It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
Confucius
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Friday, December 28, 2007
Winter Witch
We went ice skating on the lake next to my old school. What a blast. In an attack of insanity I had bought everyone skates for Xmas, the whole fam damily including Kristen, Lea’s doll.
Defying melting ice caps and rainy winters, I went ahead and invested in a whimsical idea that laid dormant in me for years: To be back on that lake where some of the happiest moments of my teen years were made and to sweep across the cold surface like a wild winter witch.
I am glad I did. We all had so much fun! The ice cracked and whistled under our feet, Jules squealed with joy, Lea got brave and pushed off with her left foot again and again, Zoë raced with me to the island and back, and even Matt managed to gain some speed despite frozen feet and achy chins.
The sun was low in the sky, barely grazing the barren treetops of the woods like an apple stuck on an unsuspecting hedgehog. The air was full of tiny knives, cold and thin. I sucked it all up, air, sun, woods and the cold shiny surface of the lake.
A moment to behold. I am so happy to be back.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
MallAise
If something sounds too good to be true it most likely is. For instance, that ominous letter on a grey Monday afternoon announcing that you are the lucky winner of $1,000,000. Winning $1,000,000 takes about 1,000,000 desperate ah-why-not moments at the check-out counter that usually result in little more than a lifetime of disappointments, as we all know.
But there are about that many other little traps we tumble into hoping that this time, just this time, we made the right investment and came out ahead of what we put in. My MacBook is such a thing.
I was promised no bugs, no crashes, and in addition to that exhilarating user-friendliness and got what I have come to treat as a rather capricious hoe. Most of the time he is either “not in the mood,” or “doesn’t like that,” or “headachy.”
And mind you, all I am asking for is mild photo editing (“Too much input hon…I am blanking!”) or burning what I meticulously organized into folders (“Uh, no! – And FYI they are called a l b u m s!!!”). Ah, yes.
But there is more, igadgets are just one in a million marketing successes that end up being flops.
Most of the time when we hold magic between our sweaty paws it all vanishes into thin air, or rather into a filthy dump, before we have even read through the unintelligible instruction manual by Mr. Sushiyoto: digital this, inflatable that. It’s all built to sell not to work.
And quite often we find out later that what we first hailed as progress such as pre-cleaned lettuce, baby wipes, TV dinners and parboiled rice is, in reality, is little more than hazardous material.
Oh brave new world.
But there are about that many other little traps we tumble into hoping that this time, just this time, we made the right investment and came out ahead of what we put in. My MacBook is such a thing.
I was promised no bugs, no crashes, and in addition to that exhilarating user-friendliness and got what I have come to treat as a rather capricious hoe. Most of the time he is either “not in the mood,” or “doesn’t like that,” or “headachy.”
And mind you, all I am asking for is mild photo editing (“Too much input hon…I am blanking!”) or burning what I meticulously organized into folders (“Uh, no! – And FYI they are called a l b u m s!!!”). Ah, yes.
But there is more, igadgets are just one in a million marketing successes that end up being flops.
Most of the time when we hold magic between our sweaty paws it all vanishes into thin air, or rather into a filthy dump, before we have even read through the unintelligible instruction manual by Mr. Sushiyoto: digital this, inflatable that. It’s all built to sell not to work.
And quite often we find out later that what we first hailed as progress such as pre-cleaned lettuce, baby wipes, TV dinners and parboiled rice is, in reality, is little more than hazardous material.
Oh brave new world.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Get a Grip
So the Apple guy, Jobs, made well over US $600,000,000 this year. Or maybe I should say, the capitalist market economy awarded him $600,000,000 over the past twelve months and his tax attorneys and accountants made sure he could keep most of it.
There is nothing wrong with that from a strictly legal standpoint. But somehow it sounds wrong anyway. US$600,000,000 (and punching in the zeros makes me kind of giddy) is a rather exaggerated figure, even for a 70 hour work week.
