 Last month I reviewed Lois Lowry’s The Giver very positively — it’s an absolutely great novel, for young readers and adult readers alike. So I had high hopes for another novel by Lowry, Number the Stars — hopes which were almost, but not quite, met.
Don’t get me wrong: the Newberry-winning Number the Stars is a quite good book. Set during the German occupation of Denmark in WWII, Number the Stars tells the story of young girl Annemarie, whose family takes in their Jewish neighbor — Annemarie’s best friend — and ultimately helps their family escape Denmark.
Number the Stars tells an amazing story: after the Nazis announced the deportation of Denmark’s Jewish population, the Danish people hid and smuggled out of the country almost the entirety of Denmark’s 7,000 Jews, mostly across the channel to Sweden. To the occupying Germans, it seemed like the Jewish population they knew was there simply vanished, virtually overnight. The courage of the Danish population, who risked imprisonment and death if caught, cannot be underestimated.
Simply told through the perspective of Annemarie, Number the Stars proceeds smoothly enough, and maybe that’s my problem — there simply aren’t enough pages in this slim volume to give more than a rough impression of the mounting terror the Jewish population (and their non-Jewish neighbors, for that matter) faced. That said, it’s a fast-moving and ultimately heart-warming story, with both the personal triumph of Annemarie over her own fears and feelings of uselessness and powerlessness in the face of forces she cannot understand, and the wider tale of the triumph of the Danes over the Germans.
For younger readers — 10 to maybe 14 or so — who might not understand the subtleties of a book like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, I would strongly recommend Number the Stars (though with a lot of parental guidance to grapple with the enormity of the Holocaust). Older readers might not find it as rewarding as a book like The Giver — the story is much more direct and straight-forward, and there’s not much moral wiggle room when it comes to opposing Nazis. Best to move on to the work of Elie Weisel or Primo Levi for readers over 16.
Read more about Number the Stars on Lois Lowry’s site.
“Always leave on a good note”. This is the advice Lisa Hendry of Productivity @ Home gives in her article Building Confidence in Children.The idea is to always let children finish a project, activity, or whatever with a success, however small — a homework problem done correctly, a goal scored, etc. That way they’ll remember these past successes as they move forward in their lives, rather than a string of failures or disappointments. Seems reasonable to me.
Schools don’t seem to be set up this way, that’s for sure. The kids I get in my intro-level courses (mostly recent high school grads, though I teach at a community college so I get students ranging from high school juniors to retirees) come to me not only lacking confidence in many areas, but practically shell-shocked by the traumatic experience of high school. They’ve learned to shut up and follow directions and don’t make waves; they’ve learned the terrible consequences of being wrong publicly; they’ve learned that grades are the only measure of their performance that matters. What they haven’t learned is confidence: confidence in their own ability to reason through a tricky problem, confidence in themselves as speakers, confidence in their knowledge of themselves as thinkers, learners, essentially as adults.
Mostly they’ve learned to see their lives (or at least their student lives) as a struggle against failure and I’m not entirely sure that’s easily reversible by the time they’re 18, 19, and 20. Many of them will come around as they get older — I have few older students (say, 30+) who are quite so timid (but there are exceptions)– but right at the start of their adult lives, when they need it most, wouldn’t it be nice to see them embrace the uncertainty and opportunity in front of them with confidence?
Cultivate Greatness has a powerful, long piece on current research into the role parental praise plays in encouraging children to succeed. As it happens, it’s not all about building up self-esteem by telling your children how smart they are. Instead, researchers find that kids do best when parents commend their hard work — and that complimenting them for their intelligence not only doesn’t help but can actually produce negative results:
But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.
Here’s the thing: intelligence in our society is understood as an innate quality, a “thing” you either have or you don’t. If you’re not smart, there’s nothing to do about it, and if you are smart, there’s nothing more you have to do. So kids that are smart and whose parents reinforce their self-perception as smart basically stop working. The article gives the example of a brilliant kid who, when faced with tasks that he had to struggle at, simply decided he wasn’t “smart” about those things and retreated to the things he was “smart” about.
