Font Fanatics

The other evening we had a friend over for dinner.  This friend was lamenting his font woes with Chuck.  Being that both are Designers, they could talk about fonts for hours.  Friend was frustrated with the font choices he was allowed to use at his job.  This spearheaded a serious font discussion by all at the table.  The kids each piped in with, "Well, maybe you should try (this) font...".  Friend was amazed number one, that the kids even knew what 'font' meant and number two, that they even knew the names of several fonts.

Oh ya.  We're that family.  We have serious font opinions. Chuck feels so strongly about fonts that he even has a whole blog post devoted to the subject matter at hand.  How could you be a child of Chuck, sit under his tutelage and not walk away with an insider's information about fonts and the images they project?

Since we piqued Friend's interest, he took the bait and asked what each of our favorite fonts were.  For the interest of the story, I shall write these fonts in a different format and post them as a png on my blog - otherwise you would have no clue what "Proxima Nova" looked like and would not get the deeper meaning of this incredibly deep blog post.

Doesn't that just help explain so much!  Each person's personality is perfectly represented by their font choice.  A font tells a reader more than you ever imagined.  I'll let you read into our personalities how ever you choose. 

Summer Vacation - Day 1

We have been out of school exactly 1 whole day and life couldn't get much better.  Well...it is about to because we're fixin to go on a real, road-trip vacation pretty soon, but I mean, as far as life is concerned, summer vacation is about as good as it gets.  I just love having my kids home from school!  I miss them so much when they're gone.  I love the carefree, come what may, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of days that summer brings.

Our very first day was no exception.  We were able to help out a friend who had a last minute trip come up and asked if we could watch their 2 year old daughter for the day.  It was as if  I had the gift of being transported back in time with my own kids.  She was SO MUCH FUN!  I felt like I got to re-live my kids at 2 again.  But this time, my kids got to experience it along with me.

Meet Tenley and her two favorite admirers.  Chloe and Bennett couldn't get enough of her.  They even sat outside my bedroom door when I put her down for her nap and listened to her talk to her stuff animals.  Bennett kept asking me if he could go wake her up so he could play with her some more.  She brought the fun curiosity and unexpectedness of a toddler into the house and kept us in stitches laughing all day.  I'd say that was a pretty fun way to start off summer vacation.

As Chloe and Bennett entertained Tenley, Gavin was hard at work on his computer tapping away.  He has decided to take an online Harvard Extension course, Intro to Computer Science since he wants to learn programming but wasn't sure which language he wanted to learn first.  He recently taught himself a little Java in order to make some Minecraft Mods (whatever that means), which were super important to him.  Then he moved on to creating his own servers so he and his friends could connect and play the same mods (again...not sure what that means, but I know I couldn't do it, so I was impressed he figured out a way).  Finally he decided that he would put his Chromebook laptop computer to better use and decided to download the Linux Operating System onto it.  No one told or showed him how.  He just troubleshooted for hours until, voila! there it was, operating on his computer.  I asked him why he did it and he said in bigger words than I repeating, "Because it can run programs that are desktop based; my other operating system couldn't do that."  Alrighty then.

How does your kid wake up one day and just understand the world in a whole different way and on a whole deeper level than you?  He speaks a tech language that I don't understand.  He has found his niche and can't learn enough fast enough.  I admire him greatly.  I love his determination and perseverance during this process of growth.   I also am endeared to my Daily Gavin Factoids.  I love the random facts that spew from his mouth at any time of the day or night.  He ensures that I learn something new each and every day. 

In order to ensure that we enjoy this wonderful break from school to its fullest, we felt that we should let the kids know what our expectations were.  The kids have always felt happier and safer knowing where their boundaries were.  As they mature, more and more of the rules fall by the wayside and it's not so much us 'controlling' them, but us teaching them to make wise choices and control themselves. But in all fairness, we have to disclose our expectations, just in a way that doesn't feel controlling to them.  As long as they live with us, we still have the awesome opportunity to teach them how to be caring, responsible, loving, hard working adults.  Hard to do!  

