Kai and Eidan are enchanted with each other. If they’re in a room together, Eidan will usually ignore Maria and I - his eyes will follow Kai wherever he goes, even if Kai’s back is turned. And whenever Eidan starts getting fussy, we can say, “Kai, help!” and he’ll happily come over and do some silly song and dance for Eidan, and put a smile back on his face. Kai also doesn’t like going anywhere without Eidan. For example, yesterday I took Kai for a quick trip to the grocery store, and after about 45 seconds in the car he exclaimed in a partially facetious, maudlin voice “I miss Eidan!” He’s also generous with kisses and hugs for his little brother, which is nice to see.
Eidan is thriving - he had a check-up last week, and he came in at about 75th percentile for height and about 45th for weight. We started him on rice cereal a few days ago, and he took to it immediately, although sometimes we have to switch to a bottle because he gets frustrated with the comparatively slow pace of eating vs. drinking. He is a remarkably smiley and talkative baby: he’ll offer up a smile for just about anybody he meets, and he loves to talk. It’s especially cute when he’s just waking up - he’ll talk to himself (or us, if we’re awake enough to pick up him right away) for a good 5-10 minutes. It’s like listening to someone speaking in tongues.
At four years old, Kai is in the peak age range for obsessing over Christmas. I think we wrote our first Christmas list for Santa back in October, and we’ve revised it a few times since. He likes to write the lists himself, and since he knows his letters but doesn’t yet know how to spell, he asks me to help him spell each word.
Watching the old Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer show the other day, Kai expressed his first doubts about Santa. He didn’t have trouble with the notion of a guy in a red suit who lives at the north pole and brings presents to boys and girls all around the world on Christmas Eve, but he wasn’t buying the magic flying reindeer. I propped up the story with the voice of parental assuredness, so he let it go. Then I started to wonder if it makes sense to try to get kids to believe in Santa anymore. It seems that the time frame between when kids can first understand and get excited about Santa, and when they start to perceive the whole thing as a crock, has become so small in the modern world that maybe it’s not worth the confusion it creates when they start to doubt the story. Of course, if we were to tell him Santa’s not real and it’s just a nice story, he’ll tell his friends at pre-school, and we would probably suffer the wrath of all the other parents at the school (we adults don’t like to admit it, but we’re subject to peer pressure just as much as kids).
Anyway, I can’t wait to see how Kai and Eidan’s relationship changes over time. I think the first change will come when Eidan starts to crawl. On the one hand, they’ll be able to actually play together, which they’ll both enjoy. On the other hand, Eidan will start getting into Kai’s stuff, which will probably spark their first real conflicts. But Kai is pretty good about sharing, so maybe it won’t be so bad…we’ll see.
A while back I tried to come up with a new title for my blog, but couldn’t think of anything I liked, and eventually gave up on it. Then last night I was listening to C-Tec while washing the dishes and heard the lyric “My wisdom is nothing but words,” and it clicked. For me it’s the perfect blog title, suggesting ambigously facetious self-deprecation, which is a space where much of my sense of humor comes from - to the extent I’m funny, anway ;-). I Googled it, and was surprised to find no one has laid claim to it yet (at least as far as I could tell, it’s hard to know for sure since it’s a common phrase).
And I think the subtitle should effectively pre-empt any smart alec remarks about my pictures ;-).
Eidan’s arrival took the frequency of my blogging down a notch, and this last month of the semester has taken it down another notch. The midterm for my Java class was right before Thanksgiving, and the final exam is on the 20th. The work has gotten harder as the semester’s progressed, so it’s been taking up every last iota of my free time (and then some).
I had high hopes for the class, as it’s taught by the head of Penn’s MCIT program. Now that it’s almost over, I have to say I’m very disappointed with it. My perspective on it is probably unusual, in that I’ve taught a semester-long programming course, but never taken one until now. It was an “introduction to programming” class (I would have been able to skip it if I already knew Java, but I didn’t), so a good number of the students had no programming experience. The most significant shortcoming is that he did not spend any time at all teaching us how to program. The lectures - delivered in an unwavering, soft-spoken monotone - were all about the rules and features of Java. That’s not enough. An analogy would be a baseball coach trying to teach his team how to play solely by lecturing about the rules of baseball. Teaching the rules is important, but it’s also essential to get into techniques and strategy, and he provided almost none of that. Successful programming is maybe 30% or 40% knowing the rules and capabilities of the language your using, and the rest is creative problem solving. The assignments were very challenging, and it was frustrating to watch my fellow students stumble blindly through them, as they just weren’t equipped to do them (he grades on a curve to compensate).
When I taught my Perl class I spent half my time lecturing about Perl, and the other half presenting common programming challenges and explaining different ways to approach them. I’m hoping that there are other teachers in the MCIT program who also take this approach, as the classes I’ll be taking in the future will get into areas of programming I’m not familiar with, so I won’t be able to fall back on my experience to get me through them. Unfortunately, the first 3 courses I have to take are all taught by the same professor I have now, so I’m stuck with him for two more semesters :-(.
If I could be in any program I wanted, I’d go down the street to Drexel University’s MSIS program. It’s been ranked #1 by US News & World Report. But one of my employee benefits at Penn is that I can take classes here for free (well, almost free - the cost of the tuition is treated as if it were part of my salary, so I pay some extra tax), and it’s hard to compete with free.
