Learn to hate French in one mangled lesson

Noah must take an enriched French 8 program in the fall, as it is required by the school that he’s enrolled in. As he has been studying Japanese until now, his French is basically nil.

No problem, I figured. This is one thing I can help with.

Wanting to ensure that he ended up with exactly the French he needs to know for Grade 8, I purchased B.C.’s Open School Introductory French 8 package. This was expensive — close to $200, as I recall, with shipping — but, it was designed exactly for students like Noah. The website billed it as “a mini bridging course for those students who want to take French 8 but have had no prior exposure to the French language.”

What a disaster! Half an hour with this program, Noah was ready to drop out of high school just to keep from having to take French. And I was wishing he would.

Briefly, here’s why:

- The first sentence in the workbook is, “C’est le premier jour d’ecole” and you’re immediately asked to “Choisis le bon nom et dis si la personne est un garcon ou une fille.” There is no English translation. So, with no knowledge of any nouns or verbs, you’re expected to write, in French, that Sylvie is a girl, Michel is a boy, and so on, making sure to correctly use “un” or “une” and “je suis” “tu es” “elle est” and so on. There is no vocabulary list and no explanation. The second exercise requires you to be able to conjugate a reflexive verb, again without instructions. After that, it becomes immensely more complex.

- There is a shrink-wrapped booklet to  accompanying the workbook, containing self-marking activities. The several pages of instructions seem to be on how to use the cassette tapes (”set the counter to zero”), but there is no translation of the exercises, no information about grammar, and no dictionary. Confusingly, the set no longer comes with cassettes, but instead with a CD, DVD, and VHS tape.

- The CD should be helpful, as it is a recording of someone reading the workbook exercises with proper pronunciation, but it is difficult to use because you can’t fast forward it or repeat what you’ve just heard. You must go back to the beginning of the CD and listen to the entire thing again, every time.

-The DVD is a brief recording of high school students performing in a “partner activity” skit, set in a hospital, that is miles beyond a beginner’s level and, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the workbook.

- The VHS appears to be another recording of a skit, although I’m just guessing that because, like the CD and the DVD, the plain green cover just says “partner video: length 20 minutes.”

So, for nearly $200 we have a workbook that assumes beginning students have a significant amount of French before they start, and that by their third lesson (on page 6) they can respond to the untranslated instruction, “Qu’est-ce qu’ils disent?” by filling out two pages of speech bubbles.  You have two shrink-wrapped bundles of paper that seem mostly to be extra exercises and exams that you can hand in to your teacher, but, again, nothing that would help you actually learn French. And, you will need to have 3 different pieces of technology (a CD player, a DVD player, and a VHS player) in order to discover how useless the other materials are.

After my experience with Open School’s Language Arts 7 poetry unit, I wasn’t expecting much.  But for 2 months over the summer, I figured that we could get by with something rudimentary. This, however, is ulcer-producing.

If you’re looking for an introductory French program, I recommend that you save your $200 and sign up with Frenchpod101. In five minutes, you’ll be able to order a croissant in French. In ten, you’ll be able to greet your friends. You’ll have fun. And it’s entirely free.

I live by mail

The young woman at the post office knows the names of all my children, even the names of Noah’s teachers. I’ve met some of her friends and know what she’s doing on her vacation.

“See you tomorrow,” she says… and I usually do.

Although this blog is called Momonline, I have a strong connection to the snail mail post office these days. I mail things to EBUS, I mail things to my brother (who is a travelling musician) and now that one of my kids is living in Japan, I mail things to him. So, I know more about postal rates than I used to. For example:

The cost to mail a padded envelope containing a student’s work samples to Vanderhoof? $12 to $20, depending upon size. More if  you have to use a box.  Sending three or four boxes of chocolates for  the teachers? About $40, by air (you don’t want them to melt). Textbooks? Depends upon size and weight.

The cost to mail a bicycle helmet to Japan? $109, by air. (Sea is cheaper, but takes two months) The cost to mail 12 Cliff snack bars to Japan (by regular mail): $30.  An MP3 player by air? $55. A CD? $4.10. An airmail letter? $1.65.

