Today we attempt to get H.o.p. to let us work on his computer. We are likely to fail though he is aware his is out of memory and needs to be upgraded and get a new video card. Oh, Marty walks in and says he’s paying H.o.p. to come with him to the studio to help him clean up. While they’re gone, I can start work on it. Oh wait, now H.o.p. says to go ahead and work on his computer, that he’s ready.
We did synonyms, antonyms, prefixes and suffixes this week. That went well.
Not so well went science yesterday, which he loves. A book had suggested using a styrofoam ball and lamp to discuss the tilt of the earth and why we have seasons. We already had from puppet making a styrofoam ball with a stick stuck through it. I marked north and south poles and an equator and pulled out a lamp and proceeded with explanations. H.o.p. wanted to make a solar eclipse and I should have gone with the change and played out the solar ecilpse. Instead I said OK enough of the solar eclipse, we can do that later and proceeded with talking about earth’s tilt. H.o.p. was thinking about solar eclipses and snow monsters and the Lego castle he wants to build for the snow monster he wants to eventually buy and the gong that he wants to buy because now he’s decided he must have a gong. When I asked him questions about the seasons afterwards, he had absorbed nothing and H.o.p. hates to get things wrong. Not all things but some things. He doesn’t mind, peculiarly, doing bad animation, he understands it is learning process. But he hates getting other things wrong.
The book illustration we were using for teaching part of this was pretty bad and that didn’t help. It was lame. It even confused me a bit at first. If you’re trying to show someone who learns visually why the poles experience unending night in their respective winters, and unending day in their respecting summers, they didn’t show it very well. And he wasn’t getting the idea from the styrofoam ball. I really should have gone with the eclipse.
H.o.p. disappeared under the table, pouting over his wrong answers. You can tell him a thousand times that wrong answers are part of the path to getting right ones and it’s all right and he still doesn’t appreciate the concept–unless, y’know, it has anything to do with art.
I got a different idea for how to demonstrate the reason for seasons and H.o.p., beginning to climb out from under the table, clunked his head on it.
He was tired. That was a problem, too.
The table of course was at fault. The table had hit him. “Get rid of that table!” We pretty quickly got that out of the way and the table was once again his friend and endearing.
He didn’t like mom’s next idea for discussing the seasons. I was going to be the sun (holding lamp) and he was going to do the earth thing. He didn’t like that and I don’t blame him because what seemed initially to me like a good idea, I realized was probably about as lame as the styrofoam ball and lamp. “I don’t want to be a big planet.” Then he complained about me being the sun and how the lamp was shining in his eyes. Fair enough, I’d complained earlier when he had shone the lamp in my eyes.
I should have left it at that. He was too tired. But I was perversely determined. I dug out the online Encyclopedia Britannica. It was useless! I went searching online and found more lame illustrations. I know there are good ones out there, I just wasn’t coming across them.
Drama ensued, I forget over exactly what but it started with the tilting earth, which was now his enemy.
We ended up reading stories instead and he got out of his mood.
We went through Netflix and chose like a hundred gazillion “fun” (won’t know until we see them) educational films that he wants to see. There’s two years worth of viewing in the queue. Longer maybe since we’re ending up keeping the films a week before we send them back in.
“I told you it would take me an hour ro clean up,” H.o.p. comes in fussing from cleaning up two big bins of toys he’d dumped all over the living room.
“It didn’t take you an hour, it took you ten minutes.”
OK, finally I can start work on H.o.p.’s computer. I’ve got dozens of his little animations to pull off of it that he did before his computer got funky. Thousands of photos to go through with him that he took for stop-animation. He’s still not taking enough photos and gets frustrated when putting the things together. Oh well, he’s not ready for me to work on his computer yet. He opened his animation program and decided he wasn’t done with one of the animations and has started working on it again.
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