Tag Archives: education

Hovercrafts, Children and Other Magic Science

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Had I realized I would be explaining the inner workings of a hovercraft to a classroom of adorable first-graders at Gussner Elementary School here in Jamestown, I would have prepared a little bit more.

As it was, I did the best I could to answer all the questions they had, both before I started reading to them and after I had finished.

I have one of my colleagues to thank, or possibly blame — he told me about the Master Reader program here, in which community members visit elementary schools and read to children. Before you read the book selected for you and your class, you tell them your name, and a little bit about what you do.

My colleague usually talks about all the famous people he’s met. I go a different route and tell them all the cool things I’ve gotten to do as a reporter. I’ve had my nails done. I’ve ridden on a hovercraft. I’ve been in the nose of a World War II-era bomber. And I’ve even been (accidentally) shot at (by a ricochet at a gun tournament, and the bullet landed about 5 feet away from me).

In this case, they had all sorts of questions about the hovercraft, some of which I could answer and others of which I had to admit I didn’t know. I told them about how hovercrafts work–the fan and the noise, and how you can go on water, land or ice with a hovercraft.

After I read them a Little Red Riding Hood story that featured a tiger instead of a wolf, they had quite a few comments on that, too. One kid told me he’d hide a knife so that when the tiger swallowed him he’d be able to cut his way out. I tried to tactfully point out that normally tigers chew when they eat, and that maybe this was a magical tiger, and that’s why the little girl in the story was still okay after she’d been eaten by the tiger.

In retrospect, I should have told them that they would make good reporters. They sure did ask a lot of good questions!

School Lunches: The Picky Eater’s Dilemma

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A Eastside Elementary student holds a fresh cucumber slice dipped in ranch dressing, part of one of the nutritious lunches prepared for the students at the Clinton, Miss., school Sept. 12, 2012.  (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

In one school, whenever salad was offered, I never took it, and if one of the lunch ladies deposited it on my plate I’d just leave it there, and toss it in the trash at the end of the lunch period.

In the other school, whenever salad was offered, I’d load my plate with it and eat every single speck, often wishing I could go back for more.

What made the difference between avoiding salad like the plague and devouring it like the delicious, crunchy meal it is?

I admit I’m a ridiculously picky eater. While I am not afraid to try new things, even things as wild as sauerkraut pizza (which, horrifyingly, is actually delicious), I very often don’t like them, and the list of ingredients I generally (but never always) avoid stretches all the way from mayonnaise and sour cream to mushrooms and peanut butter.

I keep trying things I know I don’t like, just in case. Every once in a while I eat a mushroom because hey, you never know. When I was a kid I didn’t like ketchup. Tastes change.

And now that I’m an adult, there’s a certain fairly large class of foods that I don’t care for much but eat anyway, such as green beans. Green beans are good for me, so whenever given the opportunity, say at a buffet, I eat some.

Salad is the only veggie I really like, and by salad I mean actual salad, not cold noodles covered with sauce. (Cold noodles: Another thing I’m not a fan of.) You know, with lettuce leaves and lots of other stuff.

What made the difference in those two school lunch salads?

Simple. One school served only one type of salad dressing: French.

The other school offered a choice of French and ranch dressing.

I’ve always been particular about salad dressings, and for a long time the only one I liked was Italian. My tastes have expanded a great deal throughout the years, to Caesar and ranch and Greek and raspberry vinaigrette and poppyseed and all kinds of other ones, but to this day I can’t abide French dressing.

At one school I never, ever took salad. At the other, I took salad at every opportunity and if salad had been served every day instead of, say, green beans or cooked carrots, I’d have eaten vegetables every single day at school. Romaine and spinach, all filled with nutrients. Crunchy, tasty goodness.

Yes, I probably would’ve topped them with cheese, egg, turkey, croutons and sunflower seeds if given the opportunity, but I’d've taken the lettuce and ranch dressing on its own, too, with thanks, if that’s all there was.

Why all this about my odd eating habits, you might ask? Well, I was reading a story about school lunches, and how kids are often rejecting the veggies and fruits provided in the healthier school lunches. And I have to wonder: are they offering children any choices?

