Field Trip: New York City (Again)

Last weekend we took a 4-day trip to New York City to visit my sister and N.'s sister, each of whom moved there in late 2011.  This was N.'s second visit to the city (I wrote about the first here).  It was cold and snowy and fun!

Although we arrived in the city by plane instead of by train as we did last time, there was still a significant train theme to our visit.  We went to Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens, which is beautifully redesigned public space dominated by old gantries that once moved freight between trains and barges on the East River. 

Of course we rode the subway all over and N. tracked our routes carefully. 

And we went to the New York Transit Museum!  N. loved all the old elevated and subway cars, especially the wooden ones.

Another theme of the weekend was, of course, architecture and old buildings.  We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where N. wanted to see the Egyptian mummies and the Temple of Dendur, which we'd examined carefully last trip as well.  He also wanted to see the Greek and Roman galleries this visit, and he was especially taken with this monumental column from the Temple of Artemis.  He also spent some time viewing a Roman bedroom with architectural frescoes, the painted amphorae and bowls, and the marble sculptures of men and women from 100 B.C-100 A.D.  At one point N. glimpsed the old arches from the original Victorian Gothic building that is at the core of the museum (though mostly obscured by the neoclassical facade and various additions) and was immensely excited.  He vastly prefers the Victorian Gothic style (despite the fact that the original building was almost immediately out of style after it was built)!

[Photo by Graham Haber]

We visited the The Morgan Library, designed by Charles McKim in 1906 in the gilded robber-baron style N. admires.  He loved the library's multi-tiered bookshelves and balconies (a guard showed N. where to peek through a crack in a pivoting shelf to see the hidden spiral staircases leading to the balconies) and he was interested in the books and manuscripts on display.  He also really loved the new Renzo Piano-designed addition to the Morgan complex, and spent a lot of time looking at the model of the complex and the photos showing Piano's design process and the construction of the addition.

We took an exhilarating walk on the High Line in the snow and enjoyed the elevated perspective it offers on an array of interesting buildings. 

 And we rode the A train north and took a lovely snowy walk through Fort Tryon Park to The Cloisters.  N. enjoyed seeing all the fragments of 12th-century buildings on display, especially all the plant motifs as in this column, which are much less common in the later Gothic buildings he's familiar with.  We all swooned over the unicorn tapestries.

It was a rich trip! 

"Careful. We don't want to learn from this."

Someone has discovered Calvin & Hobbes! (And has been devouring the books non-stop.)

An Autobiography by Frank Lloyd Wright

In December, Tim started reading An Autobiography (1943) by Frank Lloyd Wright to N. as the next text in the improvised biography/autobiography curriculum they've been pursuing together.  This choice made a lot of sense since N. loves buildings and drawing and has long been a fan of some of Wright's most famous structures, such as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum.  But the book is challenging listening for him, not only because of Wright's nontraditional narrative style, which N. has been able to follow well enough.  As much as N. admires some of his buildings, Wright's aesthetic was formed in vigorous opposition to the style N. absolutely loves: the Queen Anne house.  So he has had to wrestle with the intellectual challenge of appreciating some but not all of the views of an inspiring man.

In his account of his childhood, Wright dismisses most of his formal education as having little impact on his learning or development:

But -- of the schooling itself? Not a thing he can remember!  

A blank!  Except colorful experiences that had nothing academic about them.  Like dipping the gold braid hanging down the back of the pretty girl sitting in front into the ink-well of his school desk and drawing with it.  Getting sent home in consequence (p. 36).

Instead, he credits Froebel's Gifts in his very young childhood, raucous play with friends (including running a printing press and lots of drawing), and summers of hard labor on his uncle's Wisconsin farm with truly forming him. 

But the schooling!  Trying to find traces of it in that growing experience ends in finding none.  What became of it?  Why did it contribute so little to this consciousness-of-existence that is "the boy"?  It seems purely negative, and for that reason it may not have been positively harmful.  Difficult for one to say.  You can't let boys run wild while they are growing.  They have to be roped and tied to something so that their parents can go about their business.  What not a subbing post or -- school then?  A youth must be slowed-up, held in hand.  Caged -- yes -- mortified too.  Broken to harness as colts are broken, or their would be nothing left but to make an "artist" of him.  Send him to an Art Institute.

