My pretend life

Round about 2 p.m. this afternoon, I’m coming back to my real life.

For the last two days, I’ve just been pretending.

Last June, my choral group sang at the yearly fundraiser for New Music Works, the Avant Garden Party. The AGP started in the yard of my former wonderful neighbor Lou Harrison, a composer of international stature, and his partner Bill Colvig. Our other neighbor, George, made their yard into a small paradise of cascading flowers and dappled light. After first George, then Bill, and finally Lou stepped off this mortal coil, Lou’s properties were sold and demolished. Now we have two neighbors with big, fancy new homes and little idea of the history underneath their feet.

Last year’s AGP took place in a different unusual Santa Cruz garden, and on a beautiful day of cascading flowers and dappled sunshine coming through the trees, we sang and listened to other performances as supporters of New Music Works strolled the grounds, drank wine, and bid on silent auction items.

We hiked up a canyon filled with wildflowers, the chirping of birds, and the clicking of insects
We hiked up a canyon filled with wildflowers, the chirping of birds, and the clicking of insects

That’s where my pretend life comes in. I have a method with silent auctions. I go to all the gift certificates for local stores that I go to anyway. I bid up to the full amount for the gift certificate. That way, I break even and my favorite organizations get the 20 bucks I would have spent anyway. I am always grateful to our local stores who donate, and it makes me all the more loyal to them.

So on that lovely day I moved slowly through the auction items. At one that I would never have bid on on any normal day, I paused. Two nights in a gorgeous inn in Calistoga. One of NMW’s board members was standing nearby. “That’s a fabulous deal,” she said. “That’s worth thousands — that place is fantastically expensive.”

The minimum bid was way above what I should be spending on anything, especially given that my husband had been doing month-by-month contract work. However, he was in the process of negotiating a full-time job (with benefits!), and I was feeling sentimental. Two days away being adults. And he’d have paid vacation time. What a concept.

“Really,” the board member said, “That starting bid is so low, and I’m sure other people will bid on it.”

Oh, why not? I put down the lowest bid possible and moved on.

The next day I got the phone call from another board member. “I’m calling to tell you of your good fortune,” she said.

“Oh, no,” I said, “I didn’t get that vacation package, did I?”

“You are so lucky!” she said. “That place is gorgeous and you got it at a fabulous price.”

I planned to give it to my husband as a congratulations on getting the job. Then the negotiations dragged on, and by the time he was settled into the new job, school had started and everything was just So Complicated. Finally, I ended up giving him the gift certificate for his birthday. I found a couple of days that would work with our schedules, our kids’ schedules, and my mom’s schedule.

I always say that running two kids’ lives makes you qualified to run a large corporation. I think scheduling two days away without our kids qualifies me to be something like the White House Social Secretary! I put together a combination of family, friends, and babysitter. As far as I know, all went well. Even the fact that my son couldn’t find his rain jacket and was going on a fieldtrip this morning. After a frantic phone call, I suggested that he call a friend to see if he had an extra. I received a text (my son has learned how to text!) minutes later: problem solved.

This place where we spent the last three days really is the most wonderful place I’ve ever stayed, and in my younger days I stayed at a few fabulous places. We have our own couple of cabanas linked by a deck built around mature evergreens. The cabanas are close together, but we hardly know if anyone else is here. We walk up to breakfast past a pond with ducks, and yesterday, a great blue heron. No cars are allowed on the property, so the quiet is only broken by the hum of electric carts.

Our little pretend life came equipped with wine, crackers and dip, and other amenities, all included. We swam in the pool. We hiked up the canyon on private trails. We tasted wine at local wineries. We ate at some lovely restaurants, including the charming little Cook Restaurant last night.

It was a fun little pretend life. I have to say, we don’t have the money to stay here again, but I it’s worth the price. Sometimes there’s nothing better than getting away from the parenting life and remembering who you really are.

In the last three days, no one has told me I’m mean, no one has thrown anything at me, and no one has cried when I told him he couldn’t use the computer. It’s been a blissful escape.

Now we get back into the car and drive toward reality.

The rain pours down and washes my pretend life back into the pond.

The danger of science denial

I finally got around to watching a TED video of a talk by Michael Specter which had been hanging around in my browser for days. Someone, somewhere, recommended the video, and I’m glad I finally got around to watching it.

