Steelykid!
drorzel | September 4, 2015It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we've come down to my parents' for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house where they can bask in the warmth of... Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa's Netflix subscription.
(I'd say "Kids these days," but if I'm totally honest, I would have to admit that getting to watch WPIX was a highlight of visits to my grandmother on Long Island back when I was their age...)
Anyway, a lot of the pictures I end up taking look basically like this: quick snapshots of the kids doing whatever.…
drorzel | August 28, 2015SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day with Appa for scale.
And now, of course, both kids are way bigger than Appa, so they wanted some up-to-date scale photos. Which, of course, I had to share with the Internet. So, behold, the attack of the giant children:
SteelyKid and the Pip are HUGE!
Standing photo so you can see Appa for proper scaling…
drorzel | August 7, 2015Today is SteelyKid's seventh birthday, which she's been counting down to for a good while. It's a little hard to believe it's seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy.
She's become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from photosynthesis (since she hardly eats anything), and intense interests in Minecraft and Pokemon, math and taekwondo. She's a red belt now, which is only a few short of black, and this summer has started doing the "Elite Team" sparring classes. I'm pretty sure that if she really wanted to, she could kick my…
drorzel | June 21, 2015Act I:
STEELYKID and THE PIP: Happy Father's Day, Daddy!
DADDY: Aww, that's sweet. So, what are you going to make me for breakfast?
STEELYKID and THE PIP: What?
DADDY: It's father's day, right? So you guys should be cooking breakfast for me.
STEELYKID and THE PIP: No!!!!
THE PIP: We can't cook breakfast for you. We're not tall enough to bake stuff. And, also, we're not allowed to cook.
DADDY: Well, I'm your father, so I can give you permission to cook breakfast.
STEELYKID: Yeah, but we don't know how to cook.
THE PIP: Yeah, so you have to cook pancakes for us!
DADDY: Oh, all right. I guess I…
drorzel | June 6, 2015Back in October or so, SteelyKid's first-grade class started a weekly journaling exercise. Every Monday, we were supposed to send in a sheet with some prompts on it-- words about something interesting that happened over the weekend, and the kids started the day writing about... whatever it was.
I was a little dubious about having six-year-olds write journal entries, but, you know, I'm happy to defer to professional teachers, so we did it. Most weeks. some days we forgot, or SteelyKid would get all muley and refuse to help think of a topic and words.
Yesterday was the end-of-year party for…
drorzel | May 6, 2015A week or so ago, this statistical analysis of listening trends in pop music got a bunch of play on Twitter and Facebook, but I was too busy to do anything with it. The headline result, reported with all the accuracy you should expect of such things is people stop listening to popular music at 33.
By coincidence, in another part of the social-media universe, some friends were sneering at Top 40 music by way of highlighting a list of the current Top 40 chart to show how little of it they knew. As I'm currently marking time until I can call my doctor to get some help with what I suspect is a…
drorzel | April 17, 2015"Hey, Daddy, did you know that in five or six million years the Sun is going to explode."
"It's five or six billion years, with a 'b.'"
"Right, in five or six billion years, the Sun's going to explode."
"Well, a star like our Sun won't really explode. It'll swell up really big, probably swallow the Earth, and then kind of... go out."
"Right, and then it would be dark all the time. So we'd need to build a really big lamp."
"Well, in five or six billion years, maybe we'd just build a new star."
"How would we do that?"
"Well, you know, you just get a really big bunch of hydrogen together."
"Oh,…
drorzel | April 4, 2015I was thinking about writing something about the 2015 Hugo Award nominations train wreck, but you know what? Life's too short. So here's a couple of cute-kid photos from this morning's trip to the Children's Museum of Science and Technology over in Troy. They have these awesome construction toys, consisting of wooden rods with holes through them, and long bolts, washers, and wing nuts to connect them, and we spent most of our time in the building room.
On the left, you see The Pip, having picked up one of the screwdrivers that go with the set, and wearing his "fixing goggles." Because eye…
drorzel | March 10, 2015Today is my grandmother's 90th birthday: born on this date in 1925 in the Bronx, the seventh of eight kids. She moved out to Long Island circa WWII, and has lived there ever since. Many of my favorite childhood memories involve visiting her in Mineola. Back in the 70's, she used to host me and two of my cousins (one a couple years older than me, the other a year or two younger) for a week or so in the summer, to give our parents a break; as a parent of two kids about the age we were at that time, I find this kind of incredible now...
Anyway, she's still going strong at 90, and recently…
drorzel | March 5, 2015SteelyKid's school does a "March Math Madness" thing, and this year all the kids in her class are being asked to practice "Math Facts" for ten minutes a night. This appears to be motivated by some requirement that students be able to rattle off basic addition problems at high speed. So there are flash cards and the like.
She's good at this, but quickly gets bored, and does not hesitate for an instant in letting her boredom be known. It'll be sort of interesting to see how this plays out if they actually expect her to answer 30 addition questions in a minute, or whatever the ridiculous…
drorzel | March 4, 2015As previously mentioned, SteelyKid has started to get into pop music. In addition to the songs in that post, she's very fond of Katy Perry's "Roar," like every other pre-teen girl in the country, and also this Taylor Swift song:
I've seen a bunch of people rave about this, but honestly, I found it pretty forgettable until I read Jim Henley's Twitter exegesis in which he shows that the song is really about the tryst with an alien that left Swift with a faceless hybrid infant. That is, a blank space-baby. Now I can't get the idiot song out of my head.
