I keep feeling like if this recurring feature is actually going to accomplish what it claims to do, I should have a master list of commenters and be checking whose pattern of checking in makes an abrupt change. Which is not going to happen, but the secondary feature of just hearing updates from your lives has been really nice.
Oh, ME? Sure. I miss taking Adderall. It's made my life worse since last week. Being home on the weekends with my family was basically what drove me to seek treatment in the first place, so, you know, this life. (But I was getting increasingly frequent and long lasting headaches. Doctor's appointment on Friday.)
So yesterday I ate moderately, drank nothing alcoholic at all, and got a modest amount of aerobic exercise -- altogether perhaps my best weekday since my lockdown began a month ago. But I over-caffeinated and only slept for four fitful hours. Bleh.
No virus issue but my parents have no power due to storm yesterday and it was just their connection to the street line so they probably won't fixed soon. Their cell service also went out so they have to drive to town to make calls or go online. My brother also lost power but his whole town did so should be fixed. We didn't lose power but a tree limb destroyed some stuff in our yard and I need to find a way to cut up and remove a couple thousand pounds of wood.
Still fine. I feel very pleased with my use of social media -- I'd been tying bandannas around my face because I really was not feeling the crafting impulse. I can sew some, but I don't enjoy it, and I didn't have material. So I posted an appeal for masks on the neighborhood FB group, and some nice woman who does sew professionally made me a set of very competent masks for a reasonable price that I could pick up from her a day later and only a few blocks away. Neighbors 1; Amazon 0.
Parent-driven homeschooling is starting to seriously break down here. Kid's willingness to do any vaguely academic material is very, very limited. I really feel like the challenges here are something that a trained teacher would have much, much better techniques for, in addition to possibly being able to devote more time and attention to it than we can while also trying to do our work-from-home jobs.
6: If I remember where your wife works, Nathan I am having a hard time grasping how her employer adapted to her working remotely. Not so much technically and logistically but culturally.
4: Tim has been classified as essential and has been working, but the power went out at his job too, so he is home today. Our place is too small for this.
For everyone's info there are lots of Etsy sellers making masks that ship promptly. I tried to buy handkerchiefs on eBay to craft some and they were made of texturally loathsome material so I'm hoping the Etsy masks will feel nicer when they come.
Hi everyone! Checking in from PA. I think we've produced 18 masks or so at this point. Distributing them to friends and family. Our NY family members have moved on to my other sister's house and the Boston family decided to stay put. So we're back down to a 2-person household. Successfully procured paper towels and toilet paper yesterday. Otherwise, pretty much status quo here.
Mental health chez lk is not optimal. We've been in lockdown for a month and 6 is more or less our situation too. I had a frank discussion with my daughter about how she found it easy to keep her emotions in check at school, but at home they spill out in ways she finds frustrating and uncontrollable. There are endless resources online for families about finding joy, wonder, inspiration and fascination in daily life -- in fact the sheer volume of that stuff seems daunting to me. I'm so burned out on the double shift; I'm beyond burned out, and lourdes is getting closer to extreme burnout. But giving up and leaving the kid to her own devices during the day is not an option, since total lack of structure seems to compound the problems. She's intensely extroverted and misses her friends terribly; video chats don't seem to be adequate substitutes. I wish the school would do more to facilitate social interaction in this distance learning stuff, but the teacher seems to think social interaction should be actively suppressed -- they had a comment function on one assignment where the clearly desperately lonely kids all wrote greetings to one another and tried to talk about their lives, and the teacher shut it down. WTF.
I wouldn't have predicted that pure frustration would do a number on me like this. Oh well, I'll stop drinking again, maybe that will be magic.
I also saw this little corrective to a higher-profile piece on SF go by. Definitely has an axe to grind, but it also confirms my inclination to believe that a) things look worse on the ground than they do by the reported numbers (true everywhere, but even so), and b) the Bay Area and SF in particular are exceptionally fragile and in need of extreme measures.
Also our house is close to 80 and the sirens, while still pretty infrequent, are starting to get to me.
There are endless resources online for families about finding joy, wonder, inspiration and fascination in daily life -- in fact the sheer volume of that stuff seems daunting to me.
Do those work for people? I find them annoying the best of times and stabby-making when under stress.
Things are okay here. My stepdaughter returned to us this week, and she's a really sweet, easygoing, self-sufficient kiddo. So I feel bad that I'm about to talk smack about her.
But something about going from one-child responsibility to two-child responsibility tips us toward Overwhelmed. Even before the COVID times, my wife and I had a half-baked theory about the number of Adults ("A") vs. the number of Children ("C"). So long as A is greater than C, things are fine. Once C equals A or is greater than A, the potential for chaos/disaster emerges.
Sympathies to the lk's. That sucks.
I'm so burned out on the double shift; I'm beyond burned out, and lourdes is getting closer to extreme burnout.
This part is me too. I feel like I'm always getting up early and staying up late and trying/failing to keep up with work, and I can't even see any way to dial it back more. I cannot wait for my classes to end.
Even before the COVID times, my wife and I had a half-baked theory about the number of Adults ("A") vs. the number of Children ("C"). So long as A is greater than C, things are fine. Once C equals A or is greater than A, the potential for chaos/disaster emerges.
Another point for bash's instead of nuclear families.
Still doing fine in Fresno. My wife is doing okay-- not great, but okay-- and is headings to the store to get out of the house. She's rarely happy about her progress/accomplishments for the few hours she spends, but appreciates the change of scenery.
Today I've been roped into 3 conference calls -- I used to have 1 every second or third week, so that's an unpleasant development. They're mostly with applicants for upcoming projects, so it might be more a reflection of my shift in emphasis to work on big projects instead of training coworkers.
16 I have a theory that the optimal minimal A is 3, for any C less than 4. Two can work so long as they aren't a couple.
Another point for bash's instead of nuclear families.
What are bash's?
I'm okay right now, like literally right now. I just took my aunt's adult ballet class on Zoom. It was annoying and hard to try to catch up with a class that was operating on a higher level than my normal over Zoom, and also I don't really love having this relationship with my aunt, but it felt really good to move my body this way. I think I might consider getting an actual bar and straightening up my room (the place in my apartment where I could really get floor space). Also I saw Alvin Ailey is starting to offer streaming ballet, although not my regular teacher and right now only beginner, no absolute beginner. But in a Zoom class it's less of an issue if you get totally confused.
I still haven't gotten a confirmation about volunteering. The HR lady told me someone would call me today or tomorrow. They are starting a big hiring push which is maybe why, so I applied for a 30 hour a week patient escort job. It would likely be financially disadvantageous for me to take a paying job right now because it would screw in hard to predict ways with my current unemployment claim, but maybe I can verify with them that it's term limited employment and if they won't let me volunteer it's worth it to get out of the house. Of course who knows if I will get the job; probably a lot of people are applying. The HR lady did say I had "a really good resume," so that tells me something about how I'm seen as a potential hospital employee right now.
I made this calendar. I'm Cow Orker. I'm still working on filling it out; I've only done today. If you're interested in coworking feel free to add your availability. I'm also going to share it with meatspace friends which is why I didn't use either my real name or my pseud. The way coworking has been going, we've been opening a video call by some medium, chatting for a bit, working for 25 minutes, chatting for a bit, etc.
oh wait I don't think that worked. Hold tight.
I have also used the masks SP shipped, and they are very handy to have, because my town now requires that we wear them when we go to the grocery store.
13: In our experience, two is much easier to handle than one. As soon as the public schools shut down I pulled Pebbles out of preschool, too, because they play well together. My two are covid-bonding very well, although it's possible that the Calabat's brain has decided that his sister might well be the only child left in the world so he better make the best of it. He's been very clingy with her, which she adores, and I don't have to entertain either of them. He likes doing his schoolwork, but I'm pretty sure she's not learning anything right now (she's four, so I can't be bothered to care, and it also turns out that she has large amount of her picture books memorized, and none of us are sure how this happened.)
In shitty news, 2 people I know through work lost family to. COVID. Both lived in a predominantly black part of Boston/ inner/suburb which is a warm spot. The biggest hot spot is Chelsea which is predominantly Latino. Way to shine an extra bright light on disparities.
19: That concept from Too Like the Lightning, short for ibasho, multi-adult long-term co-living groups, often but not necessarily including romantic partners.
We're still doing fine here. We've had some tension recently from being cooped up together for so long, but I think we're finding ways to deal with it that should be helpful.
