Ep. 378: "Lion, Tiger, Horse, Monkey"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hello, Merlin.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: How are you doing?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: Happy spring.
Merlin: Is it really?
John: I guess it's been spring for a while, actually.
Merlin: Oh, geez.
Merlin: I haven't set up my cards.
Merlin: Happy spring to you, too.
Merlin: Are you... Is it busting out all over?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, there's so much pollen in the air up here that it's like... It looks like it's snowing.
John: Snowing yellow...
John: crusty pollen so my i'm i'm super messed up yellow colored pollen it's it's really lovely and then i had a chocolate egg for breakfast so yeah that's what you get that's what you had a heck of a dining day yesterday i noticed oh man did i ever boy oh boy whoo
Merlin: That's the kind of diet that gets you an article in, like, Lancet or something.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: You get a case study.
John: His skin turned gray.
John: He could interact with plants.
John: Hey, incidentally, I'm going to give you four animals.
Okay.
John: Which one does not belong in the group?
John: Okay.
John: Lion, tiger, horse, monkey.
Merlin: Lion, tiger, horse, monkey.
Merlin: I feel like this is not the right answer, but I'm going to say monkey because it's closer to bipedal.
John: Right.
John: That's pretty... I'm coming at it from the wrong angle, aren't I?
John: Well, I don't know.
John: It's pretty fringe.
John: See, we were working on some school this morning.
John: Okay.
John: And there were a lot of... There were these questions.
John: Here's four things.
John: Which one isn't... You know, it's like gold, silver, iron, plastic.
John: It's a child question.
John: They always ask trick questions.
John: And all of them were pretty obvious.
John: And then lion, tiger, horse, monkey.
John: And so we sat around for a while, and every time you throw something out like that.
Merlin: I can make a case for any of those.
John: Mostly bipedal.
John: It's like, sure, but the monkeys, they spend most of their time walking around on all fours.
Merlin: Horses are the closest in terms of domestication.
John: Sure, but you can domesticate a monkey.
Merlin: You can domesticate a monkey.
Merlin: Michael Jackson did for a while.
Merlin: Elvis did for a while.
John: I used to give my cars away to the monkey helpers.
Merlin: You used to give your cars away.
Merlin: Would they come and pick it up?
John: Yeah, you remember, so I had that old Audi of my dad's.
John: Oh, no, the first one was my van when the transmission fell out of my van.
John: Call the monkeys.
John: 1-800-MONKEY-PICKUP.
John: The thing is, the van was in great shape.
John: It had another 100,000 miles on the motor.
John: It was just that I'd spent so much money on it.
John: I didn't think it was worth that much money anymore.
John: And there's this group that trains helper monkeys for people that need a helper monkey.
Merlin: Oh, like in that horror movie, Monkey Shines.
Merlin: I never saw the monkey show.
Merlin: Oh, well, no spoilers, but it doesn't go great with the monkey.
Merlin: But I see what you're saying.
Merlin: Okay, so it's sort of like we did that with KQED.
Merlin: We donated our car to public radio.
Merlin: I don't know what they did with it.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Well, and in this case, they used the money to help, because the thing is, like, a monkey can put your food in the microwave.
John: A monkey can, you know, make phone calls for you if you train it right.
John: I like monkeys.
John: Monkeys are just funny to me.
John: They're wonderful, right?
John: And just saying the word monkey.
Merlin: Monkey feels good.
John: But especially if you imagine saying, instead of like, hey, Siri, can you order 50 rolls of toilet paper?
John: from amazon.marketplace if you could just say that to a monkey hey monkey order 50 rolls of toilet paper it'd be uh that'd be wonderful let's say hey monkey hey monkey so i got my i gave them not no i would just name it monkey okay uh i uh i gave it uh i gave them my van and then when my dad's audi
John: Sort of started to be a burden on me.
John: I gave the, I was like, Hey, the monkey people.
John: So I gave them the Audi.
John: And then when my dad's Chrysler, uh, no longer met our needs as a car, I gave them the Chrysler too.
John: So I've given three cars to the monkey people.
Merlin: And they're training monkeys right and left, I bet.
Merlin: I realize that with all of these sorts of things, you give it away, I guess maybe get a tax break or something.
Merlin: But the point is, they're going to sell whatever they've got.
Merlin: So you get rid of the car.
Merlin: You don't have to deal with it.
Merlin: You're not on Craigslist and stuff.
Merlin: And if you don't want to deal with that, and let's just say for the sake of argument, the transmission has fallen out.
Merlin: The classic example, I think the classic example of sunk cost fallacy, I mean, aside from Iraq, am I right?
Merlin: Is automobiles, where you say like, oh, I just did this to the car.
Merlin: I just spent over $1,000 in the last four months.
Merlin: And you think, oh, I got to keep spending money on this.
Merlin: But if you break out of that cycle, right?
Merlin: You've been through this.
Merlin: And you say, I'm throwing good money.
Merlin: As they say, good money after bad.
Merlin: I'm going to call the monkey people.
Merlin: They're going to come get the car.
Merlin: So then they sell that car.
Merlin: I realize I'm being very simple here.
Merlin: So they sell that car, and then the proceeds from that go to various kinds of monkey training.
Merlin: They don't retrofit the cars for monkeys to drive, as far as you know.
Merlin: As far as I know.