But certain episodes were harmful and remain so to this day (p. 37).

So, Wright doesn't denounce school, but he repeatedly describes his real learning taking place elsewhere.  He matriculated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison to study engineering because he couldn't afford architectural school, thus escaping what he calls "the curse of 'architectural' education of that day in the United States with its false direction in culture and wrong emphasis on sentiment" (p. 52).  He attended classes in the mornings and worked in the afternoons at the private engineering firm of the Dean of Engineering at the University; "it was with Professor Conover, in that practice of his, that the youth really learned the most" (p. 53).

His university classes frustrated him: "Mathematics excepted, there seemed little meaning in the studies" (p. 52).  Wright criticizes his math professor for having "no feeling for the romance in his subject.  A subject when rightly apprehended most romantic.... Is it unreasonable to suppose that a professor of mathematics should be a poet?  Or a civil engineer be a creative composer of symphonies?" (p. 52). Similarly, he "yearned to read and write his own language -- yearned to speak it -- supremely well" but found his pompous English professor's minimal marks on his compositions worthless.  Instead, on his own he read Carlyle, Plutarch, Ruskin, Morris, Shelley, Goethe, Blake, and Viollet-le-Duc.  "But he doesn't know in the least what he read in the school course" (p. 53).

When he was eighteen, though he only had one semester remaining to complete his degree, Wright left the University and absconded to Chicago to seek a job in architecture.  He repeatedly contrasted the "Doctrine" at the University with the "active contact with the soil" he'd had laboring on the farm (p. 57).  His family strenuously objected, but he yearned to act, do, make -- now. 

He now put "University" behind him; a boundless faith grown strong in him.  A faith in what? He could not have told you.  He got on the Northwestern train for Chicago -- the Eternal City of the West.

Here is the bravery of all life, in this tragic break with background, in this stand against the clear sky -- whatever fear, superfluous: This is my own earth!  A song in the heart (p. 60).

Wright calls this sentimental even as he writes it, and almost sheepishly blames the Goethe he'd been reading for his romantic sense of purpose and urge for "action, again action and more action" (p. 58).  But origin stories are always romances, and isn't that what we read autobiographies for?

When they see N.'s drawings and hear about his passion for old buildings, people often say to us, "Oh, he'll be an architect when he grows up."  But unlike Wright's mother (who intended him for architecture from the cradle), we have no specific plans or expectations for N.'s career choices.  Wright's story is valuable for N. because, like all the others Tim has read to him so far, it details the courage, hard work, passion, and contrariness required to live an inspired, true life, no matter what one's profession.

Game Time!

We were fortunate enough to be able to avoid traveling for the holidays, which meant lots of time to play games old and new. N. doesn't initiate playing a lot of board and card games during our regular life, but the holidays have become associated with games, in part since he receives new games as gifts. So the past couple weeks we've been playing epic, multi-day bouts of Monopoly, as well as Yahtzee, Uno, Rush Hour, Battleship, and Parcheesi. I enjoy seeing how much better he is at the math and logic required for some of these games than he was a year ago. And N. had a great time playing games with his grandparents. It's fun to have moved beyond Candyland into the realm of games we can all enjoy.

The Nutcracker and an Un-Recital

We had an arts-rich weekend!  N. and I went to our fourth annual Nutcracker performance; the university arts conservatory in our city puts on an excellent production with an all-student cast, orchestra, and crew, and N. and I love it.  Before our first Nutcracker, we read and reread this longish adaptation of Hoffman's tale, which is not the original (despite the author credit) but is fairly close to it in spirit while also being close to the plot of the traditional ballet, so N. could follow what was happening onstage.  His favorite parts of the ballet include the party scene, the growing Christmas tree, the Snow Fairies, the Russian dancers, Mother Ginger, and the Sugarplum Fairy, not to mention all the music -- in other words, just about everything!

