Category: Children

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Arguing with a cheetah

My daughter’s Grade 1 class has been practicing debate techniques. Yesterday morning, after reading a book about cheetahs (her favourite animals), my daughter said that if she had a debate with a cheetah about the black “tear marks” that help cheetahs avoid sun glare, it would go something like this (quoting her almost verbatim):

“The Cheetah would say:

— My tear marks are better than your sunglasses, because I don’t have to put them on and cannot lose them.i

Then I would say:

— Yes, Cheetah, however, I can take off my sunglasses anytime I want, but you cannot take off your tear marks!

And the Cheetah would have nothing to say to that! <victorious laughter>”

I am suddenly worried about any potential arguments we might have in the future….

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Applied science for first-graders

Last week, I was invited to give a talk to my daughter’s Grade 1 class about my research. This was a part of a series of visits from parents, where we talked about our jobs. The children have been learning about pollution and contributions to community, so we talked about my research projects related to hydro-acoustics, swimming robots (I gave them some HEXBUG toys as an example) and noise pollution in the ocean.

It was a new benchmark for me in terms of targeting a talk to specific audience. I usually explain to my graduate students that it is important to be able to talk about their research at various levels of detail – from a literally single-sentence answer to a “what do you do?” kind of question to an hour-long seminar-style presentation for colleagues working in the same field. A bunch of first-graders is a fundamentally different audience. I knew from my daughter that the expectations of me to tell something fascinating were high, so I was compelled to prepare well. I don’t remember when it was the last time when I had to refine the focus of my presentation so many times. Actually, as my wife pointed out when I showed my initial draft to her, the concept of “presentation” itself was not a good framework to begin with when talking to six- and seven-year-olds. I knew from my daughter that the expectations of me to tell something fascinating were high, so was compelled to prepare well.

From my perspective, the talk went really well. I told the kids that some of my favourite things to do when I was their age were playing with toys and reading books. And it was pretty amazing to realize that this still applies to the present-time me. More often than not, I take for granted how many cool things I use in my research – lasers, high-speed cameras, model ships,.. and that the actual mandate of my work is to be curious about things I don’t know and to tell other about what I learn. This one realization made the whole class visit experience worthwhile for me.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how interactive our conversation with the kids was. I wish I had a fraction of that level of engagement in my senior undergrad classes. At the Grade 1, there was a forest of hands in the audience at all times, including those when I was not asking any questions! I wonder, at what point in the educational process do the students lose the burning desire to tell others about what they know? Or perhaps, those of us, who don’t lose it, become professors.

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Favourite things to do

My daughter asked what was my favorite thing to do when I was a child (she said that she knew that now my favorite thing to do was hugging her and kissing my wife). I thought that it was an excellent question, because, according to many experts, what people want to become at the age of nine or so is a good predictor of their natural tendency, curiosity and, therefore, a reasonable direction for developing a career or at least taking up as serious hobby.

My favourite pastimes when I was nine were drawing/painting and reading books. I suppose it is not surprising that both of them are still high on my list. Reading widely is also kind of a requirement in my job as a professor. I am glad that I do not depend on art to make a living, though. This is not (only) because I doubt my ability to do so effectively, but because I suspect that it is difficult for creative curiosity to survive under the pressures of doing art as the main job.

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The mushroom story

This weekend was incredibly packed with activities for my daughter, even considering her typically busy schedule. She played violin at a local festival, had two dance classes, and played golf – all in a single day. And then, the next day, we were back at the golf course for more practice – all because she had such a good time the day before with some fantastic mentors from our university golf team.

I am continually surprised at how easygoing my daughter is. I think her secret is that she naturally focusses on one thing at a time and enjoys it. She is definitely a good example for me in that respect. She even turns commuting into story time, by asking me and my wife to tell her stories from our childhood, sometimes retelling the stories that she heard many times before. She actually knows them so well that she asks to make sure that her favourite details are not omitted.

Lately, she has been asking for “the mushroom story.” Here it is.

When I was about five years old, I went to a summer resort with my grandparents. One morning, as we were walking in the forest, we found a huge, round, white mushroom on a log. It appeared there overnight after rain. We picked it and brought it to our condominium, where my grandfather and I turned the mushroom into a monster’s head with some charcoal and sticks. Then, we placed it on the edge of an open window and shot acorns at it from across the room using a slingshot that my grandfather made for me a few days earlier. I suspect that he retrospectively realized that giving a slingshot to a five-year-old was not a particularly responsible thing to do, because I had been shooting acorns at everything in sight since laying my hands on it. So having an actual target must have been a welcome development.

At some point, I had a direct hit that knocked the mushroom/head over the windowsill. Grandpa and I didn’t give it a second thought and went on to play some other game. Our condo was on the second floor, and soon there was a knock on our door. My grandmother opened it – it was the neighbour-lady from downstairs, and we heard that she said something to the extent that “your boy splashed some nasty green paint all over our window.” My grandmother said that it was not possible, because the boy had been under constant supervision of his grandfather, who was an exceedingly responsible gentleman. But the grandfather came out and said that he might have an idea of what had happened. And he went to see the aftermath for himself. It turned out that the mushroom that fell downstairs was full of bright green spores that exploded all over the neighbour’s window (in fact, completely covering it with green goo) when the mushroom hit the ground.

My daughter inevitably asks how it all ended, and she is visibly glad when I tell her that I did not get into a slightest bit of trouble. My grandfather cleaned up the mess himself, probably feeling the responsibility of not directing my playing into a less destructive direction.