Why would he want to keep all of it? What is he possibly going to need that much money for? Buy a space ship, or two?
Yet, even though US$600,000,000 may be a lot of money, in the hands of only one person it is wasted because it won’t get that person anything s/he doesn’t already have nor will it provide what s/he may so desperately want. It won’t, for instance, make Jobs’ family love him more nor will it improve his health or restore air quality in his town.
So why keep it all? Maybe it’s like a badge or a medal. Men seem to like those things and make their allure so appealing that even women now want them, too.
But the truth is that by keeping all that money he loses more esteem than he wins. At least for my part, I feel sorry for poor Jobs, and the likes of him, if it takes that much to feel worthy.
When we moved to Costa Rica, the first thing I did was hire a nanny. In the US, where we had lived before, I hadn’t been able to afford a full-time childcare. With the net wage increase from our move I did what I thought was a smart investment: I bought free time for myself, a decision probably most mothers can understand.
However, that free time didn’t make me any happier than I had been before.
Also, I realized that most children who spend a large amount of time in the care of a nanny turn into whiny brats with horrendous table manners. And it takes a lot of time to correct that!
I found out pretty quickly that you can’t buy your way out of raising your own children right.
At this point in my life, I am grateful to have more time than money.
There is nothing wrong with that from a strictly legal standpoint. But somehow it sounds wrong anyway. US$600,000,000 (and punching in the zeros makes me kind of giddy) is a rather exaggerated figure, even for a 70 hour work week.
Why would he want to keep all of it? What is he possibly going to need that much money for? Buy a space ship, or two?
Yet, even though US$600,000,000 may be a lot of money, in the hands of only one person it is wasted because it won’t get that person anything s/he doesn’t already have nor will it provide what s/he may so desperately want. It won’t, for instance, make Jobs’ family love him more nor will it improve his health or restore air quality in his town.
So why keep it all? Maybe it’s like a badge or a medal. Men seem to like those things and make their allure so appealing that even women now want them, too.
But the truth is that by keeping all that money he loses more esteem than he wins. At least for my part, I feel sorry for poor Jobs, and the likes of him, if it takes that much to feel worthy.
When we moved to Costa Rica, the first thing I did was hire a nanny. In the US, where we had lived before, I hadn’t been able to afford a full-time childcare. With the net wage increase from our move I did what I thought was a smart investment: I bought free time for myself, a decision probably most mothers can understand.
However, that free time didn’t make me any happier than I had been before.
Also, I realized that most children who spend a large amount of time in the care of a nanny turn into whiny brats with horrendous table manners. And it takes a lot of time to correct that!
I found out pretty quickly that you can’t buy your way out of raising your own children right.
At this point in my life, I am grateful to have more time than money.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Homeschooling the German Way
Since we are in Germany for a little I am living the life of a German housewife/mother. Admittedly, I am having some trouble coming to terms with that, even though I know it’s just for the interim.
The last three months the kids and I lived in the States. And while demoted from my former ex-pat status, I was very content. Homeschooling two children and looking out after a third while running a household and being virtually a single mom wasn’t easy but it was a challenge I enjoyed working through because it all made sense and everyone was happy and moving forward.
This, however, stinks. Since homeschooling, as we know it, is illegal in Germany (state officials will knock on your door and eventually take you away in shackles if you keep your kids at home!!) we enrolled the girls in school. A couple of weeks into this bizarre experience we are trying to understand what went wrong in German education.
After the German education system was evaluated in a comparative international study (PISA) some years ago and fared poorly, and way behind the US, state bureaucrats got together and decided that instead of looking toward countries that had come out on top in the study, like Finland, they were going to simply do more of the same – at least in grade school as far as I can tell.
They did not reduce class sizes or assign two teachers per classroom, as is done in Finland. They decided to simply put more pressure on teachers to make the old approach work. That pressure then got passed on from teachers to students in the form of massive amounts of homework. Sound familiar?
