~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ math goblins

Posted on December 12, 2018 by marybethrew

we had an eventful weekend of pressing apple cider and playing with friends on saturday, and then attending a very exciting gender reveal party for quinn’s step-niece! he has been elected as future babysitter already for this new bundle of joy, coming to our family in march.

once he handed in his historical interview, his overall grade in social studies went from F to B, and it was a lovely piece!

he got to choose a book for blackout poetry in language arts, and he picked anne mccaffrey dragonsong. he is excited to create poetry in it, but also to now read anne mccaffrey. his friend l got him into a game concerning the warriors series about cats, so we were off to the library to collect some supplemental reading beyond the math textbook variety. (we ended up with the next rick riordan installment in the trials of apollo as well.)

this age is the odd juxtaposition of hearing him obsess about a crush on a girl, to waking him up in the morning and having him say to me, “you find a planet” and being requested to carry him while spinning (he was orbiting me?) and set him in his chair for breakfast. my completely oblivious to time/date son, knew the date of the first middle school dance. i knew i’d have to remind him to put his shirt on frontwards, but he was already committed to going. probably even with deodorant on. sheesh!

we had another parked car meltdown of a similar theme as last month; “pressure” and school sucks and everything is bad in middle school and “i just want my old life back.” it ended on a pep talk from me about how it’s really normal to feel like so much has changed and to want to go back to your old life, and feel overwhelmed a lot, and have a lot going on, as a brand new middle schooler. i reemphasized the “This Is Super Normal” part several different ways. at one point he was angry about the president. he was in tears over it, as though the angry apricot is somehow responsible for putting quinn through middle school. i tried to reel him back in to his immediate self and stop trying to take on unfortunate political officials, and he came around in the end. it is normal to not want to do your homework. and feeling pushed is normal. even if mama isn’t trying to push but just support. and i stated that and he agreed he feels i do support him and he does want me to remind him to do his homework. there was no actual problem i could put my finger on besides emotional overload, and once he got it out of his system he went and cheerfully did his last 5 problems (verbally while writing his answers… which helps him get it done faster).

on his last day with me of the two weeks, there was a day off from school, so quinn participated in a theatre workshop that was being offered (and had a great time performing in his group’s skit) and then he and i spent the remaining afternoon hours on the beach, something we haven’t been doing very regularly as of late. once again, my big huge middle schooler revealed the little person still inside, as he scampered around on hands and knees, re-enacting cat battle scenes from the warriors book he had just finished. then he buried my limbs in the sand.

after a week away, quinn came back to me on friday, the last day of his first 6-week term, and although he handed in a few things at the very last minute, there was only one assignment that was left incomplete. the assignment was an autobiographical “my name is” poem for language arts, but since that was worth 50 of his 250 points for the term, it meant the difference between a 94% A and a 81% B. he had 2 lines of the title typed into the google doc, after two full class periods of work time, so at least he’s using his class time efficiently. it was due thursday, and at that point, the teacher entered an F, and quinn despaired and didn’t communicate or finish (or really even start) the work.

until he got home to me. after a brief discussion, he stated he did want to try to finish it and hand it in, and we both suspected it may be accepted for a grade if it was done by midnight. i sat him down and filled him full of food, then encouraged him to do a verbal brainstorm of what he wanted to write. he jotted a few words on a list that he wanted to include, but what finally got him going were my outlandish examples of imagery and sensory details. after one descriptive phrase about slaying orcs in a tunnel of trees in a forest (vs. “i kill orcs”), he jotted down “tunnels” and in the end, he crafted his whole poem as a d and d adventure, taking along his band of merry elves/dwarves/rogues. (the teacher’s instructions for the poem were “Peel the onion…you have layers. You have MULTITUDES. This can include your hopes, dreams, fears, talents, family, personality, history, future plans, and ideas. Use imagery. Make me see and feel your poem. Show me your life. Show me who you are!”

he wrote (crew names changed to pseudonyms by mama):

Name: Quinn

Date: 10-17-18

Period: 2

My Name Is Quinn

My Favorite Color Is Green

My Favorite Animal Is An Owl

My name is Quinn

I am a dragonborn wizard

I have a pet owl

My crew of adventurers is strong

We have me

Aragorn the human fighter

Legolas the elf fighter

And Gimli the dwarf rogue

We walk in diamond formation

On a quest to find the ancient mithril drum set

We have a map to show us the way

To the treasure

A dragon will be guarding the other treasure

The mithril drumsticks

They are required to play the mithril drum set

I alone can read the map

It leads us through the forest of Everygreen inhabited by ninjas

The tunnels of Diamondrain inhabited by ninjas

And the Skytrayl of the high mountains inhabited by ninjas

We reach the dragon and it’s ninja minions

They are very powerful

But we defeat them

And gain the mithril drum sticks

We now possess limited but large power

After we find the mithril drum set we will have unlimited power

Our journey was difficult

But we return home with both treasures

The mithril drum sticks

Whose power is to play the mithril drum set

And the mithril drum set

Whose power when played remains unknown

Who knows

Maybe one day

All mithril instruments will have been found

he doesn’t know what happens when the mithril drum is played yet! it remains unknown! i told him it keeps it very mysterious and he agreed. it makes us all want to know, and sets up for sequels with these other mithril instruments! i loved his requirement for all of the place names (diamondrain!) to have unconventional spellings so google docs would red underline them. hence skytrail became skytrayl.

on saturday i worked farmer’s market, and left him pancakes and bacon for breakfast. and a couple of haikus (they wrote some in language arts, but apollo also begins each chapter with a haiku). he sent me one in response, via text:

my life as it should

be. nothing to do but what

i want. thank the gods.

