Little boy lost
May 28, 2003 The Story of My Life
I woke up thinking about a little boy who came to the daycare where I worked during the time I took off from college. I’ll call him Max but that wasn’t his name.
He wasn’t the cutest child in the class; he was sturdy and small with lots of brown hair. His mother was outrageously beautiful; she looked like Isabella Rossellini and she worked (appropriately) at the Lancôme counter at the mall. Her husband, however, was decidedly frog-like with slightly bulging blue eyes and a wide, flat mouth. Max took after his dad. We used to wonder what Max’s mom saw in her husband but then we learned they were divorcing and the question didn’t seem relevant anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
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Reason #912 to homeschool
May 28, 2003 Homeschooling
Courtesy of Lynn, fellow homeschool mama: The New Gender Gap
The “earliness” push, in which schools are pressured to show kids achieving the same standards by the same age or risk losing funding, is also far more damaging to boys, according to Lilian G. Katz, co-director of ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. Even the nerves on boys’ fingers develop later than girls’, making it difficult to hold a pencil and push out perfect cursive. These developmental differences often unfairly sideline boys as slow or dumb, planting a distaste for school as early as the first grade.Instead of catering to boys’ learning styles, Pollock and others argue, many schools are force-fitting them into an unnatural mold. The reigning sit-still-and-listen paradigm isn’t ideal for either sex. But it’s one girls often tolerate better than boys. Girls have more intricate sensory capacities and biosocial aptitudes to decipher exactly what the teacher wants, whereas boys tend to be more anti-authoritarian, competitive, and risk-taking. They often don’t bother with such details as writing their names in the exact place instructed by the teacher.
Read more here.
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Interesting — drafts
May 27, 2003 Writing
Holly commented that she found first drafts easier than rewrites and someone else wrote in and said they did, too. What do the other writers among you think?
I think getting down my main ideas is harder and then adding and subtracting to them is much easier. It’s a little like those logic puzzles, you know, the ones that say “Linda is wearing red” and “Pat is wearing a hat” and somehow you figure out which person is wearing which color of which piece of clothing. I love those logic puzzles — they make my brain hum nicely — and that’s how it feels for me to do rewrites. I have this main plot and I need to figure out how to best illustrate it. There are generally a million things I have to say but if I wander off too much, it stops making sense. So while I rewrite, I prune and shape, add some breadth and depth, and it gives me the same physical satisfaction as weeding a garden.
The biggest problem I have with this draft is that it isn’t casual enough. I’m trying to let myself relax in the way I do while I write my blog. Sure, I want to pretty up my writing and make sure my grammar is correct but I want my voice to come through and it didn’t as much as I would have liked.
I’m trying to figure out how to show not tell, which is very difficult because I’m talking about specific thought processes here. This particular chapter is about coming to a resolution and most of the work there was happening in my head. I’m trying to find a way to use poetic license and create some events that maybe didn’t quite happen that way to give this more weight.
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A good start
May 27, 2003 Writing
I finally finished the sample chapter for my book proposal. Well, finished may be too strong a term. I mean that I wrote the rough draft.
I’ve been struggling with this book idea for awhile. I couldn’t decide what kind of book I should write: the one I wanted to or the one that seem more commercially viable? My writing mentor — a very practical woman — told me to write the one I wanted to write and gave me her blessing. This is a big deal because she’s is nothing if not pragmatic and if she thinks it’s worth it to write what I want, well, maybe I have a shot.
Anyway, the beginnings of the chapter are lying here with a start and a finish and stuff in between. Rewrites are much easier than original writes and I feel relieved to have it done.
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The Talk
May 25, 2003 Parenting
Noah and I finally had the How Babies are Made talk. We’ve been circling it for some time now (two years, I think?) but he always shied away from any specifics. He knew that babies grow in uteruses and that was about it.
The other day we were driving somewhere (these serious talks always seem to happen in the car) and Noah said, “Don’t you wonder what testicles look like inside?”
Actually I don’t but I feigned interest and we discussed that for awhile. Then I said, “Do you know what testicles are for?”
“Sure,” said Noah. “They push the pee out.”
I thought this was a pretty good inference.
“Close,” I said and filled him in on the accurate details.
“What’s semen?” he asked.
“It’s the stuff that mixes with the egg in the mommy’s uterus and if it mixes just right, then sometimes a baby is made.”
“Oh.” Dead silence in the back seat. I stopped for a red light and we both listened to the car humming.
“Wait a second,” he said and I could practically hear the synapses firing in his brain. “How does that happen when they’re not even connected?!”
So I gave him the details of that, which I won’t type here for fear of yet more strange google searches than I’m gonna get already. Besides, I figure you all already know how it works and don’t need my explanation. He was satisfied with a fairly bare bones explanation although I foresee more car discussion on this subject in the future.
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Tags: Noah