Yet, just like when I went to school in Germany thirty years ago, the time in class is spent for the most part on listening to the teacher pontificate on some more or less abstract concept. My kids’ notebooks are curiously blank even after two weeks in school. The workbooks, however, are getting filled at a breath-taking pace, though not in school.
As a matter of fact, homeschooling is alive and well in Germany, because any hands-on work that is being done is done at home. As it is, all that pressure on performance by increasing the amount of homework has fallen to parents, i.e., generally well-meaning mothers, who more than ever before have to hover over their kids in the afternoons, so teachers can make their check marks and assign grades for one of the many tests they now have to administer.
There are two big problems with this approach – apart from the obvious one that drafting once again women for unpaid jobs is unfair!
Problem number one is that this will all but increase the difference in academic performance between children of different socio-economic backgrounds, a problem that already was cited as the most dramatic in the PISA study for Germany.
Problem number two is that it is a grand waste of time. Instead of doing what education should do: entice, encourage, and engage the student, mornings are passed doing…uh, well surviving the classroom experience, I suppose.
As far as I can tell all the enticing, encouraging and engaging is done by me in the afternoons when we all could be doing something else! There no longer is time for music, except in the car, or projects other than filing work sheets in color-coded folders, or for that matter reading something else other than excerpts stitched together in some orange textbook.
It really is sad and if this wasn’t but a short term stint for our family I would probably prefer shackles to this nonsense.
Interestingly, a recent study done by a fellow at Universität Salzburg, Austria, found that excessive homework is ranked as the second highest factor (after low family income) in explaining stress related symptoms in German school-aged children.
But then, that study didn’t hit the international press for weeks on end. What’s on bureaucrats’ budget-obsessed and otherwise distorted minds these days is PISA – and how to fix it the cheap way.
The last three months the kids and I lived in the States. And while demoted from my former ex-pat status, I was very content. Homeschooling two children and looking out after a third while running a household and being virtually a single mom wasn’t easy but it was a challenge I enjoyed working through because it all made sense and everyone was happy and moving forward.
This, however, stinks. Since homeschooling, as we know it, is illegal in Germany (state officials will knock on your door and eventually take you away in shackles if you keep your kids at home!!) we enrolled the girls in school. A couple of weeks into this bizarre experience we are trying to understand what went wrong in German education.
After the German education system was evaluated in a comparative international study (PISA) some years ago and fared poorly, and way behind the US, state bureaucrats got together and decided that instead of looking toward countries that had come out on top in the study, like Finland, they were going to simply do more of the same – at least in grade school as far as I can tell.
They did not reduce class sizes or assign two teachers per classroom, as is done in Finland. They decided to simply put more pressure on teachers to make the old approach work. That pressure then got passed on from teachers to students in the form of massive amounts of homework. Sound familiar?
Yet, just like when I went to school in Germany thirty years ago, the time in class is spent for the most part on listening to the teacher pontificate on some more or less abstract concept. My kids’ notebooks are curiously blank even after two weeks in school. The workbooks, however, are getting filled at a breath-taking pace, though not in school.
As a matter of fact, homeschooling is alive and well in Germany, because any hands-on work that is being done is done at home. As it is, all that pressure on performance by increasing the amount of homework has fallen to parents, i.e., generally well-meaning mothers, who more than ever before have to hover over their kids in the afternoons, so teachers can make their check marks and assign grades for one of the many tests they now have to administer.
There are two big problems with this approach – apart from the obvious one that drafting once again women for unpaid jobs is unfair!
Problem number one is that this will all but increase the difference in academic performance between children of different socio-economic backgrounds, a problem that already was cited as the most dramatic in the PISA study for Germany.
Problem number two is that it is a grand waste of time. Instead of doing what education should do: entice, encourage, and engage the student, mornings are passed doing…uh, well surviving the classroom experience, I suppose.
