Our friend who moved in the other day

We’re starting to get a little tired of it all: the midnight feedings, the neediness, the scratching and scrabbling, the nocturnal rambling.

It’s like we have a new baby in the house… but wait, we don’t have a new baby in the house. We have a relatively new pet, but he only bugs the girl he sleeps with. Our son, at 13, is finally (usually) sleeping through the night.

This is like the baby we didn’t ask for and we didn’t know was coming: We’ve got a lodger in the house, and he (or she) is not paying rent. On top of that, he’s a midnight partier.

I vote for “he.”

“He” is the new friend who has taken up residence in our wall. Not just any wall, mind you. We’ve heard them in the roof, in the corner of our office. But fer crying out loud, didja have to choose the wall at the head of our bed?

I was awoken last week to the sound of ripping. Apparently, although our friend had been living in there a while, it was redecoration time. He just didn’t like that insulation the way it was, and he was working on reupholstering. RIP! One of us awake. Scrabble, scrabble, crunch, crunch. We’re both awake.

I bang on the wall. He seems to settle down. Apparently, it wasn’t the right night for a party.

Good. Maybe he’ll move on.

Well, no. Our friend is a nightly visitor now. Apparently, he sleeps through the day, enjoying the comfy fiberglass decor. We go to bed with silence in the wall behind us. But sometime every night, he decides it’s time to have fun. He has loud dinner parties, dancing, and the ever-present redecoration of his apartment.

My husband has no plans to be outschemed by a rat. He set traps. Nothing. He banged on the wall. Our friend danced to the beat.

The other day he came home with an Amazon.com box. Later, he called me down to see the amazing scene. Snaked through an outlet hole in the wall, the miniature camera on a flexible extension reveals a fine nest full of nuts and other debris. But no one, apparently, is home.

Last night, the party started up again. RIP! Crunch, crunch. Scritchscritchscritchscritchscritch. My husband banged on the wall.  We groaned in frustration.

At least, when you have a baby, you have a sweet, cuddly thing during the day to remind you why you’re losing sleep.

This afternoon, I was walking through our bedroom, and I just couldn’t resist. I banged on the wall. I scratched. I thundered. I wished I had some insulation to rip.

“You hear me, rat? Keep it down in there! Go find somewhere else to live!”

The thing is, bad neighbors never seem to care when you’re a bad neighbor back to them. I could almost hear his thoughts.

“Hey, maybe those stupid, sleepy animals on the other side of this wall are more interesting than I thought.

Maybe tonight I’ll invite them to the party…”

The very best Santa Cruz County fieldtrips

I asked around to find out the very best Santa Cruz County fieldtrips. My correspondents’ comments are in quotes. I haven’t done all these, but they’re worth a try! Please leave more suggestions as comments below.

North coast:

  • Wilder Ranch: Just north of Santa Cruz, learn how a ranch operated in the 19th century. Also, bring bikes and bike the trails up on the bluff.
  • Swanton Berry Farm: Visit the farm, pick berries, pay by the pound, and eat them up!
  • Pebble Beach: No, not the one south of us. And I’m fudging because I think this is in San Mateo County. This is a beach just south of Pescadero that is a true pebble beach. To get to the beach, go down on the north side of the parking lot. To access fabulous tidepooling, follow the path down on the south side of the parking lot.

San Lorenzo Valley:

  • Quail Hollow Ranch: We love Quail Hollow. I wrote about it here and here. Aside from the planned activities, it’s just a great place for a hike.
  • Henry Cowell State Redwoods: Henry Cowell is an excellent place to bring people who haven’t yet seen big redwoods but aren’t adventurous hikers. The main loop is super easy and includes a tree so big you can go inside it. For the more adventurous, find the various beaches and go for a swim in the river. In the fall, the Ohlone Festival is a fun cultural event.

Santa Cruz:

  • City of Santa Cruz Dump: “Includes hands on recycling, a film and an art project making paper.”
  • Neary Lagoon: “Wildlife inhabiting or visiting the refuge include mallard and wood ducks, pied billed grebes, a multitude of coots, the world’s meanest geese, several varieties of fish and the occasional great blue heron or hawk.”
  • Life Lab: “We promote experiential learning for all ages through children’s camps, field trips, youth and internship programs, and teacher workshops. Drawing on over thirty years of work with students we have also created curricula and workshops for educators interested in bringing learning to life in gardens nationwide.”

Capitola/Aptos/Soquel:

  • Pacific Migrations: The visitor center at New Brighton State Beach is really fantastic. Instead of having the usual wildlife and history displays, they have arranged everything according to the theme of migration—both animal and human.
  • Nisene Marks State Park: Not a destination for many out-of-the-area folks, Nisene Marks is a really nice park for hiking and biking. If you have kids, the biking is fabulous, especially in the winter when cars aren’t allowed past the first gate. There’s a long, largely flat dirt/gravel/paved road you can follow. The cars are generally pretty respectful of bikes. The Old Growth Loop is a relatively easy hike that includes some old redwoods, including the wonderful twisted tree grove, where all the trees twisted into spirals trying to get at the sun as they grew.