Yeah. My kid is five and I am so, so relieved that I don't have to care if he's learning anything. His school (early kinder, so an optional first year of kindergarden) is starting to do online learning, but the thought of getting him his first gmail account kinda kills me, so we skipped the first day, which likely means we won't try to re-join it.
We're fundamentally fine. I hit some kind of wall a couple of days ago emotionally, but I have very little to actually complain about. I'm upset about the new public mask order and haven't been out yet. I don't mean that I'm upset that it happend -- it's the right thing to do; I just find seeing lots of people in masks alienating and sad. We have masks made by a neighbor and we're helping her with mask-related tasks.
Kraabniece has been very depressed. Today I'm extremely relieved that she's out of bed of her own volition without any cajoling/nagging/pleading on my part* and even cooking matzo brei. The last week had been a downward spiral ending with her hardly getting out of bed, skipping her Monday class, not really eating. It's partly physical -- her underlying conditions can make her really tired -- but it's mostly the total upending of her life. She really misses her friends and community, of course. She was hitting her stride socially (and helping start a DSA chapter -- color me a proud tante!). Her professors are being relatively understanding, but she's still having a hard time keeping her head above water -- school deadlines were already stressful for her (she has ADHD but can't take meds because of her above-noted U.C.s) and now is really struggling.
*It's hard to find the line between leaving her alone and leaving her to be lonely.
32- Oh good, I wasn't sure they'd make it to you because the envelope was rather overstuffed.
Heebie, did your yeast make it?
No yeast yet, unfortunately. I'll let you know!
32: Ok, I eventually understood what happened. Please excuse.
30.1/32/33: So, did peep get the envelope?
I accepted a new job (no, not that one) which takes some of the stress off as I was consulting and future stuff was looking a bit iffy. It's a weird place to be once I start, as on of the first things I'll need to do is hire a half dozen to dozen people, but I'm not really sure how that will work logistically. Especially as some of the positions won't remote well. On the other hand, I'll have the funds in hand to hire, assuming I can locate (or relocate) the right people.
20: there are so many great classes online. my mantelpiece is roughly a comfortable and technically correct height for me sooo...it's actually been a very good streak of regular practice. I did John Clifford's recorded class for the plague off youtube and one of his corrections has fixed my circular port de bras so much that when I did two-way zoom class with my regular teacher on Sunday I got a callout for it.
What else? everyone I know seems to be OK. having the gene that makes me produce vast quantities of snot all the time turns out to be a superpower not a curse as god knows how many promising young virions skid helplessly into a bath of stomach acid, but damn, that's a really disappointing young adult fantasy novel to be trapped in. couldn't it be flight or clairvoyance or being a fucking werewolf or something?
oh yes, the company I work for has declared me and a bunch of others potentially redundant, not because we're shit, or because the virus has crushed demand, but so they can do some fucking dilbert boss post-merger restructuring and make us reapply for new jobs. Read the fucking room! Or the newspaper! One of the jobs is the one I personally designed because my boss said I should do that if I ever wanted to be promoted, so...ambivalence rules, one way or the other.
I just napped for two hours, so I'm as good as I can possibly get. That included being woken six times plus having Selah snoozing in the bed beside me, so still not fully meeting any of my needs for being left the fuck alone, but something!
The girls are doing slightly more schoolwork now than before spring break. Selah is able to go digital with everything except learning cursive, but the two main apps she needs require elaborate sign-ins every time she uses them, so I'm constantly getting called away to deal with that.
Mara's anxiety is still pretty intense and requires a lot from me. I guess I should ask her prescriber if we can increase her medications, but I haven't yet. She also hasn't been doing therapy and won't be allowed to keep getting psych meds prescribed unless I get her compliant on that, so I guess I know what I have to do first. We've had one breakthrough in that she's willing to listen to psychologist/former British Baking contestant Kimberley Wilson and believes her book will help Mara restructure things for herself so she can be a "normal kid" without health problems or anxiety or other complications and this be acceptable to Lee. That part isn't going to happen, but it might still help and I'm mad at Lee for other reasons too.
This has all gotten long and ranty, hasn't it? Nia is feeling better after bronchitis, but is the most demanding in terms of wanting me to buy specific things. Wanting nail polish remover is an EMERGENCY that requires texting me from a room away (and using voice-to-text so I can hear it) dozens of times a day, sure. But she's being amazingly poised and self-sufficient. She's basically lost her friend group and no one will respond to her texts, but she's focusing on watching more Jane the Virgin rather than sulking. Her case manager bought her a electric guitar, which arrived today. She immediately decided it was too hard to play, but I've made a music room and will keep working on it so there's space for her electric keyboard and the guitar and amp down there and that will get her out of her room and maybe encourage experimentation. This afternoon Mara has been working on writing a song for her.
So basically everything is remarkably wholesome and I'm just cranky and exhausted. I miss my girlfriend and hope she'll move in after her semester ends but I'm also afraid she'll then find life with us too overwhelming, though it's fine if she bails back to her apartment. She's getting worn down by her complete isolation and just being a grad student. We'd both feel better if we could be together, I think. But at least I'm physically well, give or take a bit. I bought a VegTrug 6-foot-long raised garden bed thing for the back yard new but second-hand for a very good price and now I'm deciding what we can grow ourselves, since I won't eat anything grown from our soil even though everyone is past the most dangerous age for lead poisoning. We've already grown one strawberry to edible size and ripeness and each girl got flower seeds in her Easter basket, so we can work on that some. It's not all just weird timelessness, but it's also a lot of that. And clearly I should make time to comment about other things so I don't just blather on in these every week.
tbh 35 feels a little wierd - to be sharing good news goes against the grain somehow.
38: they still teach cursive? Tim's niece and nephew don't learn that in school. I've always wondered what signatures would evolve into if people never learned cursive at all.
No, good news should be shared.
Good news: our kids are also learning cursive!
Congrats soup! Good luck danseur and anyone else who needs it.
they had a comment function on one assignment where the clearly desperately lonely kids all wrote greetings to one another and tried to talk about their lives, and the teacher shut it down. WTF.
The teacher probably has a nigh-impossible task keeping classes on topic remotely (for kids that age that's nigh-impossible even when you're STANDING RIGHT THERE LOOMING OVER THEM). Dedicated groups for chat-for-chatter's-sake, maybe,* but not intermixed with work.
(None of this is intended to pick a fight with the lks or minimize your problems or anything.)
*And can the teacher lock such a group while teaching something real time? And when the kids use it to bully each other that blows back on the school. Is the teacher supposed to monitor that as well? If the teacher lets it slide pragmatically but misses some checkbox on the curriculum will they take flack from someone else? etc.
oddly enough all the deadlines just got extended again. shambolic mess.
Cursive was recently added back to the Kentucky curriculum. The older girls never learned it, though Nia has practiced a slightly idiosyncratic version of her own and Lee makes Mara try to learn during their time together because she too is worried about checks and signatures. I haven't complained because it's less pernicious than making Mara breathe entirely through her nose because she thinks that will help M learn to smell. (Not COVID-related; she's never had a sense of smell, probably because of early illness. Lee believes that the nose is like any other muscle and so repetition is the way to make it work better. Sigh. It has made Mara more inclined to lie and pretend she smells things, which is typical of kids with anosmia but something I'd hoped to avoid.)
I'm cheered by picturing Karl Malden's nose doing reps on a weight bench.
I honestly don't know if my son was taught cursive or not. I know he can't write cursive for shit, but I was taught cursive and I can't use it either.
44: having been a kid with lots of nose problems I was convinced this was true for me and I was pretending to smell things, but this was actually bullshit.
The good news is that I've landed on something close to the perfect martini for my taste. The bad news is it's 2pm on Tuesday. But I've had about 900 Zoom meetings already this week, my sciatic nerve is going insane, and I think I can handle email for the rest of the day with one martini in me.
42: Nah, it's fine, those are all good points and I wouldn't want to belabor it further. An emotional reaction, I guess. This is a public school where something like 70% of the kids get free lunch and at least a dozen different home languages are spoken, so pedagogy is already an uphill battle and crafting effective online pedagogy must be a nightmare. From what I can tell from the few metrics I see, "distance learning" has effectively kicked between 1/3 and 1/2 the kids in my daughter's class out of school. Even for the ones who can keep up, who have regular Internet access and support at home and so on, engagement seems pretty spotty. I'm not sure I can easily capture in words here how alienating the whole experience must be, for all of them, having school completely replaced with apps -- and I'm sure they'd eventually start to bully each other or be obnoxious, but their messages were mostly a long line of hi, whos online, did u do the homework, hi fatima, hi jorge, hi tenzin etc. etc. I wish there were some way that the social world of the school could continue to work, even if there's no way to reach the subset who can't get online.
