Elf Sternberg

I continue to be sick. This is highly annoying. At first I had what the local doctors are calling "The hundred-day cough," because it resembles pertussis, but lots of people who have been recently vaccinated, like me, seem to be catching this variant of whatever it is. I'm about thirty days into that, and now I have a really nasty headcold, the classic autumn kind, with sore throat, froggy voice, cough and the rest. I'd really like a breather.

I went with Stormy to the school open-house yesterday at her high school. Unlike the private schools to which we send Kouryou-chan, the public school system is highly fractured in how it educates your children: three of the teachers use one public grade distribution system approved and supported by the school, two use another approved but not supported by the school, and one doesn't use either. One teacher hands out assignments by posting them to twitter. Three teachers used powerpoint slides. Contacting parents and keeping them up-to-date is a very ad-hoc and unstructured system, with no systemic guidelines. It's very chaotic, and it puts a lot of time sink pressure on parents to get all of the classes in order.

That said, I at least did volunteer for a couple of chaperonage and other positions in the coming weeks.

Storm's in a ton of honors classes and aiming for an International Baccalaureate Diploma. I'm hoping to keep her on track for that, although she's making worrisome noises about a different high-pressure educational track that's more oriented toward highly skilled vocational positions.

Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I have a weekly bicycle ride on our calendars. Storm can't ride a bike and no amount of cajoling will convince her to try and learn. We decided today to ride from the West Seattle Overpass to Alki Lighthouse Point, a trip of about eight miles total, there and back. At the halfway point there are shops and there is ice cream.

Our timing couldn't have been better. The weather hit a high of 79F (26C), there wasn't a cloud in the sky. But as we headed down toward the overpass we started to notice an excess of automobiles headed in the same direction. Today was the first "beach weather" day we've had here in Seattle, so that was partially understandable. Police guiding traffic, however, was not.

The lot was empty, but it's always empty on the weekends: it's a commuter lot for weekday businessfolk coming in from the West Seattle peninsula who catch buses into downtown. I unloaded the bikes, we slathered ourselves in sunscreen, and headed out. We rode in along the industrial side of Puget Sound, then rounded the jut that sticks out into the sound and points toward the Space Needle.

That's when we heard the first explosion. "Oh crap," I told Omaha. "It's going to be packed when we get there! This is Seafair Pirate Landing Day."

You see, SeaFair is an attempt to remind the citizens of this biotech and software development mecca that, no really, we were a port of call once upon a time. We have Pacific Fleet boats come in, do hydropower boat races, marathons, and a variety of things to celebrate the approxmately ten weeks of sun we get before the Great Grey Lid closes down and we go back into our forty weeks of doom, gloom, and darkness. One of our mainstays is the SeaFair Pirates, a year-round organization of men and women dressed in outrageous piratical gear which raises money for various charities. Usually it's a toys-for-tots kind of thing, but their focus this summer appears to be a charity to help kids who need feeding tubes.

There are several SeaFair "kickoff" events, but on is The Pirate Landing, which is mostly an excuse to remind people that Seattle has beaches. The Pirates light off loud cannon, wade up onto the beach and... that's about it. People get together, barbecue, drink beer, and watch this silly parade without a trace of irony.

We decided to head on. As we came around the tip of Alki Point, we spotted a bald eagle being harassed by seagulls. Apparently he'd flown in to take something, and the locals had objected. My camera is getting balky in its old age, and I had only one chance to snap this picture as he flew all the way across the Sound without stopping, from Alki to Queen Anne, in one go.

We rode into Alki proper, and sure enough the place was packed. A local band was playing, local restaurants had set up catering stations where you could buy Thai, Hawaiian, Chinese, along with the usual fare of hot dogs, hamburgers, and grinders. We rode past the festival, reached the lighthouse, then rode back and went in.

Our timing was perfect: we arrived just in time to watch the Landing, which was silly beyond words. The dredger boat they use came up, they lit off more loud explosives (I wish I'd gotten a pic of the two dozen or so pirates with their hands over their ears, waiting for the ka-boom), they waded onto shore and the general announcement to drink beer and donate generously was given over the loudspeakers to much cheering.

We went and had lunch at some of the stands. Afterward, we escaped and had ice cream at the little shop across the way, then rode home, which was fairly unremarkable. An easy ride over faintly rolling territory.

I got some sun, but not much. Omaha and Kouryou-chan both had a great time. Poor Storm; she missed the pirates, the festival food, and the great weather.

Today was the last day of school for Kouryou-chan. This is true in more ways than one: she's been at this school, in the Montessori program, for seven years, and has never known anything else as a matter of schooling. She's had three of the most amazing teachers she could ever encounter, has had a life full of adventure and learning and fun, and at twelve years old knows more math, science, literature and art than any of her peers.

