Letting the kids roam

16. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

After writing my own post about free-ranging kids, I’ve been trying to pay attention to what I’m seeing in my own neighborhood. Laura also posts about this and the comments are a great sharing of different experiences, both the ones that the adults had as children and the ones that their kids are currently having. I’ve noticed that around here, lots of kids roam pretty freely at all ages, beginning around 8. When we went to the park, a group of kids around 9 or 10 rolled through on their bikes. I see kids on foot, bikes and scooters headed to the nearby shopping center or the closer ice cream shop. Older kids walk to the middle school, around 1 mile for many students. The public library is a block from the middle school and I regularly see unsupervised kids there. Our neighborhood has plenty of sidewalks. There are other divisions nearby that don’t, but you still see kids on bikes there. Today, my kids walked to the park–a whole 3 blocks away!–by themselves. I tried, to no avail, to get them to walk to the library, a bit over a mile.

In other words, I think a culture persists here of kids playing in the street, roaming the neighborhood. In part, it’s because, like one commenter at Laura’s says, backyards are tiny, so basketball, football and frisbee games move to the street. We have no less than 3 basketball goals on our street, with regular pickup games happening mostly after dinner. One is right under a streetlight, so the games happen well into the fall. When we’ve contemplated relocating, it’s this culture that I couldn’t be sure would be replicated in another neighborhood. And, in fact, in more upper class neighborhoods, what I’ve seen is no sidewalks, no kids on bikes or on foot. In those places, there are only structured activities and playdates in fenced-in back yards.

I do long for a creek or some woods, but we get that through visits to various places, so I think that’s okay. And I’ve also seen the kids do some pretty creative things on the computer. Geeky Boy constructed a very complex map today, which he posted to a Runescape forum. When he plays, I swear he spends 1/2 hour playing and another 3 hours writing, drawing, etc. So imagination can come from other places besides the outdoors.

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The Freedom of Childhood (or not)

14. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Two posts on “Free-Range Childhoods” caught my eye yesterday. Both were comments on Michael Chabon’s article on childhood adventure books and the general idea that our childhoods and our parents’ childhoods were much more adventurous than our children’s are turning out to be. To some extent that’s true. I can remember venturing all over our neighborhood, basically spending entire days outside roaming around rather aimlessly. It seems like I did this every day in the summer, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I suspect I remember the days I did spend outside and not the ones I spent in front of the tv.

We’ve been lucky in that most of the neighborhoods we’ve lived in have been conducive to wandering. My son, now 14, has ventured pretty far from home on foot, mostly once he reached the age of 11 or 12, a little later than I remember wandering myself. Of course, my mother sent me to the corner store when I was about 4 or 5, with a quarter to buy a cheap toy and some bubblegum. Like Tim said, I think there was a definite separation between the adult world and the kid world. I was sent to the store in large part because my mom wanted a break, to reclaim her adult space. Likewise, I suspect we were encouraged to roam the neighborhood so she could have her space.

Tim suggests that there’s a definite loss for the kids in that those adventures teach great lessons of independence and confidence, but there’s also the gaining of a shared experience as a family or as parent and child. I have vague memories of wishing my parents would join in with us and I remember family vacations as being times when they had no choice, when we did things together because we were in unfamilar territory and we explored it together. Although my kids have spent some time hanging out with friends, running around the neighborhood, they’ve also spent a lot of time with me. We’ve gone to the park together, to the pool together, etc. And I think that’s been a positive thing. I’ve often lamented the separation of generations. Perhaps what’s happening now will mean our kids won’t see such a gap between generations.

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The Looney Tune Effect

08. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Yesterday, after getting through some grading (going faster than before–hooray!) and getting some other work done, I found myself not feeling too good. Being horizontal seemed the best idea. Daytime tv being pretty universally awful, I decided to download some old Looney Tunes cartoons to watch with Geeky Girl. The one embedded here is one I refer to here that got me worked up about death. We watched for altogether. Geeky Girl did find them funny, but she commented that they were awfully short. Each one was only about 8 minutes long. And, of course, they mostly relied on slapstick humor, not sophisticated wordplay or lengthy setups for jokes. It makes today’s (best) cartoons seem like Shakespeare in comparison. On the other hand, I know some of these were clever and subtle in their humor. I explained to Geeky Girl that I used to get up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons and the grand finale was always the Bugs Bunny show, an hour and a half of these cartoons. I also told her that these cartoons showed before movies, something she thinks is bizarre considering there are now so many feature-length cartoons. Oh, and I used to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow. God, I feel old.

