Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah

I am still alive even if I don’t feel like it right now. I just spent the last week hanging out with thirty Czech kids for about ten hours a day. As an English teacher who works with kids, summer camps are one of my yearly highlights. I teach at English day camps here in Ceske Budejovice and Cesky Krumlov. The camps are five days long and usually just wall-to-wall zaniness. The first week was quite chill considering we had thirty campers, here’s the highlight reel:

Tondastruck

Tonda is a good kid mostly. He’s prone to having an overabundance of energy and we remembered that about him from last year. This year we nicknamed him, “Tondastruck” after the AC/DC song, “Thunderstruck.”

Zuzka the Indelible

Little Zuzi is five. She likes to vogue and throw shapes whether you’re looking or not. She says things like, “Alex is a flying saucer,” or, “Alex is a baby.” When my fellow counselor/teacher and fiance tried to correct her by saying, “Alex is a man,” Zuzi countered with, “No, Alex is a baby.”

The Space Cadets

In a space-themed camp it helps to have children who qualify as Space Cadets in the pejorative sense. Simon and Krystof were old enough to be at camp. We’ve had children who were even younger before and the aforementioned Zuzi was their age and behaved marvelously. These two little boys weren’t terrors per se, but you would often be making an announcement to the other twenty-eight campers and see those two way off in the distance somewhere throwing sand at each other. At one point I commented to my boss, Marketa, that maybe Simon didn’t understand the directions he was being given. She dryly replied, “I don’t think he even knows that he’s here.”  The best example was the last day when we were all standing in a big circle and we called out Simon’s name to give him his certificate and he wasn’t stepping forward to receive it. That was when we noticed he was about twenty feet away and playing in dirt.

Mein Americano is Nein Gut

We took the children to an outdoor play. This particular establishment runs plays for children every year and the shows take place in a hilltop forest. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. The plays themselves are quite lo-fi but the performances are good and the children love it. This particular play was sort of a riff on alien films and specifically “E.T.” I don’t speak Czech so I’m mostly corralling the children but at one point during the play an actress dressed as a princess called me over to her and gave me her hand and we ran off down a path. The children yelled after me and apparently after I was out of earshot Tondastruck told the lead actor that I was an American. So one of the organizers of the play came running after us and asked if I spoke Czech. When I answered no the princess did a U-turn and took me right back to the children as if nothing had happened. Then, as if to apologize and also make fun of the situation, the lead actor playfully said to me, “Mein Americano is nein gut.”

Vitek, the Crier of Many Tears

An interesting little guy. He was quick to answer questions in front of the whole group and was easily one of the most outspoken children in camp. Standing at three inches tall and aged five years old he was also aggressively sensitive. Being put on the spot made him cry. When he first arrived his eyes were cocked and loaded with watery salt bullets and he clutched a Czech/English dictionary to his chest as a means of comfort and protection. When we were at the outdoor play one of the actors asked the crowd of attending children why aliens might be coming to Earth. With nary a moment’s hesitation Vitek replied in Czech, “They must be coming to invade us.”

So Teenager-y

We tried something new this year. We raised the age cap on the camps so that older kids could attend. The plan was to mostly keep them separate from the younger campers and have their lessons be more conversational in nature and less about games. They would still participate in the larger, group activities and would be assigned as captains of the several teams that would compete against each other throughout the week. We called them junior campers because it was the only phrase that translated well to Czech and for the most part they seemed to enjoy their time with us. It was three boys and three girls, ages ten to twelve. One girl took to being a maternal figure and was the mother hen of her team, which was all girls. One boy was a stalwart leader of his team when he wasn’t also being kind of a jerk to some of the little kids. The two other boys were pretty quiet but had a lot of fun. The two remaining girls love “Vampire Diaries”, Kesha, and hate One Direction. They couldn’t be bothered to display enthusiasm for anything we did but they also couldn’t hide how much fun they were having as “cool” as they were trying to be. They especially liked talking to myself or Cynthia, as they both had told me that their favorite country was America and we might have been the first Americans they ever met. I bungled the first couple of days of planning my lessons with them but hit my stride mid-week. We watched the “Deep Space Homer” episode of “The Simpsons” on Wednesday and on the last day, Friday, I took them to McDonald’s and treated them to drinks of their choosing.