Her only frustration is that whenever the class learns something cool, all of her classmates get to go home and tell their parents, "Did you know..." and amaze the parents with new knowledge. More often than not, Kouryou-chan's "Did you know..." is often met with, "Yes, and to make matters even more interesting..." Which results in, "You guys know everything!" Well, no, we're just well-read and we love to challenge our children to be just as good.

After school closed down, the entire school met at a nearby park for the end-of-year picnic. It was truly bittersweet, with Kouryou-chan saying goodbye to classes, teachers, structures, and even a life she'll never again be part of. (Even if Omaha does get onto the school's board of directors, which she's thinking about doing in her spare time even as she's being feted to run for the local city council.) She played with them, and got phone numbers for some, addresses for others, discussed her summer plans.

I'm going to miss Three Tree Montessori all the more. That was an amazing community of people, but Kouryou-chan has outgrown it. The school admin said, "We're gonna so miss you guys. Can you two reproduce... quickly?"

I think Omaha and I are past those days, sadly.

Still, the whole point of Montessori is that it's designed to train kids to be good at doing things, at initiating and following through. Kouryou-chan is certainly that. I'm glad she went through it.

Today's expedition to Storm's high school for the parent/teacher conference was a complete waste of time. It was fifteen minutes long. The first ten minutes were a scripted set of bulletpoints that the school distributed to each student. The first instruction read, "The parent should remain silent and withhold all questions until the end of the presentation."

So, I did.

After which, I said, "This was a complete waste of time. There's nothing here that I don't know about. We keep close track of Storm's performance, ask about her homework, and about her ambitions." I pointed to the four years plan she had asked Storm to develop. "Storm and I wrote put that together a month ago after a meeting with the IB instructor. If anything, the scripted nature of this presentation seems designed to prevent me from asking you anything pointed or direct."

The teacher spread her hands defensively. "You'd be surprised how many parents come in here and learn something new, something they didn't know about their student." She then turned back to Storm to work through a list of questions she had about Storm's progress. Toward the end, she said, "Many parents don't really have a good grasp on education at the high school level."

"Storm lives a father who's a published author and software engineer, and a stepmother who's a credentialed scientist and journalist. We don't have that problem."

"Sometimes I wonder if Storm feels intimidated by her parents. Do you?" she asked Storm.

"Not really."

It was a very unsatisfactory meeting, mostly because it did what it was meant to do: deflect the parent from being able to ask about what the school was doing, or not doing, on the student's behalf.

The other night Omaha and I did the very 19th century thing of attending a good, old-fashioned lecture by Steve Hughes, Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. The crux of his talk, entitled "School 2.0," was how, when he became a parent, long after he'd gotten his degree, he did a survey of all the local schools in his area and determined to his surprise that the weird, granola-y school known as "Montessori" exactly matched what pediatric neurology had detemined was the best environment in which small children should study and learn.

So, as an experiment, he put his three-year-old into the program. And he's become a booster ever since.

He said, "I'm not going to talk science-y here. When you go to a lecture like this, you'll here things like 'it is believed that' and 'the evidence suggests.' You're not going to hear that tonight. The evidence is in the bag. ... The way you create great adults is give children the freedom to engage in age-appropriate physical experimental interactions with their environment."

It was definitely a bit of quote-mining, but he had quotes from neurological economists, neurologists, pediatric psychiatrists, and so forth exactly lined up with quotes from Maria Montessori, and pointed out that she had how children learn understood, mastered, and systemized correctly eighty years ago.

He asked, "Why is so much of the curriculum purchased, a strain on the budget, when mathematics, at least up to the high school level, hasn't changed in eighty years?" Commodity knowledge is commodity knowledge, but his question is like, "Why are so many operating systems purchased when a bunch of college kids have been making high-quality operating systems for twenty years?" Marketing, advertising, and inertia on the part of the consumer to go somewhere "different."

He talked about the budget strain, and how schools get their budgets cut first. This reminded me of a recent moment in Kentucky, where it was revealed that the Answers In Genesis "Noah's Ark" theme park had received $43 million in tax breaks and $11 million in local infrastructure improvements to ease anticipated traffic flow to and from the park in 2011-- and the Kentucky School system was told that it would have to accept a $50 million operating budget reduction for 2012. Hmm, I wonder where they could have found an extra $50 million, but no, they pandered to idiots who want to believe the Earth is 6000 years old.

Point one: Motor-control is the foundation of learning

There were two long segments on neurological development, starting with two areas in the upper cortex, one for motor control and another for sensory. Hughes discussed how these areas develop, and showed what sorts of environments help them develop best. He claimed that in our deep past, cognition emerged out of motor control: "Should I fight, flee, or hide?" laid the groundwork for the evolution of more complicated thought.

