The Family

We have a Looney Tunes DVD. We watched it. Eleanor’s very first encounter with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wiley Coyote … not all the characters, but a good core set.

It was fun watching her watch them. But the best one was Wiley Coyote.

She kept inching closer and closer to the TV. She was so focused. And then she started talking, very softly – I had to really pay attention to hear. He’d outline a plan; she’d whisper ‘no .. that won’t work..’ Over and over and over.

Then he fell off a cliff for about the 2nd or 3rd time. And with this slight air of resignation, she says ‘and he’s squished.’ Off the cliff – ‘(sigh) and he’s squished’. Opening ACME package .. ‘no ..that won’t work’. Exploding anvil – ‘and he’s squished’. Fake tunnel on cliff face – ‘that won’t work’. over and over.

The last time he fell off the cliff, after the cliff cracks off under him and with the anvil and probably something explosive to boot, she reached her hands out to the TV to catch him, and lowered him down to the ground. The she stepped back and the watched the cliff and the anvil and the TNT hit and said ‘and he’s squished.’

I am, of course, just about dying laughing. And loving my sweet girl.

She wasn’t devastated by the constant squishing. I think it was more the frustration that he kept trying things that she could already tell wouldn’t work.

Ah; this weekend.

Long weekend, I thought. I will get so much done. I will get ahead in my class so I can really relax next weekend.

Friday we have to go into San Antonio to meet with the tax prep guy. Saturday is the birthday party. Sunday we’re out at the ranch. Monday we’re out at the ranch.

Class work? It is to laugh. House work? Well, we did almost clear the table and almost clean the kitchen, so sure. House work is done.

I wouldn’t choose to not do any of the things we did do; they were all either really fun or necessary. All of which is important. It’s just .. I really, really wanted to get ahead in the class. I’ve finally figured which website to do for my project, just not how I want to go about it, and it’s a massive project to consider for a single weekend. Sigh.

So …. today’s report.

Mary & Betty came to ranch with us. Eleanor latched onto them as if they were the only two people who ever interact with her. I was shoo’d away and shush’d so many times today – she wanted to have them all to herself. She knows what she wants, and has this purity in how she expresses it. It’s all utterly transparent.

Not like she used to be. She has discovered guile, and subterfuge, and disappointment. She doesn’t have that absolute openness of her infancy. But she’s still so straightforward about everything, and so confident in the result of a clearly expressed opinion. It is a lovely thing to watch. Even when the thing being watched – the request being expressed – is that I shoo.

Eleanor was invited to a birthday party, which was today.

I’m so wrapped up in this class and Joseph is so wrapped up in selling the ranch (less than a month to clear everything – crunch time!) that we didn’t do birthday shopping till today. Then we came home and collapsed.

An hour before we had to leave for the party, Eleanor is absolutely crashed out, we’re both tired and hungry and antisocial, and we just do not want to leave the house. It’s a place we’ve never been, we have no idea who else will be there but I expect it will all be much older kids … we were dragging so hard.

And then we had an absolutely delightful time.

The place was great – it’s going to be another go-to place for Eleanor to romp in the future. The crowd was very mixed in age – everything from 1 to 12, I’d guess. Eleanor romped hard for well over two hours. It was relaxed, it was fun … it felt like the best part of belonging to a community.

And we said, oh, won’t Eleanor sleep well tonight. So of course, she’s quietly puttering around in her room, a full hour after the go-to-bed routine, being good and quiet and in no way asleep. It makes no sense. She should be either throwing a full out exhaustion tantrum or she should be collapsed in a heap.

All of our predictions about tonight were wrong.

Much of the early part of the class I’m taking was spent in talking about the growth mindset, and how vital that is to life-long learning. Which makes sense for a class targeted to professionals who are reinventing themselves.

