Lydia Archives - Page 17 of 51 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: not-absent resolution

my tale of woe

absent.truancy vs chronic absence Early in December, my daughter and some of her classmates were required to attend a workshop to determine what classes she could take for the next school year. She came home excited. Because she’s met so many requirements, she’ll be able to take more electives next year.

While she’s explaining this to her mother, I’m getting an automated telephone message from the high school saying that she was marked absent from school for periods three and four. Why, yes, she was absent from physics that day, for an authorized school activity. She was present for the physics lab during period four and handed in homework.

I call the school the next day. The phone menu says that I have to contact the office of the academy my daughter is assigned to. There are four academies in the school. But the Discovery office says that they can’t fix it because they only deal with actual absences. The teacher can fix this.

I call the teacher’s office. She’s out for the day. The substitute has a child in the school, so she knows that my tale of woe is true. She recommended talking with the guidance counselor.

A few hours later, the guidance counselor calls me back. She can verify that my daughter was at the authorized event for period three. She would write the teacher to correct the record for period four.

Redux

This is hardly the first time I’ve gone through this rigamarole. Nor am I the only one experiencing it. The mother of a freshman was baffled when she experienced a similar situation.

It appears that the school is better at tracking when a student is away for the whole day. My daughter went on a school trip to Montreal in the spring of 2019, but we got no robocalls. The problem seems to be tied to those in-school events of limited duration.

This may seem to be a small thing, but it happens frequently enough to become an annoyance. I don’t want to have to make two or three calls every time this happens.

Lydster: here comes the knight

one could

mountney-coat-of-arms-mountney-family-crest-7 The tricky thing about redoing the family tree is to be representational. On one hand, I have this whole new biological tribe to represent. On the other, I don’t want to ignore the import of my non-biological grandfather McKinley Green.

As it turns out, Ancestry.com has a mechanism by which one could change McKinley Green from grandparent to step-grandparent. Then one could add Raymond Cone as biological grandfather. And by “one could,” I mean my daughter could. Even when I read the instructions, nada. She did it in a couple of minutes.

Then she became a bit obsessed. Once you add a name on an Ancestry tree, it suggests Hints. Some verify what I already knew. Others are frustratingly unclear. Two different names of people with similar names but different dates, e.g. Was that guy a bigamist with wives with the same first name? That sort of thing.

But some Hints, usually coming from Census or other family trees, seem credible. And as she went further and further back on one strand of the Cone tree, the more people from England she found. And there were other Ancestry folks who were keeping track of them.

Ye Jolly Olde

William Garret “Garrard” Sir, Knight of Derby, Brickmason, Immigrated to Jamestown-1607(First ships)
B:1583 Derby, Leicestershire, England
D:1640 St Botolph Bishopsgate, London, England
That’s eleven generations back. And through his wife’s line, she got back to:

Thomas Mounsey V
–1573
Birth 31 JAN • Mountney Plain, Norfolk, England
Death 1573 • Mountney Plain, Norfolk, England
14th great-grandfather
I’m actually thinking it’s Thomas Mountney V from some hints – crests and, more importantly the geography – which suggests investigating even further. I’ll have to double check some of these, but wow.

My daughter worked on this for at least three hours straight. This in lieu of doing homework, I later discovered. The trick is that the more names you accept, the more Hints you’re provided. I had over 300 Hints when she started, and now there are over 600. It’s rather like an infectious disease.

And all of this on this brand new genealogical strand that I didn’t know about until extremely recently.

Lydster: talking to strangers

peekaboo

Talking to strangers when we happen to connect in some way is something I tend to pursue. My daughter HATES that.

It might be me speaking to the mother of a cranky baby on a bus. Or worse, talking to the baby. Because I’m willing to play peekaboo or make faces to infants, I have about an 80% success rate in getting wailing babies to stop, if only out of their curiosity. I’m actually better with them than I was with my once-baby, now-teenager.

We went to see Bernie Sanders in Albany in April 2016, in a line going around the block. I started talking to the couple behind us about the weather, which was threatening. My daughter was mortified at first. But as we ended up spending over an hour and a half in the line, she seemed to appreciate the efficacy of conversation.

Happy!

There was a report that was reported widely. Want To Feel Happier Today? Try Talking To A Stranger.

“The mood boost of talking to strangers may seem fleeting, but the research on well-being, scientists say, suggests that a happy life is made up of a high frequency of positive events. Even small positive experiences — chatting with a stranger in an elevator — can make a difference.”