Merlin: Because that would be pretty great.
John: You know, there's so many people in the world whose whole livelihood is they go to auctions and they buy things and then they they put their special skills to work.
John: Your lady friend with the jeans.
John: Similar kind of idea, right?
John: The lady friend with the jeans.
John: Exactly.
John: Except the jeans are a thing that who I mean, I don't even know what the market for those is anymore.
John: But like everybody needs cars.
John: Everybody needs real estate.
John: Everybody needs tractors and stuff.
John: Sometimes I would go on the city of Seattle auction sites because the city of Seattle is getting rid of stuff all the time.
John: Like this, you know, this truck with a cherry picker and flashing lights.
Merlin: is you know surplus now or right all these cop cars you know the cops can only drive their cars for a little while you see that sometimes where you see a van that there's obviously used to be a u-haul that somebody's repainted you see those automobiles that were obviously like you say you get like a blues brothers car cop shocks cop brakes and then they paint a cigarette lighter yeah that's right and we're wearing sunglasses uh-huh
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Merlin: I hate Illinois Nazis.
John: You traded for a microphone.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Carrie Fisher tries to blow you up, as you do.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: I'm sorry, I'm on the Helping Hands monkey helpers page.
Merlin: And they have profiles of the monkeys.
Merlin: You can meet the monkeys.
John: Yeah, Jimmy and August.
Merlin: There's Sophie, Minnie.
Merlin: Granddad.
John: Mr. Peepers.
John: My mom has always sworn by.
John: She's done this three times.
John: She's bought cars from rental car agencies.
John: Oh, man.
John: Like a year and a half later.
John: And I say, oh, man, exactly the same way, because I say, like, what about if you get one of those cars that some that some teenagers just did terrible things in?
Merlin: You say it was a road hard and hung up wet.
Merlin: Those rental cars, they get a beating and people are smoking cigarettes in them.
John: Well, so what so what it turns out, as you can imagine, turns out.
John: 97% of all car rentals are just somebody picks it up at the airport, they drive to the hotel, they put their clip on tile, and they go into a meeting where somebody reads them a PowerPoint demonstration, and they get in the car and they drive back to the airport.
John: Most people don't take their car out and rally it.
John: And frankly, of all, and I'm like the exact person, that's why they don't rent cars to people that are under 30 or whatever.
John: And I'm exactly the type of person that would take his rental car out and brody it around some parking lot.
John: But even I have never, I've rented 400 cars in my life.
John: I've never, I've never like,
John: Road one heart and put it away wet.
John: Yeah, but in your mom's had okay luck with that.
John: She's done it more than once Well, so so she buys these cars.
John: They're like they're one year old they have 30,000 miles on them and
John: And they've been meticulously maintained.
John: It's the same with buying cop cars.
John: You know, those guys do really ride their cars hard.
John: Yes.
John: But they also are super-duper maintained.
John: They come in.
John: Anyway, so she's had really good luck with it and swears by it.
John: And I'm always like, I don't know.
John: It's 40,000 miles of people farting in the seat.
John: But that's true of any used car you buy.
John: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: Anyway, I said, okay, lion, tiger, horse, monkey.
Merlin: Lion, tiger, horse, monkey.
John: I said, look, this isn't one that's...
John: This isn't made for grade schoolers.
John: This is some kind of, like, this is messing with us.
Merlin: John, I studied the liberal arts, and that made me an overthinker.
Merlin: I can make a case.
Merlin: I can make two cases, probably, off the dome for each one of those.
Merlin: Let's hear it.
Merlin: Okay, what should I start with?
John: Well, you just start at the top.
John: How is the lion excluded?
Merlin: The males are the laziest of all those breeds.
Merlin: uh and uh and uh it's not a tiger uh okay okay all right no but no lion it could be continental you're going to get a lion in africa i believe you can get a tiger in india yeah i said i said that i said that the only animal as we went through this i said the only animal that is exclusive to africa is the lion okay am i right i think there's no asian lion is there
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: That sounds like something that like a warlord would demand to be called.
John: An Asian lion.
John: Well, wait, there is an Asiatic, it's called the Asiatic lion.
Merlin: I think it's pronounced Aslan.
John: Aslan, is that his name?
John: No, there is an Asiatic lion.
John: So, no, that's straight out.
John: Boy, that Asiatic lion is pretty mangy looking.
John: But it's a lion.
Merlin: I mean, the horse is majestic and it is domesticated.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So you can domesticate a monkey as we've done.
Merlin: Yeah, I know.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, in terms of like, okay, see now.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You can name it granddad and it makes, it makes your microwaves.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And, and, and so it was tiger was one of them.
Merlin: Lion, tiger, horse, monkey, monkey.
Merlin: Is this, do you have an answer for this?
Merlin: Cause this is going to, this is going to really weigh on me.
Merlin: Did you call in on a zoom and find out the answer?
Merlin: So what, so what we came up with was lion was the outlier.
John: Okay.
John: And I said to her, we need to come up with our own scale because there isn't one in nature, I don't think.
John: She's like, they're all mammals.
John: I'm like, yeah, they're all, you know, and we did the bipedal one and we rejected it.
Merlin: She's aged nine, correct?
Merlin: She just turned nine, yeah.
Merlin: She just turned nine.
Merlin: So, I mean, the overthinking that somebody who studied the liberal arts would bring to this is not what you're supposed to.
