We're all goddamn monkeys playing stupid monkey dominnace games. When we're in preschool this is obvious. When we grow up we wear suits and shave and stuff, but are still goddamn monkeys.
This monkey is drunk, and so can't spell.
This little monkey had roast beef.
My son is a bright guy who does well in school, but it makes my wife crazy how little interested he is in getting good grades for the sake of getting good grades, and busywork for the sake of busywork.
Alas, I am only superficially supportive to my wife, who wants me to be sincerely angry when my son fails to complete some useless bit of homework on material he already understands.
I mean, I get it. You really have to play the monkey dominance games in adult life, and you have to start learning when you're a kid. But you also have to be able to separate the work that needs to be done from the busywork.
I say: Neither my wife nor I was raised the way that she raises our kids, and we turned out all right.
That said, our kids are pretty terrific, and show every sign of being better people in all respects than their parents. And she's got a Tiger Mom sister whose kids are also pretty awesome. So I mostly keep my mouth shut.
I am only superficially supportive to my wife...
If we renew our vows, I'm going to borrow that.
"To love, honour and vaguely acknowledge..."
10: Can you blame her for insisting on that?
#5 This was the problem my kid had at the Montessori school we had her in. It was compounded by the fact that (as you may know!) Montessori schools don't *give* grades.
So the teachers at the school, who though they were Montessori trained had been raised in Arkansas, wanted so very much for my child to do all the bullshit busywork they assigned (very much contrary to the Montessori way of education). She was only interested in doing the bits of the education that were actually educational. I would not get upset, as the teachers wished me to, when she wouldn't do the bullshit busywork.
And, since they didn't have grades, they couldn't do very much to threaten her, or us. (They kept her in for recess a lot. That was about it.)
We were all very happy when we finally parted ways.
11: "To make a sincere effort to pretend to care..."
The choir will now sing Hymn 215, "What An Acquaintance We Have In Jesus".
Here is the HTML5 code they are using for the video. Looks like it takes this animated gif as the preview poster. Its even creepier full size.
<video preload="none" width="100%" style="width: 100%;" poster="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/2016/03/comments/jessica-optimize.gif" alt-poster="https://interactive.guim.co.uk/2016/03/comments/160321AbuseWhatIsAbuse.Still001.jpg"> <source src="https://cdn.theguardian.tv/interactive/2016/03/21/160321AbuseWhatIsAbuse_4M_H264.mp4" type="video/mp4"> <source src="https://cdn.theguardian.tv/interactive/2016/03/21/160321AbuseWhatIsAbuse_4M_vp8.webm" type="video/webm"> </video>
Here's another example - deciding whether or not to be prepared for a meeting is just like deciding whether or not to be prepared for class. Do I feel like doing the reading? Am I going to have to say something intelligent? Can I wing it? Do I care about the content or is there a consequence I care about?
17: Spike's k-12 education obviously didn't prepare him adequately.
Spike's k-12 education obviously didn't prepare him adequately.
True. I barely graduated high school due to chronic lack of focus.
My kids are weirdly non-defiant with the pointless bits of education, which is kind of great. I was defiant in a low-key kind of way, but I was also terrible at telling which were the pointless bits and which weren't, which is why I'm uneducated to this day.
I do more telling them not to worry about particular grades than the reverse.
Conclusion: I should not co-parent with politicalfootball's wife. Which is convenient because I wasn't planning to.
We are making my son get extra tutoring because of his crappy grades in Spanish. Which we wouldn't do for any other subject, but being able to learn another language is actually a valuable skill that if you can't manage to do it when you are young, you are doomed to struggle with for life.
Also, Spanish is totally not a subject we are able to help him with at home.
which is why I'm uneducated to this day
Do you have any defense for this proposition?
Am I confused, or aren't you living surrounded by native speakers right now?
26: Well, I know various things because I read them someplace, but I didn't graduate from college with any organized body of knowledge about anything at all.
Come to think, I should be fretting about Sally's Spanish. After she took the AP, her school didn't have any more classes for her to take, and she's probably rusty.
I hate busywork like the fires of hell. I did HS in a period of repeated curriculum changes, between various busywork-centered regimes. Eventually all of these were abandoned and my grades went up two symbols across the board.
Maybe I secretly prefer busy work to actually having to think about what I'm doing. That would explain a lot.
No, I'm in the English speaking Caribbean, despite the city-name "Port of Spa/in."
I do work at a Latin America-focused agency (or "Latin America and the Caribbean" as they say) so I do interact with Spanish-speakers quite a bit, but my specific part is the "and the Caribbean."