when i got home on saturday, quinn and rich were watching monty python and the search for the holy grail, after quinn’s social studies teacher used clips of it to elucidate economics principles, and quinn came home quoting them, with a perfect accent.

in between resisting math homework, it was a weekend full of finding him on page 503 of his advanced algebra textbook, asking me for more logic puzzles, and asking me to play “guess the function” with him. i made up functions for him to guess, after he gave me an example because i didn’t know what he meant (or what fred meant). his example was:

dog 4

cat 4

human 2

fish 0

bird 2

the function is “number of legs.” i was making pancakes while he was asking me so i gave him:

pancakes 3

pizza 4

cookies 2

biscuits 1

playdough 1.5

the function was “number of cups of flour” and even though he knew it had something to do with ingredients, it took him a while to get it. it’s so clear to me that he digs math, and yet resists it so strongly when it is “forced” as he believes of the homework.

good old fred.

we went to a midsummer night’s dream because once quinn heard that his friend l was in it, he stated “we’re going.” his friend was one of the little goblin-minions of puck in the play, and had quite a few lines and some great action. she is in a lot of quinn’s classes, and has played magic with him. the play was great, lots of 80’s references and songs, quite a few kids with real roles, and a great balance of making you like shakespeare while also poking fun at shakespeare. (the funny rhyme stuff… with characters correcting each other on pronunciation followed by “but that doth not rhyme” and so on. also song lyrics changed by varying degrees, but always with “you” changed to “thou”. “every step thou take, every move thou make, i’ll be watching thou.” when we got home quinn asked, “so are there any plays coming up?” and i think his lapsed interest in participating in one at some point might be rekindling.

he wanted to go back to the green room to talk to his friend, and they gushed at each other with thanks for coming and what a great job she had done. rich asked if he got all the 80’s references in the play and he said um, no. none of them.

i rolled up strips of dinosaur kale into mobius strips that i held together with toothpicks… hoping to get him to eat raw kale. and he totally did! and called them mobiosaurs. then he took the toothpicks, stuck them between his fingers, and said “i’m freddy kruger.”

me: what?! how do you know that 80’s reference?

q: “everyone knows freddy kruger, it’s not from the 80’s.

(i told him to ask rich, who proceeded to read him the copyright dates for the entire nightmare on elm street series.)

he also made me chuckle with his use of the word “litotes” which i recall learning in maybe 9th grade enriched english. litotes means understatement; he likes to announce overstatement with “‘hyperbole” so when i said something that was an understatement and he said “litotes” i said, “what? how do you know that?” (i seem to say that a lot.) that one came from life of fred. more than just math in there.

he sat on my lap (painful torture and laugh therapy all in one) and we were covered with the blanket and lisa decided to sit on top of him on top of me for a few minutes one morning. he’s a confusing mix of big and little and clueless and know it all right now!!! knows exactly what pokemon he wants to dress up as for halloween (rowlet the owl) and exactly how many components of his costume to wear to the dance to be extra quull.

i mixed up cookie dough sunday night after dinner and stuck it in fridge, so i was baking the cookies monday morning while i made breakfast and packed lunches. when i woke him up, i told him pancakes for breakfast and a cookie for breakfast dessert. that got him out of bed on a monday morning.

after his pancakes, he chose a cookie, and i got out a plate for him to catch crumbs. i came walking back into the kitchen and he was at the sink running the water, and i witnessed him wash his plate without being asked! then when he put it in the drainer, a jar lid fell into the sink, and he rinsed it and put it back in the drainer! when he turned around i made a super big deal hugging him and fake-sobbing about what a wonderful thing i had witnessed.

while sitting in a boring monday morning meeting, i jotted ideas on a sticky note (i have no idea where quinn gets his distractedness!) about how to make math homework more playful and less torturous. i decided to try making it into something of a d and d game…

he has to roll the d12 to see how many goblins are attacking.
for each problem he completes, he gets one chance to attack them, and
if he completes the problem in under 3 minutes they don’t get to attack back (surprise bonus).

i had already tried giving him one of the egg timers from a game, to show him time passing while he did math problems, and it was just a distraction, something to fidget with. i had tried using a stop watch while he did problems and giving him his lap times as he finished a problem, which only seemed to make things more stressful, and made them take longer. i have had 4011 versions of the logic of time management conversation with him. if quinn had 35 math problems to do and each problem takes him 1 minute, how long does his homework take? what if he takes 10 minutes per problem? etc. the resistance is strong. i was hoping to use the game idea to bring him more awareness of time passing…. or connect it to his reality in a way he could actually embrace.

the game worked like a dream. he slayed all the goblins for days. he wanted to add features to make the game both more fun and more mathy, such as renaming it integers and irrationals. he built a table of goodness knows what, and all i know is it involves pi, tau, and wau, and other irrational numbers!

he was excited when he saw my rules sheet (complete with pi rats/midsummer nights dream slant rhyme/vi hart dragon dungeons proprietary mama inside joke blend) and then spent 10 minutes creating his grid of wonder. something about upgrading from level 1 to wau?

i eventually just said ok, time to roll for your goblins!

he did most of the problems in under a minute. some were done in 15-20 seconds. we adapted rules as he played, such as allowing 2 attacks for problems completed in under a minute. he has added different enemies and when he had a problem or two left in a section but had already defeated the enemies, out of nowhere a couple of pesky twig blights would swoop in and attack. a clever mama always keeps a couple of twig blights up her sleeve.

of course it worked; he is the kid who couldn’t get in the car; but he could get in the batmobile.

i told him he could do this for his homework any time he wanted; with any work he “has to” do. there is usually a way to make it fun. there are always choices.

i guess that goes for parenting as well. thankful to be remembering these lessons a mere 6 weeks into middle school.

there is almost nothing easy about the steep learning curve of embarking on a middle school journey. except for, in quinn’s case, probably figuring out the slope-intercept equation for said curve.

