Life/family updates

[cahn]

-Sorry, second-child syndrome, I forgot to announce THE most important development in A's life this summer, which is that he is finally getting to play the trombone! He's wanted to play it for at least two years (I tried to get him to play French horn if he was going to play a brass instrument, but no, he likes the slide, which I have to admit is pretty cool)... first I had to look around for a teacher; then I found that there is a guy at church who plays trombone and he had a teacher rec; then that teacher talked to A and said he was too young. Now he is finally old enough, and he is really excited about it. And he is way better at it than I was at flute for that one ill-fated year I took band; I was amazed that he could produce an actual note at his first lesson! (It took me weeks to get anything like an actual note out of the flute, I feel like.) He's taken lessons for several months now and is now at the point where he can play simple songs, and the teacher told us to go to the music store and see what they had in terms of easy music. We found a Star Wars book, so A. is super excited about playing the Star Wars theme and played it for his friend who is super into Star Wars when he came for a playdate. (The high note in that one is hard for him to hit, but he can usually hit it once or twice per practice :) ) He didn't want to stop doing violin or stop doing violin in kid orchestra (I think he likes being good at it), so right now he's still doing that.
(For Phantom fans:
Me: At some point you could do your kid orchestra as a trombone instead of a violin.
A: I'm not sure if I want to. But anyway I definitely don't want to be the third trombone.
Me: Because the third trombone has to go?
A: Yes!)

-A's school is actually thriving! Some minor drama with math classes but nothing to the level of last year, thank goodness, and it all seems to be resolved now. He and the other fourth grader who didn't leave are with the 5th and 6th graders and they are loving getting to do all the big kid stuff, it's rather fun.

-We have learned there is a BUS that goes to and from E's high school (she is not going to the school closest to us, so for a while I thought there wasn't one, and it turns out if we lived any farther away than we do, there wouldn't be) -- it is not exactly a school bus, but rather a bus belonging to the regular public transit system (so they have to use a bus pass, etc.) but on a route co-opted to go to the high school and back only. This is the greatest thing ever. E sometimes needs to be awakened in the morning but otherwise gets herself ready, checks the transit app to see when the bus is coming, and walks the couple of blocks to the bus stop. And when cross country gets out in time does it in reverse (though this happens only a couple of times a week). She's only missed it in the morning twice, lol.

-E still complains about running but she's getting much better at it! She jokes about how she got fourth place among the ninth grade girls at the last meet... but it turns out there were only six ninth grade girls running in that meet, so, uh, this is not nearly as much of an accomplishment as it seems on first glance! (Not sure what everyone else was doing, as I'm pretty sure there are a lot more than that on the team... but my recollection from high school was that this is around the time when kids get slammed by tests, etc., so some of them have to work on their academics instead.) Anyway the last meet is this week.

-We did not manage to get E moved to AP CS (through some mistakes made by both her and me) and she doesn't have second semester math sorted either yet either. It works out OK -- it's not an entirely bad thing to have a class that is focused on projects and doesn't have tests. AP Physics 1 is getting harder for her. She has two parents who both got physics degrees and I guess I assumed that physics would be a snap for her, and the math part is, but the physical intuition part can be hard for her, which I guess in retrospect I shouldn't be surprised by. Still, at this level you can get pretty far by just knowing how to do the ten kinds of problems with force diagrams and conservation of energy (or are there even that many? Block without friction, block(s) with friction, a couple of different kinds of pulley problems, circular motion problems...) and D and I can certainly help her with that. (Unfortunately she says her teacher doesn't explain things well, and at least I can channel the way that my amazing high school physics teacher explained problems to us... always draw a free-body diagram! always calculate your net force! that will get you 80% of the way through right there!) But anyway both she and I are not particularly impressed with the actual academic content of high school so far (though she enjoys her math class).

-E is doing Mock Trial as her main non-math/non-math-club extracurricular (Math Club, of course, has her heart) and is loving it?? Every time she goes to practice she comes back super happy, it's really quite something. I think it has a lot to do with the very large overlap between the math club folks at her high school and the Mock Trial folks -- in fact, that was why she originally did it.

-E went to an all-girl math competition and had SUCH a good time. They had a day of social events for the girls before the competition itself and she just had so much fun! I got to see two of my friends I hadn't seen in forever, and meet their kids whom I hadn't met before, and I also had just an amazing time :D

-also I got to see two people from DW last month, which is not something that happens every day (or, in one of these cases, ever)!

-I had a couple of blissful years where I did not have to do ANYTHING for Christmas at church and now my break is over, I have been tasked with a bunch of stuff. Soooo yeah I may continue to not be super present on DW for a while. Unless I end up being super present on DW so I can procrastinate doing all the Christmas stuff, I suppose it could go either way...

