Dear Dave

  It's the holidays? Already?

Dear Dave,

It's the school holidays. No more having to get up early to make packed lunches and to harangue children into eating their breakfasts quickly. No more clubs and classes. No more having to hang around the playground every afternoon for half an hour because the boys come out twenty minutes apart. Just a sweeping expanse of time to fill with day-trips, leisurely activities and grocery shopping. Ah, bliss...

Well, that's been the case for previous school holidays, anyway. This time round is a little different. This is the first major holiday since Marie started at nursery and so the joy of not being constrained by an external schedule is tempered by the loss of the 'free-time' I normally have each morning when all the kids are out of the house. Next week may come as something of a shock to the system.

It's probably a good opportunity to assess how I've been getting along with my list of things I wanted to achieve while home alone. Let's see...

Ah.

Yes.

Hmmm.

It's not gone so well, has it? I haven't cleaned, fixed or played anything. I've still only gone for coffee once. I went shopping for clothes but only bought a hat. I haven't made it to a Polish deli. I suppose I did find a Polish section in Tesco but that's not really the same. May I recommend Paluszki, though. They're like long, thin pretzel things. (I'd send you a photo but, now I've got them out of the cupboard to check what they're called, I'm too busy eating them...)

I haven't even managed much progress on zombie-proofing the house. I meant to go to B&Q for raw materials but, with one thing and another, it never happened. I've just settled for altering the sign in the front window so it reads, 'No hawkers, circulars, canvassers, snakes, spiders, cats, evil dwarves, brain-sucking alien invaders or living dead.' I feel this not only deals with the zombie issue but gives some added protection in case I inadvertently invite in a vampire or another ghoul turns up trying to hassle me into changing energy supplier.

Me: I'm really not interested in switching right now.
Ghoul: So you don't want to save money?
Me: Can't you read? Back to the Pit, foul fiend!

I find this usually gets them to leave...

So what have I been doing? Writing to you mainly, along with eating breakfast, catching up on the internet (it's grown a bit since I last looked), doing some chores and dusting off a couple of creative projects that have been moth-balled since 2002. I'm not achieving much more than I did before Marie started nursery but I'm freeing up time in the evening to lie around watching films with explosions while groaning slightly and eating Polish pretzels.

Never mind, maybe next term...

Now, excuse me a minute while I move these Paluszki out of reach...

That's better, they're gone now. (Munch... Munch...) Honestly. (Munch...)

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS If you're wondering about the 'creative projects', here's a little something for Easter that I've been working on.

Labels: housedad, school

  11:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  The mind control is failing

Dear Dave,

How's Sam getting on at nursery these days? Marie really enjoyed it at first. Then, after a couple of weeks, she comprehended it was every day and started complaining that she didn't want to go any more. She shuffled towards the nursery door each morning, shoulders slumped, head hung low, and complained she was tired. I showed very little sympathy. I told her to get used to it 'cos she had another fourteen and a half years of education left to go, and then I gave her a little shove to make sure she made it across the threshold.

This approach seems to have paid off, since she's now much more used to the idea. She comes out a lot less grumpy at the end of the morning. I get to hear about the snack she had and the story and sometimes a few of the things she's learned. They've been talking about health and food recently.

It's nice to listen to what she's been up to but it's a bit scary to realise that even my little girl is no longer entirely under my control. The kids are getting older. Other people teach them things without me being present. I don't get to police the flow of information to their brains and I'm constantly surprised when they tell me things which I didn't know they knew. The other day, Fraser was aware that the Himalayas are the highest mountain range in the world. I didn't tell him that. They must actually teach him stuff at school. What with all you hear about the state education system, this was more than I'd really bargained on. I was thinking of it as free childcare with some added social integration but there's definitely more to it than that. He's not yet eight but he can do simple division, recite information about Vikings and read Harry Potter books without moving his lips. I wonder what else they're teaching him? Actually, hang on a minute, he can read. He could be teaching stuff to himself!

This isn't good. He has enough opinions already. Imagine what it will be like if he has facts to back them up... I'm doomed.

