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~thankful thursday~ everywhere and nowhere

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11/18/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

Today I’m feeling grateful for all the little things, the popcorn and cranberries that grow into long garlands of gratitude if you string them one by one.

 

11/19/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

I am grateful for spontaneous dates to go outside and look at the moon. Rich handed me my jacket a little while ago and took me out on a moon date this evening. This photo is not from tonight, but from a moon date somewhere in New Mexico, waking up in a Rest Area and getting back on the road toward home.

 

11/20/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

I am grateful for good work bringing good food to good people. I am grateful for Saturday sun. I am grateful for my crew who sees to it that I take my break, eat my thermos full of chili, and hydrate. I am grateful for chocolate poblano peppers burnished past green to purple-brown and all the way to red. I am grateful for the architecture of each savoy cabbage leaf. I am grateful for roots.

 

11/21/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

I am grateful for a hike with Quinn, for frost pockets and cold creeks, for beaded webs and sunshine on son.

 

11/22/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

I am not taking this class for a grade so it’s fine if I cheat. November has some easy days of gratitude that I shamelessly capitalize on. November 6th is nachos. The 22nd is not the only day I dedicate to husband gratitude, but it’s a definite one each and every year. Every 22nd of every month is to be celebrated, whether we are celebrating our first date or our wedding day, and all the 22nds in between bear the title “dorkaversary” to keep things light. Today is the penultimate dorkaversary before we celebrate Ten Years Together on December 22nd.

This morning as we were wishing each other a happy dorkaversary, we recalled that ten Novembers ago, we were being helped along in our eventual romance by our yoga teacher, who decided it was high time for a partner yoga series! “Breathe with your partner,” she told us, as we sat back-to-back lengthening our spines and working out how to breathe at all, much less with our partner, oh my. “Now twist to the right and reach your right hand to hold onto your partner’s left thigh.” Do what now?! At this point in the narration Rich freely deviates from what actually happened. “That’s not my thigh you’re grabbing…”

He cannot behave. I will need more time to work on him! So grateful for the time we’ve spent together.

 

11/23/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

I am grateful for hope, which appears in this moment not as a thing with feathers, but with fur. A sea otter has been visiting our Oregon coast for several days! This is an event that for most people is probably cute and fun, but for me, it is a profound gift in a heavy time of loss.

I got into marine biology to save endangered species I loved. I became better informed about that over time, and I doubt very seriously that what I do is helping at all. What I do feels like a painstaking documentation of extinction. I know an awful lot about the very specific details of endangerment, how whole ecosystems have folded in on themselves, how our coastline here resembles what it was a century ago only on the very surface. I can take credit for saving nothing.

Sea otters were hunted down to about 1% of their historic population size. The last known individual sea otter swimming in Oregon waters was shot off Newport in 1907. Locally extinct ever since (a reintroduction attempt in the 70s did not succeed), they no longer exert control over sea urchins, which overgraze the kelp holding down the base of this ecosystem. Other species help in the role of maintaining kelp forests, though none to the extent that otters once did. Lately I lean over the edge of every far-out tidepool I visit, hoping and wishing to see a sunflower star, an important urchin predator in the absence of otters. But sunflower stars reached critically endangered status in December 2020, failing to make a comeback from the sea star wasting disease epidemic that began in 2013. Locally extinct now in the southern part of its range, sightings in Oregon are now vanishingly rare. I have not been able to find one.

I started writing gratitude posts as a way to pick myself up when the long shadows of the cold dark fall bring on familiar seasonal despair. But these last two years… despair has not been a seasonal condition. I have struggled with even wanting to bring it up this year, but my kid has still not come home to me, and this day, the 23rd, is his day the same way the 22nd is for Rich and I. I’ve been Quinn’s mom for fourteen years and nine months, and to only see him a few times a week on video and every other Sunday for a hike is… well, despair has been a steady state for this mama.

When he was little, Quinn would get into a cardboard box boat and bring a book in with him to read while he paddled, set crab traps, and coiled his ropes. One frequent book was A Lot of Otters. The premise: Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and her child are reunited.

And this is why I will never achieve any type of greatness in my field. I cannot separate this entire bundle of emotion and sadness and longing and grief and tenderness and hope from this one tiny furry being. Somehow, now, this otter is carrying on its belly, not just a tasty meal of sea urchin, but a whole load of other baggage I need it to carry for me. It is too much for one otter to fix a whole broken ecosystem, a whole broken society, a teen’s anxiety, a mama’s broken heart.

I got to see the otter for about thirty seconds yesterday. I stood there for a lot longer than thirty seconds. Waiting. Watching. My hands took a while to recover from the cold after I left, but I saw the otter. I am so grateful I got to see the otter.

This morning Rich asked, already knowing the answer, whether I would go back again today to check on the otter. I did not see the otter today. But when I heard a rumor that there was also an orca sighted in the area this morning, I knew I would stand there for a long time again. I did not see the orca either. I hope to see orcas someday. (Yes, I am crossing my fingers the orca did not see the otter…)

Maybe why I like marine mammals is that there is no guarantee of seeing them. Someone said aloud what I always think to myself about that gaze you get into when looking for mammals: that you look everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

It makes me think of one quote Joseph Campbell used about God, “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

The seeking is the thing. The waves are rough and the mammals are hiding, I’m standing there, looking at the whole wide circle of ocean, looking everywhere and nowhere. Looking for hope.

 

11/24/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

I am grateful for this sound.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ favorite college professor

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~June 23 to July 23, 2020~

Dinosaur Discoveries virtual camp

Since camp was during the day, we moved our noon video call to 6 pm for camp week. He was animated! I wasn’t sure if it was the time of day or due to camp, but he was ON FIRE in his nerdy mind. I got on the call on the first night to him frantically spinning his cube into an alternating colors pattern and he held up the blue-and-green side to the camera and said, “this is like a nerve check for me because I have to do the opposite of what I’ve trained myself to do,” and then babbled for the whole hour about phylogenies and homologies.

That day they made a tik tok, a google slideshow, did an interactive (video game) learning module, read and discussed a scientific publication. They talked about how paleontology, biology and geology relate to each other. They used starburst candy to illustrate the rock cycle (melted by microwave onto cardboard: igneous.) Two of his buddies from camp last year were in attendance, and he added seven new teens and two new instructors to his paleontology community.

The theme for day two was “geologic context of the Mesozoic,” because isn’t that what we all think of in our summer camp memories? They did a Pangaea puzzle, read about and discussed some contemporary dino fossil discoveries, met with a real paleontologist, sifted a bag of sand to find a whole bunch of fossils (24 sea snails, 17 amber pieces, no trilobites, 3 squids, gastropods, ray teeth, shark teeth – some of them not yet counted).

Day 3: biologic context of the Mesozoic. Mass extinctions, why birds are the only living dinosaurs, why Triassic animals were just the weirdest, a handy paleontology database. This was a dress-up day and Quinn chose to wear his “brambleproof” long-sleeved shirt, his Indiana Jones hat, and a rock pick. He worked on his dino diorama, which they made in the box that the camp supplies were shipped in.

Day 4: Reading the fossil record! Quinn finished up counting his sifted fossils and had 32 pieces of amber, 25 Sahara gastropods and 3 fragments (so at least 28 individuals), and he mentioned both Devonian squid and a Devonian fish called Dunkleosteus, but I’m not sure if they were included among his fossils. His knowledge on this subject has far exceeded mine and I can no longer keep up! He discovered he did have half of a Trilobite. On this day he was set the task of writing a scientific report of one of his fossil finds, and he came up with this:

“A new genus named a Trilobita was discovered to have lived about 520 million years ago and though not all measurements are available the specimen is certainly unique. The front half of this almost crab-like creature has been preserved in its 3-D structure representing a very small creature living in the Upper Cambrian Lodore formation.”

“I made up the part about the formation that it was found in, and I approximated on the million of years ago. Also I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing Trilobita correctly. Trilobita?” (Think: kilometer/kilometer.)

Quinn has a theory on Trilobites; that they were the first sentient organisms, and that they traveled in groups. I let him talk that night and recorded some audio after he introduced his Trilobite theory. These are just some segments I gleaned from a twenty minute treatise:

“To me it looked like in our fossil record, all of the things in that time period look practically the same almost, like really really similar, so it makes me think there was one kind of first species that evolved and then that evolved into a whole myriad of other things that evolved into a multitude of different things. Each species branching as it goes. To me the length of a species is determined by when it branched off the thing behind it to when it branched into multiple different things itself. That’s how I think of how long a species lived… when did it come into being from the thing that branched to BE it? That’s the start of it. and then the end is when it branched into multiple things itself. And everything kind of looks really similar that we have from back then. So it kind of looks like everything is one thing. And then that thing splits into several similar things. I mean a bird doesn’t look anything like a whale. But if you trace the two back far enough, then like a chickadee and a humpback whale, were once the same species. It might be somewhere back in the Mesozoic or before the Mesozoic, it might have been different things already when the dinosaurs were alive but if you trace them back far enough, everything has a common ancestor with everything else. So my thing is I’m thinking of like the ultimate common ancestor. I think of a trilobite.”

“Like someone looks at a rock on Beverly beach and is like, “there’s a clam shell imprint here,” but you can only see this little imprint for a bacteria if you’re looking at it micro microscopic. Attach several microscopes to your eye and walk around Beverly beach.”

“Soft parts still fossilize is my thing. If you think about it, it’s not the meteor strike that wiped everything out. It incinerates everything in one small area. Back then we happen to know that there was pretty much one continent with several large islands around it, maybe? And even when that was the case, that all the water that had life in it, was all one thing. You can swim from any point in it to any other point that has life in it. and so the biodiversity wouldn’t have been the greatest…”

“A meteor hits. let’s just say at the time trilobites are alive a meteor hits and we don’t know about it- it doesn’t deposit what it usually does or whatever. Let’s say that’s what wiped out the species then except for what evolved into what we have today… If there were bacteria I think they would have fossilized, because in the water, their soft forms would slip between molecules… If you’re willing to actually be really careful and chip them out of the rock, I think that you would have ended up with (and this is all under a microscope that’s under a microscope that under possibly another microscope.)”

“Even so I think that then that would have been like I don’t know like thinking… I think that that would have been like … I think that that would have fossilized” (I’m including this verbatim to illustrate his words trying to keep up with his brain.)

“If a meteor had struck, pretty much the whole earth is covered in possibly a mile thick cloud of ash just hovering above the earth or like encasing the earth. If you think about the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, the story goes: meteor hits earth. Ash cloud for several million years, meaning all the plants couldn’t get sun because of the ash cloud so all the plants died meaning all the herbivores died meaning all the carnivores died. Mammals survived because back then we were scavengers right? We were able to eat survive in pretty much any climate. So we were able to just eat dead stuff which there would be plenty of, so we survived.”

“The producers are subsisting off of sun, like just subsisting off of some non-living thing, like eating rocks, or filtering sand through itself, photosynthesis, like it’s always there. And if you use it, it’s not like you use it and some of it goes away. You’re done using it, and you get the energy from it, but it still has just as much energy on itself to give as when you picked it up and used it to give yourself energy. So what the meteors do when they hit is they take away that thing in some way or another. So meteors take away the producers source of energy.”