~thankful thursday~ third annual nacho november

Posted on November 8, 2018 by marybethrew

11/1/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

unlike last year when i debated joining in on 30 days of gratitude, this year it was a no-brainer to sign up for a third season. a few of the odds are stacked in my favor, such as my husband being away at play rehearsals on week nights this month (time to write), the pantry being stocked with tortilla chips (easy dinners planned), and on off days, say, when i’m standing over my eleven year old cracking the homework whip, i will just lazy-post facebook memories from gratitude challenges of yore. (let’s be honest, we don’t remember what i wrote, so it’ll be ok if we air some re-runs. it’s not lying, i’m still grateful for all that stuff!) i was curious how much i posted since last november, and while my timeline is sprinkled with fun messages from friends, as well as karate functions and family weddings in which i am tagged, my single original post for the rest of the entire year appears to have been about the founder’s day sale on tillamook cheese. but no one here is deluded about my priorities: gratitude and nachos. exhibit a, word art compiled from previous 2 novembers’ gratitude topics.

i am grateful for a sweet little out-of-print children’s book by bruce balan called buoy that i found when quinn was obsessed with boats as a toddler. i was a tad isolated as a new mama, which i know is common for new moms, especially those who have moved places without family or friends, and/or been the target of someone’s emotional abuse for a while. the book got lukewarm reviews, apparently some critics don’t think children can be captivated by a story about an inanimate object, but i find it to be a delightful piece of literature, winnie-the-pooh-esque in the way that its messages have meaning for people of every age who might come to read it. i revisit it often, and so does quinn.

on one evening with just the right conditions, Buoy and his friends Seal and Gull were watching for the green flash, and arguing over what caused it. the ruckus dies down, and Buoy decides to trust in his hunch about what was causing the green flash. when he saw it, he flashed his own light as brightly as he could in response, so The Other Buoy could see it, so The Other Buoy would know he was not alone either.

Buoy has a characteristic flash, as all navigational lights do, which in his case is flash flash flash… wait…wait…wait… flash flash flash … wait…wait…wait… (repeat forever). i am trying to be like Buoy in my facebook postings, and if i can’t find anything nice to say, i’m doing a lot of wait…wait…wait… apparently around 11 months of that. but come november, i am set to flash my light as brightly as i can, moored to a sentiment called gratitude that keeps me safely focused on the right things.

the spaces between the flashes are part of Buoy’s identity, part of how his light has the ability to shine out when he flashes it. i’d like to say i have spent my waiting time storing up summer sunshine to boost my ability to radiate light to share with my fellow humans, but as is my usual status this time of year, my light feels depleted. a friend flashed a beam of light recently through a post that had an impact on me. i don’t even think i liked or commented, or told her that it did, we all know how potential meaningful connections slip away into the abyss of the endless scroll-down. but a snippet of what she shared said, “if your body doesn’t make enough neurotransmitters, store bought is fine.” i spent $1.10 on my own self care and brought home st. john’s wort and made myself a “collect light like a plant” tincture that i am happily taking every morning. as the dimmer switch of fall gets dialed down i think i’d like a little help to make the most of what light there is. i am visualizing my newly enhanced light-absorption capacity gathering to myself what is needed and actively converting it into life-affirming, life-giving necessities. anyway, that other buoy shining her light made me feel less alone. and i am grateful for that!

11/2/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

tonight, quinn attended his very first school dance. and today i am feeling grateful for middle school teachers and the invisible capes they wear. the transition from fifth to sixth grade, from elementary to middle school, has been rather daunting, with bumps on the roller coaster ride that hearken back to the ones that derailed his successful matriculation into kindergarten. luckily in this case, he has stayed enrolled past the two-week mark and doesn’t even have any Fs anymore as of this writing. i have now met each of his teachers and i have been delighted to find that they are all wonderful people who clearly care about my kid and every other student they teach. it takes something just a little bit extra to willingly, enthusiastically, spend all day with a rotation of 30-40 (how ‘bout them class sizes?) eleven-year-olds. and then to give up their friday evening to show a crowd of tweens a good time on the dance floor! just feeling very grateful for the local superheroes who teach my kid.

11/3/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

feeling well fed and quite sleepy after a bowl of curry winter squash soup (varieties: scarlet kabocha and buttercup, if you must know), it is easy to feel a lot of gratitude for the good people and land over at gathering together farm. i lucked into this sweet veggie-slinging gig over 4 years ago and i still feel like i’ve won the lottery every time i go home with my saturday haul of organic produce. this year i feel like i leveled up as a part-time farmer when i embarked on an evening you-pick adventure with my husband and son in late august to “clear out” the siletz tomatoes still lingering on vines slated for ploughing under the next day. we cast our long twilight shadows across the first 10 feet of a tunnel that felt like it might be a mile long. we filled up the bed of the pickup truck with tomatoes too ripe to go to market, and therefore no longer worth the price of the real estate they were occupying. now they are filling up our bellies every week, tucked away in their 67 quart jars for the winter. and the good farm people acted as though i was doing them a favor by not allowing those ten feet of the crop to go to waste, when i was really the one reaping all the tomato wealth a gal would ever want to put up for one season. don’t tell nachos, but i love pasta just as much, and a pot of organic sauce simmering on my stove is a happy thing in cool november weather.