The slogan on TED’s website is this: “Gather the world’s leading thinkers and doers, offer them four days of rapid-fire stimulation, and the result? Unexpected connections. Extraordinary insights. Powerful inspiration.”

OK, a bit overblown, but this website does contain lots of gems that will excite you, anger you, and amuse you. Highly recommended. The videos are just of guys (and your occasional gal) giving short speeches. The format is loose and relaxed. The subject matter is whatever the speaker wants it to be.

Specter is a well-regarded journalist. One of those guys who actually goes out and gets the story, and he’s apparently not afraid of much. He definitely has a sense of humor about how popular his job makes him. At one point in the video he relates being called “strident” by a friend and then says as a casual aside, “No one’s ever said that before!”

So be forewarned, this is not a “sorta,” “probably,” “in some cases” kind of guy. He chose a hard topic, science denial, and he hits it head on with compassion, humor, understanding, dismissal, and pure annoyance.

I think this video is worth viewing for a variety of reasons. First of all, he’s got food for thought for lots of well-meaning parents who don’t think of themselves as science deniers. For those who think they’re doing a favor to their kids by not getting them vaccinated for killer diseases like polio and measles, he goes straight for why what they’re doing is, first, based on a theory that was studied, restudied, and roundly dismissed by pretty much every scientific study around the world. Second, he points out that in fact, what they’re really doing is endangering their kids. That guy who just stepped off a plane from Lagos, Nigeria and is now sitting in the audience? The polio virus may have chosen him as a carrier. That’s what viruses do. They exist to reproduce.

For those who have little patience with science denial, Specter’s speech is reassuring in its clarity and frightening in the implications he draws. Take the genetically engineered food debate. As he points out, it is a fact that all the food we eat, except perhaps wild mushrooms and that miner’s lettuce salad your kid fed you the other day, is genetically engineered. Natural foods proponents tend to revere Native Americans. Guess what? They did genetic engineering of corn. Natural foods stores are full of soybeans (genetically engineered), cultivated herbs (ditto), and fruits that didn’t exist five hundred years ago.

The food for thought that he offered me, however, is that our modern technology has allowed us to hasten this engineering and focus it. Where it used to be it took a generation to find out that the new variety of corn tastes better but doesn’t stand up to drought as well, now these things can be engineered and tested in a year. It’s scary, that’s for sure. But scary doesn’t mean inherently bad. As he points out: we have the ability to save the health and lives of countless people in Africa, yet we don’t do it. He calls this “technological colonialism,” and I’m sure he used that word to really make us think. It’s good enough for us that we have ample healthy food which has been engineered to suit our needs, but not good enough for Africans? Hm.

I think the most important point he makes is that you need to remember that you may have any opinion that you want, but you can’t have your own facts. The fact is that there is no correlation between the MMR vaccination and autism. Some people have the opinion that there is, but they don’t have the facts. The facts are that one doctor did one tiny, poorly administered study, then one medical journal didn’t really think clearly before they published it. A generation later, the doctor has had his license to practice medicine revoked, the journal has officially pulled the article and slunk off with its tail between its legs, and millions more kids worldwide are at risk for a disease that our parents thought had been eradicated from the developed world.

Specter also explores the reasons for the explosion of “big placebo” (his amusing take on the response to the menace of “big pharma”) — the supplement industry. In my view he goes a little far, given that I have seen in my own life some very positive effects of manipulating diet for my daughter and for myself. However, it is well worth considering how much we spend on, he says with amusement, “dark urine,” when we could be spending that money on something that has actually stood up to rigorous tests. What are supplement companies afraid of? Perhaps it’s simply their bottom line. If their products can’t stand up to FDA rules for testing and results, then why do we reward them with our money?

“When you start down the road where belief in magic replaces evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be.”

No kidding. But wait, I feel a cold coming on… Excuse me now while I go take my echinacea and guzzle some Airborne so I don’t get cancer!

More food for thought:

Watch your step! A visit to Quail Hollow

This ponderosa pine has adapted to the local ecosystem
This ponderosa pine has adapted to the local ecosystem

This weekend we did something rare and marvelous and free: We visited the Santa Cruz Sandhills.