I remember that there were days I ate nothing but a hamburger bun and pickles at school, because they’d serve sloppy joes with green beans and canned peaches. Back then I couldn’t bring myself to eat green beans either, and I hated canned peaches. Had they offered a nice little salad and a plum I’d've eaten my vegetables that day, at least.

I really like the idea of offering kids more healthy food for their school lunches, but I really do hope there are still some options. A plum or a pear. An apple or an orange. Green beans or asparagus. Ranch or French.

It’s great to make kids try new things (often they won’t do it on their own) but over the long term, offering them choices allows them to have some agency and still gets them to the healthier-food goal.

Some people will not ever like French dressing or mushrooms no matter how many times they’re served or how many times they’re tried.

Giving children a choice between two low-fat salad dressings might mean the difference between a rejected little pile of leaves and a clean plate.

A Child’s Senseless Death

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Bullies have claimed another victim, this time in Iowa.

The boy was just 14 years old. His name was Kenneth Weishuhn.

I would encourage everyone to look to themselves, their children. Not just for victims who need help, but for bullies who need to get the message that they must stop.

Yes, doting parents. Your child, too, could be a bully.

That sweet little 8-year-old with chubby cheeks and freckles might be the tyrant of her class, the empress of the playground, deciding who gets to sit alone at lunch for the rest of the year and holding other children’s lives in the palm of her bangled hand. Your child could be a victim, yes, but he or she could also be a bully, and a lot of bullies leave no visible marks.

Don’t forget that.

Don’t forget Kenneth, either. He was just a kid.

And no victim deserves it. Not ever. Not if they have glasses, not if they’re gay, not if they joined the chess club or play the trombone or like Shakespeare or have a disability or a speech impediment or a snorting laugh or red hair or the wrong outfit or a Star Trek lunch box.

Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

Stop it now.

Remembering Columbine

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Apparently they’re considering making a miniseries about Columbine on Lifetime. This has been quite controversial, as many of the survivors of the horrific school shooting that occurred there don’t want the miniseries to be made.

This particular article on the issue seems to point the finger at “the media” for not letting the story die. The Columbine tragedy wasn’t, after all, that unusual–school massacres have happened before, and they will happen again, unfortunately.

This is undoubtedly true. However, Columbine was a bit different than some of the other school shootings. One, the shooters were students. This isn’t always the case. Two, they seemed fairly normal. That’s not always the case either. Three, no one could quite figure out what their motives really were. Even they might not have known.

The death toll at Columbine was 15, if you include the two gunmen who died at their own hands. I wrote about some of my thoughts on the matter earlier here. Others had their own ideas.

Hardly anybody remembers an earlier school tragedy that claimed the lives of 45 people in Michigan. Many of the slain were students, but not all of them. In this particular case, the murderer deliberately drew emergency workers to another location (beating his wife to death and then blowing up his farm) before blowing up the school. Then, after people came to help, he set off another explosion (killing himself in the process).

As it turned out, the perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe, had been buying explosives and putting them in the school for months.

It was May 18, 1927.

What I Learned from High School Sports

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I learned a lot from participating in extracurricular activities in high school, which is a good thing, because I spent an awful lot of time on them. I was in golf and tennis, sure, but I was also in concert band and choir, as well as the jazz band and the marching band. And I was in knowledge bowl, math league and three school plays a year.

Some of these activities are competitive, and some are not. I learned from all of them.

All the music had competitive contests, in which I did always did very badly as an individual. I worked hard, and I did my best, and I loved it, but I was horrible. When I was with a group I did better, perhaps bolstered by other people’s talent.

I was also awful at golf and moderately mediocre at tennis. I enjoyed golf practice, when a group of friends was playing with me, and dreaded golf meets, in which you had to play with a bunch of strangers. I liked tennis practice, and had a great time playing doubles (I wasn’t fast enough to be a good singles player) at meets.

I joined math league purely because my friends were in it, and I don’t think I scored a more than two points the whole time. (Incidentally 2 was also how many points I made in my 2 years playing junior high basketball.) That was okay, because my coach knew better than to put me on the team of people whose numbers counted, and I still got to go along with the group and hang out.

I loved knowledge bowl, and rattling off trivia answers as part of a team was awesome. And I was good at it, too. My team usually did well.