Growth mindset in a nutshell: People’s theories about their own intelligence have a significant impact on their motivation, effort, and approach to challenges. Those who believe their abilities are malleable are more likely to embrace challenges and persist despite failure. The book – the website – the TED talk

And yes, I said all the right things, because I know the right things to say about growth mindset and fixed mindset and all that … but honestly, the whole thing seems like just another set of buzz words. I mean, what am I going to say? Yes, I avoid challenges and do not value learning new things?

But then I read the recommended article – Carol Dweck Revisits the ‘Growth Mindset, and I’ve got to say, it changed my mind on some things.

Made me think I should go read the original book, for one thing, instead of getting all the internet re-interpretations of what growth mindset is. Also, the article is well written, so it’s likely a well written book.

But mostly it was this paragraph:

A growth mindset isn’t just about effort. Perhaps the most common misconception is simply equating the growth mindset with effort. (…) We need to remember that effort is a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving. Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: “Great effort! You tried your best!” It’s good that the students tried, but it’s not good that they’re not learning.

Because that is exactly my objection to the “yay, good effort!” mentality that growth mindset seems to encourage, though I’d never phrased it so succinctly.

So I might be giving growth mindset a fresh look. Probably not a bad thing to do as Eleanor gets closer and closer to school age.

You know how married couples affect each other’s preferences over time? Joseph and I must have hit some critical threshold for that, because I kind of want this statue.

“Zombie Liberty” Limited Edition Art Souvenir! Stands approx. 10″ tall. She’s even holding up a Brain!
http://www.hypnotroniccomics.com/HypnoImages/zombieLiberty2.jpg

If I’d ever been to New York, absolutely. If I were considering going to New York, almost definitely. I haven’t, and I’m not, and yet …

If you come over to our house some day, and there’s a zombie liberty back in the game room somewhere, don’t be surprised.

I mean, she’s holding up a brain …

Sigh.

I thought I was ahead on my project. And then they moved the goalposts.

To be fair, I’m probably still a little ahead. I was 90% of the way there; now I am 60% of the way there. But let’s say the other normal people came in at 0% are are now at 40%.

So I’m technically ahead. But in the class, everyone else took 40 steps forward and I took 30 steps backwards.

It is demoralizing.

Well … I didn’t include the Futurism poster. I coded it, got it working … and then took it out and posted the assignment.

Just can’t break the rules.

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Another set of adjectives for you all: I don’t know where this idea was sparked, an earlier class or conversation or blog post; but there was a challenge to describe (for your own benefit) your own learning style and best learning environment.

Several findings from social psychology sprang to mind, but then I got into it. Experiments aside, social psych aside, what have I found works for me? I have 40+ years of experience at this, maybe I can find some patterns.

My learning style, I have decided, is thorough, detailed, and tenacious. It’s also strongly visual (I have to read things), followed by hands on, followed (very distantly) by listening. And if I’m really going to get it, I have to write it down myself.

I have to read material multiple times. The first time is to get the overall point. The second time is to get the structure of how we’re all going to get to this point. The third time is to identify what sections I already know and don’t know. The fourth time is to dig into the parts I don’t know and slowly work through whatever is necessary to fix that. The fifth time is to pretend I’m explaining it to someone and put all the parts into my own words (and fix anything that bogs me down). The sixth time is to slowly read the whole thing and verify that I understand, at each juncture, both the parts and the whole.

I’ve wasted a lot of energy trying to read things in depth the first time, and to berate myself for having to read things over and over. But hey – that’s someone else’s learning style. By stepping back and figuring out that I have a learning style, and that if I let it work for me it works very well for me, I’ve stopped berating myself for not being someone else.

I also do better in the late afternoon and mid to late evening (there’s a gap between about 5 and 8 where I should just take a break). I do better with soft instrumental music, neutral temperature, and the slight possibility of interruption.

Anyway …. if you haven’t stepped back and figured out your own learning style, you should. There’s always something new to learn, and it’s a lot more fun if you understand how you’re learning it.

For example: so many folks say how great You Tube is for learning things. I can not learn from You Tube. It’s all listening, and I do not learn well that way. I get a lot out of videos when I’m just filling in details. But I know better than to start with You Tube, and that has saved me a lot of grief.