Merlin: You're not supposed to think this is a trick, right?
John: That's right.
John: And so I said, what's our scale?
John: We're going to come up with a sliding scale.
John: Or no, not a sliding scale.
John: We're going to come up with our own measurement.
John: And she said, only one of these does not appear in the movie Aladdin.
Merlin: Only one of these?
Merlin: I'm pretty sure there's a monkey in Aladdin.
Merlin: There's a monkey in Aladdin.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Oh, is there not a horse in Aladdin?
John: No, there's a horse.
John: Midnight.
John: Jasmine rides midnight to great effect.
Merlin: Jasmine rides midnight.
Okay.
Yeah.
Merlin: Boy, see, I don't know the answer to this.
Merlin: There's also a tiger in Aladdin, but no lion.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
Merlin: So now you're, if I could say, it seems to me now you're playing the odds.
Merlin: You're going to find the one where there's the most cases to be made.
Merlin: Maybe you get an extra sheet of eight and a half by 11 college ruled paper to write all this down in a sort of exegesis, if you like, of the outlier animals.
John: My feeling about it, and this may be, I may be setting her up for a lifetime of conflict.
John: But my feeling is if there's not a scale, make a scale.
John: If there's not a scale, make a scale.
John: And then argue your scale.
John: Right?
John: If there's not a scale, make a scale and then argue.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: It could be, I feel like, a rubric or a codex of John's design.
Yeah.
John: If you come into class and the teacher says, oh, no, it's this, and it's something that you had considered but had rejected...
John: Make your case.
John: Make your case.
John: Make your case for your own scale.
John: Of course, you're going to lose 95% of those.
Merlin: Yeah, but this could be a real Cyrano de Bergerac moment that people remember for years well past, what is she, fourth grade?
Merlin: Third grade.
John: She just turned nine a couple of weeks ago.
John: And she would be happy to tell you all about how her birthday party was canceled.
John: Oh, no.
Merlin: So she's kind of a redshirt fourth grader in some ways.
John: Yeah, they're not allowed to come back to school.
Merlin: No, you have to qualify and put them on what's called the DL.
Merlin: Okay, if you can say, I'm not done with this.
Merlin: Can you give me a sense of any of the other similar kinds of questions?
Merlin: Is it usually an array of four nouns and you have to say one of these is not like the other?
Merlin: Was there more than one of these?
John: Yeah, there were a dozen of them and they were all like house, church, church.
John: gas station, swimming pool.
John: Okay, one of them has tax-free status.
John: Exactly.
John: Okay.
John: There's no reason not to just play, you know, try and beat them at their own game.
John: Yeah.
John: Except for that they could give you a bad grade.
John: But these days, I don't think that any teacher can get away with a bad grade for long.
John: All I have to do is write a strongly worded letter and go in and say, my tax dollars at work or something.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm never going to put up a sign or something.
John: I know how hard it is to be a teacher.
John: I'm not going to.
Merlin: What class or concentration is this for?
Merlin: What is this in service of?
Merlin: Is this like a social science, a science science?
Merlin: Social social?
Merlin: What is this for?
John: Well, so I don't know how much we've talked about this, but, you know, we put her in a Montessori school this year because she was having a lot of trouble at the public school getting bullied, hard bullied.
John: Oh, God.
John: And we worked on it for a whole year.
John: We worked on what to do when you're bullied.
John: What do you do?
John: Do you tell them to go jump in a lake?
John: Do you ignore them?
John: Do you ignore them and tell them to go jump in a lake?
John: You know, how do you do?
John: What do you do?
John: I mean, I got all the way to like, well, I don't know.
John: Are you going to hit him?
John: Like, if you're going to hit him, like...
John: Like, here's how you hit them.
John: Her mom is like, don't teach her how to hit people.
John: And I'm like, well, I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, you need to have that in your arsenal.
John: You got to figure it out.
John: And we got to the end, and it just felt like the combination... Anyway, the school just wasn't...
John: The school gave all appearances of being responsive.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But in the end, nothing changed.
John: You know, the school, like, had a meeting and talked to everybody.
Merlin: Yeah, my experience with things like that, not that precisely, but similar to that, where you're like you, let's just say you raise a concern.
Merlin: My experience with most public schools, which I love, I love public schools, but they're super busy, they're super constrained on budget and time, and you tend to get the equivalent of a your call is important to us response.
John: There was that, but there was also, I mean, they were socially, they were constrained.
John: And it wasn't that they didn't have the resources to deal with it.
John: There was just a...
John: And honestly, the worst moment of it all was when a vice principal said to me, well, it's kind of a he said, she said.
John: And I'm like, well, I don't think we are saying that anymore, are we?
John: He said, she said?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: There's all kinds of problems with that.
Merlin: Anyway.
Merlin: Just for the sake of the record, was it a male child that was giving her a hard time?
Merlin: Yes, it was.
Merlin: Okay, well, that's a really shitty thing to say.
Merlin: That's an extra super shitty thing to say.
John: He had gotten a whole group of kids on his team and had just tormented her.
John: And I think it was ultimately...
John: From a 1970s standpoint, he had a crush on her, but she's not, you know, she was not like, she's just not in the mindset of being receptive to crushes.
John: And he just, he went dark on it.