Day 5: Dinosaurs in pop culture and media! They met with another real life paleontologist, this time one who works on prehistoric penguins, and specifically the plumage – the colors of fossil feathers! Fossils can tell us about the evolution of the shape and color of penguin feathers! And other dinosaur plumage – they learned about a Jurassic bird that had iridescent feathers. The camp kit included (modern) feathers that they had looked at in preparation for this segment. Maybe not all the mamas have gathered piles of feathers for their kids.

This day’s topic on pop culture and media and dinosaurs (and misconceptions about them) was fascinating for Quinn. There were lots of links and resources provided, which were fun things like Jurassic Park and Disney’s Dinosaur.

Here is our conversation about the 1914 animation of Gertie the dinosaur:

“A sauropod eats a boulder and the top of the tree, sees a sea serpent in the lake next to them, starts dancing, eats the other half of the tree, tosses a mammoth into said lake, the mammoth swims back over and blasts the sauropod with water, and then swims away, a mammoth can swim, then the sauropod picks up a boulder and hits the mammoth, and then the sauropod takes a drink and drains the whole lake…”

“When were mammoths and when were sauropods?” His scientist/writer mom replied, modeling her grasp of both science and grammar.

“Sauropods were in the Jurassic period. Mammoths weren’t around until after the Cretaceous.”

“Are you saying it would be anachronistic for a sauropod to toss a mammoth in a lake then? And throw boulders at it?”

“I’m saying that a sauropod wouldn’t have lived at the same time as a mammoth. I’m saying that sauropods can’t toss mammoths by the tail…”

“Even if they didn’t have to time travel in order to do it?”

“If they didn’t have to time travel in order to do it, and they were capable of doing that time travel, and they could actually get a mammoth, they still physically could not pick up a mammoth by the tail and throw it five miles into a lake, and then accurately hit it at that range with a boulder.

“Are you sure? Aren’t you being kind of a party pooper?”

~

The two camp instructors and both guest visitors were women. I love that this camp group makes a strong effort towards inclusion and is working hard for fair representation for all in a science that has historically been exclusive to white men. I like that my white man-to-be is surrounded by all other types of people in these camps.

Q and I watched an episode of PBS prehistoric road trip together that night.

Day 6 was the final day of Dino camp, and they presented their Dioramas and played games.

On his diorama presentation, Quinn was complimented that he must have done a lot of research because of how his time period aligned with the species of dinosaurs and plant life represented. Here is his spiel:

“This is my museum diorama of the K-Pg extinction which is extremely late cretaceous. So the meteor is still in the sky yet it has already struck, so all of the grass has been burned off, and the rocks are bleached because of the immense heat. there is a river running through here, and there is a velociraptor pack here attacking this herd of triceratops, and all that’s left of these trees are small shrubs, which the triceratops herd is taking cover in trying to save themselves, however the raptor pack has expertly sent in an ambusher from behind. there are also a pair of tyrannosaurs attacking these two ankylosaurs, because big predators like tyrannosaurs assuming they were predators and not scavengers, would probably hunt in pairs or trios rather than full packs. there’s a quetzalcoatlus up in the sky looking for food, and there’s a volcano that’s erupting.”

He told me that night:

“For our final meeting they gave us like traditional class clown, most likely to become a rock star awards. Except they were specific to us regardless of the traditional ones. Frizzie got most likely to lead a paleontology expedition while wearing fancy clothing. Lead got most likely to draw the most scientifically accurate drawing of a T. rex. I got most likely to become everybody’s favorite college professor which I think is extremely accurate.”

Extremely!

~

(slightly modified by mama)

 

 

In which I realize why this post incubated a while…

I revisited my educational priorities for Quinn during this month. This was motivated by looking ahead to the 2020-2021 school year and grappling with which path to choose: hybrid online/in person public school, fully online Edmentum public school, or fully homeschool. Because I am writing this as we approach the end of 8th grade, I know what was chosen and how the story turned out to not be about what I would choose at all. It’s weird to have been thinking about things like scaffolding removal and then realize – oh we’re done with scaffolding. Now he’s taking charge of his own path. He chose Edmentum, and has handled his schooling. It turns out the scaffolding was even more temporary than I realized, and I was slow to take out the final pieces despite my awareness that removal was the goal.

Since I’m writing this later, I have control over leaving out the awkward and tense discussions of pros and cons, of offers on my part to advocate, which he kept gently but firmly turning down. I can see now that he was telling me he’s got this. If we had homeschooled, it would have been something he was doing to please me. (I cannot ensure that he did not choose his path out of wanting to please his father but that is out of my control. )Yes, I know it would have been odd to homeschool remotely – him at his dad’s but with me facilitating learning. But that would have worked, in fact I’m confident we would have slam dunked it, if it had been what he wanted and needed. It’s just that it wasn’t. It’s just that it was hard for me to hear that at first.

When I wrote the priorities, consent took up more of the bandwidth than it had in the past, though I could see it was there all along when I wrote the original mamafesto when he was six. It just wasn’t named quite as directly – it was emergent curriculum, choice, opting in. Looking through a 2020 teen parenting lens, consent rose to the surface. As I rewrote, I was thinking about how he needed to have autonomy in body and mind in the learning context. Keep those outside influences at bay and let him decide for himself, follow his own compass. But I was still a little bit holding onto some need for control over his learning in that way we have as parents of operating from a blind spot. The cliché about practicing what we preach. The cliché about 2020 and hindsight. Again.

So I’m leaving the awkward, tense conversations in my private journal, with this mile marker placed here from my somewhat expanded perspective of months. A reminder, an honest reckoning with yet another thing that was tough about the past year.

~

Quotable Quotes of Q:

“Flight was not why things evolved feathers… feathers were why things evolved flight.”

“When overwhelmed thinking about covid, I distract myself. Like, I think about how to write pi in binary.”

“An Illithids mindflayer is like a dementor possessing Davy Jones, but purple.”

Literature

We spent time in Rohan this month, and by the time we ended the month were reading the Appendices.

Q read the Monkey Wrench Gang this month.

We discussed the pronunciation of pronunciation.

One evening I just sat for a while, listening to the sound of popcorn popping upstairs, and the pages of Calvin and Hobbes turning on the other end of the video call.

Math

“Volume of a warbler” and “how many warblers on earth?” Oh, the things you google. These were inquiries during Quinn’s quest to remix Vi Hart’s binary tree of birds – her turducken-en-ducken-en…. but with 13 birds nested inside each other bird, in a long list of types of birds.

Which brought him to the question, “How many birds in the world?” So he could compare to how many in this thirteen-to the eighteen factorial power bird stuffing scheme. The 200 billion birds in the world seems like a big number, however, >121 quintillion is way bigger!

He took this ridiculously high numbers of birds even higher and google calculator eventually returned the result, “Infinity,” and he was laughing so hard at breaking google again.

Honorable mention to, “how many square feet is New York City?” and an ensuing discussion of area codes.

Nature

He was visited by a grouse in the pile of firewood he has been using a splitting maul to help create. He also used the hatchet to strip small branches off limbs, and off one cedar sapling they used to make a railing. He helped replace deck boards and build a deck addition. The seeds from Sam’s garden box were beginning to sprout – he described the sunflowers “busting out” of their seeds, and the pea “vines” that were starting to lengthen and reach out curling tendrils. He saw the comet on a few different nights, explaining to me the best time to see it at sunset and how the remaining light on one side of the sky made it shine brighter against its darker corner of the sky.

 

 

More dinos

This is Q’s giddy anticipation the night he unveiled his plans for what we would do after we finished reading the appendices.

He recreated the dinosaur game he made up on graph paper where I had to build my own Jurassic park role-play style, in a google sheets version for us to play together remotely!

Another memorable quote for the month came a few days later, “oh my god, oh my god, I’m so excited about this dinosaur game.” And we did start in before the end of this month, by the end of which I had collected three different ceratopsians and some stegosauruses.

Oh, the dinos you’ll know!

 

~thankful thursday~ seed bank

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11/5/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

I have kept a gratitude journal for much of 2020. It helps me in November, and this year I needed help in all the other months. I was also looking ahead with some awareness that this November might not be my finest hour either, and thought of it as an investment, but it’s not really money in the bank I’m picturing. More like a seed bank, like I was putting away seeds from the flowers I grew this summer, knowing I would need to have the memory of past flowers and the hope of future flowers tucked in a safe place in order to get through the flowerless days. In July I recognized this, and was grateful for, “this garden of gratitude I am growing, one which will be able to be visited in November and harvested from when I may not have enough of what is in season.”

A few of the summer seeds I collected in my bank:

7-12

Hummingbird having a snack of crocosmia while the sprinkler was watering the terrace garden, and then resting on the flower stem to have a little shower before taking off again.

8-27

Pulled over on Otter Crest Loop overlook and took pictures of the beautiful blue ocean, trees, rocks, Queen Anne’s lace. Whales came by to say hello.

9-1

The smell of fifty pounds of beautiful peaches ripening in the kitchen.

9-3

Egrets wading in the bay as we drove the bay road home for date night pizza night. Their reflections in the blue, blue water (so nice and sunny) were just stunning.

9-5

Having enough energy to chop two ziplock bags of peppers for the freezer and can nine pints of fresh chopped heirloom tomatoes in rainbow colors, the urgent care variety I salvaged from the compost bin at market. One green zebra tomato (with one tiny squashed shoulder) the size of my head filled two pints with one more chopped piece leftover… one pink damsel that was about the same size (with one hole poked in it from another stem)! By tomorrow these would have been slumping with mold. Some beautiful vegetables are so vulnerable that it defies all pragmatism to try to bring them home, but I do it anyway, to honor the farming wrought, against all pragmatism, to bring them into being.

9-17

Walk on the beach- a fun egg case, a new nudibranch, and the whole place to myself since I arrived at dawn in the fog. Just what I needed.

Date night. Always.

11-5 today:

Speaking of date night, it is date night once again… modified for the times we inhabit, but we still observe this weekly tradition. I am grateful my love didn’t look at my tenderness, my propensity to fall to pieces, and decide I was too vulnerable, grateful that he defied all pragmatism and brought me home anyway. Grateful for the gratitude seed bank today.

11/6/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

I am grateful for the tiny bird that visited my window this morning, when the sun came out (grateful for the sun). I did not think I would get any photos but this little guy really wanted to check out what was going on in our living room, and kept lurking long enough for camera retrieval, and even after Lisa kitty wandered over and settled herself down to watch the nature channel. (The bird did decide to depart when Bart panther-pounced up beside Lisa.)

I am no birder, but my Sibley guide said it might be a Ruby-crowned kinglet. They would like our spruce trees, and would be coming down out of the treetops this time of year to migrate, possibly. When I first saw this bird’s head, I thought it could have bashed its head on the window and been bleeding. No, it was a little more red violet than red, so maybe it had smashed one of my last few raspberries on his head (DIY raspberry beret?) and finally I got a good enough look to realize it was the actual color of the feathers. (Parsimony would have helped me here.)

I later discovered that the scientific name of this little bird is Regulus calendula, and, of course this magical creature would be named after a star and a flower. Not just any star… the first schooner bunk I slept in on my first semester at sea was also named Regulus. And not just any flower… calendula, one of the only things still blooming in my flower pots in November, a botanical healer, an edible salad topping, and of which quinn asked me as a toddler, “are you going to put calend-u-willa on that owie to feel it better?”