Did you know today is the first ever World Chagas Disease Day? Now you do, but no-one else does. Timing, guys.
Given I liked N.K. Jemisin's last series, I'm genuinely surprised how cold her new The City We Became is leaving me. The symbolism is annoyingly direct: we are the city and the city is us; characters do semi-magical feats by recapitulating archetypical aspects of New York; I feel confident the villain is going to turn out to be Neoliberalism or something like that. I forced myself through 100 pages and I think I'm done.
49: Was the school able to provide devices? We passed out something like 500 ipads and laptops and have been providing hotspots to the ones without internet. A few couldn't make it over to the school to pick them up and I've been delivering those.
I know they've been trying. All the kids have Chromebooks that went home and there was an effort to hand out hotspots. I'm not on any committees or task forces but I know there have been several hotspot and device pickup days. Hopefully my vague sense of things is wrong and more of the kids are participating, but so far I haven't seen evidence in class charts or with Zoom attendance.
Out here the academic stuff is on Canvas. My wife also already had most of her kids and parents on the Remind app which has been really helpful as she can message parents directly. There's been quite a few kids not logging into Canvas at all and either not telling parents or telling them the school has no work for them in there yet. They've been generating lists and making phone calls to the parents of the kids who haven't logged in. If they can't reach by phone I do a home visit.
Our district sent home iPads for each child grades 3-8 and MacBooks for high school when the shutdown began and then once it extended made iPads available to K-2 students too. All the kids in grades 7-12 have internet connections as of a few weeks ago and that means most of the younger ones do too. We're using google classroom and I still have to constantly remind the kids that you have to attach something to turn it in, nor just say you've done it. I'm pretty sure Mara hasn't done a screenshot the way her teacher wants yet, but at least they can see she's using the math app. I get calls and messages from the teachers often. Progress reports go out this week for work done since the shutdown began. I think Nia's grades may mostly be better than usual because there are more participation grades but the others' won't be and unfortunately those two are the ones Lee gets to see and complain to me about.
Part of the transition is definitely that there's very little homework up through middle school so they're having to make the adjustment of "oh, I'm going to have to block out time for this each day". They're just not used to doing that on their own. And of course there's a significant number of bullshitters trying to get away with "school's done for the year".
Spouse's experience at the high school has been a chaotic mess. Remember three weeks ago when they were going to keep the normal bell schedule and I about lost my mind? Ha. haha. All the teachers(ie administrators) are shocked, shocked, that they have like four students showing up to class. The math department gave a test and got fewer than half the students to return it four days later. Teachers are being told "you have to assign at least two graded assignments per ten days and demonstrate learning outcomes" and simultaneously "grades shouldn't hurt students". That's a nice needle to thread.
Basically, the district desperately doesn't want to fail half the high schoolers, but they literally aren't doing anything, in part because the initial plan was so ambitious and overwhelming. (Or maybe they were never going to show up online.)There's just a whole lot of magical thinking going on.
48: I'll bite, what do you put in your martini. Mixing cocktails is one of my comparatively few recourses against this distance learning demoralization march.
a significant number of bullshitters trying to get away with "school's done for the year"
No, I don't believe it. Children are innocent and virtuous, except my daughter, who alone among Bay Area children shows signs of disrespect and a devastatingly underdeveloped growth mindset. (Growth is the mindset of the cancer cell, Mom.)
LBJ, just saw your comment -- let's just give all the kids in America degrees from Trump University. It is genuinely hard to believe that we are living through this shit. I take one step back, and then I step forward again in a hurry.
If anyone wants a face mask and can't accesss one easily (one or more, up to some reasonable but indeterminate number) please let me know. I have a fast/easy pattern and SO MANY odds & ends of fabric.
(I think my email will be under my pseud, here, but if not, comment or google or whatever)
I was surprised to see a couple of people in the grocery store today with no mask at all, not even a tied bandana.
Growth is the mindset of the cancer cell, Mom.
If little k actually said this she doesn't need school.
Her wit can be pretty devastating, but that was me.
51: I heard a live reading of the short story that became that, I think before it was published, and I did think it was a little overly direct, although that was tempered by the awe of hearing it live.
On the other hand: no spoilers, but the end of the last ruined world novel gets annoyingly direct, too. But I think I accepted that because it was, perhaps consciously, following a Final Fantasy-esque plot structure. Fantasy and magic gives way to ancient technology, but that technology is still at its root mystical.
In surviving lockdown fun, we're doing fine, but my cat is stressed out enough she had a cystitis attack yesterday, which means she pissed bloody urine dozens of places throughout the flat. So that was a fun new one, only solved, for now, by giving her anti-inflammatories and opiates.
I've always wondered what signatures would evolve into if people never learned cursive at all.
Well, over here in the ENTIRE REST OF THE ROMAN-ALPHABET-USING WORLD WHERE BIZARRE AND HORRIFIC 1920s CALLIGRAPHY IS NOT CONSIDERED A VITAL PART OF PRIMARY SCHOOL EDUCATION we just write our names in a gradually messier and messier way, and that seems to work fine.
I learned calligraphy in primary school, and forgot it, and relearned it in university for note-taking, and forgot it, and relearned it for teaching, for mass-production lesson plans. This should probably go in the models thread.
Not calligraphy. Cursive. (I did actually learn calligraphy during primary school, but only because my parents are weird.)
Calligraphy is something very different from cursive, at least in American English.
I use calligraphy to mean "unnecessarily silly handwriting" in general.
||
Colonial railroads sometimes reintroduced large-scale unfree labor, such as in Mauritius at the turn [sic] of the [19th] century, where French [sic] colonial administrators turned to compulsory Native [sic] labor after finding it unsatisfactory to contract Italian, Indian, Chinese, and Malaysian workers.[citation needed]Fuck you, clown. And fuck you, UC Press. Disgraceful.
Hey Barry, this seems up your alley:
As Film Forum is currently closed, we are excited to announce our partnership with distributors Kino Lorber, Zeitgeist Films, Magnolia Pictures, Film Movement, Greenwich Entertainment, and Juno Films to present recent releases in a virtual screening room.
Are you objecting to any kind of fluidly connected handwriting -- that is, anything other than printing -- as unnecessarily fussy? Because that's all Americans mean by cursive.
True story: I have never been able to make a cursive capital 'Q' without looking at an example.
I have rejected the capital As, Gs, Hs, Is, Ks, Qs and Zs I was taught in grade school as too fussy to deal with -- those I kind of print and then transition into lowercase script.
And I hardly write in cursive anymore. I hardly write anymore at all.
75: I think we're inconsistent. We mean both non-block writing in general and the particular style that used to be taught in elementary school, as 76 shows.
78: I think email and texting are what is killing cursive, since nobody even writes notes now.
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Any reason to be an asshole!
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79: quite. Fluidly connected handwriting, yay; bizarre fussy capital letters that no one can remember, boo.
So, fluidly connected handwriting gets taught in schools, or it doesn't. People talking about their kids' schools not teaching cursive aren't nitpicking about the style of handwriting being taught, they're saying that only printing is taught. I don't think this is a huge deal myself, but it has nothing at all to do with an attachment to outdated calligraphy.
I quit writing cursive in the 1970s: turns out that even in the pre-email world, you could have a reasonable adult life without it.
I think I probably need to write a macro -- I'm sure we have a newer better word for this now -- where I just insert whatever noun people are talking about, and it auto-writes a comment like the previous sentence.
So, were children not taught any sort of fluidly connected handwriting in The Rest of the Latin Alphabet Using World, before mass computer usage? And everybody just used their own idiosyncratic forms? Setting aside people who learned longhand for professional reasons.
88: Thanks, sorry, I somehow missed that.
You should probably gather samples from other Latin-using populations.
I can't read my own handwriting most times. I should have been a doctor but then if I had I'd probably have died of COVID by now.
I've gotten sick of this vegan meal delivery service I signed up for because I'd gotten sick of eating pasta all the time and wanted some variety. I'm not big on tofu or seitan and the like. And I hate jackfruit. Today for dinner were these sushi rolls with tofu and it just made me gag, why not do normal vegetarian sushi rolls with avocado and cucumber? Those are delish. Anyway, I'm back to do a shopping on Monday morning and get some more food I can make other than pasta.
How's the pneumonia/asthma/smoking?
lingering/chronic but controlled and mild/vaping but I will run out of juice soon enough.