Ho well. Then again, sometimes I'm surprised by what the kids don't know. Usually it's just a simple misunderstanding, like the time Marie asked, "Can I have some more juice please, Daddy?" (At least that's what I think she asked. It's possible she might have said, "I want more juice, slave!" but that's not important.)

"Sorry, Marie," I replied. "The juice has all gone, I'm afraid."

"Oh," she said. "Are you scared of the juice, Daddy?"

Other times, the misunderstanding can be much less simple:

Fraser had to read to me from a book about India for his homework. One passage was to do with fishermen who work at the shore in tiger reserves. The book said that they wear masks on the backs of their heads to scare off the tigers. Fraser read the words fluently but I was suspicious that he hadn't understood their sense when he looked at the picture of the fishermen and said, "What have they got on their heads?"

"Those are masks," I explained. "It means they can keep working without having to look over their shoulders all the time to make sure a tiger isn't creeping up on them. If a tiger sees their masks, it will think they're looking at it. That means it won't attack because it will think they'll see it coming and fight back."

Fraser was puzzled. "What if there's another tiger in front of them?"

"They really will be looking at that one," I said patiently, "so it won't attack them either."

"But what if the two tigers talk to each other?" he said, his face screwed up in confusion. "If they both say they see faces, then they'll know it's a trick."

I suddenly understood the scale of the issue I was dealing with. "Er... Tigers can't talk."

"I know," he said, to my relief. Unfortunately, he then followed that up with, "I mean in their own language."

"No - tigers can't speak at all," I said, regretting having ever let him watch The Jungle Book. "They can only growl. They can maybe tell each other to look out, or that there's food or something, by growling a bit differently, but they can't say anything more than that."

He didn't get it. "Yeah, but I mean in their own language..."

"Tigers don't have a language. Only people have languages." I was tempted to add a caveat about dolphins but decided not to confuse things further. "Animals can't have conversations."

"OK," said Fraser, although he still didn't look convinced, and we pressed on with the book.

There's so much that he knows now, I was astonished by this gaping hole in his understanding of the world. Did he find Ratatouille believable? What else has he not taken in? Are there basic safety issues that he's blissfully unaware of? Does he think the moon is made of cheese?

I'm nervous. I can't possibly 'remind' him of everything I think he should know, though. It would take too long and wouldn't help anyway. I'd be bound to assume too much. It wouldn't have crossed my mind that he thought animals could talk to each other. Who knows what else he's missed?

Then there are concepts he may never pick up. A few years back, we tried out a different translation of the Lord's Prayer at church. It didn't go down hugely well for various reasons, most notably that the new version was neither poetic nor particularly more understandable than the old version. There were those, however, who were angry that the minister was trying to 'change the words that Jesus taught us'. They just didn't seem to get that there can be more than one way to translate things and that all the ways can be equally valid. These weren't stupid people - it was just a subject of which they had little knowledge or experience.

On another occasion, Fraser came home from school having been given the task of finding out what molecules are made of. I sent him back with the answer, 'It depends how close you look,' and a basic grasp of sub-atomic physics. I got called in by the teacher to explain myself. I really thought she'd at least have heard of quarks...

I was in my teens before I worked out that those pictures of our galaxy we're so used to seeing aren't photos. I was thirty before I realised that just because psychologists have given a name to an illness doesn't mean they know how to positively identify it, what causes it or how to treat it. I still think that I graduated recently.

I guess that last one is a concept I simply don't want to learn the truth about. Marie had a similar feeling yesterday. After nursery, she saw one of her friends eating a Curly Wurly. "Anna's having a snack," she said. "It's not healthy."

I nodded. "Yep, you're right, that's not a very healthy snack."

"I'm going to have a snack after soft-play," Marie said. "It will be a healthy snack."

On past experience, this didn't seem very likely. "Really?" I said.

"Yes."

"What's your snack going to be?" I asked.

"A Milky Way!" Marie said, jumping up and down.

"That's not healthy."

She looked at me like I was on drugs. "Yes, it is."

"No," I said, "it's a chocolate bar. It's made of sugar and chocolate, just like the chocolate bar that Anna's eating."

"Oh," said Marie, deeply troubled by this revelation. It stuck in her head, though, because when soft-play was over, she perused the contents of the vending machine carefully. She spotted a Blueberry Slice in the bottom corner. "I want that. It's healthy."

