EppsNet

Today was the last day of school here in Irvine . . .

“Can I get a ride to Orchard Park?” my son asks. He has friends that he meets there to play basketball.

“Did you check with Mom?” I ask.

“I don’t have to check with Mom,” he says. “I’m out of school now.”

“So you don’t have to check with Mom?”

“No. Not any more.”

After he checks with his mom, I drive him over to the park. Actually, he drives to the park and I ride along.

As we’re approaching a red light at Jeffrey and Trabuco, he says, “I’ll stop the car so you can’t even feel it.”

This is something I showed him how to do. I’m pretty good at it, but he goes through so many slow-motion false stops and starts that by the time he’s done, the car is almost entirely in the crosswalk.

“We’re in the middle of the intersection,” I point out to him.

“I did it though,” he says.

As we drive past the Arco station, I notice that gas prices are up over $3.00 again for a gallon of regular.

“Obama needs to stop playing basketball and deal with these gas prices,” the boy says.

“You’re right.”

Tomorrow’s the last day of school here in Irvine. I walk by my son’s room . . . he’s studying for his last finals and listening to bebop piano music, which is not on his normal playlist.

“What you listening to, Mr. Noodling Jazz Musician?” I ask.

“Thelonious Monk,” he says.

“Is that part of an assignment?” I know he’s been studying the Harlem Renaissance in English.

“No, it just helps me study.”

He’s in 10th grade now . . . he continues to improve his study habits and time management so I pretty much let him do things the way he wants to.

“OK. Let me know if you need anything.”

By this time tomorrow, my little boy will be halfway done with high school . . .

It was like a ghost town yesterday. The Lakers were playing a close-out game. It’s Finals Week at the local high schools. Everyone young and old had something to do.

My own 10th-grade boy spent 12 hours Saturday studying at the Barnes and Noble cafe at the Marketplace, followed by an Extreme English Breakdown session yesterday at Starbucks on Culver . . .

Good luck, students!

I’m reading a USC alumni magazine when I notice a mosquito flying around the living room ceiling. So I roll up the magazine, wait for the mosquito to drop down the wall a little bit, and crush it on the first swing.

I tell my son, “I knew my USC education would come in handy.”

The counselor also stressed that colleges are looking for well-rounded kids, not just academic standouts.

“If you’re talking about well-rounded kids, you’re talking about Casey,” I said. “He’s like a sphere, that’s how well-rounded he is.”

“That can be his new nickname,” she said. “Sphere.”

“I like it!”

We were at Northwood High today for an academic planning session with my son and his counselor.

One of the things the counselor went over in the college prep handbook was a section on interview tips.

“At a private school like USC,” she told the boy, “you can schedule an interview with them if you think that will help your candidacy.”

“UCLA won’t let you do that,” I added. “They don’t want to talk to you.” I went through the application process at both schools so I know all about it.

“None of the UC schools will do an interview with you,” she said.

“It’s very impersonal,” I said, “like if the DMV ran a university.”

“It’s worse. At the DMV, eventually you’ll get to talk to someone.”

“By the way,” I said, pointing to a “Joey Ramone, 1951-2001″ poster on the wall, “do you think Joey Ramone is a good role model for the kids?”

“I like him,” she said, “and it’s my office.”

“You’re the best counselor ever,” I said.

My son’s got an assignment to write a “metacognitive” for English — basically a short essay describing the thought process he went through in writing a longer essay.

“Let me know if you need any help,” I say. “You know my motto: I never metacognitive I didn’t like.”

What could the world be like if each day we asked ourselves, “What did you learn?” & “What did you teach?”

(Disclaimer for learning purists: until there is a shorter phrase for “create a context for someone to learn”, I’ll use “teach” as shortcut)

— Kathy Sierra

The IHF post-season honors have been announced. My kid was selected to play in the all-star game on April 18, and to receive a Special Achievement Award, sponsored by the Anaheim Ducks and bestowed by the IHF on kids who’ve distinguished themselves off the rink, via academics, community service and extracurricular endeavors.

It would be nice if modesty prevented me from mentioning this stuff, but I’m happy to see the boy coming into his own as a well-rounded young man.

Northwood High School dominated the Special Achievement Awards. The IHF has 30 high schools participating, 53 teams and almost 600 kids, of whom 11 were selected for this award. Four of the 11 were from Northwood, showing once again why Northwood owns all other high schools in Orange County and probably the nation . . .

I know my son had a history test today, and that history is a make-or-break class for him. I want to ask him about the test but we’re having a delicious family meal at Olive Garden and I don’t want to break up the festive mood in the event the news turns out to be bad.

I decide to ease into it with some small talk . . .

“So, how was recess today?”

o_O (BLANK STARE)

I continue, “I know you had a history test today but rather than get right into that, I thought we could start with some small talk about recess.”

He says, “I haven’t had recess since 6th grade.”

“Oh. In that case, how was the history test?”

It’s 7 p.m. and my son’s ready to make a deal . . .

“If I study for an hour,” he says, “can I go play basketball at 8?”

His mom is skeptical. “You just played Xbox for five hours,” she says.

He shakes his head vehemently. “Four-and-a-half hours,” he says.

If anyone ever told you there’s no reason to learn math in school, they are absolutely right!

