the only rock video you will ever see posted on this blog

rich posted the first rock and roll video i ever made on youtube. the internet is amateur heaven! anyway, here it is, made on my ever so wonderful iphone.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnaklvuCX0U

that's rich's band carlton melton with music legend j mascis sitting in for a song at cafe du nord.

the usual

maya's quote for the day, looking at another brown item on the sidewalk as we walked down utah street to a friend's house under a beautiful blue sky.

"you know, mommy, most every day we see a poop."

so true, so true.

pathetic parenting moment

last night i trailed behind a fast-moving and funny dragon composed of a bunch of fast-moving and funny 2nd-4th graders in the chinese new year parade. in front of the dragon were the bunny dancers and fan dancers. it was a cold and drizzly night and i felt very alive in the bright lights and music, sipping a delicious manhattan a fellow parent handed me mid-parade as we wound our way through the downtown streets.

maybe this is wierd narcissism, immaturity, obsessive thinking, getting older, who knows, but lately more and more when i am feeling the most alive, joyful, amazed, or loved i also think about dying. it happens more and more. i felt it last night as part of a spectacle, this fierce love of being alive and the thought of being dead. i know this is a subject i need to come to grips with a little better. maybe it is time to get some religion unless anyone has a better suggestion.

tonight, my seven-year-old dragon dancer surprised me by echoing my thoughts. in a happy family moment, drawing together at the table he looked right at me and said "i hate thinking that i'm going to die." my pathetically inadequate response was to hug him and say "then don't think about that."

it's an art, not a science

i work in a preschool special education classroom, and dealing with undesirable behaviors is pretty constant. kids not following directions, not staying with the group, not being safe, difficulty sharing, yelling, grabbing, knocking over towers, and some hitting--all in a day's work. of course most of the time our students are just wonderful and adorable. during the past two months, however, one of our students developed some pretty severe aggression toward the other kids. hitting, throwing hard and heavy objects, poking, kicking, pinching, making scary faces and sounds--up to 30 times an hour. his primary teachers and i came together as a team and devised a plan for what we decided were attention seeking behaviors: completely ignore all the negative behaviors, heavily praise the good ones. this did not fly with some of the assistant teachers, who thought it would be impossible to ignore the bad behaviors,and did not feel comfortable refraining from saying no and telling our student he was doing things wrong. but the plan was if he hit someone we would attend to the hittee. if he was about to hurl a block at someone we would just take the block from his hand with a neutral expression and move right on. this involved a lot of creative defense and comforting of the students while simultaneously trying to create lots of opportunities for our little aggressor to get positive attention. we had tried giving him positive attention before but not ignoring the negative stuff.

as these things go, the bad behaviors escalated for a while as our little guy tried more and more desperately to get attention. for the past two weeks there were a lot of crying kids, ice paks, and some serious skeptics on staff saying that this would not work, things were getting worse, we should not keep ignoring bad behaviors, this was bad teaching. it is hard to work with people who don't have patience. it is also hard to hear these doubting voices when you are trying hard to implement a plan that may or may not work.

however, the past two weeks things have been much better. some of the kids that our aggressive little guy was targeting the most have, as he probably wanted them to be all along, become his friends. instead of screaming and crying in fear a few of our more passive and scared kids have become noticeably more confident and assertive as they have had so much practice defending themselves. it is kind of amazing and heartwarming to see ( as i did today) a tiny four-year-old who would burst into tears at the mention of the aggressive kid's name actively seek him out on the playground, and take his hand, and lead him away saying firmly "you are my friend."

gustav klimt's rocker sister

there has been a lot of outside time lately. the garden is growing in the backyard, lots of little seeds sprouting up, pink and white blossoms on the fruit trees, and crazy tall greens that just keep going and going.

work has been rough lately, feeling overextended, but i am trying my best. i find myself involved in miles' school through meetings and email conversations. the teasing and bullying task force. the middle school committee. the garden coordinator political fiasco. miles is doing fine, but there is so much pressure to get test scores up that there doesn't seem to be much time to look at how to engage the kids. they keep assessing the kids to find out what skills they don't have yet that they should. i know this is important but assessment should look at not just what they know and don't know, but how they learn best.

have i mentioned these things before? i think so. project based learning. cooperative learning groups.

anway, we have been learning by getting out and about.

yesterday maya and i walked up and over potrero hill to an art class where she learned about gustav klimt and painted a huge gold background. on the way back we saw this amazing kidserve mural on daniel webster elementary. this is just a section, this thing is huge.

maya experimented with making shadows in the window of this closed down hair studio. she said she was gustav klimt's sister, who was in a rock band.
today we went with friends to the mission science workshop, a big room in mission high with a free for all of musical instruments, projectors, bones, woodworking tools, glue guns, rocks, slices of 540 year old redwood trees, live animals, dead animals, computer parts, you name it. i love this place.
maya made this cool magnet pendulum which showed how magnets can repel each other. the little hanging magnet dances around on its string.
layers of people i knew were at the workshop, and are everywhere we go, really, from the neighborhood, baby class, preschool, even pre-kid life. and outside there was an old friend, alec, looking like the cool sailor engineer that he is, with his dyke march t shirt on, headed to sunny delores park. the park was packed, a green sea of people and dogs, throwing footballs, grilling sausage, giving free capoeira lessons, playing accordion, walking on tightropes. blasting bad rock music from a fender amp, selling ice cream, drinking and smoking weed. i told the kids about how we used to go to this park a lot, and sit on blankets and sometimes play instruments, and how cassie lived nearby.

we watched as a group of people prepared to release a balloon creation into the sky, tethered by fishing line so as not to pollute. it was the size of a small room, red balloons attached to each other in the shape of a heart. the kids were patient as a very sf crowd of older women with some young tattooed women and some men, well, hey, all kinds of people talked about going around the circle and departed love ones and meditation. "the ice cream!!!!!!!!!" screamed maya and the kids ran off hand in hand to buy crappy mexican ice cream from a cart. they returned in time for the release of the heart, which floated higher and higher until it was just a small red shape above delores park, with no destination but, as miles said, "as high as the moon."

happy chinese new year

ok, i admit i was a proud bragging mama today. maya's pre-k teacher asked me a few days ago if alumnus miles would come and talk to the pre-k kids about chinese new year today. he agreed, but at 9 this morning, just after SPONGE BOB SQUARE PANTS, i looked at my very runny-nosed and goofy missing tooth child and wondered how it would go down. he packed up a lantern made in kindergarten with the fabulous ms. chang, a lion dancer costume we splurged for a few years back, a picture book about a girl in china and her pet dragon, two pop tarts for breakfast and a tennis racket for a park date later, and we were off.

at the preschool miles sat calmly on a little blue chair in front of the gang, and then proceeded to tell (in detail, for 20 minutes) about the origin of the red lanterns and lion dancers, and the story of the chinese zodiac. some of the things he said didn't really sound like him ("the elephant was approaching at a very tiny speed") and i realized he had learned this all in mandarin and this was how it translated to english. the 3-5 year olds were pretty rapt listening to these crazy stories of racing animals, crop destroying dragons, and evil spirits scared of their reflection in the lion's mirror.

maya was the lovely assistant who held the lion's tail. one of my favorite parts of the presentation was when little slade started playing some quiet harmonica to accompany miles' quite lengthy narratives.

awww. maybe miles will be a preschool teacher some day, if not a super spy, comic book artist, famous soccer player or singer as good as michael jackson. the fact that he learned this stuff in another language seemed pretty cool.