Oh, but no easy access to immersion. I was wondering why you were saying 'tutoring' rather than, like, 'playing with neighborhood kids', but that makes sense now.
18: Can you just ditch the meeting?
I have started just ditching meetings. No one actually cares if you attend most meetings, I have learned. (Does not apply to all meetings.)
For instance: Don't ditch the one-on-one meeting with your Dean over your annual evaluation. (Pro-Tip!)
Come to think, I should be fretting about Sally's Spanish.
"Come to think, I should be fretting" doesn't SOUND like the start to anything true.
[Was going to comment on the emphasis on busywork, especially home busy work, my son's education, but find that I'm still too angry to be coherent.]
I should be thoughtfully devising appealing enrichment activities for her that will refresh her skills. Like, throwing her on a plane to South America to paint schools or whatever teenagers do.
35,36: Also, don't let them appoint you as chair of a committee. Once they do that, it gets harder to skip the meetings.
My sons enrichment activities are largely based around video games. I think we are going to have to get one of those fancy new virtual reality systems so that he can get more enriched.
41: Can you somehow rig his machine (?) so that it will only play in Spanish?
40: Once you're the chair, can't you just cancel all the meetings?
39: Doesn't NYC offer a fair range of Spanish speaking opportunities?
Can you somehow rig his machine (?) so that it will only play in Spanish?
What is Spanish for "lol got wrecked bro"?
I think somehow Mossy Character went to bed, sobered up, and woke up angry between comments 2 and 31.
I don't know, but you reply with a form of chingar.
Online gaming has enriched my sons' linguistic abilities to the extent they can now both swear fluently in Russian and Ukrainian.
Aren't those really just the same language, more or less?
33-4: Spike Island always seemed interesting, mostly because of cool place names (Port of Spa/in; Bocas del Dragón) and a lake of tar; one of those semi-mythical places, like Timbuktu. Then Spike revealed it as a toxic outpost of Hades, and another small part of my soul died.
Apparently the Russians and Ukrainians spend most of their time swearing at each other. So possibly it matters to them that swearwords are similar enough for mutual comprehension but different enough that they aren't mistaken for a native of the other country. I'm just guessing, though.
The Russians and Ukrainians who play Dota2 and CSGo, that is.
46 is true, except I was angry at 2 and woke up happier. I'm an angry drunk.
The lake of tar is pretty cool. Actually, its pitch, not tar. I wouldn't want to walk on tar, but you can walk out on the pitch and soak your feet in the hot, sulfuric waters.
Huh. I'd thought it would be full of the fossilized corpses of animals which had tried that.
And maybe that's good for your feet.
There are vultures circling overhead, so if any animals do get stuck, they get picked apart right quick.
Have you considered writing for the tourist board?
"Stretch your feet in the hot, sulfuric waters as vultures circle overhead, in a brilliant tropical sky yellow with toxic garbage smoke."
Apparently the Russians and Ukrainians spend most of their time swearing at each other.
This takes the concept of make work to a new level: "Igor, if you've got time to sit there gawping at facebook, get out the Kiev phone book and start dialling random numbers and cussing them out!"
59 - truly, the copy almost writes itself.
The Russians and Ukrainians who play Dota2 and CSGo, that is.
Which seems to be all of them under the age of 25, near as I can tell.
Aren't some of them shooting at each other?
63: They might swear at each other while they're shooting.
49: My sister is fluent in Russian (used to do simultaneous interpretation Russian-English) and said that when she ran into Ukrainian, she could understand maybe half of what she was hearing. On the other hand she recently overheard a discussion in Macedonian (she had to ask what the language was, she guessed something Balkan like Serbian), and although the vowels were all or mostly different, she said she had no problem understanding.
16: I pasted that code between and into a text file, test.html and tried to load it into my browser, but it did nothing.
I used up my lifetime supply of willingness to force children to do homework up on my high-strung child self, I have none left over for little Chrysothemis Stabby. She enjoys enough of her homework that she still does some of it, but I am essentially relying on a 6 year old's judgment about what is worth learning and what isn't, which I feel not great about--as the OP points out, sometimes it's the dumbest-seeming part of school that's actually the most useful. Or maybe it's useful to realize that stuff is dumb early on and never sit though a meeting and she's gonna Reassurance from high-achieving children of burnouts welcome.
"and she's gonna" should be followed by "engineer a quantum computer"
My wife was angry at our son when she discovered that he was doing much of his sixth grade math homework by reading questions out loud to Siri and writing down the answers. I was kind of proud.
