Growing Versions

Anytime I have been stumped by a problem, I have turned to my trusty pet solution: Work Harder. Money trouble? Work Harder Relationship trouble? Work Harder Career trouble? Work Harder Lice? Worker Harder Lately, I've been introduced to a new solution: Learning. What should I do about this problem?  Working Harder seems to be making it worse?  Learning how to improve things and when to forget it seems to be a better solution. So far, I've learned a lot and I've had more naps. Seems to be better already. I found this  article  a very interesting take on learning our way out instead of working our way out.

I have had a bad relationship with math. As a grade 2 student, I remember not really understanding what the teacher was getting at when she placed a handful of cubes on my desk and asked me to take some away. Things became more fraught in grade 4 when I was one of 2 kids who was disqualified from a class taco party for not knowing all my times tables (we were eventually brought back into the fold). I developed math anxiety which made things worse. I excelled in other areas that involved language and I came to accept that I was just not a math person. As a parent, I was determined not to pass on my anxiety about math to my daughter.  By then I was also running a business that involved daily math and I discovered things I actually liked about math. I embraced math, outwardly at least, as much as possible. One day this week, my daughter wanted me to help her with her math homework. I took on the task with gusto, not betraying my underlying self-doubt. I stared for a ve...

Kids and matches together are considered inadvisable. However, there is a lot more to learn about fires than just about how they can burn you.

My kids got more than enough toys with batteries and shiny paper the other day. It was overwhelming and memory making and all that, but one gift stood out. My husband gave my son a binder. No, no you read that right. A binder. He has just started to write and draw in earnest and he thought he would get a kick out of having his own binder.  Up until now, he's just been an idea boy, now he can put that stuff on paper.  He's thrilled to have these new skills. I have seen him use the binder more than any other gift he received. Last night I fell asleep on the couch by the light of the tree.  My son busily wrote and drew in his binder while I slept.  When I woke up I was half buried in snow flakes, drawings of cubes (which he had been practising all day) and notes. One note read, my dads moms dads dad. Some things you really have to figure out on paper.

As the disturbing revelations flow from a trickle to a flood in the Jian Ghomeshi case, I, like many others have not only been horrified by what I have learned but also have just plain learned a lot. I have learned a lot about what victims of sexual assault go through, I have learned why so many choose not report this crime, I have begun to learn a tiny but interesting amount of information about the culture of BDSM and how important consent is to its participants.  I have also learned about Canadian law.  Most of all,  I have learned about myself that I still have so much to learn.  In more than one of the articles I’ve read in recent days, the writer has written something to the effect of “you (the reader) should be ashamed for immediately siding with Jian”.  I agree it tells us a lot about our collective understanding of sexual assault how readily so many of us wanted to believe his side of things, but subsequently so many of us have learned new things and ...

1. You follow the map. 2. You read the clues. 3.If possible, if you are not too tired, start all over again.

When you are learning to read, you have to read signs anyway you know how. You use the biggest letters to help you guess what the rest of the letters mean. You use the sign's location to decide what it might be all about. You see the sign as a picture telling you something. After you have learned to read, you do all the same things, just faster.

Relevance is the key to learning. Not a huge fan of learning the alphabet by rote, our child has taken to asking how to spell peoples' names. A social soul, he loves knowing how to write people's name and in the process he's learning the alphabet. So far, he's spelled names of relatives, neighbours, classmates and t.v characters. The alphabet song has more than one tune.

And just like that...after seeing only a curve or a line arranged in random order, the c has come into focus, along with it, the l and the p and g. That picture is a sound that I know. You can sing it or say that shape with your hands or your tongue. You can make that shape with your body or see it in a twisted branch. The c's and the b's and the t's are all around, here and there and over there. They have broken the surface that kept them just underneath. Now they are popping up all over.

My daughter started reading early.  As far as I could tell, she skipped right over the sounding-words-out stage and saw words as words early on. She is a competent reader, now we are working on getting her to read for pleasure.  It was not a struggle to learn to read, I hope it is not a struggle to get her  to read. My son has gone through the first years of his life with the attitude that since my sister and parents know how to read already, what is the point in me even trying?   He's only five, he hasn't started school yet, so we're not expecting him to read yet, but the contrast has been noticeable.  Until recently we didn't even think it was on his radar.  He was too busy constructing tunnels and slides and running and jumping.  Fair enough. No worries. However, over the past few months, he has begun to ask us to read to him frequently. He takes pride in remembering stories and re-reading them to younger cousins.  At the cottage, he and...

 I had an awesome (and these days all too rare an) opportunity to read to a little toddler this weekend.  Along with smelling great and being adorable, he was quite the little reader.  He pointed out all the puppies and babies on all the pages and requested each book be read 3-4 times over.  It was a delightful experience and reminded me how my own kids went from touching the page (sometimes chewing) on the page, to trying to pry the characters right off of the pages to slowly slowly, step by hundreds and hundreds of miniature step, begin to follow along. My daughter has always been very independent when it comes to reading and has disappointed quite a number of adults in her life when she insisted on taking over the reading duties from a young age--depriving us of snatching those little hair-smelling-kisses that come along with reading to a child.  (We still sneak them in).  Sitting on a lap and patiently listening to a story be read to her is just no...

Well, we reached another milestone this week. My husband taught my son how to blow up a balloon.  Now, if I was forced to teach anyone how to blow up a balloon in 45 minutes or less (or ever), I just do not think I could do it.  But together, they emerged from this brief session victorious.  And after many many many practises, he has mastered it.  His sister has also given him finishing lessons in how to twist close a balloon so that it does not lose air.  He will definitely be on deck for the next party as his lung capacity exceeds all of ours put together.  Now, he likes to blow up balloons everywhere he goes-in the car, on the way to preschool, while he's watching a show, at the bus stop.  I never gave it much thought, but learning how to blow up a balloon is a coordinated effort of timing and muscle memory.  So, both his quick mastery of it and my husband's mysterious (to me) instructions impresses me.  Just like him putting one foot i...

I have been doing a lot of math the last few years. I started a business and suddenly, I leaped into a world where basic accounting and math are a defined part of my job.  I have always been nervous about math.  I still wake up with a start some mornings fresh from a dream where I am convinced I have unfinished math business to clear up back in high school, until it dawns on me that somehow I closed that chapter already. I am very conscious of not letting it rub off on my daughter.  I realize that basic math and its more complicated aunts and uncles are just part of the world, a language like any other, that we use to explain our world in a particular way.  No more, no less.  However, some part of me still holds onto anxiety about math. I've never viewed myself as a "number person" and yet, even before I started this work, I did several calculations a  day. As the demand on my math skills has increased in recent years, I have begun to realize t...