High school interview

Jordan doesn’t talk about high school much, but he agreed to allow me to interview him, for the purposes of including more of his experiences on this blog. I’m recording his shorter responses here; two of my questions prompted more in-depth answers, which get their own posts.

Lunch
Jordan has lunch with different people on different days. He has a close friend for sharing stuff and just to keep in touch, and then two groups of people who he’s gotten to know from past experiences or classes. One group of people is a subset of the Ultimate Frisbee players, who he connected to especially because they are also musicians. The other is people he has met in class. Mostly Jordan doesn’t plan who he’s having lunch with; it’s just whoever happens to be around.

Best class so far
He loves Recording Arts Tech, which is basically a class in how to create electronic music. There is clear skill development in specific software, he sees a lot of places where it could be useful, he gets to use his prodigious musicianship, and it’s fun.

Lamest class so far
He says this is World History. He likes the teacher a lot, and the vibe in the class is terrific, but he is unimpressed by the content. The class is supposed to be about how to analyze current events, but Jordan doesn’t feel clear on what they’re really doing. One of the class routines is to watch a video with history content, and during the video, complete a template based on the “Five Habits of Mind” (5HOM – things like significance, perspective, connections) using evidence-based reasoning (EBR). This simultaneous video-watching and template-completing doesn’t work well for Jordan, and so it's hard to finish in-class assignments in class.

(We happen to have visited Jordan’s World History class for a “family exhibition night,” and we thought it was totally awesome. The students held a seminar in which they discussed questions like “Is conflict necessary for progress?”, informed by their readings and research. To Dale and me, it looked like what we were doing in our first year of college, in the best way. But Jordan is allowed to have his own opinion about it.)

Mentorship class 
Nathan Hale students have a class called “mentorship,” which is somewhat comparable to the “advisory” that they had at Billings. Both are intended as an informal time for students to connect to each other and take care of school bureaucracy things. Jordan says they feel different in that Billings advisory was strictly for socializing, whereas in Nathan Hale mentorship, people might be doing homework or busy on their phone.

Does he like high school?
He does like it. He feels more socially open, more able to connect with people personally and have memorable experiences. He even likes it better than middle school, which is a surprise to me, but great news (because I think he liked middle school pretty well). Some of this is just how big of a school it is: he has a sense that there is a friend club for every interest you could possibly have. Like if you like Fallout 76 (a particular video game), there are probably three groups of people dedicated to Fallout 76.

Elephant seals

One of the really awesome things we did on our SF visit this year was to see the elephant seals at Ano Nuevo State Park. I have memories of going there as a child on a school field trip, and my memories seemed impossible: could I really have been walking among the elephant seals, which are gigantic and not friendly? But it's true: that's what you do there. It's astonishing.

First you take a lovely drive down Route 1 on the California coast for about an hour; the boys were entranced. (And Aaron could actually enjoy it, because of his miracle wristbands.) Then you take a wonderful long walk from the parking area down to the beach - a good 30-45 minute stroll. There are pelicans on the way.

And then there you are, at the beach level, basically eye to eye with however many seals you feel like counting. In December there are newborn pups, males fighting for the rights to the harems, and just generally a whole lot of action. It's amazing.

They even come back into the sand dunes when the beach gets too crowded. Tourists like us, walking through the sand dunes, are escorted by a docent, in case we need to detour around a giant seal blocking the trail. They're not aggressive with humans; they just don't care about people at all, which means that if you're in between them and some place they want to go, they'll just mow you down. So we give them a wide berth. The big ones are 5000 lbs, the size of an SUV, so this really doesn't take much convincing.

The highlight of the visit was an epic battle between two males, which went on for upwards of half an hour - very rare. Usually they just face off and somebody loses, but these two were very evenly matched. Look how they're tearing each other up! What a spectacle.

Then a beautiful walk back to the parking lot, and home again. We'd love to do this again next year.

Muir Woods

While we were in SF, we were excited to visit Muir Woods. I can't remember if I ever went there growing up, but redwoods, right? We tried to go last year and literally could not park; this year, there is a brand new shuttle system with reservations, which made the whole thing much easier. And I love a walk in the woods.

It was beautiful, all right, but when we had been there for a few minutes I realized: It's very much like Seattle. We could literally walk to the city park near our house and go for quite a similar walk. Okay, our big trees are a different species than California's, but the overall effect is very much the same. Even the cold and damp is reproduced pretty faithfully, down there in the canyon next to Mt. Tam.

Still, we enjoyed ourselves, and learned that the United Nations had met there in 1945 (!).

The other thing that is tough about Muir Woods is the long, very windy drive down into the valley. Oof. Aaron is especially susceptible to motion sickness and that is really no fun. Fortunately, Jes had the bright idea of trying out motion sickness wristbands. Wow, do those ever work! We do a lot of driving on these SF trips, and Aaron was dramatically more comfortable with these on board.

SF visit

We just love our annual winter break visit to San Francisco. We walk up Bernal Heights every day (or close), we cook, we eat, we have adventures. The boys love golf: these pics are of mini golf in San Rafael, but the aunts also took them out on the driving range.

They also adore the Exploratorium, which warms my explainer heart. This time they especially dug the analog robots.

In between adventures, we have the wonderful pleasure of just relaxing at home with Granty Jes and Aunt Deena. Uno. Couch. These are the good times, right?