John: So we put her in Montessori and Montessori is, and it's, you know, in this Montessori that she's in is a small one.
John: It's not like one that
John: has 900 students or something i don't even know if there is one like that but it's a small one and it is one that has kind of struggled financially and identity wise you know they had they had principal and then that principal left and then one of the teachers got a job in san francisco and then some other teacher got a job somewhere else and you know there was just a lot of turnover
John: And every time there's a bunch of turnover like that, a couple of parents pull out because they're like, I don't know, my child's education and so forth.
John: So we got into the school, and it's a tight-knit little community.
John: We're entering Montessori halfway into the game.
John: So a lot of the kids that started when they were three already know how to do a Japanese tea service.
John: They already can ride a hoverboard.
Merlin: So she's the odd person out because that is a kind of intentional community, at least from the parents' POP, probably.
Merlin: If you want to be there, you really want to be there and you're paying money and you're probably hyper attenuated to the customer service angles and stuff like that.
John: But it's an educational philosophy.
John: It's a play-based economy.
John: And what it means is that they don't... What it means from my standpoint is I have no idea how they're educating these children.
John: I look at the homework and I go in and sit in the class.
John: And I'm like, so third grade, right?
John: You're like learning your times tables.
John: And they're like, well, we don't learn times tables.
John: What we do is we give them 11 D five oranges and they discover multiplication by, uh, by using an orange juicer and, um,
John: And these colorful blocks.
John: And I'm like, they discover multiplication?
John: They're like, yeah, well, the thing is.
John: What are you, Leibniz?
John: Well, and so there's a lot of that where I'm like, so they discover it.
John: And, you know, and so she would come home and she would say, you know, I did this really interesting experiment today.
John: And I would say, tell me about it.
John: Well, we put this, this, this, and this in a jar, and we added salt and nitroglycerin, and then we threw it off the roof, and on the way down, and we tried to hit a seagull with it.
John: And I'm like, wow, okay, and what did you learn?
John: And she would look at me and go, I don't know, shrug, and then walk off.
John: And I'm like, hmm.
John: So I said to the teacher, I was like, so this jar with like seven oils, salt, nitroglycerin that you threw at a seagull, like what is the, what is that, what's the point of that?
John: And you know, and the answer is always something like, well, you know, the magic of discovery.
John: So this horse... Is that really what they said?
Merlin: Or just stuff that... What happens is... I mean, was it... I'm sorry to interrupt.
Merlin: Does it come at you as a sort of now-now?
Merlin: Like, oh, clearly you haven't read the book yet.
Merlin: You know, there's always... We've been in schools.
Merlin: We've been in a total of, I think, four schools now.
Merlin: And a couple of them really involved, actually, like they wanted you to read a book.
Merlin: Or like, you know, I mean, where there's something there's something there was one school we really wanted her to go to for preschool run by this very colorful woman.
Merlin: And there was there was a not a rubric per se, but there was sort of a like what we do here is based upon this philosophy and it would be very beneficial for you to.
Merlin: well, learn this philosophy, but as importantly to like really internalize it, because there's going to be a lot of stuff that might be a little confusing to an outlander like you to come into this environment, because we hew very strongly to this philosophical approach.
Merlin: Ditto Waldorf, obviously.
Merlin: Ditto Montessori.
Merlin: There's various kinds of these things.
Merlin: And I, you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: You go to a public school, and in the case of California, and I'm guessing elsewhere, there's Common Core and
John: there's like everything is about teaching to the test in so many ways and it's extremely well you know why we're studying this we're studying this because it's going to be on the test in three months right yeah yeah and this is you're absolutely right there is there are 15 books about maria montessori that i should have read and internalized in general philosophically i do believe when somebody says to me
John: They're in third grade.
John: They should really still just be experimenting with education and learning in the world in a free space without a ton of imposition of adult anxiety and rules and memorizing because all that stuff is going to, it's all going to come out at the end.
John: And my mom always used to laugh.
John: Because she read Dr. Spock in whenever.
Merlin: Yeah, he was big when I was a kid.
Merlin: That was very much the prevailing, like, don't kiss your son or you'll make him gay.
Merlin: I mean, at least that was the sense I got from it.
Merlin: We talked about this before.
Merlin: You go kind of up and down through these different periods.
Merlin: Our kid was conceived and born in a time where attachment parenting is a thing, and I'm glad we did that.
Merlin: It's very different to what you're getting with, not Mr. Spock, Dr. Spock.
John: Well, yeah, I mean, you and I, I'm assuming this was true of you, but you know, when I was born, they put me in a...
John: They wrapped me in a blanket and put me in a nursery where my dad could look at me from behind a piece of plate glass.
John: Just like on TV.
John: And they would pick you up and take you in and, you know, mom would hold you and feed you and then they would take you back and put you in.
John: Put you in your Skinner box.
John: And you'd sit there for a week.
John: Sit there for a week and then, you know, a nurse with a mask would come in and hold you up for your dad and he would smoke a cigar.
What?
John: And so my mom always said, you know, the first time she ever held me, the first time she ever held me when I wasn't nursing was when they wheeled her out of the hospital a week after I was born.
John: Unbelievable.
John: And she was like, oh, now I get to hold it.
John: Yeah.
John: But what Dr. Spock said, what my mom laughed about was, Dr. Spock said, you know, they're going to end up, have you ever met an adult that didn't eat green beans?
