Category Archives: Mr. Boy

Memorizing

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Comments Off on Memorizing

Mr. B. still doesn’t know his multiplication tables. He has to think, for instance, about what 5 X 5 is. Sometimes he guesses wrong. I would have solved this last year by forcing him into the sort of intense memorization session my own father put me through in one evening. But Mr. B.’s teacher last year, when the tables were introduced, said it wouldn’t be a good idea. He’d not know why they work as they do, she said, and I deferred. Little did I know she was programmed to say so, whether she believed it or not.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Science/Engineering

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Killing the goose

Posted on December 3, 2009 | Comments Off on Killing the goose

Mr. B’s idiot school system has put a new requirement on parents of students: We now must have background checks, clearance before we can volunteer to help out in our child’s classroom. Imagine that. The days of the volunteer cupcake-maker are numbered.

Mrs. C. says I am living in a fantasy. She says this is the way of the world these days. They already dislike cupcakes, she points out, because of the crumbs. The head classroom parent assures me that this is a pain, yes, but it’s necessary for the safety of our children.

I say this is worse than a pain. It’s pretend security. It’s pretending that since all the good folks will obey the rules, the bad ones will, too. It will not protect the children and the bureaucrats know it. This is like the no-guns sign at the entrance, which is just an assurance to any criminal that this is a facility full of unarmed victims waiting to be slaughtered.

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Cold As Ice

Posted on November 23, 2009 | Comments Off on Cold As Ice

ColdAsIce.jpg

 

I enjoyed this 1992 scifi novel of physicist Charles Sheffield’s, though it seemed unnecessarily complicated in the beginning. A little more action before establishing the seven main characters would have prevented me from putting it down so often. Sheffield died of brain cancer in 2002, which resonates because a good friend of Mrs. Charm’s is struggling with it. Seems to have it licked for the moment, though the odds of that lasting are very low.

I bring up Sheffield to point out how easy it is to fall into these stories of ordinary life in the solar system, as if we had gotten off the engineering dime and were actually living in/on Luna, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. A lot of Cold As Ice occurs on (actually, under the surface of) Ganymede, which recalls Heinlein’s impossible young adult novel, Farmer In The Sky, which Mr. B. and I started as a bedtime story but never finished.

We had the space probe pictures and details of Jupiter’s radiation to consult, as Heinlein did not. Also life on (under, actually) Europa, which seems plausible, despite Sheffield’s scientific realism of the dangers of Jovian radiation. I hope all this verisimilitude means humanity really will do these things and not just wallow forever in political corruption and the threat of war. But a posed result of the latter is limned chillingly in Cold As Ice as one of the spurs for continued colonization.

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Posted in Library, Mr. Boy, Mrs. Charm, Obamalot, Rancho Roly Poly, Science/Engineering, Space

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Eighteenth in the Pinewood Derby

Posted on November 15, 2009 | Comments Off on Eighteenth in the Pinewood Derby

Oh, well. It’s worse than our second place last year, even our third place in 2006. But much better than the sixy-sixth we had in ’05. That was dead last. Result of some errant glue gumming up a wheel. We think we found the problem this year. Our wheels were crooked. Got to watch it when you drill those holes for the axles. Might even be worth drilling another one if the first one is bad.

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Pinewood Derby

Posted on November 12, 2009 | Comments Off on Pinewood Derby

We’re having fun this year making Mr. B.’s fourth racer for the scouts’ Pinewood Derby on Sunday. He wanted to go for a win, again, so we followed the speed rules: dimensions, etc. Then we made the axle holes too big, so the wheels are loose, and completely fouled up the camo decal. He was planning to go for wacky next year, but we already seem to be headed in that direction by default.

For all that, it’s been fun, specially with him doing more of the work this time. He’s finally old enough to hold a power drill steady and help saw the block of pine down to its speediest narrow shape. He practiced first, a bit shy at the noise the drill makes, but otherwise game. He’s growing up. He also decided we’ll take the car in Saturday for impounding, then go to his basketball game at the J on Sunday before catching the last hour of the derby and see what the car’s been doing against the competition. If the wheels stay on.

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Contradictions in academia — where else?

Posted on November 3, 2009 | Comments Off on Contradictions in academia — where else?

Wasn’t so long ago, indeed, it seems like only yesterday, Mr. B.’s teachers were complaining about his penchant for drawing knights fighting monsters with swords and machine guns. This horrible fixation on weaponry and violence, they said, was a bad, bad sign. Psychiatric help might be advisable, etc., etc.

Today he brought home a book from the school library on the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Huh? He said there were lots more like it in the school library and he planned to read a few more for his nonfiction reading requirement. After all, he got an A on a reading test on the Bradley book. High incentive there, as you might imagine.

Like a lot of other fourth graders he prefers fiction (generally fantasy) to nonfiction, so his teacher is constantly pushing nonfiction to balance it out. He said she didn’t mind the Bradley book and he found it interesting. Wanted to know if me and his godfather, who fought in Vietnam together, had Bradleys back in those ancient days. Nope. I showed him in the book where it said the Bradley wasn’t introduced to the Army until 1981. That was twelve years after our time.

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The Real Deal

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Comments Off on The Real Deal

That’s the name of Mr. B.’s "newspaper," a two- to three-page stapled collection of brief items, generally about favorite video games, bloopers at recess or clandestine food fights in the cafeteria. Some kids sell lemonade. Mr. B., being the child of two ink-stained wretches, is venturing into journalism.

I worry about possible angry administrators or even parents if some of his items wind up embarrassing another child. Mrs. Charm says I’m making too much of it. Mr. B. wants to sell his papers for twenty-five cents each at recess. He’s got visions of more than a hundred potential dollars. I demur, figuring the school will not like him doing that. Mrs. C., well, you know. It’s certainly not at this level, but I worry that the consequences could be similar. So far I’m losing. So we shall see what we see.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Mrs. Charm, Scribbles

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