Here's the secret about elementary school, though: almost nothing learned there is ultimately useful. (Reading. Maybe using scissors.)
High school -- I'd say, from watching my kid going through it now -- maybe 20% of what they're learning is (ultimately) going to be useful. (Some of it is actively harmful.)
I'm seriously coming to the conclusion that we could let kids run wild for their first 14 years, with maybe a couple of weeks intense schooling each year where we remind them about reading, and then slam them with a year or two of schooling when they're fifteen and sixteen, and then ship them off to university.
delagar utopia: The world would be a better place.
70 seems to presume a world in which math is left to specialists.
School is very useful for ensuring that your kids are not at home, as I recently found out during our ridiculous 3 week spring break. I say yay for school.
Well, 2 weeks and 4 additional school days. And then next week the pre-preschooler starts an ill-timed SEPARATE two week spring break because apparently kids need breaks from the treadmill-like drudgery that is under-2 day care. What the hell.
I have long believed 70. The child storage problem should be solved with some kind of natural park/hunger games setup.
71. US High school science could be so much better if they used math. But at least at my kid's basically high-grade school, there's only one science curriculum.
Hoo boy, my life has struggles but nothing like that! (Our spring break was wonderful, really, but also sufficient.)
76: They need Science-Science, Math-Science, and Creation Science.
70 one thing that surprises me about being a lawyer is how often I find myself using scissors? And other first grade school supplies like glue sticks. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
80: I don't think I've used glue since elementary school. A fact which brightens my day every time I remember it.
how often I find myself using scissors
Related to your pseud, maybe?
70: Don't most people learn the useful stuff in elementary school? Reading and basic arithmetic are useful for most people in our society ... and what else? I'm not sure.
Trial by combat is deprecated these days. But maybe C Stabs skipped that class?
Cly, when they tell you to cut and paste, they mean using the word processing program!
stab what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life
(Of course, when I was a young lawyer, we used obsidian knives to cut sections of documents.)
My sister is fluent in Russian (used to do simultaneous interpretation Russian-English) and said that when she ran into Ukrainian, she could understand maybe half of what she was hearing. On the other hand she recently overheard a discussion in Macedonian (she had to ask what the language was, she guessed something Balkan like Serbian), and although the vowels were all or mostly different, she said she had no problem understanding.
Macedonian is basically the same as Bulgarian. Surprised that she could understand that better than Ukrainian!
I think Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Slovene would have been harder to understand.
I remember when Serbo-Croatian was a single language. When they broke up did they have to work hard to make themselves incomprehensible to each other?
A war, a Russia, lots of swearing,Ukranoplain.
"....some kind of natural park/hunger games setup." See, wouldn't this be *much* better than elementary school and junior high? (Speaking as someone who survived both, I mean.)
Consensus position is that children should be put somewhere most of the time, but maybe instead of school it should be like maybe a dual language English/Old Church Slavonic nature scrum with bursts of arithmetic?
As in all unhappy families, the problem is not incomprehension but familiarity.
93 to 89. Or the entire blog. Either works, I think.
Consensus position is that children should be put somewhere most of the time
And nowhere some of the time.
88: When I was in western Ukraine, I found that Polish and Ukranian were largely mutually intelligible, which is not my experience with Polish and Russian.
89: They did, actually, or so I'm led to believe. Bosnian reintroduced Turkish influences, Serbian got more Russian, and I'm not really sure how the Croats made themselves feel special but I'm sure they managed.
Serbo-Groation is a type of pickled cereal.
Unpleasant reading about Bosnia.
The public prosecutor in Sarajevo believes that the Salafists purchased eight hectares (20 acres) of land from Serbs who used to live here, using a $200,000 donation from the emirate of Qatar. As a rule, fundamentalists in Bosnia buy property where it is cheap, remote and unlikely to receive unwanted visitors.
The article is a little hysterical, but mentions BiH as the origin of weapons and ammunition in the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Macedonian is basically the same as Bulgarian.
Isn't saying this anywhere east of Vienna likely to get one stabbed and dumped in a river?
Isn't saying this anywhere east of Vienna likely to get one stabbed and dumped in a river?
If you say that in Bulgaria, they will agree with you, and launch into an extended discussion of why the territory in F.Y.R.O.M would be more appropriately contained within the borders of a Greater Bulgaria, as it was before it got stolen by the Turks in the 14th century.
So, they just assume that you don't want to be stabbed and dumped in a river?
101: Surely X. Trapnel Can help test this assertion?
