Sound Relationship Advice

1. "Turn toward" the people we care about when they make "bids for attention."

For example, you might tell your spouse, or another person you care about, "I learned something really cool today." You hope that he or she will "turn toward" you by replying with something like, "Oh? Tell me about it," as opposed to shutting you down: "Can't you see I'm busy?!!!"

2. Politely turn down bids for attention.

Demonstrate interest in what the people you care about have to say, but make clear the practical limits on your time and attention.

3. "Maintain your bearing" in stressful negative situations. In other words, don't freak out.

4. It's okay to screw up... as long as you make amends or apologize afterwards.

5. Appreciate the people we care about out loud.

6. Do not treat the people we care about with contempt.

Source

Racism without Racists Chapter 1

"There is a strange kind of enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still, racism persists, real and tenacious."
—Albert Memmi, Racism


"Color blind racism" -- the rationalization of contemporary racial inequalities by whites to keep racial minorities at "the bottom of the well" (e.g., dark skinned racial minorities have about an eighth of the net worth whites have).

Contemporary racial inequality is perpetuated by new racism practices that are subtle and institutional (e.g., "smiling face discrimination.")

Whites view racism as prejudice; people of color view racism as systemic or institutionalized.

Race is a social construction but it has a social reality.

"Racial structure" is the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege. It exists to benefit members of the dominant race.

"Racial ideology" is the framework used by actors to explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge (subordinate race) the racial status quo.

The strength of an ideology lies in its loose-jointed, flexible application -- it allows for contradictions, exceptions, and new information. Ideology is a political instrument, not an exercise in personal logic.

Caveats:
1. Whites are the dominant race but are fractured along class, gender, sexual orientation, and other forms of social cleavage. They have multiple and often contradictory interests.
2. Not every single white person defends the racial status quo but most do.

The goal of this book is to uncover the collective practices that help reinforce the contemporary racial order.

Setting Limits with Children

Children need structure in their lives -- without limits, they may be anxious, unpleasant, and a danger to themselves and others. Children feel more secure and successful when they can operate within known boundaries and routines.

The goal is to teach children to solve problems, make choices, learn to live with the consequences of their choices, and achieve desired behaviors.


Tips:
* Plan the day and tell children what activities will be offered and how they are expected to behave.
* Set a good example.
* Be clear and straightforward. Avoid over-explaining.
* Keep rules simple.
* Limit the amount of rules.
* Stick with the situation at hand.
* Offer specific choices.
* Pick your battles - you do not need to react to everything!
* Offer time-out, divert, and redirect as needed.
* Do not over react.
* Do not act in anger. Wait until you settle down before you settle on a consequence.
* Use phrases that reflect consequences.
* Follow through on your consequences.
* Use positive statements for positive actions.
* Distinguish feelings from behavior. It is okay to be mad, it is not okay to hurt someone.
* Try not to compare children.
* Always focus on the behavior, not on the person.

Specific Situations:
* Public places: Weigh your options and decide what you want to accomplish. Is it more important for you to stick to your rules or to get something done?
* Special events: Adjust activities to attention spans, prepare for transitions, and keep children occupied.

Adapted from a Bananas handout.

A Conversation with Asians on Race

10 Questions You Should Ask Your Doctor

1. What is the test for?
2. How many times have you done this procedure?
3. When will I get the results?
4. Why do I need this treatment?
5. Are there any alternatives?
6. What are the possible complications?
7. Which hospital is best for my needs?
8. ow do you spell the name of that drug?
9. Are there any side effects?
10. Will this medicine interact with medicines that I'm already taking?

From The 10 Questions You Should Know. September 2012. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/patients-consumers/patient-involvement/ask-your-doctor/10questions.htmla

The April 2 Mark

Personal goals for 4/2/16 - 4/9/16
1. Break a sweat.
2. Be more outgoing. Try to meet new people.
3. Find a local cause to support.

Previously:
1. Drink more water.
2. No caffeine and chocolate after 3 pm.
3. No screens after 10 pm.
4. Spend 30 minutes outside everyday.
5. Stop saying "good job" to my daughter. Use more specific praise instead.
6. Use smile.amazon.com when ordering off of Amazon.
7. Have a conversation with a friend or family member every week.
8. Read a book just for pleasure.
9. Be more forgiving of myself and others.
10. Say "Thank you" more and "I'm sorry" less.
11. Laugh more.
12. Try to understand other people's thinking, especially if they disagree with my own.
13. Create something.
14. Fail. Try to laugh it off afterwards.
15. Spend an hour everyday being present with my wife and daughter.
16. Brush and floss my teeth every night before bed.
17. Go for a walk.
18. Try something out of my comfort zone.
19. No electronics between 10 pm - 7 AM every day.