We go to one of the matinee performances, along with every other small child in the state, it seems, most of whom squirm, whisper, and sometimes even cry their way through the two hour show (some Nutcrackers are longer, but happily this production is streamlined and fast-paced!).  Their reaction is understandable, if preventable; The Nutcracker is a fairly odd story, and seeing it acted out via ballet can be confusing if you don't know what is going on or aren't used to watching ballet.  I think it is worth going because it can be a lovely visual representation of the magic of Christmas, but it is not worth the expensive tickets if your children aren't prepared to actually enjoy it.  Here are my (fairly obvious!) tips for having a successful Nutcracker outing.  Before you go:

1. Read aloud a good, detailed version of the story that bears a strong resemblance both to the original and to the stage version many times.
2. Listen to the music (full score, not the Suite) a lot and talk about which pieces go with which parts of the story.
3. Prepare your child for watching ballet by addressing questions such as "Why are the men wearing tights?" 
4. Talk about proper concert-going behavior!  Although no one expects classical-symphony-concert-level behavior from kids at The Nutcracker matinee, everyone pays a lot of money for tickets, so let's be sure they can all see and hear the performance. 

After watching this performance, N. participated in another the next day.  The students of N.'s piano teacher were invited to a party at a house in the country where they played the Christmas tunes they've all been learning on a gorgeous Steinway grand.  It was a lovely, low-key un-recital focused on sharing music, punch and cookies, and after making music the kids all ran wild outside through the rest of the crisp, sunny afternoon.

N. was nervous beforehand, and in the days leading up to the event, the ragtime "Jingle Bells" and "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" pieces he was going to play completely fell apart.  But he rose to the occasion, played beautifully, and really enjoyed performing (in fact he said he wished he'd been able to play more pieces!).  It was fun to see all the kids so focused and intent as they played their holiday songs.  

Yet Another Train Museum: Roanoke, VA

PRR GG1

For a couple years N. has longed to go the the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, VA, so we took a day trip there Saturday.  Although the collection was smaller than we expected, its stock was very clearly labelled (unlike that of the North Carolina Transportation Museum!) so we learned a lot.  The museum collection includes two important engines that are the sole survivors of their classes, the J class and the A class.  Both classes were built in Roanoke and were among the most powerful modern steam engines; they were the last steam engines in regular service in the United States (Norfolk & Western abandoned steam for diesel in 1960).  Another gem in the collection is the iconic Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 electric locomotive, with streamlined sheath and paint scheme designed by Raymond Loewy in 1930s.  The J and the GG1 might be our new family favorites!

We then proceeded to the O. Winston Link Museum, housed in the former N&W passenger station in Roanoke (built in 1904 and redesigned in the late 1940s by Raymond Loewy!).  Link took incredible photos in the late 1950s of the soon to be defunct steam trains and life in the towns along the rail lines out of Roanoke.  Some of these are collected in The Last Steam Railroad in America, a longtime favorite book of N's.  (We'd also seen an exhibit of Link's photographs last year in a local museum; that show was the occasion for N's first movie, The General).

Another small gallery in the passenger station was devoted to the work of industrial designer Raymond Loewy, who is responsible for the look of so much of 20th-century American life, from Coke bottles, to trains, to Greyhound buses, to Studebakers, to the Exxon, Shell, Post Office, and Lucky Strike logos... We learned a lot and our interest was piqued enough to take a look at his autobiography Never Leave Well Enough Alone, for a possible text in Tim and N.'s autobiography curriculum!

Bonus reading: Wikipedia article about the GG1

Second-Grade Science at Home: Experiments and Stories

For N.'s kindergarten and first-grade years, we took a very unschool approach to science, alert to all the ways small children build scientific knowledge through everyday experience and elaborating on concepts as they arose (for example, volume and displacement in bathtub play) while eschewing formal science lessons or experiments.  N. learned science through play outdoors and in, gardening, long walks, butterfly and cloud study, plant- and animal-kingdom classification.  Self-directed reading has been an important means of his science learning, from the concepts of physics and construction in David Macauley's Cathedral, Mill, and Castle, to the principles of engine mechanics in the many books we own about trains, to random topics such as simple machines that are explained so effectively in Macauley's The Way Things Work, to picture encyclopedias of insects, animals, and the planets.

