Decelerated Reader

This morning at breakfast my daughter sadly eyed the book I’d gotten her for Chanukah, Alice in Quantumland. This is the sort of nerdy, unusual book I love to buy—once we’re done with it we’ll donate it to our library and hopefully they’ll make it available to other nerdy unusual kids in our community.

But why was she sad?

A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?
A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?

When you have kids who are avid readers, they run into different obstacles than the general public understands. Our children’s publishing industry is focused on “hi-lo” books—high interest, low readability. In other words, books that are very similar to the type of kids’ movies that Hollywood puts out. The producers of these books assume that:

  1. Kids don’t like to read
  2. Kids have to be enticed into reading by high concept stories
  3. Kids are terrified to come across a word they don’t understand
  4. Kids will refuse to pick up any book that’s heftier than their iPad

Problem is, there are tons of kids who don’t fit this model, but because they are “doing fine,” no one is paying them much attention.

In the past, I’ve written about two periods of childhood in which avid readers run into roadblocks (pre-K/K and tween) and also how hard it is for science-minded girls to see themselves in kids’ literature (here).

Our daughter, now that she’s doing 7th grade in school, has run into another avid reader roadblock: Accelerated Reader.

In concept, AR sounds great. Kids read books on their own, log into AR at school, take a quiz about the book*, and get credit for reading time. At the beginning of each year, teachers set AR goals for all their students. Not having much of an idea who these kids are**, they set a low goal for the semester and kids like my daughter blow through that goal in a couple of months.

You can guess what happens next: The teacher doesn’t say, wow, this child has mastered everything she needs to in the area of reading, so I’m just going to encourage her to keep reading things she loves and stop worrying about proving that she’s reading certain, approved books. Instead, the teacher says, oh, no, this child reached the goal so early, I’m going to have to set a much higher goal.

So kids like my daughter learn a lesson that perhaps the teacher didn’t mean to teach: If you enjoy something that school cares about, make sure to hide it and pretend you’re just like everyone else. If you don’t, you’ll be punished with more busywork that will keep you from doing the things you want to do.

Here’s why my daughter was sad this morning. She clearly wants to read Alice in Quantumland. But she has to meet this new, high AR goal her teacher set soon after winter break has ended.

And Alice in Quantumland is not listed in AR. That means she can’t take a quiz to prove she read it. That means if she reads it, in her words, “I’ll be reading it for no reason since I won’t get credit.”

Oh, no! Reading for no reason! This terrible impulse must be quashed!

I can never get over the irony of being someone who understands how our education system works while listening to politicians and concerned community members talking about education. They want kids to read (mine does), be inspired (mine is), and learn (can’t stop mine from doing that). Yet they push our system for more and more “accountability,” which ends up quashing any interest in reading, any inspiration the teachers might be able to uncover in their students, and any real, deep learning that can’t be proven on a standardized test.

My daughter’s at school only because she wants to be. She knows that when she complains about AR, it’s not my problem. She could be homeschooling right now like her brother is, determining her own curriculum, reading books that inspire and excite her whether or not AR thinks they’re worth reading.

But for some reason, she’s continuing on this social science experiment that she started last year. I still stand firmly behind my reasons for letting her go to school: If I believe in child-led learning, then I have to let her see this through.

But when I saw her lovingly and sadly flipping through her new book, it gave me pause. It’s the last day of school before winter break. I could just say, “Come on, let’s be homeschoolers today.” But she had her celebratory cupcakes for her Humanities class party, and she was ready to go.

“Well,” I suggested. “Perhaps you will have time during vacation to finish your AR goals and then get to this book.”

And then we went to school.


* They take the quiz to prove they actually read the book—I won’t start on my rant about how unnecessary this is if educators were given the time to really work with and get to know their students…

** Another homeschooler rant here: If teachers had fewer students, if there were more continuity in our public schools from year to year so teachers didn’t have to depend on assembly-line teaching to try to serve their students’ needs, if we didn’t think we had to have “accountability” for each and every smidgeon of learning our kids do…

Sifting and sorting: summer beach magnetorheological fun

Yes, it’s not summer anymore, yet I just was sifting through my blog and found this post I never activated. So keep this in mind for the coming summer. Or if you’re like us, you’ll enjoy a winter beach as well!