Comments

[landofnowhere]

Yay for everything!

My mom used to be one of the organizers of that competition -- she stepped down because although she loved the parts that were organizing a giant party for math girls, she didn't actually enjoy the "running a math competition" side of things.

[cahn]

Ohhhhh that's so cool about your mom! The giant party for math girls thing is THE BEST, E just adored it so much and I am so grateful for all the organizers that have made this exist in the world. (and please tell your mom that!) E enjoyed the math competition part a lot too, of course! but I can see how that would be rather more stressful to organize in a lot of ways.

[thistleingrey]

Glad both kids are doing well! Hee, third trombone--plus perhaps different social resonances for people who play different instruments? And bus support is amazing.

[cahn]

He hasn't come out and said it, but I think the other issue with trombone is that there are always a whole horde of violins, but if you're one of three trombones then you're a lot more exposed!

Bus support is indeed amazing!

[thistleingrey]

if you're one of three trombones then you're a lot more exposed!

Oh yes--I remember being glad not to be a woodwind or brass player in middle + high school. It's not even whether one could play the occasional solo bits, or being relatively loud no matter what; it's being so exposed.

[cahn]

Yes, exactly! I remember that too -- I certainly understand his trepidation! :)

[hidden_variable]

Hi! Glad to hear things are going well. The bus thing is awesome! Now that we've finally moved, we're in walking distance of S's school, and it's really a game-changer.

the ten kinds of problems with force diagrams and conservation of energy

I mean, in some sense there are only two of these problems, and only two equations to solve them (F = ma and "energy at this point = energy at the other point"). :P But should you ever want input from someone who knows aaaaall the variations on these problems by heart, I'm here!

[cahn]

Yay that you have finished moving! And ohhhh walking distance, that's wonderful! Although the high school E is going to is better for her specifically in a number of ways than the one closest to us (and the bus is great!), I'm rather wistful that she could have walked to the closest one...

I mean, in some sense there are only two of these problems, and only two equations to solve them (F = ma and "energy at this point = energy at the other point"). :P

Haha, true! There was this really annoying bit of her class where she'd come home and say she didn't know how to do force diagram problems, and it turned out that her teacher had apparently never told them to set net force equal to ma for both horizontal and vertical components? Once I pointed this out to her, she was like, "Oh, that's it?" and had a much easier time. But I can see how if no one has told you how to do this, that it would be kind of challenging to figure out oneself!

[seekingferret]

Yay trombone!

This might be a dumb/obvious suggestion, but as an engineer more than a physics person, perhaps the best way to build physical intuition is by testing your physical intuition? Labwork! Build an Atwood machine and put different weights on it! Do some Galilean experiments with ramps! Ride a bike and pay attention to the gearing!

[cahn]

Hahahahaha you are, of course, absolutely right, and this is exactly why I should not have been surprised that she actually doesn't have great physical intuition! Although she is fine with being told concepts ("this is how a bike gearing system works") and applying them to specific cases, she very much dislikes figuring out general principles from specific ones ("let me pay attention to the bike gearing and see if I can figure out how it works").

A., who likes both hands-on things and physical reasoning quite a bit more, has much less trouble with all of this, and I still hold out hope he might be more of an engineering type ;)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Although she is fine with being told concepts ("this is how a bike gearing system works") and applying them to specific cases, she very much dislikes figuring out general principles from specific ones ("let me pay attention to the bike gearing and see if I can figure out how it works").

WOW, she is me at that age. (And to a more limited extent now.) I basically went on strike against "let me pay attention to the bike gearing."

Brief because typing on phone, but: yay good things with A and E!

[cahn]

Hahahahaha sooooo not surprising! As I said, I do think you and E have a lot in common.

(Though she is a looooot less forthcoming online than you or I! But she's working on that.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

she very much dislikes figuring out general principles from specific ones

Though in my case it was specific to the real/physical world: give me linguistic, mathematical, or logical data, and I could extrapolate the general principle so effortlessly I couldn't figure out what was taking everyone else so long.

[cahn]

E definitely is extremely good at this in the mathematical/logical realm (it's part of the skill set that makes her very good at math competitions), although I suspect at least part of this has to do with the fact that in math, when you make a hypothesis, you can then prove it... whereas in real life you often have experimenter clumsiness or experimental error getting in the way. Not so sure about linguistics, which I think may be prey at least to the uncertainty part, but I have very few data points for that so far.

ETA: But also, in real life, you can't really prove it. Do all bikes work in the same way? Maybe not? What if you had another bike that worked differently? E, especailly when she was younger, was basically the epitome of the joke that says, "a physicist, mathematician, and logician are on a train ride in Switzerland and pass by a number of flocks of white sheet. The physicist says, 'Hmm, it seems that the sheep in this canton are white.' The mathematician says, 'Well, no, we only know that there exist a certain number of white sheep in this canton.' The logician says, 'Well, no, we only know that there exist a certain number of sheep in this canton that are white on one side.'"