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Why I am not a scientist: Part 2

15. June 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Part 1 is here.

Here I was in Middle School, interested in math and science, loving some aspects of science, but pulled for who knows what reason to pursue writing instead. Middle school was a confusing time. There was puberty to contend with and then there were boys. My diary from those days is filled with entries where I am a) writing about who I like or don’t like or b) writing about dealing with friendships. Negotiating the social terrain of middle school seemed to occupy a lot of my time. Which meant there wasn’t a lot of time to think about science.

Negotiating the social scene just got worse in high school. There were even more factions to figure out. Boys became increasingly more important and, I started drinking. This combination of things did not help my grade situation, but it was cool for a writer. I started drinking very deliberately in an attempt not to be popular, oddly, but to separate myself from the popular crowd. They were all *too* good, so I thought drinking beer would make me *bad* and therefore differentiate me from them. Before I started drinking, I had a straight A average. I was tied with about 20 other people for the top spot. Somewhere around the second semester of my sophomore year, my grades slipped and I could no longer contend for the top position. In some ways, this took any pressure off of me to keep up the A average and so I kind quit caring about school.

Besides the drinking and social issues, math and science suddenly got a lot harder. I probably should have stuck with biology because I took two biology classes, one intro and one on genetics and loved both of the them, and did really well in both of them. I avoided physics because I was told the teacher didn’t like girls. This is the only time ever that I experienced blatant sexism. In fact, two of my three science teachers in middle school were women and both teachers I had in high school were women. So I had role models. And they did encourage me. Just maybe not enough.

When I hit chemistry and trigonometry, things got rough. Coupled with my new “I’m too cool for school” attitude and the difficulty I had understanding basic concepts, I found myself seriously struggling. And I had never had to do that in my life. For a while, instead of just buckling down and figuring stuff out, I just let it slide. In chemistry, several of us were struggling, and a collection of people, more as a prank than as a real attempt to cheat, stole a test. I can’t remember if I saw the test. It seems I didn’t, because I recall getting a horrible grade on that test. The teacher found out and issued another test. I was so scared of the difficulty of that test that I did buckle down and study. After all, I’d done so poorly on the original that I was likely to do even worse on the new one. But I didn’t. I actually got an A. Shockingly, this did not inspire me to study. I did not really put two and two together and realize that if I just studied a little harder, I might do fine. And no one else pointed that out to me either.

The same thing happened in math. I made it through trig in large part because I had a great teacher. I should have hung around him more. He used to tell me he thought I might be a genetic engineer, knowing that I was doing well in biology. Even when I wasn’t doing well, he still encouraged me and didn’t make me feel stupid if I didn’t understand something. At the end of the year, I calculated (real world math!) what I needed to get on the final exam to get an A, a 98. In the past, this would have been no big deal, but I had missed some basic concepts and wasn’t sure what to do. So I stopped by my teacher’s office and explained to him where I was and that I needed help. And this, I will never forget. He didn’t chastise me or tell me how disappointed he was that I hadn’t kept up. Instead, he said that he felt like he had let me down. And then he spent almost two hours working with me, going over the basics I had missed and making sure I had understood them. At home, I spread out all my papers and did practice problems for two days straight. I had never studied so hard for anything in my life. I got a 98, giving me an A in the class.

In English, I wasn’t struggling at all. I was breezing through. I was getting praise for my writing, both for my creative work and the analytical work I did. Before school, when I was hanging out with friends, they’d ask me if I’d written any poems or stories and I’d show them things I’d written and they tell me how good it was. My English teachers doted on me. And I loved that kind of attention. Once I got to calculus my senior year, and I had a teacher who wrote problems on the board and erased them at the same time and was really unfriendly, I had pretty much given up on math and science. It wasn’t worth the struggle, I figured. And I wasn’t getting as much attention for my work in math and science as I was for my work in English.

Also, I think I could see a career for myself if I pursued English. I was still hooked on becoming a writer of some kind, maybe a poet, but I was also considering novelist or journalist. Besides genetic engineer, no one really mentioned possible science careers. And since I wasn’t doing so well in those subjects . . . No one really said that I didn’t have to have perfect grades in an area to pursue it as a career option. I just figured you had to do whatever you were really, really good at.