Space Oddity

One of Cynthia’s highlights had to be when the kids made landing modules. They were given egg and milk cartons, as well as string, tin foil and cloth. The task was to create a craft that would carry a raw egg and when dropped protect the egg from cracking. I took the modules up to a third-story window and the kids had to refer to me as Major Tom and I referred to them as Ground Control. They had to give me permission to land in English before I would drop their modules out of the window. I would yell, “Major Tom to Ground Control!” They would have to reply with, “Ground Control to Major Tom!” My next line was, “Do I have permission to land!?” And they’d finish it with, “Roger. Major Tom you have permission to land!” Three out of four made it safely. Last year we taught them Shakespeare, so David Bowie is about on par, right?

Space Race

It was quite fortuitous for me that the theme chosen by the company I work for was space. My boss Marketa was on the same page as me, we were going to have fun but make things factual if we could. We weren’t going to entirely dress it up and only include cartoon-y depictions. The games and activities would be fun but we would try to use real science terms whenever possible and for me with the junior campers we were going to talk about actual facts regarding the solar system. The teams would be competing throughout the week to get as far as possible in the solar system. Each day they would be awarded fuel based on performance and this week the best team got as far as Neptune and the other three made it to Uranus. I thought about making it possible that teams could reach the Kuiper Belt and even the Oort Cloud but that would be too difficult to explain to the younger kids. So, the teams did quite good when you factor in that I was adamant that we keep Pluto off their star charts. I was actually a pain in the ass this week because I kept correcting or changing things to make them more factually accurate. Even though she was annoyed she acquiesced to my demands if they were seen as reasonable, so major respect to Marketa.

That’ll be that for now. One down, three to go.

I’m a Sheep, I’m a Weirdo

The DJ says it’s a sheep. I think it’s a cat. Which one it really is, none can say.

One of the biggest benefits of teaching little tykes English in the Czech Republic is the gratitude of their parents. Sure, some are almost entirely ambivalent and see you as just a babysitter, but can’t that be said for a lot of after-school programs? However, there are plenty of parents who present you with gifts at every holiday and all school-year milestones.

One such parent made me this sheepcat cake. Her son is a energetic kid who gets into trouble every now and then, but he’s also enthusiastic about English and genuinely likes having me as his teacher. I’ve been teaching him for a little over a year now as part of a second-grade group I have at a nearby Catholic primary school. At the end of the school year in 2013 I was gifted by him a wheel of Belgian chocolate, about eight inches in diameter. This past Christmas it was a four hundred inches cubed box filled to the top with cookies.

A private student’s father makes me a Turkish coffee every time I meet with his son and a mother of two boys that I teach supplies me with a limitless supply of coffee and strudel, then serves up dinner with tea and a glass of wine. I had a parent last year who, on more than one occasion, furnished me with alcohol as recompense for having to teach her son. Such graciousness has become so commonplace that I can hardly fathom what it would be like to do anything else with my life.

Type So Negative

Like many who’ve never read George Orwell’s 1984, the fact that I haven’t read it won’t stop me from using it to prop up an argument.

In the classic book, Big Brother watches over all and the population’s will to express themselves freely is oppressed and kept under tight control. Ever since it was published and probably even before that, it’s been a common fear of the conservative and liberal, the religious and secular alike that some power greater than us will assume and maintain authoritarian rule. And that under this rule civil liberties and even the ability to state one’s beliefs will be severely limited and harshly regulated. It should be noted that these concerns often seem to be comprised of either entirely paranoid delusions or are utilized in one political party’s stump speech about the other in order to gain support by using fear as the primary motivator.

Eddy Snowden. Still curious about this guy and his motives, but he seems legit.