Things I've Liked this Week

* Savory soy milk (shan dou jiang) recipe on The Woks of Life
* Watching "Finding Vivian Maier" on Netflix
* Making a Flying Captain America Shield for Naveen's 2nd birthday.
* Building two 4x4 raised beds with trellises for vertical gardening using the Square Foot Gardening book.
* Finding out that Jon Stewart has a farm and animal sanctuary in my hometown of Middletown, NJ.
* Using the Duolingo app to learn espanol.

The March 23 Mark

Personal goals for 3/9/16 - 3/16/16
1. Continue reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee.
2. Continue building a raised garden bed.
3. No electronics between 10 pm - 7 AM every day.
4. Keep track of my budget using the YNAB app.
5. Look into setting up a Will, Living Will on the GYST website.

Previously:
1. Drink more water.
2. No caffeine and chocolate after 3 pm.
3. No screens after 10 pm.
4. Spend 30 minutes outside everyday.
5. Stop saying "good job" to my daughter. Use more specific praise instead.
6. Spend 30 minutes every day looking for a job.
7. Use smile.amazon.com when ordering off of Amazon.
8. Have a conversation with a friend or family member every week.
9. Read a book just for pleasure.
10. Be more forgiving of myself and others.
11. Say "Thank you" more and "I'm sorry" less.
12. Laugh more.
13. Try to understand other people's thinking, especially if they disagree with my own.
14. Create something.
15. Fail. Try to laugh it off afterwards.
16. Spend an hour everyday being present with my wife and daughter.
17. Brush and floss my teeth every night before bed.
18. Research FDA approved devices for snoring.
19. Go for a walk.
20. Try something out of my comfort zone.

Things I've Liked this Week

* Watching Embrace of the Serpent in the movie theaters and The Barkley Marathons on Netflix
* Freeing up space on my cellphone by backing up photos onto Google Photos
* Meeting a financial planner
* Playing with Adi at El Cerrito Co-op Messy Art Day
* Using the Duolingo iOS app to learn Spanish
* Playing a game of Jenga with Adi and Jess

Dialogic Reading for Preschoolers

From Reading Rockets:

When most adults share a book with a preschooler, they read and the child listens. In dialogic reading, the adult helps the child become the teller of the story.

The fundamental reading technique in dialogic reading is the PEER sequence. The adult:

Prompts the child to say something about the book,
Evaluates the child's response,
Expands the child's response by rephrasing and adding information to it, and
Repeats the prompt to make sure the child has learned from the expansion.

Imagine that the parent and the child are looking at the page of a book that has a picture of a fire engine on it. The parent says, "What is this?" (the prompt) while pointing to the fire truck. The child says, truck, and the parent follows with "That's right (the evaluation); it's a red fire truck (the expansion); can you say fire truck?" (the repetition).

Except for the first reading of a book to children, PEER sequences should occur on nearly every page. Sometimes you can read the written words on the page and then prompt the child to say something. For many books, you should do less and less reading of the written words in the book each time you read it.

How to prompt a child

There are five types of prompts that are used in dialogic reading to begin PEER sequences. You can remember these prompts with the word CROWD.

* Completion prompts: You leave a blank at the end of a sentence and get the child to fill it in. These are typically used in books with rhyme or books with repetitive phases.
* Recall prompts: These are questions about what happened in a book a child has already read. Recall prompts work for nearly everything except alphabet books. Recall prompts can be used not only at the end of a book, but also at the beginning of a book when a child has been read that book before.
* Open-ended prompts: These prompts focus on the pictures in books. They work best for books that have rich, detailed illustrations. For example, while looking at a page in a book that the child is familiar with, you might say, "Tell me what's happening in this picture." Open-ended prompts help children increase their expressive fluency and attend to detail.
* Wh prompts: These prompts usually begin with what, where, when, why, and how questions.
* Distancing prompts: These ask children to relate the pictures or words in the book they are reading to experiences outside the book. For example, while looking at a book with a picture of animals on a farm, you might say something like, "Remember when we went to the animal park last week. Which of these animals did we see there?" Distancing prompts help children form a bridge between books and the real world, as well as helping with verbal fluency, conversational abilities, and narrative skills.

Children will enjoy dialogic reading more than traditional reading as long as you mix-up your prompts with straight reading, vary what you do from reading to reading, and follow the child's interest. Keep it light. Don't push children with more prompts than they can handle happily. Keep it fun.