Basically, this little bird might as well have started singing to me, “you belong among the wildflowers, you belong on a boat out at sea, far away from your trouble and worry…”

So it was an easy choice today, though happy nacho day to those celebrating (we’re out of avocados, such bad form! We all know I will be grateful for nachos other days this month!)

11/7/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

I am grateful that a woman can hold the office of the vice president of this country, and not just in theory anymore, but in reality.

What it’s like for me personally, is I’m just now realizing how much it matters to me. I have been thinking for a while, like since maybe a little over four years ago, of how it matters to little girls everywhere, watching, listening, absorbing, that women be trusted with positions of power, but it hit me tonight that, as Quinn pointed out to me one time, I was once a girl. Tonight, hearing our Vice President-elect say, “I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” was the moment I could no longer hold back tears. The other thing this election outcome is like, for me personally, is like the time when I was leaving an abusive relationship and I was having a panic attack that I had almost forgotten to get some of his tools out of the vehicle we had shared, and my guy friend who was helping me pack my U-haul told me, “MB, someday, someone is going to say nice things to you.”

I’m getting pretty used to the person I’m married to saying nice things to me all the time, I mean it’s pretty relentless, all the nice things he says, and does. Also, when I showed up wildly unprepared for cold rain and gusting wind at farmer’s market today (pretty sure I’m not the only one with some of my ducks not in a row this week), I was so grateful for his XL hooded sweatshirt (and the fishing community who keeps him supplied with F/V swag from all the boats he works so hard to build and repair every day) stowed in the back of the car, which nested nicely atop my size M sweatshirt and kept me warm for the whole day.

I am grateful to be able to look forward to having a president very soon who, when he speaks, will not trigger memories of years of emotional abuse. A nice aside is that the President-elect is the very guy who wrote the legislation that enabled me to get a restraining order when I needed one. America, get ready, because someday soon, someone is going to say nice things to you.

11/8/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

I am grateful for the glorious weather today as my honey and I made our annual honey pilgrimage to obtain our four-gallon bucket of gold. I am grateful for the fully stocked chest freezer and pantry heading into the season of slow cookers and staying in. I am grateful for the way the god light was slanting through the conifers in the fog as we drove east, and for the colorful trees painting our journey into a rainbow road trip.

 

11/9/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

Today when I was waiting an extra long time for my grocery order, I was grateful I had brought along my book. I am grateful for the ability to order groceries from home and pick them up outside the store, and for the energetic youth who cheerfully hoisted two cubic yards of potting soil into my trunk, saying he does the same to help his grandmother, who also likes to garden. I’m grateful the store gave me a discount I didn’t ask for, just because I had to wait; I basically got paid to read fifty delicious pages. I am so grateful, in case I haven’t said it yet this year, for good books. Sometimes, they take me right out of myself, and sometimes they pour me right back in. I have leaned on them hard this year for both of these essential services.

 

11/10/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

There are days when writing a gratitude post is like plucking words from the air as easily as picking raspberries off the vines in the vase on my kitchen table. Even though I spent part of my day today studying word-crafting, tonight I am in percolating, not plucking mode.

I do have one gratitude I’ve been tucking away for a day when I was otherwise undecided. I have been having a much easier time waking up in the morning this November, having finally bought myself a full-spectrum light near the end of October. I’ve suspected myself to be a SAD puppy for a lot of years now, so I’m not sure why this took me so long. I’m grateful that when I mentioned it, my husband was also wondering why we didn’t already have one, and happily turned it on for me the first few mornings, during his usual wake-up (yes, I’m a grown-ass woman who has trouble waking up before dawn without help). The thing is, just a week or two in, I’m already awake enough to turn it on for myself, and more importantly, I don’t feel like rotten black death inside for the first hour of the day as my body rejects it’s-still-night-time like a mismatched organ. I don’t know what wizardry this is, but I know this little light is better than any supplement has ever done by me. We call it my sun ball.

When I was buying it Rich supportively said he thought it would help us both, though he felt he may not be as affected by shortening daylight as I am because, he said, “I generate light.” Boy does he ever. (He meant welding but I mean how he lights up my life.)

 

11/11/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for and in awe of the connections… the unseen order of things… the cosmic consciousness. This may not make any sense to anyone else, and I’m okay with that. (I’m not taking this class for a grade!) I was told to “just obey it” yesterday when the wrong scene came to my mind during my writing workshop, and I spent ten minutes writing descriptive language about a scene I had no idea was connected to the piece I’m writing. Turns out it was so integrally connected, I spent the next twenty-four hours with wave after wave of profound revelations crashing over me. A significant breakthrough. In the earlier part of the class, when asked to explain why I was the most qualified person to write what I’m writing, I wrote why I’m the expert on mothering my son, including a sentence about the placenta that it still in a ziplock in the back of my freezer. Then today, as I was reading more of my book (my teacher is one of the authors), I came across a passage where she announced to her teen daughter that her placenta is still in the freezer. Shortly afterward, a rainbow came pouring across the page as the low and lazy November sun streamed in through the glass block window.

In other literary news, Rich and I discussed this morning what constitutes a nacho (singular). Grateful for November nacho nights, a pair of placentas, and rainbow connections.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ character building

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~5-23 to 6-23~

I feel like posting this one in journal format, the way I actually typed it into my word document… Each day in the life of a month in the life of a lifelong learner, day by day.

5-24

Quinn mowed their driveway and then said he spent “a long time” outside, picking dandelion greens for his guinea pigs. He said Squeaky will eat anything green, but Ms. B is a little more picky and her absolute favorite is dandelion greens. (Now that I am documenting this, after Ms. B’s passing, it stands out to me how particular his observations are of his guinea pigs’ eating habits and how attentive he is in tending to them.)

5-25

Quinn said he did not do any more mowing, but he did build a fire last night in the wood stove! He is also very into the electronics projects they have been doing, and is learning how to solder and connect up lots of detailed circuit board/resistors/connections. We are reading about Sam and Frodo traveling into Mordor, but then turning and passing through Ithilien with Gollum to go “the other way”.

Wednesday 5-27

Q seems rejuvenated somehow, rallying to end the school year strong, and showed up in a button down to our video call and stated a goal of getting all schoolwork done by the end of tomorrow. He is redoing where he needs to show work, etc.

He told me about how his factoring polynomials project (one he was procrastinating) “turned out to be my favorite assignment.” When I asked him to explain it to me (after having heard from his teacher about needing to redo and “show his work”), he said, out loud, without hesitation:

“To convert from x2 + bx + c to a(x+b)(x+c) find two numbers p and q where p+q=b and p times q equals c and those are going to be the b and c of your x2 + bx + c and p and q will be b and c in the a(x+b)(x+c)”

He just rattled that off verbally, that quote you just skimmed over because blah blah math blah, which leads me to believe he is able to grasp the concept and articulate it, whether he has showed his work or not.

But we did revisit the topic of showing one’s work, with the reasoning that the 99% of people who do not just see/know the answer, may appreciate him having the ability to walk them through/teach them the steps they should take (even if you don’t take them, Quinn!) Also, as he gets into more advanced math, he may at some point reach a threshold where he does actually need to put some of the math on paper to keep track, or be able to trade proofs among scholars.

Friday 5-29

Quinn is getting all caught up on school! He did two math assignments today. So proud of how hard he rallied. So grateful he will soon be done. But wow. DONE with seventh grade! He has been sending me photos of the electronics project. I have been hearing words such as “potentiometers, LED, PCB, circuit board, jacks, capacitors, resistors, transistors, diodes, switches….” during our chats.

5-31

On hangout with Quinn we began to read The Return of the King today. Our page numbers no longer match (his book 3 is from a different paperback edition) so we tried to do algebra to it, specifically to our page numbers to calculate the other’s page number based on whoever reads, where the reader left off, and where the listener should pick up next time.

6-3

We went to the Black Lives Matter protest and stood and marched.

painting by Hayden Sargent who some of my readers will know!

I am reminded of fourth grade Quinn with his peaceful protesting… just after Mrs. Schroeder assigned the MLK essay, and he would peacefully bring his drawing stuff even when I felt he should leave it home.

Lots of people turned out – marine science people, farmer’s market people, goldberry and family (she and Q waved at each other from a safe social distance) and so many young people. There was car honking and it felt good to be there…  I think he was glad to be there. His sign. His awesome sign.

6-4

Quinn had to do one more elective credit, and after talking it through with me he realized a really easy one would be the short presentation of “a new skill you’ve learned during quarantine” and he even had pictures of his electronics project ready to put into a presentation for it.

6-11

We watched a quetzalcoatlus you tube video Quinn found. Yay for paleontology!

6-14

Camp robber (gray jay named “Brad”) landed on Quinn’s hand!

6-16

Q set up a google meet to play D&D with Goldberry and Aragorn. Tonight at 5pm! Yesterday in our hangout he answered my question of what plans he had for the rest of Monday with “look forward to tomorrow!”

As we were planning our upcoming hike, I sent him photos of his last trip down to Drift Creek; snowman pants and river rock snowmen!

6-17

Hearing about how his D&D session went with friends. The electricity went out on him right in the middle! But it wasn’t out for long, and when he got back into the meet, the other two were there, and filled him in thoroughly on what had happened while he had been gone. There was a nearby town that a bunch of orcs had been attacking and there was “like a whole encampment of them,” so Goldberry’s character “went in and singlehandedly dealt with that, and then I came back in right as the boss orc came out. I was still level one because I missed all the experience points from that, so that only worked semi-well for me. So we defeated that orc, and then we went to the nearby town and hung out for a while, and apparently the blacksmith has a quest for us… that’s next time. Oh and I’m level two… and I also got my arm lopped off by the orc, but it’s growing back.”

“So when you say next time do you already have an idea when it will be?”

“Friday.”

6-18

Drift creek hike!

We had one conversation during our hike where Quinn shared some of his early memories. So much fun to hear what he remembers!

Draconis story details…

Our first egg, found in a rose bush, was glowing turquoise-green and looked like a seed, and we placed it in a nest of moss and hatched a Photosynthesim draconis we named Douglas Fircone. Doug for short. His power was absorbing sunlight and transmitting (through breathing green gas onto things) plant nutrition.

After we got to the river’s edge and started seeing crayfish, we found our next egg, a blue one that seemed like a fish egg, in a water erosion hole. This was an Aquarius draconis egg and it nested in river silt until hatching. We named this dragon Crayfish Ripple (Cray for short.)

Next, we found a bright red Volcanis draconis egg in a sinkhole, but the egg, which looked like it was made of obsidian, was not sinking. In a nest of oasis mud, we hatched Lavaspark Flameflow (nickname Lava).

Finally, we explosively hatched a never encountered dragon that could only be seen as a shadow or sometimes a bend in the light… We named the new species Lumenergescens draconis, and its name was Shimmer Shade.

Binary hand counting on the trail.

6-19

Reading Return of the King, he stopped me mid-paragraph to do the math on “a month of Mondays” and we realized a month of weeks is the same as a week of months, or 210 days, given that there are 30 days per month in the Shire calendar.

We stayed on our call for an extra half hour. I was a bit tearful, discussing how it’s the first day after a nice long day with him, and not knowing when it will happen again, it feels long. And I miss him.