11/4/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

cracking the homework whip on a sunday night is making me feel grateful for another book, one that i read back when my three-year-old was full of intensity and a sense of his own agenda. the book playful parenting was not the only source of the concept that has been so helpful in my parenting journey of infusing even the most mundane aspects of parenting with play, but it was the most succinct and direct communication of the concept i came across.

middle school is turning out to be a timely moment to recall this concept, and i’m feeling pretty grateful to have remembered to engineer a playful approach to math homework just 6 weeks along. at 3 (and 4, 5, 6, & 7) he just would not put on his clothes or get into the car when asked, but he would get dressed in his hogwarts robes or hop in the batmobile. “do your math homework,” has been about as appealing and likely to rise to the top of his priority list as “put your clothes on,” but once it became about slaying goblins, he was down.

i was just telling him about when he was 3, and how even that long ago, he had the endearing quality of completely ignoring what i was saying. back then, i was explaining to him in calmer moments how i really wanted him to acknowledge what i was saying, even if it meant just telling me you heard me and aren’t going to do what i asked, for whatever reason. one time when he sensed that i was about to get testy after several repeats of a request receiving no response, quinn shouted, “i recognize your knowledge!” which given how it made him giggle tonight may soon be trending at our house as the way to “use your words” when you ignore your mom.

11/5/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

i wrote about my gratitude for karate during my first annual gratitude challenge, and just over a week ago i tested for my green belt in the art of kenpo. as i sat nursing my sore muscles, i reflected on what i have learned from this journey the past two years since that writing.

like my time on board a schooner, karate has turned out to be something i love even more than i anticipated. also like sailing, i have taken some serious hits and have been lately in a process of reassessing to try and articulate what i am doing, risking injury on a regular basis, to continue to practice and progress in this art. my years of sea time ingrained in me a respect for the ocean that means i’ll never take it for granted, but also means i don’t live on a boat anymore.

when i was a kid, i added “find out how i would do in a real fight” to my bucket list. i’m not sure i ever wrote it down, or admitted it to anyone, but this has always been something i wondered about myself. it turns out, i can hold my own in a sparring simulation-of-real-fight, and it’s sort of thrilling to know that for sure. what i said 2 years ago still holds true: i would not cower.

while i feel my odds of surviving any attack encounter have greatly increased as a result of my training, i am also very much more aware of how vulnerable i truly am, and the limits of my skills against truly sinister forces that exist in the world. it’s not that i live in fear of being attacked in my actual life in rural oregon, and truly i know i would handle any true attack with much more competence, confidence, and reflexive skill now than i would have any time before 3 years ago. it’s the old conundrum of, the more i know, the more aware i am of exactly how much i don’t know. (i remember rolling this around in my mind when the knife attacks happened on the portland trimet bus, the same bus system i used to ride around on several times per week with my infant… would i, given my training, be able to counter a knife attack any better than those men who stood in harm’s way? probably not.) i am keenly aware of my own limitations as a result of paying this much attention to honing this skill set.

for example, my husband is 3 inches taller than me, but weighs one and half times my weight, plus in the dimensions that really matter, such as upper body strength, he is truly four times my size. when i sit shoulder to shoulder with him, it hits home that anyone in his same size range (a good percentage of the male population) who truly wished to do me harm, even without any training, most certainly could and probably would. my best bet is to be married to a soul who would never raise a finger or even his voice to hurt me, because as i know too well and is well documented in statistics, harm is ever so much more likely to come to a woman from within her home than from anonymous sources. if i were to be faced with an actual attack, i know my non-karate husband would stand in front of me and be the one to do the actual defending. (i haven’t had a fit of mushy husband gratitude overtake me yet on this year’s posts, but it’s sure to happen. so grateful for him!)

a few years ago, i went out there on that mat because of my kid, and after all this reassessing, i’m staying out there because of my kid. it’s a bond between us, and a way we can both practice asserting ourselves in the world, in a safe environment. it’s also how i know i would stand the best chance of being able to defend him in a fight, because you never know.

i have learned what my assets are in a fight, how to assess the opponent, see their weaknesses, and use them to my advantage. my reflexes are trained through all the repetition – i routinely catch heavy round vegetables falling off the veggie scale at farmer’s market, so these skills even play a practical role in my every day life.

before my test, i helped one of my fellow testers adjust some things in one of his forms, and at the end of my test, i read aloud the green belt pledge which plainly states that the requirements of this belt rank are to actively teach in the art. huh, i guess that does start happening if you just keep showing up long enough. i remember the thing that hit me from the blue belt pledge, last time around, that i will actively defend the weak and vulnerable; and the purple belt pledge before that, to never use my skill to harm or make afraid. there is much more to the art than how to punch and kick and win a fight. one could even apply these principles to voting in tomorrow’s election! i’m grateful for my instructor and all i have been able to learn, as well as the character traits that have been instilled in my son that reach a long way beyond the edge of the mat.

11/6/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

one of my goals is to only be grateful for nachos one time during this round of gratitude… and today is the day! it’s national nacho day, and gosh i think there’s something else going on, too. oh yeah, voting! it was my pleasure to vote against several appalling measures on our local ballot, and i think everyone ought to reward themselves for voting with a big plate of nachos. last year i could not think of any appealing images of nachos, but as i was scrolling through the toddler archives i came across one i quite like.

vote nachos! vote gratitude! gratitude for voting! gratitude for suffragettes, the 19^th amendment, and the equal rights amendment (oops, still haven’t ratified that last one yet! gratitude for e.r.a. pending future ratification!)