One of the three plays was competitive. We never did well, but we generally ran crowd-pleasing comedies, whereas to win at a contest you had to perform something artsy and depressing, preferably something where someone experiences a horrific loss or dies. If they do both, it’s pretty much an automatic win.

One of the plays was a musical. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, so I either had a bit part in the chorus or a small non-singing part.

But when I go back and think about all the extracurriculars, I realize they taught me a lot about myself and how I interact with others, and what I like and don’t like:

  1. I liked working cooperatively in groups. If those groups competed with other groups, great! If they didn’t, also great! But I enjoyed teams best.
  2. I wasn’t very athletic or musical, but with a lot of work I did see improvements. It’s not just talent, it’s hard work, too.
  3. Some of it is talent. I sing every day and I’m still awful. It can’t be helped.
  4. Winning is a lot more fun than losing. Losing feels worse when you’re on a team, because you let down the team.
  5. I hate math. But if taking short math tests is what I have to do to hang around with my friends, I’m gonna do it, because people are more important than specific activities.
  6. I’m not too good at math.
  7. A driver to the back of the head really, really hurts, especially if the golfer has lots of muscles.

Probably the most valuable points here are the first three, with an option on 6 and 7.

#1 is why I love working in a newsroom. We’re a motivated group working to beat the clock, and sometimes, to beat other news organizations. Sometimes there’s some friction but we’re all on the same side working together, and it’s so much fun!

#2 is important, because the things you’re horrible at in life will greatly outnumber the things you’re good at. With work and a bit of cleverness you can compensate.

For example, I am horrible at remembering where I have left objects, so I leave my keys on the floor in front of my door every night so I can’t lock myself out. Another example: My thoughts tend to jump around from topic to topic, so my writing sometimes lacks transitions. I’ve been working on that in my newspaper articles–I hope you’re able to tell.

#3 is a sad fact of life. I will never be a ballerina or a professional basketball player or a musician. I can still enjoy singing, particularly if it’s in a soundproof room as far from human habitation as possible. Making people’s ears bleed isn’t nice.

Sports and extracurriculars can teach you all sorts of other things too.

You can learn how you function on a team, what parts you play well (leader, encourager, creative or steady worker, problem-solver, observer) and how other people think. You can learn how to form strategies and implement them, whether it’s a football play or determining who answers the question in knowledge bowl. You can learn how to compete against yourself as an individual in a sport like golf or math league, where you have separate results. You can learn how to win graciously and how to lose gracefully.

Through failure, you learn how to adjust the plans you’ve made, and compensate for past mistakes. Through success, you learn what works and what accomplishing goals means: new goals, new challenges, new expectations and new competition.

You can learn a lot, in other words.

Why Sports Are Important to Schools

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When I was a young geekette, I did not understand why sports can be so important to a school.

I bitterly resented how much time and attention athletics got at my school. They took up several pages of the tiny weekly newspaper every single week, and they got an awful lot of glory and attention for being able to throw a ball, run fast, or hit something really hard.

Meanwhile, here I was, slaving every day in school to get good grades. Here were all the art students, creating gorgeous sculptures, wacky airbrushed portraits and ceramic bowls day after day. Here were all the math league kids, who had frightening trigonometric formulas completely memorized, and seemed to be some sort of math ninjas. Here were the theater geeks, who memorized lines and blocking and could make you laugh until you cried, or cry until you laughed. Here were all the writers, who could crank out poetry or prose with equal facility. Here were the band and choir kids, who loved music and constantly made hilariously irreverent jokes.

There were so many other students who deserved recognition in the newspaper.

And this is still true. Many students do go unrecognized. Newspapers only have so much space and time.

However, times were changing even when I was still in school. They started giving out academic letters, and you could letter in music. The local newspaper did cover us whenever it could.

And now I realize that many students who play sports also go quietly unrecognized. And then there are the kids who love sports and serve as managers, keep stats or just go to the game every week to cheer.

What I didn’t understand when I was still in school is how much of an impact sports can have on the lives of the kids who are in it.

And mind you, I was in sports myself until the middle of 10th grade. I loved tennis and although I never really learned to love golf, I had fun when I was in it. Tennis was the best, because my friends were in it, and we played all sorts of games and drills during the practices. I really liked tennis.

