Any questions, comments, or compliments?

My kids all attended a public Montessori school. Overall, I would say that experience has been positive. My son is in his last year there, and then he'll move on to high school, and after fifteen years, all of my kids will be out of Montessori.

I remember when my oldest child started kindergarten that there was a lot of discussion among the teachers about how much they should or should not be embracing certain technology. There was debate about how screens as an educational tool fit into the Montessori philosophy. So watching my son do eighth grade entirely on screens has been odd in yet one more way.

There are lots of quirks to the Montessori method, some of which I find really inspired, and others feel somewhat odd because they are so different from how I experienced elementary and junior high schools. But one of the things the kids are taught to do that never ceases to amuse me, is that when they give a presentation at one of the many fairs that parents can attend (science, cultural, etc.), when they finish explaining or demonstrating at their display or table, they ask, "Do you have any questions, comments, or compliments?"

I find that so sweet and funny and weird. I get asking for questions, and maybe even comments, but the first time I heard one of my kids asking for compliments, too, made me laugh.

But why not? So in that spirit, I present to you my latest project: A new book entitled "My Violin Needs Help! A Repair Diagnostics Guide for Players and Teachers."

 

Isn't the cover pretty? My brother Barrett made it. He also helped me nitpick a bunch of things from the images to the formatting, etc. He's the one who suggested I include a references page, and because he's an entomologist, I wound up with two entries in there about bow bugs.

I think it's a nice little book. It could have been much longer, but I really wanted to keep it simple. It fills a need, because most of the books out there about violins can be overwhelmingly technical, and those of us who work with violins all the time forget that many people who use them lack really basic information. I try to educate people all the time at my shop, and this attempts to be that same sort of friendly discussion in book form.

So check it out if you can! I tried to make it a fun read, even if you're not heavily involved in the violin world. It's available to order from anywhere you buy books. (Plus at my violin shop. If you want a signed copy just ask, and I can send you one.)

And when you're done, let me know if you have any questions, comments, or compliments! (Or even better, if you liked it, leave me an Amazon or Barnes & Noble review.)

Pigs in Space

My first baby just graduated from eighth grade.

How does that happen?  I remember a decade and a half ago the pregnancy test coming up positive, and telling Ian, and then telling my grandma (who cried).  I remember talking to Aden in my belly and enjoying having her with me everywhere I went even though I hadn't seen her yet.  I remember the baby who smiled at me for real at three weeks old, and who had full blown empathy at four months.

I remember a little girl starting at her public Montessori school who refused to walk down to her kindergarten classroom in the basement unaccompanied, which was a problem in the winter for her pregnant mom with the toddler in tow and a husband deployed in Iraq.  That problem was eventually solved by her finding a friend to walk with her.  That same friend was one of the last she walked out of the school with after graduation.

I can't believe time can come crashing all together like this.  Hundreds of trips in and out of that school, no particular one looking like a milestone, and yet she started as a tiny four-year-old I could scoop into my arms, and came out an impressive young woman who performed a violin solo on the stage for the graduating class and left clutching a certificate.  I am overwhelmed.

The Good and the Bad

Aden invited me to go with her class on a field trip to a movie downtown.  As part of the Milwaukee Film Festival there was a showing of Landfillharmonic, a documentary about children in Paraguay who live in a dump and play music on orchestral instruments assembled from garbage.  Aden knew I'd be interested, and when her teacher said there were a couple of tickets left for any adults who wanted to come along she was excited to ask me.  It was short notice (she told me the night before), but I was caught up on my work and figured it would be fine for Ian to cover for me in the morning.  I told Aden I could go.  She was delighted.

Aden is 13.  13 is hard.  We are struggling a bit with her lately, because the parenting road is not particularly clear anymore.  When children are younger there are relatively fewer choices about many things.  I'm not saying it's easy, by any means, because it's not, but the variables are different.

With toddlers, for instance, you know all of their friends.  You usually share most of your child's environment.  You know where they are, what they are eating, and what they are watching.  The scope of their potential worries tends to be narrow.

By eighth grade, for many, that all goes away.  Most days my daughter spends more waking hours outside of our house than in it.  I do not know all of her friends.  I have only a vague idea of what her days look like, I no longer have control over what she eats or watches, and her concerns are complicated.

Report Cards

My kids got their report cards last week.  They all seem to be doing fine.