[lokifan]

Oh, good for A and E!

the physical intuition part can be hard for her, which I guess in retrospect I shouldn't be surprised by.

Ah, is she dyspraxic? Might be making a leap there, but me & both my sisters are dyspraxic, and it often goes with ADHD and autism and such. And I was good at physics overall but I def did well with the maths part and struggled with picturing movement in space.

[cahn]

Oh, interesting! This has never been on my radar. Huh, I don't think she has enough of the symptoms to be diagnosable at this point in time, but she definitely was slower in a lot of these things as a kid, and I could totally see her being sort of farther along that spectrum than the average person. Thanks for telling me about this, I will be watching out for it more now!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Dyspraxia was also something I was wondering about when I was reading this, because it's so commonly comorbid with autism.

Between anxiety, dyspraxia, and alexithymia, which have all come up in this context, it might be worth looking into "things that are commonly comorbid with autism" and keeping an eye out for any that might apply to E?

[cahn]

True!

[sophia_sol]

oh man you are making me remember all the reasons I never excelled at physics despite being very good at math! I too am bad at the physical intuition part. I struggled to even draw the free body diagrams to start with....translating the word problem into a free body diagram required more ability to visualise things in space than I actually have. I'm glad you're able to help E with this stuff!

[cahn]

Oh gosh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense! <3 I'm glad we can help her too... E reports there are definitely other kids in the class who are struggling and I suspect they don't all have parents who happen to be able to help. (I've told her that she needs to help them in that case, if she can!)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Does E have any symptoms of aphantasia?

[cahn]

Hmm. Not to my knowledge? (I just asked her some questions about visualization and she didn't seem to have any issues.) Her weakest math skill is geometry, but I don't think it has to do with a lack of visualization skills: a) she's still pretty good at it, at least half her issue is a lack of confidence in her geometry skills, and b) the other half of the issue is that the kinds of problems she has difficulty with are the ones where you have to keep drawing random lines or triangles connecting various points and see what you can prove about them, and she hates the trial-and-error uncertainty of that kind of thing coupled with the number of theorems she has to keep in her brain. (Her favorite right now is combinatorics, because where she is right now she feels she doesn't have to really remember very many theorems, just use logic.)

[sophia_sol]

haha yeah I grew up with two parents who had both FIRMLY gone into the arts side of the arts vs sciences debate....no math/physics help from either of them! and I never had a physics teacher who would have actually been worth going to for extra help either. I'm glad E can maybe help some of those other kids who don't have access to their own resources for help!

[cahn]

haha, yeah, that would be difficult!! Her teacher also... does not seem like the sort that one can go to for extra help. Soooo yeah I hope she can help some other kids out!

[hamsterwoman]

so A. is super excited about playing the Star Wars theme and played it for his friend who is super into Star Wars when he came for a playdate.

Aww! One of the neatest things for me when O was learning to play an instrument was when they were learning a piece that was from a franchise he was a fan of, and he then could just play it whenever he wanted (Star Wars and Harry Potter, and later he taught himself the Sherlock theme).

Glad to hear the mixed 4-6th class is working well for him!

She has two parents who both got physics degrees and I guess I assumed that physics would be a snap for her,

Heh, this was me and chemistry with my kids. I found it so intuitive and beautiful, that I had a hard time accepting that it didn't "click' for them in the same way. they learned to handle it just fine, and me being able to help was definitely useful, but it never became their "thing" the way it did for me, even though L had to take quite a lot of it for her bio degree.

YouTube might be helpful with Physics if you can find the right channels. There are lots of people out there explaining stuff, and also animations of forces and motion that I think can make it easier to grasp. Or at least I remember O watching those things for E&M, but I seem to remember they exist for Mechanics as well.

And yay for E having a great time at the math competition and for meeting DW folks! (I'm still bummed it never worked out for us to meet up so far, but hopefully some day!)

[cahn]

Haha, my violin training was all classical, so I was totally blindsided by this "pick a piece that you know and like!" I was like, how does that even work?? Lol.

Heh, this was me and chemistry with my kids. I found it so intuitive and beautiful, that I had a hard time accepting that it didn't "click' for them in the same way. they learned to handle it just fine, and me being able to help was definitely useful, but it never became their "thing" the way it did for me, even though L had to take quite a lot of it for her bio degree.

*nods* Yes, this! Yeah, she's handling it reasonably well now, with mostly just the occasional question (it really does help that she doesn't have to think about the math part), but it doesn't look like it's going to be her "thing" the way that math is, which was just surprising for me.

I'm sure we will get to meet up one day, one way or another!