chapters of randomness! crystal cave!

1. my kids' school: yippee, test scores went waaay up across all the grades and classes, which makes people feel good. i will try to look at this as a very positive thing, rather than think cynically about what these standardized tests and requirements of adequate yearly progress yada yada yada really mean. like, possibly, the destruction of good public education. i do feel proud of the hard-working kids and teachers. let their learning continue to be high-scoring AND joyful.

2. on that note miles' teacher left without a single day's notice. she seemed kinda' unhappy, and we will never know why she quit except that there were "personal reasons". of course. miles has let me know that it doesn't matter if they do homework this year, and that they are not learning anything this year. it is shocking how quickly apathy has set in! the sub seems like a nice man, but is not really teaching. miles has been saying things like " i flew a paper airplane because i wanted to see if mr. X would mind, and he didn't mind tooooo much." hopefully there will be a new teacher soon but in the long run it is all just fine. i had a completely senile teacher in 5th grade who assigned the same homework every day for weeks before parents started to notice something was up-then he disappeared and left in his wake a trail of subs who could not pronounce anyone's name. i remember this year as the first year i was around pot, which was being smoked AT RECESS in a stone pagoda right outside the school.

3. we had an expanded group for mom's first friday out and i love my mom friends! woo hoo. you know it is a good night when you are singing the chorus from that song about canada at the bar (take off, to the great white north,etc.). these same great moms showed up for the soccer practice at potrero del sol on monday and one of them brought her mini-rex bunny with a portable pen for all the kids to pet and commune with--very cool and unexpected.

4. maya got together with her old old old pre-k friends from 3 weeks ago and they played pretty hard for a few hours, rampaging through about 20 changes of clothing. it was REALLY FUN according to maya who informed her friends that kindergarten had a lot of rules including: 1. you have to sit IN your square! 2. you have to sit criss-cross! and 3. you have to LOOK AT YOUR TEACHER THE WHOLE TIME YOU ARE LEARNING!!! (maya was pretty incredulous about this one). she told them that you get to play to learn in english class but in chinese time you just have to learn. there was one upsetting incident involving a lower case "a" that got my mama hackles up but she is sleeping in her uniform right now and seems to be going along with the program.

5. today we met up with our brisbane friends and ended up picking blackberries which were growing dangerously intertwined with poison oak at san bruno state park. this was my first time here (thanks corinne) and we got a good haul of blackberries and saw lots of butterflies and thistles and thistle down seeds and eucalyptus trees and ferns and a little bog and even bumped into an old painter friend from the philly days who now lives in noe valley. there were also four little kids running around with their shirts off making obnoxious jokes and laughing raucously.

6. after that we parked in a mysterious warehouse's parking lot and followed our 7-year-old friend (and graduate of the brisbane hiking camp) up a completely insane trail to the crystal cave. there were several spots which were so steep and narrow that the only way was to hold onto a rope and pull yourself up hand over hand. more poison oak and nettles everywhere. it was so dense and the trail so narrow we really felt we were walking through the brush, and then there it was--crystal cave! high enough to walk in and about, hmm, 15 yards deep. i almost expected to see cave paintings from 10,000 years ago. we were very lucky to have friends who knew had to get to this cave. the kids got out their headlamps and chisels and hammers and we found a whole bunch of beautiful crystals, growing like little teeth or cities out of cracks in rocks. i found the best one, a crystal that was perfectly clear with a perfect point, about as big as a jellybean, but better.