Although, honestly, Montessori report cards are a little odd.  There are lists of skills broken down by category, and for each item Aden and Mona receive an X, a / , or a - .  At first glance it always takes me a minute to figure out what is going on.  An X is good on this scale.  Aden had lots of Xs, and some of her /s from last semester had gone up to Xs.  Same for Mona.  There is also a list of behaviors that get graded with a U, an S, or an R (for Usually, Sometimes, and Rarely).  They each had a U for most everything, and a few places had upgraded from an S.  I seem to recall Mona getting a bunch of Ps at some point and I still don't remember what those were, or if I was supposed to be Pleased or Perturbed by them.  Anyway, both girls had nice comments from their teachers saying they are working hard and getting along well, so that's great.

K5 is graded differently, so Quinn's report card took me longer to figure out than his sisters'.  One page of it had a long list of categorized skills, but he was graded on a scale that went from 1 to 3, 1 being good, 3 meaning needs work.  The second page was general areas like Reading and Math and they were scored from 1 to 4, but this time 1 was minimal and 4 was advanced.  So on one page you want to see 1s, and on the other page you don't.  I have no idea why they don't use the same system for the kindergarten students as they do for the older kids.

In any case, Quinn's report card had a few things on it that took us slightly by surprise.  But his classroom has had a lot of upheaval because his teacher moved away at the winter break and other than saying a brief 'hello' at the pickup we have not really met his new one.  She seems very nice and Quinn likes her, but I don't know if she graded his report card or if his previous teacher did.  Regardless, it had things on it we didn't get.

School

The first week of school went well here.  Unless you count the second day where Quinn threw up.  Twice.  So he came home early, but had no fever and seemed fine.  We sent him back the next day and things were less messy.  (I have no idea what that was, but I'm chalking it up to 'transition.')

Aden, Mona, Quinn, first day of school

The first day of school Ian biked there with the girls and I followed along a few minutes later with Quinn in the car because we had at least six bags of supplies to deliver.  We get a list every year from each teacher of a dozen things that includes paper towels and pencils and copy paper.  I don't remember as a kid being responsible for any supplies beyond what I was supposed to use myself, but now basic things like crayons and glue are not available in the regular school budget apparently, so all the families pitch in.  That's fine by me, since my kids attend a public school and their education is essentially free to begin with, but it makes me sad that as a society education is such an underfunded priority.  So many of the good things about a community radiate from having a well educated population, so I'm amazed that schools have to fight for the money needed to do what they do.

End of the Half-Day Pickup

We are entering a whole new era.  Our youngest child just had his last day of morning only classes.  (!!!!!!!!)

Quinn showing me his latest map

Montessori has mixed aged classrooms, and the kindergarten has K3 and K4 children who leave school at lunchtime, and K5 children who stay the whole day.  It's a great system in that the younger kids don't get overwhelmed and the older kids get more serious attention in the afternoon.

Half-day pickup

It's a great system for the kids.  For the parents, not so much.  Especially if you have a mix of kids at the school for half-day and full-day.  We drop the kids off at 7:40, then come back for the 11:00 pickup, then back again at 2:20.  That half-day pickup kind of breaks up the whole day into unworkable parts.  The morning stretch is not quite long enough to do anything involved, and then we can't go far after the half-day pickup because we have to turn right back around and do the end of the day pickup.  It can be a bit limiting.

Since Ian is the stay-at-home parent most days, he's had to deal with the brunt of the school chauffeur duties.  He missed the one year with no half-day pickup when Quinn wasn't in school yet and Mona moved to full-day, but that was my one saving grace during that deployment, not having to chop up my day with another drive to the school at lunchtime.

I will say, however inconvenient, there is nothing cuter than the half-day pickup.  Watching the procession of three and four year olds being herded out of the building and onto the playground in uncertain rows, most of the year bundled in brightly colored coats and hats, is adorable.  It unfailingly makes me smile, regardless of anything else happening in my day.

Next year I will get to wait for my son on the other side of the building at 2:20 like we do for his sisters.  I'd go anywhere, anytime, to be greeted with that smile--but I'm glad we won't be doing it at 11:00 anymore.

Quinn is now officially a K5!

School school school (Babble)

I can’t believe summer is over and all my kids are old enough to be in school.  Aden is in third grade, Mona is in first, and my little baby boy is a K3. 

