Tag: Lydia

The Daughter’s homework keeps me awake at night

This is NOT her father’s fourth grade math, and not only do I love the subject, I am good at it; she, conversely, is learning to HATE it.

When I indicated I was having trouble sleeping, someone suggested telling myself a story. This doesn’t work for me, because my head is already filled with stories that I want to let out, i.e., blog about. But I have not the time to do this. And while there are a few reasons for my busyness, none of them has more of an impact than my daughter’s homework. It takes us, and I do mean US, an AVERAGE of 90 minutes per night.

So if I’m spending an hour and a half doing THAT, by the time I’ve washed the dishes and done other chores, it’s 10 p.m. Should I write or should I go to bed? If I write, I may get overtired; if I go to bed, the mind continues to write narratives that I can’t offload.

I’m writing this because I can churn it relatively quickly, but when do I write my feelings about FantaCon or the musical Ghost, both of which took place LAST month? Or the ABC Wednesday pieces that I USED to write three or four weeks ahead, but I only have the immediate next one written? Important anniversaries coming up, and remain unaddressed.

And much of the homework involves math problems from the so-called Core Curriculum, or Common Core that I think are quite challenging for a fourth-grader, especially since New York has deigned to start on the process BEFORE it really trained its teachers in the methodology.

You have questions asking about the number of footballs, when it’s told you about the total number of balls, and the number of baseballs, and that the number of basketballs is a certain number less than the number of baseballs. The process means one needs to subtract to get the number of basketballs, then add them to the number of baseballs, then subtract that sum from the total number of balls. And these are four- and five-digit numbers.

This is NOT her father’s fourth-grade math, and not only do I love the subject, but I am also good at it; she, conversely, is learning to HATE it.

Then one gets a question such as this one:
“In the 2010 New York City Marathon, 42,429 people finished the race and received a medal. Before the race, the medals had to be ordered. If you were the person in charge of ordering the medals and estimated how many to order by rounding, would you have ordered enough medals? Explain your thinking.”

I discovered, after talking with two colleagues, and after a couple of hours, that the second sentence is the source of the utter confusion, and by excising it, then what is being sought in the question becomes clear.
If one rounds 42,429 to the nearest 10, it’s 42,430 and you have enough medals.
If one rounds 42,429 to the nearest 100 or 1,000 or 10,000, it’d be 42,400 or 42,000 or 40,000, respectively, and it would be an insufficient number of medals.

This is not the only bad question, only the most egregious one. It’s become a challenge to motivate her to do the stuff that has actual value when it’s so heavily laden with rubbish.

Attacking these questions is perceived as not wanting to “challenge” or “enrich” the students. I think the IDEA is fine; it’s the EXECUTION that I think is faulty.

The Lydster, Part 114: Anita

She went online and got the lyrics to ‘America’, her first favorite song, and then “A Boy Like That.’

I mentioned that the family saw an Albany High School production of West Side Story this spring. Since then, the Daughter has been listening to the movie soundtrack, which pleases me, since it was #2 on my favorite albums of the 1960s.

More specifically, I burned her a copy of my CD so that, if she loses it, I’ll still have it. I’ve done this with some 1959 rock ‘n’ roll compilation and the Beatles’ albums A Hard day’s Night and Help. She’s been playing WSS before she goes to sleep quite often of late.

The Daughter has been particularly enthralled by the character of Anita, the leading Shark girl. In the program, we saw Bryana Greer play Anita, and she was the best performer, we all thought, in a quite good cast.

So she went online and got the lyrics to ‘America’, her first favorite song, and then “A Boy Like That.’ She hasn’t yet figured out the “I Have A Love’ duet that Anita has with Maria, but give it time.

And she HAS been asked to be called Anita, not all the time, but when she’s “in character.”

I have NO idea where she gets this music/theater interest.

What’s the “lesson” of 9/11?

The feds tell web firms to turn over the encrypted user account passwords, just in case they need them, but they’re not going to use them without cause, and a (rubber stamp) court order. Of course.

Photo credit: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Every year, I hear, especially since the 10th anniversary, “Remember 9/11! Never forget!” If we somehow forgot, we’d cease to be ‘vigilant’. I remember September 11, 2001, amazingly well, thank you. Just this summer, I was at a highway rest stop on I-87, the Northway, not far from Albany, when I saw a memorial for three people who worked for the Department of Transportation, one of whom I knew not very well, who died on that day.