An off-size Valentine’s card to New Orleans? Just over $3.

A letter by FedEx to China? About $200. (FedEx is not Canada Post, but sometimes the only way to guarantee that your important item will reach a person who is on the move is to use this extra-fast service. And yes, I can tell you all about the FedEx guy’s kids, too!)

Graduation!

School for Mom

Over the past few years, my youngest son has introduced me to many things that I’d never paid attention to before, and, in some cases, had never heard of.  Mathematical infinities and how they differ from, say, anything that fits into my head; why things do what they do (physics); computer game development; and, most recently, the development of the atomic bomb.

Now, with Noah heading off to a 9 to 4 school in the fall, I’m going to be in charge of my own continuing ed program. If he’s like his brothers, I won’t see his homework, assignments or projects at all for the next 5 years — I’ll be lucky even to see his report card.

Without Noah patiently explaining to me how to solve ax + by = C  over tea, I’ll have to come up with some intellectual appetizers and main courses for myself.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Noah, it’s that the world is full of gripping mysteries just waiting to be solved, and that I’m as oblivious to most of them as our cat is to our leaky faucet problem.

Should I take a course? (There is so much available for free these days.) Write a book? (Nothing like writing about something to make you really learn it.) Get together with some like-minded people?

Even just thinking about thinking is fun….

Celebrating in an invisible world

Five years ago as I was making sushi for 200, I remember wondering why schools bother with the whole elementary graduation ceremony hoopla. I’m sure that my son’s classmates and parents wondered, too, when they ate the sushi and discovered that I’d accidentally added Japanese syrup to the sushi rice, rather than seasoned vinegar…

But now, three of my sons have graduated from both elementary school and secondary school, and all of us look back on those elementary school festivities with more appreciation.

Many of the girls, impeccably dressed in dresses, often wearing heels and a little lipstick for the occasion, towered over most of the boys, and seemed years older. Awards were handed out — apparently to everybody. Parents snapped photos, the principal made speeches, teachers gave out hugs and received tributes of chocolates and gift cards, there were ‘memory’ envelopes under each student’s seat, containing students’ thoughts about their future, written years earlier and saved by a teacher for this day. Slide shows were shown of the grads, starting with their baby pics, while  Green Day (Time of Your Life) or Sarah Maclachlan (I Will Remember You) reduced parents to tears.

Were our kids ready for high school? I knew mine weren’t. I wasn’t even ready for the grad party!

But now, as my youngest son is “graduating” from his online elementary school and moving to a different secondary school, I miss that. Everything I scoffed at. Even messing up with the sushi and then having to apologize 200 times.

Maybe it’s because Noah is my youngest and so this is the last time through, but…

What I miss most is the chance to celebrate as a community, to ‘kvell’  over our kids with the teachers who have meant so much to us, to beam with the other parents and to say with them, “Do you remember?” Sure, the other things were nice — the memento CD slideshow, the diploma, the gigantic party with decorations and adoring parents. But, it’s the togetherness I miss.

So, I’m looking for a way to mark this significant event in my son’s life, a way that will be memorable for him and meaningful for us, in a way that recognizes how unique his online elementary education has been. And I’m open to ideas.

One thing I’ve thought of is of getting his brothers together for a midnight walk across the Burrard Street bridge. From there, you can look across the waters of False Creek to the lights on the island. The world feels bigger at night, and moonlight forces you to notice all the things you miss during the day: twinkling bits of mica in pavement; ponds of light beneath street lamps; the way that darkness pools between the crests on the water; the smell of lavender and peonies from a bike route boulevard.

On a bridge at midnight, at the juncture between the city and the sea — that seems a fitting place to honour Noah’s transition from online kid to teen.

But — what do we do on the bridge? Blog? MSN?

I haven’t figured out that part, yet. How do we evoke a sense of community in the middle of a bridge?

Summer’s coming soon…

This will be a special summer.  The summer between homeschooling and brick and mortar school. Between elementary and secondary. Transitions.

