bearing blog

Thinking about first grade and reading.

I sat down today to plan Oscar's first grade curriculum --- just the preliminary stages.

After many, many hours of drill and practice, mainly from lists of words I drew up, Oscar can recognize many different spellings for many different sounds and has developed a decoding strategy.  I tried giving him sentences and little stories a long time ago, but he found them frustrating --- it was pretty obvious that he needed to be able to decode words reasonably rapidly before he could see through the text to the content.  So, I abandoned the whole idea of "stories" and just did drill and one-word-at-a-time practice.  I introduced sounds and spellings systematically and slowly, trying never to give him a word he couldn't decode by calling on the knowledge he had, and avoiding all "sight words."   This seems to have worked really well for him.

Just last week I decided to try stories again.  I chose the Bob Books for his very first readers.  The first books are written at a level far below the level of the wordlists that Oscar is reading right now.  Yesterday his wordlist was cutting, poked, bumped, ate, off, different, laugh, and the next one will be tried, size, July, might, use, count, pound, powers, wow.  But the Bob Books he read this week included, for example:

Mac had a bag.  The bag had a dog.  Mac had a bag and a dog. Mag had a rag.  Mac can tag Mag.  Mac got the rag.  Mac sat on the rag.  Mag sat on the bag. 

The End.

There's no difficulty there for him to read the words, not at all, though he still reads most of them drawn-out --- "Maaaaa... c....  Mac... had... a.... baaaag."  I can practically watch his confidence grow on every page.  He's just flown through them, and he has been begging me to sit and listen to him read more of them.  Granted, this is partly because I promised him a sticker for each one --- but if he wasn't enjoying the work, he wouldn't do it for a paltry little sticker.

I'm hoping that once we've gone through them all, maybe repeated a few of them to help build fluency, he'll be ready to tackle readers and "real" books.  And then, we can stop all this phonics business and simply start reading.

Contraception and the continuum.

I wrote this as a post to a newsgroup about the Continuum Concept --- mainly focused on raising children according to their human sociobiological needs (e.g. nursing, babywearing, cosleeping) --- in response to a thread about contraception.  (The term "in the continuum" is a bit of jargon that roughly means, "in a lifestyle that meets the human needs communicated to us by our biology, our bodies.")

A previous poster had mentioned --- perhaps in order to make a point that population control is common and should be considered a part of our continuum expectation --- that infanticide exists in nearly all cultures, including our own.  True enough, and it's certainly especially widespread in our own if you include abortion as a form of "invisible infanticide."  I was interested in exploring the idea of what contraception does to the human continuum of relationships.  I wonder if it might even be more insidious than infanticide (note:  this doesn't mean "more evil" but only "more insidious") at destroying our sense of rightness of being, precisely because it's so invisible.  Here's what I wrote.

I'm glad [name withheld] brought this up.  ISTM that contraception is profoundly incompatible with continuum living.

Even though infanticide and/or abortion, tragically, exist in all cultures, and
even though I suppose there's always been herbal concoctions and other attempts
to regulate fertility, there's something more insidiously noncontinuum (note:  more noncontinuum does not necessarily equal "more bad" here) about modern contraception's effects on relationships and sexuality.

I mean, it's basically sowed an attitude among many people that sex and babies are
NOT inherently associated.  Remember, without modern contraception, every time a
man has sexual intercourse with a nonpregnant, nonlactating woman of childbearing
age, it is a reasonable expectation that a baby might result.  (Even those of us
who know our cycles very well know we can be mistaken about them.) With modern contraception, the same couple engaging in sexual intercourse might well have an expectation that a baby is practically impossible.  Enough of that and they might not even think in terms of "this is an activity that may make a baby," or may not have
any real concept that "baby" and "sex" are intimately related activities.  If they fall pregnant, they may be surprised.  "How did this happen?" they may ask.  The answer then seems to be "Something was wrong with my contraceptive," rather than, "I had sex with a fertile partner."

Why do I say that this is perhaps less compatible with the human continuum than infanticide?  If the only effect of either was on the population numbers, maybe it wouldn't matter. 

But even if a baby is killed after birth, the baby existed, and the link between
sex and babies is known in the depth of everyone's being.  The woman experienced
pregnancy, swelled and grew, gave birth to a wriggling, squalling, rooting little
human being that everyone knew originated in a sexual encounter that she had had
some months before.  For the community to control the population via infanticide, someone has to take that baby and kill her, one way or another.
That is a very... concrete... experience within a family or within a community,
to say the least.   

One would expect that in a culture that knows in its bones that sex makes babies,
sex itself would be a somewhat different experience than in a culture where sex
and babies have been, effectively, disconnected.  By extension, relationships between
men and women, husbands and wives, would be different too.  We've nearly destroyed
our expectation that sex makes babies.  Abortion, too, is different from infanticide
in that its invisibility makes it possible for many people to deny that the baby
ever existed --- and so it, too, feeds that attitude.  Sex and babies are not linked,
because today it is possible, with not too much effort, to have plenty of sex and
never lay eyes on a single live, wriggling, squalling, rooting little human being.

I mean, let me point out from the discussion that's gone on about teenagers and
sex.  There's a lot of people here hoping that they can help their teenagers wait
until they are "emotionally ready" for sex.  Certainly this is true, because
sex tends to bond people to each other (and the biological reason for this, of course,
is the babies that sex naturally tends to bring into being.)  But ISTM that a more
cc test for being ready for sex --- one based in our biological expectations ---
is being ready and willing to parent a child.  And perhaps being ready and willing
to parent a child is not all that different from being truly emotionally ready for
sex, no?  If we look at it from the point of view of the continuum, *within which
the expectation is that sex can make a baby --- a wriggling, squalling, rooting
little human being?*

I mean, if we have the quite rational expectation that sex makes babies, then we
would KNOW in our bones that if you're not ready and willing to mother a child,
to father a child, you're not ready for sex. 