John: No, they all end up eating green beans.
John: So don't force them to eat food.
John: Don't, you know, if they're picky, just let them be picky.
John: They'll figure it out.
John: Okay.
John: And I ended up not eating green beans until I was like 27 or something.
John: And so my mom always laughed like, oh no, sometimes you have to teach them to eat green beans.
John: But in the Montessori thing, what's crazy is that if you get into a conversation with any two parents, it becomes a thing where you can hear them
John: really excitedly talking one another into the philosophy.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know exactly what you mean.
Merlin: And it becomes, it's sort of like the way some people, well, there's an extreme example where people like to tell their birth stories and freak other women out about all the things and how they can't pee anymore or how they have to pee all the time or whatever.
Merlin: They had to get a stent in their face or something.
Merlin: all those horror stories to make women terrified.
Merlin: But then there's also that thing of like, we're doing this right, aren't we?
Merlin: Like, yeah.
Merlin: Don't we think there's this, especially when you're buying into something like that, you're like, this is a good idea, right?
Merlin: The blocks, the blocks are good.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Students discover your blocks.
John: You know, that kind of thing.
John: There's, there's all that.
John: And there's this, there's just this really strong feeling that,
John: Because so I went to a parent teacher meeting and there were a lot of people in the meeting that even I, a lot of parents in the meeting, even I felt like saying, did you not read the book?
John: Because there were a couple of like what clearly like ambitious parents that, that were saying, well, how are they going to compete with, with high school at high school level?
John: And all the other parents are like, it's, you know, at high school, you know, 98% of Montessori kids by the time they're in high school are already in NASA.
John: They already, you know, they've already built their own nuclear powered submarine.
John: Like, don't worry.
John: If you, if you look at, if you, since Montessori was developed, if you looked at the heads of state,
John: Of all 198 countries in the world, like 95% of them went to Montessori.
John: So don't worry.
John: Don't worry.
John: And the agro parents who clearly have tech jobs and are like 49.
John: are like, well, I don't know about that.
John: It's like, you're sending your kid to Monastery.
John: What did you think this was?
John: Even I know that you joined a cult, so just be in it.
John: Like, shush.
John: Sit down.
Merlin: You got into Sea Org.
Merlin: Do not complain about having to swab the deck.
Merlin: That's right.
John: It's just like, just hush.
John: Let them talk.
John: Let's figure out what they're really talking about.
John: Anyway, so since the quarantine, I've been doing this work with her.
John: And, uh, and I've just been Gen X modifying it at a certain point, you know, a week or two ago, I was like a little bit.
John: I'm like, okay, we can do this lion tiger monkey, uh, bear thing all day.
John: I'm happy to do that.
John: And, and I'm happy to whatever we're going to learn from it.
John: We can put nitroglycerin in a jar of oil and throw it at a seagull.
John: That's like right out of my playbook.
John: Sure.
John: But after we do, let's sit and talk about what we learned, if anything.
John: And then about a week or 10 days ago, I was like, also, we're going to memorize the times tables.
John: I don't care if they say that you don't need to.
John: There's no reason not to.
Merlin: I have an anecdote about that.
Merlin: That's a real thing.
Merlin: That's straight up your alley, which was that, yeah, third grade.
Merlin: So when I was in third grade, back in, I guess it was about, it was during reconstruction.
Merlin: So I want to say in like probably 1870.
Merlin: That's what you did.
Merlin: The math unit when I was in third grade was this.
Merlin: You get usually a green sheet of paper with 100 multiplication problems on, and you keep doing it until you get 100%.
Merlin: That's third grade math.
Merlin: Now, I'm not here to stand for that as a great paragon of learning, but I do know that I battled through my sevens and my eights, which I was terrible at, 56 being the most difficult for me, but I did get through it.
Merlin: Sure, that's a very hard one.
Merlin: And now I know those.
Merlin: I don't have to think about it.
Merlin: And here's what happened is they said, OK, well, there were some very interesting things happening at my kids' elementary school, I think.
Merlin: One is that when she was in, I want to say third grade, by fiat, the entire third grade, the four third grade teachers all said, look, we're not going to do homework this year.
Merlin: Go read the papers on this.
Merlin: Homework for kids this age is so important that you not email me about this.
Merlin: But basically at that age, all the homework stuff, it's third and fourth grade are such, to me, very important crossover years.
Merlin: Because everything from preschool through second grade is very much about socialization, standing in line, holding your urine, all the kinds of things that are important to become a citizen in a civic society.
Merlin: And then sometime around third or fourth grade, now you're getting into fractions.
Merlin: And I don't know if you're doing number lines and that kind of stuff, but the way they do math now, that becomes very important.
Merlin: But here's what happened.
Merlin: So in this experimental phase, they said, look, yeah, so this year we're not, you know, we don't teach times tables anymore.
Merlin: We have a different way we do that.
Merlin: And they sort of looked at it.
Merlin: Imagine me making my eyes really big and slowly shaking my head a little bit from side to side.
Merlin: We're not going to learn times tables this year.
Merlin: But if you wanted to do that at home, it would really help.
Merlin: True story.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Oh, absolutely true story.
Merlin: It's sort of like when the old lady comes to see Bob Parr at the insurance agency.
