I learned it from you

At dinner.

J: That was delicious. I just wish I had another samosa.
R: That was the last one.
[Aaron, with a huge smile, hands Jordan the rest of his samosa.]
J: WOW! Oh wow. That is so incredibly nice of you. I am just going to take one bite. [Does so. Hands the rest back.] Aaron, you are the nicest brother I could possibly imagine. That was incredibly nice of you.
A: Jordan actually where I learned to do that is, you taught me. You are that nice to me, and I learned it from you.
[Big smile from J.]
R: I think Aaron is right. Because, Jordan, since you were three years old and Aaron was a tiny baby, we have always made sure you know that a big brother is a teacher, and that you are teaching Aaron all the time, whether you mean to be doing it or not. So when you are kind and generous to him, he learns how to be kind and generous, and if you fight with him, he learns how to fight.
A: Yes. And Jordan is very kind and generous to me.
R: I agree.
J: It's true about babies. Once I was playing with a very cute baby and I stuck out my finger for the baby to grab and instead, the baby stuck out its finger.

I think Jordan's experience with the baby is profound as well as funny: it is probably true that we teach and learn more through modeling than by responding to explicit lessons.

Tires

There is a thing that is difficult for me that should not be so difficult, which is putting air in the tires of the car I usually drive. One of them has a slow leak, so I have to do this every so often, and it's ridiculous. The gas station air hose never seems to fit onto the valve; the best I can do is barely get it on so that air escapes from the tire but does not go in, which is totally maddening. Especially because I am usually in an uncomfortable position, getting my hands filthy black, with a loudly whirring air pump reprimanding me for the quarters I am uselessly plunking into the slot. The last time I did this I paid for four separate rounds of air and was no better off when I left than when I had started. This makes me feel like a total girl. Once I sheepishly asked Dale to do it for me. He had the same experience I did, which made me feel somewhat better. But the tires still need to be filled from time to time.

For example, yesterday when I got out of my choir concert, the front driver's side tire was flattish. Much as I wanted to ignore it, I knew that was a bad idea. I was in an unfamiliar downtown neighborhood. I found a gas station; but this gas station had no air. Hmph. I used my phone to find another gas station in the next neighborhood over. At this one, the cashier was reluctant to give me quarters, and the clientele was a little intimidating. But they had air. So there I was in my choir clothes and again, the blasted air hose would not attach to the tire valve, and the air was shooting out, and it was raining, and I'm in this absurd squat trying not to get my skirt in a puddle, and my hands are killing me from trying to shove the thing on and keep it there. I thought: There has got to be some other way. I looked around for someone else to do it for me, but there were no attractive options. I left with the tire no better than when I arrived; I was just hoping it was no worse.

And then, when I told this story to Jess and Jules that night, Jess said, "I have the solution for you." Apparently, if you go to any Jiffy Lube, they will fill your tires for you for free. Even if you are not having them do anything else. You just drive up and ask, and they hop to it. I did this at the Jiffy Lube at U Village today and it was exactly as she said. I didn't even have to get out of the car! It was wonderful! And no, I did not feel like a girl, having someone else fill my tires for me: I felt like a queen. What a life improvement.

Chant

Aaron and his friends spent some part of their time in the after-school program today chanting, “Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!” The poor head counselor was so distressed he was hardly able to tell Dale what had happened. This word is not distressing to me, and I was very curious about the whole thing, so we made it a subject of dinner table conversation. Actually, the first thing Dale and I did was re-enact the chant ourselves. We couldn’t resist! It was too good! And wow, did we impress the children. Jordan, having no idea why we would be doing such a thing, was stunned. Aaron unfortunately thought we were making fun of him and left the room nearly in tears. We got him back, and heard what he had to say about the chanting, but it was not a lot. He claimed he “wasn’t chanting very much.”

Well, a lot or a little, this is a word worth talking about, so talk we did. I asked Aaron if he knew what a vagina was. He said he did. I asked who has one, and he pointed at me. Check! I asked who else, and he said, “Girls.” Check! I asked if he knew where it was, and he indicated the general location of such. Check! Then I asked if he knew what it was for. He was a little blown away by this question. I said, “It’s for all kinds of stuff!” and Dale said, “For example, you came out of a vagina!” I think they know this, but prefer not to think about it. Okay. Still, though, we were going to have this conversation, in spite of the fact that both boys were obviously uncomfortable. Dale and I stated clearly that this is the name of a body part, like the elbow, and that it is very important to be able to speak clearly about every body part. We said that this is not a bad word. We said that because it is a word for a private body part, a lot of people think it should be a private word, and they do not want to hear the word. We disagree with this. People need to be able to use the right word for every body part, especially in case there is a problem, like if you got hurt. (I was also thinking about safety from sexual predators, but did not make that part of this conversation.) I said, “For example, what if a dog bit your penis? You would need to be able to tell Nurse Anita (the school nurse), ‘A dog bit my penis and it hurts a lot.’ If you go to Nurse Anita and say ‘Um, er, I have a problem, and I am too embarrassed to tell you,’ then that is not as good. You should just say the body part right out.” Of course the boys were laughing uncontrollably at this bizarre scenario, but that seemed good; it helped them relax.

I said that in the case of the after-school chant, I felt pretty sure there was not a need to say the name of the body part. Probably, Aaron and his friends were chanting this word in order to bother the counselor: they were trying to embarrass him and make him uncomfortable. This was not a good thing to do. Aaron said he would not do it anymore. (Personally, I think that this is in the category of things for which a counselor needs to have a well-rehearsed response. For example, in preschool, taboo words like poop were “bathroom words,” and were to be said only [and therefore incessantly] in the bathroom.)

