Like Breathing

Saw a link to this article from the Washington Post today. Short version: Kids don't read. People don't read. This is bad.

The story the numbers tell, Gioia said, can be summed up in about four sentences:

"We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life."

This hits home, of course, because I come from a long line of book addicts. My house is full of books (kinda overflowing...sorry for those who have to squeeze into the guest room!). We read all the time; all of us.

Anecdote: Last week, we went for a parent-teacher-student conference at our (six-and-a-half year old) daughter's school. One of the exercises in the conference was for each of us to list strengths, challenges, goals, and action plans for our daughter. One of the things that surprised me when my daughter was listing her strengths was that she left out reading. That's probably the area where she excels most, and it could be called her defining characteristic. She's always walking around, carrying a book and reading it.

It occurs to me that she doesn't see this as a strength: everyone around her (at home, anyway) is always reading, too. It reminds me of an experience my wife related, where she was at a class, and people went around the room listing their hobbies. She was surprised how many people listed "Reading" as a hobby. She'd never thought of it as one, though she reads daily, because "it's like breathing, just something you do." It seems it's like that for our daughter, too. We have always read with, to, and around her. We read for pleasure, read for work, just read.

Now, I realize that this is atypical. We read far more than most people. But I also realize we're reading so much that we (and people like us) skew the averages upward. Which makes the overall decline in reading all the more disturbing to me.

So, go out and read a book in public. Support your public library. Support your local bookstores, especially independent ones. Make it visible; make it popular. Carry a book with you so people see what you're doing. Talk about what you read. Especially around young people. They need to know that reading is a Good Thing, and not just in the "taking your medicine" sense. It may not be as easy as watching TV, but it's much more rewarding.

Street-corner Discourse

Last night, we took my mother-in-law out to dinner to celebrate her birthday. We were in Berkeley, and parked the car right down the block from People's Park. (If that name doesn't mean anything to you, you're either far too young to be reading this, or you desperately need to go read the linked history! A somewhat more objective view is here.)

As I was attempting to negotiate my way into the parking space (always a treat parallel parking on the left side of a one-way street in an unfamiliar car), I rolled down the window to see how I was doing, and the vehicle was suddenly filled with the sounds of the "discussion" among several people on the sidewalk. Perhaps "argument" is a better description. I never did discern the substance of the disagreement, but whatever it was, it sounded as if someone were playing the soundtrack from Casino out there. (The MPAA rating noted "pervasive strong language" in that; I know there are plenty of other examples, but that one stuck in my mind.)

It was, quite literally, a conversation dominated by "F-bombs." Now, sitting there in the car with my six-year-old daughter, I wondered what this must sound like to her. It's not as if she's never heard one of us use the occasional profanity, but I doubt she's ever heard a torrent of that sort. As I finished parking, the participants headed off, still yelling, in the direction of the park.

As we sat down in the restaurant a few minutes later, my mother-in-law commented that she hadn't heard anything like that in quite a while. She used to be a teacher in an urban high school, and her husband spent many years in sports administration, so she has certainly heard her share of profanity-laced tirades. Even my niece, a college student who is more frequently immersed in the current coarsened idiom, noted that this was a particularly vehement example.

We discussed for a bit the fact that while one might use profanity as an intensifier in conversation, a "conversation" that consists of little but intensifiers expresses emotion at the expense of substance. The phrase that kept coming to my mind was "...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Of course, the well-known context of that quote is "...it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." And clearly, it is easy to dismiss the participants in last night's tirade as idiots with no meaning.

But the full context of the sentence in Macbeth's soliloquy upon learning of his wife's death, is not about the idiot, but about life:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It's brilliant writing ("Duh, Chard...it's Shakespeare!"). The single line, "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," is one of the greatest lines of poetry ever written. But behind all the froth and fume, what underlies it all is life.

Meanwhile, my daughter, immersed in a game of Brickbreaker on mom's Blackberry, seems to have ignored the whole event and discussion thereof. I hope that's a good thing, but I can't help wondering what portion of the soundtrack penetrated her subconscious. I know she hears everything, especially when she doesn't seem to be listening.

Theme Park Overload

I'm still recovering from a family trip to San Diego two weeks ago. It was our first attempt at doing a home exchange, and it seems to have gone well. We got to stay in a very nice house, visit friends, and go to far too many tourist attractions.

San Diego is a lovely place, with great weather and many fun things to do. We didn't even scratch the surface, but we managed to fill far too much time with stimulating activity.

We had taken our daughter to San Diego a few years ago when she was fanatical about pandas, because the San Diego Zoo had a new panda cub on display, and we thought it might be her only chance to see a live baby panda. She has since seen a newborn cub at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, so I guess it wasn't a one-time thing. And much to our surprise, the day we arrived in San Diego, the Zoo announced the birth of yet another cub, although it won't be on display for many months. So I guess we have good cub karma or something.

During our brief visit, we managed to hit Coronado Beach, get ice cream at the Hotel Del Coronado, spend a day at Legoland, another full day at the Zoo, and a very full day at SeaWorld.

Legoland was actually the key reason for this trip. The last time we'd gone, our daughter was a bit too small (i.e., too short) to do a lot of the rides and things. This time, she was just tall enough to be able to do anything in the park, at least with someone along. (The Volvo Driving School was a big hit.) So we pretty much did it all. Legoland is impressive in that it manages to be really fun for small kids, but has enough to hold the interest of adults, too. The Lego sculptures are very impressive: I love their little scale model of Washington, DC.