Merlin: You know, it's like, I'm not allowed to help you with this problem, but I know somebody who could, but I can't tell you who it is, but I'm going to tell you who it is.
Merlin: And we really encouraged that.
Merlin: And she hated it because it was drudgery.
Merlin: And now guess what?
Merlin: Mixed message.
Merlin: Because at school, they're saying, you don't have to learn this stuff.
Merlin: But like her teacher was like, it would actually super help a lot.
Merlin: And that is not unique.
Merlin: Stuff like that has happened so many different times where you're like, well...
Merlin: You know, on the one hand, when you're sitting in the sanctuary, you want to be a perfect Christian, but guess what?
Merlin: None of us are perfect Christians.
Merlin: And if we try to min-max this for people who are perfect Christians, this church is going to empty out real soon.
John: Yeah.
John: But you're in Montessori.
John: In my experience of dealing with adult people, I feel...
John: A practical difference between people my age – well, the thing is everybody my age memorized their times tables.
John: It was just a thing that if you were in – if you're like old Generation X or whatever the hell we're called now.
John: Yes.
John: They just hit you with the hickory switch and dipped your pigtails in the inkwell until you learned your times tables.
Merlin: They bring in an ad hoc nun to come in and just beat the shit out of you with a ruler.
Merlin: Even in public school.
Merlin: Even in a public school, especially in a public school.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So, I mean, I think a case could be made that a lot of parents would be squealing like a stuck pig if their kid did not learn the times tables when they were your daughter's age.
John: In our house, when my mom first divorced my dad, she bought a bunch of furniture.
John: And this has got to be like proto, proto, proto IKEA furniture.
John: I don't know if I've told you about this, but it was made out of cardboard tubes.
John: It was, you know, like a map tube, like hard, thick cardboard tube.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And then the end pieces were little three-way, you know, the little plastic end piece would slide into a tube.
John: And then at right angles, you could put two more tubes onto it, and it would be a little corner.
John: And with those little pieces, you would build coffee tables.
Merlin: It's not PVC.
Merlin: It's cardboard.
Merlin: It's cardboard.
Merlin: Cardboard okay, so I'm thinking a little bit of like a lounge chair like those lounge chairs that are made out of PVC tubes Is it a similar concept where it's almost like the trap of a sink you have a curve here?
John: You can put that there and you can like furniture hack Well except that they were just tubes, so there weren't any curves.
John: It was just it was what you could build it was basically what you could build with Lincoln logs or or treks or whatever that okay stuff was and
John: And so all of our tables, and the tubes were red.
John: They were like, it was like the tubes you get when you get to the bottom of a roll of Christmas.
Merlin: I just looked up red cardboard tube furniture, and I think I'm seeing it.
Merlin: They're mostly horizontal.
Merlin: They're expressed horizontally or vertically, and you put these together, and it makes this very, a lot of this is shown in sort of an outdoor context, but this is some weird-ass furniture.
John: So let me see if I can find it.
John: And then on the top, there were the tabletops.
John: Cardboard, tube, furniture, 1970s, let's say.
John: Nope.
John: Nope.
John: Not that stuff yet.
John: There was nothing.
John: Surely we weren't the only people in the country to have this.
John: I have no idea where she found this.
John: I'm really going to have to get to the bottom of this.
Merlin: Was it part of an omnibus effort to distance her environment from the husband times?
John: No, it was that she was desperately poor.
John: Okay.
John: And desperately poor and...
John: Of the nature, the mental nature of someone who was going to do this on her own and not take any help from anybody.
John: Got it.
John: And so we rented a house.
John: And when she left Alaska, when she left my dad...
John: She took nothing with her except what she could put into a bag.
John: And the thing is, it's not like she was abused or anything.
John: She left in the middle of the night because she just wanted to, it was just like when Millennium Girlfriend left me.
John: The only thing she didn't do was take my dad's Filson bag.
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Merlin: That still stings, doesn't it?
John: She did it because she was dramatic, but also because it mattered to her that she...
Merlin: that now she was on her own and she was going to do it.
Merlin: We went through the exact same thing, John.
Merlin: And it was so important.
Merlin: We got into a two bedroom house that smelled like cat pee.
Merlin: It was $250 a month.
Merlin: And the single most important thing for my mom, who was, it was pretty close to abuse, but like for her, it was like, I, I'm going to break from this life and this man.
Merlin: And I, I want some, I want him to give me some money.
Merlin: And apart from that, I never want to even see him again.
Merlin: And my new life starts at the end of the sentence.
Merlin: Right.
Right.
Merlin: This is not something I'm going to debate about or go to a whiteboard.
Merlin: In my head, this has been done longer than I realized.
Merlin: Nothing against your dad.
Merlin: But in my case, my stepfather was the worst.
Merlin: And actually, his son owned our house.
Merlin: And we came home one day.
Merlin: And the truth is a true story.
Merlin: And mom got home from work because he didn't work and she did.
Merlin: And he said, oh, there's something for you over there.
Merlin: And it's an envelope.
Merlin: And it's from his son, who was an attorney in Virginia, saying that as of immediately, we were evicted from the house.
Merlin: they were married they were married and uh it was three of us in the house and he's yeah so that's it so sorry randy randy wants you to leave and that that's how that and she's like okay that's it she found two dudes to come big burly guys she said put that in the truck put that in the truck put that in the truck and we it's one of the greatest triumphs of my mother's adult life and i will always admire her for the way she fucking sliced that shit off clean like
Merlin: Like it was done.