At the same time, I never needed tennis.

I was always going to stay in school. It would no more have occurred to me to drop out of school than it would have occurred to me to fly into space by flapping my arms to talk to the Martians about spearfishing and pink polka-dotted umbrellas.

Not every kid is like that. Some kids stay in school specifically so that they can play sports. Some kids keep their grades up–enabling them to at least get a high school diploma and maybe even go to college–specifically so that they can be in sports.

Sports can serve as a worm on a hook to get kids to stay in school or work on their grades.

Then there are the financials. Some sports directly make money, through ticket sales. Others do not.

However, the state government distributes money to schools based on the number of students. If one student stays in school who would have otherwise dropped out, that’s something like $8,000-$9,000 in a school’s pocket. (Those are the Minnesota numbers, and they are a little old, mind you.) While one student obviously doesn’t pay for a sports program, if there are several of those kids on a team it could make sense from a financial standpoint to spend money on sports.

Clearly that does go for the arts and all the other extracurriculars, such as speech and knowledge bowl, too, but most of the students I remember struggling hard to stay eligible were studying hard so they could be in sports.

I don’t think there are any easy answers to how much funding and attention athletics should get in a school, but I do think they keep kids in school–and that’s a goal held dear by educational institutions and geeks too.

Damaged: Bullying’s Effects and Fighting It

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Bullying may alter your brain chemistry, and not because you hit your head when the school creep shoved you into your locker.

I don’t sit around and worry about my brain chemistry. I do wonder sometimes whether my lack of trust for other people stems from a decade of social ostracism. That, I worry about.

Then again, my worries also include, but are not limited to: 1. whether my brother will like his Christmas present (he will), 2. whether the two Koreas will blow each other up in a fit of Rumplestiltzkinesque pique, and 3. when exactly the snow/sleet/other-bad-stuff-starting-with-S storm will begin.

I’m probably just a fretter.

But! Solutions are at hand. One experiment shows that babies may fight bullying! Apparently cuteness is toxic to evil or something, I don’t know.

Another Child Dead

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Bullies seem to have claimed another victim yesterday. I doubt they meant for Cassidy Joy Andel to take her own life. I hope they didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of them did; adults routinely underestimate the vast, inhuman cruelty of which adolescents can be capable. But it’s far more likely that they were simply thoughtless; the part of the brain that deals with consequences doesn’t develop until the 20s.

As usual, whenever the topic of bullying comes up, a flurry of thoughts pop up in my mind, disorganized, angry, and yes, a little bit bitter. I will never understand people who think being a kid was awesome or a fun experience. And I didn’t have it nearly as bad as other kids I knew, either.

So here are a few of  my gut reactions. They are about my experience only. Other victims of bullying have very different experiences, and mine are not representative of all victims.

  • “This bullying has become almost an epidemic nationwide.” I honestly don’t know that this is the case. I think we’re learning to recognize forms of bullying that were never considered bullying before. I was a victim of relational aggression. Although relational aggression has never been considered a good thing, I am fairly certain it was not called bullying 20 years ago when it was happening to me. If someone had asked me if I was being bullied at school, I would have said no, and I would have been telling the truth. No one ever beat me up or stuffed me into a locker at school. That’s what bullying meant.
  • The general tone of the article seems to implicate social media and the internet in bullying. Although social media and the internet have given bullies unprecedented access to their victims, they are not the cause of bullying. They can make bullying easier and worse, because it enables even the most cowardly bullies to make comments they would never say to another person’s face. But remember, they are not the cause of bullying, and in some cases, may provide a child an escape from bullying.
  • “It’s a trend our kids are going through,” he said. “…They don’t always realize that who they are writing to or about is a person.” This is very true. The internet can be a very depersonalizing thing, and bullies are great at depersonalizing, converting people into nonpeople and classmates into outsiders. But it is a tool, and just as a hammer can be used to pound nails or pound faces, the internet can certainly be used positively or negatively. Teach kids good online habits and practices; forbidding them to use Facebook will not necessarily solve the problem any more than forbidding them from using the phone.
  • Although this doesn’t relate to this article, I have heard several people state in passing their beliefs that bullying starts in junior high or high school. This always surprises me, because I can’t clearly remember a time when I wasn’t being bullied. I remember being crushed when people didn’t invite me to their birthday parties in second grade, and I remember sitting in the lunch room alone day after day, hoping someone would sit by me, but bringing a book along in case they didn’t. Other social outcasts were my only hope. Later, when we had to ride the bus, I developed a strategy of looking out the bus window so I at least wouldn’t have to see people consciously decide not to sit by me.
  • I did not tell my parents or teachers I was being bullied. We didn’t call it bullying back then. And even if we had, I probably still wouldn’t have told them. Why? I’m still not entirely sure myself, but repeating nasty things someone said about you makes those things more real, and they feel more true, and you are humiliated all over again. And I was afraid my parents would be disappointed in me for not being able to “get along” with other students. (I was dead wrong about that, by the way. My parents are awesome.) Plus, there was literally nothing to report most of the time. What do you say, “Mommy mommy, no one did anything to me at school today”? But I like people, and being forcibly isolated from almost everyone for years was a terrible punishment for an extrovert. And my classmates did it to me for years.