"Maybe," I muttered, trying to work out what is was. It appeared to be a type of cake but it didn't have chocolate and the name implied some level of fruit content. It was almost certainly entirely made of lard and sugar apart from a small smattering of blueberry scrapings. Still, a hint of vitamins is sometimes all it takes to persuade a parent to cough up twice as much money as normal for a snack that explodes into sticky crumbs as soon as it's unwrapped.

More than that, I didn't have the heart to inform her that anything which comes from a vending machine is very unlikely to be nutritious. She wouldn't have been able to cope. She wanted to be healthy but she was tired and needed a snack. Compromise was the only way forward.

While I was busy hoovering us both down after we got home, I got to thinking about Fraser again. I can't possibly teach him everything. I don't know everything myself. There are things he's not ready for yet. There are things he won't want to hear. I may even struggle to convince him that he doesn't know everything already.

All I can do is continue to help him understand the world and try to answer his questions as they arise. The next time I get into an argument with him (or anyone else for that matter), I should take a step back, however. What's the argument really about? What assumptions are we both making? Does one of us think tigers can talk to each other?

It might help life run more smoothly.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children, nursery, school

  9:45 AM - Permanent Link - 3 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Virtual wedgies

Dear Dave,

Congratulations on managing to locate and purchase a Wii. I'm sure Sam will thank you in a year or two when he finally gets to grips with the controller and stops battering the cat with it. In the meantime, you can break the console in with a bit of Zelda and some Mario Galaxy. It will also be invaluable for keeping yourself entertained on long nights sitting up with a grumpy baby - being able to surf the internet effectively from the comfort of the sofa using only small movements of one hand is genius. You no longer need to suffer hours of phone-in quizzes presented by people who smile too much. Hurrah! (Remember to keep a spare wiimote with fresh batteries handy, though, just in case.)

Sorry to hear, however, that Liz's parents are worried it's going to corrupt the children and turn them into over-weight, psychopathic, criminal, illiterate loners. Good luck convincing them otherwise.

I can kind of see where they're coming from. If they think computer games are for kids but all they know about them is what the newspapers and TV tell them, then it's not surprising that they're nervous. The press for computer games hasn't improved much since the last time I wrote about it. If anything, it's got more hysterical. The science fiction role-playing game Mass Effect was recently described on prime time American TV as Luke Skywalker meets Debbie does Dallas. After extensive playing of Mass Effect, however, I can report that there's a single, non-interactive sex scene. It's half a minute long and the only nudity is a split second of out-of-focus alien butt. I can't really see this warping the mind of the average thirteen-year-old, to be honest.

Admittedly, the claim was retracted a couple of days later, when it was pointed out as abject nonsense, but it was a bit late by then. An 'expert' had already slated the game. The scary thing is that she'd done so on the basis of a single comment made to her before the show. She'd asked what it was like and been told it was pornography and gone from there. That she believed this statement, shows the level of misunderstanding that videogames are facing.

There are hardly any games released in the western world that feature sex, let alone anything explicit. Maybe one or two a year surface that deserve an 18 rating in the UK due to sexual content.

If I were told that a major release featured actual pornography I'd be sceptical. It would be a bit like being told Gordon Brown wears ladies' underwear - not entirely impossible but I'd want some evidence before repeating it. I certainly wouldn't go blabbing about it on TV.

Still, computer games are an easy target and getting rid of them seems like a quick fix for everything. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if all society's woes were down to those Nintendo PlayStation Box thingies? We could just dump the whole lot in the sea, safe in the knowledge we were releasing the nation's youth to return to the good old days of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll...

Unfortunately, the madness isn't limited to America. Over here, Bully's in the news again. It's been re-released on the 360 and Wii and teachers' unions are calling for shops to stop selling it because it 'rewards bullies and those who engage in brutal and savage attacks'.

Who told them this? Was it newspaper reporters looking for a quote? Bully is, in an odd way, one of the most charming games I've played in the last couple of years. (Bear in mind here that I haven't just been playing lots of games involving bald space marines shooting things - the kids have ensured a steady supply to our house of games involving plumbers, princesses and super-fast hedgehogs.)

