Frenzied Daddy

I strolled into the house today after a long day of slaving over a hot keyboard. I was all fired up to make stirfry wraps for dinner and then get back to work in my basement, slaving over the hot keyboard again. Until I met up with the girls.

Ms K immediately asked me what time it was. (“uhhh six.”). She panicked and started to babble. Ms B lifted her head and said “Miss K has an art show tonight at her school.” Whoa? One of the nice things about Miss K going to the neighborhood school is that it’s ..well, in the neighborhood. So I could turn to her and say “Well, what time is the show?” And I hear that it started at 5:30. I think to myself “It’d be nice to say yes more often. And how long could it take, anyway?” So I say “Let’s go!” Miss K runs to get her shoes and her jacket on. She was all fired up. Ms B says “It’s something about ‘paint mumble bumble’.. there’s a flier on the table. I don’t mumble bumble she has any mumble in the mumble.” By the time Ms B got these three sentence fragments out of her mouth, Miss K had her shoes on and was waiting expectantly by the door. Miss K said something about “we can make art.”

With no knowledge at all of what I was getting in to. But I figured I had a check if they wanted money — we could figure it out. K and I parked back around by the cafeteria where we usually go to drop her off in the mornings and she pulled me feverishly to the front entrance. We walked in, where Miss K was greeted by name. Everybody knew her and was delighted to see her. They give us pizza tickets and we go have pizza, soda, cookies and salad. Then they give her a bag of art supplies: pencils, crayons, water colors and a Strathmore notepad. Then they give her some raffle tickets with her name on them and we take them over to the gym where there’s art on the walls. Real art in frames, or not – photographs, paintings, sketches, blown glass, pottery. There was some really amazing stuff. Her instructions were to put her raffle tickets in envelopes for different pieces, or all for one, or whatever she wanted.

There was enough art for all the kids there; a raucous crazy bunch of kids.

She put all five tickets on a nice mosaic peace sign hanging, and we went back to the cafeteria where we made some more art (we did some landscapes with paper scraps).

Later, they gave Miss K the mosaic to take home – the first “official art” she picked out herself and brought home.

It was a neat evening. I’m glad I said yes. Of course, now, I feel like I should be working and not telling you about all of this; but that’s ok.

When I was a wee lad, I wanted, no, I needed a calculator. And my dad, in his infinite wisdom, said that he didn’t have a problem with me using a calculator.

If I didn’t need one.

So I memorized multiplication tables, played with numbers, developed a whole brain toolbox around how to play with numbers and get them right. I even developed the pattern of seeing two possible ways to get to an answer and making sure they lead to the same answer. For instance, if “x squared” is 144, I knew the multiplication table and can see 12×12 on one side of my inner vision, and on the other I knew that 12×2 was 24 and 12×10 was 120, so I could add those together and get the same numbers. Or on a multiple choice test, I could use one of those two ways to quickly get into the right range, and the test answers were usually pretty far off from one other, I could quickly narrow down the options.

Eventually I didn’t need that calculator although it was still faster, so I used it. Especially for things like adding up long sequences of numbers. And then I hit algebra and geometry and algebra 2 and even calculus. I spent hours — yes hours on pretty graphs for my solutions, finding the best answer, making hyperbole graphs, drawing sin(x)*tan(x) graphs. I probably used the most colored pencils of anyone in my high school who was not in the Art program.

You remember those days. Well, pretend that you do, ok?

Ms B had to take a statistics course for nursing. And for that, she needed a graphing calculator. You plugged in the numbers and it drew out your graph on its little LCD screen. Fascinating! A ten minute graph now took ten seconds. Well, at least she knew how to do the graphing, right? But her math wasn’t my responsibility and whoa, that little calculator was pretty neat too. She could look at the black on grey output and compare it to her paper and see that she had the right idea.

And now I’m reading The Talent Code and learning about focused practice, repetition, ironing out the errors, and myelin, and how long myelin takes to wrap around a “brain circuit,” and how that wrapping affects what we see as talent. Which is about a 10,000 foot view, sure, but you can see that I did a bunch of math practice, then people claimed I was talented at math. A direct relationship as it were between practice and talent.

I want to share this with my kids. And I considered putting Octave on the computers so they could see the glory of these cool graphs that equations make, but only after they build a few hundred themselves. I want them to have the practice behind the glory that is math. I tried to describe the formula of conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit as a graph line to Miss B the other day but I’m pretty sure she tuned me out. (Yeah yeah, the slope is 5/9 and it’s offset by 32 blah blah blah). (Actually what I was trying to do was show her how to answer the question from her current knowledge… 0C=32F,100C=212F so what is 80F in C?).

But, like my dad, I could filter their tools by their practice level.

And then, because of a silly post on reddit.com, I stumble across wolfram alpha. Goddamn, wolfram alpha. You want to see the graph for Celsius to Fahrenheit? Here ya go:
actually this is F to C but you see the line?

Oh, and did you want a sine wave?

Neat. How about three dimensions ?

(note: I had a hard time building an ellipse because Wolfram kept changing the X axis so my ellipse would be circular. She’ll have to watch that.)

And here I was worried about the girls searching for porn? Porn is tame compared to the damage they could do with this — why bother to learn something hard if goddamn wolfram alpha (and I think I’m going to add that adjective to it every time I say that) will just jump in and do pretty graphs for the girls.

What do you do to filter this out of their possibilities? Look — you can e’en do this on your iphone!!

(ps: here’s the link I followed to G.W.A. )

So, for reasons I won’t go into, I had to come clean with my daughter this morning.

“Honey, the only reason I had kids was for science fair projects. I go to Michaels’ (arts and craft supply store) and just pick up and hold the solar system model packages, and then put them back on the shelf. And I do it again with the dioramas. I just want to make science fun; and I can’t.”

Hopefully I put enough pathos into my delivery (These are real tears!!) that it sank in. I’m the guy who took three AP science courses his senior year in High School. I’ve had some fan-fricking-tastic science teachers and I loved the stuff; chemistry, biology, physics, even the geology we did for the “Natural History of Oregon” class. Ms Dexter, Mr Carlsen, Mr Sauer, I’m lookin at you. On the other hand, Mr Keupker (AP Calculus) can go jump in the Willamette.

I told her we could split up water in to H2 and O2. She thought that meant just boiling it (no). And I described how we could do it and then demonstrate that these were those specific gasses. We talked about some other science projects she could do in the two weeks she has remaining before this project is due. We talked about how to find out what her teacher is expecting, and that I wanted his rubrick to come home with her tonight.

Do you know any good science fair projects? Have any good science stories?

My favorite might be telling Peter Gunn to “hay feel this little white pellet… feel that slipperyness? (it was Sodium Hydroxide) … That’s your skin dissolving. You might want to wash that off…” … No, wait, that’s not my favorite.

How do I tell the universe that it’s ok, I’ve learned that lesson and could we please make this less painful? Specifically finances. I keep shouting on the inside but nobody’s listening!