I had heard about this tour of a sensitive eco-system at Quail Hollow Ranch that was off-limits to visitors except once a year. I didn’t know much more than that, but just the fact that so few people see it made it sound special enough for a visit! Once a year, in late February, a handful of lucky people (who remembered to put it on their calendars) sign up for an April tour. Then come April, you meet in a group at the farmhouse and go off-trail to see the tiny wonders of the sandhill.

Our guides were Sean, a local naturalist, and Lee, longtime Park Interpreter at Quail Hollow. They weren’t just leading us on an unusual hike — they were initiating us into a small group of avid preservationists who see the delicate eco-system as a precious resource, fast-disappearing.

A purple sea of lupine blooms in a field below the sandhills
A purple sea of lupine blooms in a field below the sandhills

I learned a lot even before we veered off the trail into a faint trail off-limits to daily visitors. The sand up in the hills above Santa Cruz didn’t come from the ocean. Long ago, it came down from the Sierras and took up a brief (in relative terms) residence in the Central Valley before the land buckled and sent it tumbling into the ocean. It stayed underwater just long enough to gather the skeletons of sea creatures before the land buckled up again and formed the Santa Cruz Mountains, trapping the sand high up above the redwoods and the beaches.

The resulting sand is rich with sea fossils and has distinctive features that made it the sand of choice to make the concrete used for the Golden Gate Bridge. Unlike true sea sand, its particles are not rounded by long abrasion. Their flat sides form a stronger and more durable concrete, which of course is what we all want. So much of the sandhill ecosystems up in the hills are now nearly empty quarries. Sean pointed out that they are saved by the fact that they are the mechanism which makes the wonderful aquifer water enjoyed by residents of SLV, so when the quarries go deep enough to

My half a brain didnt retain the name of this flower!
My half a brain didn't retain the name of this flower!

encounter rising water, they have to stop or lose the entire aquifer formed by that natural purification system. However, the Sandhills at Quail Hollow alone are untouched by human industry, except this new, less-lucrative industry of keeping this delicate ecosystem alive.

Along with the very rare plants found actually in the sandhills are some curiosities right there on the trail. Most notable is the Ponderosa Pine, which outside of our hills is found only at elevations above 3000 feet. The ones at Quail Hollow are adapted to the local ecosystem, and probably couldn’t survive anywhere else. You can identify them by their unique honeycomb pattern on the bark, and the fact that woodpeckers just love to use them for food storage.

As our hike took us up a hillside, through a grove of trees, and out into a scrubby landscape, there were some immediate differences. First of all, it really is a hill of sand. A weak topsoil creeps in along the edges, but the path was as sandy as the entrance to a beach. Second, the colorful cards that each of us held in our hands, detailing the

Sandhills poppies are an adaptation of California poppies with lighter flowers and purple foliage
Sandhills poppies are an adaptation of California poppies with lighter flowers and purple foliage

various aspects of the special Sandhill species, got one thing wrong: these plants are tiny, sometimes unnoticeable right under our feet. Outside of the looming pines, this is a miniature world of precious monkey-faced flowers and the haze of spring blooms hovering just over the sand.

Check out the website for longer descriptions of these plants, some of which are cousins to plants at lower elevations. We learned that these plants have evolved in a world of little competition, since so little will grow in sand. Over the years conservationists have realized that a hands-off approach isn’t what’s needed: they saw that as plant debris broke down to form a small layer of topsoil, ravenous grasses would move in and kill off the delicate little sand plants. So now they clear off the plant debris to keep things pleasant for the less aggressive, endangered species.

And they also keep the people off. As we entered the sandhill, both guides pointed out that the pink haze around us was spring-

A pretty little annual flower
The Ben Lomond Spineflower forms a haze of pink over the sand.

blooming Ben Lomond Spineflower. This delicate little creeper just loves the trails, because no other plants are growing there so they will be left alone. So we had to step cautiously so as not to crush the little things as they eked out their tenuous survival.

Up at the top of the hill, we could see other patches of sand on neighboring hills, almost all of them victims of quarrying. But we stood in a marvelous little world, which was all the more special because it wasn’t ours. We can’t just tramp through there anytime we want. We were invited ambassadors, being primed to go out and treasure this magic from afar.

And then it was over. We’d seen the plants, many of them blooming, and talked about the creatures such as the Santa Cruz Kangaroo Rat, so named because it hops on its two powerful back paws like a kangaroo. We watched excited woodpeckers soar from pine to pine, flashing the white spots on their wings. And we descended back into the main part of the park, noticing the sudden drop in temperature as we once again walked on forest floor.