Now, with the recent and ongoing NSA scandal and the furor it’s caused amongst the public, businesses, and countries friendly and unfriendly to the United States, the fear of a real Big Brother is as palpable as it’s probably ever been. Some feel violated, others angry, and as far as the public goes, many certainly feel helpless. And who can blame any one for their feelings on the spying? It’s hard to know what, if anything became of it and if something did it likely won’t be declassified for years. And if we wait that long before any news comes out about how the spying prevented this or that, at that point in the eyes of the public it’s the same as if it never did anything at all because our privacy was violated.

And yet, people still text. They still email. They still tweet, Facebook, Instagram, make phone calls, you name it. How many people do you know that went off the grid when the NSA leaks started flowing? Probably not many I’m willing to wager. And why is that? Why, when it seems like the Big Brother of fantasy made manifest in reality has finally appeared is everyone still going about their business?

To me it’s simple, the NSA isn’t Big Brother. You are.

Oh snap, did I just wrinkle your mind grapes? Spooky, right?

Seriously though, the internetting public is Big Brother, that’s the assertion I’m making. Anywhere you can publicly share your thoughts, whether it be in comments sections, social media networks, or blogs and so forth. So, how about this as a for instance: Name all the mothers who appeared in the news in one form or another this year for something they did or some lifestyle choice they made that caused an uproar. I don’t think I clicked on a single one of those articles but I can name four off the top of my head. I don’t know enough about any of these moms to comment, but I do know that they attention paid to these women and their lives was unrelenting and unsparingly critical. I’m not here to defend them, but if I can talk about the internetting public as a whole and its subsequent reactions to the first reports about any of these women, it’s more often than not negative and quite commonly hate filled.

’nuff said.

It’s folly to think that posting in a comments section on an article or a blog post will change anything let alone anyone’s behavior. To me, working oneself into a lather over a difference in opinion with a stranger whom you can’t even see is the very epitome of an endeavor in idiocy. Spirited debates have occurred online before and will occur again, but the vast majority of internet conversations, if they can be called that, are no different than that awful moment where your party dies because the guests were over-served and politics and/or religion become the topics of discussion. It’s just a bunch of heads banging against walls at that point, people talking at and through each other, both sides confident that if they keep restating their own beliefs that the other will eventually relent and come over to their side. Part of the problem with people engaging in a spirited debate online or otherwise is that the goal of a debate isn’t to broaden your mind or learn something new, it’s to win and for the other person to appear wrong.

And that is a big part of what it means to be a part of the internetting public. Sure, you can abstain from commenting online, but maybe you comment to whomever’s in the room with you at the time, I know I do. I usually start off the same way many do after seeing a headline and reading the first two graphs of some news story. I start going off at half-cock, thinking I know what the deal is even though the word “alleged” appears right before me. I cast aspersions, doubts, make criticisms, and condemn. This is a tale as old as time. It didn’t come about when the internet blew up, nor with television, radio, or print. It probably started in the caveman days:

“Me heard Ug make baby with Neanderthal woman.”

“Yeah, baby probably come out with flat skull and thick brow, har har har.”

I’m angling for the weirdest assortment of pictures yet. “CAPTAIN CAAAAAAAAAVEMAAAN!”

What a couple of cavedicks. So, the degree of separation between you and some other bloke and how that enables you to be endlessly opinionated in spite of having all the facts, that’s nothing new. What is new is the instant backlash that a medium like the internet can create in a span of moments. The sheer volume of hate and derision and the rapidity with which it is written is new to us humans. The ability to like or dislike or comment on any new submission to the internet by another person almost as soon as it’s shared is new to us as well. Feedback has never been more instant. It would take something like a precog from Minority Report to get input from friends, family and strangers any sooner than we do now. I really would dislike that though, how can you edit a thought you haven’t finished thinking? Man, that’s some heavy stuff.

