Lift Up Your Hearts!

My first reaction to the good news that girls are now doing as well as boys in mathematics, at least through high school, was to laugh at the headline, which was "Numbers don't lie: Girls equal to boys in math."  Anyone who knows anything at all about numbers knows that they are frequently used to express untruths.  Nonetheless, it's still good to hear that the distressing gap between male and female performance that once appeared between elementary school and high school has disappeared.

And yet, I wonder.  I don't give any more credence to the idea that boys might be inherently better in math than girls, any more than I do to the idea that girls are naturally superior in reading.  (I do leave room for the idea that certain ways of thinking, some approaches to problems, and even some narrow fields of mathematics, might show sex-specific correlations, because, after all, men and women are inherently, biologically different.  I'm quite certain, however, that differences among individuals are great enough to make sex-related differences of little import.)  What makes me less than elated about this new study is a nagging suspicion of anything that sees parity as the goal.  From the school principal who told me that the ultimate purpose of kindergarten was to get all students on the same level, to the school board members who were much less concerned with student achievement than with making sure no school in the district looked any better or worse than another, I've found that a victory in mere equality often masks a decline in real accomplisment.  Both kindergarten and school district "parity" are often achieved as much by holding some students back as by bringing others forward.  I'm certainly glad girls are doing "as well" as boys in mathematics—but much more interested in how all our students are doing, not only in comparison with each other, with students of the past, and with students of other countries, but most importantly in consideration of actual achievement.  "As good as" is a slippery measurement, and "better than" is little better.  In the company of serial rapists, a "mere" adulterer might feel pretty good about himself.

(It is also worth mentioning that the reason given for poor female performance in the past, that people expected girls to be stupid when it came to math, was certainly not universal, even "50 years ago."  My parents never expected that I would not do as well as my brothers, nor did any of my teachers offer me such a flimsy excuse as gender for poor performance!)

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek...to be understood, as to understand.—St. Francis

I can't resist taking a moment to share another excellent post from Random Observations, which gently reminds me that I need to spend more time trying to understand the point of view of those with whom I disagree, especially if I disagree strongly and emotionally.

If you can't even correctly repeat the arguments of your opponents, how in the world do you imagine you've refuted them?

For a monolingual person, I have an inordinate love of languages.  Not only is multi-lingualism increasingly important in today's world, but it does wonderful things for the brain—from increased brain growth in babies to decreased dementia in the elderly.  I wish the great resources available for teaching young children another language had been around when our kids were little, and I wish I had more aggressively pursued what there was.  Be that as it may, I am only a language dilettante, enjoying learning a few phrases of Japanese before our trip there, brushing up on my minimal high school French, and listening to the language CDs from the Hippo Family Clubs.  I wish I were multi-lingual, but face the reality that at my age it just isn't going to happen.

Nonetheless, I should be able to learn, if I put the time and effort into it, enough of a language to get along reasonably well with basic, necessary communication.  Which brings me to the question of why I find myself attracted to almost any language other than the two that would be of the most immediate practical use to learn: Spanish and German.

The source of my prejudice against Spanish was not hard to discern:  I don't react well to threats and pressure, and the increasing dominance of Spanish in Florida makes me feel about that language the way many Québécois feel about English.  Unreasonable prejudice, I know, but at least I understand its origins.

German is another matter.  Anticipating many future trips to Switzerland, not to mention German-speaking grandchildren, learning German should be a high priority.  And it will, when I can talk myself past the mental block.  But why the reluctance?  Why does the German language sound ugly and angry to me?  Sophie Scholl helped me untangle this puzzle:  My association with German and Germany is too much influenced by World War II.

Not that I ever experienced WWII myself, nor did my parents express any particular anti-German sentiment.  But when I was growing up, the memory was yet green in American culture, and Germans were not presented positively in the books we read, the movies we saw, the television shows we watched, and even the games we played.  The bad guys barked "Heil Hitler!" and "Seig heil!" and "Ya voll!" and spewed angry-sounding, though incomprehensible, strings of harsh consonants.  For some reason, perhaps because I grew up on the East Coast rather than the West, Japanese was spared this treatment.

I'm sure that German words out of the mouth of a young grandchild will sound perfectly lovely.