On the other hand, kids whose parents praised them for their hard work are driven to work harder to please their parents and earn more praise. When confronted with something they aren’t “smart” about, they are more likely to work at it until they get it. In tests given under carefully controlled conditions, children whose parents commended their hard work showed greater gains than those whose parents congratulated them for being smart — and in many cases the “smart” kids actually did worse of follow-up tests.
What isn’t mentioned is how this kind of praise works in a household setting. Years ago I took a psychological anthropology course, and I remember something the professor said about clinical psychology: it’s very good at describing how the mind works in a clinical environment. What’s less clear is how well these descriptions apply outside of the lab. What I’m wondering is how praise of one child affects their siblings. I would guess that these effects would be seen in the other children’s performance, as well. That is, if older brother is congratulated for his hard work, younger sister will work harder to earn praise for herself — while if he’s praised for being smart, she might be discouraged as “not as smart” or simply concentrate only on the things she thinks she’s “smart” about.
Here’s a real-world example: yesterday we got a letter telling our oldest boy, 12, that he’d been nominated for a leadership course in Washington, DC. It’s a real honor, I think, and if we can afford it (it costs some $2000) we’d love to send him. The nomination came from his history teacher, and as far as I can tell there’s only one nominee from the entire school.
His sister, 11, goes to the same school, though she’s only been there since the fall semester started in August. Obviously, we want her to work towards getting the same kinds of honors. What we don’t want is for her to feel that “brother is just smarter than me”. My partner said something interesting: “Brother got this because he works really hard and shows people that he’s really committed” — a good example of the kind of praise that the research in the article recommends, I think. The message is that if you work really hard, you can get this kind of nomination too.
How successful will that be? I don’t know. They are, after all, two very different people with their own goals and style. We don’t want her working towards something just because her brother has achieved in that area, any more than we want her to avoid working at it because she’s “not smart like him”. What we do want is that she realize that working hard can help her accomplish things she wants, that it will be rewarding for her, and I think my partner managed to strike the right note to convey that lesson.
We often hear about the marriage benefits that are denied to homosexual couples because of their inability to legally marry. This is a compelling argument — nobody should be barred, for instance, from the bedside of their ill or injured loved ones in hospital simply for lack of a marriage certificate that they cannot legally obtain.
However, laws that ban same-sex marriage (in Nevada we have a Constitutional Amendment!) don’t just prevent recognition of same-sex relationships; they prevent recognition of non-traditional straight relationships as well. My partner and I are not married, and though we may decide to be down the road, the only good reasons for making that decision should be emotional and symbolic — I don’t want to get married for financial reasons. But both of us are state employees, me at the College and the University and her in public health, and use the public employees health insurance plan, which will not cover unmarried partners or their children. I cannot get on her plan, she and her children cannot get on my plan.
The school would like to do something about that. What’s the problem, then? They have to feel their way very carefully around the anti-same-sex marriage amendment to make sure that the state doesn’t “accidentally” treat same-sex domestic partners as if they were married! Sure, we could legally marry, but who wants to be forced into that — and over insurance? Is that in the state’s best interest? Is it in anyone’s?
Frankly, I’d like to see marriages between all consenting adults legalized, and domestic partnerships between consenting adult couples recognized. If marriage is supposed to be “sacred”, why should insurance, power of attorney, hospital visitation, tax law, and all the rest hang on it? We live in a changing world; to insist that only one kind of relationship can meet hte needs of all individuals and of society a a whole is foolhardy at best.