When I was homeschooling my daughter, I often wrote about things that we’d do to satisfy her need for tactile stimulation and goal-oriented projects. She just loves getting her hands into something, and when she was small, that meant our house could be, ahem, rather chaotic!

Recently she and her father were talking about iron filings (why were they talking about iron filings? these are the sorts of questions it’s best not to ask!) and he suggested that she get some from the beach. It being summer, we were able to indulge this whim without worrying about getting homework done. (Ah, homeschooling a younger child, how I miss you!)

We made our way to the beach with two strong magnets and three ziploc bags. The bags are important: Of course, you need one to store the filings into. The other two are to cover the strong magnets, because the thing her father warned her about came true almost immediately: if you drop a strong magnet into sand, you end up with a strong magnet covered with iron filings! OK, that in itself is pretty interesting, because we spent a good while pondering the physics of how to remove iron filings from a strong magnet! But I recommend trying to keep the magnets in their bags, because even though we came up with lots of nifty ideas, our magnets are still, to this day, covered with iron filings.

Step 1: Sweep your magnet through the sand and pick up iron-rich sand.

IronSandsm1
Step 1 if you accidentally drop your strong magnet directly into the sand. (Oops!)

Step 2: Put your magnet and bag into another bag. Pull the magnet out and the sand will drop into the bottom of the second bag.

Step 1, using the bag around the magnet
Step 2, using the bag around the magnet

Step 3: Repeat until you have a bag of sandy iron filings.

IronSandsm3
Step 2, assuming you have forgotten about keeping your magnet in the bag and instead dropped it directly into the sand.

Step 4: Repeat the attract and drop sequence with another bag or container so that you can further refine your iron filings and filter out sand.

My husband then recommended that we follow these instructions to create a “magnetorheological fluid.” That was pretty interesting, as well, though not quite as satisfying as the sifting process.

Mushroom magic

No, today’s post will not be an argument in favor of legalizing magic mushrooms. Move on to the next blogger if that’s what you’re looking for.

The other day I was waiting for my daughter to get out of school. Next to her school is a playing field with a dirt track running around it, and I try to arrive a bit early so I can get a walk in before she’s out.

Recently, they put out new mulch in various garden areas around the track, and I noticed the wonderful spectacle that mulch-plus-rain often offers: a lovely crop of varied mushrooms everywhere. My family are great appreciators of mushrooms in the woods and on our table, so I was enjoying the variety and exuberant growth.

As I rounded the track, I came across something curious. In a grassy area, not a speck of mulch to be found, there was a perfect circle of mushrooms. It was an almost magical thing, to see this perfect circle sprouting from the grass.

ShroomFairyCircle

Yes, mushroom fairy rings have a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation. But sometimes it’s just lovely to enjoy natural phenomena for the magic they bring into our lives. This fairy ring made me smile.

Just then, the bell rang and the first two kids out were boys, one of whom was carrying a long, cylindrical object. They walked up to the mushroom ring, took a second to voice a “whoa” of appreciation, and then proceeded to destroy the whole thing. The boy with the cylinder played golf, and the other boy grabbed mushroom after mushroom, ripped it from the grass, and flung it as far as he could.

Now, to be fair, as my husband pointed out to me it’s not just boys that do things like this. So I’m not going to make any gender generalizations here. But I am going to bemoan this aspect of humanity—or perhaps it’s the fault of many of the cultures humanity has created—to want to defeat the magic of nature.

So I will rewind the tape, which ends with the flinging boy hitting me in the leg with one of his particularly large victims, and rewrite this scene from the “whoas.”

“Whoa,” the boys said in unison.

They looked at each other in astonishment. How could such a weird thing have happened without any sizzle of magic or hand of a god?

One of the boys thought, I bet our science teacher would be able to explain this. But he didn’t say anything.

The other boy thought, I bet I could find out what this is on Wikipedia. But he didn’t say anything.

Instead, the boys’ eyes met, and they knew immediately the appropriate response to this situation. They dropped their backpacks outside the circle, stepped inside, and sat down back-to-back within the ring of mushrooms.