But we also talked about how this time is shaping us and changing us, but that doesn’t have to be bad, in fact in our case, having to think about heavy things and having to make difficult choices is character building (Quinn laughed and referenced Calvin and Hobbes; “character building is painful”).

Which reminded me that I should add some Calvin to his next care package, as it is such comfort reading for him. I think we have two copies of one of the books anyway…

We ended our call on that note; holding onto the thought of using the energy of this time to become better humans. More strength, more empathy.

6-20

On Thursday I sent a 2-bag care package home with quinn including lots of food (white chocolate chip cookies, pancakes, chocolate covered acai snacks aka “deer poops”, popcorn made by his stepdad aka best popcorn ever, seaweed snacks, almonds, pasta, goldfish), a hexaflexagon I decorated for him with fractals and mathy art, some books (calvin, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah and Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi, as well as his D and D player’s handbook and a book of Oregon Fossils, and with my version of “Sam’s gardening box” that has so enamored him as we have read about it, and his set of rubik’s cubes and instruction book for solving. He got the 4 by 4 solved today for the first time and also found instructions in the book he hadn’t seen before about how to solve the orientation of the emblem, which had caused him much consternation with his 3 by 3 cube.

6-22

Sam’s gardening box is unleashed and brings renewal and abundance to the Shire during our reading and Quinn is content with this outcome.

6-23

The gardening box has been planted in a pot!

We realized Q is 13.333 repeating today when we signed off an evening call (we had not been able to do a noon call because his electricity was being worked on, but it was back on and he CALLED me on the phone and we had a bonus half hour to read and have some time together.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ black holes and parabolas

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~4-23 to 5-23~

Quadratic and executive functions

Executing school tasks took some additional remote mama support this month. He found the format of electives for school to be uninspiring. However, I talked him into doing one of the robotics options. Once he was convinced, he lit up while telling me the steps a robot would need to take to reach the Hogwarts kitchen from the front doors.

For language arts, Quinn was assigned to read The Outsiders but was putting it off. Once I found that out, I told him I thought he’d really like it (he was of course surprised I was familiar with the book), and encouraged him to read me the first paragraph. He grumpily obliged and discovered the teen male protagonist with green eyes and long hair. He came around quickly after that, read to me through chapter two, and read the entire rest of the book in just a few sittings.

Then there were quadratic functions. Quinn started caring deeply about parabolas as a freshly minted eleven-year-old, and has read an entire math curriculum through calculus in his spare time. He is not often thwarted by new math concepts, and had been quite self-sufficient learning quadratic functions, the math magic of the parabola, with only online lessons. However, two weeks before school ended, his teacher contacted me to let me know he was on his way to earning an incomplete in algebra. As usual, I only understood more about what happened in hindsight (2020) and it amounted to being stuck on one sub-concept, not seeing the obvious available ways to solve that (ask his teacher, ask me, consult textbook/video, google it) and just not doing it, or any of the following lessons. He stayed stuck and started blowing off everything, but then ended up caught up in a lie and that only added to his anxiety about the whole thing. Once I found out, we got him sorted out on completing the square, (we used khan academy and life of fred and fred is who ultimately got him there; by which I mean he was right back to doing it all in his head the instant he grasped it). I asked him afterwards if he felt relieved to not have to continue the lie, and I could see the relief written all over his face when he said “yes.”

He was overwhelmed and said he thinks about the pandemic even when he’s not thinking about it.

I wanted him to know I heard him: that he felt like no one was taking him seriously (because he has said “I can’t work under pandemic conditions.”  He did try to let me know he was struggling.

I am trying to coach him through handing in enough to earn a Pass when he feels like this, but it is hard when he is just seeing the pile and is stuck in overwhelm.

He did a programing in scratch assignment and a video tour of Iceland for his elective; in Iceland he enjoyed how they drill into magma to harvest energy. The morning after the teacher clued me in, I sent him the mp3 of his favorite song seven nation army and a ten minute meditation and he listened to both. We spent more time together on google hangouts just so I was “in the room” if he needed support. He watched a Smithsonian zoom about octopuses, something he had planned on attending prior to the math debacle. I liked watching him watch it and seeing his face light up at certain parts. I wanted him to do these other things that feed him, because we were also talking about the importance of self care in keeping up our ability to handle tasks. He is now also signed up for both dinosaur discoveries and ancient seas online camps. He had been hesitant on the dino camp because a) he already knows a lot about dinosaurs and b) he wasn’t sure the end of June would feel like enough time out of school, but in the end I told him there were 2 spots left and he wanted in. Then we did talk about the math concept, but it was sandwiched in between those lighter topics and our quality time (reading aloud). Maybe life is a little like a parabola, you have to get to the bottom of it at some point, but you can look forward to it going back up on the other side!

His paleontology camp community continued their zoom lecture series for camp alumni through May, and Quinn participated enthusiastically. He was proud because, “I asked a question!” He asked, if I understood correctly, about how they tell things about a prehistoric animal based on eggs; and got answers about how environment determines a lot about egg shape, whether an animal is aquatic or terrestrial, and where they place their eggs in order to keep them moist or from being submerged or dry. He is so quull!

He had a paleontology text flurry with his camp friends and they apparently have a conspiracy theory that, “all of the birds died in 1986 when Reagan killed them all and replaced them with spies. They are in league with the bourgeoisie.” A couple of the other camp friends consistently show up for the lectures. It is such a nice balance of getting to be nerdy and getting to be weird teens together.

The flavor of video calls this month – physics and fantasy

A friend mentioned she and her husband have been doing madlibs so I printed a dinosaur one for Quinn. It is logistically tricky to play games over hangouts so I take all good suggestions very seriously! Quinn then picked some out to do for me. Some of our favorites were, “What happens when a unicorn poops”, one about pizza, and another about how to hatch a dragon egg. We ended up with 3 new species of dragons; chartreuse dragons, butterbeer dragons, and flibberty-gibbet dragons.

During recent video calls we have continued to read Zero, do a daily logic puzzle, sometimes a vi hart video, and usually some talking and cat gazing.

Zero has been good fodder for discussion and vocabulary (new word: carom): Quantum leaps, general relativity, etc. It sends us on other tangents. One day we looked up Dr. Katie Bouman who photographed a black hole successfully in 2019, based on spinoff conversations from the book. Quinn’s imagination was quite stimulated, and I managed to convince him to speak one of his ramblings into a document using the speech-to-text function:

“First get two black holes, a star, a spaceship capable of moving at 90% of the speed of light and with a fuel cartridge big enough to hold a star in, and a very heavy object. Then get the star into the fuel cartridge of the spaceship (the spaceship must run on helium). Once you have a spaceship running on a star, connect your two black holes via 4D space-time Continuum breaking and attach one end of the wormhole that results to your spaceship and the other end to the very heavy object. now take your nearly light-speed wormhole with a very heavy object on the other end and wait 46 years because you will have messed up the space time continuum, you will have effectively ruined mathematics to the point where one year on one end of the wormhole is 2.3 years on the other end of the wormhole so after 46 years you go through the wormhole and bam you’ve gone back In time by almost 46 years. some problems are: 1. it is currently impossible apparently to define “very heavy object” in my sources. 2. it is currently impossible to go at 90% of the speed of light in one spaceship. 3. it is currently impossible to obtain a star let alone to stick it in the fuel cartridge of a spaceship. 4. it is currently impossible to collect two black holes and connect them via four dimensional space-time Continuum breaking. 5. it is currently impossible apparently for you to actually go back in time to the point where you are before your own birth and keep living on to infinity by traveling back in time infinitely and going forward in time infinitely after that so that you have infinite life-span at the time of your birth and live forever because your star even though it will last for like 8 million years is still finite so you can only become 8 millionish years old but hey, even then you are older than Yoda so…”

Tom Gauld

I also convinced him to share the document with me and he did, with the  note, “I’ve invited you to comment.” Well, thank you for inviting me!

My comment:

“I don’t know if you understand why I ask you to do things like this… and that is okay! I am thankful that you humor me, and do it when I ask. It may not seem like a big deal to you to be able to speak this kind of complicated thought in such an organized manner, but this is a skill not everyone has. It’s a skill I’d love for you to continue to nurture, and it’s a skill that I think will really help you build up your writing ability as well. Being able to speak a story or an essay is the same as being able to write it – if you use the right tools. I think the speech-to-text tool is potentially very useful for you and I hope it helps empower you to do more writing, more recording of the amazing ideas and stories and lines of thought that you have inside you, waiting to get out into the world. One day you may look back at these and really treasure them! I know I will.”

Upon finishing Zero, we discussed quintessence theory. As you do.

Then we got started on re-reading Fellowship of the Ring! The day before mother’s day, we read about when the nine leave Rivendell, and their fight with Caradhras, when they turn back and the men have to carry the hobbits through the snow, but Legolas can walk on top of the snow to bring hope back to all that the journey is one they can endure.

I end up reading most of the time, but since we both have copies of the trilogy, he has been reading to me as well.

When the fellowship were departing from Lothlorien and Galadriel gives them each a gift, Quinn became quite absorbed with the gardening box that Sam is presented. He brought it up several times thereafter, and it gave me an idea. I ordered a plain wooden box and some gray wood tint so I could make him one like the description in the book. I planned to mix some flower seeds into it for him so he could spread it out somewhere at his dad’s house to grow.

still trending: quokkas (mama attempts her first memes)

On mother’s day, I had a lovely extra visit with Quinn. He showed up at noon after sending me Sierpenski’s triangle mother’s day card, freshly showered, and wearing a button-down shirt. He dressed up for me.

We also started an email story where we each write one line and send it back and forth. It began, “Once there was a boy who lived in a land where the only things were a chain of islands and the ocean.” I’m excited to see where it takes us!

In other vocabulary news, I learned of Quinn’s pronunciation of onerous “one rus” and we both chuckled when he was reading aloud about a “biplane” in our logic puzzle which he mispronounced with a short i.

We like it when the logic puzzle is about particle accelerators and one of the researchers is named Dr. Quinn.

Subatomic particles

I listened to a nature news podcast and learned all about pions, and then Quinn and I discussed various subatomic particles, learned that we should call them elementary particles instead, and he is pretty into particle physics after our last book, but he wasn’t even aware of all the particles that have been named and identified… he particularly liked the ones named after pi and tau, of course. I think I fairly blew his mind when I told him that Ender’s Game had been written well before many of these had been discovered to exist. In 1985, electrons were still the smallest known particle, and I remember a big deal being made about quarks back in the mid 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_particle_discoveries

The podcast also talked about Galileo, so it was easy to convince him to listen.

Life skills

Quinn said he used the lawn mower to mow the yard so they could move their kayaks. It is a battery mower. Certified lawn mowing technician!

Music

Aragorn sent Quinn two guitar tracks he had recorded, and Quinn has added a drum track to them. So rad!

 

educational priorities ~ a mamafesto ~ 2020 remix

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Quinn recently attended a six-day online Dinosaur Discoveries camp and at the end earned the “Most Likely to Become Everyone’s Favorite College Professor” award. It launched a great conversation between Quinn and I about how online learning does not necessarily have to mean pushing a bunch of “submit” buttons to enable the instructors to assess his learning accomplishments. The instructors provided materials for him to immerse himself in, trusted that he was absorbing them, and then detected his absorption of said materials through conversations, group discussions, and other contributions (voluntarily written and presented). No grading or testing occurred. And yet, both Quinn and I felt the instructors had somehow managed to glean a lot about who he is as a learner and an individual simply through six days of connecting with him over meaningful curriculum, meaningful because it was chosen intentionally by Quinn.  As for the assessment of Quinn’s likelihood of becoming everyone’s favorite college professor, Quinn said, “I think it’s extremely accurate.”

