Day 329 - Energy Monitor

Thought of the day: I volunteered in the annual vision screening event in Jasmine's school today. All day long, kids lined up grade by grade and had their eyesight tested by volunteers. It was my first time doing this and it had been an eye opening experience for me. I got to observe the remarkable physical and behavioral differences between kids from different grades. It's amazing how much difference a single year of age difference can make at this early stage of life. An idea just popped into my head: I want to make a photo book for Jasmine's 10th birthday so she, and we, can see how she has changed from year to year. Our minds mostly live in the present moment and it's easy for us to forget how we or our loved ones once were. "Old" photos will help us recall memories buried deep inside us and help us see the whole person and how her present self came into being. Just like annual vision charts record the vision history, photos record the life history. It would be a pretty interesting and meaningful project to reconstruct a life using photos.


Photo of the day:

Jasmine's climbing gym employs an 100kW solar system to offset a quarter of the electricity usage in the building.  It has one of David's energy monitoring devices installed and the real-time energy information is prominently displayed on the wall near the entrance. The device has a detailed memory of 30 years so you can reconstruct your energy usage history over a long span of time. Hopefully, your usage will trend down over time as you learn more about energy efficiency, pay more attention to your footprint and take steps to reduce it. So, in a way, the device captures your history of becoming a green citizen.

Day 320 - Face Painting

Thought of the day: I have been trying to teach Jasmine some math over the weekend. I have never worked through lessons with her like this before so it was quite a learning experience for me. One big discovery was the importance of the fun factor (shocking, huh?). When she thought the material and learning were fun, she learned really fast. When she thought otherwise, alas, learning turned into a boring chore or even a struggle. I was taught in the traditional way when I grew up in China so I never gave much thought to the importance of material presentation. I used to think that the elementary school teachers here wasted too much time playing games with kids and spent too little time in actual teaching. Not any more. I still think there is something lacking in the elementary school curriculum but I have developed a new appreciation of their teaching methods and a new appreciation of the teachers as well. It takes a lot of energy and creativity to keep things fun for a classroom of thirty kids. And now, just imagine that you need to do that every day, five days a week. It take a special breed of people to do this willingly and do this well - and get paid very little on top of that. They surely deserve our wholehearted appreciation.

Photo of the day:

Lila getting a face paint on the last day of Boulder Hometown Fair.  The face paint artist was self-taught and painted happy dogs on both girls' faces.  It's easier to make it fun when you're learning art but not so when you're learning something abstract like math. Luckily, the math manipulatives come into rescue and good teachers make use of them to make learning visual, concrete and fun for kids.

Day 316 - Lila

Thought of the day: It's September. The first two weeks of frenzy back-to-school and reconnecting-with-people are over.  Time to catch a breather and reflect upon what I have learned over the long Labor Day weekend.  Afterward, the after school activities are going to start in full force and every week is going to come and go at an even faster pace. Such is life when your entire schedule is driven by your school-age kids.

Photo of the day:

Lila in her new preschool.  She enjoys it completely and we are happy to be back in this preschool community.  There is something to be said about going to a neighborhood school that is run by devoted and loving people whom we have known for a long time.

Day 302 - Lila

Thought of the day: Today I had both lunch and dinner with parents from our neighborhood school. As the school year had just started this week for all of our kids, naturally it was one of the main topics in the conversations. There are currents and undercurrents in the school that I am not aware of. That's hardly surprising. From as far back as I can remember, I always feel like being an outsider in any larger social circles and it's no different with this school. I can connect with people individually on a personal level but I can not easily relate to a larger group of people. This personality trait has not so far negatively affect my life in any significant way, but I am afraid that it may take a toll on Jasmine's education.  There are few things in the world that I desire more than giving my children a good education so perhaps I'll try harder to get involved in the school instead of standing at the peripheral looking and feeling like an outsider.

Photo of the day:

Lila just finished her first day at her new preschool.  I took the girls to Alfalfa's Juice Bar for a little treat after school.