"20 km east of Vienna, still not stabbed."
[...]
"90 km east of Vienna, stabbed, left in ditch between road and river."
"Come to think, I should be fretting" doesn't SOUND like the start to anything true.
I just wanted to read that again.
|| I was just reading about the Stairway to Heaven case -- I don't know if anyone here is involved in the case -- but I was intrigued by the ruling that what sounds like an admission by Jimmy Page made in an interview while he was with LZ was stricken as hearsay. Am I missing something about 801(d)(2)? |>
It's not a recording or a transcript, though, so I guess that's it. I don't usually have press reports of statements . . .
I asked Kid C why he can't swear in Russian or Ukrainian when Ume's boys can. He said, "oh, everyone can swear in Russian." So I asked why, and he said that CSGo (which I hadn't mentioned) is known for being played by Russians who can't speak English and shout at each other all the time.
My wife was angry at our son when she discovered that he was doing much of his sixth grade math homework by reading questions out loud to Siri and writing down the answers.
Haha. Kid C was doing Latin up till last year, and had an insane teacher who wanted them to learn 80-100 words a week, and their homework would be to send him a screenshot of them getting 100% in a vocab test - he'd written his own little program for the test for them to use at home. I assumed that lots of them just used their books whilst doing the test, but at least some of it would sink in. In the summer after he'd dropped Latin, Kid C told us that the program involved a text file with lists of the Latin and English words, so he simply changed everything to the same word and then pasted in the same answer 83 times to get the 100%.
108.3: But I'll bet he learned that one word extremely well.
101/2/4: ha. Iberian Fury has a Bulgarian colleague, I could ask her...
Is our Latin teachers programming?
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Should I get off the bus outside's Trump's bloviating or take it home?
===============
Tomorrow I will have that choice. I will go home. Or to the bar.
Asia begins at the Landstrasse
I've already been drinking, which makes it seem like a reasonable idea.
The bus driver tells me that road has been blocked off.
What good thing do you think might happen if you go to the rally? I see only downsides.
He might inspire the audience to reject Trump and all he stands for?
I mean, probably won't go down that way, but you never know unless you try.
If you're into angry older men wearing baseball caps a Trump rally is like a trip to Temptation Island.
Well, I did not go.
Apparently, they had at least one protester hustled out.
The event in Pittsburgh tomorrow is apparently a Sean Hannity show. It's in the same building as Hannibal Lector was jailed in.
120: well, shit, that place probably can't keep hannity in, either. Still lesss with trumpalo bill in tow.
108
When I was learning Russian there was the "Dictionary of Russian Obscenities," which everyone in the course purchased and attentively studied. It was much more fun than figuring out all the (essentially insane Russian) verb roots.
122: I think my mother has that with the reference books in her office. Is it a really small but packed book?
There is an open carry rally associated with Trump that is gathering literally 200 feet from the classroom where my wife will be. This does not make me feel mellow.
Anyway, I'm far enough away that I'm mostly worried about the traffic.
123: That's right. Paperback-sized, hand-stapled, yellow cover with (IIRC) an illustration of a stereotypical 19th century Russian. I've still got it on a shelf somewhere. Schoenhof's in Harvard Square carried it.
So far, the site of the Trump thing is marked only by a few signs about no parking, a single traffic cone, and a news van parked over by food trucks that are never open when I walk by them.
I walked by the Trump thing twice. The first time just a really long line, a few quiet protesters with signs, and a bunch of gawking students. The second time, a shorter line. The only thing really interesting I saw was a very old Land Cruiser that was nicely restored (and tricked out with a sign reading "The Donald - 2016").
126: Teaching.
I happened to be at the field where the gathering was supposed to happen. There were reporters, but no guns in sight. Still unclear whether it was always a hoax, or if it was meant to happen, but didn't.
I was going to walk there, but I was too lazy.
I asked Kid C why he can't swear in Russian or Ukrainian when Ume's boys can. He said, "oh, everyone can swear in Russian." So I asked why, and he said that CSGo (which I hadn't mentioned) is known for being played by Russians who can't speak English and shout at each other all the time.
The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion and accompanying dashcam footage was pretty good for teaching people Russian swearwords too.
When I was learning Russian there was the "Dictionary of Russian Obscenities,"
One of the greatest language-learning resources ever, right up with that other legendary Russian textbook we've discussed here before, the title of which escapes me. There's an entire sub-vocabulary based on the word for "mother," and a single word denoting the sexual position involving the woman's legs over the man's shoulders (heteronormative, sorry). What a rich linguistic culture.