Chuck came up with the following:

1. Wake up before 9am. We've always been a house of early risers. We like to get to places early.  But as the kids are entering adolescence we now have people that love (and need) to sleep late.  So we had to cap the sleeping in at 9am so we could still have some morning left to enjoy.

2. Do what you have to do before you do what you want to do.   This has always been our rule in regards to chores.  Chores always come first.  If someone comes to see if they can play, we ask if they have done what they have to do first.  If the answer is 'yes', they can play, if not, they know to finish their responsibilities.  This will serve them well in life. (We borrowed this phrase from the movie The Great Debaters).

3.Write down your goals/daily rhythm.  Our people love schedules.  Sometimes it's hard for them to be spontaneous.  But sometimes it's also hard to remember exactly what you want to do each day.  Having them write down their own summer goals and expectations helps them own this.  If Gavin wants to finish his online course this summer, this little written reminder will help him instead of give him the excuse, "oh, I forgot."  And it keeps me from nagging and reminding them.

4. Spend time outside each day. Gavin especially can easily get caught up in his computer work and learning and the whole day can slip by being caught up in what he truly enjoys.  But summer is about being outside, getting plenty of sun and fresh air.  He set his own personal limit on his computer time and we trust him to abide by that.  My people aren't huge tv or movie watchers, so being outside comes easy for us most of the time.

5. Do something for someone else every day.  Learning to be others focused is hard.  May as well start now because it takes a lifetime to learn.  It's easy to see our own needs, it's hard to see someone elses. 

6. Govern yourself.   In other words: we are trusting you to make good choices.  If you choose to have cookies with lunch, don't eat the whole bag, take what you feel is an adequate amount.  We will not always be around to set limits for you.  We know you will fail, but we know you will learn from those failures.  Self-control is another lesson that takes a lifetime to learn.

Let the summer fun begin!

Love is....

Dinner Guests

      Michio Kaku

The other night Chuck and I were talking about who we would invite to dinner if we could invite anyone from any time in history or in the modern era, dead or alive.  It's a pseudo dinner afterall - so we don't have to worry about little details like death or if we can even speak the same language.  Those assumptions just don't exist.  Naturally, we would understand each other, differences in language aside and apparently dead people live and breath and talk again in our pseudo dinner world.  The only other parameter would be that obviously, our whole family would already be at the dinner party, so we wouldn't need to invite each other and Jesus is the most obvious first guest, so he's also a given...he'll just hang around for each party with us.

It was so much fun, I decided to ask the kids who they would want to invite.  I didn't realize the mental anguish this would cause.  True to form, he can't commit to any one thing specifically.  I mean, this list is a permanent, personal representation of who you are at the very core - you MUST make it count. This is official - it's going in the record books.  There's no turning back now. This morning Gavin gives me the following list of invitees:

• Michio Kaku  
• A King from the Middle Ages  
• A Japanese Samurai  
• An Egyptian Pharaoh   

But upon further review during this evening's dinnertime conversation (and being forced to pick actual people with names instead of generic titled people), his list changed to:

• Michio Kaku (a theoretical physicist)
• Bruce Lee
• Vechs (of YouTube fame for his Minecraft tutorials)
• Leonardo DaVinci

Same thing happened with Bennett.  His earlier choices were:

• Ben Franklin
• Michael Jordan
• Dirk Nowitzki 
• Thomas Edison

His reasoning went as followed, "Ben Franklin was just a boss and so was Michael Jordan.  Dirk Nowitzki is Clutch and Thomas Edison, well, I love his quote 'I haven't failed, I've just learned 100 ways not to do something.'" Then something changed his mind during dinnertime and he retracted two people to be replaced with two others:

• Ben Franklin
• Michael Jordan
• MLK jr.
• Bob Goff

This morning, Chloe wanted to invite:

• MLK jr.
• Mother Teresa
• Brynn 
• Cara

The last two names are the 7 & 5 year old neighbor girls who live across the street from us.  She also back-pedaled, uninvited the neighbor girls and MLK (since he's going to be at Bennett's party) and issued an invitation to a couple of other people she feels are more deserving:

• Gabby Douglas
• Mother Teresa
• Barbara Park (of the Junie B. Jones fame)
• Saba - The Ethiopian Princess

Chuck's humble list included:

• Dirk Nowitzki
• Brian Regan (our favorite comedian)
• Mel Blanc (the voice guy for all the Loony Toons characters)
• C.S. Lewis

Everyone recited my list to me, apparently I'm an open book.  But no one got the last name on my list. For years I would have said it was Michael Jordan (and if I could invite 5 people, he'd definitely be on my top 5 list), but alas, I came up with someone more intriguing than even Michael (if you can imagine such a thing).