And fortunately for me, Schwyzerdütsch k'valt mir goed.  (Real Swiss German speakers please forgive my attempt at spelling what I hear.)

Having worked my way (the first time) through the Pimsleur Swiss German lessons (unfortunately there are only 10 of them), I can now say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you, ask you to repeat what you just said, tell you my name, and ask how to get to Bahnhofstrasse or Marktgasse.  I can also order a restaurant meal—though only if it's Gschnätzlets mit rösti—and a drink, if I'm willing to have coffee, beer, wine, or mineral water, which means I'd get pretty thirsty if it weren't for those great Swiss public drinking fountains.  I can make a date with you; that is, if you're willing to come at 9:30, 10:00, 1:30, or 2:00.

Schwyzerdütsch ish schön!  Especially if spoken by someone you love.

I don't recall the era of the 1960s with fondness; it wasn't all bad, but it was a messy, unkind time that accelerated our culture's decline in the areas of civility and decent behavior.  However, there must be more of the 60s in my make-up than I thought:  I'm finding good reasons to distrust The Man.  :)

Just as the National Education Association adamantly opposes home education, the American Medical Association, unnerved, perhaps, by Ricki Lake's popular home birth movie, The Business of Being Born, has taken direct aim at home birth.^*  Reaction against yet one more threat to personal freedom has come from across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right.  Congratulations to the AMA for provoking agreement between pro-choice and pro-life groups. 

Naturally one would expect professional associations for doctors (and teachers, and plumbers for that matter) to fear and oppose anything that threatens to take even a small amount of business away from their members.  This conflict of interest, however, does make it difficult to believe that the driving motivation for their actions is altruistic.  They would do better, I think, to consider the advice of wise Gamaliel to the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:12-39) when they threatened to kill Peter and the other apostles who were disrupting Jerusalem (and the Sanhedrin's business) with their stories about Jesus:

Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.

---

^*If you follow this link to the U.S. News and World Report article, some of you will be particularly interested to note the first comment.

Equality means everyone gets to run the race. It does not mean everyone comes in first.

John C. Wright and I may not agree on Prince Caspian, but we saw the same message in The Incredibles: the loss of excellence, enthusiasm, and initiative that results when we foolishly favor equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

The inspiration for Wright's post was a soccer trophy won by his five-year-old son.  Well, "won" is stretching quite a bit, and that's Wright's point.  Everyone on the team received the same trophy, just for showing up.  Or even not showing up; the coach also wanted to give a trophy to Wright's other son, who had quit the team mid-season!

One can argue that five-year-olds should not be competing for trophies.  One can even argue, à la Alfie Kohn, that getting trophies will actually decrease the children's enjoyment of the game.  But if you're going to have a competition, make it a contest, not a sham.  Don't give out hunks of plastic or cheap metal that waste resources, take up space, gather dust, and have no correlation whatsoever with accomplishment.  I like to think that the child who has done well does not need an award to tell him so, and the child who has done poorly will not be fooled by the award into thinking he has done well; unfortunately, my college professor friends won't let me keep that illusion, since they've had plenty of experience with students who have been given (not earned) A's all through high school and nearly break down when they discover they're not the academic whizzes they thought they were.  If their parents, teachers, and coaches had not, in effect, lied to them for years, they might have learned to buckle down and work and actually become highly capable students.

Wright found the problem on the soccer field; I've seen it time and time again in the educational system, from the principal who out-and-out told me that the purpose of kindergarten was to get everyone on the same level, to the elementary school "contests" that were rigged so that every student won at least once, to similarly-rigged "Teacher of the Year" awards, to the school board that took a monetary award away from the school that earned it and gave it to a poorly-achieving school.  No matter what a school district may say in principle, "making everyone great" means holding down those who are capable of exceling more often than it means raising those who are struggling.

None, least of all the winners, likes a situation in which the same few people win all the awards again and again.  Dash would soon lose interest in racing, and possibly in running itself, if he blew away the competition every single time.  But a coach or a teacher, for example, who wants to reward every student can, with a little creativity, devise competitions where the outcome is by no means certain, and yet in which the winner knows he has truly earned his victory.  (John Holt did this with some of his classes, but I've forgotten in which of his books he discusses it.)