OTOH, I've actually been losing weight a bit despite lack of exercise, I'm not doing my usual stress eating thing I do and actually have less appetite than usual.
I'm not sure that means what you want it to mean.
Morally speaking, invertebrate animals are plants.
re: cursive writing (and contra 68)
The UK approach, these days, seems to be to go all in for cursive more or less immediately. I don't think they even teach them "printing" or "baby" writing. The learn the letter forms with the lead in and lead out, right from the start.
This is a page from one of xelA's stories: https://i.imgur.com/vrazvzg.jpg
It seemed to me to be unnecessarily difficult, at first, as he's not a great writer, and he's left handed, which makes it harder. But, his writing is getting more adult by the day. That's not the best example (he wasn't trying to do his very best writing), but it's fine, he turned 7 a week or so back.
By cursive, I mean, joined up writing. Rather than some specific florid version of the same.
That's pretty good, and entirely legible. I was taught cursive in I think 3rd grade, so age 8.
102.2: the suspense is killing me. What happened next?
Also - nice cursive!
102: That looks like how I learned it except we had loops in letters like lowercase L instead of a straight line going up and down. Also I never bothered with the capital cursive letters either. Q? G? S? All bizarre. But the lowercase ones being joined together is simply a faster way to write.
So, ajay is WRONG WRONG WRONG
the french are all in on cursive and have - wait for it, you'll be so surprised - a fully developed theoretical structure to back it up. for years each assignment had a separate note for the handwriting, apart from the note for the content. as was earnestly explained in numerous parent-teacher interactions over the years, the fine motor control taught by cursive lays the necessary ground work for understanding/mastering certain math concepts years later. don't ask me to remember which math concepts. also, relatedly, impassioned debates in 6th grade math class were intended to act as foundational learning experiences for later civics classes, so that they could all become properly formed citoyen-nne(s).
the kid's handwriting deteriorated as soon as he was no longer separately graded on it, and settled into a barely decipherable mish mash. didn't seem to negatively impact his bacc score though, so i suppose just legible enough.
I don't know if we've ever had an explicit justification for it, but when it's been semi-mentioned to us, I think it's always been presented as being easier (long term) to just teach them one form of writing, even if it takes a little longer to get started, rather than teach them one, and then once they've mastered that, teach them another.
The same applies to the whole phonics approach that's taken. It seemed massively more complex at first, but it does seem to have paid off in the sense that he is much more able to decode new and unfamiliar words than I think kids taught they way I was taught in the 70s were taught. With downsides, on the other hand, in terms of memorising spelling.
My daughter has been at her dad's for 10 days so life is mostly working, running, and home projects. I miss restaurants and especially pastry shops, but I've started cooking the things I used to get there so it's increasing my cooking skills.
My boyfriend lost his job and I've been paying his rent. As a thank you he's been helping me with house projects. We put up chicken wire around the gardens so my plants make it this year instead of being decimated by my relentlessly hungry chickens. I got bees. My bf has been obsessed with sanding including sanding a table I bought in college. We stained it last night and it looks better than it did 20 years ago!
I can't read my own handwriting most times.
Jammies is like this. It's mindboggling to me. And he writes really painstakingly slowly, and in all caps, to try to make it legible, and it's still a mess. He puts weird spaces in the middle of letters that make them look like separate letters, and then parts of consecutive letters will be touching to look like a single letter. It's incomprehensible.
110: Like, she flew to NC? Did you guys come to an agreement that you feel ok with?
My father was an engineer back when block lettering was a thing so we learned another form of writing besides printing and cursive (not that it's so different than printing but it is very particular).
Cursive is the only class I got an F in (Grade 6) so I haven't used it since. Although my signature is modified cursive - my capital A is not a true cursive A.
I was hooked on phonics, but I got help.
73: There are railroads in Mauritius? Why?
94: I've noticed a bit of this. Lunch seems to have become quite a bit lighter? Also there are no pubs. And although the gym is closed I'm still exercising quite a bit.
107: oh god those special exercise books with the tiny graph squares. our equivalent was endless lectures about how your messy penmanship would catch up on you one day, at Big School, the exams, university, your career, your love life, something or other.
I've gained some weight. I don't think I'm eating much more. I'm eating more veg, and sleeping more, which should all be good.
I suspect my metabolism is on the shitty side after over a year of weight loss,* and the enforced lack of activity is taking its toll. Not some astronomical amount of weight, but about 1kg - 1.5kg in the past month. Since I am working from home full time, and doing more childcare (or differently distributed childcare), and not walking a few miles a day while commuting, and not going to the gym, it's hard.
* 30kg+ lost.
To carry stuff? Shipping coal cheaper than shipping/giving land over to fodder/food? Speculative building? Apparently became unprofitable after WWII, I guess they were just waiting for trucks.
112: The compromise we came to is that we are on a three week schedule back and forth until June. That way she's not in the airport every week. I'm not thrilled with it, but it's a decent compromise. It has benefits like that I cover more school time, which I prefer because I don't think her dad is putting in the proper effort. And I get her on her birthday. He gets her during spring break, which is also great because my work has been demanding lately and I'm trying to work as much as possible while my job stays secure.
I guess it's just a bigger island than my mental image of it. According to Wikipedia they're currently building a light rail system to address traffic congestion.
Though honestly who needs trucks when your enslaved Francophone dodos can figure out how to commercialize railways 60 years ahead of schedule.
Those dodos are smarter than they look.
It's too late to save the dodo for sure, but isn't it also too late to save the rail on Mauritius?
1.2m. And much flatter than Reunion.
My biggest complaint right now is that I somehow managed to bruise my coccyx, and even with my recliner, it still hurts a lot to sit. My sister has been continuing to improve, so we're hopeful there. She and my niece and my mother are probably flying back to the Midwest in late May, so that will be exciting! I'm finding that, somewhat counterintuitively, I don't mind being screamed at by idiot clients as much as I do in the office. Just easier to get back to an even keel, I think.
A good recliner will do that for you.
119: Glad to hear it. That sounds reasonable.
116: they started them out with special paper with wide-apart-three-lines, and there was all this tension in the build up to the year when they had to switch to the closer-together-three-lines.
the theoretical justification was so elaborate, i'm failing to convey it here (mostly bc don't recall the details as thought it was hilarious but mostly ignored it), stuffed with all kinds of direct links asserted between fine motor skills -> specific neurological developments - > mastering some particular sub species of calculus. okey dokey artichokies! i mean, his kindergarten (k3) teacher earnestly went on at me at *some length* once about how some p.e. task that the kid was obviously skivving off on out of sheer boredom (running from one spot to another as fast as you possibly could, i think?) was really an issue bc like 6 years later he would need to have really committed to this p.e. task in order to have the necessary neurons on the ready for tackling nimble analysis of the passe simple. sure, lady! i mostly managed to convey interest, i think.
Well, I think I stopped cursive a few years before I topped out in math, so maybe these French people are on to something.
I still write the cursive capital A, because that's the first letter of my first name. I agree with LB that the cursive G is unnecessarily fussy, but the A seems simple enough.
Nothing like this, thank God, could ever happen today.
The sedition of Thessalonica is ascribed to a more shameful cause, and was productive of much more dreadful consequences. That great city, the metropolis of all the Illyrian provinces, had been protected from the dangers of the Gothic war by strong fortifications and a numerous garrison. Botheric, the general of those troops, and, as it should seem from his name, a Barbarian, had among his slaves a beautiful boy, who excited the impure desires of one of the charioteers of the Circus. The insolent and brutal lover was thrown into prison by the order of Botheric; and he sternly rejected the importunate clamours of the multitude, who, on the day of the public games, lamented the absence of their favourite; and considered the skill of a charioteer as an object of more importance than his virtue. The resentment of the people was imbittered by some previous disputes; and, as the strength of the garrison had been drawn away for the service of the Italian war, the feeble remnant, whose numbers were reduced by desertion, could not save the unhappy general from their licentious fury. Botheric, and several of his principal officers, were inhumanly murdered; their mangled bodies were dragged about the streets ...
107/128 are so amazing I really want them to be true (as in, I'm sure the comments are true, but I want the theory described to be true). The idea of incredibly specific connections between motor skills and intellectual ability is insanely inventive.
Can't really complain, home office is easier for us than for most. Sad that my mothers visit for April had to get cancelled (and probably summer plans, though Portugal in August might still be possible). Stress with buying an apartment but that's obviously a nice "problem" to have. Happy that the nearest park is open again (local parks were, but this is federal so was closed until Tuesday), went out yesterday and it was gorgeous.
