June 6, 2013

• First Piano Concert

  We had a concert this past Friday night.  That was six days ago, but now it feels like a very long time.  It was the culmination of a long period of practice for my three older children:  My Flagship, My Dandelion, and My Shining Knight.  This was their first piano concert.  

  I have not written on Xanga for a long time.  I would like to give some money, but do not know much about the blogosphere, how to have assurance that after giving money, another crisis would not transpire, where we would be asked to give more money.

  I guess that it cannot go on forever.  When interest drops, there is less interest for advertisers.  I don't know how Xanga makes money.  If it required some time, I would not mind giving some time to sustain Xanga.  Though I know only a little about computers, I would be happy to learn more.  I am in my first Java programming course now, at NCSU.  We moved from South Korea, Land of the Morning Calm, to North Carolina, near Raleigh, in April of 2011.  I have been busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest since then, adapting to the U.S. of A., helping my whole family adapt.  We are still not what you would call "adapted."   We tried home schooling my 15-year-old because he got such ill treatment at the public school for one semester.  He did OK with home schooling (following my "unlearning" method), but pressures from his mother, conflicting with my methods, have given him high anxiety.  I will put him back in the public school this coming August.  He sort of wants to go.  

  I have a math tutor for him, a pretty young coed from the local seminary where I take courses, as it were, per se.  She was an accounting major in her undergraduate experience and is a seminarian right now.  She is nice to him, though my wife and I cannot decide whether her occasional risque cleavage exposure clothing is too stimulating for our son, to focus on les mathematiques, or whether it is just the thing, to keep his focus on the topic . . . that being in the fuller consideration of his autistic disposition, which would have him concentration for 14 to 16 hours a day on one thing, insects.  If you need a Wikipedia page on insects dressed up and error free, My Flagship is your man.  If you need a highly unusual bug (big gaffe in the insect world, to call them bugs, unless of course they are "true bugs") instantly identified once it lands on your shoulder, he's your man.   Otherwise, he suffers gross impairments for skills vis-a-vis the typical child his age.  

    Well, it is not entirely like that.  He can pass clubs rather well (a form of team juggling).  But all my children will be able to do that at the age of fifteen.  It is just one more thing that comes with the territory.  He can swim well, better than I.  It takes me 22 to 24 strokes to make it across the 25 meter pool when I do backstroke.  It takes my son 13 or 14.  And it looks like he is not even trying.  He plays piano better than I ever will.  He beats the pants off me in baduk (the most challenging cognitive game, and the oldest, and the one for which the professionals have always gotten paid the most, and the one most obscure in the Western world so much so that we must seem solipsistic to God at times by this singular example).   South Koreans revere baduk professionals like we look up to rock stars in the U.S.

     But, my son is astonishingly weak in most of the basic academic areas, with math and p.e. as exceptions.   What to do, what do to. . .   It is tough to know how much pressure to put on him, hold him to standards, to avoid indulging him and making him ever more lazy, that, versus how much to give him free reign in recognition that he indeed  walks to a different drummer and recognizing that the more pressure you put on him, the more anxiety he gets, an anxiety which spills out in one way or another, rendering him less capable of functioning well in anything, and more painfully aware of his difference from the main body of people.  

  Love, Padooker  
   

   

  • 10:38 am
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