11/7/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

i am grateful that i can just take the night off, because you don’t have to get an A in gratitude!

pancakes then and now

Posted on October 15, 2017 by marybethrew

sunday is pancake day at the dragon house, and often i think of the other pancakes while i am stirring batter and pouring maple syrup. on this chilly fall morning, i added cinnamon and apple slices. for anyone newer to reading my blog, i don’t use the real names of other peoples’ children. years ago when she came into my life, i began referring to rich’s granddaughter (and now both of my stepgranddaughters!) as pancake(s). we had the blessing of spending a whole week with the pancakes surrounding our wedding. the bottom photo is from that visit. it warmed my heart, and reminded me distinctly of the top photo from the early days of their friendship.

then: these two pancakes have been close ever since april 2012.

now: pretty sure we’re looking at some lifelong friends here.

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ turrets and portcullises

Posted on May 12, 2017 by marybethrew

minecraft fortress building was a frequent occupation these past two months. quinn has also been inspired to build games in scratch, making use of a book fair purchase to familiarize with how to use code within the scratch framework to generate a game.

birthday books; on the right, an excellent story called eagle boy that i found at our local book store.

contemplating fortress features (like hidden sky libraries) with kitty ball.

mission control; where the scratch games are made, as well as some of the minecraft work accomplished. the head lamp slays me.

we cleared off a small area of his desktop so his piper can fit there, alongside a story cd. (he was listening to harry potter and the deathly hallows). i asked him if he felt he had figured out how to work in scratch, how to use the various commands.

“the only one i don’t know what it does yet is pen.”

“have you ever just played around with the commands and figured out what they do?” i asked.

“yeah! i figured out how to make someone jump! you go “face in direction zero (which is up) and then say move 5 steps then wait 1 second, then face in direction 180 (which is down) and then move five steps. and you actually JUMP!

“…and i know how to make gravity.”

he made his “first game ever” called whale saver, in which you have to click the space bar quickly enough to get the mama whale across the screen to the baby whale. if you are too slow, the mama whale drifts towards the left, and you lose if she gets all the way to the left and her thought bubble reads “defeat”; if she makes it to the baby, her thought bubble reads, “victory!”

then he made it more difficult by adding a shark that the mama whale has to out swim in order to reach the baby whale before the shark does.

we have an ongoing discussion concerning cool math games, and before he played it one day, we talked about using it to research how parts of a game work together, with his new perspective of game making in scratch, i.e. how you make it look like a penguin is swimming even if he is in the middle of the screen, by making other objects move past the penguin. though in my opinion there is nothing cool and a negligible amount of math embedded in cool math games, a site which i resent the schools promoting because of its blatant ads targeting kids and its ability to require restarting my computer, i am trying to find the middle ground between adamant disapproval of (big air quotes) cool math games and finding some redeeming value since it is obviously something quinn enjoys. reverting back to my principles, i asked how can we use even this despicable platform as a tool for learning?

he came home pretty psyched about his tag program one afternoon, just absolutely buzzing with inspiration about automata. they are going to build automata. i played dumb and asked what’s an automaton? he regurgitated the definition, understood what it meant, and was able to discuss it critically, such as when i asked “ok, so what makes it different from a robot?” we ended up watching some of the you tube videos he had seen in class, finishing up with the TED talk of theo jansen, which quinn subsequently reenacted, listing each adaptation that was added to each new iteration of strandbeest. his capacity to memorize reminds me of my ten year old self, while my 39 year old self has trouble remembering where i parked.

raspberry storytelling.

becoming entrusted with more dangerous kitchen jobs; serrated knife use, birthday candle transportation, and (the incredibly risky) making of guacamole.

shown above, his finished essay on martin luther king, jr., plus a collection of notes and research on the subject. one worksheet (most of which was empty, classic quinn) contained a space to write one connection made during reading/research on mlk where quinn had written “martin and i both are as non-violent as possible.”

we’ve been getting outdoors between bouts of rain. when we trek to the bayou, we sometimes catch imaginary pokemon; other times we observe trilliums, trout lilies, the flora and fauna. he was compelled to do some irl minecraft brick laying. i was intrigued to realize that he understood to alternate the way the bricks are oriented so their seams are offset in each layer. play is never pointless.

his class took a field trip to cape perpetua. we hiked, wrote and drew in nature journals, did a visitor’s center scavenger hunt, and hiked some more. our final hiking destination was the giant spruce, under whose roots the whole class crawled. walking together alongside a stream, quinn and i brainstormed descriptive language; gushing slushing sploshing galoshing giggling clapping hooshing whooshing shhhhhh… were just a few i can recall, describing our impressions of the different character of various sections.

he fell asleep on my lap on the return bus trip to school.

the library hatched a batch of baby salmon, so we stopped and paid them a visit.

baseball! i am surely biased, but i believe that quinn has very good aim, and i adore his pitching style of raising his left arm as though to place his pitch where he wants it. he has been practicing archery since he was quite small, and i noticed that when he began learning to use throwing stars, he aimed well with them, too. we are looking forward to more throwing stars, nunchucks, eskrima sticks, and bo staff classes that are going to be happening soon at our dojo.

quinn worked diligently on a birthday present for the baseball buddy pictured above (aka panda)… his very own pokemon collection. quinn sorted through his own binder to find cards of which he had duplicates, to put together a pretty awesome starter collection. he put them in a binder for panda, colored the front and back covers (raichu and greninja, panda’s faves) and he was very excited about giving him his gift.

earth day! more (slightly unfinished) school artwork.

one day when i was volunteering, quinn’s class discussed and voted on several topics, items that had been submitted to the suggestion box. one was written by quinn about rotating between play porch, gym and classroom when brain break has to happen somewhere other than the playground due to rain. his suggestion was the one voted into effect, after careful consideration of pros and cons of each alternative. their discussions are amazing to behold. (“who can show proof of listening to jasmine, and add to what she said; do you agree or disagree… because…” were some of the prompts the kids are accustomed to receiving.) they also voted on saving spots in the classroom for work (this was sorted out in all its nuances of when it is and is not okay to save spots), as well as whether to do yoga both at the beginning and end of the day (they already do it at the beginning) and they did institute an end of the day yoga session by majority vote.