A pretty little annual flower
A pretty little annual flower

As we sat down to eat our picnic at the table next to the farmhouse, the seven-year-old sighed with a jaded air. “That wasn’t so special,” she said. Her father and I smiled at each other. Not so special now, but someday she too might treasure the experience of seeing something so small and fragile that humans need to be kept away except on a sunny day in April.

Woodpeckers fly from pine to pine, showing off the spots on their wings
Woodpeckers fly from pine to pine, showing off the spots on their wings

Note: Quail Hollow’s wonderful afterschool science program, which was a victim of county budget cuts, will be returning for a brief visit this spring. If you live nearby, check it out!

I just love sticky monkey flowers, one of our cutest natives.
I just love sticky monkey flowers, one of our cutest natives.
This diminutive Santa Cruz Monkey Flower was hard to find.
This diminutive Santa Cruz Monkey Flower was hard to find.
This is a battle-scarred veteran of the war against non-native eucalyptus. Theyre planning to use a bulldozer next, as the tight bands didnt do the job.
This is a battle-scarred veteran of the war against non-native eucalyptus. They're planning to use a bulldozer next, as the tight bands didn't do the job.

More on math

My friend Heddi (visit her blog, Hands-on Learning) objected a bit to my blog yesterday. I will point out a couple of things. First of all, the piece that I cited is not, in fact, an article in Psychology Today, nor is it based on research. Heddi pointed out to me that his blog entries are heavy on anecdote and very light on research the contradicts his idea du jour.

Mea culpa. I agree entirely and wanted to clarify that. I was a teacher, but when I was a teacher I taught adults. The funny thing about teaching adults is that unlike teaching kids, all you need to do to teach adults is to be able to do the thing you’re teaching. My degrees are in Linguistics and Creative Writing, so that made me qualified to teach Composition and English to college students. Sorta. I actually was told I was a good teacher, but I know that I did a lot of learning on the job. Yes, we all do. But my point is, I have actually never studied teaching, except since I became a homeschooler. And it wasn’t until this year that I ever dared to permanently scar… eh, teach… anyone else’s children but my own!

However, I do think that there’s a level of the child’s experience that often gets lost in teaching theory. What I liked about the piece was the emphasis on how much of math really does come from life, and it really doesn’t have to be so awful! Heddi is a wonderful teacher (get yourself over to the Educational Resource Center and find out — she’s offering homeschool classes, afterschool classes, preschool classes, summer classes…), but many teachers are not, in fact, wonderful. They have their hearts in the right place when they start, but then they get stuck in a difficult, underappreciated, overbureaucratized (heh, and you thought I was an English teacher), impossible position. Each year that they teach, the beautiful, astonishing aspects of child-led learning can get overshadowed by No Child Left Behind, state standards, proposed federal standards, really dumb textbooks, and all the pressure from people who think they know how it’s done.

Really, the amazing thing is not that we have some bad teachers — the amazing thing is that we have any good teachers left at all!

I just posted the first article I’ll be writing about Salman Khan of Khan Academy, who has left a lucrative career to bring math to the masses. He’s a great person to talk to, because all the time he’s talking you’re thinking, Yeah, that’s the way to do it! Yes, all children can learn this! Wow, this is going to change the way I approach math!

And I do believe that he is making a difference. But it was so ironic that the day before I talked to him, I was sitting at the breakfast table trying to slam math into the head of a little girl who just lives experiential learning. She doesn’t study. She doesn’t start at A and go to Z. She really does learn what she needs to and disregard the rest. Now, it’s true that she “needs” to learn a lot. She got interested in knights so she had to know everything. She got interested in babies so she learned everything about how they are made, birthed, and raised. But she has not needed (as you’ll see if you read yesterday’s blog) to know about adding fractions with different denominators, and darn it, she’s just not going to learn it.

So yes, please do view everything that non-educators write that’s full of feel-good anecdotes with a healthy smidgeon (or is that smidgin?) of skepticism.

But I think that there’s always something worth taking out of these pieces as well: Your child’s teacher doesn’t necessarily have all the answers for your child. Your child’s teacher has the weight of history, government, the school board, the district office, and and the school principal sitting not-so-prettily on her head, and sometimes she just wants your child to do well on tests, period.