• MLK jr.
• Gandhi
• Mother Teresa
• Abraham Lincoln

Don't even get me started on authors I'd like to invite.  I don't think I could host a party that big.  How are you supposed to narrow that list down?  And there are many ordinary, every day people that no one knows that I think are awesome people and would like to have a party of just 'regular awesome people' too.  So, as you can see, we are going to be quite busy with all our dinner guests coming up.

10 Years Old - Happy Birthday Blog!!!

Ten years ago Chuck kept encouraging me to start a blog (whatever that was).  I was just fine writing down all my stories and memories in my convenient little spiral notebooks, thank you very much.  I actually found one of my pre-blog notebooks not too long ago and we had a blast reading through it. But then Chuck went and did what he always does, he made me something.  He is just so creative, how can I ever say no to him.  He created my first blog, got me all set up and just pointed me in the right direction and told me to start writing.

I have quite an affinity for paper and pencil.  I had an internal struggle in regards to loyalty and my little notebook.  But then when I saw the ease with which my fingers flew over the keyboard, I was hooked. I could write the same story 10x faster on the computer than I could handwriting it (in my speediest, messiest, sometimes illegible hand).  Time was of the essence for me back then. I have not looked back since.  I thank Chuck all the time for designing my first blog and giving me an outlet to write.  I didn't even know how much I enjoyed writing back then.  I was literally just trying to stay afloat.  This is what we looked like 10 years ago:

Bennett (2), Chloe (2mos.), Me (31), Gavin (5)

Bennett (12), Chloe (10), Me (41), Gavin (15)

Gavin (5), Chuck (31), Chloe (10), Bennett (2)

Gavin (15), Chuck (41), Chloe (10), Bennett (12)

By staying afloat I mean, I was just trying to survive each day with the demands that come with a toddler, newborn and a very active, talkative, inquisitive 5 year old.  The blog became my outlet.  It helped me see all the things happening around me in a humorous light when I would have been tempted to become emotionally overdrawn.  It helped me keep time and circumstances in perspective. It helped me still be me when it was easy to get swallowed up being 'mommy' 24 hours a day.  

We could have never imagined the direction our lives would take 10 years later to lead us to where we are today.  3 states later; 5 houses later; 6 jobs later, too many road trips to count later....what a beautiful, incredible, awesome, amazing journey I've gotten to take with my absolute favorite people!

Chopped - Revised

Nana recently came to hang out with the kids while Chuck and I were in Heaven.  They all said their time was filled with games and laughter...and lots of food.  Sounds just like Nana.  Nana loves to cook! So it makes sense that on her last night with us, we play Chopped.  I don't know if it's actually a real game, but we sure like to make it one.  We didn't video it this go around.  Pictures will have to suffice. And we revised our original rules.  The whole fun part of the 'game' is the opportunity to cook each round.  So in order to find the winner, we each gave a numerical vote to each dish, the higher the number, the higher the score.  The high score wins.  So, technically, no one got chopped until the end - but for our family, it was much more fun, filling and exciting this way.  Oh ya, and it was our dinner, so we each took a bite out of each plate made.  We were eating dinner for almost 2 hours that night. Another one for the memory books.

Chuck presenting the contestants with the 'basket' ingredients.

Bennett's dessert.  Still don't know what the brown side consisted of.

Chloe's dessert creation.

Nana's scrumptious dessert bite.

Gavin's creative and delicious dessert.

The Winner!

Working Through It

I've noticed a trend....I work through most things in my life by writing/blogging.  It helps me make sense of it all. It helps me empty my brain of all my thoughts, order said thoughts and then see how my brain and heart are processing whatever issue I'm working through.  Flannery O'Connor says it best, "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."  Amen.

