Teeny Manolo

The Munchkin is an almost-six-year old who definitely has a mind of his own.

And that mind has no problem letting people, including his teacher, know that he doesn’t like coloring.

He can draw until the pencil or crayon is down to a nub, or until the marker practically runs out of ink.  But coloring? Inside the lines? Madness! It is beneath him! To him, it is gruntwork, pure and simple. 

Unfortunately for him, it seems that kindergarten teachers can be sticklers when it comes to coloring pictures.  Especially when coloring the picture is part of the assignment, not just for prettification.  You know, like coloring in all the triangles red, and all the squares blue.

So, coloring outside the lines is verboten.  Ditto with leaving some white in there.  They prefer that the item in question be properly and completely shaded.  Which, I guess if you are going to do it, you might as well do it right.

But didn’t I hear a while back that children were supposed to be encouraged to color outside the lines?  That insisting they color inside the lines stifled their individuality and creativity?  Say no to conformity, kids, anything goes!

Er, except that particular philosophy is not embraced at the Munchkin’s current school.

I understand that coloring is a fine motor skill.  And perhaps it comes down to committing to doing a task and doing it properly, even if you don’t find it a pleasant pastime.  Still, there is a part of me that is secretly annoyed at the notes about his lack of coloring finesse that are penned on his worksheets.

The amazing and confusing thing is that I have to sit here and beat it into him that he is to color inside the lines, when adults who have the ability to “think outside the lines” are lauded.

Maybe I should have homeschooled. 

The rallying cry for last week’s poll was “Save Mr. Rogers!” Ninety four percent of respondents felt that Mr. Rogers should stay in the weekday rotation. I totally agree. I admit that the Land of Make Believe is a bit outdated, but we might just be looking at that through an adult world view and not that of a child.

With all the back to school hoopla that is going on, I thought I’d ask you about your own school experience.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s August out there, and around the ol’ raincoaster homestead that means one thing and one thing only: making a laughingstock of yourself trying to play with the kids’s beach toys.

You name it: hula hoops. skipping ropes. beach balls. shovels and pails and pimped-out sandcastle engineering equipment. swimming pool badminton. trac ball. nerf football. water balloons. boogie boards. that stupid little rope on the ring with the dooie at the end of it that you stick on your ankle and dance around like Ed Grimley rolling on E.

They whup my sorry ass every damn time.

But among the glories of summer toys too tempting for even those of positively Malkovichian gravitas, one stands supreme, like the lone cherry on the very summit of the quadruple chocolate-mint meltie with extra crushed hazelnut praline that lives in my dreams, if not in my diet.

The SuperSoaker.

And, as with all the many immortal archetypes which chime agreeably in our collective unconscious like the orchestra of the divine Big Band which plays at the right hand of God (except when the bagpiper is there), the history of the SuperSoaker is nothing less than an epic of human achievement and a moral fable of the most exquisitely resonant irony.

And iSoaker has it; here’s a snippet:

The year of 1989 began the water weaponry revolution. The origin of the Super Soaker® actually dates back to 1982 when Dr. Lonnie Johnson, a nuclear engineer, first had the idea of making a high performance toy water gun. At the time, he was employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California as a spacecraft systems engineer on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. As a part time inventor, it took eight (8) years before the gun was finally introduced to consumers…

The idea behind the Power Drencher was actually derived from some work Lonnie was doing on a heat pump that used water as opposed to freon. He hooked up the model of the pump to his bathroom sink at his home. “I turned around and I was shooting this thing across the bathroom into the tub and the stream of water was so powerful that the curtains were swirling in the breeze it sent out,” he said. “I thought, ‘This would make a great water gun.’” (Quote from a Weekend Edition interview between Lonnie Johnson and Liane. Click here for more information.)

Unlike its motorized predecessors, Johnson developed a gun that relied on air pressure and arm pumping for pressurizing the firing chamber. The end result was a water blaster capable of delivering more water farther and faster than any other water gun on the market. The brand name, Super Soaker®, was introduced nation-wide in 1991 through a series of TV-advertisements.

If we, the adults, cannot beat those darn kids at their own game, the least we can do is learn enough to bore them stupid on the subject, right?

Leave it to the Japanese to make a toilet training device with no sense of shame but an overdeveloped sense of theatre and the bizarre. Stolen from JapanProbe, here is the World Famous Shimajiro Toilet Training video, subtitled in English. Over at JP they have the actual sounds the machine makes as MP3 files as well: if only this little device looked like the Dora the Explorer aquapet, my day would be complete!

Always wanted to raise your very own Donald Trump, Henry Kravis, or Michael Bloomberg? (but why?) Well, now there’s a summer camp designed with you and your tiny tycoon in mind. Camp Millionaire, in cut-throat Santa Barbara, California, offers a week-long introduction to the realities of cold, hard leveraged assets.