He discussed the Hebb rat study in 1947, the one that originally backed up Montessori's claims with hard neurological evidence, but was rejected because the US had just put enormous resources into building schools on "the manufacturing model," in which every kid is a "product," built at the same pace and delivered at the end of the line on schedule and supposedly complete, and didn't have the political will to change to a more touchy-feely system.

That reminded me of a recent issue of RadioLab, in which researches talked about white-matter studies in chimpanzees, and how researchers put chimps in one of three environments: an unstimulating one with low social interaction, a stimulating one with toys and games and a tribal level of social interaction of approximately 50 monkies, and a highly stimulating one with even more toys and games and even monkey pinball-like machines and about 200 monkies. The result was that the low-stimulus ones showed a decline in white matter (the stuff that actually thinks), but the other two groups showed the same level of white matter growth. So there's both a floor and a ceiling to brain development, but for most kids we're barely on the floor, if there.

A child, Montessori asserted, and neurology backs up, grows best when her need, desire, and ability to discover the world for herself are encouraged.

Point two: Motor control is the basis of Self-Control

The other long segment was on executive function, what most of us call "self control." Self-control is a function of motor control: moving when appropriate. If a child feels free to move when appropriate, and the environment has been structured so that it, and not punishment by adults, teaches that appropriateness, then the child learns to self-control. Montessori called this "the normalization of spontaneous self-discipline," but it amounts to the same thing. I think this may be why so many high-level executives work out and practice martial arts: its maintenance for the parts of their brain that enables them to engage in work for long, disciplined periods of time.

The Chinese government has discovered this also. Hughes claims their state 0 through 6 program has begun restructuring itself along Montessori lines, and 25,000 pre-school teachers are getting an in-depth education over the next five years in moving from a discipline model to a guidance and mentoring model.

Tentative discoveries

A few things in the "tentative" class of research results that he mentioned briefly are these: schools are getting worse as they head towards a standardized testing program. The punitive method doesn't work. In the past ten years, there's some evidence that children are failing to learn the social cues for "have a conversation": in the past, if someone was talking, they were usually talking to someone, often the child if the child was the only possible conversant, but now the odds that they're just talking into thin air, the bluetooth headset hidden under their hair, means that children are learning that "I'm talking" probably doesn't mean, "I'm conversing with you." In the past twenty years, there's been a scary rise in nearsightedness, and an equally scary drop in full-body coordination: exposure to sunlight prevents nearsightedness, and video games teach only hand-eye.

My experience with Kouryou-chan

I've seen this time and time again with Kouryou-chan. She is, as Montessori said she would be, "Good at doing things." When you point out to her what needs to be done, she does it, and usually does it well. The kid has a scarily powerful attention span when she wants to learn something, sometimes lasting for hours, even days.

I can't speak for other methods, but the Montessori method certainly worked for her. She wouldn't be who she is without it, and she certainly wouldn't have the opportunities she has now without it.

"That's Alizee!" (Wow, the boob fairy apparently visited Alizee' somewhere in the middle of her poptart career.) Storm came running into the kitchen and started eagerly listening to the mini stereo set, where J'en Ai Marre from her live album was playing as I cleaned up the wreckage of a well-made dinner.

"Yes, it is," I agreed.

"We listen to her in French class."

I sighed. Because I have been listening to, and playing, Alizee' for years. (Her first appearance in my LJ is January 6, 2009, three years ago.) But when her French teacher played it for her, it wasn't like, "Oh, yeah, my Dad listens to the French equivalent of Katy Perry all the time." It was something new to her, despite having heard it many times throughout the past three years. And then when she gets home, suddenly she makes the connection and says, "How do you know about Alizee?"

Omaha says that teenagers just don't pay attention to what their parents listen to, and that it's not personal when Storm has no idea what music I have in my collection, and never connects hearing what I play to what she experiences in the world outside our home.

But my worries about her go deep. I started learning French to keep up with her, and she continually brushed me off and said she didn't want to practice French. "I don't want to learn how to speak it," she said. "I just want to get an A in the class." (If she does, she'll have mastered the signaling mode of career advancement, which is a fine thing, I suppose.)

At 14, she has that air of teenagery "I know everything.". It's annoying as hell.

It has been an insane couple of days here at the Villa.

Back in late November, Omaha ordered three new bedsets for the children and ourselves, so now Storm will have her own room and no longer share with her sister. Both are big enough, and have enough stuff, that their own bedroom is too crowded. Omaha and I haven't needed room for either of them in our bed on a regular basis, so we're swapping the king for a queen, which will give us room to move our clothes, which we've been keepinf in the space bedroom, into our own, and Storm can move in and make the spare her own.

But this means that the spare room must be cleaned, and Storm must move her stuff into it. We also got rid of their bunk bed already; we gave it to a couple who was freaking out because one of them had just won temporary custody of his kids and needed bedding for them by Monday, so there was a flurry of activity to break the bed down and get it into their SUV.