I am taking a coding class. Part of the class exercises are to replicate some given example webpage.

It’s still in the intro phase of the class, so it’s still covering parts of coding that I know very well. So at first I was particular to the point of ridiculousness (what font is the example text? Is the heading and text in the same font? Can I open the example page as an image and count the pixels in that tabstop? If I add a hover effect, do you want the same green or a different accent green? …. These are all questions I asked, literally.)

After some heroically supressed eyerolls on the part of my TAs and instructors, I started to relax. Started to add subtle rollover and text effects that ~could~ be part of the example page. I mean, they’re showing me a static image. Who’s to say that if you hover over something, you won’t trigger some interactive effect?

No one has said anything to me about it, but I’ve been getting full marks. Bear in mind, full marks consists of ‘turned in on time’ and ‘has some passing resemblance to the original’.

So … it’s been several weeks of this. I’m starting to relax a bit more. The latest assignment has this retro futuristic vibe to it. And the point of this exercise is responsive design – that as you resize your browser, different things will happen.

And I so, so, SO want to throw in the Wondermark Futurism poster. One just one of the ‘responsive’ layouts – the largest one, where there’s lots of space left blank. Just to amuse myself; possibly to amuse the instructors. I think it’s terribly funny. I think it’s thematically related to the example page. It will require some extra (stretch to call it advanced) coding.

Yet I wonder … is this going to far away from the intent of the exercise? Will they also find it amusing, or am I the only one who finds myself quite this entertaining? Am I showing creativity and initiative, or am I being disrespectful and missing the whole point of the exercise? Am I over thinking this?

Project has to be turned in tomorrow (Sunday). Fate of the Futurism poster is still unknown.

Defining a voice, pt 1

About a year and a half ago, I posted about wanting to define what my particular voice was. Its something I continued to think about, and eventually I settled on this list:

My voice is approachable, knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and articulate.

This is mostly for professional communication, though the idea behind the exercise is that while one’s tone changes to match the occasion, one’s voice is consistent. And it does give me a certain framing structure when I’m writing and email (or any other writing) to remind myself of these core characteristics.

It’s kind of like any kind of self-analysis in that regard. By focusing on certain elements, I enhance those elements until through a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy they become the core attributes I defined them to be. Which is why I made sure my definition was all positively framed.

However……

A few weeks ago I was frustrated and a little sick and in a generally unhappy place, and I wrote some things that were very decidedly not positively framed. And then, as I got un-frustrated and un-sick and .. un-unhappy? .. I thought about how I’d written what I wrote, and the voice that I used. So I wrote out the characteristics of that voice.

Which came out as sarcastic, self-deprecating, apathetic, and rambling.

I wrote the two lists side by side to contemplate them. What could I learn; who was reflected in these two lists. And it dawned on me in this flash of insight that they were the same list, just mirrored back at each other. In a good mood I am approachable; in a bad mood I am sarcastic (possibly caustic). I see myself as knowledgeable; I am self-deprecating. Enthusiasm turns to apathy; articulate (presumably focused) becomes rambling. It’s all the same essential me in there, just in a positive or negative light.

Like most psychological insights, it seems perfectly obvious when you just lay it out there, but the discovery was personally illuminating.

Since I was gifted a lovely gift card to Goulet Pens, I had to do some shopping.  I also had a Thank You card from Goulet that included a coupon for free shipping on my next order – if I used it before Jan 31, 2018.

Well, how could I resist that?

A few dollars later and I now have on the way:

1 Goulet Fine Nib (that I’ll be trying out in a dip pen I just bought elsewhere)

1 Sample pack of Nemosine Ink (full line, so there is a good bit to explore)

1 bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku Ajisai (I’m claiming this was the gift card bit)

And a few notebooks for Christina that she uses for planning and karate training notes.

Once it all gets here it’ll be a good new year indeed.