So high school was certainly a point at which I could have been encouraged to consider a career in science. Perhaps if my other teachers, especially the two women science teachers, had pulled me aside at some point and said, you know you’re pretty good at this stuff and maybe you should think about becoming a scientist. But there were other complex reasons for my not staying interested in science or math. They certainly weren’t cool. As we progressed through high school, the “cool kids” were definitely not the ones excelling in math and science. There were one or two exceptions but still. And it’s amazing how much we cared about that stuff–who was cool, who wasn’t, who was dating whom, who was friends with whom. So much energy spent on things that just would not matter a year after we’d left high school. And I don’t know how you counter that. And the subtle socialization about who pursued science and math. The boys I knew pursuing those areas wanted to become doctors or engineers. The girls? I didn’t know. Mostly, even the smart girls I knew talked about dating and clothes. I had no idea what their intellectual interests might be. And this whole problem would continue in college. I just didn’t hang around any girls who were studying science. In fact, I mostly hung around guys, and this, I think, caused some problems . . .

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Why I am not a scientist: Part 1

14. June 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

When I was about 9, I declared I was going to be a writer. Specifically, I was going to be a poet. I wrote sing-song rhyming poems in school whenever I had the opportunity. I put together little books of poetry or whole stories in rhyme for my parents for Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. I declared that when I was a famous poet, I would buy my parents a big house and take them on expensive vacations. I was lucky, I guess, that my parents didn’t laugh me out of the house. They neither encouraged nor discouraged this poetic tendency of mine. I didn’t just write poetry; I wrote stories too, always getting accolades for my work in in school. In fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Cooper, helped me submit one of my stories to Stone Soup. The story was a tale of a man hit by a mysterious illness while he was exploring “deepest darkest Africa.”1 Eventually, it was discovered that the illness was caused by the Tse Tse Fly and was in fact, malaria. But for a while, everyone suspected foul play. My teacher helped me type up the story and together we wrote a cover letter and sent it off. It took months for them to respond. In fact, by the time I heard from them, I was in 6th grade. One day my Science teacher, Mr. Redmond sat me down and handed me the rejection letter. It was a nice letter, really, explaining that they liked my story, but that they just didn’t have room for it.

What does all this have to do with my becoming or not becoming a scientist? Well, first of all, the story itself was kind of science-y. In fact, many of my stories were. I wrote about a planet beyond Pluto that was actually heated by a nearby star just hot enough to heat one side of Pluto enough to create a temperate climate that was then plunged into serious winter. But the people had learned to cope. Secondly, after the rejection, my confidence in my writing career pretty much plummeted. I wasn’t completely devastated or anything. I just thought, okay, so I’m not that great at this. Let’s see what else is out there.

And there were lots of other things I liked, one of them being Science. Mr. Redmond, the science teacher who broke the rejection to me, was a great teacher. Not only did he teach me about science, but he taught me how to take notes and do research, how to ask questions and do experiments. Starting in 6th grade, in fact, I have lots of memorable science moments. I remember distinctly learning about Mendel and genetics. I had to do a report on oil as an energy source (it was the 70s and we drew lots for which energy source to report on; I wanted solar). In 7th grade, I remember dissecting a squid (yes, PZ, a squid) and getting its backbone out in one piece. I carefully wrapped the squid backbone and an eyeball and the brain in a brown paper towel and carried it home. My dad proceeded to throw it away, thinking it was a wad of trash. Oh, the obstacles! But that was the year I went on a dissection rampage. I started dissecting things outside of class–crawfish, worms, frogs. Armed with lots of lysol and some curiosity, my friends and I took apart all kinds of creatures. I also collected rocks, labeling them all very carefully. In 8th grade, I had less of these moments, in part because my teacher sucked, but still I put together my science fair project on the science of wine, actually making my own batch of, I’m told, not very good wine.

Through the “gifted” program, I began taking computer science. I liked working with computers. I think there were about ten of us. I’m sure there was another girl, but I don’t remember there being one. We mostly played computer games using a cassette player and a Tandy or on the brand new Apple IIe. Lemonade Stand anyone? But we also created flow charts and wrote programs in BASIC. I’ll admit, I didn’t love this part. It just wasn’t very satisfying writing programs that did nothing more than write “Hello World” on the screen or calculate complex equations. We did have a way to make the computer talk and it was fun to make it say, “Fuck you” and “shit”. No, we didn’t have much supervision.

But I also returned to the idea of writing. In part, I was driven by competition. A new girl had moved to town and she was scary smart. She also had scary hair. But she had a nice rock collection and she’d written five books! Not published mind you, but still. And so, I went back to this idea of becoming a writer, holding that torch and ignoring the fact that I was good at science and good at math, and that there were a lot of things I liked about it.

To be continued . . .

1 Let’s ignore the racism for a moment, because yes, there was a native assistant, Thursday, I think. And yes, it was somewhat misinformed.

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