As far as I can tell all the enticing, encouraging and engaging is done by me in the afternoons when we all could be doing something else! There no longer is time for music, except in the car, or projects other than filing work sheets in color-coded folders, or for that matter reading something else other than excerpts stitched together in some orange textbook.
It really is sad and if this wasn’t but a short term stint for our family I would probably prefer shackles to this nonsense.
Interestingly, a recent study done by a fellow at Universität Salzburg, Austria, found that excessive homework is ranked as the second highest factor (after low family income) in explaining stress related symptoms in German school-aged children.
But then, that study didn’t hit the international press for weeks on end. What’s on bureaucrats’ budget-obsessed and otherwise distorted minds these days is PISA – and how to fix it the cheap way.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
School Night Special
It’s late. I am still up because I am trying to turn this day around, I am still trying to give it that little positive spin. It looks like I am running out of time though.
It wasn’t even that bad a day but it also wasn’t really good. I had to work hard to keep my thoughts from turning into molasses and clogging up my entire system.
As I am thinking about it, I am done living life on hold. I am done checking in and out of different settings, like changing in and out of costumes. I am tired of living life on top of suitcases. I want to settle down. And I am ready to deal with the consequences. And, in the end, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
It’s all about accepting the good with the bad and being ok with it. I suppose, up to now, I still thought that I could do better. And we did better for a while. Costa Rica was pretty cool and for a family of five a lot better than life was in downtown DC.
But neither Matt nor I felt ready to deal with the consequences of an ex-pat existence any longer. So now we are back in the first world: We are back to where life is fast and dinners are short. We are part of the regular crowd again. We are, once again, middle class Europeans.
It’s not easy but it’s going to be good.
There is one thing, however, that has to change fast lest I lose my mind: That’s school. Since Zoe has started, it’s dominating our entire family 7am to 8pm: if it’s not something that’s missing, or some heap of homework that needs to be done, it’s who said what or did what to whom.
With homework here taking the form of endless not-so-funny spelling riddles and math problems ad nauseum there isn’t really time anymore for Harry Potter (sorry pal). Also, Fiamma, Zoe’s violin, has acquired patina along with several cardboard boxes that I can’t help but keep just in case there is a fifteen minute break in her hurried schedule to erect one of her awesome fortresses with ramparts, gatehouse, turrets and all.
We all agree homeschooling is a lot more sane and fun and as soon as we can we’ll go back to it. The countdown is running…
It wasn’t even that bad a day but it also wasn’t really good. I had to work hard to keep my thoughts from turning into molasses and clogging up my entire system.
As I am thinking about it, I am done living life on hold. I am done checking in and out of different settings, like changing in and out of costumes. I am tired of living life on top of suitcases. I want to settle down. And I am ready to deal with the consequences. And, in the end, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
It’s all about accepting the good with the bad and being ok with it. I suppose, up to now, I still thought that I could do better. And we did better for a while. Costa Rica was pretty cool and for a family of five a lot better than life was in downtown DC.
But neither Matt nor I felt ready to deal with the consequences of an ex-pat existence any longer. So now we are back in the first world: We are back to where life is fast and dinners are short. We are part of the regular crowd again. We are, once again, middle class Europeans.
It’s not easy but it’s going to be good.
There is one thing, however, that has to change fast lest I lose my mind: That’s school. Since Zoe has started, it’s dominating our entire family 7am to 8pm: if it’s not something that’s missing, or some heap of homework that needs to be done, it’s who said what or did what to whom.
With homework here taking the form of endless not-so-funny spelling riddles and math problems ad nauseum there isn’t really time anymore for Harry Potter (sorry pal). Also, Fiamma, Zoe’s violin, has acquired patina along with several cardboard boxes that I can’t help but keep just in case there is a fifteen minute break in her hurried schedule to erect one of her awesome fortresses with ramparts, gatehouse, turrets and all.
We all agree homeschooling is a lot more sane and fun and as soon as we can we’ll go back to it. The countdown is running…
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