They go to a public Montessori school, so the classes are mixed age (grades 1, 2 and 3 together, grades 4, 5, and 6 together, and kindergarten is a mix of K3, K4 there for half day and K5 for full day).  When Aden was in Head Start at age three, her teacher recommended that she would do well in a Montessori school, so we looked into it, and so far it’s worked out nicely. 

In Milwaukee you can apply to go to any school and there are so many choices it can be overwhelming.  There are charter schools and language immersion schools and schools that focus on art or science….  I even toured a traditional public school very close to home that offered ballet and it was so charming that if we hadn’t gotten our first choice I’m sure that would have worked out fine as well.  We’re fortunate that there are a few Montessori schools to choose from within the public system, and one of them is only a mile and a half from our house. 

When we applied to get Aden enrolled there as a K4 she was on a long waiting list and I agonized a great deal about exactly what to do.  It was hard, because Ian was on his first deployment, and I had to make the decisions about school alone, which didn’t feel right.  I was very conscious about setting into motion a path that would determine most of Aden’s friends and the people we would be involved with for many years to come.  Those kinds of long term consequences to choices tend to put me in a slightly panicked mode, but I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older not to be become paralyzed by them.  Experience has taught me that when faced with good choices it’s better to assume you can’t mess it up and just move on.


The nice thing now, is having made the choice years ago for Aden, we don’t have to agonize about schools again until she’s ready for ninth grade.  Sibling preference rules means Mona and Quinn had no trouble getting into the same school as their sister, and I haven’t had to repeat that same struggle. 

The thing I like about Montessori is that the kids are self-directed and the teacher teaches to the individual instead of the group, which means it doesn’t matter if, for example, other kids in Quinn’s class aren’t ready to start reading and he is, he’ll still get to learn what he’s ready to learn.  I remember being frustrated when Aden was in Head Start that her class spent the whole year learning the alphabet when she walked in knowing how to write that out on the first day.  We’d really only signed her up for the social experience anyway, since she wanted friends and Mona was too little at the time to make much of a playmate yet, so we figured it didn’t matter, but I’m glad for Mona and Quinn that they had a situation lined up that’s both fun and challenging from the start.

Aden loves her teacher and is glad to be back in her class again.  She was worried about whatever she thought the responsibilities of a third grader might be, but as soon as Aden was reunited with her friends she was very happy to be back in school.  I like the long term relationship we’ve had with her teacher.  She knows what to expect from Aden by now having had her in the classroom for the past two years, and on the first day had her working with a partner on a writing project and she’s excited about it.  I think Aden’s going to have a good year.

Mona spent the last three years in the same kindergarten room, so moving up to first grade is a big deal.  On the first day her old teacher called her over on the way to her new room to show her something.  The last day of school back in June, Mona gave her a picture of the two of them in a frame she’d decorated herself, and her kindergarten teacher has it on display above the fireplace.  I think Mona was pleased to see that she is a part of her old room even as she’s moving on to a new one.  She’s nervous, but her classroom this year is right next to her sister’s and I think that helps.  Her new teacher seems very nice and I’m sure Mona will do fine.  I can’t wait to see what she does this year!  Mona, however, becomes laconic when you ask her about school.  I don’t know why she doesn’t want to talk about any of the fun things she does there, but she simply doesn’t.  If I want to know anything aside from what she had for snack I usually have to get my information from other sources.

The big shock is having Quinn start school.  He’s my last baby, and I’m sure he will love half day kindergarten, but it’s hard for me to let him go.  He’s so smart and capable, and his teacher has been nice about emailing with me over the summer to get to know us a little bit.  She even let us come in and tour the classroom a week early with his sisters so it would be more familiar to Quinn on the first day. 

Academically he will be fine.  (He doesn’t get confused around 15 and 16 when counting to 20, and he spends a lot of time on his magnadoodle perfecting his letters and drawing what he calls ‘alphabet puzzles.’  He asked me the other day when working on his numbers why they don’t come in upper and lower case versions like letters do.  I’m still not sure why letters need upper and lower cases so I thought that was an interesting question.) 

I can’t picture yet what the social impact for Quinn will be.  Either having spent every day of his life with his sisters around will have prepared him well or it won’t.  We’ll find out soon enough.  He’s a very sweet little guy, and his classroom looks like an environment where his gentle nature will serve him well, so I’m hopeful that he will be happy there.  Now I have to keep myself from falling apart when I drop him off in the morning.