I am tempering my language in this blog post in case any of my readers might be uncomfortable, but I tell you what, at the dinner table I was throwing around the V-word like it was my favorite word ever. After just a few minutes of this the boys were begging me to stop. They plugged their ears, they squirmed, they protested. Aaron wanted me to use a different word: his suggestion was “Mimimi.” I said “Okay fine, I will do it to help you be comfortable, but it is not a bad word.” Dale gave the example of our pediatrician friend, who, he speculated, would be happy to have joined us in our dinner-table chant. Then he remembered our friend the labor and delivery nurse, who surely has quite a bit to say about vaginas almost every day of the week. We gave the boys some examples of things she might say at work. They accepted this, but basically had to end the conversation just from sheer oversaturation. It was pretty funny.

The next morning, I said, “Since we were talking about mimimis last night [I said this with a dramatic flourish], if you like, I can show you a sculpture of a lot of different mimimis. Would you like to see it?” Aaron said, “I do not want to see that.” Jordan said, “Actually strangely I kind of do want to see that.” So I showed him the Great Wall of Vagina. He was fascinated, and asked some questions, including, “That’s a vagina?!” I kept up a pleasant patter about how all of these vaginas are different and all totally normal, that all penises are different and normal too, etc. After a minute or two he was finished looking at it and went back to horsing around with his brother. I am pretty pleased with this whole thing. There was some good content, and plenty of levity.

Dumb homework

Some of Jordan's homework is not a good use of his time, if you ask me. (Aaron has very little homework so it's not yet an issue with him.) For example, in social studies right now they are doing civics kind of stuff, especially about the state of Washington. This could be great stuff, but instead it is: On what date did Washington become a state? What is the state bird? State flower, tree, marine mammal, endemic mammal, motto, song? Ugh. There is so much worth learning about government and governance, and this is not it.

A friend of ours is a professor of political science, so I asked him what he thought fourth graders should be learning about politics. His answer: "Fourth graders should be playing a lot of competitive and non-competitive games. How to share. How to care. How to lose. How to win. Who to play with. Who to avoid. When to drop out of a game. How to get back in the game. If they are advanced, they can think about the nature and variety of the rules that structure a game. Play within the rules. Play outside of the rules. Solitaire. Games with two people. Games with lots of people. Games with two sides. Games with more than two sides. Games as a leader. Games as a follower. Games as a judge. Games where subterfuge is important. Short games. Long games. It's not a bad idea to watch others do those things, too, impartially, as it were. Maybe betting sometimes, too. And then: they should be able to explain which games are better for what and why." What a great answer. How awesome would it be if this was how kids learned about political systems? And instead, they learn the name of the state song. Seriously.

Math, which has historically been an area of fun success for Jordan, is also not impressing me lately in its homework form. There is a lot of drilling algorithms, like long division, greatest common factor, least common multiple, etc. I don't know whether this is just what this year of math is about, or whether it's attributable to Washington's adoption of the Common Core (a set of standards for math and reading), or whether it's because Washington adopted the Common Core without adopting a curriculum that complies with it so teachers have to fly by the seat of their pants. All I know is that I miss the old curriculum, Everyday Math, which seemed to me to be about the logic of quantity and number and shape, instead of arithmetic procedures.

Last night's math homework should have been an exception, because it was about word problems. Word problems should be a good thing, a tool to bridge abstract math problems to real-life situations. Too often, however, they just falsely couch abstract problems in contrived scenarios, making the whole thing silly and pointless. This assignment annoyed me even more than a page of silly word problems would have because it was trying to teach how to analyze silly word problems, so that what ought to be a bridge to real life became instead a weird little world of its own. For example: "The cook at the diner scrambled 1/2 of the eggs served. One-fourth of the eggs were fried, and 1/8 were boiled. How many eggs were left?" You are supposed to say that you don't have enough information to answer; you need to know the total number of eggs. But come on. What cook at a diner says to himself, "I'm going to scramble half the eggs that are served, and then we'll see how many are left"? It's incomprehensible. Another problem said, "The park has 10 swings, of which 2/5 are broken. Half the swings have metal seats and 1/10 of the swings have wooden seats. How many more swings have metal seats than wooden seats?" Huh? I think the answer is that there are 5 metal seats, 1 wood seat, and 4 broken ones; but don't broken swings still have seats made of something? And why would anyone possibly bother to express any of these numbers as a fraction, much less care how many more metal than wooden seats there are? The whole question is very distracting. There are too many great real-life opportunities to apply math skills for me to feel like I can support him putting his precious kid time into this dumb stuff.

Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is something of a national holiday no matter what, but in Seattle this year, there was real dedication. At 3:30 this afternoon, I think you could have taken a walk down the middle of I-5 undisturbed. Fine friends of ours hosted a terrific party with multiple screens, a fantastic spread, and a friendly vibe that got friendlier and friendlier as Seattle's score continued to climb. The naturalized citizens among us were free to ask questions about the game. The children asked questions about the commercials... especially that Butterfinger "cup therapy" one, which was a mystery to them (and pretty funny to some of us old married folks). I admit that internally, I am asking questions about whether the whole football industry is morally supportable; but I mostly compartmentalized that, and enjoyed myself.

We were in "Feast Mode" all afternoon. There were Mackle-Smores (with Ryan Lewis): a chocolate chip cookie with melted marshmallow and Hershey bar on a double-Grammy cracker.

 There was a Marshawn Spynch (spinach) and Golden Tater Pie.

 There were football meatballs. (Foot-meat-balls?)

 There were blue and green cupcakes, for which the kids made "12th Man" flags.

And there were various other themed contributions... Lynchee (that is, lychee) Marshawn-tinis, guacamole with blue chips, blueberries and green grapes, Skittles, and so on and so on.

The kids were in fine form, and we grownups had a great time.