Leo at Zen Habits offers Eight Keys to a Happier Marriage and they’re really good (and applicable to any romantic relationship, not just marriage). A lot of the advice seems like common sense — communicate, be prepared to put work into your relationship, that sort of thing — but it’s surprising how many people I see that need to be reminded or maybe even informed) about these simple principles. Take his third tip, “Speak Plainly”, which is about playing mind games:
The very worst thing you can do in a relationship is play games with each other. No, not the twister or monopoly varieties, I mean mind games. It’s tempting when you are in a bad mood or when you don’t want to be hurt to be passive aggressive, to not say what you mean, to make veiled hints in order to test the other person and so on. Tempting, but it doesn’t go anywhere except sour.
In every relationship I’ve seen that was in trouble, mind games were common — even my own. In my last failed relationship, it was at the first sign of mind game playing that I knew the relationship was doomed, even if it took several months for that to happen. Let me give an example: if housecleaning is an issue, and one partner purposely leaves a mess to see if the other partner cleans it up, that’s trouble. Especially if the other partner sees the mess, relaizes he or she is being messed with and leaves it just to prove a point. That’s double trouble!
Mind games are a betrayal of trust. They say “I don’t trust my partner enough to air my grievances without them throwing a fit” or worse, “I’m afraid to talk to them because they might not love me anymore”. I see relationships — if you can even call them that — where the entire focus of the partner’s lives has become to “win”, to not let the other one “score points” on them, and so on. At this point, you’re no longer in a relationship, you’re in a cage match — no matter how good the sex still is. You might get some sort of twisted satisfaction out of a situation like this, but not happiness. And if there’s no happiness in your relationship, why bother?
I’ve been a fan of Charles de Lint’s work since I was a young teenager and picked up a copy of Moonheart. Moonheart probably isn’t for younger readers, as it includes some pretty graphic sexual descriptions and some pretty dark situations, but minus the fairly adult sexuality most of de Lint’s work would easily appeal to younger readers. The central idea of all de Lint’s books is that there exists, somewhere between the corner of our eye and just to the left of reality, an Otherworld peopled with all manner of fairy-tale creatures, from goblins and fairies to darker things: soul-stealers and giant spiders and evil spirits. A great deal of his early work draws on the mythologies of the British Isles and Ireland, but the last decade or so he’s turned more and more to the mythologies of Native America for inspiration.
Little (Grrl) Lost finds de Lint once more exploring the more familiar terrain of European fairy tales with the story of a Little named Elizabeth Wood, her Big friend T.J. fresh from the farm, and the great big world of gnomes, fairies, goblins, and other magical beings they find when they take a step away from the safe, comfortable world the girls’ parents had created for them. A Little, it turns out, is a 6-inch tall person, and a whole family of them are living between the walls of the suburban house T.J.’s family moved into when their family farm failed. Full of punk energy and teenage angst, Elizabeth runs away from home far enough to meet T.J., in whose room the front door of their home is. Frightened by the discovery of their girl by the Big, Elizabeth’s parents quickly move, and in search of clues as to where they might have headed, T.J. and Elizabeth try to contact an author, Sherri, whose books about little people seem real enough that the girls think she might just know about real Littles like Elizabeth. And then things start to go wrong…
Little (Grrl) Lost is, like all of de Lint’s novels, a pretty fun read, and I imagine that any fantasy-minded young teen would enjoy it. Long-time readers of de Lint will probably enjoy it as well, although at this point de Lint has settled into a pattern (maybe even a rut) with his characters and plot elements that take a little of the fun out. For instance, one of the recurring themes in de Lint’s books is sexual abuse, especially of children. In other books, he’s delved deeply into the trauma and personal consequences of victimization. At the beginning of Little (Grrl) Lost, T.J.’s parents mention a man harassing girls on the main drag of their suburban center, and T.J. of course has a run-in with him a few pages later, but it’s incidental and does nothing to forward the plot other than give T.J. and the readers a scare. He could have been left out and nothing would change about the book — except de Lint doesn’t seem able to leave the topic alone.
