(no subject)

[the_rck]

Scott’s laptop is on the verge of dying. He’s not sure we can afford to replace it, but him doing without also isn’t a viable option, especially this time of year. Suddenly, this morning, it stopped recognizing either of its hard drives, and the screen went entirely blank. It took him about an hour to get it back, and he still doesn’t know what caused the problem.

We have one hitch on the baking front— We have lots and lots of bread flour but almost no all purpose flour. We can make fudge and gooey butter bars without flour, but we can’t make any of the other cookies we want.

I woke with a migraine this morning. I have no idea why. I would have liked to sleep later, but, with a headache, that wasn’t an option.

Scott got up at 2:00 to go to work. When he got there, they didn’t need him and sent him home. He didn’t call ahead to see if they needed him because they normally call him if they don’t.

I was going to go to bed early last night, but Cordelia came out just after I finished brushing my teeth and wanted to hang out and talk, so we did that for over an hour. I think it was definitely worth the lost sleep.

She’s frustrated that they aren’t allowed to bring any of the books they use at school home, not even the books they’re assigned for individual reading. I can understand with the social studies textbooks because they only bought half as many books as they have kids, but Cordelia had to miss two other classes yesterday because she had to finish an assigned book before the end of the school day yesterday so that she could write an assignment on it over the weekend. She’s fairly peeved about that because she loathed the book and because, well, missed classes. Also, it was apparently really, really hard to find a place where she could read undisturbed. She can’t read if there’s anyone talking or any music or anything much else in the way of distractions.

I told her that, next time, we will get a copy of the book in question from the public library when it’s first assigned, and she admitted that she probably should have done that. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a choice about which books she reads for these assignments. The teacher picks the option that she thinks is most appropriate for Cordelia. Cordelia is hoping that the next assignment will be The Diary of Anne Frank because she thinks that sounds interesting, but she’s worried she’ll get stuck with something as bad as the Grisham book she just finished.

I found one of the copies of my baby name book last night. It is, sadly, the damaged copy, the one that is missing part of the male H names and all of the male Y and Z names. I think it will still serve my needs, but handling it always makes me feel uncertain because I don’t know how much longer the remnants of the binding will hold. I keep that copy in a large ziploc bag so that I don’t lose any further pages. It’s worked so far. The parts that are missing were missing when I got this book a few decades ago.

Comments

[zhelana]

I'm currently reading Annexed, which is about Peter from the Anne Frank story. It's interesting to see the story retold from a different character's POV. I guess it's published fanfic though. lol.

[the_rck]

RPF, no less! I'll be curious to hear what you think. I hadn't heard of the book, but it sounds interesting. I don't know that I'll want to read it just because that whole thing is heartbreaking. But Cordelia might be interested later on.

I think it's easier for people to grasp the horror and tragedy when looking at such a small group of people and what became of them. Looking at the big picture is more than most people can wrap their heads around. Our minds flinch from things that big.

[zhelana]

I'll definitely be posting more on Wednesday but so far it's pretty good - but there is a limit to what you can say about living in an attic and I still have 4 hours left to go. It does have the advantage of being written by a historian, so it's not like some random person decided to write Anne Frank fanfic - at least they know what they're talking about.

I'm always hesitant to read fiction about the Holocaust because I feel like how can fiction do it justice? How can fiction encapsulate this horrible thing?

Plus I think a lot of authors don't do enough research. Like I read "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" and they had them marching into gas chambers after they were already in the camps. Nope. That happened at the very beginning - either you worked or were gassed. Not both. Not unless you complained and went to sick call. They didn't just round up their workers and gas them at random. Also all of the prisoners were carefully controlled so A. you wouldn't get one sitting by the fence talking to the warden's son. and B. they wouldn't accidentally gas the warden's son just because he happened to be in the camp at that moment. Because they would have checked the ID number on his wrist and when he didn't have one (and when he was fat to begin with) they would have noticed he didn't belong there. So basically Holocaust fic has a history of driving me nuts because I know what I'm talking about. So far this hasn't done that and I'm hoping it won't.

Anyway, I think if Cordelia is old enough for Anne Frank, she's old enough for this book. The library had it stored with general fiction, not YA fiction, but I don't think it includes anything worse than the original story. Of course I haven't finished yet, so it may include his time in the camps. I don't know how comfortable you are with having her read that.

I agree. It is much easier to look at these 8 people than it is to look at 6 million people. I read another book - nonfiction - called the Search for 6 in 6 million in which an American Jew goes looking for information on his family and how they died. He only finds one of the six people with any definitive information.