Last year (first grade), Tim supplemented these unschool science experiences by reading aloud to N. the compelling narratives of scientific discovery in Uncle Tungsten and Madame Curie.  These stories articulate the thrill as well as the grind of scientific pursuits, and together they offer a rich account of the history of chemistry from Humphry Davy onward.

Following their general trend toward more formal learning activities this year (though we continue to see science learning in all the ongoing unschool activities listed above), Tim and N. have been doing experiments from two workbooks several times a week.  The books are Hands-On Earth Science and Hands-On Physical Science.  We don't recommend these books: the experiments are not always clearly written, sometimes flawed in design, and occasionally even wrong (for example, suggesting that a cup full to the brim with water and ice cubes will overflow when the ice melts).  The explanations of the concepts that the experiments demonstrate are extremely brief and unsatisfying.  I'm sure there are much better books out there, but we happened to have these (bought cheap at a homeschool fair), so they've been using them as a first foray into home experiments.  These experiments introduce or reinforce concepts that Tim and N. will want to (in some cases have already begun to) pursue in the future in greater depth as well as simply giving them practice in conducting experiments.  Even when they don't produce the expected result, N. talks with Tim about experiment design and tries to puzzle out why they failed.  Tim and N. choose experiments to try at random, so their exploration of scientific concepts through experimentation is fairly haphazard.  They do an experiment when it appeals to them, which I think maximizes its learning potential.  Rather than approach N.'s science learning more systematically (i.e. learning about foundational concepts and then building on them), we try through conversation to reinforce and make connections among the concepts they have explored because they seemed interesting.  I hope that their next phase of at-home science experiments will move beyond simply reproducing experiments in a book to designing and executing their own experiments to explore scientific questions generated by N. 

In addition to experiments, since Uncle Tungsten and Madame Curie were so effective as narrative science "textbooks," Tim has been reading to N. several days a week this semester from Joy Hakim's The Story of Science, beginning with the Greeks in the first volume.  These books are written for children and N is really enjoying them.  He has absorbed both history of science and abstract concepts from this reading. 

So far then, our science curriculum has been made up of play & life + experiments & stories.  Do you have any favorite books of science experiments or stories to recommend to us?

Synchronicity in Newport

I had fun this morning reading a recent New York Times article to N. that I had "clipped" to my phone (I love the Instapaper app) to share with him over breakfast. In the article, "Plans for a Memorial Splits Newport's Old Guard," a disparate bunch of people of historic importance from 4 centuries collide in a surprising way, and N. has encountered them all recently in his various studies: Roger Williams, Edith Wharton, Doris Duke, and Maya Lin. The article describes how some wealthy residents of Newport disapprove of Maya Lin's commissioned design for a memorial to Doris Duke in a city park Duke developed in the 1970s. Other wealthy residents who'd hired Lin meet to plan their continuing support of her design in a house once owned by Edith Wharton. Lin says her design was in part inspired by the importance of public assembly to Rhode Island's founding father Roger Williams.

Over the past two weeks, N. and Tim have been reading about the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth, the Separatists and Pilgrims, and Roger Williams' role in the Rhode Island colony in A History of Us. Somewhere the other day N. and I encountered an image of Maya Lin and her cat, which led us to look up and discuss her Vietnam Veterans Memorial. N. has long been interested in Edith Wharton's various houses and he's pored over library books with photos of hers and other Gilded Age houses in Newport. And we've gawked repeatedly at "Doris," James B. Duke's private railcar named for his daughter, which is on display at the North Carolina Museum of Transportation.

N.'s mind was fairly blown as I proceeded through the article and read the casual references to each of these four figures. I enjoyed seeing him process this surprising historical remix. Such moments when our discrete tidbits of learning converge are so rich!