There's some inconsistency/ambiguity about kindergarten policy. The national policy is they're open for those who absolutely need them, which until this week was just in-person workers at essential services. Now smaller retail is open, and so they're also open for those workers. But apparently not for home office workers, though obviously home office doesn't mean "free to take care of a kid". Lots of push-back on this, unsurprisingly.
Interestingly, our current KiGa has said they're open as of this week also for working parents doing home office, so the Infanta will probably go back on Monday. Since Iberian Fury and I are still isolating and doing home office, I feel like this isn't too bad from a public health PoV-- we're connecting to a potential infection hub, but at least not bridging networks.
Well, they may be true. Evidence in favour: there is a general connection between actions and intellectual ability, or else no one would stick out their tongue when concentrating. Secondly, there is a clever man (Ray Tallis) who has deduced almost the whole of the human condition from the development of our pointing, grasping fingers, which not only promote intellectual skills, but also the distinction between I and Thou. And writing out things by hand, in the days when I used to do it, certainly helped to fix them in the memory, and to promote some kinds of thought as well -- the scribbles in the margins of one book were for me the seed of another book to write myself, and I think that without a pen in my hand it would never have happened.
I know that the French connections are much more specific still, but they don't seem impossible.
There are a bunch of therapies for kids with developmental delays that involve things like crawling around in order to stimulate certain kinds of neurons that help with reading. Or using centrifugal force in various ways. The idea always seems to be that Kids Today are not playing in the woods, and so they're not establishing their skills of balancing on precarious things, and they're not spinning enough, and so they're having problems in public school.
Clearly, on the veldt, all the children were able to sit at their desks for long stretches without squirming while they perfected their cursive, so the theory seems sound to me. It's one of those things where the acquaintance telling me about their child therapy practice is not strong-willed enough for me to dive in and ask all the scrutinizing questions I want to know about which kinds of wackadoo ideas are considered mainstream at this point.
they're not spinning enough, and so they're having problems in public school.
Aha, clearly this explains why so many great European mathematicians and physicists were of the Jewish faith, given their propensity for dancing in circles. (Napier and Maxwell, of course, were Scottish, and spent a lot of time dancing reels, which are very similar.)
And the European Enlightenment followed the development of long-distance sea trade, because the seafaring nations of Europe had populations who were used to balancing on taffrails, yardarms, maintops, forestays and so on, and were thus ready to make great intellectual advances.
That must explain the impact of philosophical Sufism.
I don't remember any dervishes at my school having problems with mathematics.
Interesting Wikipedia article on cursive (which I was actually reading last night on a tangent from reading about early Middle Ages minuscule!). Apparently teaching cursive has become a bit of a culture war battleground in both the USA and Germany!
Cursive Fraktur is a bit of a pain, though. Especially with a ballpoint pen.
Which leads me to wonder what German handwriting looked like ca. 1900. Obviously, I know from Asterix that the Goths not only wrote but swore in Fraktur
Did Germany have two different alphabets for a while, one of you were fancy?
Which leads me to wonder what German handwriting looked like ca. 1900.
It didn't look particularly weird - here's a letter from Rosa Luxemburg dated 1915. http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/imgLib/20110925_Kirsch2.jpg
It's like a duck, but bigger and better tasting.
143: Kafka to Felice 1904
https://booklover.tumblr.com/post/169072463530/books-i-liked-in-2017-letters-to-felice-franz
Couldn't read that to save my life. The guy should have been a doctor. Is it in German or Czech or something else?
Now I want a duck to cook and I've already made my weekly trip to the store.
I worked on a project with Kafka's letters and postcards when I was still at the naieldoB. His writing was quite hard to read, for me. It was all in German, though. I don't know if he (more or less ever) wrote anything in Czech after he left school.
Better image of his writing (from Wiki) here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/De_Kafka_Brief_an_den_Vater_001.jpg
I just realized that I'm going to emerge from self-isolation looking like I invented a critical part of public key cryptography back in the day.
You could probably find a clean shirt at least.
Are there any theories as to why doctors all have such bad handwriting? My theory was that it had to do with repetitive injury from taking notes using 4-color clicker pens in their pre-med classes. But nowadays, they type and sign things electronically on their EMRs and don't need to scribble daily for work, and they still have illegible writing.
143, 146: My grandmother and great-grandmother were Latvian, and the Latvian educational system was very German-influenced at the time. Their handwriting was very neat and almost indecipherable. Much more like Kafka's than Parks'.
I have a mild form of dysgraphia that I only discovered after I'd learned to write Arabic and kept transposing the dots above and below for many letters though I never read it incorrectly. Then I realized I do the same thing in English with lower case d's and b's some numbers and other letters too (again, it never caused a problem for reading).
I remember being asked by European flatmates when I was in my first year at university to proofread their essays, and I couldn't read most of their handwriting. The two I read the most -- one Belgian, one Spanish -- had quite similar handwriting, in that very neat, very compact, quite florid, and almost utterly unreadable style.
It was like trying to read 17th century documents in secretary hand or the court hand used on legal documents.
re: 159
My son swaps "b" and "d", all the time. He does the same thing with some numbers, too. Although he doesn't, as far as I can tell, show signs of being genuinely dyslexic.
My kid said he could never remember which way the bump goes for 'b' and 'd'. Thought about it for a day and then I told him that if he writes the word 'belly', the b's belly will face the word. Think it worked for him.
making Mara breathe entirely through her nose because she thinks that will help M learn to smell
FFS.
I often think I must have one of the last remaining lawyer jobs (state court;criminal law) that involves lots of handwriting. Just off the top of my head:
-I handwrite notes when talking to clients, witnesses, other people involved in a case; those notes go in the file, which is a physical file folder full of papers.
-I handwrite notes during court appearances.
-I handwrite on the physical folder an update of what happened in court, and my office's support staff uses that handwritten note to update the case information in our computer system.
-If I inherit a case from another lawyer, there's usually lots of these handwritten notes to decipher, so my colleagues and I are good at reading one another's writing.
-Sometimes I get a copy of something that a judge has made notes on, and it's helpful to decipher those notes to see what the judge is focusing on.
-Sometimes people go to the magistrate to make a criminal complaint, and that's handwritten statement made under oath, so those can be super important yet are often hard to read.
||
I have an idea for a graphic genealogy app. Who wants to be a zillionaire? (And is capable of turning the idea into a program?)
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161 It never fails to amuse me, given what I do, that I can never hand-write the word "atlas" without it coming out "altas".
152: His gravestone says "Dr. Franz Kafka," because being a lawyer used to be prestigious.
154. I think some letters to Ottla in Czech? He liked Hebrew, I've read that there are drafts of the letter to his father in Hebrew.
136: I think heebie's caricature is expressed in detail here (and in other linked articles) -- I remember sending this around to family members with the description "wonderfully neo-Victorian and fascinating to read".
102.2: the suspense is killing me. What happened next?
Yes, what?!
Is there an unexploited grift potential here? Exercise videos for toddler that will improve their math SAT scores? Calisthenics that will allow them to ace AP Calculus? Baby Newton?
Melissa and Doug made a fortune convincing parents that toys made of wood will help get your kid into a good college.
I don't know that it's "unexploited".
Let's all market the theory that Kids Today Can't Sit Still because they lack sufficient class anxiety. They're not worried enough about getting into the right college and living in the right neighborhood. Parents, up till now you've been doing all the fretting, but it's urgent that you teach your kid how to fret, and teach them early.
I'm curious, heebie, about what scenario you think is pernicious: the idea that these sensory/developmental activities are not just necessary but sufficient for improving cognitive skills? Like, "my patented Spin-To-Read intervention" is shortening the causal chain in a way that seems ridiculous? On a super-general level, "kids should have more time for free play if they're going to be reasonable and sane" seems to me like a harmless truism. But I suppose you can trust grown-ups to ruin everything good.
I don't think any of it is pernicious exactly. I just suspect that there's a lot of hocus-pocus baked into the theories.
I think that often one-on-one attention to a matter is like a grow light for kids, and speech and physical therapy and all these things are perfectly reasonable vessels for working on delays. So I think it helps, basically.
What I'm curious about is what the data is like under these blanket assertions for how kids today are not getting the right kind of motion and play as they did back in the day. Are we talking about rich kids with overly structured four year old lives, like that article implies? Or poor kids trapped in apartments? But haven't there always been wealthy and poor kids trapped in apartments? Are we talking about stranger-danger and kids not being able to roam freely? But 3-4 year olds haven't been given substantial freedom maybe ever. Etc. Etc. These are the questions I'd like to ask my therapist friends, but I assume they haven't done a deep dive into the original studies and will just repeat what their professor said at some point. I suspect there's a half-baked, over-cited study that doesn't really hold up to all the conclusions that have been drawn from it. But again, I think it still lands in the ballpark of being helpful, because one-on-one relationships help people thrive and grow, and therapists are smart people who get to know the kid individually, and respond to the kid individually.