Day 211 - Fireplace

Thought of the day: Recently, Jasmine's class sent a scrapbook to a Chinese class in Beijing.  In the scrapbook, every child wrote something about their lives, hobbies, pets or school and attached photos of themselves and also photos illustrating what they wrote about.  This week, they were very excited to receive a similar scrapbook back from China as the response.  As I translated the Chinese writings to English, I had the opportunity to go through the book in detail.  For me, it was very interesting to read what the Chinese kids had to say about their lives in their own words.  Their lives revolved around their families, pets, playgrounds, parks and their school.  Some of them listed hamburgers and ice creams as their favorite food.  They liked to raise pets and fly kites.  They played piano, soccer and ice hockey.  Really, their lives and hobbies didn't seem to be much different from Jasmine's classmates.  I did notice a few subtle things, though.  Many of these kids demonstrated remarkable self-confidence, which was probably a result of being raised as a single child, as most of them were, doted on by the parents and grandparents and cheered on by the teachers. Some of the kids had already travelled widely with their parents, but not a single kid mentioned hiking. When I grew up in China, "hiking" was considered a necessity that transported you from one scenic spot to another.  Now that the tour buses were readily available to take you anywhere, perhaps this mode of transportation was just forgotten. Nobody mentioned "skiing" either. Over time, I am sure that many of these "western" leisure activities like hiking, skiing, camping, backpacking, climbing, river rafting, etc, will be gaining and expanding their footholds in China.  Take an example: traveling.  When I was growing up in China, traveling was so cost and inconvenient that it was pretty uncommon.  Now people in China travel routinely - the rich frequently travel abroad and the "normal" people frequently travel domestically.  It's liberating and exhilarating to be able to travel so easily.  However, it does put a lot of stress on the culture and the environment.  Some ancient cities are completely transformed to accomodate tourism and lost much of its original charm in the process.  The effect of commercial tourism on many of the places I visited in the past years made me sad.  It's the same for introducing other leisure activities to the large population - a liberating lifestyle, a huge economic opportunity, and a risk to the nature and the environment.  No wonder today's China attracts the bold, curious, and ambitious - the opportunity and the challenge are abound.  It would be very interesting to see how China progresses in the future years as it will not only have a bearing on the Chinese economy and environment, it will have a global bearing as well.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine in front of the fireplace at Alfafa's. She was exhausted after a day of school and the after school activity - a strenuous hour of training in a swim team. I heard that the Chinese kids are often as busy as she is, if not more.  The academic pressure is building up in elementary school already in China - kids study hard so they can be accepted by a reputable middle school. Jasmine and her classmates are not under the same pressure. So it's not surprising that the Chinese kids are able to demonstrate excellent math in the scrapbook.

Day 162 - Clapping

Thought of the day: I helped Jasmine's class make dumplings today.  It was a bit stressful to prepare, demonstrate, rush home to cook and then rush back to serve warm dumplings before the school was over.  The kids had lots of fun making dumplings and loved the tastes so it was well worth the effort.  I have noticed that if you are a Chinese, somehow everybody expects you to be an expert dumpling maker.  However, I have never made dumplings before coming to the US.  It is a northern China tradition and is just not done much in the south.  A friend's excellent recipe for making dumpling fillings and a few handy YouTube videos demonstrating dumpling wrapping and cooking techniques saved my day.  Yes, cultural stereotypes can surely be frustrating and sometimes self-fulfilling, but when it comes to dumplings, I really don't mind!

Photo of the day:

This kids adored their teacher!  And perhaps the dumplings gave them extra energy to be so enthusiastic at the end of a school day.

Day 147 - Expert Share

Thought of the day: Jasmine did her last "expert share" presentation in her elementary school today.  In "expert share", a student is supposed to make herself an expert on a subject that she is passionate about, and then share her knowledge and observations with the rest of the class in three mini-presentations, each ending with a Q&A session.  Jasmine skipped the first step and jumped right into sharing - OK, she did spend an hour each night before a presentation to read some facts on the internet and make a poster for the next day.  It was partly my fault - I forgot to inform her that her expert share was coming up until the last minute. But in any case, I think she still got a lot out of this.  There are a number of interesting activities like this in school, for example, the Science Fair and Destination Imagination.  These activities can be both challenging and rewarding at the same time and are great for young minds that are developing rapidly both intellectually and emotionally.  Literacy and math are certainly important, but I wouldn't be surprised if these optional enrichment activities could have a broader and deeper impact on their development than the required curriculum.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine doing her "expert share" on Star, her darling betta fish, which I brought into the classroom today.  She was holding the poster on the right and her teacher was holding it on the left.  The topic of this third and last sharing was "how to maintain the tank".  Jasmine took care of Star all by herself so, in a way, she is an expert, despite the fact that she hasn't done much research or reading on betta fish.