In Bully, you're a new pupil dumped at a rough American boarding school and it's up to you to make the most of it. Yep, you get into fights but these are the kind of fights that involve catapults and stink bombs. You seldom have any reason to start them. Anyone the game sends you after usually has it coming to them for picking on other people and, after some fisticuffs, you get to embarrass them in front of their friends by giving them a wedgie. You're just trying to bring some order to a school that's gone off the rails and where the teachers are patently useless. You tend to do this by helping people out and making allies.

You can attack other pupils, teachers and police officers indiscriminately but there's no advantage to this. In fact, the normal outcomes in these situations are getting beaten to a pulp, put in detention or arrested. Most of the time, backing off or running away are far better options than violence. Avoiding having to outrun a squad car while on a BMX is always advisable.

The whole thing actually feels like a gritty Harry Potter or a contemporary, American version of Jennings. It's a dog-eat-dog setting but school can be like that. The bullies are portrayed as idiots, however, and there's no reason to play in a malicious way.

The game is also rated 15, so most school children shouldn't even be playing it. (Which is a bit harsh, honestly. This puts Bully in the same category as the film Brick which has a similar setting but the added bonus of murder, guns, knives and drug dealing.)

There are only two primary reasons the game is getting this kind of press:

• The title.
• It's by Rockstar, the company behind Grand Theft Auto.

That it's set in a school doesn't help but it's a school so divorced from real life that that wouldn't be an issue if the game was called something else. Compared to the 'trash' I was forced to read in English Literature class when I was fourteen, it's pretty innocuous. Let's take a look at that reading list, shall we:

Macbeth - witchcraft, murder, treason, suicide and crude sexual jokes.
Brighton Rock - murder, spite, a gang of criminal youths and a couple of hundred pages of psychosis inducing tedium followed by some face-melting acid.
Up the Line to Death - World War I, death, rats, death, despair, more death, violence, death, more despair and, let me think... ah, yes, some death.
Modern short stories in English - under-age sex and doughnuts.

I might well have learnt more from Bully. It's one of the few games around that would stand up to serious literary analysis. It would actually make a great game for Standard Grade students to write essays about. 'To what extent is violence acceptable when it involves sticking up for others and yourself?' might be a good place to start.

It would be nice to answer that there are always non-violent ways out. It may even be true... but I doubt it's necessarily the commonly held view even among teachers. I was bullied at school. The only adult I can remember telling, told me to fight back. She was the school nurse. In fact, I got the impression that adults in general reckoned that a swift kick to the privates was by far the simplest way to get bullies to leave me alone. (As long as no one saw me, of course. That would have involved paperwork.) It never really worked but I certainly never felt that reporting things would help either.

Maybe attitudes have changed. Schools take bullying more seriously these days and I'm encouraging my kids to talk about any problems they have. Ultimately, though, it can still be dog-eat-dog in the playground (or anywhere else) and much of how they get on will be up to them. Look past the catapults and egg-related petty vandalism, and Bully actually has some useful lessons. Fighting back is all very well but the best thing to do is make friends with everyone else by helping them out. More than that, the main character's greatest strength is that he simply doesn't care what everyone thinks of him:

Bullies are idiots. There was one guy at school who made me miserable when I was thirteen. He called me names, said nasty stuff and occasionally kicked and punched me. It was horrible. When I was seventeen, though, the same behaviour just seemed laughably pathetic.

I wish I'd been able to see things that way sooner. A game like Bully might have helped.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS One thing to come out of all this, is just how well Nintendo's advertising is working. Another spokesperson was quoted as saying that, 'young people will physically act out the violence they want to inflict on a classmate and that is frightening'. That's right: Nintendo Wii - makes videogames just like real life! If only. Unless they've brought in a new mini-game where you batter someone about by frantically waggling a couple of remote controls at them, I don't think there's much to be frightened about. (And even then...) If anyone wants evidence of the flimsy connection between wiimote mastery and actual proficiency in reality, they should come watch my boys bowl. Typical Wii score - 191. Typical real life score (on a good day and with the bumpers up) - 53.

The defence rests.

Labels: computer games, school

  9:30 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post