नवी पोस्ट - देवनागरीत!

मी आत्ता ब्लॉगर वर साइन केलं तर समोर काय तर देवनागरी फॉण्ट! सगळ्यांना हां ऑप्शन असतो का फक्त मलाच आहे हे पाहिले पाहिजे। बहुधा मी देवनागरीवर पोस्ट लिहिल्यामुळे मला त्यांनी हा ऑप्शन दिला असेल। ब्लॉगर ची कमाल आहे!

This is something else! I did not expect to see an option to write Devanaagari on Blogger of all places. I doubt that everyone is the world gets this option. Most likely I was given it because I wrote about Devanaagari recently. I am not able to write exactly what I want, but it's close. I am truly impressed by Blogger.

More Logic Links

Supriya and I have had a strange ritual the last few nights. She and Aseem love to watch "Drake and Josh" from 9 to 10. Aseem goes off with Manisha to sleep, and then Supriya says, "Let's do Logic Links!" It makes perfect sense actually. She has a ton of physical energy and it's only when it's all burned off that she can tackle purely mental stuff.

So she sits down on her bed and puts the lid of a bin in her lap as a tray. I read her a puzzle and she works it out. I read the instructions slowly, one at a time. She thinks about each and starts assembling the circles. Once we have read through all the instructions and she has a decent hypothesis, I go back and read all the instructions again. She verifies that they are all met, "Check. Check. Check..." Then we go to the end of the book and double-check her answer against the key.

She has been doing anywhere from 4 to 8 a night, as her mental energy allows. I am impressed by the progress she has made in the last couple of weeks. She still tends to jump the gun a little and assumes more than the instruction is telling her, but that's rare. We just got done with #50, which is the halfway point (the book is aimed at grades 3 and 4).

Supriya and Her Sansa

Supriya's cousin Gargi gave her the Samsung Sansa m240 (mp3 player) for Thanksgiving ("the best gift Gargi ever gave me!"). She spent the whole day going around the house with headphones on, listening to the songs I uploaded and also the radio. Aseem was feeling rather left out so she gave him her CD player (also given to her by Gargi). At one point she gave the right earbud to Aseem - with the left one still in her left ear - and they walked around listening to the Sansa together. "Look, Dad," she said. "I am 'i' and Aseem is 'Pod'!" Then she added, "I am 'mp' and he is '3'!"

Aseem's Reading

Today Aseem pointed to the calendar and asked, "Does it say October?" I asked him to point to what he was asking about. So he went up to the calendar and pointed to the word October. He added, "It is November now!" Firstly, I did not expect him to read "October", but evidently the time he spends on Starfall.com is helping him figure out words. Also it is just like Aseem to know that it is November and that it is just plain wrong that the calendar is still showing October!

"Logic Links"

We have had two Logic Links books for a year now. Supriya worked on Book A ("grades 1 and 2") a while ago and did many problems from it. Yesterday she brought it out and basically finished it. She did not do all but did many near the end. Aseem was nearby and got interested. So we went to the beginning of the book and they both did the easier ones side by side. Aseem did not seem to have any problems with the puzzles. I am going to try to involve him more in Book A and see what he does with it.

Today Supriya and I worked on a few puzzles from Book B ("grades 3 and 4"). The level of difficulty is much higher and now they are in 2 rows. She was able to zip thru 6 thru 12 without any problems. She still gets a little confused between left and right, but she has the logic part of it down pat. We will keep working on the book until she tires of it or finishes it, whichever comes first!

"Is Raising Kids a Fool's Game?"

This is an article by Karyn McCormack on BusinessWeek Online. It opens with:

Like many parents, I'm suffering from sticker shock. It's not just the $375 monthly tuition for preschool. (And that's for just three hours, two days a week; five full days would cost me $1,000.) Little things add up, like the school's solicitation to donate to their school in Africa and monthly dues for Scholastic Book Club (how could you say no?). The school even put a price tag on potty training: If my daughter, who will turn 3 in December, was not able to use the toilet by herself by the end of September, I'd be charged $100 a month until she achieved this milestone. (She did it, whew!)

I don't know whether to laugh or cry! All I can say is that I live in a different reality.

Fall Hike at Great Brook Farm

We went on a great Fall hike at Great Brook Farm State Park yesterday with our friends Katie and Ray. It was cold and we were in parkas and mittens. We walked for about forty minutes, following horse-tracks and hoping to get lost. Then we came to a meadow where we took a snack-break. We played tag for about half an hour and got warm enough to take off our parkas. Now it was time to head back. That's where we came across this humongous mushroom growing on a tree stump. Since the ice-cream shop was closed we came back to our house for some ice-cream. After that Supriya invited herself & Aseem over to their house for dinner! A great time was had by all.