From Dealbreaker:

One little f*cker, Andrew Adams, 10, told his mommy that “her credit-card billing cycle had changed, and that she wasn’t keeping up with payments. Her delays were racking up late fees, jacking up her interest rate and hurting her credit score.” Roughly translated as, “Mommy, you numbnuts! Get your shit together and pay the bills on time.”

Then, presumably, he foreclosed on her.

Today my son will “graduate” from preschool.

I feel embarassed just writing that.

I understand the impulse to mark the occasion. Sort of.

But to have a big assembly, complete with musical numbers, to mark the move up to kindergarten just seems a bit over the top. Or, it could just be a reason for the school to charge twenty bucks for the video.

Are today’s children so lacking in self-esteem that they must be given a certificate for every single thing that they attempt? I mean, yes, I guess they “earned” the right to move on to the next grade level, but as no grades were ever given, the kid who licked glue all year gets the same thing as the one who can read one grade level ahead. Or even the kid who never did his homework.

I am sick and tired of the “everybody is special” vibe given out by all the schools. How are we to compete globally if we are raising a bunch of people who got awards simply for showing up? What happened to first place? What happened to the best in the class? Will they begin doing away with valedictorians because it might hurt someone’s feelings that another is recognized for their superior grades?

However, you will of course find me at the special event, probably with my video camera.

It’s the peer pressure.

Last week I asked how important you thought it was to raise children with a religious background. Forty percent said they felt it was “extremely important” while the next top vote getter was “not important at all” with twenty six percent. Twenty percent felt it was “somewhat important” and a smallish thirteen percent felt it wasn’t important at all.

My thougts echo what more than a few said in the comments, which is that whatever manner you choose to raise your children, it has to be authentic. Kids can smell a fake a mile away, and if you aren’t fully convinced about your choice, then chances are they won’t be either.

And this week I am going to jump onto that other taboo topic, politics. Wheeee! Breaking rules is kid of fun! This is a presidential election year, and the political talk/rehtoric is just beginning to rise to what will probably be a fever pitch.

This is an amusing, yet paradoxically educational, video by Mose Giganticus and The Emotron, two guys who are driving a vegetable-oil-powered bus from New York to Alaska. Made for Mrs. Aderman’s 1st Period Environmental Science Class, school unknown (if you know, please share put out in the comments (there’s only so much sincerity and wholesomeness I can take, you know?)).

A human finger??? Those New York hippies are hardcore!

Seventeen year old Marche Taylor from Texas found herself handcuffed and led away by police instead of attending her senior prom.

Prom chaperones said her dress violated the dress code, and told her to leave.  She disagreed, apparently an argument ensued, and eventually the police arrived.

The video below is a news clip from a Houston station covering the story.

What say you? Was the dress too much? Should the school have offered her some sort of compromise, which she claims they did not? 

Back in the sepia-toned, bell-bottomed days of the Seventies when this documentary was shot, Langley was a lovely village surrounded by stables and farms, three-quarters of an hour’s leisurely drive outside of Vancouver. Now it is a strip-mall-encircled bedroom community an hour’s infuriatingly tense drive outside of Vancouver with, improbably, stables and farms still interspersed between SUV dealerships.

And this is the Langley School Music Project, a public school initiative by Hans Fenger, a teacher in the system. Just another public school teacher.

In the early 70s, Vancouver musician Hans Fenger decided to get a real job. His girlfriend was pregnant, and he couldn’t raise a family on earnings from club gigs and guitar lessons. He got a teaching certificate and a job in the Langley school district.

Here is some great analysis from The Delete Bin:

The recordings were literally a school project, headed up by music teacher Hans Fenger based in Langely B.C (just up the road from where I’m writing this), and incorporating 60 students who sang and played percussion instruments on songs which included David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Band on the Run”, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, and the Eagles’ “Desperado”. The record polarized opinion. Some said that the takes on the songs create a sort of ghostly, otherworldly effect, while others denounced it as sounding amateurish and very “school assembly” in delivery. Perhaps it’s their origin which makes these recordings so compelling. Fenger had this to say about the project and the kids who created it:

“I knew virtually nothing about conventional music education, and didn’t know how to teach singing. Above all, I knew nothing of what children’s music was supposed to be. But the kids had a grasp of what they liked: emotion, drama, and making music as a group. Whether the results were good, bad, in tune or out was no big deal — they had élan. This was not the way music was traditionally taught. But then I never liked conventional ‘children’s music,’ which is condescending and ignores the reality of children’s lives, which can be dark and scary. These children hated ‘cute.’ They cherished songs that evoked loneliness and sadness.”

And now, click on to see (and hear) the kids:
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