I don’t intend to condemn the lightning quick exchanges made possible by the internet. I think that the ability to share and receive opinions on the information you’ve shared is important and those who have and wield information in the wisest manner are to be respected and even feared a little bit. It’s how we use these tools that I am leery of. I’ll share the clip at the bottom, but to paraphrase Louis CK, smartphones and the internet remove empathy from human interaction. As a child you might call another kid fat and then see how that makes them feel. When you’re saying it, it may elevate you, make you feel better about yourself because you’re not them. However, when you see the affect it has on them, you may lack the faculties then to process the emotion, but later in life you may remember that moment wherein you were an asshat and may also come to regret having been that way to another person. And sometimes kids realize it right after they say it that it was a shitty thing to say and it made someone feel bad. The personal interaction that does not exist via computer, tablet or smartphone gives a user the instant gratification derived from the degradation of another but not the sadness or hurt from the target of their vitriol. Without the effect to witness, how can one know the damage their cause wrought?

This is kinda sorta funny, right?

The internet is a weird place. It’s mostly where people go for cat memes and porn. Some use it for work and then go looking at cat memes. Some read a Buzzfeed list and then regret having done so. Par exemple, “The 23 Most Unforgivable Spelling Mistakes of 2013”?

Charleswhatnow?

The internet is as much a realization of the advancement of humans as a species as it is also the path of least resistance to every thing that makes us suck. It can be both things, and it definitely isn’t just one thing. I’m not one of those “kids these days” types, but I feel that the culture they’re coming up in is a harsh and unforgiving one because of the internet and the various electronic gadgetry that connect to it. Imagine all the kids in your class make fun of your new haircut that you think is neat. Now imagine that you just shared a picture of it online and hundreds or even thousands mock and tease you. Maybe you don’t have any sympathy for some one who voluntarily shares online, and that’s okay, whatever. But the shit kids and teens end up doing isn’t always their idea to begin with and isn’t always the result of overt pressure from their peers like you were taught in health class or some drug education week in middle school. Many kids go get stoned and drunk or start smoking simply because their friends are doing it. If they don’t go and get drunk they’ll just be sitting around the house with their parents and who wants to do that at any age?

Most of youth is just fumbling around in the dark, aping your friends and classmates. But it’s no longer limited to just that, is it? One girl’s Instragram of herself can get half way around the world and back again with tons of negativity added to it before she can remove it or defend herself. In these modern times, your peer group is no longer restricted to just the people in your immediate vicinity and when that becomes the norm and empathy is subtracted from the equation, how long can any one feel good about themselves before they need to ease the pain by returning it in kind to another essentially anonymous person?

The first story you learn to write in Journalism class: Dog Bites Man

It’s like my middle school/high school teacher Mr. Nick used to say when explaining cause and effect: “The dad has a bad day at work, gets home and hits his wife. The wife hits the kid and the kid hits the dog. The dog bites the mailman who goes home and hits his wife.”

It can become just a perpetual negativity machine as long as we feel enabled by comments sections and social media networks to say whatever the fuck it is we’re thinking so long as it provides us with a momentary reprieve from the shit we have to handle in our own lives. Not every outlet is a healthy one, not everything is worth saying.

Ah, I figured it out. You see, I could just ignore all these sources of negativity. The websites who sensationalize, the comments sections, and the social media networks. But if I do that I might end up reading my spam folder for entertainment. And for many, complete avoidance of the internet is no longer looking like an option. Smartphones aren’t getting slower or harder to use and phone companies will make you feel like an ass if you ask for a phone without a data plan. They probably assume you want one to use as a remote switch for an IED or something and will just report you to the NSA (and circle gets the square!).

Cue the unruly mob.

The unruly mobs that amount to the internetting public can govern more effectively than any world leader, especially when someone does something they don’t like all that much. This kind of knee-jerk response and the resulting vilification and subsequent correction of one’s behaviors is much more akin to the storied Big Brother than any government could ever aspire to be.

