The days are long and the years are short

I have been reading (or re-reading).
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade
Ghost Story by Jim Butcher


It is amazing that I have been able to make time to read all this.

Emily is doing more reading on her own, because she wants to and with interest in the actual book to be read. Self-motivation, in other words. :) From here, she can do all sorts of things. Follow a series through multiple books, read a non--fiction book because she wants to know more about that topic, share books with other children. And while you enjoy reading, so many other things happen...learning vocabulary, exploring settings, exploring common themes in fiction, and learning things about the craft of writing.

She read one whole book from the Rainbow Fairies, half of another, and some poems from "Where the Sidewalk Ends" by Shel Silverstein. In a way, she has already shared the Shel Silverstein book, because she asked me to give it to a friend of hers for his birthday.


I can not even begin to share how happy this makes me.

I am off to the book club tonight. It should be fun. We are going to see the movie at the book club.

Before that, I probably need to check in with my tutoring student. In fact, I should call this morning to confirm. Hey, I have email that he is canceling.

And I got "And the Band Played On" from the library. it is a classic now, but it was a barn-stormer for research into AIDS and for press coverage of AIDS in the 1980s.

There is a biomedical book club that I am hoping to join. That is the book for December. Some of the other books will be more recently printed (and hence, harder to get at the library).

I will be trying to read a reasonable amount in the coming year (including some fiction). It's not good to give up on something that was an important part of my life.

Another non-fiction work that I am interested in is "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" by Christopher Caldwell. It's about the integration or lack of integration of Muslims into modern Europe.

Emily read us a level 2 Scholastic reader last night. It's wonderful.

Of course, she had some of the words memorized (like antibodies and antibiotic). But she had confidence and determination to get through it all.

I did my lunch room stint. I went outside for the half-day pickup. I talked to a father picking up. This father is most likely Italian (I channel Rocky Balboa when I hear him speak) and his parents are/were living with his family. The grandfather of the family died a month ago, and the kindergarten boy is acting out. He's angry all the time these days. The father has a meeting next week about putting the child in ESL (English as a Second Language) for extra support at school. But it really sounds like the boy needs grief counseling (I don't know if the school can do that, but they certainly can find a referral). I hope that the father remembers my point that sometimes kids show grief as anger. I actually did not know that the school did ESL for kindergarteners. I thought it was pure immersion.

Then I took Emily and headed back into the school and unloaded and organized books for the book fair. Emily mostly watched a 4th grader play video games on his Nintendo DS. Emily found a bunch of words that she can read in the titles of various books. Her words are "and, we, you, a, I, see, can, the, go, like". Yeah, this one word at a time thing is growing old. After a while, I was more looking for work to do than doing work, so I gathered up Emily and left.

And I am determined to write more about my life and my child.

I am tired of the way children's books express surprise by saying "[the character] gasped". Every time T reads it in a story, he pauses and looks at me before reading it. I am ready to dig out our thesaurus to find a synonym. It is a common action. At least, I am laughing now instead of frustrated.

The leaves keep falling and falling and falling. Some trees are completely bare and some are completely full of leaves. It just depends on the species and the sun/water balance of that particular tree.

We have four pumpkins (down from five) on our porch. Time to cook them or compost them.

Emily and I read a book last night. We were reading the chapter on the Earth's environment and how to preserve it for future generations. It is a British book and so the chapter on composting was very interesting. In Britain, they tend to use peat for fertilizer.

Thanks to a thread on cvirtue 's livejournal, I have put the "Tales of a Frog Princess" series by E.D. Baker on my checkout list at the library.  We've been in a bit of a reading rut at bedtime lately, ever since we finished "Charlotte's Web".

I want to summarize. This, like so many books out there, would have been better as a 7-page essay.

One, don't deliberately expose young children (less than 10) to the nerd stereotype. In general, they will treat it like the "baby" stereotype, and use it to tease someone less mature or who gets along with their parents well.
Between 10 and 13 or 14, children will finally get the non-sexually attractive part of the stereotype and many of those in the middle will punt their math/science classes to avoid the stereotype.
Around 14 or 15, children will be more comfortable in their own skin and treat the stereotype with some irony/sarcasm/or embrace it for its power. That is when the difference between nerd and geek can actually have some meaning.

Two, the show "Beauty and the Geek" needs to be taken off the air.

Three, "The Legend of Sleepy Hallow" needs to be only assigned in late high school, or saved for college. It is typically assigned to pre-teens and is corrosive in its depiction of Ichabod Crane as the beginning of the nerd stereotype.