Today was a very sad day for me.  I need to process everything that's happened over the past three months and have a place where I can go back and read and remember what it is I learned from this special person at this time in my life.

For the last three months I've volunteered once a week at a homeless shelter downtown.  My original plan was to read to the children there.  The position I wanted was called "Roving Reader", right up my alley.  But upon my orientation I learned that there are no school age children around during the time that I was available to volunteer.  The coordinator kept hinting that "Donations" really needed help, so I figured, why not, all I want to do is help, so I may as well help where they have the most need.  I was placed under Varney, the only one in charge of the massive amounts of donations that needed to be processed on a daily basis.

He was actually surprised to have his very own volunteer.  Not just any volunteer, but one who stayed. He was used to having college kids show up one week and never return.  I came every week - excited to work for him.  I LOVED my "Wednesdays with Varney".  He grew to trust me. I grew to respect him.  We traded stories.  Here is his:

Varney grew up in Liberia and immigrated to the U.S. twenty years ago.  (I knew nothing about the history of his homeland until after I read a book about the horrible coup and consequential wars his country and people have lived through since the 1980's).  He landed in Brooklyn, NY.  He eventually settled in Minneapolis.  He worked at this shelter for 5 years.  He is one of the kindest, patient men I've ever met.  He spoke Liberian English which took a little bit for me to get used to, but once I did, I enjoyed the lilt to his accent.  He was very patient with my constant, "excuse me's?".

I marvelled to him one day about how he could remain so kind to everyone around him even after I had witnessed blatant discrimination against him.  He told me, "Cori, I just smile and pray in my head, 'Father forgive them, they don't know what they are doing.' "  He was always smiling, always ready to help anyone. He would bend over backward for anyone.  He never wanted or expected recognition. He was very wise, but no one asked him opinion.  He was very humble and peaceful.

He genuinely cared about the residents at the shelter.  He was always coming up with a way to give them more and more of the donations received that weren't being used.  He genuinely cared about every detail and was so proud of his organizational system (for a shelter this large, it was truly a feat of genius).  He was tickled that I was so impressed.  Every can in the food pantry was faced forward and in orderly rows. Every item had a home and that made him happy and in turn made the shelter run smoother.

One of the very first things he had me do was to take a load of shoes and bags down to the main atrium and let all the residents know that they were free for the taking.  He said he wanted me to 'get to know the residents - to get comfortable with them.'  How smart is that - putting a face to the people you are helping, it suddenly becomes more personal.

Every week he would ask me how my children were doing.  He couldn't wait for summer to start so I could bring them with me each week to help.  My kids were even looking forward to working with him.  They had already worked with me over Spring Break and felt the same way about Varney that I did.

I learned much from this gentle soul in the three short months I knew him.  I hadn't seen him for 3 weeks due to my being on vacation and then him taking a vacation week after mine.  I was so looking forward to seeing him again today.  However, when I got to the site today everyone was tight-lipped about my friend.  No one would share anything with me, just that 'he was no longer here'.

I told them that he was the only reason I came week after week.  I personally don't feel the shelter is doing as good a job as they think they are but came only for the chance to work with this incredible man, learn from him and talk to him.  I was devastated.

I mourn for the loss of the friend I have no way of contacting.  I mourn for the 'mysterious circumstances' of his abrupt departure.  He would never have left me hanging like this.  I wrestled all night with distraught thoughts regarding him and woke up many times praying fervently for him, for what reason I didn't know.  I shouldn't have been surprised by today's events given last night's torment. I have no way to thank the man that made such a huge impact in my life.

When I was in San Diego, walking down MLK Boulevard I enjoyed reading many of his famous quotes carved in granite lining the street.  When I read this one the only person that came to mind was Varney.