Muscles, be they physical, mental, or spiritual, grow with use, and atrophy if left unchallenged.  Wright is right to be worried about his sons.  Fortunately, awareness of the problem is half the solution.

For two quite different yet effective views of the consequences of "anti-elitist" policies, see Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron and C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Proposes a Toast.

So. Studies have shown that length of life can be extended by eating a very low calorie diet, twenty to thirty percent less than a "standard diet." Whatever the standard diet is, you can bet it's significantly less than the average American diet, so we're talking severe calorie reduction here.

Thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (my nephew's current college of choice), the National Institutes of Health, and DSM Nutritional Products of [ahem] Basel, Switzerland, there is a better way. Drinking red wine apparently has similar effects and works by nearly the same mechanism. (If you're ambitious you can read the full report.)

Let's see. To drink, or not to eat...is that a question? I don't care much for wine and even then I prefer whites to reds, but I could manage this.

The article doesn't say what happens when you combine the starvation diet with drinking red wine, though the picture it evokes in my mind is not exactly one of robust health....

With all due respect for everyone's personal choices, and with free acknowledgement that in our diversity of educational options lies our strength, here's an excerpt from today's Frazz for a moment of homeschooling joy:

While chatting with the dental hygienist yesterday, I learned about a science project that had been assigned to her fifth-grade son: Each student was assigned a "body system"—perhaps circulatory, digestive, respiratory, etc.; I didn't get the details—and told to make up a game using questions about that system.  At first glance that seems reasonable, perhaps even interesting. Games are not a particularly efficient way to learn facts, but they can be an enjoyable way of masking the repetition that is required to commit them to memory.  Certainly making up the questions is a good exercise.

However, the amount of time and effort required for this project was 'way out of proportion to the science knowledge gained, most being devoted to extraneous matters:  the game must have a well-made game board, with a detailed, typed instruction sheet, and a sturdy, well-decorated box.  Such a project might be a joy for some students but torture for their less-crafty classmates—and to what purpose?  Whatever one might think of the merits of training fifth graders in manual dexterity and design, it seems unfair to base a science grade on such work, and in any case one ought not to pretend that it is science that is being taught.

This assignment is yet one more example of how those who claim they don't have enough time to teach properly waste the students' time with busywork.  Craft projects instead of science, PowerPoint presentations instead of written reports, browsing the Internet for images instead of writing paragraphs, and tweaking fonts and backgrounds instead of improving sentence structure!  It's bad enough when a teacher allows a student to get away with such nonsense; to require it is ludicrous.

My theory is that the teacher in question is using her students as slave labor to create classroom materials for future years, so I encouraged the hygienist to make sure the project comes home after it has been graded. 

Thanks to Tim at Random Observations for alerting me to this interesting commentary on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.  The book and the movie derived from it have formed our national image of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.  The trouble is, that's a false impression.  Like Amadeus and Braveheart, The Grapes of Wrath tells a good story based on historical events, but without letting the truth get in the way of the narrative.

Someone with a solid knowledge of the historical situation might be able to imbibe the story without harm, but the rest of us, unfortunately the majority, are learning history through these media, and learning it wrong.  We're left with a mish-mash of fact and fiction we may never sort out, and upon which we will unconsiously base our philosophical, political, social, and moral decisions.

Whoever said (I've seen various attributions), "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws," might just as well have been speaking about its popular books, television shows, and movies.  The only antidote besides a healthy (uncynical) skepticism is a solid grounding in history, preferably from several viewpoints.  Mea culpa; my own knowledge of history is abysmal, and I did not do much to help our children achieve more.  But if I were designing a home eduation program now, the tripod on which I would rest the entire academic program, beginning from the earliest stages, would be: language, mathematics/logic, and history.  Those who are strong in these three areas will not easily be duped.

Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices is a New York Times article about research at Ohio State University that may have profound implications for the teaching of mathematics to young children.  Unfortunately, just what those implications may be is completely obscure to me, as it is, I daresay, to the researchers.

I've written before (here, and here) about my belief that many children can learn abstract math concepts much earlier than is commonly supposed, and do not need to be limited to practical, real-world mathematics until they reach Piaget's magical age of abstract thinking.  So I suppose I should have been pleased to read about a study that purports to show that children actually learn mathematical concepts better through abstract symbols than they do through practical examples.  Not so; I'm also a fan of practical math, and believe both to be important.  In any case, it's hard to draw any conclusions one way or the other from this research—or at least from the Times report.