Another issue I have with this book is one that’s been building in much of de Lint’s later work, which is the off-hand and almost bored way his characters react to their discovery of the supernatural. I think de Lint himself is bored with depicting the surprise that is natural when, say, a 6-inch person steps out of your baseboard or a 2-foot gnome appears out of nowhere. Earlier books revolved around the difficulty people have wrapping their heads around things that defy all their ideas about the normal, natural, and rational; nowadays, though, characters just seem to take it all in stride, often without a second thought. “Oh,” they seem to say, “faeries are real. Neat. Hey, how’s your stock portfolio doing for you, anyway?” It’s as if magic has become so everyday for him that he’s forgotten how to be amazed by it.
These aren’t really deal-killers, though; they probably wouldn’t be noticed by someone who is just being introduced to de Lint’s work, and there are quite a few good reasons to introduce yourself. Nobody imagines and fleshes out the Otherworldly as well as de Lint, and the underlying message of all his books is open-mindedness, awareness, and community — not a bad message for young readers and adults alike. The characters in Little (Grrl) Lost learn to stand up for themselves, and to stand up for others, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either. For readers from 11 or 12 to their mid-teens, I’d recommend it, especially if they’ve already started getting into fantasy — de Lint is head and shoulders above the typical swords-and-sorcery stuff out there. Older readers might also enjoy it, although I fear de Lint’s dialogue and his characters’ reactions might come off as a little corny.
If I were using a star system, Little (Grrl) Lost would get three stars out of five — a good solid book with a few non-critical flaws.
 The Wall Street Journal had an article recently about child art collectors, whose wealthy parents supply them with the cash to buy works by classic artists like Cezanne, Pissaro, and Rembrandt as well as contemporaries like Jeffrey Koons, Nao Matsumoto, and Michael Vasquez. We are treated to the somewhat unseemly sight of art gallery owners fawning over their 9-year old clients’ “eye for art” and a 14-year old who collects work with a candy theme because it’s “his favorite food”.
Learning to relate to art this way is a valuable skill for the children of the upper classes, for whom the consumption and display of art is part of the way one gains and asserts status. But for the rest of us, it seems rather shallow and unfortunate — it’s hard to see whether these kids are learning anything about the art itself, or just how to work the art market.
And that’s sad, because art is a crucial part of the human experience, and can be a source of great pleasure and even wisdom when approached as an expression of the human soul rather than as a commodity to be bought and traded. Since we now live in the era of No Child Left Behind standards which have utterly marginalized art as a significant part of a children’s education, art is being abandoned more and more to the children of privilege.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Teaching kids to enjoy and appreciate art is not difficult — the wealthy and powerful have spread the story that understanding art is too demanding for the ordinary guy, but it ain’t so. With a little patience and attention to detail, anyone can find something of value in art. Children’s natural curiosity makes it even easier to share art with your children, even if some of the “heavier” meaning goes over their heads.
Here’s a few pointers to help you and your children develop an interest in and understanding of art. First, take them to a museum or gallery, or get a big art book from the bookstore or library. We like to go to our city’s First Friday festivals at the beginning of each month; Google “First Friday” and the name of your city (or the closest big city) to see if there’s a First Friday in your neck of the woods. However you manage it, once you’ve got your child or children in front of some art, follow their lead — let them pick something that appeals to them.
Then ask them some questions. Ask them what they like about the work, what grabbed their eye, and what it reminds them of. Use further questions to direct their attention to the subject, symbolism, and style of the piece:
- Subject: What is this a painting (or drawing, sculpture, etc.) of? What story does it tell? (Feel free to help your child make a story up if the work lends itself to that.) If there’s people in the painting, what are they doing? What sort of feelings are they expressing? If the work is a landscape or a picture of a city or building, what features can you make out? If the work is abstract — that is, it doesn’t represent anything identifiable — what feelings does it call up? Does the work look angry, or sad, or peaceful, or excited?