I think that, well, hell, I don’t really know at this point. I think moderation in all things is key, I believe that you should never pay full price for a late pizza, and that even though I suck at following my own advice, “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”

I See a Man Without a Country

I’m an American sasquatch and I’ve been in Europe since the beginning of September 2012. My girlfriend Cynthia and I spent a few months travelling and then getting certified to teach English before landing in České Budějovice, which is in the southwestern corner of the Czech Republic. We’ve been living and teaching here for almost eleven months now. We love our flat, our jobs, and are making more friends all the time. After initially being strapped for cash upon arriving here in CB, we now make enough from our teaching jobs to pay for trips without needing any of our (her) savings for funding. Everything is great and every day feels like we’re living the dream. Except for one thing, one huge problem.

We don’t know what to do next.

At first glance, it seems like one of them good problems. We’re living in Europe, regularly travel and can afford to do so and live comfortably while only working part time. But we don’t feel that CB is our permanent home. We have aspirations to make a real home somewhere, you know, the kind of home you renovate and buy furniture for. We’ve accumulated very little in the way of personal effects in order to keep ourselves light and streamlined for more travel in the future. The biggest thing either of us have bought so far are an acoustic guitar and a typewriter, but both are so cheap that they could be easily jettisoned when we go to move again.

If CB isn’t our permanent home, then what is? She’s from the state of Washington, specifically an island town near the San Juans and I’m from the thumb knuckle of Michigan. Seattle perhaps? Detroit maybe? How about other cities? We share a former boss who would hire us in a heartbeat in San Diego but it would require making coffee again. What about Colorado? Montana? Alaska? A lot of European countries bear consideration based on availability of work; Croatia, Germany, Austria and a few others included. Hell, even though it’s America’s attic Canada is on our radar.

I think this is the Prime Minister of Canada.

That last part may have sounded a little silly, but it’s quite simple to me. Why is Canada even an option if we decide we’re going to go back to North America? Why not just go back to America? Well, even though I sometimes consider myself a proud American I can say that Canada seems so damn attractive to me because they seem to care more about their own people.

There’s the whole universal health care thing. Yeah, we kinda sorta maybe got some health care in the United States now, but it’s a lot of half measures because Republicans are obsessed with low taxes and protecting big businesses. I’m skipping the political debate here, but I could go a lot further. And anyway, since the Democrats don’t have a solid majority in the Senate and are in the minority in the House, we got a camel for healthcare reform. Just so you know, a camel is what you get when you design a horse by committee. In first world countries, free healthcare is damn common and America doesn’t have it. Countries we tend to look down our noses at have a better record of taking care of their sick and elderly than we do.

Anyhoo, what’s another thing that is important for young people to consider who may want to settle down and have a family?

Paid maternity leave, another thing that America doesn’t have. Canada has fifty weeks of it and here in the Czech Republic you can choose to have up to four years of paid parenting leave. That’s right, four years. Granted you only get a percentage of your salary, but being on leave for that long right up until your kid starts school means no babysitters or daycare if you don’t want any. To make it sound even a little crazier, the parents can switch off during parenting leave. Yeah, it almost sounds like magic. Next thing you know I’ll be telling you that every kid here goes to Hogwarts and that you can find herds of unicorns in the forests of South Bohemia.

Biggest drawback of living in the Czech Republic? Nothing gets done unless Jaromir Jagr wills it so.

To be absolutely clear, the Czech Republic does have a lot of problems. We aren’t planning on starting a family here or anything. People are not always very kind to visitors or humans in general, there are ongoing issues with the Romani, the roads here are Michigan-level bad and the government is Chicago-level corrupt. And yet, every one has healthcare and paid parenting leave. So, yeah, you gotta take the good with the bad, but at least the people are being looked out for.

Is it silly to have considerations like these affect your choice of where to raise a family? I don’t know, to me it seems pragmatic, maybe too much so I’m willing to concede. Maybe to others it seems too opportunistic, but I’m from the motherfucking land of opportunity so yeah, I like a sale. What’s that? You’re giving away free healthcare and paid parenting leave? Gimme gimme gimme.