Even my daughter, who wasn’t even born then, knows about 9/11. Her third-grade teacher made a point of making sure those eight-year-olds knew about it. It even got covered on the local cable channel, YNN.

But what is it that we should not forget? Since then, the United States has had two of its longest wars, including with a country that had nothing to do with the tragedy.

We have had a series of laws – such as the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed less than six weeks after the tragedy, suggesting it was already in the hopper – that has directly led to the surveillance of Americans. OK, not on Americans, just our “metadata” involving our snail mail, and phones, and e-mail. The feds tell web firms to turn over the encrypted user account passwords, just in case they need them, but they’re not going to use them without cause, and a (rubber stamp) court order. Of course.

Whether or not soldiers have been fighting for our freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s abundantly clear that freedom is being stolen at home by secret courts and executive overreach, against the wishes of most Americans. If the lesson of 9/11 is that we’ll do anything to be safe, that would be yet another tragedy.

The Lydster, Part 113: Robbed!

It was that it was my stuff that was stolen AFTER I had played the unwilling but gracious host.

The Daughter has been going to her summer camp in a nearby park, Ridgefield by name. She decided to ride her scooter there. It was in a location she could keep an eye on it.

About a month ago, it was raining, and they had to move to the alternate site, which happened to be her usual elementary school. Her scooter was in the hallway next to one of her counselor’s bicycles, but not visible to her. You can guess what happened at the end of the day.

There was a police report filed, and, allegedly, there was a film being reviewed, but nothing has come of this, to date.

She was sad that her scooter is gone, of course, but it’s more than someone who she probably knows, perhaps not well, but still, took her vehicle. It made her understandably wary about returning to the camp. She looked sad a lot the next few days, especially getting up on weekday mornings.

I know she remembered when my previous bicycle got stolen about three years ago that I went through a period of anger, frustration, and grief, especially after the then-custodian of my church actually saw some kid riding it a few days later, pursuing him in his car, but the kid went down some alleyway. I held onto the hope of recovery for even longer than I might have.

Two or three days after her incident, I told her a story, a true story, how I was at my home in Binghamton when I was about 13. My parents had a couple over from church, and they had a son who was about 10 who I knew, of course, but we weren’t what I’d call friends. I was required to entertain him while the grownups chatted.

I took him to my (tiny) room and showed him my baseball cards, and my collection of US coins, which were in these blue folders, in all the denominations. At some point, after they left, maybe not until the next day, I noticed that my half dollars were gone! I looked everywhere, but, as I said, it was a little room in a little house. I KNEW this kid had taken my half dollars. It wasn’t just that they were worth $12 or $15 face value; it was that it was my stuff that was stolen AFTER I had played the unwilling but gracious host. But my parents said I couldn’t accuse him; I had no proof.

After I told that story, The Daughter sat on my lap and cuddled. She did ask if maybe my sisters could have taken them as a joke, but I noted that the “joke” would be almost 50 years old by now.

Dreaming about my dad and my daughter

It’s now 13 years since my dad died.

\”Got big-time swagger,\” sister Marcia proclaimed.

About five months ago, I dreamed that my father had ordered a bunch of nondescript raw materials in long, brown cardboard boxes. He was convinced that would resell them and make himself rich.

At some point, he decided that we (he, my daughter, and I) had to drive into Canada. “Dad,” I said, “I don’t have my passport. Or Lydia’s.” He did not have his either if he had one at all. He starts schmoozing with the border guard, while I’m filing through my wallet hoping that maybe I had SOME paperwork that would be satisfactory. The odd thing is that he described his granddaughter as his daughter.

Of course, as I’ve noted, my father and my daughter never met on this plane, though my daughter once told me that she DID meet my father, while she was up in heaven waiting to be born.

That said, much of the dream was basically true. He could drive a tractor-trailer, he always had get-rich schemes but was often lazy with the details, and he could often charm people.

It’s now 13 years since my dad died, and he’s still in my dreams.
***
Coincidentally, back in October 2011, Melanie wrote about HER dad dying 13 years before. “Many people feel that’s long enough to be sad about it… It’s like we’re supposed to have some on/off switch on our biological clocks that automatically turns the hurt and the caring off after an acceptable number of hours, minutes, and seconds have passed. It’s not like that.”

 

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