- Symbolism: A symbol can be simply defined as something that means something else. A skull as a symbol for death, a dove as a symbol for peace, and so on. Pick out different objects depicted in the work and ask waht they might stand for. You don’t have to guess what the artist had in mind — what’s important is what you have in mind. Is an object scary, or warm, or cute, or disgusting? There’s an etching by Rembrandt that shows the Good Samaritan from the Bible helping an injured man into an inn; in the bottom corner of the painting, there’s a dog relieving itself. Look for parts of the image like this that seem out of place and ask why the artist would have included them. In the Rembrandt, the dog reminds us that this is real life, bringing the stories of the Bible down from the realm of divinity and into our own everyday reality.
- Style: Style is the artist’s expression of individuality in his or her work. Some painters use wild, ecstatic brush strokes; others use tightly controlled strokes. A sculptor might leave large pieces of unworked stone around his or her subject (as Rodin did) or might work hard to mimic reality so closely that their finished work looks like it could get up and walk around. What does the way they worked tell us about the artist? Why did the artist make the work this way? How does the work make you feel?
 Obviously you have to pitch the questions you ask to the child’s level. The point is that it’s possible to approach an artwork with no previous knowledge of the artist, the historical setting in which they worked, or the nature of the subjects they depict in their work. If you know any of that, by all means share it — it can only add to your enjoyment of a piece — but if you don’t, forge ahead by looking at the subject, symbolism, and style of a piece, and don’t worry about being “right” or “wrong”. You’re not writing a book on the piece, and there won’t be a test at the end.
If you find an artist whose work you really like, go ahead and learn more about them. There are really great books for kids about almost every major artist that include lots of beautiful color pictures and kid-level stories about the artists’ lives and ideas — check your library. You can also find lots of information on the Internet; the WebMuseum and the ArtChive are great places to start, as well as Wikipedia.
One last note: don’t worry about whether a work is “great” art or not. Experts disagree profoundly on what makes a work or an artist “great”; you don’t have to. Andy Warhol said that if you want to be able to recognize a great painting, first look at a thousand paintings. That is, your sense of what works offer more to their viewers will grow as you look at more and more art. The goal here isn’t to create little art scholars or, God forbid, little collectors — the goal is to develop an interest in art, and the skills of looking at and thinking about the world around us. And if your child should develop a passion for art that they want to explore, all the better.
 A few months ago, our 11-year old girl came home from spending the weekend at dad’s with a proposal. Her 11-year old step-sister, a competing martial artist who spends a lot of time out of town at competitions, was going to be homeschooled and her step-mother thought she should join them.
Now, there’s some history here — very different views on parenting between the step-mother and my partner, an effort a couple years ago to get custody of my step-daughter — but ultimately the bottom line was whether homeschooling would offer the best educational opportunity for her. Given that she’d just been accepted into our school district’s magnet school program, that’s unlikely, but even without the prospect of a top-quality, specialized education through the public school system, I still come down flatly against homeschooling, for a number of reasons.
First of all, as an educator myself (albeit at the college level), I know how hard it is to create effective learning experiences. All the more so when the student to be engaged is not an adult but a 11-year old child. Skilled educators undergo several years of college-level coursework and guided on-the-job training before they ever take on their on classroom — and then are expected to continue to develop those skills and keep up with new teaching techniques. None of this can be replicated with a computer program, a standardized curricula, and a parent, no matter how dedicated the parent. I wouldn’t take it on, and I have a master’s degree and over 4 years of classroom experience!
Second, curricular materials are only a part — and possibly the smallest part — of an education. Far more important are the social skills that a child learns as part of attending school. A student that stays at home, even if the parents make an effort to maintain an active social life, is gaining little experience in dealing with other viewpoints and perspectives. They are not learning how to relate to people who are very different from them, either in ethnicity, class, or just interests. They are not challenged to defend an unpopular viewpoint, or to build a case against another’s opinion. They have no opportunity to develop leadership skills, empathy, or a talent for empathizing with others.