And if we DON'T have that expectation, if we prefer to live in a world where we
can effectively pretend that sex is not going to lead to babies, how can we say
we are trying to live in the continuum?  What does it do to our sex lives, the sex
lives of our children, when we can have sex without the slightest thought that pregnancy and birth and a baby might result?

Disclaimer:  I don't use artificial contraception, and I am expecting my third wriggling,
squalling, rooting little human being this summer.

I am curious what kind of response I will get.  I hope I didn't water my comments down too much --- I'm really not trying to say that infanticide is preferable to contraception --- but seeing as how I was placed on "moderated" status last year due to "inflammatory comments" (I objected strongly to a comment from someone who felt that adoption was cruel and abortion was kind), I always feel that I can't be fully expressive of my opinions lest none of them at all make it through.

Light blogging.

Over the next ten days or so.

Message to all those people in college who wondered what Mark and I talk about behind closed doors: Yes, it really is exactly what you think it is.

Breakfast conversation:

Mark:   Is there something called the Mercene primes, or the Marecene primes?

Me:   Mercenne primes.  Um, they're of the form 2n+1 I think.  No wait, that's just an odd number.  Um...

Mark:  Is it two to the power of n plus 1?

Me:  That sounds right.  I forget.  (Note:  I was wrong, it's two to the power of P minus 1 where, by implication, P is also prime.  See, e.g., the Mersenne Wiki, or this page by an enthusiast/researcher at the University of Tennessee-Martin.)  Anyway, google Mersenne series.  Why do you want to know, anyway?

Mark:  In case anybody asks me how many children we plan to have. 

Me:  Oh, I see. "Four, plus or minus two, with ninety-five percent confidence," doesn't work anymore. 

Mark:  Right, so I figured I would go with "I don't care as long as it's a Mersenne prime."  One, five, eleven, and so forth.

Me:  Don't you think the Fibonacci series would be better?

Mark:  Why?

Erin:  Well, at least with Fibonacci we haven't made any mistakes yet.  First we had one, then we had two, now we're going to have three.

Mark:  Ah-ha!  I can say that we are having an ongoing argument about it.  "Erin prefers the Fibonacci series, but I am shooting for the Mersenne primes."

Erin:  Well, you know, they start out pretty close---

Mark: ---but they diverge wildly after a while!  Yes!

Erin:  I don't know about this "eleven" thing. 

You can imagine my relief when I clicked around and discovered that eleven is not, actually, a Mersenne prime.  (Of course, I had to send an e-mail to Mark at work with the subject line "URGENT:  MERSENNE PRIMES," lest he make a fool of himself describing our family planning strategy to some product formulator who turned out to be a closet GIMPS enthusiast.)

UPDATE:  This post seems to have inspired some commentary elsewhere --- see, e.g., Rutabaga Dreams.  And Selkie, which seems to be a pretty cool homeschooling mom blog too.

Very cool prints.

Click this link to go to a site selling prints depicting various historical topics in infographic format.  I particularly like the two "History of the Political Parties" prints.

I wonder if Edward Tufte has commented on them?

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has lost its mind.

Court rules:   New York City public schools may explicitly ban nativity scenes during Christmas while in the same policy explicitly permitting displays of menorahs during Hanukkah and the star-and-crescent during Ramadan.

This boggles the mind.   Either all three must be permitted, or all three must be banned --- right?

The policy at issue expressly states that the display of "secular holiday symbol decorations is permitted," and it lists as examples the menorah and the star and crescent. The policy specifically excludes the display of the Christian nativity scene. The City defended its policy by arguing that the menorah and star and crescent were permissible symbols because they were "secular," whereas the nativity scene had to be excluded because it was "purely religious." Even though the majority recognized that the City's argument was fallacious, stating that the policy "mischaracterizes" these symbols, it still upheld the discriminatory ban on the Christian nativity.

This is nuts.  There's no way the U.S. Supreme Court will go for the argument that a menorah is secular "enough" and a nativity scene is not secular "enough."  Since when is the government allowed to decide the degree to which speech is religious in order to determine if it will be permitted?

I wonder if it's because there really aren't any widely recognized secular symbols of Hanukkah that can be substituted for the menorah (dreidels? latkes?).  Why, if we didn't classify a menorah as "secular," children wouldn't be allowed to experience Hanukkah-based art projects at all.   Whereas Christmas always has jolly old St. Nicholas. 

I mean Santa.  Strike that last bit.

It's Saturday!

And Mark's not around, so I'm letting the kids watch video after video while I sit around and blog and read blogs.  In case you were wondering why I suddenly got so prolific.

Here's a blog I never clicked on before:  Agoraphilia (yet another law-econ blog, I'm afraid).  I liked this post.

Take note of this one.

Olive oil ice cream with balsamic strawberries.

Simplifying sushi.

OK, this is a really great idea. 

Sensitive.

The inimitable Mark Steyn:

Even if you were overcome with a sudden urge to burn the Danish flag, where do you get one in a hurry in Gaza? Well, OK, that's easy: the nearest European Union Humanitarian Aid and Intifada-Funding Branch Office. But where do you get one in an obscure town on the Punjabi plain on a Thursday afternoon?

If I had a sudden yen to burn the Yemeni or Sudanese flag on my village green, I haven't a clue how I'd get hold of one in this part of New Hampshire. Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.

Ha.  More seriously:

The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point....[W]e should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.

Mm-hm.  (H/t Tim Blair.)