Summer swimming. Our wildlife. What is education?

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Zoriana is the most athletically precocious child I've had. We have three sets of monkey bars in the house and yard, and she is all over them. When we go to playgrounds she fearlessly climbs to the top of whatever structure is there and swings bravely from side to side over seven or 8 feet of empty space.

She took the bicycling immediately. We cycle everywhere. As I wrote this she was finishing breakfast before we took off to her music lesson. Actually, halfway to her music lesson. We take the dirt roads and back streets as far as they go and take a bus the rest of the way. However awesome she may be as a rider, it is only a 14 inch one speed bicycle. She is too small to be easily seen on the street.

With cajoling from Eddie, I went swimming for the first time on Monday. As I completed my standard 40 minute circuit, Oksana was there with Zoriana and a swim ring. Zoriana came in the water and I pulled her around by the hand. I was impressed that she stayed with me for the hundred yard swim across the lake.

Yesterday the two of us went alone. I started out towing her as I had on Monday, but soon let go as she seemed to be doing pretty well on her own. For 15 minutes I swam in circles around her as she paddled back-and-forth. We took a break, going along the banks to look at the frogs. More on frogs in a minute.

After the break she wanted to go back and swim on her own. I expected she would paddle around close to the concrete steps somebody had poured long ago to ease entry into the lake. Nope. She asked me to walk along the path back towards home, watching her through the thick bushes parallel to the shore as she paddled. It took a bit of faith that if the air started to come out of the water ring I would have enough time to get her. She stayed in the water for another 15 minutes, venturing as far as she could before daddy got nervous.

Coming home, she bragged to complete strangers about what she had done. I didn't discourage her. I'm pretty proud.

Eddie is an independent soul. Oksana and I more and more often find ourselves asking “Where’s Eddie?” And find that neither of us have any idea. He spends a lot of time with the bee business, naturally because his friend Artem lives in the house with the bees. He goes down to the lake to go swimming by himself.

A modern American parent would be concerned with a kid swimming alone in a large lake. American parents are most comfortable having their children take swimming lessons, then going in groups to places with chlorine, lifeguards, showers and a million rules like no running on the deck. 

Swimming in nature was totally routine for my kids’ grandparents. My mother as a child walked alone to swim at the nearby beach in Long Beach, California. My father’s mother talked about jumping off of a railroad bridge into the Mississippi to swim. Now that was a childhood!

Four short episodes this week show the enterprising and imaginative side of Eddie’s character. First, Oksana thoroughly scrubbed the sinks in the children’s bathroom in preparation for company. The metal stopper in one of the sinks had stopped working, as they often do. When you push down on the shaft that is supposed to make it come up, it doesn’t. It stays firmly down. I gave up trying to fix it and bought an old-fashioned rubber plug, which works fine.

After cleaning the sink, Oksana dropped in the metal stopper and it stayed stopped. What to do? I recalled that Eddie had ingeniously solved the problem once before. The rubber stopper has a hollow bottom. Holding its top with a pair of pliers, he pushed down hard on the metal stopper and jerked it up quickly. The plug came up with suction.

Grandpa Sasha broke his rechargeable shaver while trying to clean it. I know nothing of these things – I have been a blade shaver all my life. Of course at 10 years old Eddie has no practice whatsoever with shavers. But I no more than mentioned the problem than he had it fixed.

This afternoon I’m headed to Nova Poshta to get a luggage rack for the wonderful bicycle that subscriber Charlie Spell left when he returned to America last year. Mounting one of these things is no particular trick, but it would be dangerous to get between Eddie and the bicycle before that happens.

Last and certainly least, Zoriana’s handlebar twisted sidewise as she was taking off yesterday. I brought a handful of wrenches downstairs and Eddie had it tightened and no time at all.

Matthew Crawford writes wisely on a vast variety of subjects. He came to my attention as a statistician offering insightful analysis of the Covid situation. It turns out that he has extensive experience founding schools in teaching extraordinary children. In today’s article, entitled why specialization is anti-education, he talks a bit about his own background, about four brothers who dealt in drugs and dated strippers.

Crawford and I absolutely agree that today’s world is too long on credentials and too short on wisdom and judgment. Probably intelligence as well. We need more people like von Neumann, Richard Feynman and Crawford himself who can tackle any problem that comes along. People used to ask with regard to my own domain of data processing what kind of programmer I was – C, Java, Python? My answer was that a programmer is a programmer. If he is good at what he does the language doesn’t matter. The key to all of it is being able to envision and implement a solution.