Anyway, a week or two ago, I actually went…
drorzel | February 27, 2015SteelyKid has developed a habit of not answering questions, whether because she's genuinely zoning out, or just not acknowledging adults, it's not clear. (She's going to be a real joy when she's a teenager, I can tell...) In retaliation, I've started giving imaginary answers for her, which generall snaps her out of it, but I've been waiting to see what the next step was.
Which was taken last night: in the car on the way to taekwondo sparring class, I asked "What are you guys doing in art class these days?" silence.
"Hey, [SteelyKid]? What are you doing in art these days?"
Silence
"Oh,…
drorzel | February 16, 2015SteelyKid is spending a couple of days this week at "Nerf Camp" at the school where she does taekwondo. This basically consists of a bunch of hyped-up kids in a big room doing martial activities-- taekwondo class, board breaking, and "Nerf war" where they build an obstacle course and then shoot each other with dart guns. Which, of course, required the purchase of upgraded Nerf weaponry, as seen in the "featured image" above.
This thing fires darts at a fearsome speed-- they hit the ceiling with really loud "thwack" that was a huge hit with both kids. Of course, you know what's coming next,…
drorzel | January 29, 2015Math with Bad Drawings has a post about "word problems" that will sound very familiar to anyone who's taught introductory physics. As he notes, the problem with "word problems" for math-phobic students is that it requires translating words into symbols, and then using the symbols to select a procedure. It adds a step to what at a lower level is a simple turn-the-crank algorithm: given this set of symbols, do these abstract operations, and write down the answers.
This is a very familiar problem in intro physics, where I regularly have struggling students tell me "I can do the math just fine, I…
drorzel | January 25, 2015I've mentioned in a few places that SteelyKid frequently comes home from school/ camp/ day care singing garbled versions of current pop hits. So for the first time since about 1990, I added a Top 40 station to my car radio presets, so I would know what she was actually trying to sing. This leads to a bunch of seat-dancing and sing-along in the back seat as I drive her to taekwondo and so on, so I give you three of the songs that she's grooving two these days:
First up, we have:
My first reaction to hearing that was "Hey, it's great that Morris Day is getting work..." But, you know, I enjoyed…
drorzel | January 15, 2015SteelyKid missed the bus this morning-- she was dressed and ready, but I was talking to Kate, and if there isn't a person at the end of the driveway when the bus comes around the corner, they won't stop. So I drove her over to school myself (which is faster, anyway). The GE research lab complex is behind her school, so there's a nice view from the parking lot to the eastern horizon, where the sun was just poking over a big band of clouds.
"Hey, look at that cool sunset!" she said as we were walking from the car to the building.
"That's not a sunset, honey, it's a sunrise. It's morning."
"Oh,…
drorzel | January 15, 2015"Daddy, ask me a math problem."
"OK. What's 18 plus 6?"
"Ummm... 24."
"Correct."
"See, I just keep the 18 and then add 2 from the 6 to get 20. That leaves 4 from the six, and 20 plus 4 is 24."
"Right. Good work."
------
"Hey, SteelyKid. What's 120 plus 180?"
"Ummm... 300."
"Very good!"
"I just added the hundreds to make 200, and then 80 plus 20 is 100, and then I add them all together to get 300."
"Nice work."
"It takes a little while, though."
"Yes, but you keep practicing, and getting faster."
"Practice makes perfect!"
------
"That would take ten minutes, which is... six hundred seconds."
"…
drorzel | December 25, 2014Once again, it's Christmas for those who celebrate it, and a really boring Thursday on the Internet for those who don't. In keeping with tradition, we've taken the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Scenic Whitney Point, NY for a few days.
This will coincide with a big drop-off in social media use on my part, for a number of reasons; I've got one more post scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and that's probably it for 2014 blogging. I'll be ringing in the New Year in Charleston, SC at the Renaissance Weekend event there, and while that promises to be a good deal of fun, they've got very…
drorzel | December 17, 2014I visited SteelyKid's first-grade class yesterday with several liters of liquid nitrogen. Earlier in the fall, they did a science unit on states of matter-- solid, liquid, gas-- and talked about it in terms of molecules being more spread out, etc. Looking at her homeworks, I said "Oh, damn, if it wasn't the middle of the term, this would be a perfect excuse for liquid nitrogen demos..." I mentioned it to the teacher, though, and she loved the idea of having it in December, as a call-back to earlier science lessons.
It turned out to be weirdly difficult to find assorted round latex balloons…
drorzel | December 12, 2014One of the questions from a caller when I was on the "Think" show was about how to keep kids interested in science. As I said, the issue isn't so much creating in interest as working to not squelch the interest that's already there. Taking kids to cool places like zoos and science museums is a great way to do that, and just generally encouraging them to ask questions and try things out.
But if you'd like some more specific gift ideas, here's a selection of science-y things that SteelyKid and The Pip enjoy that you might try out on other kids of your acquaintance:
-- Magna-Tiles These. Are.…