Soon other students drifted away from the school buildings, and many of them were attracted by the unusual spectacle of a circle of mushrooms embracing two of their classmates. Some of them, also, threw down their backpacks and quietly sat down within the circle. Soon the circle was full and other kids stood outside of it, watching.

Impatient parents craned their necks from the parking lot. What the heck was going on over there that was so interesting? The kids were probably just getting itchy for winter vacation. The parents looked back down at their smartphones.

The kids quietly rose from the circle, fetched their packs, and went off to find their rides.

That night, raccoons came and picked the tastiest mushrooms from the circle. Then a drenching rain melted the mushrooms back into the grass.

In the morning, kids walked over the soggy grass, rushing because they were late for school.

 

Mommy brain

Moms congregating in groups at parks, breastfeeding support groups, and cafes often find themselves trading stories about “Mommy brain.” You know, B.B. (before baby) you were a high-ranking partner at a law firm and now you can’t remember where you stashed your favorite nursing bra. B.B. you aced calculus and now you stare blankly at a restaurant receipt, trying to remember how to calculate a tip. B.B. you never missed an appointment, but now you’ve rescheduled your haircut twice because it’s not like you were actually doing anything important, but somehow you managed to forget the only hour you’ve had to yourself in the last three weeks…twice.

This is me performing when I was studying at Stanford. I have blogged before about my beloved lime green skirt!
This is me performing when I was studying at Stanford. I have blogged before about my beloved lime green skirt!

You know how most of the time changes like these can go unnoticed, but every once in a while a ghost of your former self comes out to haunt you? That happened to me the other day. I was going through all my various 3-ring binders that I keep music in. Rather than having any sort of logical system (an idea I’d love to bring about but never have), my music binders tend to represent me at various stages in my life.

So I pulled out the binder I used the last time I performed live in a singing/guitar duo. I have no trouble remembering that time: I was hugely pregnant the last time we performed. My singing partner at the time and I had discovered that by random chance, we’d been born in the same town, so we named our little band after the town. I truly meant to get back to performing after the birth, but at 7 months pregnant, I was swollen up so much that my hands had gone into full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome (which my physician assured me would go away after birth, ha ha ha). Somehow, that return to performing never happened, and now that baby I was pregnant with is fifteen years old.

How did that happen? Mommy brain…

Anyway, here I was opening this binder, which was a little snapshot of who I was then, more than fifteen years ago. I was charmed by our playlist, which included a couple of my favorite Disney songs (“Everybody wants to be a cat” and “Cruella deVille”).

But here’s where my realization about Mommy brain came in: Each sheet had the words printed out, and some notes about how we were performing, but no chords. I rifled through the binder, amazed. Did I really perform without the chords written out?

Yes, apparently I did.

I’m in the midst of getting my song-singing chops back, fifteen years on with two kids, carpal tunnel surgery, and the painful process of creating new guitar calluses behind me. The lime green skirt is long gone, along with any expectation that I will ever again fit into a miniskirt, or dare to think I look good in one.

But it’s hard to see that despite what research might say, Mommy brain in my case is real: I really did perform without chords when last I performed. And when I was twenty and singing out on that patio, I apparently had memorized the words as well.

The best wisdom I have read about aging is that it’s important to remember that along with what we lose (chord progressions, words, our favorite nursing bra), we gain (insight, perspective, depth of understanding, appreciation for clothing that stretches and hides).

But when these occasional reminders come about, I can’t help but be a little sad for my loss. I used to be able to perform without chord progressions in my book. I used to be able to perform…without a book at all. I was good at calculus. (If Mommy brain hasn’t ruined me completely, I seem to remember I got an A+.) I did manage to hold everything important in my life inside my physical brain, before Evernote, cellphones, and even Google.

Now there seems to be so much—two kids’ schedules, a whole family’s needs—that I can’t stuff it all in there.

Car keysI just hope that when I get back out there with my new singing partner (who, as far as I know, wasn’t born in the same town I was), people will forgive us. Here we are, two post-baby moms, hers out of the house and mine plummeting headlong toward that end, making music and loving it.

If nothing else, give us a little applause for getting up there.

In spite of Mommy brain, we managed to find our car keys.

 

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