The biggest real problem that I'd assert is: kids with trauma and ACES just getting shunted through medication/getting in trouble at school, and not getting help with their actual problems. But that's hardly the fault of the therapists - it's poverty/structural/shitty health care system, etc.
Sütterlin! https://www.margarethiley.com/index.php/a-rare-skill-sutterlin-script/
The amazing thing with that stuff is that the Nazis abolished it although it looks like they would make it compulsory and shoot anyone who didn't do it.
On the weird body-oriented education theories, thanks to this J/amie Z/awinski post: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/04/wilhelm-reich/ I was looking at the Wikipedia page for Wilhelm Reich and learned that in the phase where he was painfully prodding people in the belief this would change the muscular, physical behaviours they adopted to cope with their mental problems, he'd left his wife for a Laban-trained dancer (this rather impressive lady: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Lindenberg), so apparently he'd just decided to reverse the process.
Rather than her doing drastic and painful physical manoeuvres to express her inner emotions, he'd do them to patients in order to change them. Like so much midcentury insanity, it's so near to making sense yet so far from making sense.
151/152: it's in Italian! (I think.)
176: I suspect there's a half-baked, over-cited study that doesn't really hold up to all the conclusions that have been drawn from it. -- yeah, I get that, I'd be curious too. If I am understanding right, it sounds like your objection is to these piecemeal approaches that allow people to professionalize and overspecialize without taking the whole socioeconomic picture into account. And yeah, that is pernicious for sure, but not specifically because of the nature of these theories, no? Well, except that Spin-To-Read is such a wonderful bit of satire. Spin to read, trip to count! If you can write cursive while hanging by your knees, you can rule the damn world.
I'm not sure the Calabat has been formally taught to write. He's left-handed, we think, and he really, really struggles. We also haven't really been pushing it and he's never been one to spend hours drawing, but it's becoming noticeably. He's nearly seven and could not produce anything like what xelA is doing above. It's frustrating him now because he's unusually bright, but homework takes him longer than he'd like because writing is hard. We also suspect he may not be left-handed, but he used to suck his right thumb constantly when coloring, etc., were the activities in preschool. His preschool teacher sent me pictures of him writing, in the same day, using first his left hand and then his right. Either way he has a hard time.
I have no idea how to ask his teacher for help with this without sounding like a crazy mom. He hates writing, and he struggles, but he's also without exaggerating a nearly perfect student. If his lack of fine motor skills are hindering his math ability I can't see how because the kid loves numbers and finds math easy. He reads whatever he wants to read now. His handwriting isn't affecting his schoolwork except for the one time his 'a' looked like an 'e' and he missed a point on a spelling test. So.... do I just make him trace letters and hate me?
Cala, I don't know your kid's situation, but maybe get a specialist involved, on the grounds that they're good at what they do? My friends have a super picky eater, enough that she didn't gain weight for three years and they got the occupational therapist involved and the kid went to Food School. From the little I've overheard, Food School was awesome. It taught her a lot about bodies and food, in really useful ways. (Digestive system; protein builds bodies; carbs can be fast energy or slow energy and you want both. Here's how to try foods.) Just really practical and useful* and their kid gained five pounds in six months.
There doesn't have to be a complicated problem for you to assume that a professional would have good ways of dealing with it. Why not remove an obstacle? Why not have someone else remove an obstacle?
*I mean, shit. Even when we called a dog trainer, she diagnosed that our dog wasn't getting enough sleep because he was driven to guard all night and she told us to hang a blanket over his window so he couldn't watch the street. It worked and he slept and I would never have thought of it. Experts know things!
What kind of specialist would I be looking for? I'm fine with seeking expert advice, but most school diagnostic stuff seems to require evidence of a learning setback before there are interventions.
If I am understanding right, it sounds like your objection is to these piecemeal approaches that allow people to professionalize and overspecialize without taking the whole socioeconomic picture into account. And yeah, that is pernicious for sure, but not specifically because of the nature of these theories, no?
I don't think the theories are pernicious! I just think that they're amusing and likely to be baseless. The therapy itself is still helpful, just not because of the theoretical underpinnings. But what do I know? Maybe there's a robust body of evidence after all. The socio-economic thing is unrelated, and has nothing to do with the therapists.
Theory is both important and baseless. Life is like that.
182: I'm not sure of that - we got Ace into speech therapy via the schools, and she doesn't have any setbacks. It turned out to be a surprisingly easy process. I texted the teacher, and she had the speech therapist come in and observe. The speech therapist thought it warranted further intervention, and started meeting with Ace 2-3x a week. There was no paperwork or anything. Granted, different states, etc.
I'm guessing a child physical therapist would have some fine-motor therapies that would help.
This is off the top of my head, but I think possibly the person you'd go to for handwriting issues would be called an occupational therapist. (And all my sympathy for the Calabat. I was him -- way ahead in everything academically in grade school except miserably bad handwriting, and it poisoned the whole experience.)
And I think needing it to be screwing up his schoolwork is just a question of who pays. If you walk into an office and the OT diagnoses something going on they can help with, they'll treat if you or your insurance company will pay for it, it's just that the school system might not pay if he's doing well in school.
re: 168
I didn't know that. I worked on a virtual exhibit of those letters, when the Bod bought them, and saw a lot of the originals and the associated notebooks. All of the ones I saw were in German, but that's not a comprehensive sample, obviously.
re: 179
He hates writing, and he struggles
Ironically, xelA's teacher continually tells us his writing is not good enough, and that we should be working on it more. He also hates it.
He is not naturally academic in the way that I was, or some of his peers are. He quite enjoys maths, reading, and science, but he hates writing, and anything that requires him to sit still and concentrate for any length of time. I sometimes worry that his school puts too much pressure on the kids his age, which I think is part of the testing and assessment culture which has changed a lot since I was at school.
Schools are continually chasing the coveted "Outstanding" rating from the UK assessment agency.
For example, xelA does multiplication, fractions, addition and subtraction of double-digit numbers, for example. I distinctly remember when I learned multiplication at school in Scotland in the 1970s, and I was a year older than he is now. He can also read well. Well enough to read, say, something like Danny the Champion of the World, or Fantastic Mr Fox for his own pleasure. And yet ... we still get told that he needs to work harder, and we (especially we) should be working harder with him. I sort of caught them out last year when we were being told his reading was behind where it should be for (then) age 5.5. I looked up the official reading level for the books he was reading, on the website of the publisher, and he was reading books that were for the age 6+ level, and reading books nearer the top end of the reading scheme for that age group.
"Oh those are just a guideline, we really expect him to be reading at current-level plus X".
I'm absolutely certain that it wouldn't have mattered whatever fucking level he'd been reading at. We'd still have been told we had to work harder.
It's like you're not even trying to instill class anxiety in him.
That seems quite advanced for 5.5. I haven't read DtCotH since I was the right age for it, but I remember it as something I'd think of as appropriate for a much older kid: 8 to 11 or so.
Oh, I can't read. He's 6.5 now, at which point it's still impressive but slightly less wildly impressive.
re: the fine motor thing.
A friend of mine went to a Rudolf Steiner school. His parents sent him when was about 12 or 13. Where they immediately made him write in huge baby letters with a crayon in the sorts of exercise books that I hadn't used since I was 7. Given that at the time I was, I think, about to start calculus, and was definitely doing algebra and reading Shakespeare it seemed absurd.
The justification given was something about fine motor skills not being developed enough until ... some bullshit about molars or something? ... so kids should not be made to write small letters or use a pen until age 14 or so.
I also remember his friends from that school all doing amazingly well in life, and the school trumpeting this as a sign of their methods being so amazing. Whereas no, it was because they were all rich as fuck and everything was done through the old boys and old girls network.
"Oh, Cloudwind Monkeyberry Fitzwilliam's Dad is a director of Bank of Scotland. I'm sure he'll get you an internship and a starter job at 50,000 a year, darling ..."*
* the kids were all fucking arseholes. I mean, amazingly stupid and privileged even by the standards of trustafarian rich Edinburgh hippies (which they all were).