Mistakes

Heaven

Chuck and I just got back from Heaven.  Long story.  It was actually under the guise of him going to a conference in San Diego and me tagging along, but really, it was heaven.  This was the first time we've been away together in almost three years.  The first time we've flown on a plane together in over 10 years.  Everyone asks how our time was.  How do you describe heaven?  I can only answer that question with adjectives....peaceful, beautiful, sunny, warm, relaxing.  It was a time full of love, no responsibility, no plans, just fun, adoration, sun, having each other's full attention, getting up late, exploring nature, laying by the pool, reading, being overwhelmed with joy and happiness.  It felt more like a honeymoon than a vacation/work-conference.  Here is a very small sampling of pictures that will hopefully tell a better story than my mere words can.

Of the many animals we saw, this little guy 

on Seal Beach cracked me up the most.

These two seagulls were hilarious.  The one bird 

stood on top of the other for at least 10 minutes.

This seagull allowed us close enough 

to her nest to get this amazing picture.

This pelican claimed the sink that the fishermen 

were washing their fresh catches in.  

Just one of the many picture perfect days at the beach.

The architecture in Balboa Park is phenomenal.  

I took at least 20 pictures of buildings, 

but spared you since I'm only posting this one.

Chuck sitting amongst the roots of the 

giant Banyan Tree in Balboa Park.

One of my all time favorites:  The Carlsbad Flower Fields.

50 acres of these beautiful flowers.  I couldn't stop smiling. 

Just one of the multitude of Ranunculus that are grown on this farm.

Another happy picture.

The massive Eucalyptus trees lining the

streets of Carlsbad.

The sounds the waves made as they crashed

off the cliffs were so powerful.  It filled me with awe.

One of my favorite places in the world, La Jolla Cove.

Me and sunsets....we go way back.

Our lazy day at the La Jolla Shores beach.

Chuck deciding whether or not to brave

the freezing cold water.  He did and even 

ended up swimming close to a seal (not the NAVY kind)

Unfortunately, I didn't catch that on camera.

The view from Mt. Soledad, the highest point in La Jolla.

Hairy flowers.

Dr. Seuss looking flowers.  We realized that Dr. Seuss

must have gotten his inspiration from all the flora around 

his home in La Jolla cuz there are many crazy looking 

trees and flowers all over the place.

Chuck surprised me with a dinner cruise.  We sailed around

San Diego Harbor eating a scrumptious dinner and of 

course watching the sunset from the top of the boat. So romantic!

The bridge to Coronado.

The pool at the hotel.

Our last sunset....taken at Dog Beach of all places.  

It was the closest beach to where we were at.  

And of course, these luscious Palm Trees that

remind you that you're not in Minnesota anymore.

 

Talking In Gavinese

Gavin LOVES math.  It's right up there with Minecraft and looking cool.  He doesn't only love math, he thinks in mathematical variables and formulas and terminology all the time.  He only thinks in logical, sequential order. He sees math patterns all around him without even trying.  I'm so lucky to get glimpses inside that brain of his.  I love that he still loves to share his math thoughts with me...even if I have trouble interpreting what they mean sometimes.

The other day I heard him in the kitchen excitedly sharing one such math thought with Bennett.

Gavin:  "So, I created a matrix on my calculator of all the perfect squares from 1 - 20.  I'm surprised you're allowed to use the calculator I have for tests cuz of all the matrices you can create."

Bennett: "What's a matrix?"

Gavin: "It's a set of numbers I create and then assign a certain value to.  My perfect squares is Matrix G on my calculator."

Bennett: "Oh.  Why?"

Gavin:  "In case I ever need them."

The next day the boys are standing next to one another preparing their pizzas for pizza night.  Gavin sneezes very loudly.

Bennett:  "Thanks for sneezing on my dinner."

Gavin:  "I didn't sneeze at your food Bennett, I sneezed away from your food.  My sneeze is a vector, not a scalar quantity."

Bennett:  "Huh???"

Gavin:  "A vector is a quantity that has both magnitude and direction while a scalar only has magnitude."

Let me interpret for you:  He's saying that even though he sneezed and it appeared to be all over Bennett's pizza, it in fact wasn't because Gavin controlled the direction of his sneeze away from Bennett's food thereby being as polite as possible even though he didn't cover his mouth like we've taught him since he was 2 years old.

And lastly, just this morning, Gavin wanted to let me know what's been on his mind lately.

Gavin:  "Mom, I want to tell you about a math thought I had."