Luckily we have a sort of ‘breaking in’ period right now.  They stagger the start date for the different levels of kindergarteners so Quinn doesn’t really start attending class until after Labor Day, but he did get to go to an orientation for an hour on the first day.  He seemed reluctant initially to let me go when I dropped him off until I told him I’d be right back after a meeting for grown ups, and then he said, “Okay,” took his teacher’s hand, and went off to his new room. 

 It’s his first room that’s his and not mine, too.  He’ll have friends I don’t know and discoveries I won’t see….  Ugh this is hard.  But it’s good.  I still get to teach my kids whatever I want to teach them, but they deserve the right to be out in the world and learn things they wouldn’t learn from me or their dad, and to have relationships where I’m not involved.  I understand the appeal of homeschooling for those who do it, but I know for Mona in particular that having a classroom apart from her siblings and her parents has made an enormous difference for the positive in her life.

Anyway, Quinn told us more about that one hour he spent in school than Mona probably told me about everything all last year.  As we drove around as a little family of three doing errands while his sisters were still in class, Quinn told us he did a puzzle of a person and that it was easy, something else involving letters but that he couldn’t finish it because then the teacher told him to sit on the wooden part of the floor and they all had a snack, and that he ate a long carrot and some celery and that he really likes celery now and that another child near him didn’t like tomatoes. 

Seems like a good start to a new adventure.  I can’t wait to hear more when he starts for real next week, but in the meantime I’m glad I get to keep him to ourselves for a little longer.

In Defense of Handwriting (Babble)

There have been several articles here and there recently about whether or not children should still be taught cursive in school.  The first time I came across one I didn’t give it much thought.  My reaction was some version of “whatever” and I didn’t dwell on it.  I had a vague question in my head about what that would mean for how people would develop their signatures for signing documents in the future, but beyond that it didn’t seem important.

But I’ve had more time to consider it, and I’m coming down squarely on the side of teaching handwriting to children.

I started thinking about this in more detail after a debate I had with one of my brothers over the holidays about spelling.  One of the tangents that discussion took touched on handwriting, and he thinks it’s pointless.  His arguments were that it was time wasted in school that could be used for better things, people use keyboards now, printing is clearer, not enough bang for your educational buck essentially.

My brother and I come from different places in our fields of study which likely affects our perspectives on many issues.  He’s a scientist and is accustomed to stripping things down to quantifiable elements.  Things he deals with need to be efficient, practical and show clear benefit or progress.  Music has other aims.  I want to capture something from the past with most of the music I play.  I want to participate in a living tradition of musical knowledge passed down from one generation to another.  I experience the value of doing things simply because they are beautiful in a way that doesn’t touch my brother’s work life in the same way.  Science and music speak to different parts of the human condition and both help us understand our world and our place in it, but I think they prime our reactions as to what things are important quite differently.


So I’m leading with my weakest argument in favor of handwriting because it makes sense to me.  (I’ve got practical points in a moment if this one seems irrelevant.)  Handwriting done well is beautiful.  There is value in that.  How impressive is it that we remember John Hancock on the strength of his extravagant signature?  That’s some handwriting with impact.  There was a girl I went to school with named Nicola, and I didn’t know her well, but I still remember her handwriting.  It was sophisticated and gorgeous.  My brother sarcastically suggested that we should keep cursive because “that’s how grandma did it.”  But that’s not a joke to me.  I like doing some things like grandma did it.  There’s value in that too.  Finding small ways to connect us to the past makes us less likely to forget our history.  I’m not someone who thinks the past was better–I’m thrilled to be living in the here and now–but I also don’t think everything has to be streamlined to be good.  Efficiency isn’t always an improvement.  Sometimes it’s just cold.

If that’s too ethereal, here are the practical arguments in favor of handwriting.  Sometimes you need to write by hand.  That’s just true, regardless of technology.  And it makes sense to learn to do it in a way that is both quick and understood by many.  I have a dozen legal pads scrawled with my notes from four years of violin making school.  That was not an environment that lent itself to taking notes on a laptop or other such device.  I did transfer my notes at the end of each week onto my computer to print out in a more easily accessible form, but my original notes were invaluable.  I have nice printing, but it’s slower.  Cursive writing on paper was the most practical way to record the information I needed, and that’s been true for much of my life.  I would be unhappy working on a novel that way, and I love typing these posts, but for writing on a post-it, or for jotting down information in an unexpected place, or slipping a note under a door, you still have to write.  Electronic gadgets for writing are superior in many cases, but not for everything, and why limit yourself?