[the_rck]

If I'm recalling correctly, a good bit of what I know about life inside one of the camps comes from Corrie Ten Boom's book about the experiences she and her sister had during the war. They were Dutch Christians who got sent to the camps latish during the war for hiding Jews, so their experiences were different but still very grim. (There is, as I recall, a kind of weird thread of even bad things being God's will and, potentially, blessings that runs through the book. At one point, Corrie's sister makes her give thanks for lice and fleas, and Corrie comments that, actually, the guards didn't come into the barracks because of the lice and fleas so that those actually were kind of a good thing.)

I read that in either middle school or high school, after I'd read both Anne Frank's Diary and the play based on it. (We read the play in class, acting out parts, in eighth grade.)

I remember an X-Men comic that I read, probably in the early 1990s, where some of the characters end up time traveling back in time to the 1930s. One of the characters is Jewish, a teenager, and she wants desperately to warn her relatives in Europe, but she doesn't know the names of the people left behind when her grandparents or great-grandparents (I forget which) emigrated or even where in Poland they came from, and she doesn't speak Polish or Yiddish. She just knows that, in the history she's familiar with, they all died. Those few pages were heartbreaking.

I do wonder how the X-Men comics will carry the character of Magneto forward. He absolutely does not work without his WWII backstory, without being Jewish. Of course, some writers may prefer giving that up because they work very hard to make Magneto evil and wrong to be worried about what people might do to a despised minority. There's a bit in X-Men: First Class that shows him hunting down and assassinating escaped Nazi war criminals, and the movie tries to show that as a terrible thing for him to be doing. Which... Um. No. Extradition followed by a trial would certainly be better, but that was often not a possibility.

[zhelana]

Jews had that weird vein, too, I think. At one point they put God on trial for abandoning them and in the middle of the trial they stopped for their prayers. So who knows, maybe that wasn't uncommon.

Sounds like an interesting XMen comic. I hope they keep Magneto the way he is.

[hamsterwoman]

he’s frustrated that they aren’t allowed to bring any of the books they use at school home, not even the books they’re assigned for individual reading.

That's pretty crazy! I'd be very frustrated, too. (I was going to ask if the public library had a copy, but see you've already hit on that as a solution for next time.)

My high-schooler has very little excuse for not bringing HER textbooks home -- she's allowed, but she feels they're too heavy to drag along (cry me a river; this is pretty much the exact same route I walked to/from school when I attended it). I am thinking of looking into maybe "renting" some of the textbooks from Amazon next time or something like that, so she doesn't have even that excuse. But for regular lit reading, hopefully the library is a good solution.

What grade is Cordelia in, btw? It sounds like she's in the same general age range as my kids (7th and 9th grade), but I couldn't narrow it down beyond that from your recent posts :)

[the_rck]

Cordelia is in 7th grade, but she's at a non-traditional middle school. Basically, her elementary school was about a block from our house, and during what we expected to be her last year there, they announced that they were turning the thing into a magnet school, STEAM focused, and making it K-8 instead of K-5. They're adding a grade a year, so Cordelia's class will be the oldest for four years running.

It's mostly been good. I really like having less than 50 kids in her grade. It means that the teachers really know all of the students and their dynamics pretty well. I really like, too, having the school so close by for three years longer than we expected. They're big on project based learning and on exploring topics through multiple approaches.

The downside is that the principal has no experience with middle school students and doesn't really get what they need. Also, because this is a new program, everything happening with Cordelia's grade is being tried for the first time ever in any school in the district. And the district is strapped for cash because the state has been spending less and less on students for years now. (We tried to pass a millage two or three years ago to make up the funding, but we're a university town with a lot of rental properties, and the various large landlords put a lot of money into defeating the millage.) Hence the only buying twenty five or so seventh grade social studies textbooks. Last year, they had ebooks for textbooks, but the licensing fees were too expensive. The readers are paid for out of a completely separate pot of money-- The millage to pay for computer equipment upgrades did pass (largely because it was the only thing on the ballot. Local millages are a lot more likely to pass if there's not much else being voted on, at least around here).

We also have fairly large traffic problems at the start and end of the school day because 2/3 to 3/4 of the students are from outside of the 'attends area.' Students within the attends area can walk or take the bus, depending on where they live, but students from outside can only attend if their parents arrange (and pay for!) transportation to and from school. There's no room for parents to pull up to the school for drop off or pick up, so they're all supposed to find somewhere to park in the neighborhoods around the school. Kids coming by cab have to be dropped off somewhere in the surrounding neighborhood, regardless of age, and then walk to school on their own.

[hamsterwoman]

That sounds like a pretty neat school experience, actually! The standalone middle schools seem like kind of a strange concept to me, honestly -- taking the kids at their most discombobulated and putting them all in one place, interrupting their normal routine -- so we would've very much liked a K-8 school for ours, but it wasn't in the cards.

Though I'm sure it will be an adjustment from her to go from being the oldest for four years running to high school freshman...