Of our kids, Pokey is the most voracious learner, and he's game for anything, and it is such a delight. I'm reading A Little Princess with him and Ace. I had hesitated out of latent gender bias on my part. But he loves it. I think Ace is a little bogged down in the language, but Pokey absolutely is enraptured, and it's so fun.
I can't tell if these "my kid is advanced but not really that advanced" threads make me tense because I worry that my kid is not achieving sufficiently great things, or because it's provoking never-resolved terrors about whether I myself have ever performed adequately and, if not, what punishment I deserve. I suppose this is the punishment.
"Oh, Cloudwind Monkeyberry Fitzwilliam's Dad is a director of Bank of Scotland.
This made me laugh.
For Gswift: remember "Little Lord Fauntleroy's School for Albino Hemophiliacs"? That always amused me.
re: 192
Yeah, he's 7, although he finished DtCoW just a few weeks before his 7th birthday. I'd say he's somewhere in the upper half to upper third of reading ability for his peers at school, maybe slightly better, but absolutely nowhere near the "top" level. He's just a good confident reader for his age.
He does enjoy it, though, which is not the case for all of them. His best friend is a technically better reader, but he'd never actually read a book for pleasure, whereas xelA will.
I have fully embraced not living up to my potential. Mid level civil servant is where I'm topping out, and I'm good with that.
The "advanced but not that advanced" discourse is peculiar. I used to talk like that about Sally and Newt, and mostly I meant that they seemed fairly bright but not in a way where leaving them mostly alone in an ordinary school was going to do them any harm. There's a category of 'gifted kids' people talk about that's sort of an educational problem, and that never seemed to be an issue.
re: 198
Yes, I've gone completely tonto about that here on threads in the past. Sometimes, to be fair, probably unfairly so.
But ... it's almost always mostly about social class, and sometimes about race, and sometimes about people's (bad) experiences of middle school.*
xelA is, I think, at the moment, an entirely average student. Literally average, not as in "a high achiever but not as high achieving as me" sense of average. The idea that he'd need any kind of specially enriching environment is hilarious.
* this latter in a way that seems peculiarly American, and I never know whether it's a real thing, or just people being overly sensitive, as my youth in a rough(ish) Scottish comprehensive wasn't exactly flower arranging and glee clubs, and continual validation of my worth as an intellectual being, either.
I'll bite, what do you put in your martini. Mixing cocktails is one of my comparatively few recourses against this distance learning demoralization march.
Way late, but adding a dash or so of bitters (in this case Scrappy's Aromatic) was the key bit I didn't have before. The rest is the 3ish:1 with a twist that I settled on a while back, currently with a bottle of Big Gin I picked up in the PNW and Dolin dry vermouth, plus a little extra stirring (40-50 times) to mellow the gin just a little bit.
this follow-on conversation has much that is amusing in it, so happy about that. i'm basically in heebie's camp, it all seems ludicrous, although sure maybe there is some traceable link between *this* elbow movement being perfected at age 5.42 and *that* differential equation being master at age 15.74. sure! much more likely - little human flourishing across a comfortable range of physical, emotional and intellectual activities in the context of materially comfortable lives leads to bigger humans having brains comfortably equipped to handle whatever weird ass learning is thrown at them. sometimes particular little or big humans need a bit of support in areas particular to each of them. done. i have not once regretted blowing off pretty any push-push-push from teachers over the years, or discounting any unrealistic or overblown negativity. sometimes the teachers see something you don't see at home, or you can collaborate/coordinate/pick their brains to tackle something you both see where the little humans needs some support. sometimes there are tough problems! generally a good idea then to not go out of your way to create them.
table manners, on the other hand! there i draw the line. early and complete mastery is absolutely necessary to human flourishing.
[ducks]
I'm losing that fight so badly right now.
My point is always that if nobody can stand to watch you eat, you'll never get a good job.
199: One perhaps interesting aspect of that is the cross-atlantic differences in dealing with class. In my (obviously limited) experience it's pretty straightforwardly addressed in scotland, but americans really like to pretend hard that it doesn't exist which ends up sublimating the effects into all sorts of less obvious dynamics.
You can get away with so much if you can send out the right class markers while being a middle-aged white guy. But not shitty table manners.
A friend once (jokingly) suggested I had "Dunning-Kruger in reverse" and I objected that clearly I'm an idiot because I didn't even know what "Dunning-Kruger in reverse" meant. That is, do you invert the relationship between intelligence and self-awareness, or do you just move in the opposite direction from "but I wore the juice!" up the existing Dunning-Kruger gradient? This is precisely what is meant by "advanced but not that advanced."
I thought having bad experiences in middle school was the default because it is made up of 11- to 14-year-olds.
I can't remember the part of the Dunning-Kruger test after you explain (incorrectly) that a tortoise is the same as a turtle.
Uh, somebody better go and get Moby now.
As it happens, I'm friends with an occupational therapist so maybe I can ask her for a roadmap.
195: Honestly, I'm without much of a comparison class. I've described him as 'precocious' in the past because it's not terribly surprising that the child of a nerdy academic is advanced academically. It's only in the past year that I'm starting to think it's not just educated parents/house full of books/etc. because his teachers are consistently making remarks. The Calabat is the top of his gifted class and extremely motivated to learn but it's possible that our state school system just isn't that good and he'd be average anywhere that didn't sit on hundreds of millions in education funding during a teacher shortage and conclude that the thing to do was to loot the education fund.
As it stands I've got too much to do to homeschool them properly so the next month he's doing whatever the schools sends home and then playing with his sister.
210: I think it's really hard to know once you are even a little bit outside the normal parameters.
I spent a little time as a TA and then instructor in an academic program that was high profile enough to have a) national/international pull for undergraduate students and b) a streaming system to try and filter some of the best prepared incoming class into advanced sections/courses.
Every year these advances sections would have a bunch of students who had always been told they were "gifted", "talented", "the best we have every seen at X high school", "the best student I've ever had" etc. And every year some of them wouldn't even break the bottom 1/3 in their new classes.
This must have been so difficult for some of them. It was certainly difficult to watch sometimes.
Sometimes you are the best student east-everywhere high school has ever seen, but the girl next to you is going to go on to be the youngest faculty hire in Harvard history, so it doesn't really matter.
Theoretically, someone gifted should be in a good place to figure out that there are similar kids at every other school and that the application process that picked them should be picking those similar kids.
Gifted programs are good places to figure out that there are parents with class anxiety at most schools.
Found out yesterday that my kid qualified for, but didn't lottery into, the gifted school. So now I have to act indistinguishly from the striver parents that I sneer at, when my motivation is totally! different!! I'm not doing this out of class anxiety. I want to spare him from the boredom and ostracism I lived with until I got into a school of my peers.
I asked my kid at the beginning of the process whether he wanted to keep at his school or whether he wanted a school with more and harder work. He asked for the 'more and harder work' so eagerly that I felt bad over it.
There's a lottery to get into GT?! I literally think that is illegal. Schools are legally required to educate students appropriately, and GT students get GT, because it falls under special services, like any other accommodation.
172: Unfortunately, Melissa got all of it. On the other hand, I got the rights to commenting in good blogs. Maybe I should have learned French cursive.
Oh wait, it's a whole school, not a program within a school. Never mind.
215: I don't know details, but anything like that is going to be state rather than federal law, so different from Texas to California.
My firm belief on gifted schools is that how smart your kid is doesn't necessarily track closely with how much they'll find it difficult or academically damaging to be in a regular school. Some kids get along fine with classmates with a broad spectrum of abilities, others less so. And of course there are better and worse regular schools, in terms of how unpleasant they make life for an unusual kid.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with my niece next year, as she's going to move from a small town school in Maine where ~75% of the kids are on free-or-reduced lunch, to a small town school in Wisc. that is somewhat more prosperous.
My sister did redshirt her, so she's never had any problems keeping up, and she just loves the both the social and intellectual aspects of school -- her one Achilles heel seems to be excessive chatting with her fellow students. Frankly, she's such a relentlessly positive kid that I think she could do ok pretty much anywhere. And she spends a lot of her free time at home reading to the cat. Still, big life changes can be more disruptive to kids than they let on.
Let me tell you, having you Achilles heel be your Achilles heel isn't a piece of cage either.
Far as I can tell, more kids qualified for that school than they have slots for. Lottery seems like the right solution to that. Don't know yet how programs within a school work. That might not start for a couple more years.