But there’s also the point I’m trying to make. And that is, “Hey America, what gives?”

One issue that I find really agonizing and that affects my view of America greatly is gun control. I.e., the lack of it. It breaks my heart that I would rather not live in America because of the gun problem than live there and have to stomach it. I can’t change the way I feel about it, plain and simple. I’m not afraid of guns, I don’t want everyone’s guns to be taken away and melted down, and I don’t think I’m in great risk of being shot. I just frankly am quite depressed when whacko birds with guns mow down a bunch of kids and nothing changes because a bunch of other whacko birds with guns think that the solution is more guns.

If I’m being honest, I do really like Seattle quite a bit and I lived there for three years. I just don’t have the same feelings about it that Cynthia does. I’d rather live up in the islands near where she grew up.

I love America, but I don’t always miss it. Okay, I’ll be honest, I rarely miss it. But I am a misanthrope with little to no feelings so this isn’t news to those who know me best. I don’t miss things often, I don’t do whatever “homesick” is, and even though I love my family, I don’t choose where to live based on where they are. It has nothing to do with them, and as cold as that may sound, I was raised thinking I could do whatever I wanted if I worked hard because that’s part of the American identity and that’s exactly what I’m doing now. I don’t exactly know how it sounds for me to say that, but as an American I can expect to be welcome in a lot of countries and even anticipate less stringent VISA requirements than other non-European Union citizens. With those and other advantages available to me it seems silly to not make use of them.

Cynthia and I have differing views of what being American means and whether or not we should live in America permanently. At the present, I’m thinking that there are countries and situations that people are born into where they’ll never get to leave their country even though they want to. Whether it’s because they’re poor or oppressed, they will die having never crossed the border. I hate to get all heavy handed here, but am I wrong? No, I’m not. So I think being American means making the most of the chances we get and using our freedom that way. Cynthia’s opinion on the matter is that America is a part of her, it’s where she’s from, it’s where her closest friends are, and the Northwest specifically is where the people who she relates to the best live. She’s not wrong to feel those feelings, you might never have friends who get you like the people you grew up with or met in college. And she is much more sentimental than I, but not to a fault. I mean, come on, she quit a job that she liked quite a bit and moved out of the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard that she loved to go on an adventure like this. So I don’t think she suffers from an abundance of sentimentality and I also don’t think she’s incorrect to feel the way that she does.

So, does that mean I’m a bad guy? Am I too hard, too distant and callous to consider living anywhere but America? Does it mean I hate America now?

Detroit’s got a certain Berlin post-wall thing happening at the moment. If it continues, it could become an entirely different kind of city than what is the norm in America.

No, if anything it just proves that I’m feeling conflicted and that our predicament is a complex one. Detroit is atop the list of places in the States where I’d want to settle, so I don’t think I’m completely anti-America nowadays. Actually, I have several places I’d be willing to live. However, when it comes to Detroit I want that city to be great again and I want to be a part of it. I also love the idea of cheap ass real estate. However, if we don’t settle the issue of which country to live in will we always be looking? Will we ever really settle in a single spot?

Having kids would probably do that. We know a Czech family here and we’ve both taught their daughters. I’ve never been entirely clear on what the father does but I know he commutes to and from Prague regularly these days. His work used to have the family living in New Zealand and I think both of the girls or at least one was born there. The older one is seven and the younger one is five. They both are fluent in Czech of course as their parents are Czech born and raised. But because of growing up in New Zealand for a little bit, the seven year old is fluent in English with no accent and the little one for her age is about a decade ahead of any other five year olds when it comes to English. At some point they either decided to live in Czech Republic again or his work required him to, but whatever the impetus for their return was the experience was incredible for their daughters. Parents are shelling out money here to teach their kids English and these two girls are light years ahead of their peers because their parents lived abroad. I could have bilingual kids solely because I raised them abroad and the doors that could leave open for them are a great many if they keep up their second language.