Me:  "ok"

Gavin:  "I had the numbers 9 and 12 stuck in my head the past last night.  Did you know they add up to 21 and if you took the factors of both of 9 and 12, you would find that 3 is in both of them.

Me:  "uh-huh"

Gavin:  "The factors of 9 are 3 and 3, the factors of 12 are 3 and 4.  If you add 3 + 4 it is 7 and then multiply that by the common factor of 3 you get 21."

Me:  "cool"

Gavin:  "That works for any pair of numbers that share a common factor."

Me:  "I love learning new things every day.  Thanks for being my teacher today, Honey."

Technology and Kids

I fear I must be old.  Officially.  I can honestly better understand now when old people say, "Things used to be better back in my day.  We got along just fine without (fill in the blank)."  Not only do I understand why old people say that, I ACTUALLY caught myself saying it too!  Yes, I confess.  It's hard getting older in this fast paced, technologically advanced era where kids are more tech savvy than adults in many cases.  What type of world are we passing on to them?

If I was being honest, I would say there are some days I begrudge technology and other days I embrace it.  It's like an oxymoron, you can't live with it, you can't live without it.  As a parent I struggle with knowing the limits to set for my children in regard to technology.  There are no precedents to go by.

What age should a child get his/her own cell phone?  This question hit close to home when Chloe's friend received an iPhone for her 10th birthday.  I was aghast, "What kid needs an iPhone when they're 10?".  Chloe however, had a different take on it. She tells us, "I'm the only kid in all off 4th grade who doesn't have a phone."  She's different because of our choices.  I responded with, "And you're probably the only kid whose mom stays at home.  Do you want me to go to work so you can have a cell phone?   What would you do with it anyways?"   Come to think about it, she's never known a time when people didn't have cell phones.  Since she's been born, we've always had one.  We haven't had a land-line in ages.  Cell phones are perfectly 'normal' to her.   But from our perspective, we've only had one for 10 years.  When we were kids/teens, it was a big deal to have a phone line in your own room.  Mostly, you just talked on the phone attached to the wall in the kitchen in front of everybody.  My kids can't even fathom that concept.

Time and age give us a completely different perspective on technology.  I can't imagine how hard it must be for our grandparents' generation to accept the lightning fast changes in technology they've witnessed in their 80+ years of life on this earth.  I'd be hesitant to trust it too given the life experiences they've lived through.  My grandma didn't even like the answering machine...that little bit of technological wonder came out in the 80's!  My grandfather would go unplug anything in the house that was plugged into a wall socket every single night.  Electronic devices (such as a toaster) didn't stand a chance in his house.

Gavin (at 15) just bought his first smartphone.  He has been the only kid since 7th or 8th grade who did not have one.  He never complained.  He laughed about it and we joked about it as a family, but it was never a big deal to him.  He kept the same phone we gave him at the end of 5th grade for 4 years. That's ancient in the tech world.  I asked him if waiting this long made this new phone purchase that much sweeter.  He said he couldn't agree more.  He appreciated it in a way that people appreciate something they've waited a long time to get.  Reminds me of the old saying: Anything worth having is worth the wait.

Here's where my critical attitude towards technology and the entitled attitude that most in our culture have toward it takes a turn towards the good.  Last night, Bennett, Chloe and I were messing around with Garageband on their iPads.  I was a little ticked off at the beginning saying things like, "Wouldn't it be better to actually know how to play these real instruments?" all the while thinking to myself, where has music appreciation gone to these days?  But as Chloe was navigating her way around and making up some pretty cool music that combined several different types of instruments, I suddenly realized the awesome opportunity we had to experiment with it all.  There's no way I would have been able to give my kids the chance to mess around with many different types of drums, keyboards, winds, guitars - ever.  We were appreciating music together after all - what do you know.  We were learning different styles of music on a garageband app on the ipad of all places.  Maybe this could be fun afterall.

