h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

EMR, what department is your mum in? If it's history, I probably know a couple of her students...or at least people she knows of. A really good friend who is in my 3rd year cohort did her undergrad at UCSD.

Don't worry...I'm not a creepy stalker person or anything...just one of those people who likes small world coincidences.

My mum's in Warren Writing -- each college within the university has a separate writing department. She teaches the basic required writing courses, Warren 10A and 10B. My dad's at UCSD too, in philosophy.

Don't worry. I know you're not a stalker. Only republicans are stalkers.

EMR

Wow, I'll have to ask my friend if she did anything there with Warren. Knowing her, she probably did. She's bloody brilliant, she is.

That'd be a funny coincidence. I like coincidences.

EMR

Ask your mum if she knows someone with the last name of Goldsworthy.

(I love that name, really I do).

I think I'd rather have my daughter in your school than in the ones in Irvine. Irvine's standards are outrageous. Did you have homework in kindergarten?

Actually, I went to kindergarten in a Montessori school in Atlanta. I lived there and went to school there until I was 9 (summer before fourth grade) when we all up and left to San Diego cause my dad got a job offer at UCSD. I didn't get homework for any of my years at that Montessori school.

My sister got homework in first grade that first year we were here, and all the subsequent years afterwards we've got homework in all our years of school, a load I am convinced increases exponentially as one grows older.

Other than having a crazy district superintendent who's infected with 'back to basics' and a 'two-hour literacy block', we do pretty well, especially since I live in an affluent neighbourhood with the best schools in town (that being why we moved to this neighbourhood). The literacy block does mean that we have to have two-hour-long periods for everything else too, though, and trust me, two hours of physical education is pure .

EMR

Sorry. last word was meant to be 'torture'.

Ei-ee! Two hours of phys ed? That would simply, well, suck. I had a knee problem, and I actually flunked a segment of phys ed in high school...gymnastics. I've never been able to turn a cartwheel, not even when I was a little girl, and darned if that wasn't okay.

I don't know. Do you ever get the feeling that pre-college education is sort of silly, in the sense that we expect (by we I mean society at large) students in grade, middle and high school to excel in all areas, whereas once you get to college, you pick a major based on your strengths and interests? I'm lousy at math, always have been. Which is why I went into history. But my daughter is expected to know math and spelling and geography...you know what I mean.

I'm looking for a Waldorf school for my daughter, because at this point, I'm thinking it's just a better idea.

Trust me, two hours of PE is awful. Especially because I have a teacher that my dad likes to call a 'fascist pig'. To get an 'A' for the marking period we have to run a mile in under eight minutes (under seven minutes for the boys). He says that effort doesn't matter and that he grades solely on performance. A couple of my classmates are making mock-serious plans to assassinate him.

We learn all this stuff in pre-college education that we're never going to have to use again in real life. I hate math with a passion, physics too, and I want to be a lawyer or a humanities professor when I grow up, so it's highly unlikely that I'm going to have to use trigonometry and quadratics in my day-to-day life.

How old is your daughter? I've heard that beyond the elementary school years, Waldorf schools aren't so beneficial, though I suppose that would depend on the child.

she's only 8, so it would be for a few more years. We'll see. I'm also looking at art magnet schools.

Now that's something that I'd recommend. I have a number of friends who go to the School for the Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA) downtown. It's a public school in which dance, theatre, vocal and instrumental music, and visual art feature as a much more significant part of the curriculum - the other San Diego City Schools rely on parent volunteers to get visual art into the elementary schools, and underpaid, part-time band teachers to educate all grades in instrumental music (band and orchestra).

We have something here called "Art Masters" where once a month, the kids learn about a famous artist and then try to recreate one of their works. It's fun when it's, say, Roy Lichtenstein, but not so much when they do formal art.

Actually, I hate that they have the kids copy artworks. It seems so restrictive of their creativity. Part of the problem with an art school is that they're constantly critiqued, and I have issues with that. When D was 4, she painted a canvas in about 10 minutes that ended up in a juried art show. That kind of raw eye cannot be taught, I don't think.

Off to do more laundry related stuff...hanging things up, ironing. I think I might skip that second part and do some thing more exciting, like clean the bathroom. Gods, my life is so exciting (I promise, being grown up isn't all it's cracked up to be).

My sister (she's 11) does this program called Monart, where the whole premise is that the kids learn how to create their own artwork by copying famous pieces. I must say, her copies always look much nicer than her original works of art, but I agree that it's restrictive of creativity. I like what they did at our elementary school, with the 'Art Corps' parent volunteers, which was to take a principle from a famous artist's work, or an art movement such as impressionism or cubism, and let the kids create their own art based on the basic ideas of that artist or movement. That way there's a bit of structure and it teaches the kids about different styles, but they still get to express themselves to some extent.

I'm perfectly content to stay a teenager. Freedom and independence, but no real responsibility other than school. Suits me!