Betsy-Tacy for Boys

In a recent blog post on the New York Times website noting the publication of The Betsy-Tacy Treasury (an omnibus reissue of the first 4 Betsy-Tacy books) Pamela Paul writes,

"A ramshackle four-story brownstone in mid-20th-century Manhattan. A Lower East Side tenement at the turn of the last century. The woods of Wisconsin in 1964.

These are just a few of the landscapes that female readers of children’s literature cling to well after they cease reading the books that introduced them. ('The Saturdays,' 'All-of-a-Kind Family' and 'Caddie Woodlawn'for those who somehow missed these greats.) But there may be no world that provokes such profound girlish longing as the bucolic century-old Minnesota of 'Betsy-Tacy.'" [italics mine]

I found myself irritated by Paul's assumption that the readership for the classics listed above is exclusively female and that thus only women look back on them fondly, because these are all books that my son loves and that we have read and reread aloud together with great pleasure.  Some, like All-of-a-Kind Family or Betsy-Tacy are about girls, but in The Saturdays the two boys and two girls in the family take up equal space in the narrative.  If we assume a fun, charming book like The Saturdays, with two engaging boys as central characters, is a "girls' book," we are shutting boy readers out of whole swaths of children's fiction thanks to our own gender biases about what girls and boys enjoy.

As feminists, Tim and I have always emphasized with N. the fundamental equality of men and women, boys and girls.  Gender stereotypes that appear in our reading that imply essential differences in the abilities or interests of boys and girls never stand without critical comment from us.  Boys can cry.  Girls can fight.  Some boys like dolls.  Some girls don't ("Mom, I know," N. will say with impatience at my zillionth editorial comment to this effect!).  As an extension of this, we have tried to avoid gender stereotyping in our selection of books to read to N.  We don't assume that because he is a boy, he will be drawn to certain kinds of stories or bored by others.  When we began reading chapter books aloud, I was thrilled to begin sharing some of my childhood favorites with N., such as the Betsy-Tacy books, The Railway Children, and The Five Little Peppers and it never occurred to me that he wouldn't love them too; I did not love these books because they were "girl books" and I was a girl, but because they were great stories and I loved to read.  While I've looked to others for help generating a list of books with boys as heroes (because I read few such books myself as a child) my main goal in reading aloud with N. has been to share great stories with him, no matter the gender of the characters. 

We make a mistake when we assume that children (or we ourselves, for that matter) need to identify with the hero or heroine of a book in order to have a meaningful encounter with it.  Indeed, much of the pleasure of reading is in experiencing the unfamiliar, the strangeness of a book's world and its people, and our strong awareness as we read that these are not our lives or our selves.  We read not only to find kindred spirits, or rather, when we read we find kindred spirits where we might not have expected them.  We should beware of constructing boys as readers primarily interested in one kind of book or character so we don't deprive them of the opportunity to make connections with a diverse range of characters and types of stories.

As I've been thinking about all this, I asked N. why he liked the first four Betsy-Tacy books so much.  I think his reply sums up everything I've been trying to articulate above: they're about "3 wild girls who can go out by themselves and have adventures!"  We recommend them enthusiastically!

***
Bonus reading [updated link]: Other parents who read Betsy-Tacy to their boys, and also to a whole classroom of kids.

Letterboxing Redux

The very first post I wrote on this blog in November 2008 was about our first letterboxing adventure.  Since then we'd found about 20 boxes, but we hadn't hunted for any for the past year and a half.  Looking over all the neat stamps in our log book revived N.'s interest in the activity, so we set out on a gorgeous Saturday morning to search in a lovely park.  What I especially appreciate about letterboxing is the combination of purpose and wandering that it offers.  On this outing we only found two of the five stamps we were looking for, but we had a wonderful time exploring the park, kicking through the fallen leaves, and soaking up the autumn sun.

Bonus reading: Atlasquest, where we find our clues.  Letterboxing North America (lots of information, although the clues at this site seem less up-to-date).  The Smithsonian article that is said to have introduced letterboxing to Americans.