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~thankful thursday~ light cone

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed.  It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

~thankful thursday~ glow slug

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~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

kodiak august edition

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Back from Kodiak.

 

Otters!

Salmon!

And bears! Oh my!

I found another career idea for Dad: boat launch backer-upper. When you want to launch your boat but you need a big tractor to do it…

This octopus is named Gilbert.

These jellyfish are unnamed.

Until next year, Kodiak.

banner day

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This kind human is a sophomore. He spent our labor day hike dispersing dandelion seeds because, “every living thing deserves a chance to grow.” I made a wish on each seed, in similar words, but my wishes were all about him.

Also, today we sign closing papers to buy the dragon house. A long-held dream comes true.

 

Honorable mentions:

I am halfway through semester three of my program, and still loving every 4am writing session. On a sunny day back in January, I typed one of my essays on Great Grandma Rew’s typewriter and submitted it to a zine called Selkie, and I recently received word that they’ve published it! I will share how to get copies when they become available. My first published essay, hurray! In a zine named for mythical females who zip in and out of sea-suits to live in both realms, on the theme of “disobedience.” Sounds about right!

I started my permanent job in July. I’ve filled out what could be the last round of new hire paperwork, for the last set of changing benefits, and the waves of relief are still washing over me, and I expect that will keep going for some time. Three pay periods in, I went to Kodiak, Alaska, for field work. A new place to fall in love with. (They have otters there!!!)


rock greenling


penpoint gunnel


giant Pacific octopus



humpback!


uh-oh


Salmon for breakfast, and second breakfast.

Sending love to all the mama bears out there with cubs snuggled close and the otter mamas with their pups swimming off and away.

~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!

 

~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.

~summer shorts~ star ecology

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A disease outbreak erased sea stars almost completely from the tidepools of our coasts in 2013. I see them in greater numbers than I have in years, but still with telltale symptoms of the devastation they’ve suffered.

Sea star wasting disease is still poorly understood, and having worked in disease ecology professionally, I know this is not for lack of attempts made to understand. It is a very tricky branch of biology to study. Sea star larvae go through a dispersed pelagic phase where maybe their socially distant selves manage to stay disease free.

sea star larvae illustration by on of my faves, Ernst Haeckel, public domain

As the new recruits settle back into the intertidal, some of them have managed to grow to maturity at least long enough to spawn for themselves, but most are still showing telltale signs of infection with this disease some scientists believe may be caused by a virus. The disease persists, and for now sea stars, too, persist. It will remain to be seen how the population will respond longer term, and what effects their prolonged absence will have on the other organisms in the intertidal community. The invisible, inextricable linkages connecting members of an ecosystem sometimes reveal themselves when the system is under strain.

I have spent a few early morning tidepool rambles on a few different beaches I love, my own very small emergence into the world in a low-covid-risk manner. I make a point to watch for and photo-document sea stars now whenever I am out for one of my beach walks during low tides. For several years I saw almost none, but slowly an increase is becoming perceptible.

I lingered a last few minutes on one beach, and a hermit crab captured my attention, tucked into a former snail’s abode frosted with pink icing bryozoans. I watched and watched, and it slowly, slowly, emerged. Our return to the world feels comparably slow. I think we will be hermits for longer than is comfortable, and face choices about how we minimize our in-person interactions with the general public so we can reimagine the in-person interactions we don’t want to continue to have to live without. Not the triumphant takeover of the world as we knew it, but a halting, complicated return, much like the quiet, incremental return of the sea stars.

~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.