quinn was pretty elated when his suggestion about brain break won in a landslide.

we also got to do a yoga session while i was there. quinn asked if we could order a set of the yoga cards for home, “so i can teach you yoga.” so we ordered some! we have done quite a few sessions so far. as yoga has been an incredible source of self care, solace, exercise and healing in my own life, i am quite pleased to see quinn embracing this positive practice.

feeding ice cream for mama’s birthday to the family of camp boss. beautiful sunny day to play with friends!

easter egg dying and hunting, and a fun (belated) easter basket when he got back from his dad’s.

one recent wendesday morning wake up (after a late bedtime due to karate then dinner then bath) was not one of my better ones (nag nag nag), so for thursday morning i decided to do a better job. when i went in he was burrowed under his grammy quilt, head and all, and my usual “good morning boo-pa-loo” song turned into more of a david attenborough narration.

“here we see a rare undescribed burrowing creature in its natural habitat. this animal has a fuzzy head and is very quiet, just before emerging from its sleeping burrow. we are hoping to catch a rare glimpse of this new species, which we shall give the name boo-pa-loo boo-pa-lee-doo, as it rises to consume one of its favorite foods; biscuits. with any luck, the aroma of the biscuits will entice the creature out of its sleeping burrow at any moment.”

for some reason, that worked better. it was easy to then coax each appendage out of the sleeping burrow with further narration, sans nagging. (i say it again: play is never pointless!)

play can be a science experiment. quinn made some spinning tops from legos, and it was a great avenue to discuss experimental design. he was telling me that the one made from the big lego wheel and the taller stick spun for the longest duration because it was the biggest. i asked him if he thought it was the larger diameter of the wheel or the weight of it (which aspect of “bigger”) that helped, and whether he could design an experiment to determine which factor was most important. he hesitated, then told me “you just gave me an idea” and came back having tested the wheel on an even longer stick, having found out that with the same wheel, the longer stick helped the top spin longer (yet another aspect of size). then he was able to verbalize how one could test two different diameters of the same weight on the same length of stick, or two different weights of the same diameter on the same length of stick, to test the diamater vs weight concept.

“concept” is a word he is using quite frequently. his battle/dungeon/castle/mythology/pokemon story language is as lyrical as ever.

in the realm of d and d, he has me on a mission to defeat a dragon, who is guarding a treasure stolen by some orcs/goblins from the elf high council (my character is an elf and she is apparently a member of said council) and right now we are discussing an alternate plan, instead of killing the dragon, to get him on our side. i freed one of the original guards who wasn’t killed when the treasure was stolen but who was taken prisoner, so he informed me that the dragon has one scale missing over his heart and that’s his weakness and the way to kill him if i wanted to, but i suggested making the dragon a shield/artificial scale and offering it to him in trade for the treasure (agreeing to set him free in the process) but then it turned out one of the orcs has the missing scale (made of mithril) and is using it as a shield so before i face the dragon the new plan is to go kill the orc with the missing scale and bring it to the dragon to return it as a peace offering.

and the experience of actually playing d and d is a lot like an incredibly long run-on sentence, so i’m going to leave that exactly how it is.

there was more work to be done these past months on the theme of advocating for himself. quinn arrived at the conclusion after one frustrating karate session (frustrating because of a missed week of class, and because he had forgotten the techniques he had learned the previous week) that he was disappointed about not being brought to karate at least once during his dad’s weeks. we had a pretty good conversation about how he, quinn, has a lot more power to change that than i do, and how he would be wise to communicate his wishes to his dad.

karate has provided a plethora of opportunities for self-advocating and initiative practice. our sifu believes in letting the kids have space to learn how to initiate their own advancement through curriculum; this implicitly allows them space to flounder, until they realize they are in charge of their own destiny. i very much appreciate this, and have had numerous discussions with quinn about this dynamic; such as discussing how open mat classes allow an ideal time to “bug sifu” for a new technique, given the smaller class size and therefore increased availability on the instructor’s part. children deal with so much powerlessness, and i want to teach quinn how to use what power he does have, teach him that, “it is what you make of it” and the structure of self-paced learning at karate is helping him see how much control he can have over his learning.

both his classroom this year at school, and his dojo, are achieving some of the educational priorities i hold nearest and dearest, such as connection with his teachers and a sense of belonging.

though my favorite memory this month is not my shoulder injury, one bright spot in that particular evening at the dojo was the way quinn rushed to help me with carrying my bag, and holding doors for me.

one morning we parked at school several minutes early so quinn sat on my lap and snuggled while we finished a deathly hallows chapter. when i turned it off and took the keys out of the ignition, quinn tried to take them back, then got this twinkle in his eye and said, “i’ll roll you for your keys!” and i laughed so hard. our sifu uses that particular choice bit of slang (and other good ones… “you talkin’ mess?” for example… when he’s creating a scenario for using a given self defense technique). sifu had joked the previous night to quinn, about his new day-glow safety green karate hoodie, “i’ll roll you for that hoodie” but having q use it on me (and immediately start giggling uncontrollably) was hilarious.

and i will leave you with one final gem from the school spring concert, during which such rites of passage as 50 nifty united states, found a peanut, and the rattlin’ bog were sung. but this one really says it all!