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Justifying fun

In his auto-biographical “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, Richard Feynman criticized physics textbooks of his day by saying that most examples in them were written by people, who never tried to replicate the problems as experiments (for example, to illustrate friction, one could have timed how long it would take a rolling ball to stop on different surfaces). When I first read it, I thought how much fun it would be to do things not for their potential value or impact, but simply for “the pleasure of finding things out”, as Feynman put it. But at the same time, I thought that it would be prohibitively impractical: who would be interested in a simple friction experiment that must have been done countless times before?

It is justification of trying and doing fun things that what I, and probably most other people, struggle with. Perhaps, one way to think about it is to somehow link the individual fun experiments into larger-scale projects. Perhaps, thinking about them as contributing to a “body of work“, e.g., learning a skill, developing a relationship with a child, etc.

Speaking about doing fun things with children, last week, I learned that a cheetah, my daughter’s favourite animal, can cover 7 m in a single stride. This came from the illustrated book called “Animal!” that she spent a lot of time with over the Spring break. As a side note, the photographs in that book and nothing short of amazing – quite inspiring. In the spirit of Feynman’s suggestion, we measured 7 m with a measuring tape, and it turned out that a cheat could jump across both our living and dining rooms at once! I must say that it is one thing to read about 7 meters in a book and another to see what it looks like in reality. Power of a physical demonstration in action!

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Keeping up with children

After spending a beautiful afternoon at the Butchart Gardens, my daughter wanted to go for a run/bike ride with me. We first did thins kind of thing last year in Milan. I would go running, and she would bike alongside. We would go from our apartment along Naviglio Martesana to a playground that was about 2.5 km away. That was about how far my daughter could pedal nonstop at that time. Today we did a solid 5k, almost without a word of complaining from her. Our average pace was still nothing to brag about, but I am not taking for granted that we can do this together at all. At some point, it is I who won’t be able to keep up and will be slowing her down. What are the chances that she would want to run with me then?

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Learning experience

Last week, I was eager to try out my new markers, which I got as a birthday present. So I started drawing a portrait of my daughter, based on a photo that I took in Sindney, where she was holding a scooter and squinting into the sun. I did a pencil sketch, and it looked pretty good, so I was quite pleased. When I started shading it with markers, though, the colours on her face came out so dark, that I immediately declared the drawing ruined, and tore it apart in a classical Georgia O’Keeffe fashion. Even though I know that it is important not to become attached to the final product and instead to treat each artistic project as a learning experience, it is amazing how easy it is to start expecting pleasant surprises at the end of every drawing session.

Anyway, one lesson learned from this: don’t be in a rush to destroy things because (a) they don’t look that bad the next day when seen with fresh eyes, and (b) many mistakes are actually correctable, even with such media as markers.

  • More seriously, a couple of things to keep in mind when drawing are:
  • Maintain subtlety of the colours and the tones seen in the subject. It is easy to become too excited and over-paint things.
    Throw away the idea of creating a pretty picture. This seem counter-intuitive, but it is actually somewhat similar to sutemi in kendo – abandoning the idea of winning and throwing yourself completely into the attack.

It actually took me some concentrated thinking and watching a few YouTube videos to somewhat come to grips with blending the markers. i also decided to zoom in on the portrait to keep things more manageable for my next attempt. Here is the result.

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Snow day

Last year, we missed the uncharacteristic snowfalls in Victoria, because we were in Milan on sabbatical, but today we had a rare glimpse of beautiful winter weather. The kids in my daughter’s class even got a break from homework to enjoy the snow.

We built a snowman. And if you think that our sculpting skills are wanting, our neighbour’s dog didn’t think so – he was baking at it for quite a while, trying to scare it off our lawn. I consider it indisputable acknowledgement of likeness by an impartial judge.

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Treats and rewards

I often thought about treats and rewards as interchangeable terms, but lately I’ve realized that they are quite different. Rewards imply expectation of a certain performance, and this makes me a bit uneasy, particularly in the parenting context. I think that developing a dependance on external approval, especially of performance rather than effort, can be counter-productive. It removes the sense of control and agency. For adults too (I am thinking about myself here), the expectation of a reward can substitute the original motivation for doing something.

On the other hand, a treat, in my mind, is something entirely positive. It is doing a pleasant thing for someone (or for oneself) simply because we want the person to feel good. There is no expectation that a treat has to be earned or that it is due regularly. Actually, I think that regular treats are good, but they have to different in nature from one another to avoid Hedonic adaptation to their positive effect.

With my daughter, I like celebrating seemingly insignificant milestones like the first day of a school term or the first day of vacation by doing something outside of our daily routine.

For myself, a change in activity is often a nice treat in itself. I think I somehow developed a pool of go-to treats that I can rotate and that I know would be good for me in general, like reading a non-technical book while eating lunch (my current one is the biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson) or working on a personal photo project for a couple of hours a week.

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Things I like

One of the things I look forward to every week is waiting for my daughter while she goes to an art lesson after school. I sit at a cafe next door to the studio, and the one hour I have there feels like a bonus time to catch up on things that usually get crowded our of my day. I am glad that she is doing something that she enjoys and that, at the same time, I can work on something without the pressure to be productive.

Surprisingly, productivity takes care of itself, probably because I don’t rush to finish anything in particular and can actually think about what I am doing. I can think about the paper I’ve been reviewing and how it relates to my own research instead of rushing to finish and submit the review, as I often do in the office during “regular” work hours. Or I feel free to play with photos on my phone or computer to explore new processing techniques. Or I can read my own notes on the books that I’ve read in the past. Sometimes, I surprise myself with the ideas that I had at the time, but completely forgotten.