The traffic situation does sound hectic, though! And public schools never have enough money *sigh*

[the_rck]

My own middle school experience was thoroughly hellish, so I was very concerned about Cordelia. She's much more socially together than I ever was, and unlike me, she would have known a few people (30 kids out of a class of 300-400 is not a lot, but it's something. For me, we moved between elementary school and middle school, so I knew no one, and I dressed funny, and my hair was wrong, and...).

Someone actually told me several years ago that the reason that our local schools went from a 7-8 junior high school to a 6-8 middle school was that kids were reaching puberty earlier and that nobody wanted hormonal adolescents around the younger kids. Which, well, I can see, but... Middle school is so thoroughly awful. I can't help but think that there must be ways to make it better. It can't all be because the kids are at an awful stage in their lives.

I suspect that, for Cordelia, the adjustment to the much bigger school will be more of a shock than suddenly being the youngest again. There are currently less than 45 seventh graders (I think there are 60-70 sixth graders). The high schools around here are mostly very, very big, and getting to the one she'll attend will involve a fairly long bus ride. She's never ridden a bus to get to school before.

I'm hoping we can get her into the alternative high school, but it's not a good bet. There's a lottery, and there are always four or five times as many applicants as there are spaces for them. I hesitate, though, because that school doesn't emphasize science and technology the way that I'd like. They don't ignore it, but they don't focus on it. Cordelia says she's not interested in science, but I would like her to be at least minimally scientifically literate. I think that's crucial for being an informed adult (and for much more important reasons than just spotting the handwavium and utter bunkum on SF shows).

Cordelia has been saying, since kindergarten, that she wants to be a teacher. I'm not sure she has a good grasp of what's involved or that she would be good at it (I don't know that she wouldn't be, either).

I just don't want her to back herself into the sort of corner that her father has ended up in-- He majored in materials science engineering but didn't know that the school he went to (a big state university) wasn't accredited in that field. Nobody ever mentioned to him that accreditation existed. He graduated during a job slump and really wasn't qualified to get into grad school. He's been working an exhausting, physically demanding, blue collar job for about twenty two years now. Before I became unable to work (which was long before Cordelia), we were talking about relying on my job for benefits and borrowing enough money for him to quit and go back to school. There just hasn't been a way to do that.

[hamsterwoman]

I was concerned about my kids, too, going into middle school. They're attending the same middle school that I did, and while my experience was not nearly as bad as I've heard from other people (in other schools), it was definitely not fun, either. I also didn't know anyone, and transferred in 7th grade (after a year of private school/ESL -- I came to the US when I was 11), so I even missed out on the reshuffling of friendships that seems to happen in 6th grade when kids from different elementary schools come together in the middle school. I probably dressed weird, too, but that was something I was oblivious to (still am, frankly; I've been insulated from this sort of thing by working in hi-tech my whole life, so nobody cares), but I get the feeling that here in SF it's at least possible to be oblivious to it. Well, and I'm about ten years younger than you, too, I guess; that probably makes a difference, too.

Middle school does seem to be kinder/gentler these days, at least here... I was pleasantly surprised. I guess all the "say no to bullying" stuff has actually helped somewhat, and the emphasis on conflict resolution (which I think they make more effort to teach in elementary school these days). Basically, L had no problems at all, beyond some friendship drama with one elementary school friend who has always been really volatile. O seems to be OK, too, but his cohort seems to just be hitting puberty around now, so we'll see how it goes.

You're probably right about school size and bus ride logistics, come high school. I guess our middle school did provide a decent transition in that regard. They could walk to elementary school, but the middle school is both walking distance away and has a bus route, so they got to practice public transit, and it's considerably larger than their elementary school (which was ~400 kids), while still being a lot smaller than L's high school (1200 vs about twice that).

Good luck with the high school application ordeal next year! We just went through that with L and I'm already dreading it with O. Our alternative high school has merit-based admission rather than lottery, but that's stressful in its own way. And the other decent school (charter school) does have a lottery and crazy ratio of applicants to available spots (as it's got a feeder middle school that it has to accommodate as a priority).

My kids both like science, but we've had the math conversation with L. She doesn't like it/finds it boring (which her father, who is a math professor, hates hearing of course; it makes me sad, too, because I've always liked math), which is fine, but I keep trying to make her understand that this is stuff everyone should know, and this is a foundation she absolutely needs if she wants to do anything in science.

He majored in materials science engineering but didn't know that the school he went to (a big state university) wasn't accredited in that field. Nobody ever mentioned to him that accreditation existed.

Wow, that's terrible! Especially as I'm sure the MatSci degree was pretty intensive... to have wasted all that. Wow :( That is a terrible thing his university did to him. How can they even OFFER a major they're not accredited in?