Merlin: And like, and it really frustrated my, my stepfather because he thought this was going to be something where he got to watch the woman ball or something.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: She was going to grovel.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It was all gone.
Merlin: And he still would be real creepy and like park outside that new house and stuff like that.
Merlin: But yeah, that's, I know that urgency to get away.
Merlin: And the independent part of that is so critical though.
Merlin: Like, you know, this is, this is a totally clean break.
Merlin: It's done.
Merlin: It's not that we're going to leave in our Conestoga wagon at 2am.
Merlin: It's that like, we're done.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's over.
John: And, and I don't know, you know, the difference I think between
John: So did that happen in your life in 78?
John: 82.
John: 82.
John: Okay.
John: So the difference between 72 and 82, I think is profound.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Amongst my friends, divorce was virtually unheard of in 1972.
Merlin: And in 1982, it was way beyond 50%, at least in Florida.
John: Yeah.
John: And in 82, it was happening.
John: But in 72, I think that some of the challenges were that like a woman couldn't get a credit card.
John: Without her husband's cosign.
John: Yeah, everything everything was probably in his name He probably did all of the like she would might manage the checkbook But the money was all basically his well and the problem in my parents marriage was she didn't if she had managed the checkbook They'd still be they still be married
John: Not happily, but.
John: They'd still be married.
John: He would be dead for 12 years and they'd still be married.
John: He'd still be alive is probably what would happen.
Merlin: And you'd be throwing pieces of lit paper off the back of a train.
John: But she had her own bank account because she had insisted on it because of something.
John: She gamed it.
John: five years before because she needed some, she had some reason that she needed it because my mom is just, she's always apocalypse prepping, but you know, like a single woman renting her own house, you know, would have, would have raised a bunch of eyebrows.
John: Like it was hard for her, but so she bought this furniture.
John: I can't imagine, I can't find it.
John: I'm looking here with under all the keywords I can think of and there's no sign of it.
John: And this is something that will turn loose on the Internet, and I'm sure somebody will have it to us by the end of the day.
John: But it was – it had on the tops of these cardboard tubes –
John: There was kind of a thin plastic, white plastic top to all the tables.
John: Like a cap.
John: It was like the plastic was just thick enough that it could support its own weight and you could put a drink on it or whatever.
John: I mean, it was thick enough that it could be a tabletop.
John: But if you took it off, you could...
John: I don't know.
John: It was a piece of plastic that was an eighth of an inch thick, maybe a little thinner than that, a sixteenth of an inch thick.
John: You'd get a nice map delivered in.
John: Well, that's the tubes, but I'm talking about the flat plastic tops, which were tabletops, but they were made out of this white plastic.
John: It was kind of like floor linoleum, I guess.
Okay.
John: And this was our furniture.
John: And the thing is, if you sat on it, if you sat on the table, it would, it would break, but it would, it would kind of come apart before it would break.
John: But they worked.
John: I mean, our coffee table was that you can sit and put your feet up on it, you know, made out of this plant.
John: Anyway, by the time I was in third grade, uh,
John: we'd had this furniture for a long time.
John: She was, she'd been working for a long time.
Merlin: We had, she could have programming management stuff at this point.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: She could afford furniture, but we still, because we're, you know, because we're a depression air family, because as older generation X, I grew up in the depression with my, with my mother, with depression, mom, with depression, mom, like we still had this furniture.
John: And one day she said,
John: Kind of like exactly like I'm doing.
John: She said, I don't think the schools are teaching your times tables in a way with much alacrity.
John: And I was like, I don't know.
John: I mean, we work on it and stuff.
John: She was like, that's not how you learn your times tables.
John: You don't work on it and stuff.
John: you memorize your times tables.
John: And I was like, oh yeah, I know, but you know, like free to be you and me or whatever.
John: I mean, you know, like no kid wants to learn their times tables.
John: I was like, oh, but you know, Mel Brooks and Marla Thomas said that it's fine.
John: It's all about to cry.
John: And so she took, she went over to the cardboard tube coffee table, which was pretty knackered by this point.
John: And she took the tabletop off
John: And she put it against the wall.
John: She took a ruler and a permanent marker.
John: She made a grid?
John: And she made a grid on the underside of this coffee tabletop.
John: Oh, this has got to be featured in your biopic.
John: This is such a good moment.
John: Type of thing that she would do.
John: Because now, well, I guess her coffee table is gone.
John: And I'm watching her...
John: like with a lot of attention because I don't know what's happening.
John: It's a little bit like Richard Dreyfuss and the mashed potatoes.
John: Yes, exactly.
John: When my mom would do something like this, the order of the day was, okay, focus your attention on what mom's doing because it's clearly important.
John: We've sacrificed our coffee table to this.
John: And she sat and just like, um,
John: You know, my mom can draw a grid pretty well.
John: And she did a times table on the underside of the coffee table and leaned it against the wall in the hall.
John: And every time I walked anywhere near it, anytime I walked out of the door of my bedroom, you know, she would say...
John: Seven times eight.
John: And I sat and looked, you know, I still can see this times table.
John: Absolutely.
Merlin: This is your father now.
John: The grid is your father now.