Mikki Willis, the filmmaker who did Plandemic two years ago, did an impressive interview with Los Angeles area child psychiatrist Mark McDonald.  McDonald recounts how his own views on education have changed over the course of a 30+ year career. He used to advise parents to locate themselves in areas that had good public schools and support those schools. He advised that private schools were generally not worth the money. He is come around to believe that the whole educational enterprise in America is so thoroughly corrupted that there is no alternative to avoiding it altogether.

This was my conclusion after putting my first family through expensive private schools, with a smattering of the best-reputed public schools, in Washington DC. I had served on school boards, been a graduate student at the University of Maryland College of Education, and worked 10 years as a substitute and then classroom teacher. I worked as a tutor.

At the end of all of it, I concluded that I would be best off homeschooling my own children and wrote a book to that effect.

Nonetheless, our son Eddie attended a small private school in Kyiv from the second through the fourth grade. Ukrainian teachers and textbooks in public schools are rigorous and fairly free of cultural Marxism. Nevertheless, my conclusion was that I can simply do a better job of teaching than the schools.

Furthermore, I strongly believe, like the educators to whom I link above, that formal education is only a small part of what a child needs to learn. I fight credentialism every time I turn around, especially on the home front. My wife is properly credentialed and she is horrified at the thought that Eddie might not be. I am convinced that success in life is a matter of what you can do, not what credentials you hold, and that this truth will be all the more evident as the present corrupt system collapses of its own weight.

I lose as often as I win in these battles with my wife and the teachers, but my key to success will be Eddie himself. He recognizes BS when he sees it and pretty much refuses to waste his time with nonsense assignments. As I have written before, my focus is on reading, writing and arithmetic. The vehicles for teaching those things will be history and practical knowledge of how to do things. Aside from that, teaching himself beekeeping, bicycle maintenance, cooking (he did last night’s pizza dinner) and gardening teaches him the most essential of all skills, how to learn.

The wildlife in Ukraine is a source of continuous fascination. Last year, having not heard a single cuckoo all spring, I theorized that development and construction of the metro and highway through our neighborhood might have driven them away. Whatever the case, construction halted with the beginning of the war in February and the cuckoos are now clearly audible in the early morning.

A pair of magpies have been trying to nest in our jasmine bush for a couple of years. Two years ago some idiot gardener whacked the heck out of the bush just as they were building their nest, driving them away. Last year they seemed poised to start and then disappeared. This year I hear them chattering from time to time, but the foliage is so thick we won’t know if they have a brood until the babies hatch and start to squawk.

I am concerned as well about our hedgehogs. They evolved the perfect defense against every natural threat in their environment, but they are defenseless against automobiles. On my bicycle outings the spring I have seen three of them crossing the roads. I hope they learn to stay put someplace safe.

The frogs are always in full voice this time of year. There is invariably a series of splashes as you approach the edge of any lake. Yesterday, swimming with Zoriana, was nonetheless unique. Walking up to the water we could see eight or nine of them squatting happily on the land. Zoriana took a stem of grass and started to tickle one of them. Amazingly, he didn’t jump. He wasn’t ticklish. She got down on her hands and knees and touched him.

I had feared that the frog was not healthy, but all of a sudden he unwound. Though he was only about 2 inches long, he made a 2 foot jump into the water. Zoriana’s inquisitive mind wanted to discern whether that was an aberration, so she tickled a half a dozen more with more or less the same result. I hope that they are more wary of cranes and herons than they are of little girls.

As the Vice President of Public Relations for our ArtTalkers Toastmasters club I wrote a piece about Toastmasters to place in the English language Kyiv Independent. I asked Jim Brooke, a former New York Times guy whom I knew as the editor of the Ukraine Business news, if he had an acquaintance there to whom I could send it. Yes, he did. And as a bonus he sent a link to a YouTube presentation of his own speech about the war in Ukraine. 

Jim is representative of a sizable community of people who have worked here and know the country. They are contributing significantly to the support that Ukraine is enjoying worldwide.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the good looking women are loving the warm weather, and the above average children beg the strong man daily to swim and bicycle with them.

Graham