In the experiment, students were taught a mathematical concept either through abstract symbols or through concrete examples such as combining liquids in measuring cups.  They were then asked to apply that knowledge to figure out the rules of a game.  Those who had learned the concept abstractly did better at that application than those who had learned through the concrete examples, and also better than those who had been taught first the concrete examples and then the abstract ones.  Supposedly the real-world examples actually obscured the underlying math.

I'm going to break the post here, because some of you will want to look at the puzzle yourselves before reading about my experiences.  I strongly encourage you to read the article, but if you don't do that, at least follow the link and click on the link in the upper left under "Multimedia" that will show you the problems.  (It's a javascript pop-up, and I can't figure out how to insert it here without offending someone's copyright.)  Then click the "more" link after this paragraph to continue reading this post.I quarrel with the application of this research to any conclusion other than "We need to study this further."  For one thing, The laboratory rats in question were college students, whose brains might reasonably be expected to have already become capable of abstract thought.  It would be risky to apply anything learned from them directly to six-year-olds.  For another, the "concrete" examples appear—thought it's hard to tell for sure from the article—to be abstractions themselves.  Thinking about a measuring cup filled 1/3 full of liquid is more similar to thinking about a circle than it is to pouring liquid from an actual, physical cup.

Believing my own brain to be reasonably competent at both mathematics and abstract reasoning, I was shocked at how difficult I found the problem.  I couldn't get my mind around what they were trying to show.  What finally gave me the necessary clue was actually the measuring cup example, but thought about abstractly, as numbers.  Thinking about its physical properties was, indeed, distracting from the underlying mathematical concept, but the abstract symbols were no more helpful.  When I finally thought about the problem in terms of numbers alone, then answer was obvious, and to my mind much more easily explained abstractly—though I do still have a problem with the third example in the measuring cup system, so I may be missing something even though I got the correct answers.  I'll be very interested to hear what other people think.  Especially my reader from Oswego.  :)

I wouldn't change the way I taught anyone mathematics based on this study alone, but I would be very interested in hearing the results of a similar study done with other demographics: not only children of different ages, but also adults of various occupations and levels of education.

Okay, so it may not generate any cash income, but my status as a blogger has earned me a free, one-year subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica online!  Many thanks to Groshlink for the alert.  I'm grateful for the existence of Wikipedia, the hare in the online encyclopedia race, because of its wide-ranging, rapid-response (if not necessarily dependable) fluidity, but the opportunity to be able to access, and link to, a steady, reliable tortoise like the Britannica is not to be missed.

The application site has been swamped, it is claimed, but my blog was approved for the free account in less than 24 hours.  Try it with your blog, before they change their minds!

Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer story about Diane Goslin is a good summary of, or introduction to, Pennsylavnia's home birth problems. Such struggles are not limited to Pennsylvania, but are a good example, like the recent California homeschooling crisis, of how rights and practices that we have relied on for years—centuries!—in our country can be stripped away in an instant if not specifically written into our laws. I don't blame midwives, like the one who assisted with the deliveries of Noah and Jonathan, for fearing that legislation will bring more restrictions rather than fewer. That's what homeschoolers feared 30 years ago, when the modern home education movement was going through its own birth pangs; in some ways they were right, but when society's attention makes it no longer possible to stay under the radar, the protection of the law becomes necessary.

The concern of the U.S. Supreme Court for the religious freedom of the Amish (Wisconsin v. Yoder) was a significant force in the eventual acknowledgement of the rights and responsibilities of all families in the matter of their children's education, though as California has proved, we must be ever vigilant. The wisdom of the serpent is a complement, not a contradiction, to the harmlessness of the dove.  May the Amish also succeed in establishing recognition of the parents' rights and responsiblities when it comes to the birthing of those children!

The Story of an Experiment is another interesting story from Perla (see previous post), which she posted to support her contention that children should not be taught arithmetic, except as connected with real life experiences, until they are at least ten years old.  I write about it here, not because I agree with her, since I most emphatically do not, but because the story nonetheless makes some excellent points.

