What They Said

Note: this post will be much funnier and enjoyable if you can picture Jonah and Stephen and if you can "hear" them in your head.  If you can, this is pretty hilarious stuff.  If you can't this will seem a gratuitous "aren't my kids awesome in school" post (which it's not), and you can just skip it.

Three of our boys are in school: Timothy (10) is in fourth grade, Stephen (8) is in second, and Jonah (7) is in first.  Near the end of the first semester (in December) there is a sort of cumulative "exam" given, so that the teachers can gauge how well the children are learning.

In first and second grade, the student sits at a table with a parent volunteer.  The volunteer asks the question and then writes down everything the student says.  And I mean everything, as you'll see.  (My wife has done these before, and she says they're lots of fun.)

For the first graders, the question is along the lines of, "Tell us what you remember about the human body." They had done a unit on the body earlier in the year, spending weeks and covering most of the major organ systems.

Here's Jonah's answer.

The most greatest part is the skeleton. It keeps your brain safe like a helmet. But you need another part to cover it up. The skull is one of the coolest parts. The teeth are part of the skeleton that you can touch. That's how your skeleton feels. You have gums and they are pretty rubbery.

Now the rib cage. It looks like the wires. I like the spine. It's really cool. It has scale things.

The heart keeps you alive and it is red. It has these four spaces. They are like doors that open and close. Air goes in and air goes out.

The digestive system. My most favorite part is the esophagus. It goes through your chest, after your throat into your stomach. You can feel on your throat when the food is going down. It's like a muscle and pushes the food down.

When you rub your knuckles together, it feels weird.

Feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, smell. The brain can store memories. Sometimes you can't remember. Your brain makes you do whatever you have to do (like talking). They do that really quick.

Stephen's question was a bit more detailed.  He was asked about the Oceans, and was given a list of topics to cover.  Here's his answer.

There are the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic, the Arctic, isn't there a fourth one? What's the fourth one? I don't really remember the last one.

There are many creatures and plants an we learned about this last month, but I missed part of it on vacation. Some creatures are octopuses, sea horses, crabs, jelly fish. And there are some creatures in the deep water called the monkfish and squid. I have a movie called Planet Earth and it has deep waters and shallow. Let's go for some of the shallow. . . there are whales in the shallow waters and there are sharks that come up and catch anything they can. What other animals are there? There's something like a squid that lives in a shell that lived in the dinosaur times. . . what's it called? It lives in the deep and comes up to feed. Hey! I know pretty much my favorite ocean animal is the stingray. The stingray has a stinger on the back of its tail that it uses to catch prey and sting it. It also has these things on its mouth that help catch plankton and pushes it into its mouth (acting it out with his hands and mouth). Pretend like my fingers are the plankton and my hands are the thing-a-ma-jiggers, whatever they're called. They go inside and eat it up.

I think I should go to the deep now, see what I can remember about the deep. I think that's all I can remember.

A tide pool is where some rocks are in a circle and the water gets in and gets trapped. Some crabs live there and so do some starfish. What are those things called? That live in a shell? Do eels live in the open ocean or the tide pool?

A coral reef is a bunch of little corals. It starts by one coral that dies and then another one grows and dies then another one grows and on and on until it makes a beautiful coral reef. Some animals that live in a coral reef are some fish and maybe a bit of crabs, and well, let's just go with crabs and fish. Some interesting facts I found on the coral reef are it has many colors and it's an animal habitat, sometimes maybe, and it can come in many shapes and sizes and it can live for a very long time. I think that's everything I know.

The eel! An eel looks like a big wiggly string that's kind of wide and long. Eels eat some fish, some even eat sea urchins--spiky balls. I once stepped on one, I hate sea urchins. Good thing eels are here! An eel can get at least 23 feet and its enemies are stingrays, maybe. Really, I don't know much about the eels. It lives in the open ocean."

Timothy's exam was a writing assignment.  They had just done a huge module on Ancient Egypt, including both an oral and written report.  (He did very well on the reports, by the way.)  The end of semester exam had two questions that he could choose from, and one of the questions had four parts.  Unfortunately, due to misreading the instructions, he only answered one part of the one question.  But he did that one part very well and very thoroughly.