~rainbow mondays~ finding the color

Posted on December 5, 2016 by marybethrew

colorless: right around this time of year, things start to feel about like this for me: washed out gray birds in a gray sky flying south without me. my rainbow practice becomes increasingly important for me to strive to do, so i can remember there is actually still a lot of color in the world!

even if it’s artificial coloring. spoiler alert: all the kids in our lives are getting playdough for christmas! quinn helped me make the first four colors yesterday.

rainbow: mindful tea arranging. this way the tea becomes a self care exercise multiple times.

red: one of our frequent visitors.

red: cranberries getting ready to be sauce, for what turned out to be a very mellow and laid back thanksgiving with more of our kids than we thought we’d get to have around.

orange: glad there are still some of these hanging on.

orange: false chantarelle in our forest. still hoping for some true chantarelles but no luck yet.

orange: quinn’s week off of school for thanksgiving was a week of much game playing. after enough rounds of loot and risk, i decided i wanted a word game, so we invented thanksgiving scattergories.

yellow: apple tree leaves.

green: extra water in the bayou over the past week or so.

green: the first of my rainbow terrace plants has sprouted! i planted 3 bleeding heart roots at the base of the apple trees, and they are already up! i hope they did not jump the gun, and that they do well next season.

blue: this kid makes me happy.

blue: i re-purposed my baby baptism blue jar and baby’s breath as a thanksgiving centerpiece. never mind that it looks more like christmas than thanksgiving! that’s what i could find in the yard for a fresh cut arrangement.

purple: mashed potatoes at thanksgiving ended up lavender, since i had a few purple potato stowaways in the mix.

purple: deep in thought in mama’s purple chair using mama’s purple computer. for christmas, i’m thinking: new socks!

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

make like a geek ~ game sliders and creative dice rolling

Posted on January 25, 2016 by marybethrew

a long time ago (2015), in a galaxy far, far away, there was a yoda snowflake.

yes, it all started with a yoda snowflake. that was what possessed me to buy another exact-o knife, even though somewhere in storage, there is already a perfectly serviceable exact-o knife in my possession. even for what could be considered essentials, it is hard to convince me to buy something that i already own a set of in storage. rich had to give me an assignment about long johns one day over christmas break, because thus far into the cold weather months, i had just been carrying on with a single pants layer; the pair of long johns i own are buried deep in a box with all the winter clothes, in a galaxy far, far away, called storage.

unconvinced by my reasoning, he told me i could find time in my busy day to buy myself a pair of long johns. “and get the good ones, not the cheap thin ones.” thank you, honey, for saving me from my frugal self.

i digress. because of storage, and because we had no ornaments, i collected fun free ornament-making ideas earlier in december, and i was excited about star wars snowflakes, and so i overcame my reluctance to buy a tool i already own and got the exact-o knife. i only managed to make the one snowflake, yoda. it was an arduous process, so i laminated that bad boy, and maybe next year i will attempt leia.

meanwhile, my son, game engineer (he named his game engineering firm qaz8quintillion just yesterday; no idea what qaz means, but it sounds like the first syllable in quasi) has taken his game engineering to such a new level that i have started having trouble holding all of the various numbers and quantities and damage points and health points and karma points in my admittedly deficient brain.

game master pajama

another aside: rich laughed and laughed, when my sister-in-law posted a retort about “rew memory” on my bro’s facebook post concerning a time capsule from 22 years ago that he had discovered in the junk drawer. none of us rews could remember anything about it, but apparently he had unearthed it, she said, maybe even within the past year. “good old rew memory” she teased us, for how the same discoveries are novel, over and over again. i think rich felt validated by this aspersion cast upon our collective brains as a family. there are many times he just shakes his head and laughs at my forgetfulness. but, i mean, we’re smart people, everyone forgets things now and then, right?

what was i saying?

oh yeah, so i was trying not to poke my eye out with the pencil while quinn was going back over which ninja weapons each ninja of various expertise could use depending on their belt rank status, and how many times they could attempt to roll the d20 any time they were on the attack, based on which weapon they chose, while i tried not to let static take over my brain as all the rules blurred together on me. (you feel me after reading that run-on sentence, i know you do.) while my son would have been perfectly content to play this game verbally, and hold all the growing and shrinking relevant variables in his considerable noggin, the only things growing and shrinking for me were my dread and my attention span, respectively. i needed a visually appealing, tactile way to keep track of it all.

and then it came to me: sliders.

for every geek attack, there is an equal and opposite geek attack reaction. at least, when i bring my a game to being a mama.

d20, the 20-sided die from d&d, comes in handy for lots of games!

it’s possible, as a mama, to not really actually desire to play ninja wars on graph paper for the entire 72 hours of long weekend, and yet also possible to surrender to the need for connection with my son (who i rarely get to hang out with for 72 consecutive hours anymore), and fully immerse in ninja wars on graph paper for the entire 72 hours. as for me personally, i just needed to put my own spin on it, and get a little crafty so that i could remain awake and static-free.

qaz8quintillion h.q.

i grabbed my exact-o knife, some card stock and a thin sharpie, and started by making a slider for keeping track of my ninja’s health points. (she has princess leia buns: see? my own spin.) something about keeping my hands busy while the game went on… and on… really enhanced my endurance. as usual, this is not a tutorial, i don’t really do tutorials, but i am hoping that the pictures give you a sense of how to make something similar, should the need arise in your household. it’s essentially a piece of paper sliding along another piece of paper, with some way of indicating the value it is keeping track of (in this case, a hole punched in the sliding piece of cardstock).

by the time i finished the first one, i had a sense that we were in this for a very long haul, so then i really let my geek out to run around. we ended up making sliders for keeping track of 4 different ninja’s hp’s, 8 opponents’ hp’s, each ninja and each opponents’ belt rank status, which boss we were fighting, the boss’s hp, karma points, level, and gold coin earnings.