Americans are so mathematically illiterate that you’re better off learning to speak Klingon if you want anyone to understand you.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve walked through a mathematical demonstration of some concept and gotten back a reply like “Well I don’t see any reason why . . .” or “Let’s have a meeting to discuss that.”

God, it’s painful.

If you’re still in school, don’t bother learning any more math than you absolutely have to. It’ll just come back to haunt you.

The last place I worked, I kept my James D. Watson bobblehead on a cubicle divider, next to a Spongebob bobblehead that belonged to a colleague.

Everyone who saw these two guys recognized Spongebob, but not one person ever recognized James D. Watson.

I mean, they knew it was someone named James D. Watson because his name is right there on the base, but despite the fact that he’s holding a double helix structure, nobody recognized him as James D. Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule.

(Ironically, one of the main reasons I got into software development was the opportunity to work with smart, educated people.)

I brought Watson with me to the place I work now, but unfortunately I accidentally knocked him off a credenza one morning and his head broke off. I tried a couple of times to glue it back on but it didn’t take. So I had to throw him away.

The real James D. Watson is actually still alive at age 80.

I posted something on Twitter about helping my son with The Great Gatsby and got what you might call a spam reply from this girl, who said “have u tried http://shmoop.com for The Great Gatsby?”

Evidently Shmoop, which I’d never heard of, has people hanging out on Twitter waiting for someone to mention a book, at which point they send back a “have u tried …” reply.

Lest you think that’s a totally ineffective thing to do, I actually did click over to the Shmoop entry on The Great Gatsby, which starts off like this:

The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of MTV Cribs, VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of…, and HBO’s Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spritz of adultery, and the little pink umbrella that completes this long island iced tea and you’ve got yourself a 5 o’clock beverage that, given the 1920’s setting, you wouldn’t be allowed to drink.

So it’s a little bit more hip than Cliffs Notes. I haven’t seen enough of it yet to know if I really like it, but I like it . . .

Wednesday was national signing day for college football. Looks like UCLA got a good group of kids.

One of my Facebook friends, a UCLA grad, updated his status to say that he thinks UCLA will now rule the city in basketball AND football.

I posted a comment on his status: What about SAT scores?

And within minutes he had dropped me from his friend list, after sending me an angry email saying that USC is getting smart kids internationally and out of state while UCLA has to take California kids and besides that they’re manipulating the stats and blah blah blah . . .

To fully appreciate that, you need to know that traditionally the perception has been that the rich SoCal kids go to USC while the smart kids go to UCLA. In recent years though, USC has moved ahead in SAT scores, GPA, National Merit Scholars, etc., and continues to widen the gap.

So now the USC kids are richer AND smarter and the Bruins aren’t taking it well. Not at all.

FIGHT ON!

It was after 11 p.m. last night. I was already in bed but my son was still downstairs doing homework. He’s got a hockey game tonight in Huntington Beach and he wanted to work ahead a little bit.

Then I heard: “WOOOOOOO! WAAAAAAAH! BABABABABABABABABABABABABA!”

I got up, went out to the stairs and yelled down, “What are you DOING?”

“It’s my homework war cry!” he yelled back.

Hmmm — having a homework war cry actually sounds like a pretty good idea to me so I let the matter slide and went back to bed . . .

The school thought Gillian [Lynne] had a learning disorder of some sort and that it might be more appropriate for her to be in a school for children with special needs. All of this took place in the 1930s. I think now they’d say she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they’d put her on Ritalin or something similar. But the ADHD epidemic hadn’t been invented at the time. It wasn’t an available condition. People didn’t know they could have that and had to get by without it.

— Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

First semester grades are out. My son missed getting straight A’s by a point and a half. He had an 88.5 in honors history.

He got an A in honors English with a 90.14.

The honors classes at Northwood are very demanding. Even the best students get low A’s and high B’s.

Three kids got A’s in the history class. The high score was a 91.1.

“The 91.1 is Ted,” my son says. We know Ted. “Ted is history. He’s bad at math, average in English, but he knows everything there is to know about history.”

“Make sure you touch base with the history teacher,” I say. “Let him know you’re really doing your best for him and ask him what you need to do to get that extra point and a half this semester. He’ll tell you.”

“He’ll say, ‘Study hard, get a good score on all the assignments, blah blah blah.’”

“You’re a pessimist,” I say. (I was going to say “fatalist” but I’m not sure he knows what that means.) “I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. They want you to do well and if there’s a close call on a grade, they may give you the benefit of the doubt. So be proactive with this guy.”

His mom chimes in at this point: “That’s right,” she says.

“I hate that,” the boy replies. “You don’t even know what he’s talking about. You just say ‘That’s right.’”

I say, “She doesn’t have to know what I’m talking about to know it’s right. If my lips are moving, it’s right.”

My wife is telling me that because Northwood finals are over today — Thursday — the boy now has a four-day weekend.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. It kind of makes sense to have Friday off, but why Monday?

“It’s semester break,” the boy says.

“Semester break?!”

“That’s right. It’s like the off season.”

The off season . . . it’s so ridiculous I have to laugh.

“Isn’t it nice you have a funny family?” my wife says.

“It’s like the all-star break,” the boy says.