The last thing we did at SeaWorld was probably the most impressive, a ride called Journey to Atlantis. At the start of our visit, we agreed that each member of the party (there were six of us) would get to choose the thing they most wanted to do, and the group would do it. My daughter chose the Atlantis ride, but the first couple of times we went by, the lines were incredibly long. Later we got into the queue, but they shut down the ride for a while, and we bailed. Finally, we came back in the evening, the line wasn't too long, and we got to ride. And man, was it impressive! It is both a water-splash ride and a roller coaster, and both very good. You start out going up, then dropping down into a big splash pool, then circle around and get elevated again, and this time you go around a pretty good roller coaster. So it's like two rides for the price of standing in line once, and so much fun that we had to ride it twice in a row.

I had somewhat hoped to take in a baseball game at the new ballpark, but it didn't fit into our schedule. On Saturday evening, however, I was in a store picking up some beer, just in time to hear Barry Bonds hit his 755th home run on the radio. That was weird. (And of course, I was at the park when he hit 756 a few days later.)

All in all, a very exhausting trip. One needs to get back to work to get some rest!

Dinosaurs at a Birthday Party

Forgive a little self-indulgence. Today we had a sixth birthday party for our daughter, and the theme was once again dinosaurs. The location was the wonderful Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. At least early on, the day was sunny and nice, so the view from the cafeteria was terrific. It got gray later, which was less stunning, but it's still a great overlook.

The highlight of the party was the cake. At the fundraising auction for the school, we'd won a gift certificate from Debbie Does Cakes, so we thought we should use it on a special birthday cake. Wow! Debbie is an Artist. She worked with us to design just the right dinosaur, a fine looking triceratops, and even delivered it herself. You can get an idea of her work by looking at her website, but the little pictures don't do it justice. The cake looked phenomenal, and tasted wonderful, too (devil's food with peanut-butter cream filling and delicious butter cream frosting.

Debbie mentioned that she's going to be part of a cake-baking special on the Food Network this summer. I will definitely tune in so I can see her at work. It should be a real treat to see how she creates her art. Meanwhile, we have leftovers to eat. Yum!

I'm a Spork!

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter (approaching 6 years old) was making her lunch for school the next day. She wasn't making much progress on her peanut butter sandwich, and I noticed she was having trouble getting the lid off the jam jar (bad design, Smuckers: the big plastic jars from Costco, while cost-effective, are prone to sticky lids, and the jars aren't solid enough to really grab and twist effectively...but I digress).

Eventually she just looks at me and says, "Dad, you're a spork." I am? "Dad, you're a spork!" Apparently she means it, whatever it means. Why do you say that? "I'm trying to do something, and you're not being useful!" [beat...laughter all around the kitchen]

Some months earlier, probably while dining at some fine dining establishment that thinks it can save money by using sporks instead of spoons and forks, I had taught her the expression, "useless as a spork." It appears the lesson was learned and remembered.

The History of Nature

So, as noted in the last post, we spent almost a week in New York City. In the evenings, my wife and I went to the theater, and the daytimes were spent with our almost-six-year-old daughter at the American Museum of Natural History.

As I am sure I have mentioned elsewhere, said daughter is dinosaur-obsessed. And ever since seeing a video called Dinosaur Hunters, she has told everyone who will listen that she plans to be a paleontologist, and after she gets her degree in Paleontology (from UC Berkeley, of course!), she plans to work at the Museum of Natural History in New York, although she will spend much of her time in the field in Mongolia, digging for oviraptor fossils.

So going to the museum itself was sort of a pilgrimage for her. Needless to say, after purchasing our membership (given the length of our stay, it was much less expensive than daily tickets), we headed straight to the 4th floor [pdf], home of fossils. We spent much of that first afternoon in the hall of saurischian dinosaurs. Needless to say, the scale of things is daunting. Not only are the dinos BIG, but there are so many, and so much to read. Probably the thing she found most mesmerizing was a little video of a time-lapse view of reposing the big T-Rex skeleton. Scientific consensus about how T-Rex stood and moved necessitated disassembling and reassembling the display that had been there since 1915. It's quite interesting to watch how they managed it.

Subsequently, we managed to wander around to the orientation hall, where they have an excellent video narrated by Meryl Streep that explains they layout of the whole floor, which traces the evolution of vertebrates from the earliest brain case and simple backbone through advanced mammals. There are some truly spectacular items on display, but until we saw the video, we didn't get how brilliantly they have laid out the displays to trace the development of vertebrate life.

Needless to say, our daughter really got it, and thereafter insisted on following the development path in the proper direction only.

One cute note is that she is quite petite for her age, so she had some difficulty using the many computer displays in the different exhibit halls. She would convince various people to lift her up onto the display itself, where she could easily manipulate the controls and work her way through the lessons. Several times we noticed museum staff come over to shoo the little kid sitting on the computer, until they realized she was really studying the material.

We all got a great deal out of the 4th floor. Since we returned, we have gotten daily lectures on various aspects of vertebrate development, such as the fact that we are synapsids. Our plush platypus has been named Amnion, and so on.

Although we collectively spent the bulk of our time at the museum wandering the 4th floor, we managed to sneak off at times to see some of the other exhibits. Of particular interest to those of us who love to dive was the Hall of Ocean Life, which covers all sorts of things, from coral reefs and kelp forests to big marine mammals. We were dubious that a dry exhibit (as opposed to an aquarium) could capture the essence of ocean life, but they've done a really credible job.

All in all, despite the overwhelming amount of stuff, we all came away with both a great appreciation for the museum itself and the lessons it teaches and a desire to go back to explore some more. When we realized that we'd spent a huge amount of time exploring a relatively small percentage of the material on display, we knew we'll be returning to see more.

Truly, the museum is an astounding place, and well worth visiting.

Rant

My five-year-old daughter, tonight, at the end of a long rant:

"Dad, you're just not providing me with the pleasant life I want."

Oh.

Don't know what I can add to that. It is, after all, my role in life to make her miserable. Or so she tells me.

Good job, Dad!