In 2012, I sat down and wrote out my priorities for Quinn’s education, a valuable and worthwhile exercise that received a lot of positive feedback at that time, and that I have returned to at times when I’ve felt a need to check the calibration of my compass concerning Quinn’s education. Each time I’ve returned, I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well that list concerning my going-into-kindergarten five-year-old still fit, say, when he was transitioning from second grade at our living school to third grade in the public school, or when he was moving from there up into the middle school. These transition points pushed me to revisit my priorities for Quinn’s education more than the years in between, but when I did so, I found that what I valued for him at the beginning of his school years are the things I still value, and each time, it has helped me orient my efforts in advocating for his learning needs in each context in ways that aligned with those values.

2020 is a different year in every way, and it is exceptionally different in terms of how education is being and will be carried out. Quinn finished seventh grade pushing buttons on a computer screen, disconnected from his teachers and peers, isolating himself at his dad’s house in the woods. However, for the month it took for the school to transition into distance learning mode, he had a fresh chance to direct his own learning, and it was an oasis between the overscheduled school year to that point, and the button-pushing specter of school on a laptop that limped across the finish line. As we envision what his eighth grade year will be like, his last year before high school, it has been on my mind to revisit the priority list yet again. (Click here to read the original post.) With years of additional insights into how Quinn learns, I decided it would be a good time to do a fresh rewrite, although once again my revisit reconfirmed that everything on the list still resonates for me. The first priority, however, is the one that stopped me in my tracks this time: “Safety- A learning environment where physical safety is a no-brainer.” This cannot possibly be assured this coming school year with any physical presence in the school building. Though the language of that priority once centered around booster seats and sunscreen, the language of school safety has grotesquely mutated into how we can carry out active-shooter drills during a pandemic. Safety will always remain priority number one, and hence, this year will look very different from other recent years while Quinn has attended public school.

Still, I wanted to write this 2020 version from a place of naming what we want to move towards, vs. what we want to move away from. This is how I approached it in 2012 when I was feeling a visceral aversion to Quinn attending public school while he still needed quite a lot of social emotional support a good portion of the time. At that time, I tried to hone in on articulating the goals I have for his learning environment rather than just describing the outcomes I wanted to avoid; instead of focusing on how likely a differently-wired kindergartener is to be misunderstood in public school, I focused on working towards an organic learning environment where choice is central, the whole child is nourished. In 2020 I want to focus less on COVID-19 risk and more on crafting the best learning options for him given the circumstances. Still striving for an organic learning environment where choice is central, the whole person is nourished. The long-term goal is still and always a thriving lifelong learner.

Many things have changed in eight years, but so much has stayed the same. Most of what changed in this list is an organization of the original 12 separate items into 3 categories they seemed to gather into naturally: safety, connection, and self-direction. A disclaimer I would attach to this and all posts of mine: this is a description of my own values and is intended only as a means of articulating them for myself; if they resonate for you, that is a pleasant outcome we can enjoy, and if they do not, feel free not to let them slow you down as you scroll on by.

~Educational Priorities~

As Quinn’s mama my priorities for his educational experience are to surround him with nurturing environments and people and to protect and feed his love of learning. While I do not distinguish between learning and the rest of life, as I believe the two are inextricably linked, I will do my best to list my priorities for how I believe Quinn can best be supported so that he may thrive as a lifelong learner. I believe this will be achieved by prioritizing:

1. Safety

A learning environment where physical safety is a no-brainer. As drastically different as the content of this paragraph may be in 2020 than it was in 2012, the first sentence is the same first sentence. Physical needs must be met before learning needs can be fully realized. At Our Living School, we repeated a mantra concerning safety, “Our bodies are safe, our thoughts are safe, our feelings are safe, our work is safe,” and this is still a useful list.

Physical safety: Quinn’s physical safety is secured in his learning environment to enable him to focus on learning. The physical safety of educators must also be paramount. The presence of my learner in a school is possible only when teacher health and safety, and the health and safety of the families of those teachers, and the health and safety of other students and their families, can be ensured.

Mental safety: Quinn is in an environment where he can express his thoughts freely and knows his learning needs will be respected and supported.

Emotional safety: Quinn is able to feel, express, and care for his feelings.

Work safety: Whether it is what he was building out of blocks at five, or a research project he is getting ready to present at thirteen, the integrity of Quinn’s work will be honored.

2.Connection

I believe that a positive learning environment for Quinn will flourish when it grows from strong roots of connection and belonging. Several of the 2012 priorities focused on specific connections; between student and teacher, parent and teacher, student and peers, student and others of all ages. In 2020 I can see that these one-to-one connections are impossible to extricate from the web of community surrounding a learner, and while these individual bonds may stand out from the web when highlighting learning priorities, they all perform their roles in the best ways when the whole web is strong and stable. Strong connections will help Quinn develop empathy and compassion, and a realistic understanding of others’ realities. They will also help him self-reflect through relationship with others, and to continue to build healthy relationship skills.

Student-teacher connection: A bond between student and teacher ensures priority #1 through open communication and positive regard of one another. From connection flows the sense of nurturing, unconditional positive regard, and feeling of equal dignity that all humans deserve and require in order to do their best learning. I believe safety and equity for all other students is necessary for Quinn to experience the benefits of a connection to any teacher. If he can see that his peers of all identities and abilities are all being treated with that positive regard, then he will be able to trust that lighthouse when its beam is directed towards him.

Student-teacher-parent connection: Open channels of communication among those involved in Quinn’s learning endeavors allow for his strengths and areas needing extra support to be known so that all involved are attuned to his unique learning style. Parental involvement in learning is ongoing and meaningful.

Student-peer connection: The stronger the connections between Quinn and his learning community, the greater sense of belonging he will experience. Quinn feels ownership of his school as a place that is Home to him, with a positive sense of caring for his fellow students, who in turn care for him as part of their community. Values are instilled by the teachers towards this end, and extend outward to include his greater community, in which his school is an active participant. These values of community care are best realized by distance learning in 2020, protecting all learners and teachers, and finding creative ways to still foster belonging. Peer connections may take the form of online paleontology discussions and online D&D gaming sessions this year.

Connection to others of all ages: Quinn is connected with older teens and young adults who have skills he has yet to acquire to look up to, admire, and imitate, and kids who are younger, to keep things infused with imagination and wonder. He has involvement with people of all ages from the surrounding community, because the real world is a place where people of all ages interact, to everyone’s great good fortune. In 2020 we’ll have less in person interaction to be sure, but this will be good to keep in mind as a guiding principle, that while peer interactions are very important to developing teens, interactions with others of all ages matter as well, even if they have to be emails and video calls for a time. Grammy and Grampy, Mario and Luigi, I’m looking at you!

3. Self-Direction (trust)

The rest of the 2012 priorities group themselves comfortably under this heading. In 2012 I wrote about a whole-child approach, an emergent curriculum, a Yes environment with emphasis on play, developing an internal moral compass, and nurturing an intrinsic motivation to learn. In conversation with my teen about what works and does not work about schooling for him, we keep circling back to the need for choice. I want to strive towards a learning situation that prioritizes self-direction for the learner. (The heading contains parenthetical trust, because this path requires a large amount of it on the part of a parent supporting the self-directed learning journey of their youth.)

Whole-child or whole-teen approach: In my worldview, children come into the world as fully intact beings, destined to grow into their innate competence, as well as prosocial beings whose default desire is to cooperate, belong, and get along. Other worldviews exist in which children are born deficient or damaged, needing to be filled with knowledge and morals through a hierarchical top-down approach. My worldview encourages deep trust in the child’s inevitable trajectory towards competence, while the opposing one often requires proof through standardized testing or other means that they have reached competence.

I like a phrase coined by Marji Zintz that says, “attribute to children the best possible motive consistent with the facts.” Giving kids the benefit of the doubt in their intentions and abilities empowers them to grow into their competence.

Whole-child or whole-teen approaches to learning must acknowledge the following: Academics, while held at high priority, do not eclipse other important lessons. Some of the lessons/skills I value most, in no particular order, are:

  • social/emotional skills
  • healthy bodies
  • mindfulness practices
  • self-confidence
  • compassion
  • writing
  • relationship skills
  • empathy
  • communication
  • movement
  • sustainability
  • fine art
  • creative writing
  • world culture
  • cooking
  • sports
  • drama
  • reading
  • conflict resolution
  • scientific reasoning
  • practical life skills (everything from gardening to making things to voting)
  • being a citizen in a democracy
  • critical thinking
  • math
  • social justice
  • music
  • community-mindedness

Many of Quinn’s skills will be honed at home, e.g. woodworking with dada or sewing with mama, and at private (dance/music/art/sports/karate) lessons or through outside-of-school classes, so I apply this concept to Life in General as well as educational goals.)

binary hand-counting in the wilderness

Self-directed learning: I referred to this as emergent curriculum in 2012, while in 2020 the term self-direction feels more resonant for the same set of ideals around choice, maybe because it emphasizes his agency in bringing about what emerges. Quinn is able to learn what he is drawn to, and the purpose of teacher guidance is to help him create meaning for himself about what he learns. He is able to approach each component of academics as he is ready for it, in a way that he can absorb it efficiently because it’s meaningful to him. He has the freedom to opt in or out of lessons he feels compelled or uncompelled by, and there is plenty of enriching material for him to engage with and be challenged. Further, the lessons offered are set at a level that is most likely to compel him, given that they are based on his/the student body’s emerging interests/intrigues/questions/thoughts/votes. He sets his own balance of autonomous learning time to cooperative group learning. Quinn’s preparations for his life/career goals (college, trades, conservatory, world travel or whatever they may be) are in his own hands and he is confident in his ability to craft his own educational curriculum, one that will land him squarely where he desires to be, wearing a set of wings to take him far beyond.

Consent: As mama of a young man, I see it as one of my most important roles in his learning to make sure he is aware and competent around the concept of consent. By honoring Quinn’s integrity, boundaries, and self-direction in his learning, I am modeling consent. If Quinn’s stance on a given subject or learning objective is no, it means no. Often choice is seen as something a teacher “allows” a learner, but that still creates a top-down dynamic which, instead of preserving choices, in fact limits them; if one of the available options is not “no”, the choice is not freely chosen. There is an illusion of choice that is created when someone says, “I will let you choose” but then the power rests with the person “letting,” not with the person doing the choosing. Forcing someone to learn, to press the “submit” button, is one way that consent is overridden in young people routinely, and I strongly suspect it contributes to a culture where consent is undervalued. Where students experience teaching as something to be done to them, they learn not to honor their own signals, but instead become resigned to others’ demands on them. Instead, by being clear on his boundaries, Quinn is learning where he ends and other people begin, and not just knowing about it in theory, but practicing and embodying consent.