Watsonville and south coast:

  • Elkhorn Slough: Birds, otters, little sharks. Hiking, kayaking. Teachers must first complete a Teacher Workshop before bringing a class to the Reserve.
  • Near the Slough: “We absolutely love going down to Moss Landing State Beach–not only are the waves often wilder and during the week NO ONE is there, but every time we have gone in the past year there is a large family of sea otters (about 30-50?) we can observe from really pretty close.  And then the sea lion colony can’t be beat!  We could watch this wildlife for hours.  And of course with the slough right there, such animal watching can easily be paired with a birding expedition there, which we have done and which was really fun.”
  • The Farm: The Farm is a unique agricultural showcase. It consists of an agricultural education center, demonstration farm, produce stand and recreation destination. The Farm is designed to tell the story of contemporary farming amidst the majestic surroundings of California’s Central Coast.

On learning and remembering

Neither of my kids learned their multiplication facts on schedule. The way the public school standards tell it, kids are just supposed to do it in third grade. You know, the way they’re supposed to walk on schedule, talk on schedule, and read on schedule. My kids have been equally as dismal at being “normal” in all those categories!

Schools assume that you learn things in order, and all their materials are based on that assumption. And even materials that are not created for public schools tend to follow the same assumptions.

The thing is, kids don’t learn things in a standard order. In fact, it’s often the kids who are eventually going to become masters in a subject who seem to lag behind. There are numerous tales of mathematicians who couldn’t add their way out of a paper bag. (“Let’s see, one paper bag plus one mathematician… Oh, geez, I really should have memorized that one before I got stuck in this bag!’) It’s heartening to know this, but when you’re in the thick of it, having a math-smart kid who can’t remember 7×8 — much less 5×6 — is hard to deal with.

A recent e-mail list discussion I was in on tackled this subject. Here is some of the wisdom I gained.

First of all, question why your child has to memorize math facts, and if it’s in his/her best interest to force it right now:

  • Does your child need to learn them because she’s in school and her teacher is pressuring her?
  • Does your child need to learn them because not knowing them is holding him back from doing math he enjoys?
  • Does your child need to learn them for reasons of self-esteem? (Kids who can’t seem to memorize random bits of information are often at a disadvantage in our schools.)

Secondly, be aware that there is absolutely no correlation with ability to memorize and overall intelligence. They are separate traits with nothing bit a tangential relationship.

  • A fairly large amount of successful people have trouble with rote memorization. That’s why they went into professions where rote memorization was not necessary for success.
  • Our schools operate on the assumption that certain types of learners should be rewarded, while all others should be punished into becoming the “right” kind of learner. But if your kid has trouble with rote memorization, there is no research that indicates that this will ever change, no matter what consequences she faces.
  • The “visual spatial” learning style is particularly noted for producing kids who have trouble with math facts. Visual spatial learners are very likely to have trouble in school, except in art class, shop, geometry, and other disciplines where their skills shine through. [Learn more about VS learners here.]

If there is a good reason that your child has to learn math facts, try a variety of methods in order to determine the one that “speaks” to your child’s way of thinking. Methods include:

  • Visual representation with blocks, pictures, or manipulatives. Make sure that your child really gets that when you say “2 times 4” you really mean take 2 of something and count it  4 times.
  • Different aural approaches like singing (lots of kids like Multiplication Rock or the silly rhyming method which I can’t seem to find a reference to but will at some point!)
  • The analytic approach: Show your child how you can fill in almost all of a multiplication table just by using the facts she already knows. Talk about how to quickly come up with math facts that he can’t remember off the top of his head.
  • The project-based approach: Take math facts as the starting point to do the sort of project your child likes. Incorporate math facts as part of the project. One of my daughter’s teachers, for example, had kids build “factories” out of recycled containers that spit out math facts on slips of paper.
  • The carrot-and-stick approach: You don’t necessarily have to pay, but find a way to reward each math fact earned. It could be as simple as the method we’re doing right now, where the math facts she doesn’t know are stuck on the walls of our breakfast room. Each day, if she can tell us the answer to one without hesitation, she gets to take it off the wall.
  • Association: This is the most tried and true method of memorization, but it’s hard for a lot of people to do with numbers. The basic principle is this: Find something to associate with each number, and practice the association so that it’s grouped with the number in your head. People who see numbers as colors or smells do this instinctively, but it is possible to create these associations on purpose.
  • Games: Any game that requires math will help. A good one I got recently is Muggins, which is quite fun.
  • If your kid loves computer games, find games like Timez Attack and let them play.

The main thing to remember about memorization is that the harder you force, the harder the brain fights back. Kids’ brains learn best through play — when it becomes work, it’s time to take a break. Sometimes that break can stretch out for a long time…much longer than the school standards might want to admit. But if the eventual goal is a happy, well-educated child, the standards just sometimes have to wait.

 

Now available