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Merry Whatever
Dec. 25th, 2009 07:54 pmHope allayez have been or are having a good time. We have been too. C has been mostly delightful; B has been sick but game (and those long naps are golden no matter what their source)
Today I learned how much there still is to learn.
For me: our sleds are completely unsuitable for packed snow. They don't steer, and the only possible way to slow down, namely digging in both heels, throws up roostertails of snow directly into the faces of the riders. "I can't see! There's snow all over my face! That was not a good experience! I don't want to do it again!" Other people with smaller, boxier pieces of plastic fared much better (as did C and I when we borrowed one).
For C: pretty much everything there is to know culturally about christmas. From Charlie Brown, he got that Snoopy is voiced by an actor. From the Grinch, he got that the scene on top of Mount Crumpet when they pull the sleigh back from the brink is a physics violation. Oh, and the Grinch feels better about christmas when it's over. So many things packed into even simple expressions of the dominant culture, and not clear how much of it can actually be taught rather than just absorbed by experience (which he mostly won't have).
(I whistle a lot when I'm with C, even more with B, since there are only so many things to converse about past "Bring Big Red Barn to Dad", and one of the things I was whistling today was "When Johnny Comes Marching Home". As I did, I considered how much cultural baggage is contained in a passage of a dozen notes or so, how much history. Its use in Dr Strangelove, for example, must be very nearly incomprehensible to people of generations that have not heard and sung it from early childhood -- with all the sentiments about war and familiarity with war that that implies. And Dr Strangelove itself is probably mostly incomprehensible to people who haven't grown up with the likelihood of annihilation woven into their everyday lives. If anything, they watch the movie as a window into that time -- should they care to have one. It puts some perspective on my plans to explain to C that we do some things the way we do because of the views that his great-greatgrandfather formed 150 years before he was born.)
Oh, and when he got home from watching a movie with his friend Henry L tonight: ""this little robot's batteries are dead. Please put three AAAs in my battery compartment in the morning."
Me too.
Today I learned how much there still is to learn.
For me: our sleds are completely unsuitable for packed snow. They don't steer, and the only possible way to slow down, namely digging in both heels, throws up roostertails of snow directly into the faces of the riders. "I can't see! There's snow all over my face! That was not a good experience! I don't want to do it again!" Other people with smaller, boxier pieces of plastic fared much better (as did C and I when we borrowed one).
For C: pretty much everything there is to know culturally about christmas. From Charlie Brown, he got that Snoopy is voiced by an actor. From the Grinch, he got that the scene on top of Mount Crumpet when they pull the sleigh back from the brink is a physics violation. Oh, and the Grinch feels better about christmas when it's over. So many things packed into even simple expressions of the dominant culture, and not clear how much of it can actually be taught rather than just absorbed by experience (which he mostly won't have).
(I whistle a lot when I'm with C, even more with B, since there are only so many things to converse about past "Bring Big Red Barn to Dad", and one of the things I was whistling today was "When Johnny Comes Marching Home". As I did, I considered how much cultural baggage is contained in a passage of a dozen notes or so, how much history. Its use in Dr Strangelove, for example, must be very nearly incomprehensible to people of generations that have not heard and sung it from early childhood -- with all the sentiments about war and familiarity with war that that implies. And Dr Strangelove itself is probably mostly incomprehensible to people who haven't grown up with the likelihood of annihilation woven into their everyday lives. If anything, they watch the movie as a window into that time -- should they care to have one. It puts some perspective on my plans to explain to C that we do some things the way we do because of the views that his great-greatgrandfather formed 150 years before he was born.)
Oh, and when he got home from watching a movie with his friend Henry L tonight: ""this little robot's batteries are dead. Please put three AAAs in my battery compartment in the morning."
Me too.