Sometimes the conversation with the bank teller or sales clerk can be informative and/or fun. My daughter finds these interactions particularly cringeworthy, which, I always assumed, was the whole point of parenting.

Moreover, Malcolm Gladwell wrote Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About People We Don’t Know. It’s considered a “fascinating study of why we misread those we don’t know.” It is, in other words, the act is a social good.

Interestingly, my daughter has finally started recognizing the value of dialogue with people she doesn’t know. They’re not necessarily total strangers. It might be a kid she saw in middle school but never talked to. Now that they’re both in high school, she might take the initiative just to say hello.

Could the father be…RIGHT?

Lydster: homework is unrelenting

“It teaches time management skills.”

homework My daughter was sick the second Thursday and Friday of the school year back in September. She really was ill, with her temperature spiking over 100F, always in the evening, before we took her to the urgent care place and got her antibiotics.

Obviously, it’s been a LONG time since I’ve been in high school. But I don’t remember the homework being so unrelenting. And being ill is no excuse these days.

Her school district had embraced an “Attendance matters” initiative, “All day. Every day.” And if you’re not there – a high fever is reason enough IN THE DISTRICT’S RULES to keep the child home – the homework doesn’t go away.

It’s very easy to fall behind. My daughter has caught up, but it took over a week. It often involved staying up later than I would have wanted for her. I have been told that even second graders are getting homework, and are responsible for it, whether or not the child is present.

If you Google value of homework pros and cons, you’ll find some pros:

“It encourages the discipline of practice.” Maybe. “It gets parents involved with a child’s life.” That IS true. Since at least her third-grade class, I’ve been the parent who helped try to explain Common Core math, even when I was mystified by it. I look forward to school breaks and vacations as much as, or possibly more than, my daughter.

“It teaches time management skills.” Theoretically, but not necessarily, in this case. “Homework creates a communication network.” Not applicable. “It allows for a comfortable place to study.” I have NO idea how she studies with the television on.

“It provides more time to complete the learning process.” Sometimes the stuff that seemed to have made sense in the classroom actually becomes fuzzy by the time she gets home.

“It reduces screen time.” Well, THAT isn’t true. Much of her homework REQUIRES screen time to complete. The weekly AP European history quiz is online. The English papers are submitted electronically. An ad she did with some classmates REQUIRED her phone. Some research requires doing searches.

My daughter doesn’t love the homework. Her father isn’t a fan, either.

Lydster: talking about school shootings

January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California

Active Shooter Drills At the end of the summer, my daughter was waiting for her friends, who were late. She calls me at home, and she brings up the subject of school shootings.

She wanted to know if I had to think about these things growing up. Heck, no, but I’m better than a half-century older than she is. This got me to look up the Wikipedia page for List of school shootings in the United States. Ah, such a convenient tracking of carnage.

There were shootings back in the 19th century, but most involved zero to two casualties. An exception took place on March 30, 1891, in Liberty, Mississippi when “an unknown gunman fired a double-barreled shotgun into the mixed audience, made up of black and white students, parents and teachers. Fourteen people were wounded, some seriously.”

Six were killed in a melee in Charleston, West Virginia on December 13, 1898. I’ve written about the 1966 University of Texas shooting, the first crime of its sort that I remembered.

20th century

Hmm, they counted Kent State and Jackson State from 1970. I have no recollection of the December 30, 1974, Olean (NY) shooting that killed 3 and injured 11.

The worst shooting in the 1980s was on January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California. A 24-year-old fatally shot five children and wounded 32 others at an elementary school, before taking his own life. “The victims were children of refugees from Southeast Asia.” The shooter “had a history of violence, alcoholism, and drug addiction, and criminality.”

Then April 20, 1999: Littleton, Colorado, with 15 dead, including the two shooters, 21 wounded. I had to admit to my daughter that I had managed to forget the March 21, 2005 incident at Red Lake, Minnesota, where five students, one teacher, and one security guard were killed, wounding seven others, after the shooter previously killed a couple of relatives.

I do remember the guy who killed five Amish girls in Pennsylvania in 2006. The Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 made the international news. Then Newtown, CT; Parkland, FL; Santa Fe, TX. I remember that my daughter was particularly upset by Santa Fe after she and her classmates protested following Parkland.

How stressful her life, and the lives of her friends, must be. She so related to the disturbing Sandy Hook Promise ad here or here or here.

We had duck and cover, but I don’t think we took it too seriously. They have active shooter drills, and they have reason to believe it COULD happen “here.”