Yes Environment: Yes means yes! A Yes Environment means that opportunities, space and materials are available to him whenever he takes initiative to express and explore. When he reveals an interest, the tools and materials he needs to follow that line of inquiry appear in a timely manner so he can continue and take it as far as he wants, until he is satiated. If he is engrossed in dinosaurs today (/this week/this decade), books and activities (games, videos, camps, virtual museum tours, ecology simulations…) show up in following days based on that theme and are strewn in his path for him to gobble up. His teacher’s role is to observe what is sparking his interest and tend the flame, requiring an individualized approach and attentive observation. This is best achieved in small class sizes where curriculum can flex and adapt. Instead of “no” stance on deviations, a “how can we…?” approach is the default. A Yes environment also provides structured and unstructured time and space to play. Play is of extreme importance to learning, and not separate from learning. Play is learning. Beyond K-12, Quinn is encouraged and supported in his life goals and help is always available to guide him in the right direction to meet them.

Internal Moral Compass: Quinn gets to grapple with right and wrong based on his own inner knowing, as he practices and calibrates his internal compass. He receives lots of guidance, information, and suggestions to help him navigate territory that is new for him, but never force, coercion or bribery, rewards or punishments. In areas including but not limited to consent, it is increasingly important for him to make morally right choices when nobody is around to police him or direct him in the right decision. He will do that if he has been exercising this muscle all along and his moral compass is well-calibrated and strong.

Intrinsic Motivation to Learn: His desire to learn comes from within, and that is honored in a way that maintains its integrity within rather than pulling it outside of him and replacing it with an external stimulus. Rewards and punishments are avoided in order to protect this intrinsic motivation to learn. Self-reflection around daily experiences, triumphs and disappointments will hold more meaning than grades, test scores, diagnoses, labels.

It is my belief that by prioritizing these values in Quinn’s education, Quinn will be set up to lead a fulfilling life. He will know himself well, always having been aligned with his own internal motivators, conscience, and self-knowledge. He will have confidence that he can achieve whatever he sets out to do, and will have obtained skills and knowledge that are required for that journey. He will know what it is like to be surrounded by supportive, encouraging people, and will recognize them in society. He will be attracted to workplaces with inclusive atmospheres and friendships featuring positive regard and nurturing. He will be unwilling to tolerate injustice because of his intimate experience of participating in a compassionate, justice-promoting community. He will know how to be respectful as well as to live in a way that inspires respect. He will know how to be flexible, how to think critically and creatively, and how to navigate real world situations because the real world is the place he will always have dwelled. He will be fully competent in making choices, as self-direction has been a key component of his entire educational experience- he will know that life is made up of choices, and he will be empowered to make them. These approaches to Quinn’s education will produce a strong, capable, caring, well-rounded, enthusiastic, empowered, joyful human being.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ the morphometrics of distance learning

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~3-23 to 4-23~

Quull School

At the end of March we started what we called Quull School, a self-directed version of the supplemental learning of the school district. I did show Quinn the lists of projects and learning tools from the school, but after a glance at it, he decided his focus would be on his own pursuits, and I supported him on that. By design, the school’s supplemental learning could not delve into new territory beyond what the students have already learned, as not all students had gained access by just a couple of weeks into the stay-at-home order. The IT personnel of the school had been delivering chrome books and the bus drivers had been delivering supplemental learning packets along with lunches, but it would be a few more weeks until Distance Learning For All could be implemented, new material could be provided, or grades could be back in play. I support the equity of this, and at the same time, I would not require Quinn to review topics he already knows, as that is a particularly painful form of torture to kids with his neural wiring.

We launched Quull School with a game of scattergories. I had him come up with the categories based on areas of learning he would like to dive into more, so we ended up with categories of Music, Programming, Math, Periodic Table, Dinosaurs, Marsupials, and Mythology and played several rounds. For the letter E, I recalled Eoraptor from Quinn’s days of pre-reading when I would draw dinosaurs starting with each letter of the alphabet for him to color, along with the letter. When I told him about that phase of his learning career, he did not remember, so I showed him the sketchbook from that era. We discussed what would work for planning and reflecting on the learning he would be doing, and he decided on a few organizational tools and accountability measures. We planned an extra hangout later in the afternoon each day of Quull School to touch base on how his school day went. I walked him through using google calendar for initiating the meeting, which he called “school with mama.” No time like the present to acquire these extremely relevant skills; like so many life skills, he and I are learning concurrently.

I saw an example of a basic planner where each day of the week had two boxes: 1. the plan and 2. what I did. I showed it to him as a potential idea for how to track his learning goals and progress. From here, he developed his own Quull school log/table in a google doc; it started the same way with the plan/what I did (reflection) and for that first day, his entries were “make a plan” and “made a plan.” His resulting schedule slides ultimately ended up several steps more detailed than the original example. An extra slide contained his list of ideas in case of days when he wasn’t sure what he felt like learning: Math, Electronics, Music, Computer Programming, Italian, Chemistry.

As for the content of the schedule, it started filling in rapidly. Quinn’s paleontology camp director set up Paleontology lectures on zoom for every Tuesday and Thursday; Q agreed to write a paragraph summary of each one, to keep his writing skills sharp. He also spent a fair amount of time learning more computer programming on khan academy. He had been chipping away at the html section, having finished animation in javascript, but now he has moved deeper into advanced javascript because “I want to really start making games.” I helped him set up to use zoom for his paleontology lectures. I can’t help but notice that Quull school is allowing us the opportunity to actively tackle some big executive functioning skills that don’t easily fit into the normal schedule of school and life.

screensharing: check.

Geometric morphometrics

After his first zoom lecture he told me about geometric morphometrics, which he explained very eloquently and I recorded on my audio recorder. I know he found that area of study quite intriguing – math plus fossils. Quinn was munching on cherries on the hangout, or I bet he would have said a lot more!

“If you take two faces, like yours and mine, and you compare segments of them, like say between nose and earlobes and chin, for example, uh, then the overall shape formed by that is going to be different for you than for me,” said Quinn.

I said, “Ok and so you could go by the length of the segments or you could go by the area or the volume or other geometry… So then if you find a new fossil of us, of our group of beings, then you measure it and you can kind of place it in sort of the timeline of age? And or gender, or whatever it is that you’re able to find out? Uh, that is awesome. That sounds really Quinn-like, like a Quinn thing.”

“What’s just morphometrics?” he asked.

“I guess it would just be comparing without the geometry of it, just comparing features… hmm, so morphology is like the shape of things, like when I do parasitology there are different worms that I identify. I can identify them by genetics but a lot of times I do it by morphology which means I’m looking for certain features like the shape of the mouth or suckers or spines or things that a parasite can have. But just descriptively instead of measured. So presence or absence of a spine is not geometric morphometrics – morphology is what I’ve always called that. -metrics by definition is measuring, so morphometrics is maybe measuring the lengths of the features but not necessarily calculating the geometry in terms of angles and area and volume… of the snout or whatever. That’s a really cool topic. I could see you getting into that.”

Quinn’s paleontology lecture summaries contain some real gems of wisdom:

3/31/2020

Geometric morphology is where you take a series of points on a subject and only look at them, and do the same for a different subject, then compare the shape or the distance between certain points and see how, say, some animal’s shoulders get broader as it ages or that in that species, the females have smaller feet than the males, or something like that. Also, as a side note, make sure to take at least one or two classes on public speaking and presenting and other things like that. The last thing that I learned is that sometimes, political arguments between countries can block off certain areas to fossil hunting.

4/2/2020

Elytra are the wings on the inside of a beetle’s husk, folding into the shell when they stop flying and land. Also, here are some tips for doing destructive analysis if you have low sample size: do some other destructive analysis on a different fossil type that has higher sample size and keep doing it as practice until you are sure that you will not only do the destructive analysis correctly and not mess it up and that you will gain valuable knowledge from the research.

4/7/2020

Hippidion was an ice age horse that scientists are pretty sure had a trunk because of how long the nasal passages are on the skull. Also, some hooved animals that are ice age and older had three toes and some even had five toes extending off of their hooves. These are believed by some to be proto-hooves that later evolved into the one and two “digit” hooves of modern animals. Another thing is that sometimes there can be things that conflict with everything that you have studied and learned thus far, and if this happens just know that there are a lot of things we haven’t learned yet even on well studied subjects. Also, side note: never discount data just because you don’t like it or because it conflicts with what you found in your studies.

4/9/2020

There are many different types of cells in the brain and they all have very different functions. Four specific types are trained to let loose certain hormones in the brain like fear.

4/14/2020

Networking can help get you into the job you want. Also, just a note think outside the box if/when you are getting fossils out. Some weird things can be useful.

4/16/2020

Antivenom comes from mixing the venom of different snakes and injecting enough to be noticeable by the immune system of, but not deadly to, sheep. Then you collect the antibodies made by the sheep, and mix them together. Side note: if there is no job that matches the thing you want to do, make the job up, because then not only will you get to do what you want, but it makes space for more of those below you in the ranking of the business as well.

4/21/2020

If you are trying to get a job as a federal worker, make sure you did everything right (i.e. your resume is PERFECT), otherwise you won’t usually get the job. And if something says “PHD preferred” treat it as “PHD required”, because it probably basically is. Another thing, make sure to never turn down any math classes for science careers, because it might be useful.

4/23/2020

Science is not a good subject to frontload on, because it will be painful to go through as you go through the classes you picked for science. Also, try visiting different universities to narrow down which one you want to go to, but don’t go out of your way and spend $200 to go visit one thing.

In-person paleontology camp has been canceled for 2020, but online camps are being invented. I am so thankful Quinn is already hooked into such a cool paleontology community and grateful for the opportunity he has had to immerse a little more in learning on a favorite subject.

Distance learning for all

Quinn had a bit of an emotional response to the idea of school starting up online. He said, “there is a pandemic going on and if they think I am just going to do school, they’re wrong.” Distance learning for all started April 15th, and part of the resistance was, I knew, not knowing what it would really entail. The arrangements were: two half hour sessions with their homeroom teacher per week, with teachers available by appointment for other time slots for additional help. Assignments and quizzes were administered through google classroom… periods 1 and 2 released the week’s assigned work on Mondays (Language arts social studies), 3 and 4 on Tuesday (PE and band) and 5-6-7 on Wednesday (algebra, video production, science) and so he had a week to turn in the work for each class. He ultimately ended up being much more flexible, and it was a nice enough format so he could plan his time how it works for him, not be expected to be in a seat from 8:05 to 3:05 each day and tune into certain classes at specific times (he could still attend his paleontology zooms, and so on). The chance to virtually see some of his peeps for homeroom was nice (but with no pressure to – live classes could not be graded since they can’t ensure all kids can attend.) For his elective, there was a list of projects to choose from, and he chose some of the robotics-related ones first.

On days when he had trouble bringing himself to do school work (and these were not rare) I reminded Quinn to prioritize self care. That YES, we are in the middle of a pandemic and sometimes we won’t feel resilient enough to do our work. I told him I feel like that, too. We have to get our work done in good moments between now and when the work is due, but it is okay to have down time when you just don’t do any work. I think he works through these intense emotions more quickly for the lack of push back from me. I try to reflect his feelings, rather than fighting them, and I think he feels validated and can let them go.

Electronics, pi, volume of sphere, wau, frequency and pitch, volume of an icosahedron, waves and particles, extra dimensions

The sweet spot of this month was, however, that space prior to the implementation of Distance Learning. Always self-directed lifelong learners at heart….

