Tuesday, September 28, 2010

"I Hate School" and other lies kids tell

So the school year is in full swing, and we are now less than 48 hours from the start of October break. Good timing, too, as the boys and the adults in this house need a break. Especially Emmett. Of late he has been grousing about the following:
teachers tell him what to do

they haven't even taught him how to read and write yet

he has to go swimming during PE

he has to eat home lunch instead of school lunch


Ignore for a moment the contradiction between the first two gripes. Focus instead on the fact he loves to swim. Or that home lunch is classic stuff like PB&J and school lunch is usually some variant of chicken in brown sauce with rice.

Enough with the whining. Both boys clearly love their teachers and what they are learning so far this year. Desi is doing subtraction and urban planning (I'm not kidding). E can count to 39 (he thinks 50 is next) and knows all his letters and numbers and sings in Chinese.

Break will start early as the Shanghai govt. just announced road closures that force SAS buses to get on the road sooner. So 2:30 tomorrow, we are homeward bound. No work til some meetings next Thursday. Kids no school til a week from Monday. God Bless the People's Republic of China (and its vanilla suburbs)!

In other news, JV baseball is over. FInished the season with a tournament last weekend, full of drama. Friday game vs. Beijing ended 6-6 when our runner was thrown out at home trying to score on a wild pitch. After that, it was too dark to continue (JV field has no lights). Beat our cross-town rival Sat. morning, no shock there. Then had a comeback against Hong Kong fizzle out when Jason hit a bases-loaded smash that the 3rd baseman snared. He stepped on 3rd for the double play and that was that. Sunday was rained out, and now he long wait begins. Next season is more than 6 months away. Oh well, at least we have Ken Burns to tide us over.

Books I've been reading: Angels and Demons (kept me up for a couple nights). Factory Girls (gotta re-read whatever I am teaching in Anthro--my memory is terrible). Up next, some Nick Hornby.

Sarah has been reading Drive, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, and our hero Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism.

And even though it seems that the proper place for this is our facebook status update, we just started watching True Blood. Vampires make for great TV. We will finish the last handful of episodes of The Wire over break, after a hiatus of several months. (It got too intense to watch at bedtime, and really, when else can parents watch TV for a solid hour?)

Surely the blogging will be more frequent over break. Pics soon of our latest shenanigans. In the meantime, here are pictures of our friends.

1 comment:

  1. You'll have to tell me more about how Martin S. became your hero. My Master's thesis was related to explanatory styles across cultures and Learned Optimism is what got me on that track. Got some good info from Martin himself at the time. All that is locked away in a dark corner of my mind and hasn't been revisited since I defended. In fact, I'm starting to get a negative physical reaction just from these few lines... Must.. twist lid... back on... tight...

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