And finally, here’s a cautionary note.

I offer no solutions to bullying. I don’t know how to prevent it, solve it, or fix it. There are no easy solutions.

I do know one thing, though Teachers and parents care, and they are making tremendous efforts to prevent it, solve it, fix it. Support them in their efforts. Don’t assume either group is at fault. Help them, because bullying is a wide, far-reaching problem that can’t be solved by waving a magic teacher-wand or sprinkling some superpowered parent dust on a bully.

We are all in this together. Bullies divide, so logically, any efforts to stop bullying should unite.

I don’t know why Cassidy Joy Andel is dead. Maybe we’ll find out it had nothing to do with bullying at all as the investigation proceeds. Either way, today is a sad day and we are all diminished by her passing.

3:55 p.m. updates:

WMS, Beauty and Loving Your Hair

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Today I visited Worthington Middle School to take a picture of the awesome kids and staff, who are hard at work raising money for breast cancer research. (Look for the photo in the Daily Globe tomorrow or the next day.)

One of the girls there looked at me and told me I was pretty.

This made my day. She had an awesome pair of glasses and she was wearing a pretty cute outfit herself, I might add, and I would have told her so if she hadn’t wandered back into the lunch line, but at least I did say thank you.

This is the second time I’ve been told I was pretty in the line of duty. The first time I went around all day telling everyone a cute Latino boy had told me I was pretty, only explaining that he was about 3 years old after people looked impressed.

These days it’s hard even for beautiful people to think they’re pretty. Apparently Barbie is the ideal for this, although I don’t remember ever thinking Barbie was the icon of beauty. I had another fashion doll I liked better.

In fact, I had two. One was named Whitney. She had the longest, most beautiful dark hair, far longer than the hair of any of the blonde Barbies I had, so you could turn it and twist it into ornate updos the blondies couldn’t manage. The other one, I think, was a Teresa doll, although I could be identifying her incorrectly. I haven’t been able to find any pictures of this doll online, but she had dark hair, too, slightly reddish. It was also crimped. This was back when crimped hair was cool.

Neither of my favorite dolls was blonde. Maybe I was just a weird kid, though. Or maybe my mom (and her light brown hair, which was just as long as Barbie’s would have been in real life) has been and always will be my standard of beauty.

Why am I yammering on and on about hair, you may ask. Well, this isn’t an issue I’ve ever had to deal with, but apparently hair can be a big problem for African-American girls, or anybody whose hair has a different texture to it than the hair people think of as “normal.”

So much so that Sesame Street is doing a segment on it, with a cute little muppet with adorably frizzy hair. Watch it. It’s pretty cool.

Shoulda Learned

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I brought my guitar to work today.

No, it is not Bring Your Guitar to Work Day today. A coworker wanted to see a classical guitar and check how it differs from your standard acoustic rock guitar, so I brought my lovely classical guitar in.

For the record: It has a shorter and wider neck and does not have a pick guard. Less quantifiable: Playing it is less painful.

I am my guitar teacher’s only classical guitar student, and I am a very bad one. I don’t practice much and I probably whine too much about how far I have to stretch my chubby little fingers. But I’m still enjoying it!