I’m getting way ahead of myself here. We don’t even know if we’re staying here in CB past this school year yet but we’re looking into finding work elsewhere before we decide. The likeliest course of action is that we stay in Central Europe. If not here, Germany, maybe Austria if there are jobs anywhere other than the bigger cities.

In Berlin there are lots of cool things things to see and do and lots of cool people to meet and party with and lots of free time to do all these things because no one has a job in Berlin.

An aside, Germany and Austria would be slam dunk propositions to move to if we felt that the salary/cost of living ratio was doable and met our travel expectations. Vienna (Austria) or Hamburg (Germany) would be a dream if we could do better than break even but we’re not confident that we could. There is no work to be found in Berlin so that’s right out, so maybe the small to medium sized cities have a better ratio of pay to cost of living. Par exemple, CB compared to Prague is a dream. I don’t envy friends who live in Prague and the rents they pay or the commutes they have to deal with.

This is literally a can of worms. And so is the VISA process in most countries.

In a nutshell, moving to Germany is a whole other can of wax or ball of worms when you start thinking it out. Finding work, a flat, getting VISAs in another country, it all shaves years off your life. After all that we’ve been through here thinking about going through it again leaves us both a little short of breath. There’s also where I started this whole post: we are really loving where we live now. We have a massive ass place at a fraction of the cost of the smaller Seattle apartment we used to share and we’re right by Germany and Austria and countless other places that are easily enough reached by bus or rail. We both really like our bosses and our landlords are the greatest people on the planet. They bring us more furnishings whenever we need them as well as the occasional cake and just yesterday one of them invited us on a cheapo day trip to Vienna. So if we take the leap to another country, are we falling prey to the “Grass is always greener on the other side” trap? Because let me tell you, the grass here is pretty fucking green.

So yeah, it’s totally a bunch of pansy ass first world problems, I can admit that. But they are problems for us none the less. Do we move back to North America? If so, where to and when? Do we stay in Europe? If so, where and for how long? If we leave Europe we will regret it forever? If we leave CB for somewhere else in Europe will we have it as good?

At some point we will make a tough decision and cross our fingers and toes that it doesn’t lead to a long, regret filled life where each day we cook alive in a personal hell with the crushing realization that we ruined ourselves by making the wrong choice and that no matter what we do, each morning the brimstone oven fueled by our self inflicted misery will fire up anew and the hot suffering will bear down on our minds and hearts even fiercer than the day before.

In the meantime, Happy Holidays!

And now, an old favorite from Kids in the Hall to take us out:

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Tiny Plastic Microscope

Let him put the knife in the wall socket. I swear, he’ll learn more from that than sitting in front of the television.

He could get a super power. Maybe?

I do not recommend you follow my advice, I do not claim expertise. But I was officially a kid once and still am on a part-time basis. My childhood was mostly a blur of television, movies, and video games with awkward and painful social interactions around the outside edge. As for now, I’m slightly less awkward and work with children. I’ve babysat, been a camp counselor, and even a recess supervisor at an elementary school. Nowadays I teach English as a second language to Czech school children. Now that my kiddie CV is out there, I still intend to make it fully clear that I have no credentials besides those. Right, now that the defense has been laid, may I be absolved of any potentially litigious blowback.

Science is good, and so are kids, mostly. Kids want to experiment pretty much all the time, but not always safely. They are still kids after all. They aren’t born with fears, they learn them. So you do have to keep them safe to a degree, they can’t have complete and utter free reign. When I was a toddler those fence-like baby pens were at the height of their popularity. I was born in the “ME ME ME” years of the nineteen-eighties, so if my parents jailed me to keep me out of danger and so they could relax, I understand. That casserole ain’t gonna cook itself and with limited motor control and little to no understanding of personal hygiene, I was no help in the kitchen at the time.