Third, I shudder to think what the curriculum for homeschooling looks like. I know lots of people choose homeschooling in order to minimize their children’s exposure to ideas that would challenge their family’s religious or political beliefs, and that’s bad enough, but even worse would be a curriculum that follows the No Child Left Behind criteria. Children need the resources a school can offer (if it’s funded well — this is another issue, though) to “tickle” fancies that are well outside the curriculum. After-school clubs, for instance — how is a homeschooled student going to develop a talent for, say, reporting if they don’t have access to a school newspaper? Or how will they discover a passion for event organizing if there’s no dance committee to join? The possible substitutes for this kind of almost random exposure to new activities are unsatisfying at best — I suppose a child could write for some online equivalent of a school paper, but where’s the engagement with a local community the student lives among and cares about there?
In short, I think homeschooling sells kids short, and unless there’s a compelling reason (and keeping a homeschooled step-sister company is hardly compelling) I don’t see any reason to do that to our kids. I don’t doubt that some people have the time and financial resources to compensate for at least some of the shortcomings outlined above, but most folks don’t. I do know there’s some evidence that homeschooled kids do just fine on standardized academic tests — but that’s setting the bar pretty low, and I think as parents it’s important to set the bar as high as possible.
 The name-sake character of Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline is a bored young girl whose family has recently moved into a strange old house filled, by and large, with strange old people. Left to entertain herself by her always-too-busy parents, Coraline sets off exploring the grounds, meeting the neighbors, and puzzling over the strange door in the front parlor that opens onto a plain brick wall.
Except one night, Coraline finds the door open, and beyond it is no brick wall, at all, but a corridor. Unable to repress her insatiable curiosity, Coraline walks down the corridor only to find herself… home.
But then, not home at all.
Instead, she finds heself in a near-duplicate of her own home — the same, but different. Better. Where her toy chest is filled with the standard complement of neglected dolls and playsets, her “other toy chest” is filled with living toys that fly and zoom around and perform for her. Where her downstairs neighbors sit around reminiscing about the theater they once performed in years and years ago, her “other neighbors” run a theater in their own house, performing to an audience of talking dogs. Where the black cat roaming her yard at home is aloof and standoffish — as cats all are — here the cat talks and gives her advice (when its not being aloof and standoffish — as all cats are).Where her parents were too distracted and busy to play with her, and awful cooks, her “other parents” dote on her and feed her banquet of delicious foods.
And all her other parents ask is that she stay and be their daughter. Forever.
It doesn’t take Coraline long to realize there’s something wrong, sinister even, about her other parents and her other house, but by then it’s too late. Her other mother has her mind set on having Coraline as a daughter, and Coraline must be clever and, more important, brave to save not only herself, but her mother and the other poor souls trapped by the other mother.
Coraline won Gaiman a handful of honors, including the Hugo and Nebula awards for best speculative fiction novella, and they’re well-earned; it’s really a fabulous book. If you have kids that enjoy delightfully creepy tales (or even if you enjoy dark, creepy fare), Coraline is your pick — it’s well-crafted, amusing, and suspenseful, a real page-turner with an upbeat message to counter-balance it’s grim, dark fantasy. Highly recommended.
Here’s an idea I whipped up when we took a family vacation in August. We were in Utah, doing some hiking and visiting ghost towns and the like, and I was worried about the kids wandering off. The best thing would be an information card tucked into each one’s pockets, but getting thm to keep it on them is, well… highly unlikely. The thing, I decided, would be to get them each a plain rubber jelly bracelet (like those “Live Strong” bands) and write their name and mom’s cell phone number on each one with a Sharpie pen. If they got separated from us or hurt or whatever, whoever found them could let us know right away. I found a three-pack of these bracelets at a sporting goods store for a couple bucks — a tiny investment for the peace of mind they bring. Since then I’ve seen these bracelets at a couple sporting goods stores, so that seems to be the place to find them, if you want blank ones — though there’s no reason bracelets supporting your favorite cause wouldn’t do the job just as well.
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