My favorite recent example of a moment when handwriting proved superior to technology was during the holidays when my whole family took a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.  I ended up watching all the tots in the kids’ area and had to be content with other people’s reports of the fabulous things they’d seen, and both my brothers had enjoyed the exhibit on the Arts and Crafts movement.  Barrett pulled out his pamphlet with pictures of some of the more impressive furniture on display, and in one of the margins in his distinctive and lovely handwriting he’d put down a William Morris quote that moved him and that he wanted to remember.  Arno also had recorded a quote that he wanted to share, but he’d spent a long amount of time typing it into his phone and it didn’t seem to have saved properly so I have no idea what it was.  (He preferred to ignore the irony in this when I brought it up during our discussion later.)

Besides being a basic skill kids should learn because writing legibly is practical, I think there is something to giving them a way to train their hands.  It takes practice to learn to control and strengthen the muscles in your hands well.  More people should be trained in basic drawing skills because drawing is extremely useful (and is another area of education that is too thoughtlessly dismissed), and I think writing for many is the closest a lot of us get to drawing.  If you develop the skills it takes to make clear curves and straight lines you have a lot of possiblities at your fingertips.  Why not do that with writing?  If you are going to spend time to learn to take an image in your mind and successfully get your hands to transfer it to the page, why not practice that with something so useful?  You can’t expect kids to type on keyboards and then just magically know how to use their hands for something else.  It doesn’t work that way.  Practice is necessary, and that is not time wasted.

Writing things yourself also helps you process them in a different way.  I know I make the most progress in teaching people to read music when I make them write it out themselves.  Just because they’ve seen a treble clef and recognize it, doesn’t mean they have ever really taken the time to process what it really looks like.  Making them think about it and engage different parts of their brain to write it out helps them learn.  Writing helps teach you how to see.

And lastly, it’s personal.  My brother tends to focus on the information that is being communicated as the central point.  He doesn’t think the means by which an idea is displayed is relevant in most cases, and resents it when people’s ideas are judged unfairly based on presentation.  I can see that, but the method does matter.  That’s why even when typing you have to consider the font or color, etc., because it will affect the impact of your point.  Ideas are important, but they are not everything.  Sometimes you just want to hold something that you know another person held.  When you take the time to write certain thoughts down, the mere act of writing them with your own hands is powerful.

I have probably a hundred fascinating, well-written, gripping, touching emails from my husband during his last deployment.  I’m glad he shared those thoughts.  But I also have two hand-written letters just to me from that same time, and which do you think I come back to most often?  I don’t want to print out an email that says, “I love you” that looks the same as if I’d written it to myself some lonely afternoon.  I want a piece of paper that was in Iraq with my husband, that he wrote on in his own slightly scrunchy handwriting, that tells me he was thinking of me when he put that pen to paper, and that is a unique reminder of the man I love.  The idea is not always the same when you change the delivery.  Sometimes the delivery is the idea.  An education that does not prepare children to communicate their ideas in a way that is powerful and personal, efficient and beautiful, is not a full education.

My children go to a public Montessori school, and there they start cursive in kindergarten.  I love seeing Aden’s homework all in cursive.  She’s got a good hand and she’s improving all the time.  I prefer a hand drawn and written birthday card from my daughter to something she could have printed out on the computer or bought in a store.  I have a feeling my brother is just playing devil’s advocate with me on some of these points because I’ve seen the binder he has of all the letters his wife wrote to him from India before they were married.  And his five year old daughter composed an inspiring ‘list for life’ that is moving because it was written in her own hand.  The ideas are wonderful, but typed out would lack authenticity.  Seeing the words “Be kind to people” in her childish printing gives it a heartfelt charm that the idea alone lacks.  Her innocence shines through, and the sentiment is her own, not something anyone might have said.

Having given it this much thought, I’ve made an effort recently to work on my own handwriting.  I tend to print because it’s clearer, but if I take a moment and use care, there is nothing about my handwriting that is hard to read.  When I take the time anymore to write a real letter, I do it in cursive.  Just like grandma did it.