At some point kids start running around and knocking things over like Billy Joel in a china shop. As a teacher of children whose first language is not my own, I deal with this on pretty much a daily basis. I’m not a parent, but if this is how they act during a forty-five minute window once a week, I can understand why television and video games are such a great babysitter. I myself had every Nintendo system (minus the Virtual Boy) at one time or another right up until the Wii. I spent entire summers watching cable television. It’s easier, it’s simpler. The kid stays on his tuchus, nothing gets smashed to smithereens, and emergency room visits are kept to a reasonable minimum. And hey, a cable bill is cheaper than paying a benzoyl peroxide slathered fifteen year old to chill with your kids for forty hours a week.

Once upon a time, this was in fact, a thing.

Problem: I learned NOTHING. I got a beginner’s science kit for Christmas one year and learned more with that tiny plastic microscope than I ever did punching in Game Genie codes. Also, that damn Game Genie only worked like, what, half the time or something? But I digress, there is more to be gained from the study and careful, borderline-cruel live dissection of ants than by trying, and failing miserably at beating Contra. In the present, speaking as what I’m supposing is a full-grown adult, I have the attention span of whatever insect you can think to name and am discouraged immensely by any endeavor that lacks immediate and continual payoff.

Video game box art used to be waaay cooler looking than the game itself. Take Contra as a for instance, they managed to rip off Predator, Alien, and Rambo all at the same time. Glorious.

Let’s not forget that video gaming has changed drastically in the last decade or so. It’s a complete money pit and developers release additional content on the regular to get more money and time out of you and the kids. It’s a vicious cycle and with new Call of Duty editions coming out once or twice a year it’s not going to be letting up any time soon. As far as television goes, I love it. However, it’s a time-burning Achilles’ heel of mine and sometimes I’m ashamed of it. Television programming was created to fill the time between advertisements. There is educational programming out there, but no one’s burning any calories or learning anything for themselves parked in front of a television screen regardless of how sleek and sexy they’ve become (the television of my childhood was bigger than a steamer trunk and wooden).

The trivia you pick up from movies and television is glorious and abundant in nature, believe me. I’m not afraid to say I’ve won a free drink or two in my time at pub trivia, but what of processes? The scientific method? How do I find those bits of trivia for myself?

It’s not like home is the only place that could use more science, more experimentation. We grow up being told we can be whatever we want, to go outside and play, and then we get to school and we’re told to sit down and shut up. I’m not going to get bogged down in all the painful realities of underfunded schools, underpaid teachers, and uninterested parents. There’s not enough time in the day to write about that. But I am interested in the effect of just a little scientific curiosity and scientific literacy on children.

I’m dropping in a reference to Pink Floyd’s The Wall because who knows the next time I’ll get the chance to?

Just a little bit of science goes a long way. The basic concepts of gravity, motion, acceleration, how light and sound work, things like that can inform so much of a person’s daily life and their understanding of the things around them.

What kinds of questions do kids ask?

“Why is the sky blue?”, right?

“Well, Huckleberry, of all the visible light that we get from the sun, the blue wavelength is shorter and smaller than the rest and the particles in the air scatter it when it reaches the atmosphere.”

That blew my mind and I’m the one who just typed it.

Here’s another. Why does Mom look scarier in the morning than later in the day? Well, Mommy uses anti-aging cream to cover her wrinkles. She thinks it’s getting rid of her crow’s feet but really what it does is reflect light out from the wrinkles instead of letting minuscule shadows form in the folds of her skin. Sorry to let the cat out of the bag, Moms.

I had to do it.

Let’s not forget the fringe benefits of a kid interested in science. They can make a lot of money. The demand isn’t like it was in the Space Race/Cold War era, but when was the last time you met an engineer or an astrophysicist who was going hungry?

So yeah, science is great, we get it. But how do we get the kiddies into it? It’s very simple. When they ask you a question, don’t just give them the answers, give them the means to find them for themselves. I’ll be real here and admit that there isn’t enough time in the day for all those strange little queries that only a kid could think of to be thoroughly tested. That’s a fact, but it only requires a little creativity, and maybe a little science literacy of your own to help them along.  I’m gonna let my mainest man, Neil deGrasse Tyson take us out: