Tag: kids

Two quick true stories

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting4 Comments

kids-are-creepy-7.jpgIt is Saturday night and I am at OtherJob.  A mother and her young daughter– six, perhaps seven years old– come up to the counter.  The little girl is carrying a toy stuffed dog.  (Given where this story is going, it is probably important that the word “toy” be in there.)

She shows me the dog in that proud way little kids do, a thing I’ve seen my son do with strangers a million times, and tells me his name is Happy.  I make entertained grown up noises at her and pivot toward Mom to explain how our price structure works.

She keeps talking.  She shows me a hole in Happy’s side.

“This is where I cut him with a scissor,” she says.

“Um.  Okay,” I respond.

She shows me where his back leg is nearly cut off.

“And this is where I cut him with a knife!” she says.  She’s super excited about cutting Happy with scissors and knives.

My eyebrows raise a bit, and I look at Mom, not saying anything.

Mom is mortified, and says “She didn’t cut him with anything.”  Sure, Mom, okay.

And then the little girl starts chanting at us.

A scissor and a knife!
A scissor and a knife!
A scissor and a knife!
A scissor and a knife!

Never seen a parent complete a transaction that quickly before.

There is an old vanity cabinet in the room of our house that we haven’t settled on a name for yet.  The den, maybe?  The family room, as opposed to the living room?  The playroom? Who the hell knows, but it’s in there, and the top of the thing has sort of become a messy catchall for artwork stuff of the boy’s that we don’t really know what to do with.  The dog’s food and water bowls are right next to this vanity.

Several weeks ago, a little candle holder thing he made at school for Halloween got knocked over, and the little LED candle that was in there fell out and landed on the floor in between the dog’s bowl and the vanity.  That little electronic candle has annoyed me every time I have seen it for weeks, and it took me until today to bend my lazy ass over and pick the goddamn thing up to put it back in the jar and back on the vanity.

I don’t tell you this for any particular reason other than maybe it’ll make you feel better about whatever stupid shit you’re avoiding doing right now.

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: DINO SQUAD

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television3 Comments

vlcsnap-2011-08-29-23h37m58s59Oh, Dino Squad.  How much do I hate thee?   I hate thee a whole damn lot.  In general, I am very much pro-dinosaur and pro-dinosaur programming, but this show is edging closer and closer to the “Oh, sorry, Netflix is broken” level of I can’t watch this shit anymore right now.  It’s getting the kid interested in dinosaurs, and he’s learning a few things, but it’s making me insane, and it’s all about me and we can’t have that.

We will start with the theme song:

You didn’t click that, so here are the lyrics:

I’m in
I’m in
I’m in
in the dino squad
on a beautiful beach not far away
I went to visit for a day
got covered with some gooey ooze
that changed my DNA
Now I’m trying to act normal
Keep my cool
While other kids play after school
I turn into a prehistoric hero
I’m in
I’m in
I’m in
in the Dino Squad!

Okay.

I understand that complaining about suspension of disbelief and scientific inaccuracy in a kids’ show is a mug’s game.  I’m a superhero guy.  There are expensive superhero statues in the room with me and action figures on my desk.  My disbelief is suspended from the firmament itself most of the time, but this show still breaks the hell out of it.  So let me just lay this show out for you, and you tell me exactly when it gets to be too much.  Here is what Dino Squad is about:

  • A bunch of kids (high school students, old enough to drive motorcycles) go to the beach and get covered in ooze.  They discover it has given them the ability to turn into dinosaurs.  So far, I’m OK!  This is basically Daredevil’s origin, right?  Spider-Man got bitten by a radioactive spider.  Gooey ooze.  I’m good.
  • They meet this old lady, whose name I can never remember, and she tells them they can turn into dinosaurs.  She’s in this picture:

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So, all right, still okay.

  • The lady tells them that she is, herself, a dinosaur.  She is, in fact, a velociraptor!  A velociraptor who somehow avoided dying in the Chicxulub impact and “evolved” to be able to turn into a human being.  You literally see the two velociraptors diving into a cave during the meteor strike.
  • This is not how evolution works.
  • Velociraptors were the size of turkeys and had feathers.  If you saw one today, you’d think “Ooh, what a weird-looking bird!”.  Cassowaries are considerably scarier-looking.
  • Velociraptors died out ten million years before the Chicxulub impact.
  • This means that she was already somehow ten million years old before that explosion, and therefore the oldest living thing on Earth, exceeded possibly only by the other immortal velociraptor, and is therefore…
  • …currently 75 million years old.

But that’s Science Luther talking.  Shut up, Science Luther!  It’s a kid’s show!  Okay. Like I said, eventually that line gets crossed.  Maybe this is what does it:

  • The other velociraptor is also still around, and is therefore also 75 million years old.  He calls himself… wait for it… Victor Veloci.
  • Victor Veloci’s evil plan is to occasionally turn rodents and fish into dinosaurs, but only a couple at a time.  He’s insanely incompetent for a 75 million year old immortal dino-person.  The two of them should literally rule the planet by now.
  • You turn Victor Veloci’s dino-rodents or whatever back into regular rodents via a two-step process:  1) shooting them with a sprayer that causes the “dino DNA” to be sweated out of their skin, and 2) then– I am not joking– sucking the dino DNA up with a vacuum cleaner.  This makes them better.

Has the suspension of disbelief gotten harder yet?  Still need more?  Okay.  Here’s the kicker, then.  This is Victor Veloci’s hair:

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And, lest you think “Oh, he’s just long-haired, what’s the big deal?” let me show you another picture of Victor Veloci:

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No, he only has long hair on one side.  And that is an honest-to-God red streak dyed into his hair.  His haircut, somehow, is the most ridiculous thing about the show.

Note also his minions, who are dressed like COBRA applicants who got rejected for dressing too ridiculously.

So, yeah.  The show is about how this 75-million year old supervillain is routinely outwitted by a bunch of teenagers who can turn into dinosaurs.  Note that Veloci himself can regain his velociraptor form at any time.  (So can the old lady, presumably, although I don’t know if I’ve seen an episode where she does.)  

And those teenagers?  They’re… weird.  Especially this one:

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Now, again, these kids are in late high school, because they’re driving, but this one particularly– he turns into a pteranodon– keeps getting storylines that imply he is nine.  This particular image is from an episode where he’s having problems with bullies.  The bully’s name is McFinn, which is somehow much more ridiculous than it should be; it sounds really dumb anytime anyone says “McFinn” on the show, especially when they imply that this “McFinn” person is scary or tough.  He’s just not.  Plus, dude, you’re a dinosaur.  Drop him off a cliff.  There’s one right there by that lighthouse y’all are based in for some reason.

Now, I know, high school kids do have problems with bullies, and I’m not trying to minimize that.  But the way they handle it is weirdly infantilizing, especially since they really do try to treat pteranodude like he’s a lot younger than the rest of them.  He also gets an episode where Victor Veloci pretends to be a pretty girl in an MMORPG (75 million years old, people) and tries to get him to “break Internet safety rules” and tell her where he is so that Veloci can… do… something.  I dunno.  Underpants gnomes, profit.  The high school students have technology sophisticated enough to detect two mutated dinosaurs three states over and this dude is trynna catfish over Xbox Live.  I don’t get it.  And mohawk dude is the only one who gets these storylines.

(Oh, and remember that “play after school” line from the theme song?  Is that what high school kids do after school?  They play?)

Here’s the transformation video.  It plays six times an episode.  If your kid watches this show, expect him to spend a lot of time yelling “65 million years back!” and “going into dino mode” when you need him to put on his shoes:

One (1) point is awarded to the show because the big black kid, who would be a football player on any other program, is actually the computer nerd.  Other than that, I hate this show.

On judgmental bastardry and little kids

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Politics21 Comments

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ALTERNATE TITLE 1: Why I Need to Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 2: Why Everyone should be Glad I Don’t Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 3: Why Liberals are Dumbasses and Don’t Run Anything

The boy’s at a birthday party right now.  I’m not at the party, but my wife is; as someone who has run dozens of parties over the years for young kids where the adults way outnumbered the kids, I long for the days when it was okay to just drop your child off at a birthday party and then just go away for a couple of hours, but that’s not how society– or at least the parts of it I move in– works any longer.  I wouldn’t have objected to going, for the record, but I had some stuff to do around here and she volunteered.  So she’s there and I’m here.

The party’s for one of the girls in his class at Hogwarts.  I had been meaning all week to email her parents and ask for some details about what she might want for her birthday, and finally remembered to do it yesterday.  Mom responded pretty promptly.  The first sentence of the email was “Oh, she’s all girl.”

Oh.

I would kinda have liked some more specificity than that, but whatever; basically it meant go to the Pink Aisle and close your eyes and pick something.(*)  My wife and I went through this fun and stupid rigamarole in the Pink Aisle last night where neither of us really wanted to get her something froofy and glittery and princessy but that’s basically all there is; I suggested a couple of different (mostly pink and purple!) age-appropriate Lego sets when my son came running over with a Barbie doll dressed as a superhero.

Just under $20, Barbie, and the boy literally picked it out.  Fine.  Done.

The mental subcurrent of all this, of course, is that while I don’t especially like the idea of plastering kids with this is for boys and this is for girls, it ain’t like my own son isn’t into superheroes.  Of course, so is his daddy, and I suspect if I had a daughter she’d be just as able to tell you about the Hulk and Iron Man as he is, but I don’t have a daughter, now, do I, so who knows how much reinforcing of The Patriarchy I’d be doing as a parent compared to how much I’m already doing, and who the fuck am I to try and subtly condition somebody else’s kid by trying to find a toy for her that isn’t ridiculously gendered when I have never not once suggested my own son go into the Pink Aisle when he was hunting for toys for himself.

(Did you know there are girl Nerf toys?  I did not know this.)

So, yeah, whatever, we got the kid a Barbie doll, and somehow I managed to turn buying a gift for a five-year-old who I think I can pick out of a lineup, maybe, into some sort of political act, because that’s exactly the sort of stupid wanker I am sometimes.  And then my wife texted me from the party while I was busy hanging a mirror at home (let’s not let the gendered nature of that little detail escape us, either) to inform me that this party had blue ribbon water and pink ribbon water and she’d just heard one of the boys loudly insist that he needed the “boy water.”  This was, thankfully, not my son.

So.  Yeah.

That happened.

We shoulda gotten the kid a soccer ball.

(*) And I should make this explicit, too– Mom was trying to be helpful, and her point was “Don’t stress yourself out too much about a present.”  She explicitly said that her daughter would be perfectly happy just to have all of her friends there.  This post is about I’m an idiot sometimes, not Jeez, look at how these people I barely know are raising their kid, just to make perfectly certain we understand each other.

LTR WTF LOL

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

0b6622fce10fd4eb2d2d03ed66c87c74.400x254x1.pngI’m not convinced this is actually a terribly important or interesting insight for anybody other than me, but it’s been on my mind for the last couple of days and I wanted to get it written down before it slipped away.

My son is four.  He’s in preschool now– real preschool, which means that I can’t just go get him if I’m home and bored in the afternoon any longer, which hit me the other day while I was heading to the car to do just that.  There are, I don’t know, eleven or twelve other kids in his class, something like that.

He has four friends.  Now, at his age, “friendship” is obviously a really fungible concept, but there are two kids from his previous day care who are still showing up at our house (and vice versa) every once in a while and there are two kids in his preschool class who he seems to be part of a mutual admiration society with more so than the rest of the kids.  That’s not to say that he doesn’t play with the others, of course, but these kids clearly are getting more attention than the others.  And, interestingly, they give me more attention than the others, too.  I’ve been dropping the boy off lately, and generally walk with him to his classroom, and one of the kids has been insisting that he also gets a hug before I can leave.  The other one seems to be more of a priority during the after-school program despite being in his class, but she too insists on me paying attention to her a lot of the time before I am allowed to take her (him!  Him! Christ, I’m only getting my own kid.) home– either that or he’ll drag me over to her to have her tell me something about their day.

1433504206201518479.jpgWhat’s gotten into my head is that he’s at least in theory at the point where he might know some of these kids for a very, very long time.  Now, I’m not friends any longer with anyone who I knew as far back as nursery school, but I was through college or so, and my oldest friends now are people I met in middle school or late elementary.  But part of the deal at Hogwarts is keeping their clan together– I get the feeling that a lot of the kids that eventually transition out of there are graduating, meaning that they’ve been with mostly the same kids for a bunch of years.  So it’s possible that he’ll be forming lifelong friendships earlier than I did, especially if we’re able to afford to keep him at this school. I have– most people do, I imagine– my own relationships with the parents of some of my friends who I’ve known for a really long time.  And it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point with him where I can look around at the kids he knows and go “Which ones am I going to have to buy high school graduation cards for?”

In, like, 2030 or whatever.

Nah.  No way I live that long.  Never mind.

Challenge met!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting1 Comment

scrambled-eggs.pngDid my typical pre-post GIS for “scrambled eggs” and that image came up.  Can you tell those are supposed to be scrambled eggs?  Because I’m not sure I can.

You may recall the Baked Egg Challenge, where my son was forced by his doctor to eat cupcakes in steadily increasing amounts until she became convinced that the eggs contained within the cupcake mix were not going to cause him anaphylaxis or death.  At the time I thought it would be six months until the Scrambled Egg Challenge; it turned out to be just over a year.  We were at the doctor’s from 8:00 AM until after one, feeding the boy steadily increasing amounts of premade, reheated scrambled eggs, which sounds kinda gross to me but he wolfed them down.

It turns out that eggs will not kill him.  We were cautioned to avoid things with runny yolks for a bit longer, but it ain’t difficult to avoid fried eggs and I’ll be damned if I’m poaching him anything so we ought to be okay.

In other news, the cat yanked me out of a sound sleep at 2:30 in the morning by puking on my bed, and it’s been close to a week since I had more than three hours or so of sleep at a time, because I absolutely can not get a full night’s sleep in December apparently.  So I was a zombie through the entire Challenge and I’m not much better now.

End of year book saleswanking tomorrow.  I will try and get one more post up today and actually be a little bit entertaining.

The things they tell me

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching9 Comments

I do a little activity with the kids at the beginning of the year where I ask them to tell me ten facts about themselves.  I just rediscovered the pile of papers and I thought I’d share a few of them.

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Someone did not get the message that the facts were supposed to be true, perhaps.  I’m translating this as “My brain is a ruler, I play two guitars, and my cat has three ears.”  One of them maybe, all three?  Somebody missed the memo.

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Hmm.  I’ve been pondering this for a couple of days and don’t know what a “nethfil” is.

A surprising number of them wanted me to know their favorite superheroes; they’ve got me figured out already:

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Crossing my fingers that #9 here is just an omitted plural and not a favorite food or something:

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And this one gave me a favorite villain. I also like #4, which thus far I find to be accurate.  She’s been trying to get me to call her “Bacon” instead of her actual name.

Trying hard.

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And I will be the last:

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I strongly enjoy colorful language:

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Because “blue” is too generic:

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Some of them are impressively talented:

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And some of them have crazy people as parents.  There’s no way this one can see over the steering wheel:

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Some of them are sad and/or scary:

FullSizeRenderThis could be an abusive parent or it could be a haunted house.  The question is which I’d actually prefer.  The haunted house, right?  It’s the haunted house.

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Do the math.  Mom got pregnant in middle school, apparently.  Mental note to keep a close eye on this one.

And the worst one:

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Sigh.

#Weekendcoffeeshare: math edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

CL42-OSUAAAEGr5

If we were having coffee, I’d likely keep trying to talk about long division, and you’d probably spend the entire conversation trying to change the subject.

After three weeks of this, I’m starting to suspect that I may not be very good at this whole “having coffee with people” thing, honestly.

But anyway: long division.  I realized something this week.  I have never taught long division before.  I’ve always had at least sixth graders, and by that time most of them have it down and the mathematics are complicated enough that I’m frequently willing to hand a calculator to the kids who are struggling anyway, at least after being shown sufficient effort.  These kids, though?  Some of them appear to have had it last year, others don’t.  Maybe a third of my kids are comfortable with it, and all of those are concentrated into one class.  My entire afternoon group is basically clueless.

One girl in particular makes me want to go find her fourth grade teacher and slap the shit out of her.  She appears to be the only one who has been in this particular teacher’s class, but I’m told the teacher “didn’t like” the standard algorithm so she taught the kids a different way.  Without getting too deep into details, the “different way” works all right when you’re doing something like 55 divided by 6, which will give you a small answer in a couple of steps and a small remainder.  It becomes insanely complicated when the problem is a more fifth-grade-ish 8108/9, and will become flatly impossible to use once two-digit divisors or decimals enter the picture, which they’re going to do soon.

Professional malpractice, is what I’m saying here.  You don’t teach kids a method of doing something that is going to completely break in the very next year of school.  You particularly don’t do it to this specific girl, who appears, to put it mildly, to not have been born with the usual allotment of confidence in math skills that one might expect, and was in tears when she didn’t understand my first example.  Typically I expect at least three examples before I’ll allow don’t-get-it crying to happen.

Got my work cut out for me here, is what I’m saying, and I’m seriously in need of some research time this weekend for better teaching strategies.  Lucky for me, it’s a three-day weekend.

Thank a union member, by the way.

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The holy water story, plus some other stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

article-2185554-14656D19000005DC-909_306x423I have some really angry kids in my class this year.

That’s new.

I should explain.  I’ve had plenty of kids with anger management issues.  I’ve had plenty of kids who had explosive tempers.  That’s part and parcel of working in an urban middle school, and frankly is probably part and parcel of working with middle schoolers no matter where you find them.  But I’ve got a handful of girls in my afternoon class for whom pissed off at the world seems to be their only available emotional state.  They walk in angry and they somehow manage to stay angry for the entire time they’re in the room.  That’s the weird part.  Kids get angry all the time; they get angry at me all the time.  I’m used to that.  They don’t stay that way for long.  For a kid to keep up an angry mood for three successive class periods is exceptionally rare, and to do it for multiple days in a row practically unheard of.   Being mad is hard.  It takes work.  Most of them don’t have it in them.

And somehow in this group I have more than one of them.

I’m being weird today.  My son’s birthday was last Sunday, and today he got a gift card for Toys R’ Us in the mail from my aunt, so the three of us went to the comic shop (it’s Wednesday, after all) and to the toy store after I got home from work.  And the toy store managed to depress me.  I don’t even know why, but I’m still fighting it off.

I owe you two stories, I think.  The first one is the Holy Water story I teased the other day. One of my girls in my afternoon class– not one of the angry ones– came up to me on Monday and asked if she could go to her locker.  Later in the year this will be met with a near-automatic “no” except in case of emergencies, but they’re fifth graders and they’re not used to having to bring all of their stuff with them into classrooms so I’m being nice.  I do generally ask what they need, though.

“I need to put something in my locker,” she says.

Ah.  This is automatically lower-priority than needing to get something from a locker.  “What do you need to put in your locker?”

“My holy water.”

Um.

“You’re carrying holy water with you?”

“Yes.”

Parts of my brain immediately start a cage match with other parts of my brain, doing their best to starve the entire thing of any residual oxygen.

“Why, my dear, do you have holy water with you in class?”  Because Holy shit this is actually a new one.

“It helps me concentrate.”

“And… you have decided that you don’t need to concentrate any longer?  We still have an entire class period left after we finish with math.”

“No.  I’m tired and I think I’m done concentrating for today.”

“I think your holy water needs to stay with you, then.  Perhaps it could use a recharge this Sunday; it appears to be losing some of its potency.”

“So I need to keep concentrating?”

“Indeed.”

She stands there and stares at me for a minute.

“Back to your seat, dear.”

She turns and leaves.

Today, as we’re working on two-digit multiplication, a concept they all appeared to have a decent grasp of until I began trying to teach it, one of my girls came up to me and demanded that I yell at her.

“Why do you need me to do that?”

“Because you yelled at me yesterday and I went back to my seat and did my work.”

I think about this.  I didn’t yell at anyone yesterday.  In fact, I’ve made a big deal with this class that I didn’t even need to raise my voice on Monday or Tuesday after a reasonably rough first couple of days.

“I don’t remember yelling at you yesterday.”

She thinks for a minute.  “That was my teacher last year.  Sorry.  Can you yell at me anyway?”

Brain, cage match, starving, etc.

“Honey, I don’t think–”

“I really think it’ll help.”

What in the blue sadomasochistic fuck is going on right now.

She finally got me to bark GET AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW at her, at which point she smiled, thanked me, and literally skipped off back to her seat.  I watched her for a moment and then looked over my shoulder, fully convinced that one of my bosses would have taken that moment to appear in my classroom for the first time all year.  No one was there.  The kids all looked shocked for a moment, then realized what was going on and went back to what they were doing.  They were so blasé about it, in fact, that I find myself suspecting that this was a regular move that this kid pulled last year.  Which… hell, I don’t even know what to do about that.

I’ll stop being tired all the time soon, right?  How the fuck is it 9 PM already?