Quinn sent me a photo of his organized resistors for making a foot pedal for his dad’s guitar. “Electronics day 1” was his caption. This is something he’s interested in, without being interested in playing guitar, just for the electronics learning. So quull.

I showed him what I have been working on- measuring the diameters of arctic cod eggs, and how I measure them in ImageJ software, based on setting a scale in the program to a known number of pixels per millimeter taken by the microscope camera; then we went over how I go from diameter to volume of an egg (sphere) and he was all over that four-thirds-pi-r-cubed math. Then we reviewed where pi came from, and how round things have pi inherent in them, and you can measure the circumference and diameter of a bunch of objects and average that ratio and you will approach 3.14159… Then I taught him a few tricks with calculations in google sheets for this, after he measured a few circles. Tricks I learned in a basement computer lab as a college freshman; how to click and drag to fill a formula down a column. We also discussed how the average will approach pi more quickly/closely for larger objects because the measurement errors would be more diluted.

We watched Vi Hart’s the science and math of frequency and pitch together at his request. She zooms in on the sine waves of each overtone of her own voice in Audacity software (which Quinn has been using to record music with his dad) to help understand how we experience sound, including nuances like why a middle C is always the same note but sounds different coming from different instruments or voices; along with a playground swinging metaphor and her excellent logical thought progression, I think we both learned a lot.

Audible made it free to listen to Harry Potter book 1, so I emailed that link to Quinn, and then realized he can also listen to it in Italian! We’ll see if he takes me up on it.  “Harry Potter, il ragazzo che ha vissuto.”

On our hangouts, we verbally reviewed wau; I used the end of my bokchoy to do an ink print on a piece of paper and then measured the angles and we were happy to see the phi angles of Fibonacci. We worked on math doodles like netted spirals, impossible triangles, fractals, Pascal’s triangles, and tesselated fish.

We played Uno and made hexaflexagons together. Then he wanted to do a project where we each made a set of D&D dice out of paper, so we did. I had Quinn look up the formula for volume of an icosahedron, aka a 20-sided dice. Quinn also worked on creating his own version of the card game mentioned in Percy Jackson called Mythomagic.

I sent Q photos of hummingbird babies enjoying multiple dinners. I miss feeding him multiple dinners. Also this month, we hiked on the beach together for my birthday and saw squid eggs and a green worm.

Reading this month: Quinn read The Parrot’s Lament and shared with me something he learned about dolphins collaborating with humans in fishing endeavors. I began reading to him Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea by Charles Seife. Sometimes a word or phrase would get him to interrupt and reveal some secret knowledge – he knew all about triangular numbers, for instance. We learned new words like flinders. He seems not only undaunted, but energized, by the necessity of additional dimensions to scaffold string theory in order to bridge the seemingly infinite chasm between quantum physics and relativity.

~black and white wednesday~ abide

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“We live in a place where north meets south and many people are running for their lives, while many others rest easy with the embarrassments of privilege. Others still are trying to find a place in between, a place of honest living where they can abide themselves and one another without howling in the darkness. My way of finding a place in the world is to write one.”

~Barbara Kingsolver, Stealing Apples, from her book of collected essays Small Wonder

sitting with the uncomfortable truth of systemic racism

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I am not here to teach anyone anything about racism, just to get that out of the way up front. I’m still learning a lot about myself when it comes to this subject, and I’m consciously, actively pursuing this learning. I know enough now to know that I have a long way to go, and while I will share some resources I’ve been using to do this learning, I have not researched extensively enough to know if they are the best or most thorough or accurate resources. Still, I share in case others are looking for a place to start.

I am posting from inside that place of discomfort, where there is a tension between, “I am not the right person to talk about this,” and “I must not be silent about this.” By not being silent, I am not trying to be an ally on a performative level, only speaking out to paint a rosy picture of myself and all the wonderful things I am doing for the cause. For show. Words without actions. I am saying something about striving to become a better anti-racist, because saying nothing makes me complicit in this moment in time when the world is paying attention to exactly how alive racism is in this country, in our communities, and in ourselves. We are either racist, or we are anti-racist.

I do not want to simply re-share others’ words without making it clear that I personally am saying these words. I am outraged by injustices that continue to occur to Black Americans based on race. Also, at the same time and as another source of tension, my words are irrelevant in this conversation, and amplifying the voices of Black Americans is one thing that is needed, so we can hear about the effects of racism from the voices of Black Americans themselves. Using my own voice is helpful only so long as it does not drown out the voices who matter on this subject: voices of people of color. And even so, I am hearing calls for both silence and non-silence by the Black voices I am turning up in my feed, and I have felt paralyzed about how to show up and show my support without making it about me, without being performative, without diluting Black voices, but also without being silent.

In an extremely low-risk setting, (minus the coronavirus concerns), Quinn and I marched in a local protest, where we had no real fear of violence or retaliation by law enforcement to our chants, from behind our masks, of “Black lives matter.” I want to be careful not to believe now that I’ve done this one action, that I have now done my part to end racism. Anti-racism is going to be a lifelong practice, and most of it will go on behind the scenes, in my own insides, where I have to find a way to stay in this zone of discomfort, knowing I can’t fix it, knowing it’s in me even though I reject it, knowing that I have benefited from it and finding a way to get curious about what racism still looks like in my own heart. My place in the conversation is primarily one of listening. Noticing when I feel defensive, taking that as a signal of where my garden has some weeds I need to pull. Digging in deeper. (Also, signing petitions for justice, emailing people in positions of power, showing up in my community, donating to organizations helping people of color.)

I have believed my whole life that I was not racist. Growing up, it was because we attended school with a Black family, The Walkers. My brothers and I each shared a classroom with one of the Walker boys, and their Dad was the baseball coach. We were definitely not racist because they were our friends.

I remember learning that the church I grew up in, the Free Methodist church, was founded in 1860 (and named “Free”) because their breakaway sect from the Methodist denomination was anti-slavery, and because they refused to charge a fee for sitting in pews, as this would exclude the poor. Despite this inclusive beginning, among the congregation I belonged to over a century later I heard many overtly racist attitudes verbalized, when such matters as interracial marriage arose, say, because someone’s daughter or son-in-law was Black. I heard how someone, “had no problem with Black people,” just so long as they didn’t mix in marriage with whites. It took a long time before I thought about how being anti-slavery as a denomination didn’t necessarily mean our church was welcoming to Black members, or actively fighting racism. I had learned about slavery in school, and knew it was wrong, and being on the right side of that issue was comfortable.

I nodded my head in agreement in 1992 when En Vogue played on the radio, “free your mind, and the rest will follow, be color blind, don’t be so shallow.” The next year Michael W. Smith, my favorite contemporary Christian musician, really got me on board with being color blind:

There’s not a world of difference

Out in the world tonight

Between this world of people

Red, Yellow, Black and White

But instead of riding a rainbow of love

We still are fighting with prejudice gloves

Of anger

With something to claim

But nothing to gain so

Why can’t we be color blind

You know we should

Be living together

And we’d find a reason and rhyme

I know we would

Cause we could see better

If we could be color blind

Being color blind was comfortable, because it meant that we were unable to see differences like skin color. The problem is, if we can’t see them, we can’t celebrate them, nor can we recognize how they are used as an excuse to oppress. There is no shortcut to erasing four centuries of oppression.

In college, I had friends and housemates with brown and black skin, and they were my friends. I was definitely not racist. I was a little miffed that some of them had been admitted to college on scholarships because of their skin color, because I had actually had to earn my scholarship through academic achievement. I wasn’t sure I liked Affirmative Action, because I felt the playing field should really be level and have nothing to do with the color of one’s skin. Wasn’t it just racism in reverse, if someone like me with good grades could be bumped out of a position by someone with grades not as good, who happened to be Black? I did not like to think my generation needed to pay the price for previous generations of white people who committed grievous acts like owning slaves. At that time I did not recognize how I started off life on second base simply by being born white, when my Black peers were trying to make it on base at all, just based on the difference in our skin color. I did not know that reverse racism cannot exist, because racism is prejudice plus power, and can only exist in one direction – coming from the people with the embedded power from a long history as a racial majority, aka white people.

I attended my friend’s graduation from University of Delaware, where Ben Carson delivered the commencement address, and I felt the surge of pride and hopefulness that a Black man could be so successful, could do groundbreaking conjoined-twins brain surgery and achieve so much. We really had come a long way since the olden days, a long, long time ago, when racism had been a thing. I did not realize that pointing at the token successes of a few wildly successful Black people such as Oprah and Obama and black ball players is just one of the many forms of covert racism, one of the many ways to stay comfortable in white supremacy.

(Source) Scaffolded racism resources – I really like this resource and the way it presents an easy grid to find your stage in confronting racism and access resources to help you move past it.

In graduate school I encountered for the first time the poisonous line of research known as eugenics, in which race inferiority was the a priori conclusion motivating a whole branch of “scientific” inquiry. I only discovered this because I was studying whale conservation genetics and looking at the concept of fitness in behavioral ecology. Until then, I had had no idea that science had been misused to justify slavery, segregation, the denial of voting rights. Luckily, that type of belief being underpinned by false scientific conclusions was a thing of the past. (I thought.) I did not know that the horrifying legacy of abuses of people of color in the name of “research” still pervades contemporary science and medicine.

I became a parent, and consciously included toys and books representing people with different skin colors in my son’s life, wanting to make sure he didn’t end up with any unconscious biases based on race. I think this is when I finally started to realize I, too, had biases to overcome, when I started to realize that actually, racism might not be totally in the past, that maybe some of my beliefs might have some evolving to do.

In kindergarten, Quinn had three teachers: a white lesbian, a Hispanic woman, and a Black woman, and I felt so great about providing such a diverse learning environment for him. Long time readers will remember Quinn spent exactly two weeks in kindergarten, but that was still plenty of time for me to realize my clumsiness in this area in which I had just gotten done congratulating myself about my enlightenment. The day Quinn described his teacher’s skin as chocolate, my post was entitled “diversity”. I’ll never delete this part of my process, though it is a tiny bit painful to read now. This post, in which I committed many of the faux-pas I am now learning to be aware of, such as “I’m so ashamed,” claims that I do not have a race bias, and the urge to “fix” anything to do with awkward feelings around the uncomfortable topic of race, depicts where I was truly at, and looking at it is uncomfortable because I kept going in the process and did not stop there. It is an insightful mile-marker for me to look back on. I’m starting to be able to see where those “I’m ashamed of my whiteness” thought patterns just center the conversation back around my white self, rather than keeping the spotlight on the very real, atrocious experiences of Black people. I’m uncomfortably aware that this current post centers very much around my own white process, and my goal is to show up and be accountable, not to make the story about me, but to hopefully highlight how everyone is at a different place in the process. I have been at a lot of different places in the process, too. I am 100% sure I am saying something now that in my ignorance I will look back on and wish I had known to say differently. Nevertheless…

Right now where I am in the process is a place that is not nearly as comfortable as some of the other places leading up to this one. The more aware I become, the more uncomfortable the truth of the issues becomes, and the more unlearning I realize I have to do. My goal right now is to stay in that place of discomfort. I think that is how I will know if I am going in the right direction, because the more I know, the more I realize I should not be comfortable with anything to do with systemic racism in America. I should not work at becoming comfortable that a system that was established to catch slaves (the police) is committing violence against Black and Brown bodies every day. Even when they are not literally deprived of breath, they have to walk in fear, as described poignantly in a passage I stumbled across by Shola Richards about how he only walks his dog with one of his daughters along, never as a lone Black man, and his follow up post describing how everyday life events white people take for granted, for him, present a relentless stream of challenges; “death by a thousand papercuts.” My place in the conversation is as a listener. The links in this post are an effort to amplify a few black voices who have gotten through to me in some way. I am committed to continue listening. When I hear, “racism work is NOT a self improvement space for white people. If protecting bodies & empowering Black lives aren’t at the center of your work then you’re not here for Black people – you’re simply going through motions to make your white self feel better,” from a voice (Rachel Elizabeth Cargle) I am listening to, I am committed to noticing how uncomfortable that makes me feel, and pressing against that discomfort to be able to hear the truth in her words. And keep going to figure out how to protect bodies and empower Black lives in my community.