Yes, in some ways it will be typical: desperately tossing sofa cushions onto the floor to accommodate the people who want to visit Vancouver when it’s not raining. And feeding them.

But I plan to steal some time with Noah to:

• Wander the city, talking to people.

• Take a bus to somewhere new, and then find a tree to read under.

• Eat cherries at the market and toss muffin bits to seagulls.

Daydream. Do unexpected things that seem meaningful at the time. Talk about the future. Rent kayaks. Look closely at things we usually run by.

It’s probably apparent by now that all of these are for me, fulfilling my own unschooling dreams. Noah would be happy with Linear Algebra and our hammock. In fact, Noah would be happy if I threw a few tests his way. (People think I’m joking when I tell them he’s unschooled and self-directed.)

Anyway. We have loved our time at EBUS. That is, we have loved our time together while Noah studied at EBUS, and we have loved the people at EBUS who have allowed Noah to create his own flight path. I think that in the world of public education, Noah’s adventure at EBUS has rivaled the experiences of  those guys who jump off cliffs in winged airman suits.

Like this:

Do the thing you love to do, every day

Jonathan Mann loves to write songs. He clearly loves to sing. So, he’s set himself a goal of writing a song a day, and  is posting his songs on YouTube.

This makes for really fun viewing, and is inspirational as well.

“The thing about  writing a song a day is some of them are going to suck. Many will be plain mediocre but you shouldn’t give up,” Jonathan sings in his Song a Day anthem.

“No, ’cause some of them will be just excellent like the best things you ever wrote. It’s simple probability, so listen to me note for note… Just sing it, and paint it, and build it up to the sky. Oh, write it, and play it, bake a billion different pies. Just do the things you love to do and do them all day long. Allow yourself just to suck sometimes and let yourself be strong…”

So, Mann has a song for Passover (The Ten Plagues), one about partying Penguins, a tribute to Jon Stewart, another to Battlestar Galactica, and even one that takes all its lyrics from the torture memos. Check a couple of them out here  them out here, or go to:

Torture Memos: Waterboarding

Penguins Having a Party

And then, give it a try! Sing… write… paint… bake… garden… every day!

(Yikes!)

How do you eat a bouquet?

You start with the chocolate-covered strawberries first, of course!

Weapons of Math Destruction

I’m a pacifist, generally. But I draw the line at Weapons of Math Destruction — those sombre, fun-killing or jargon-flicking textbooks that kill the love of math in countless kids each year. Let’s call it what it is: extermination of wonder.

And let’s act.

First, let’s put an embargo on those daunting, dour math tomes that look like they’re built to outlast a generation of kids kicking the h— out of them. One of those killed the math in me, somewhere around October of Grade 7.

Then, let’s shun those sly cotton-candy books, the ones with the bright pictures and seductive fonts, that offer little in the way of sustenance but so much in the way of convoluted descriptions that even parents can’t grasp them. Math Makes Sense comes to mind.

Finally, but most of all, let’s get rid of all the math books that make kids give up on themselves before they even begin their math journey: Surviving Math Five is the quintessential example. The title alone is like a slow-acting venom, sapping your belief in yourself. Then, open to any page of drills, and you’ll find that you’d rather pit yourself against a zombie attack than to survive 12 years of math.

Once we’ve quarantined these math killers, what do we replace them with?

Well, let’s start with the notion that math is neither regimen nor prescription. Diabetics must poke themselves with a needle at the precise moment that their body requires it; children don’t have to learn math this way, suffering through chapters and exercises, percentages in January and geometry in May.

Math, I’m learning late in life, is about wonder, investigation, exploration, and debate. Computation is part of it, but at the elementary school level, computation is to mathematics what phonics is to literature. There is so much more.

Would you like to learn about the Sierpinski Triangle, which has an infinite perimeter but no area? How, by dropping needles onto lined paper, you can discover the value of pi? The probability of a monkey typing the script to Hamlet, given unlimited time?

Then I recommend (for all ages) The Heart of Mathematics: an invitation to effective thinking, by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird.

International Day Against Homophobia – May 17th

Take up the Idaho Challenge….