And no, I don't have it written out.  Sorry. 

Sam and the Toothpaste

Our boys get toothpaste for Christmas.  It's not their only gift, nor is it their main one (that spot seems to be held ad infinitum for LEGO's).  But neither is it a scorned gift, like socks.  

The big thing about Christmas toothpaste is that each of the boys gets his own tube (not that it comes in tubes anymore, but that name seems stuck in the language, like "books on tape"). Normally, throughout the year, as the boys use up a tube of toothpaste, I'll pick up a new one at the grocery store on the daily run.  If I forget, then we tell them, "Just use water."  And then I remind them, for the upteen-gazillionth time, that "80% of the work is just in brushing.  Quit whining about the 20%."  We like to work our math lessons in with our life lessons.  

One big problem with toothpaste is that Jonah (7) and Sam (4) go through theirs very quickly.  That would be caused by the way they use toothpaste:

Step 1. Put toothbrush on counter, bristles facing up.

Step 2. Put a lot of toothpaste on the bristles, and the handle, and the counter, and possibly the sink.  Do try your best not to get it on the floor.  If you do, wipe it up with whatever is handy, like Mom's bathrobe.

Step 3. Run the toothbrush under a high-powered stream of water from the sink until all the toothpaste has come off the bristles.

Step 4. Brush your teeth with the mildly toothpaste-infused water that remains in the bristles.

Now, it doesn't take an SEI-trained process specialist (*cough*) to see the flaws in this procedure.  It also doesn't take a genius to predict that Jonah and Sam will burn through a new tube of Christmas toothpaste very quickly.  In this case, it was two weeks.

Last week, Sam was out of toothpaste, but his eldest two brothers still had some.  So, when confronted at 7:30 with cries of, "My toothpaste is all used up," I told him to use some of brother's.  He started crying.

But this was not the normal, I'm-not-getting-my-way crying.  This was serious, mournful wailing.  "It's mint!  If I use mint toothpaste I'll die!"  He was serious.  He believed it.

"Who told you this?"  Sam has a wonderful imagination, but he's not death-obsessed, and would not come up with bizarre rules like this.  That's Jonah territory.

"Stephen told me," said Sam.

"I did not!" yelled Stephen (8), from the next room.  I believed him, since he's usually very up-front about these sorts of things (he's a brilliant trickster, and loves to take credit for his clever schemes).

Sam and I went back and forth on this for a few more minutes.  I told him he would not die from using mint toothpaste, and he claimed that "Brother told me I would."

Finally, "Brother" changed to "Timothy" (10), who was standing nearby but, atypically, was not getting involved in the discussion.

I looked directly at Timothy and asked, "Did you tell him this?"

Timothy looked sheepish and horribly guilty and said, "I didn't want him to waste my toothpaste."

I gave Timothy a look that conveyed both mild amusement and profound disappointment (it's a hard look to pull off, but having huge eyebrows helps).

So I said to Sam, "See, mint won't kill you."

Sam, not having heard a verbal counterspell or repeal of the original Law of Mint Toothpaste, yelled even louder, "But Timothy said it would kill me!"

I looked at Timothy again.  "Well?"

My oldest son is quick on the uptake.  "Sam," he said, "I was wrong.  You will not die if you use mint toothpaste."

Sam, looking up into Timothy's face, accepted this statement stoically and said, "Okay."  Then he turned around, went into the bathroom, and brushed his teeth with Timothy's mint toothpaste.  

He left at least a teaspoonful on the counter.

Willy Wonka

First, I'm sorry to begin writing (again) with a screed.  But I just figured this out the other day, and it's been stuck in my head.  Maybe now it will crawl out and leave me alone.

Second, SPOILERS AHEAD.  I'm going to give away important details about a book and a movie.  However, since the book has been out for over 40 years, and since the first movie has been out for 35 years, I find myself well within reasonable limits for posting spoilers.

When I was a kid, I loved Roald Dahl.  I read his books over and over again, particularly loving The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.  For some reason, I never got around to reading any of the Willy Wonka stories before seeing the movie with Gene Wilder. And since several parts of the movie were disturbing (Augustus in the pipe and the chicken-head-lopping-off boat ride, to be specific), and I didn't enjoy it very much.  So I never read the Willy Wonka books.

