Wednesday, November 23, 2011

An unexpected moment of silence

I have been running around like crazy since school started in September. While I love everything I've been doing, I just had sixty seconds of sitting still and being quiet... and I am so filled with relief that I might start crying any second. Even lying on the chiropractor's table it is my wont to make lists. I don't know how I just achieved that complete brain silence (maybe it's actually dementia or something and I should not be so excited about it?) but it felt great.

Today I've made pumpkin bread pudding ( a purely indulgent act, since I'm the only one who likes it), sourdough bread, and nanaimo bars. I've been to Michaels, with Younger Daughter (which means that I spent twice as much as I intended going in). I've been to the supermarket to get some things I forgot yesterday when I was at Whole Foods. I took the girls out to breakfast, since my school celebrates the beginning of every break by reminding the residential faculty that this isn't really home (in other words, testing the fire alarms early in the morning). And now I have had a moment of quiet.

Time to give thanks!

Monday, November 7, 2011

Long Division

I've been sitting with younger daughter for the past half hour while she works doggedly at her math homework. As a math teacher, I'm both pleased and horrified at the work she has to do.

The Good:

  • Someone has taught her to use big 0.5 inch graph paper to line up the problem
  • She has amazing notes from class on why you need to know division, and its relationship to multiplication
  • She has five steps to follow
The Bad:
  • She has twenty problems to do, along with all of her other homework
  • She's just finding quotients, and the remainders can apparently go hang
  • she doesn't really understand what she's doing
This is a child who is doing her level best to produce what her teachers want. She doesn't really understand what the process is about, or what is happening with the numbers, or what she's actually accomplishing, other than completing her homework and checking that task off the list.

How is this learning? Or, where is the benefit to my child? It isn't intellectual growth as I understand it, but I don't teach middle school. What am I missing?

That being said, I'm really pleased with her school today. Over the weekend she and her best/only friend had a playdate-gone-awry with lots of quarreling and misunderstanding. Younger daughter wrote a long e-mail to the adjustment counselor, who made time to write her back, meet with her today, call me, and to offer to sit down with both girls later in the week to help them find ways to disagree productively.



Saturday, November 5, 2011

Two Years Later

And all of a sudden I'm thinking about blogging again. For a while, all my online downtime was going to Ravelry, then to Facebook (how many Words with Friends games can one person play at once?), with detours to HBOgo and Hulu (Game of Thrones, True Blood, Modern Family) .... and now that I am faced with a horrific Nov 21st deadline (of my own making, I freely admit) all of a sudden I found myself returning to the blog, and imagining new pictures here, and ... true, all of my former connections have no doubt moved on, but the question of whether anyone's listening doesn't seem to be enough to stop me from tentatively putting my toe back in these waters.