Learning about Orchestration

The kids and I were listening to the Beatles "1" CD in the van. It came to "Come Together" and about a minute into the song it struck me. There is hardly any guitar or keyboard in it. The accompaniment consists of mostly drums and a very loud bass guitar. In fact the bass made the whole van vibrate! There are a couple of guitar riffs in the song and then there is a guitar solo at the end, but not much more. Very unusual, I said and Supriya agreed.

On the way back Supriya asked me to play the song again ("that song with the loud bass"!). After that I went back and played "Hey Jude" and we went over its orchestration. It started very minimalistically with just lead voice and piano, but then we listened carefully and checked off the other instruments as they came in one by one - tambourine, backup voices, drums (& cymbals) and finally the bass guitar. I feel very good about this discussion with Supriya.

Another Great Article by Tim Ferriss

This one is about learning (not mastering) a language in ONE HOUR. I have not tried this yet (nor am I likely in the near future), but what I like about Tim is that he always challenges conventional wisdom and finds short-cuts to wherever he wants to go.

For a past couple of weeks I have been reading up on running marathons. We watched this fabulous documentary called "The Marathon Challenge" on NOVA, about 13 "ordinary" (i.e. fairly physically unfit) people who trained together for 9 months. They all managed to complete the Boston marathon! A friend of mine who recently finished a half-marathon told me that the rough rule of thumb is that it takes about 15 weeks of training once you can run for 30 minutes. Now that's news to me! I thought it takes years and years of preparation to run a marathon. (I guess 90% of it is half mental.)

That reminds me of another conversation I had with the great Dr. Greg Lyne (a god among barbershoppers). I asked him how long it would take for a quartet to qualify for the Internationals (basically a matter of performing at a certain level). He replied, "One year!" Not years and years. One year. I have come to believe that if you are really committed - which means being smart about rehearsing, working intensely on the basics and above all being willing to change - one year will take most quartets to the Internationals. In fact I am trying to put together a quartet to do just that.

The point is that we have a picture in our head about how difficult a certain thing is and how long it's going to take us to get there. It also seems obvious that the insiders have a vested interest in prolonging the training ("It will take you 10 years to master a language!" "It will take you 6 years to get a black-belt.") There is a lot of research and personal experience (such as Tim Ferriss's) out there that proves otherwise.

Devanaagari Continues...

So Supriya got up in the morning and wrote some more Devanaagari stuff: "Hey Dad, I wrote my name again without looking at it [what she wrote yesterday]!" She and my mother spent more than half an hour just now rewriting all our names and then names of several cities. It's great to see Supriya turned on like this and also the bonding between her and her Aaji (grandmother).

Writing in Devanaagari

Today my mother taught Supriya how to write all our names in Devanaagari. Supriya has been copying them over and over again, trying to cement it in. It's a lot to take in in one day, but she has managed to absorb a lot. (Go to this Wikipedia article for more.) It's an abugida script (that sounds so esoteric! I learned that word from the Wikipedia article.) - where you start with a basic consonant sound and modify it using diacritical modifiers to denote different vowel sounds. I explained to Supriya the difference between this system and the standard alphabetical way of doing things. It's rather obvious when you write Devanaagari and I think Supriya got it.

IQ Article on Cato Unbound

This month's lead article on Cato Unbound is "Shattering intelligence: implications for education and interventions" by Prof. James R. Flynn (he of the Flynn Effect, the discovery that over the past century average IQ has been increasing at a rate of about 3 points per decade across most countries). This is college-level material. I just read it and will likely have to go over it again to fully grasp it. Worth reading in any case.

Supriya's Marathi

Supriya has always had a decent grasp of Marathi and since my mother moved in with us this Summer, her Marathi is getting more exposure. Aseem has never been immersed in Marathi and understands very little.

Today Supriya and I made a list of everyday words she knows in Marathi and we came up with more than 35 (besides counting from 1 to 10). She probably knows many more by context and inference (like all of us). She is well-prepared for our upcoming India trip. She still does not speak Marathi, but that is normal and OK with us. That's how I was with Konkani, my father's mother-tongue. I could understand conversations but did not feel confident enough to speak it.

I would not call Supriya bilingual yet, but she is well on her way there. If we went and stayed in Pune for three months, she will be probably be reasonably bilingual.