This past weekend, we took a trip to Memphis (Tennessee, not Egypt) to visit some friends.  They had lived in Atlanta for a few years, leaving two years ago to help plant a church.  They have a great old house in a great old neighborhood near downtown. We had a good time, even though almost their whole family was sick when we got there.  Also, it was cold (below freezing for the entire weekend), so we only spent 5 minutes outside, down at the riverfront.  But they are great folks, and so we didn't mind staying inside all day with them.

The drive to Memphis is long, so my wonderful wife got some books on CD to help pass the time.  We ended up listening to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the way out and The Tale of Despereaux on the way home.

I liked Despereaux and think it's a great book for kids (our school apparently reads it in Second Grade, so there you go).  But, given my history, it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that interested me most.

As we listened to it on the way to Memphis, I was listening to how the book handled the scary parts.  Sure enough, Augustus Gloop did indeed get sucked into a pipe full of chocolate, get stuck, and then get pushed through by the pressure.  However, the boat ride in the book was made scary just by the fact that they were going fast through a tunnel.  Apparently that kind of excitement doesn't translate well into a movie, so they added a bizarre montage, including the chicken head removal, to make sure that we got the point.  Stupid movie.

With those issues out of the way, I settled down into the rest of the story.  As we got toward the end I noticed that the book lacked two things that were in the movie and that were very important to the plot.

First, Charlie and Grandpa Joe did not drink the Fizzy Lifting Drinks.  In the movie they do, and almost get cut to pieces by the fan.  In the book, Wonka explains about the drinks and the burping as the characters walk past the door (this explanation made my boys howl with laughter).

Second, while the book does talk about the spying done by other candy makers, the books does not have Slugworth approaching Charlie and trying to get an Everlasting Gobstopper.

Which leads me to my point.  The book and the movie are very different about one very important fact: how Charlie wins.

In the book, Charlie wins the contest by simply not being a spoiled brat.  This is shown in the story by him not breaking any rules.  The other four kids all break important rules, and they all disobey direct instructions from Willy Wonka.  It's made clear that each of the other children in the story are spoiled rotten by their parents and given whatever they want.  This leads to their downfall, sometimes with long-term consequences (Mike TV is 10 feet tall, Violet remains blue).

In the book, Charlie wins by following the rules. You can see why this would not be a popular object lesson in 1971, so the movie adds a twist.  

In the movie, Charlie breaks a rule, just like all the other children.  He and Grandpa Joe do go back and try the Fizzy Lifting Drinks.  So everybody breaks rules, but only those very clever people manage to avoid the consequences of disobedience.  Classic.

But if Charlie disobeys in the movie, how then does he win the contest?  I remember vividly what happens  They're standing in Wonka's office, he's just told them that they broke the rules by drinking the drink and dismissed them.  Charlie has lost.

What does Charlie do?  How does he make himself different from the other contestants?

He gives back the Gobstopper.  You see, all of the kids took a Gobstopper to give to Slugworth, even Charlie.  But he gives his back to Wonka.  Then the celebrations begin.  Charlie wins by not giving in to corporate greed.  He stuck it to The Man.  You can almost see this story line being written by the 1969 graduating class of Wellesley College.

There.  I've said it.  Whew.

There are other interesting differences.  In the book there are two parents per kid.  You can see why they reduce this down to one parent each in the movie, since that would be a lot of people on screen at one time.  But in the book, one parent is actively involved in spoiling each child, while the other parent stands back and lets it happen.

The language in the book is decidedly un-PC.  Augustus is called "fat," with a description of his appearance that made Jonah laugh out loud.  The Bucket family is described vividly as starving to death.  Mike TV's dad only speaks once (in my memory), and then only to tell his son to "Shut up."  Charlie's grandparents speak ill of the other contestants, as do the Oompa Loompas.

Books are better than movies.  We've gotten used to that fact, and we've tried our best to pound it into our boys' heads.  But it's bizarre to see a movie take such a wonderful book, remove the core, and then use the book's surface features to tell the opposite message.  

We'll read the book again, I'm sure.  Although I sound nothing like Eric Idle, and he does such a wonderful job with the voices.