I then asked them if they had a karaoke app that we could sing into on their ipad.  They couldn't find that, but we did find a voice recorder.  Sweet.  And Chloe found the music and words to "O Say Can You See" on her ipad.  So we used Chloe's ipad for the music and Bennett's to do the voice recording and we sang some pretty rockin versions of that song.  The best part was, we could change our voices to sound like chipmunks.  I can't even tell you the giggle fest that ensued.  We laughed our butts off listening to ourselves sing "O Say Can You See" like chipmunks (that version was 10 times better than our real voices - trust me!).  I asked the kids if they could somehow get that recording to me so I could insert it here - but none of us were tech savvy enough to figure that one out (and Gavin was elsewhere or he would have done it).  But it doesn't take tech smarts to push the 'chipmunk' button and provide crying-rolling-on-the-floor-holding-your-stomach-laugher.

The kids kept thanking me the rest of the night for 'singing' with them.  They gave me notes telling me how happy they were.  They said 'thank you' over and over again.  We made the most wonderful memory with the technology I was wanting to fight.  It's not worth it.  We need to embrace it and teach our children the boundaries that we feel are good and right for our family.  We need to learn to trust them with this technology instead of always feel like it's hurting them.   We need to empower them to make the right choices with it when there are so many wrong choices available to them.  We need to not live in fear of it or it will cause our children to live it fear of it.  We need to be more balanced in our thinking because, like it or not, this is the world our children will inherit and I don't want them to look at us like old curmudgeons who aren't teachable about the things that are prevalent in their world.

Horses and People

I just love days when a light bulb goes off and I get an epiphany.  They don't come all that often, so it tickles me on days when I can actually remember them and even relate it in a way that makes sense to another human being. Normally, my epiphanies only make sense to me - kinda like a dream.  It makes perfect sense until you start telling someone else about it and then you sound a little crazy.

I was in the middle of teaching a student today.  He is such a sweet, young Hispanic man.  He's a bull-rider and farmer.  He speaks, reads and understands English well, he just can't write it - unless he's copying something already written for him.  This baffled me.  There was no 'rule-book' for figuring out his situation.  I was asked to help him write better.  Where do you start?

I came to the understanding that he knew the name of the letters in the alphabet, just not the sounds they made.  He doesn't have all the tools he needs for writing since writing is made up of the sounds of letters.  The words he reads, he's memorized by seeing so often.  Many immigrants learn to read in order to survive, so that didn't surprise me.  I'm just surprised by how many words he's memorized.

As I was praying for wisdom in how to help this young man, I was reminded about when I began teaching Gavin math.   He was 5.  I had a curriculum with the exact words to say for each lesson.  How hard can it be to teach Kindergarten math, right?!  The problem was that the curriculum didn't take into consideration Gavin's brain.  He would interrupt my teaching monologue with brazen questions or observations saying, "you can also do it this way" or "why, mom, why?".  It was maddening.  I ended up ditching the daily teaching monologue and just asking Gavin questions.  Often times, I would be the one who would learn something new.  The kid just sees math on a completely different plane.  He literally sees the patterns math makes all around him and does an excellent job explaining the hows and whys of it.  My brain does not.  I needed  the monologue - not him.

Then it dawned on me.  Raising children and teaching people (be it kids or adults) is very much like riding a horse.  When you ride a horse (you've never ridden before), you can't just get on it and start making it do what you want or teach it new things.  You have to learn about the horse first, get to know the horse and his nuances. Once you take the time to learn the horse, he can trust you more and you can have a better ride.  Only then can you teach the horse what it is you want to teach it.

Sounds alot like my situation with Gavin.  It didn't take but a few weeks for me to realize that my little teacher's manual was of no use.  He was having none of my daily teacher reading from the book.  He wanted to do math in a completely different way.  He had  to do math in the way that made perfect sense to him.  I backed off and let him lead.  Math became way more fun.  I loved his excitement about it.  When I made him do it my way, neither of us were excited.  But once I learned to understand his style, we both grew in math by leaps and bounds.

The same holds true for adult students.  The most wonderful thing about adult students is that they want to learn.  They choose to take time out of their busy, work-filled day to come and learn English so they can better their lives in their new country.  My student and I finally figured out how to work on exactly what he needs, but it took me listening to him first.  I had to learn about him first before I could do anything to help him.  Now he trusts me to help him.  I like that.

Like I said, I just love epiphany days!