In the early 1930s the superintendent of schools for Manchester, New Hampshire tried an experiment—several experiments, actually.  Essentially, he abandoned math as it was taught in the elementary schools, and concentrated instead on language and logic:  reading, reasoning, and speaking, with arithmetic introduced only as it came up in the course of the rest of the studies.  The results, as he reports them, were spectacular, with the "new curriculum" students far exceeding the abilities of their traditionally-taught age-mates, even in mathematical reasoning, and where they were behind (in basic arithmetic manipulation) they caught up quickly when formal study was introduced in sixth grade.

I don't believe for a minute that the secret of their success was in what the students didn't learn, but what they did.  Reasoning is a skill, and those who have been taught to think logically can be expected to out-perform those who have not.  Before considering that the early teaching of mathematics will "dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning faculties," one would have to see the accomplishments of those who learned both reasoning and the multiplication tables.

What I suspect is going on here, besides the laudable emphasis on logic and language, and the deliberate connections made between learning and real life, is that the old curriculum was teaching math as if mathematics comprised rote arithmetic skills alone, and these were taught—most likely by teachers with no understanding of the math themselves—with no context, no grounding in real life.  Thus the children learned nothing about math, but only how to plug numbers into formulas, and that poorly.

Real learning does not paralyze the brain, but fear does.  The errors described in this article are of the same kind and degree as those made by the bright fifth graders John Holt describes in How Children Fail, which he attributes primarily to the fear that comes of seeing math as irrational and incomprehensible—just a collection of magic formulas into which one casts numbers and hopes for the best.  In my own experience, I remember being taught what seemed to be a dizzying array of disconnected formulas for finding surface areas and volumes of various solids, none of which would stick in my mind even long enough to make it through a test.  Only later, when I made the monumental discovery that math actually could be expected to make sense, did I discover that one could derive most of the formulas with a little thought; then the fear went away and I could even remember most of them.  :)  Similar fears assailed me in the conversion of temperatures between Fahrenheit and Celsius; I could never keep the formulas straight.  Again, a little logic (and the knowledge of a few data points, such as 32°F = 0°C) fixed that problem—but I had been taught not to think, but to apply formulas blindly.

So I'm sure the superintendent's experiment helped the children's mathematical reasoning, not by keeping them away from harmful knowledge, but giving them reasoning skills and by taking away the fear engendered by long hours spent in rote learning.  That doesn't mean rote learning is bad, especially at an age when children memorize things as a matter of course.  Can it possibly be more harmful to memorize subtraction facts or historical dates than Star Wars characters and commercial jingles?  It does mean that memorization should be done in short, frequent doses—that's more effective, as well as more enjoyable—perhaps a few minutes every day, and should be only one small part of the total mathematical experience.

Jonathan is memorizing Scripture; not just short verses, but entire psalms, and when his mother gets around to posting his recitation of Psalm 1 I'll include a link.  :)  What's more, he's learning the King James Version, full of words and verb forms no longer in his everyday language experience.  Not that I have any complaint, because whatever one might say about the KJV's comprehensibility and the accuracy of some of the translation, it's still the most poetic version we have.  If he were merely memorizing words it would be of limited value, though even "just words" would establish a foundation he could build on as he matured.  But he's not merely memorizing words; he's learning what they mean, and of course it's all in the context of a family life in which the truths are worked out in practical, daily living.  In this situation, I find it hard to imagine the learning is harming his developing brain.  :)

Frequency, consistency, and context are powerful keys to learning, whatever the subject.  So are delight and the absence of fear.  If I could teach elementary-age students only arithmetic or logic, I would choose logic, but that's a false dichotomy.

Take time to read the article, it really is enlightening.  Note also the shadier side of the superintendent's experiment.  Not wanting to deal with complaints from his more articulate, educated parents, he chose for most of his experimental classrooms those "located in districts where not one parent in ten spoke English as his mother tongue. I sent home a notice to the parents and told them about the experiment that we were going to try, and asked any of them who objected to it to speak to me about it. I had no protests."