Dr. Brene Brown Says...

Connection gives purpose and meaning to our lives; to create connection, we need the courage to do things that make us feel vulnerable.

Shame is the fear of disconnection: "Is there something about me that, if other people know it, that I won't be worthy of connection?" The feeling "I'm not good enough" underpins this shame.

Shame motivates many negative behaviors:
1. We numb our emotions. When we numb ourselves from shame, grief, and disappointment, we also numb joy, gratitude, happiness.
2. We blame others to discharge pain and discomfort.
3. We seek perfection. We orphan the parts of ourselves that don't fit with our ideal, leaving just the critic.

Focusing on our behavior (guilt) has a positive influence while focusing on ourselves (shame) has a negative one. So when we do something regrettable, we should think "I did something bad" rather than "I am bad."

The Man in the Arena

"It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly."

- Theodore Roosevelt

The March 16 Mark

Personal goals for 3/9/16 - 3/16/16
1. Go for a walk.
2. Try something out of my comfort zone.
3. Build a raised garden bed (repeat).

Previously:
1. Drink more water.
2. No caffeine and chocolate after 3 pm.
3. No screens after 10 pm.
4. Spend 30 minutes outside everyday.
5. Stop saying "good job" to my daughter. Use more specific praise instead.
6. Spend 30 minutes every day looking for a job.
7. Use smile.amazon.com when ordering off of Amazon.
8. Have a conversation with a friend or family member every week.
9. Read a book just for pleasure.
10. Be more forgiving of yourself and others.
11. Say "Thank you" more and "I'm sorry" less.
12. Laugh more.
13. Try to understand other people's thinking, especially if they disagree with your own.
14. Create something.
15. Fail. Try to laugh it off afterwards.
16. Spend an hour everyday being present with my wife and daughter.
17. Brush and floss my teeth every night before bed.
18. Research FDA approved devices for snoring.
19. Read The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee.

Things I've Liked this Week

* Family fun day at the Jewish Contemporary Museum
* Ultimate chocolate chip cookie and chocolate cream pie recipes in the Cook's Illustrated cookbook
* Watching The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
* Celebrating Pi day at a friend's house and the Exploratorium

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

- Margaret Mead

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

by Elliot Eisner

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. Th e limits of our language do not defi ne the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts tra ffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children lean to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe
is important.

Ten Habits of Mind

1. Make room for creativity.

2. Encourage questions.

* Knowledge: "What do you know about...?"
* Process: "I noticed that you are..."
* Reflection: "Tell me more about..." or "How did you...?"

3. Listen actively.

4. Be curious.

5. See mistakes as gifts.

* "What can we do to change this outcome" or "How could you do this next time to have it turn out differently?
* Look at mistakes as oppoortunities for growth rather than indications of failure.

6. Embrace a good mess.

7. Accept boredom as a tool for self-discovery.

* The first few moments of boredom may feel uncomfortable or seem never-ending, but as we push through them, we have to face our ideas, passions, interests, and curiosity.
* Children need unstructured time to follow their curiosity: to imagine, build, experiment, and explore.

8. Step back and enjoy the flow.

* People are happiest when they're deeply absorbed in an activity.

9. Spend time outdoors.

* "When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

10. Think of everything as an experiment.

Via Tinkerlab

The Scientist

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions."
- Claude Levi-Strauss

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The March 9 Mark

Personal goals for 3/9/16 - 3/16/16
1. Spend an hour everyday being present with my wife and daughter.
2. Build a raised garden bed.
3. Brush and floss my teeth every night before bed.
4. Research FDA approved devices for snoring.
5. Read The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee.

Previously:
1. Drink more water.
2. No caffeine and chocolate after 3 pm.
3. No screens after 10 pm.
4. Spend 30 minutes outside everyday.
5. Stop saying "good job" to my daughter. Use more specific praise instead.
6. Spend 30 minutes every day looking for a job.
7. Use smile.amazon.com when ordering off of Amazon.
8. Have a conversation with a friend or family member every week.
9. Read a book just for pleasure.
10. Be more forgiving of yourself and others.
11. Say "Thank you" more and "I'm sorry" less.
12. Laugh more.
13. Try to understand other people's thinking, especially if they disagree with your own.
14. Create something.
15. Fail. Try to laugh it off afterwards.

Things I've Liked This Week

* Spending time with Jess' family in Florida
* A homemade coloring book Shan made for Adi
* Listening to "A Man Alive" by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
* Watching the Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
* Spotting several California slender salamanders in our backyard and Portuguese man-of-war on a Florida beach