But if your child doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world. Play games, go shopping, and do all the other things in life that use math. As Sal Khan says: do freethrows for a half an hour and then calculate the average of the results. Show your child the power of math in real life, and have fun doing it. Yes, the tests are there for the next ten to 20 years of your child’s life, but that’s not the only thing that’s there.

There’s also life.

All the math she needs

I saw links to this Psychology Today piece all over the place today. Actually, I haven’t gotten yet to the digests of my e-mail lists, but I bet it’s there, too.

The piece is called “Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning,” and it’s all about things that I know: Kids who aren’t force fed math like it better. Almost all elementary level math will be learned by a child in normal, creative play if you let him and encourage fun with numbers. As long as a child is learning in a rich environment, anything can be learned in a small amount of time when they really want to learn it, even if that thing takes years of standard public school curriculum.

Yet, the other day, there I was at the breakfast table, a.k.a. schoolroom, with my daughter, slogging it out over fractions.

When I first started homeschooling her, I was so frustrated I hired an educational consultant to tell me what I knew already. One, she’s a fantastically quick learner who sucks up anything she wants to. Two, she learns in an integral way — that is, she’s not interested in facts or skills themselves, but how they relate to something that she loves or a project she’s doing. Three, she is verbally quick and creative, but absolutely uninterested in doing things in any linear, organized fashion.

In other words, she’s what’s called a “visual spacial learner.” For me, she might as well be called a Martian.

Well, OK, that’s exaggerating. Because when it comes to learning, I’m pretty clear on some of my own idiosyncrasies, such as the fact that I seem unable to learn something, absolutely unable, if I don’t really care about it. My daughter shares this particular trait with me. How many yards are on a football field? I dunno. What are the specifics of post-modern literary analysis, in great vogue when I was a student? Well, I might be able to give you a vague outline, but frankly, I don’t have space in my head for it.

The way I learn things is that I jump in and do it. Manuals? I’ll use them for reference, but I’ve never read one from cover to cover, or even consulted one before I started doing the thing I didn’t know how to do yet.

Nevertheless, I was a good and pretty passive student when I was a kid. I believed my teachers that one type of learning was the right type (aural sequential, I think they call it), and I learned that way, darn it. I got great SATs and went off to Stanford, took a few tests, then got myself into the sorts of classes where you talked about interesting stuff, read ideas, wrote about ideas, spent lots of time in coffee houses arguing with your friends about ideas…

And then (fast forward), I got this kid. And here I sat at the breakfast table with her and darn it, she was just going to learn to add fractions with different denominators because I knew she knew it. I had seen her demonstrate the knowledge when cooking and playing with blocks.

And she, well, she knows who she is and what she wants, and it is not sitting at the breakfast table giving in to Mommy’s need to prove that she can do a darn worksheet. Even candy didn’t help.

The babies all suited up for the Baby Space Program (note the flag: BSP)
The babies all suited up for the Baby Space Program (note the flag: BSP)

So back to that piece about learning math. If I am to believe — and I do believe — what I have read over and over, my daughter could learn all of elementary school math in a month when she’s 13. She could do no formal math at all, then one day master every concept needed in order to do something that she wanted to do. Heck, she could probably do that now, if she wanted to. But how many seven-year-olds want that? Some do — I even know them. Their parents ask questions on gifted education lists like “where can I get great trig curriculum for my eight-year-old?”

I’m jealous, and then again, I’m not. My seven-year-old has some of her priorities damn straight, as far as she is concerned. Do math when she could be out riding her bike in the new sunshine, finding out where the sound of the chainsaw is coming from? Do math when she could be playing Legos? Do math when she could be making space suits for her baby dolls?

It’s my priorities I need to fix: Is it really worth fighting over adding fractions when it’s just not what she interested in learning today? The day she wants to do it, she will be able to — of that I am certain. And that day could come soon, when she’s having a conversation with another kid and they reveal something that they know that she doesn’t (she hates finding out that she doesn’t know everything!). It could be the day that she really needs to know: if she needs 2/5 of one plastic bag for a baby space suit bottom, and 7/10 for the top, how much total will she need to make a full space suit?

And on that day, she might just need to calculate how long it will take them to get to her favorite galaxy, far, far away, and she’ll be off, learning all the math she needs in spite of our breakfast table struggles.

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