because he literally cannot do the things that kids without a broken leg can do.

Belated birthday blogging

Three months ago the boys had their birthdays and I didn’t blog about it. Then I didn’t blog about our many other events this summer… our 20^th college reunion, boychoir camp, Camp Kesher, and so on. Ouch! Part of how you know your life is too busy is the lack of time for reflection. But never mind; let’s start again.

Aaron had a classic birthday party at home, with a dozen friends and a cake like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle except purple. (My first experience with fondant. Fun!)

It was a fabulous hot day, so we set them up for water play and just let it rip. 

Play for an hour, cake at the end, what more do you need?

Parents sat in the shade noshing on grownup treats. Six is an age when parents start to assume a birthday party is a dropoff situation, and while part of me appreciates not having to entertain twenty adults in addition to ten kids, another part of me misses the opportunity to hang out. So we make it very clear that adults are welcome to stay at the party, with French cheeses and moscato and such, and cultivate our friendships with those who choose to hang out.

Aaron digs his friends too, and then later he digs the Legos they give him for presents.

For Jordan, this year was all about Magic: The Gathering. We offered him a true MTG birthday party, held at a toy store that hosts MTG tournaments and hosted by a young man who knows what’s what. He was totally thrilled.  Here’s the guy: 

I had no idea what do to for a cake until a geeky work friend said, “You just need to put all five mana symbols,” and showed me what they are and what order they need to go in. Total mystery to me but it came out great.  More fondant.

This is the first time we have had a birthday party outside the house. The host let me know that this would be a two-hour party and that the boys would be completely engrossed in playing the whole time. “Fifteen minutes at the end for cake,” he said, and that’s it. Any additional activities or snacks or whatever would be ignored. This turned out to be exactly true. The leader taught everyone how to play, did a “draft circle” to help them build their decks, and set them into pairs to play. They were obsessed. They wanted no parent intervention of any kind. They didn't even want chips and salsa. The party favors were the decks they had built, which was way better than any goody bag. It was the most relaxing birthday party we’ve ever supervised.

Lions

Prosper drove us a long, long way to see lions, and we were not disappointed.

We even saw lions mating.

Lions who are mating go off together for a period of about five days, during which they copulate every fifteen to thirty minutes. Who knew? Thus, if you come across them, you can just hang out for another fifteen minutes, and you will see them do it again. But don't blink, because it's quick. During this "honeymoon," as Prosper calls it, they do not eat, and barely drink. They sleep in between sessions. The pair we saw was very tired, especially the male, but he still staggered determinedly after the female whenever she stood up.

Buffalo and hippos

Cape Buffalo

Nobody messes with the cape buffalo. They are huge and powerful. They kill lions.

Their horns are deadly poisonous because of bacteria that flourish on them. Lions who hunt buffalo have learned to attack from behind, aiming to break the back legs and disable the buffalo. If they bring it down, they will begin eating it while it is still alive. Lions teach their cubs how to properly hunt a buffalo. This is so fascinating to me. Do they teach them that the horns are poisonous, or do they only teach them (by modeling) that buffalo must be hunted from the back?

Hippos

Hippo pools are much more crowded, active, and smelly than I realized. Fifty hippos might be stuffed into a pool together, from multiple families, and apparently they get in each other's way, because there is a lot of the hippo equivalent of "Hey, watch it, buddy!"

They continually splash water over themselves with their tails to cool themselves and protect their skin from the sun. But it's not really what I would call water: it's a green frothy sludge of water and hippo poop. They churn it. They prefer to submerge in it, but there's not always room. I was eager to see hippos, and was surprised by how gross they are in real life.

Wildebeest and zebras

Our safari guide, Prosper, was wonderful in many ways: a good driver, a good communicator, funny, kind, and great with the kids. But Prosper was at his best with the animals, both finding them and teaching us about them. Though he could tell you any facts you might want to know, what stuck with me was what he showed us about the animals' personalities and relationships. We saw so much, and without his guidance I would not have understood what I was seeing.

Wildebeest

When I first looked at this scene, I just saw a bunch of wildebeest. The mooing and grunting is very loud.



Prosper showed us that they are arranged in clumps of females guarded by a dominant male. It is rutting season, and the males have a harem to protect. They chase off other males and sometimes clash with them.

But wildebeest have a very short working memory. So once they finish fighting, they stand there looking around blankly, because they've forgotten where their ladies are, or even who they are! Meanwhile some other male has probably taken over, leaving his own harem behind. We had a lot of fun imagining what must go through their heads. "Didn't I see you last night?"

Wildebeest have a great sense of smell, but poor eyesight. If a lion approaches a crowd of migrating wildebeest, they will run away; but the lion knows that if she hides downwind in the tall grass for a couple of minutes, they'll forget she's there, and she can ambush them. 

Zebras

Zebras have a less developed sense of smell than wildebeest but excellent eyesight, and are very intelligent. They know the lion is there in the grass, and their response warns the wildebeest. When they stand around, they stand in pairs facing opposite directions to keep a lookout.

In general they were much quieter than the wildebeests. They make a pleasant whickering-whinnying sound.

Zebra foals are fuzzy and their stripes are brown.

Zebras have round bellies like fat ponies because their stomachs are full of worms that aid digestion. (This is an alternative to the four-stomach system that a cow uses.) They only need to drink water once every three or four months. When they do go to a watering hole, the tension is palpable: There might be crocs in the water or lions in the grass, and the zebras know it.