I think the new model is differentiation within a classroom to meet the range of abilities. I'll ask for that if I can't get my kid into the other school, but have my doubts. I'm not worried about academically damaging (unless he gets so bored he gives up) but I don't want him to re-live my experience of never fitting until I was placed right and then the entire problem of socializing wasn't a problem at all.
spending a lot of your time reading to your cat is such a primo activity, fully endorse, excellent parenting anyone having their kid do that, brava(o)!
Today, during video-game-centric free time, we're discovering that Mr. 7 does not have the emotional resiliency necessary to... play Super Mario Odyssey.
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NMM to brilliant character actor Brian Dennehy.
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(sorry. I don't mean to make light of it.)
226 is the guy in First Blood and Tommy Boy. 228 is just the guy in Tommy Boy.
Or diminishing one of the best Willy Loman portrayals ever.
I have no idea if this thread has been recirculated for the sad occasion, but this is a great story: https://twitter.com/quinncy/status/1060303097178673152
It almost makes me want to read the Wikipedia plot summary for Death of a Salesman.
I would like a chart of the French action-to-ability links to try as an adult.
People come to social dance classes without any dance, or sometimes movement, practice, and most of them get some better but never fluid and some people go through a whole reformation mental and physical. At seventy!! Free your lower limbs.
I don't know about that, but I think today should be the day I change my socks.
clew! this was a persistent source of hilarity in parent-frenchie-school interactions for us, bc frankly the kid was a sever underperformer in school p.e. (setting aside the gymnastics modules) and the french take education physique tremendously seriously, while at the same time he was insanely fit and dancing up a ridiculous russian storm for almost all of his frenchie school career, so the sport profs harangues were really hard to take seriously. badminton people, we got long detailed critiques of the kid's center court game weakness in badminton! in which by the way the french just call it a volant, here english is indisputably superior with the fabulous shuttlecock. what a great word - shuttlecock.
also clew! i am afeered for the mini proto humminbirds as a couple of blue jays have been hanging about thuggishly. why oh why does bird watching always break my heart???
One of those spring-loaded Daisy BB guns won't even kill a bluejay, but will make it go somewhere else.
I'm pretty sure that pellet guns and severe cabin fever are a bad combination.
In Pennsylvania, we can't even shut down the guns stores.
My dad almost knew Brian Dennehy in high school -- different schools, but Dad had a number of friends at Dennehy's who knew him. Not that that's important, it's just what I think of.
200 is pretty much my workflow too, though Angostura is all we have at hand in these desperate times.
"Doc McStuffins" was trending on Twitter. I was afraid she will ill or dead.
Dungeons and Dragons is so much easier if you just roll the dice again whenever you get below fifteen in an important situation.
Or just say, "fifteen" regardless of what the dice says.
If she wasn't ill or dead, what's the occasion?
238: Ever read "What Maisie Knew"? No spoilers.
Ok, this is bonkers and I don't know what to think. (Just being presidential because I was given it via a family member).
The Chinese say it's from the Americans, and the Americans say it was the Chinese. What if it was UNC, Chapel Hill along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology together, in 2015, reverse-engineering a bat coronavirus so that it could more easily have other hosts for laboratory purposes?
It's probably still several leaps away from anything resembling a conspiracy theory, but it still took me by surprise. Like, maybe something created in a lab could have gotten out on accident?
Also clearly I have no idea what the language means in this thing. YDNEW! SP! LW! WHO ELSE. Tell me everything.
Haven't seen that article, but the virus was sequenced months ago and I've seen more than one virologist say there's no indication of human tampering.
Like, there's a reason they've named the virus SARS-2. SARS was bat>civet>human in a wet market Guandong. SARS-2 is bat>something>human in a wet market in Hubei. Same fuckup, different year.
252: Yeah but when the CCP accuses the U.S of making it now I have to consider that they made it because that's exactly the kind of shameless propaganda move they're capable of.
There's no way UNC did something that evil without bragging about it to Duke.
248: Making a comparison with Dr. Oz.
bat>civet>human
Worst superhero ever.
FFS, this was debunked in February.
Another claim in Chinese social media points to a Nature Medicine paper published in 2015 [7], which reports the construction of a chimeric CoV with a bat CoV S gene (SHC014) in the backbone of a SARS CoV that has adapted to infect mice (MA15) and is capable of infecting human cells [8]. However, this claim acks any scientific basis and must be discounted because of significant divergence in the genetic sequence of this construct with the new SARS-CoV-2 (>5,000 nucleotides).
The lab hypothesis is not that it was engineered in the lab--that seems clearly debunked--but that it was something natural that escaped from the lab due to improper handling.
259: 250 says engineering _and_ escape.
Otherwise, fine, but I have William of Ockham right here and he prefers the wet market.
250- When humans assemble genomes in labs there are various clues left behind because of the methods needed to put long bits of DNA together. Even though 30k isn't that long it's much much longer than we can make by synthetic methods. So you make short pieces and stitch them together and that leaves behind either evidence of the stitching or other selectable markers you include to ensure that your stitching worked. Figure 3 shows an example of this.
No such unnatural markers have been found in the SARS-CoV-2 sequence. If you were trying to cover your tracks and not leave any unnatural sequence evidence? I'm not sure that could be done, and now you're talking about a whole other level of conspiracy where someone wasn't engineering viruses and they accidentally escaped but they were intentionally engineering something for release and were trying to hide it. Even if it were possible there would be no non-nefarious reason to leave out the usual traces of the most convenient molecular biology tools.
Meanwhile, there is evidence it evolved naturally by gradual mutation and incorporation of other naturally observed features: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 where they find similar mutations in other naturally occurring coronaviruses that have been incorporated into SARS-CoV-2 over time via natural selection.
Whether it was a naturally collected virus sample that they propagated in a lab and then it escaped? Well, if it was naturally occurring, given how well it transmits in humans it probably would have started circulating anyway. I'm not sure there's any molecular biology method to tell one from the other, but Occam's razor and all that.
Crap, my omelette burned while I was writing this.
Important update: it was still edible just crispy.
260: Yes, but I haven't seen anyone anywhere else who I take seriously taking that seriously, nor is that what the US diplomats who visited the lab in Wuhan before all this claimed in their dispatches. But the fact that there was concern over this before hand means that escape of something natural being researched needs to be considered separately, and earlier comments weren't distinguishing these cases well.
Whether it was a naturally collected virus sample that they propagated in a lab and then it escaped? Well, if it was naturally occurring, given how well it transmits in humans it probably would have started circulating anyway.
I don't necessarily buy this. It might have been in some biological reservoir from which the leap to humans is difficult. On the other hand, if the leap is easy, that places not-necessary-occamy additional constraints on the virus: it appears the epidemic started from a single area. So either it is highly geographically constrained in the reservoir, it doesn't spread well in its reservoir (but does in humans), it's very recently evolved (from my ignoramus position, the most defensible of these), or its reservoir is itself geographically constrained.
And even considering the double hypothetical of that it was collected by researchers, escaped from a lab, but it eventually would have started circulating, while that might inform your probabilities, that's not a great way to assign causality.
That all being said, I don't think there's any clear evidence in favor of this beyond said diplomatic dispatches, and it probably can't be determined biologically. But I don't see any reason to rule it out as a possibility even if not the most likely one. I am glad the omelette survived.
Got up real late, real hungover, (was up late with my The Wire rewatch), lounged about, cleaned my kitchen a bit in anticipation of cooking later. Now lounging on the couch, will probably play Halo soon...
I think "very recently evolved" is a reasonable default position. It's the third new coronavirus with nasty impacts on humans to emerge this century and jump from animal reservoirs; meanwhile the less nasty ones that give you colds mutate all the time, which is why they'll never "cure the common cold". Very recently evolved sounds like just another day at the office for these sort of things.
Thanks for 261, SP. Glad you didn't have to sacrifice the omelet in the production of the answer!
I love how Mossy in 258 is like...[scrambles all over the internet for five hours trying to find academic article from Emerging Microbes & Infections, Vol 9, 2020]..."FFS, don't be daft. This was all over the 9th volume of our favorite rag back in February."
265: Even then, it's not obvious to me that the default position should be that it hasn't spread within its reservoir and it easily transfers to humans. For comparison, MERS is thought to have evolved in bats in its present form in the 1990s, and took 20 years to get to humans via camels, and there were multiple camel to human transmissions. I imagine there's going to be a lot of interesting research coming out of this, some day, if the Chinese government doesn't suppress it.
It was under 10 minutes skimming and searching. The paper I linked was about google#4 for maybe my fifth search string.
267 Mossy should consider becoming a librarian.
269: So modest! "Oh, this lil ol' search result? It was nothing! I just grabbed something out of my closet and threw it on."