Kouryou-chan had rehearsal Friday and Saturday, and so did Omaha and I since we're on stage again. Sunday we had our D&D game, and Storm had her own performance for The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, so there was coordination madness as we tried to get everything done.

Monday, there was the dress rehearsal. It did not go as well as planned, but we all looked marvelous and not nearly as dorky as I'd feared. Omaha looks better than I do. I know that Kouryou-chan and her peers have to wear the lipstick and eye shadow so their faces are clearly outlined and visible to the people in the back of the auditorium who forgot their spectacles, but up close on stage, it just looks a little creeptastic.

Somewhere in there I spent time on the roof of Kouryou-chan's school, one of our shovels broke, I had to get under the kitchen sink to replace a leaking feed line. And a full-time work schedule. Can I have a break soon?

I went to Storm's high school last week to attend the so-called "Student-Led Conferences." These were terribly disappointing when she was in middle-school: mumbly events where the kid led the parent from classroom to classroom, showed you one folder after another of incomprehensible and often disorganized materials, and then directed you to the next. If you engaged the teacher at all, they were usually pleasant but disengaged: this was a "student-led conference," and it was up to the student to communicate with her parent about the quality of the work.

Ridiculous. Either you already know what the kid is up to, or you're hopelessly out of touch with what the kid is doing.

This conference was decidedly better. It was not "student led"; it was a fifteen-minute conference with each teacher the student had, discussing their progress.

I found most of the teachers to be delightful. Even more to the point, every teacher was confronted with a parent who gave a damn. As a ferocious diletantte from a family of the same, I was able to engage every teacher at some level, which gave me some insight into their caring. The science teacher was discussing electron shells with the kids; I was able to discuss the difference between covalent and ionic bonds, so he knew that Storm's parents weren't being left behind on that topic. The same was true in language arts: "Both of the adults in Storm's house are published authors. Much of the Writer's Digest collection on writing genre fiction and reportage nonfiction is on our shelves." And in social studies: "Storm sits at a dinner table where the phrase 'the marginal utility of wealth' is not unknown." French: "Je parle un peu l'Francaise."

The only teacher who let me down a bit was for mathematics. I think she was honestly surprised by, and completely unprepared for, a parent who could still do the kid's math homework. She started in a droning voice, "I keep every kid's progress report on-line. Here's how you get to it..." Blahbitty blahbitty blah. When I started engaging her directly in the material on simple linear and quadratic equations, you could see the gears in her head shifting as she changed over from the routine she had built to actually discussing her topic. She seemed pleased with my inquiry, but more than a little unready to actually discuss material. I frankly doubt such inquiry happens often.

Storm continues to be a pretty good student. She's sliding a bit, but we're pushing her hard to succeed. I don't think she quite gets the importance of it all, but she's figuring it out.

The big news for this weekend was Kouryou-chan turned twelve. Omaha and I aren't ready for her to be a middle-schooler, but damn she's growing up fast.

There were seven giggling girls. I stayed in the office and fine-tuned my new laptop for most of it, but it was my duty to load up the video player for the show they were going to watch, and to make my Flagship macaroni & cheese for dinner, which I did with some stress, as a double-sized batch took more planning than I'd anticipated. I made the six-cup Bechamel sauce with the same sized spoon I do for a three-cup, and oddly that seemed to work even better, as if making the sauce slower made it smoother. So maybe I'll ratchet down the milk mixture to one tablespoon per stir, rather than the usual two.

Kouryou-chan got a ton of drawing supplies, a new backpack, and a few other things. She's really into drawing right now, so that makes sense. She's eminently grateful for pratical things, which makes the cockles of my heart glow.

She taught her friends how to play Give Me The Brain.

Only two girls stayed for the sleepover. They were up until midnight, and after lights-out we heard giggling until 1:30. But they did eventually get to sleep.

In the morning, I made pancakes with chocolate chips. I really "cake" the recipe, adding extra egg and a touch baking soda and whipping the egg whites into a soft meringue to make them the fluffiest things on Earth.

She's a real handful, our twelve year old. She alternates between the child hungry for cuddles and love and attention, the snarky brooding teenager furious with the interruptions of responsibility, and the brilliant one ready to show off her work to the world. Most kids nowadays look forward to their 13th birthday, the COPA birthday, when they can get accounts on Facebook (if you're sociable) or Tumblr (if you're super-emo). Kouryou-chan is looking forward to getting a DeviantArt account. Good for her.

Storm made dinner tonight. Delicious! Now she knows how to make tacos on her own. Ground beef sautee'd with garlic and onions, cumin and chili powder. We discussed more knife skills for doing tomatoes and lettuce, and she shredded the cheese.

It's not a hard thing, tacos. But it's way better than ramen noodles, and the objective is to give her and her sister feed-yourself skills in college.