I can hardly count Perla Adams my friend, since we met online and I only visit her blog occasionally.  It's in my feedreader, but the posts and comments in Spanish get ignored.  I'm not proud of my monolingualism, but must deal with it.  Still, I'm not sure how to speak of her in this introduction.  "Internet acquaintance"?  "Fellow blogger?"  Nothing sounds quite right.  Anyway, this delightful person, of whatever label, recently wrote a post (in English) that provoked me to comment, and when I write that much I usually can’t resist sharing in more than one place, i.e. what I’ve written ends up here.  You can find Perla’s original post on her blog, The Classical Mommy.  (That's actually her main site, with all sorts of interesting things.  The post on math is here.)  My response, with a few modifications, is below.

Research on the Teaching of Math (one of the links Perla included in her post) is interesting; it is also disturbing, because some of the researchers seem to be amongst those who are afraid of mathematics themselves.

As you may or may not know from things I have posted, if I must give myself a label (which I usually don't), I'm closer to the "unschooler" side of the continuum, though I do believe in organization and discipline.  I also greatly respect Raymond and Dorothy Moore and agree wholeheartedly that children under the age of 10 should not be in school.  (Personally, I would extend that to at least 14.)  However, that doesn't mean I would withhold "formal" instruction from them, even workbooks.  There is a world of difference, which the researchers seem to have missed, between academics in a school setting and one-on-one, relaxed instruction at home that is sensitive to the child's needs, desires, and capacities.  In that context, a workbook is just a tool like any other, to be used or misused.

I am glad to see that some of the writers realize the importance of much immersion in mathematical language, even while recommending delay of mathematical study.  Because mathematics is a language, and as such much better grasped at an early age.  You certainly know much more about multi-lingualism than I do, but wouldn't you agree that those who learn second or third languages at a very early age learn them much, much better than those who wait till 10 or 12 to begin?  I've read studies (sorry I can't give a link) that show that language learning is physically different in the brain for early and late learners.  I strongly suspect that's also true for mathematics.

The question, I suppose, is then:  What is the equivalent in mathematics of making a two-year-old sit still for formal French grammar drills (which is not how they learn), and what is like surrounding the child with a linguistically rich, correct, and abundant exposure to the French language?  We must be careful not to give our children the equivalent in mathematics of a diet of French baby talk or street patois.

In everything we must be sensitive to our children.  Being a math major myself, I had no fear of the subject to pass on to my children, and they quickly came to understand that math and logic are delightful games.  (Better than me, in fact, since my initial mathematical experiences were those decried in the research you cited.  It wasn't until I discovered algebra that I realized math didn't have to be confusing and boring!  It wasn’t my age, but the subject matter that opened my eyes.  If I hadn’t been put into that advanced class in 8^th grade I’d have been miserable for yet another year.)

It's true that the one in our family who developed her mathematical skills the most was the one least exposed to stultifying school mathematics, but what I want to emphasize is this:  workbooks and worksheets were an important part of her preschool education—by her own choice.  She wanted "homework" like her older sister, and devoured every math workbook I could get my hands on (thanks to a helpful first grade teacher; there wasn't much available to the lay person in those days) and every worksheet I could invent for her.  Perhaps that did destroy her understanding of math, and we thus deprived the world of some brilliant mathematical discoveries, but somehow I doubt it.  Granted, her heart is in music, not math, but she “speaks” math and logic with ease, and she did get a math degree "along the way" in college whereas I had to struggle for mine.    As a young child she absorbed mathematics the way a Parisian child absorbs French, and workbooks were one of many contributors to her exposure.  They are not evil, nor are "formal" lessons, if one is sensitive to the individual child.

Isamu Fukui doesn't make lemonade out of life's lemons, he makes the whole lemonade factory.  As a fifteen year old high school student, he vented his frustrations by secretly writing a novel about a dystopia in which the world is run like a school.  Unbeknownst to him, his father found out, and instead of sending his son to a psychiatrist (I'm extrapolating here), sent the manuscript to a publisher.  Three years later, Fukui is still in high school with a critically acclaimed, published novel and a contract for two more.

Write a book for yourself alone, so you can say just what you want, let someone else promote it, and have the publishers come begging you for more.  Works for me!  And a far better use of teen ambition than working for gender-blind college dorm rooms.

Thanks to Jon who directed me to the GeeK Dad article on Fukui's book, Truancy.