The framework of DARVO from which Rachel Elizabeth Cargle presents anti-racism work parallels something that I experienced in a domestic violence context. I’m saying that not to make this about me, but to say that her words turned on a light for me. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.”

“White supremacy is being the ex boyfriend who somehow always came out of the argument as the one who was hurt.” ~ Rachel Elizabeth Cargle

Reconciliation is only possible when the abuser can get to a point where they can listen to the person they’ve hurt define the hurts they’ve delivered. Many of us never receive this from our abusers, even if the abuse stops. Even if the abuser has completed a searching and fearless moral inventory and enumerated for themselves the ways they think they abused us, it falls short.

When I hear, “all lives matter,” it sounds to me like a refusal to listen to the victims of abuse say in their own words how they have been abused. There are a million examples on the internet you can google of how this feels just like replying to your spouse asking if you love them with, “I love everybody,” or sharing about the loss of a loved one and being told, “all people die.” To say all lives matter in response to Black lives matter is a refusal to listen to someone who is in very real pain. I don’t get to tell them about the hurts I think I’ve delivered. They get to tell me. I’m listening.

The uncomfortable truth about systemic racism is that it’s inside me. Wanting to maintain comfort is a white supremacist yearning.

 

If that thought makes you squirm, find a way to enter the conversation as a listener. Do it as a sports fan. A history buff. A scientist. A Christian. Stay uncomfortable. Sit with it. Keep listening.

The truth of systemic racism is uncomfortable, but I’m not going to die from it; many, many Black people are dying from it. I am committed to staying awkward and vulnerable, and uncomfortable, because it’s the best indication I have that I’m going in the right direction, towards justice for their lives. I don’t want to get comfortable with this ever again. I appreciated the sign of one of the teens at the protest that read, “Don’t Look Away.”

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ parsimony

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~2-23 to 3-23~

One afternoon just after his birthday I fed Quinn a mountain of food. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs (dragon eggs) had been the only snack the kids hadn’t eaten at the D&D party, so I suggested one for snack. “You made eggs for the party?” They were sitting right there in front of him the whole time. He ate two, then said he’d eat “the rest” for dinner (+5) but I convinced him to let Rich and I have two for our Caesar salad. And he did proceed to eat three more for dinner! And chicken, and veggies and the raspberries he needed at the co-op… oh my goodness.

Sifu gave him a birthday present- it is a grocery bag FULL of snacks; he knows what’s up!!! One of the carrot slices I served was a “snowman” from a mutant 3-prong carrot and he was putting off eating it and I encouraged him to just take a picture and eat the thing. He wanted to use my good camera, but since I had it on manual setting, it took a dark photo. I explained why and showed him how to change the shutter speed one step slower, take another photo, over and over until he got one he liked. Then I had him keep going to slower shutter speeds so he could see how it can make the image more blurry. He tried a 1″ and a 30″ shutter speed so he could see just how blurry (30 seconds is max on my camera). Then he finally ate the carrot.

Going to bed sometimes takes a few minutes. One night at 9:30 I was ready to be done but he needed to sit on my lap for a snug. Then he asked me to sit on him to see how that felt, and I did. I read him the part of the blog post from when he was three (into the heathers of the waters!) when he got in my jacket and told me when he got big he’d put me in his jacket… and then asked me to sing him a quiet song about the indigo girls. (He really got a kick out of hearing that he told me, “that means so much to you!” and now he will insert it into conversations and giggle.) I do not have documentation of which indigo girls song I chose to sing him back then, but I think it might have been power of two. Thirteen year old Quinn asked me to sing one now, so I sang Galileo. “Galileo’s head was on the block, the crime was lookin’ up the truth…” Which resulted in him reading the wikipedia article on Galileo Galilei.

I finally got him to go to bed, but his brain was just on. He was talking about a billion brainy things. We got on the subject of Occam’s razor (he brought it up – it was mentioned in ender’s game series but I am not sure why it came up as I was delirious by this time) and he gave a great example of a scenario to illustrate Occam’s razor (I threw down the word parsimonious for him and that was new, unschool at bedtime is how we roll). He said, “if you have a school of fish, and then you look at the place they were and they are gone, and you decide there are three possible conclusions to get you to this outcome

  1. they swam away
  2. a big fish came and ate them all
  3. a man in a boat came with a grenade and exploded it in the water and killed them all

and you have no other evidence to work with, you should definitely not conclude 3, because that’s very contrived and involves a whole bunch of unrelated pieces to the puzzle that don’t even really fit (why was a man there? why did he have a grenade? why did he detonate it in the water??) so the best, most parsimonious choice is 1 that they swam away, because it doesn’t require any extra agents (without evidence of them occurring) to be involved in the scenario. (But maybe we can’t rule out 2 because it also “fits” in ways that 3 does not.)”

Okay Quinn, perfect example, make your brain go to sleep now!

After we talked about the indigo girls I played their CDs in the car driving to and from school.

In science class this month, Quinn enjoyed the ecosystem modeling lesson because it involved an interactive computer simulation.

Lesson

Simulator

The simulation enabled the student to control the linkages in the ecosystem between primary producers, herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores, and then ran over time based on some built-in parameters that would result either in an equilibrium balance point where population levels reached a point where they stabilized, but in some cases depending on how you set up the links, you might cause the extinction of some of the players and one or a few species might take over the whole system.

Quinn related it back to dinosaurs. I was stealth recording audio at the time anyway, because of how excitedly he was talking about the simulation, and caught this:

“Time for a lesson on the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction real quick. The reason that all the dinosaurs died during that is because, so basically a meteor hits the earth. All of earth, even at the opposite end of the planet, the sky is just covered in solid dust for centuries and millenia. And the reason that earth’s life survived at all was because mammals at that time were incredibly diverse creatures in what they could eat. The thing is there’s dust everywhere so the herbs, the plants, the producers have nothing, no sun at all. They all died. Except the ones that didn’t need any sun in the first place. The plants in the polar ice caps survived, they never get any sun so they’re used to it. All those places that never have any sun anyway, they survive, but all the other plants are gone. So all the herbivorous dinosaurs are finished. All the herbivorous dinosaurs die because all the plants are gone so they have no food and it continues up the food chain so then the omnivores have nothing to eat – all the producers and herbivores are gone. The omnivores can’t eat the top predators because they’ll get eaten themselves, but once the omnivores are dead the top predators don’t have anything to eat so they die. So it went all the way up the food chain. Not to mention that half of them were suffocating from dust from the meteor (and all the ones in the immediate area of the meteor got blasted to bits).”

I asked, “How come the mammals didn’t go extinct?”

“Because we were diverse. Basically we could eat pretty much anything at that time period.”

“Okay. When you say ‘we’ you’re basically talking about rodents?”

“Yeah. But we can eat pretty much anything so we have no limits on specific things to eat. We can eat the dead trees and the fungus growing on the dead trees… All the death around us doesn’t affect us. Like we can eat the dead stuff, and we flourished because we were the only class of species that could. We were the only ones left who were able to like not have nothing at all to eat. And so what happened here (back to simulation) was the bunnies were eating one thing. Grass. The snails ate two – grass and ferns. So the snails are like the mammals in this scenario, and the bunnies are the dinos. Everything except the grass here is trying to get the grass gone. Even if that’s inadvertent and they need the grass. The bunnies need the grass, it’s the only reason they’re alive. But it’s not able to have balance. So they have no backup plan because the grass just got eliminated by bunnies, snails, ferns and trees. So bunnies have nothing to eat so they basically just groundrocketed….”

We talked more about ecological modeling, which I know only with a passing familiarity, and mentioned how it’s even more fun when you can control more of the parameters behind the scenes. Sometimes I point out when other areas of learning point back to dinosaurs, or when they involve skills that could be applied to his future paleontology career. Other times, I don’t need to point anything out. This time, he immediately transitioned to designing his own simulation in Scratch, and though he didn’t get far with it yet, I think it inspired him to delve back into computer programming.

In other news…

During a Minecraft Monday before his cousins arrived in the sandbox, Quinn discovered that cousin Luigi had left a giant taco floating in midair. He decided to populate the levitating taco with cats, each of which he named, obviously, Tacocat. (Q loves palindromes, and knows his cousins love cats as much as he does or maybe even more in Mario’s case.) I love that they leave little easter eggs of “Cousin was here” for each other to find in their shared world.

helping out with mini-karate one time when we were there for open mat

This month marked the beginning of our coronavirus reality; schools closed, we had the last swim and karate classes we will have for a while, and Quinn’s trip to Italy was postponed.

I shamelessly click on my own blog posts “other posts you may enjoy” and this one felt good to read at that time. My favorite part was seeing how Rich is still that same positive, solid guy who gets stuff done. Well that, and Quinn in a seal suit. It is fun to reflect on how Q is taller but still into math and in-depth characters.

Quinn and I started doing video calls and sharing our time together in various ways: reading books aloud or playing taboo or sharing a screen to watch vi hart’s pi day 2020 video or wellington the penguin touring the shedd aquarium. During one of the first visits he held his guinea pigs up for me to see and snuggled one in his lap for a while. Another time he talked me through solving his 2×2 rubiks cube after I scrambled it. He really blew me away with how he could visualize what I needed to do based on what I was looking at and then tell me how to orient and twist the cube to solve it again. He does not have an analogous cube at his dad’s to reference.

We talked about him directing some home learning for himself (with me as consultant sharing ideas of things to put on his list or not based on his choice and then to be accountability person when he does do things he can report back to me) and he went right to work on a schedule. Computer programming, drums, and electronics feature prominently.

He read Ready Player One this month, after he finished a Neil Gaiman book called Norse Mythology and was inspired to subsequently speed-re-read Magnus Chase.

I sent him picture of quokkas (they have a permanent smile and are an Australian marsupial starting with the letter Q so… duh) and he hadn’t seen my text so he googled it on a new tab while hangout was going, then screen shared with me so I could see what he was seeing. Digital telecommunications skills, check. Treat yourself to a quick google image search, you will not be disappointed.

Quinn and I took a social distance hike at Ona beach. We looked at textural details of drift logs and he came up with a new plan to create his own Jurassic park but without carnivores. He instructed me to take images of the various dinosaur skin texture inspirations on the driftlogs.

On the last day of this month of lifelong learning, we began our Risk game, and he was already well on his way to taking over the world by the end of session one.