belt color slider; she’s an orange belt!

opponent belt color and hp slider consoles

karma points, level, and gold coin sliders; for some sliding pieces i hole punched and cut 2 slices with the exact-o, and for others like the yin-yang symbol, i taped an additional strip of card stock to the back.

like a boss; a side note: this game is heavily inspired by ninja warz 2, a game i’ve never played and that quinn saw his friend playing online. quinn is not allowed to play this game online, as the site requires an account owner to be age 13 or older. we’re talking a lot these days about ethics and honesty and integrity in online choices.

it wasn’t until after i got fully involved that we worked out some actual rules and ways of making the game really a game that someone could walk up and play, even if they didn’t happen to be quinn. since he had already applied hp as a quantity to determine who would win each battle, we used the multi-sided dice from d & d and came up with a points system, also based on belt status, weapon choice, and so on. ultimately, we spent the whole weekend doing arithmetic and rounding out loud with each other: “14 plus 8, that’s 22, plus 7, that’s 29, plus 6 is 35, now roll the d10 mama, ok plus 4 is 39… that rounds up to 40 damage!”

we get a lot of mileage out of those dice, such as when quinn decided to bust out his oregon trail journal from last year at ols, and begin writing in it again. we made a list of 20 events that could happen on any given day that he has to incorporate into his story writing, just to add that element of chance that one would experience out on the trail. broken axles, backtracking, weather, health, and hunting bison. river crossings aren’t on the list, because he’s actually attempting to write over a realistic number of days, and traveling a realistic number of miles per day while following a map, so rivers will come along in the story according to geography. this is all just part of my plot to help quinn bloom as a writer, of course.

but maybe that’s the subject of another make like a geek moment. until next time… embrace your inner geek!

~a month of unschool~ the merry-go-round went around again

Posted on May 1, 2014 by marybethrew

the beginning of the month was spring break, featuring unschooling in its rawest form (you know, without going to school), which i wrote about in spring break in the age of reason.

pictured here are some writing he was doing using 3-finger grip (he was creating sequels to some books from his reading class) and some other assignments he tackled of his own choosing.

back in school, we did our one and only set of assessments for the year, and we did not do them using any sort of exam structure. it was interesting to realize there are a few things we forget to cover (those >< symbols in math for greater than, less than, for example), and while sometimes it’s helpful (we decide to go ahead and cover them), other times it feels more like an opportunity to decide if it’s really something worth covering, or whether it needs to come up in a contrived way, rather than just letting it come when it is pertinent. yet another reason to love ols! quinn completed both a math and a language arts assessment, and seems to be right on grade level in both, for whatever that is worth.

quinn checked out a stack of early readers from the library – one of the favorites was dinosaur time, by arnold lobel, and another little series called detective dinosaur. in keeping with his need for fresh material that isn’t already memorized (in order to actually practice reading), he read them each forward and read some backwards, too.

also in language arts, we began a poetry unit at ols, and worked on long vowel sounds.

in his spanish lessons, quinn learned the song la araña pequeñita (aka the itsy-bitsy spider) and learned the names of los animales.

science was focused on rocks and minerals this month, by popular vote. we made a geology layer cake together as a group, and talked about the way the earth’s crust is formed, and how old the various layers are. we also watched bill nye’s episode on the earth’s crust.

math was focused mainly on the assessment, but we also played the game race for a flat, which helps with learning place value. interlox makes a pretty handy set of units/rods/flats for this, and the game is in their manual.

in art, we practiced still life drawing for several lessons. we also got to take a tour of toledo clayworks, where our ceramics work has been traveling for firing all year. this was a wonderful trip, and the kids got to see their community-made teapot and begin work on glazing it; they studied the making of textures, extruding clay, saw a pot-throwing demonstration on the wheel, and got to visit the kiln.

it was fun to see the students’ work on the same shelves with professional pieces. quinn’s leonardo cup (his second of his set of 4 ninja turtle slab cups planned) is shown here on the “finished” shelf. i think whoever made the head/gears sculpture above attended school somewhere like ols…

after the clayworks tour, we had a picnic in the park. some of the kids, including quinn, couldn’t eat right away because they were too caught up in the merry-go-round.

also this month we had an egg hunt, after studying the history behind easter and ostara. we also had a wonderful family-filled earth day celebration.

here is quinn doing his part to care for the school, raking the rubber mulch under the play structure to level it out.

he made this awesome tie dye shirt at after school program. he chose such a cool design, don’t you think? he even got a ruler out to measure it out precisely how he wanted it to look!

quinn has also been getting more and more comfortable with dogs, including hershey at ols, and has taken an interest in working with romper, the chihuahua we have been long-term babysitting.

all in all, another delightful month!

~this moment~

Posted on August 9, 2013 by marybethrew

~a friday ritual~

a photo capturing a moment from the week.

a simple, special moment.

a moment i want to pause, savor and remember

~a month of unschool~ play learn

Posted on April 1, 2013 by marybethrew

(posted june 2013)

~lego university!~ building a model ship (from a kit)~ drawing an awesome ewok birthday card for a friend who likes star wars almost as much as quinn does~

~academic stuff like discussing the spanish language over pancakes (he asked enough questions to make me get out the dictionary!)~ reading a non-fiction book, with rapt attention, about paleontology~ homeschool group visit to the aquarium to study seahorses and salamaders, during which quinn was dressed as a seal~ making an easter card for mama (handwriting practice!)~ and plowing through bob books~

~playing! which is of course, his number one responsibility at his age, and it can’t help but involve learning~ monopoly (money!)~ chess (strategy!)~ kite flying (physics!) ~ building a k’nexasaurus rex (following instructions! motors! dinosaur locomotion!)