John: But it wasn't, you know, it didn't feel punitive.
John: It very quickly started to feel like something she and I were working on together.
John: This was a major project that we needed to do together.
John: And I was on her team.
John: She was on my team, I guess, is what it was.
John: And we got this...
John: Times table into my head and the sacrifice of the coffee table did not feel like a Mountain of mashed potatoes on the living room table.
John: It felt like the coffee table also has given its life to This the times tables.
John: Oh, it's the giving table.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: It's the giving table.
John: It's exactly It's where the coffee table ends
John: And so I learned that green eggs and coffee.
John: You cannot take the times table out of my head because I see this coffee table leaned up against the, if you ask me a times table question, you know, and I see the top and I see the coffee table, but young generation X people that were born in, let's say 75 or six or seven.
John: Those people that for a long time I was like, they're not generation X. There's something else there.
John: I don't know what they are.
John: Teenage mutant ninja, ninja turtle.
John: Mm hmm.
John: Who are now like, we're old.
John: 77, that's old generation.
John: Those people, I feel like I meet them in the wild sometimes and they never learned their times tables.
John: And you say some basic thing like, oh, well, there's seven of us and we need to get six bagels each.
John: And they wave their hands like, nah, it doesn't matter.
John: We'll just get some amount.
John: And I'm like, no, we should get the right amount.
John: And they're like, nah, some general amount that's in the general area.
John: And I'm like, oh, wow, you don't know your times tables.
John: Wow.
John: How do you do it?
John: How do you get around the world?
Merlin: There's a, there's, there would be a time in my life where I would look at that and think that that was almost as bad as being illiterate.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: If you can't, if you can't instantly know that three times two is six or whatever, like that's, that to me would be a sign of an, at a certain point in my life, that would be a sign of a very undereducated person.
Merlin: How could you, right?
Merlin: How could you, that's like that third grade equals, equals multiplication tables.
John: Third grade equals multiplication, right?
John: So the other day I was like, I can't live like this.
John: I cannot live in a Montessori world where we're throwing nitroglycerin at seagulls.
John: But if I say, if she says to me, you know, how many of these should I get for the, you know, how many beads is it going to take?
John: And I'm like, well, what is, how many is this plus that times that?
John: And she's just like, I can't do it.
John: So I got a big piece of, I didn't turn the coffee table upside down because that would have been weird, but I got a big piece of board.
John: And I said, let's make a grid.
John: Oh my gosh.
John: Okay.
John: Let's make a 10 by 10 grid on this.
John: And she was like, why?
John: And I said, you'll find out.
John: And so we got a straight edge out and we made a grid and she had a lot of fun doing that because making a grid is fun.
John: And I was like, big grid, you know, big, big wall size thing.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And then I was like, now let's put every number in across the top and down the side, one through 10 and one through 10 all the way down.
John: She was like, this is fun.
John: I was like, fill the whole square with the number.
John: There's nothing else going to go in the square.
John: She did it.
John: And then I was like, okay, now you're hooked.
John: Now here's what a times table looks like.
John: And as we did it, I also had her write the odd numbers in a different color.
John: What?
John: I was like, every odd number, just write it in green.
John: The rest are in red.
John: And I don't know why I did that.
John: No one ever did that.
John: That's not part of the times table.
John: But I was like, look, some of these numbers are odd, and it will be interesting to see them in a different color.
John: I don't know.
John: I mean, if she has this table burned into her head like I have into mine, why not also have additional information?
Merlin: That's the thing is you can't live inside those combinations.
Merlin: you know what I mean?
Merlin: You can't really live inside that and have that.
Merlin: It needs to be so automatic in the same way that, I don't know, a musician can sight read or the way that you can know that STOP on a red octagon means stop.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Like in my head, I'm ready to be a little bit wrong about this, but like that should be something where like, you know it so well that if you did put different odd and even numbers, different colors, you might notice a pattern and understand why.
Merlin: Same way that when you multiply a negative number, you get this kind of result.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: There's
John: patterns to that that could be very illuminating but you do need to first learn learn and memorize all of those it was even interesting to me in that in that grid how few odd numbers there are in the you know in the lower um within the multiplication right but because because her granddad was like well they're same you know same number of odds and evens like equal numbers and i was like not in a multiplication table because yes there are like between one numbers want to be even
John: They want to be even.
John: That's right.
John: So we're working on it now.
John: So today she's memorizing her eights.
John: She's upstairs right now.
Merlin: Oh, bless her heart.
John: Memorizing her eights.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: And when I come up, she's going to show me that she knows her eights.
John: And it's very fun.
John: But one of the things we've discovered is that a multiplication table is also a division table.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: It sure is.
Merlin: You just do it from a different direction.
John: You just do it in a different direction.
John: And that has been really interesting.
John: Did she get that?
John: Well, so this is a thing where we're like, okay.
John: Because for me, I was also like, huh, it is a division table.
John: What do you know about dead apples?
John: And so we've been like throwing, as we're learning multiplication, we're also reverse engineering division.
Merlin: They're the same thing.
Merlin: They're the same thing.
Merlin: They're the same thing.
Merlin: That's the trick.
Merlin: That's what those Wall Street fat cats don't want you to know.
Merlin: They're the same thing.
Merlin: That's exactly right.
Merlin: That's exactly right.
John: Division seems harder, but it's not.
Merlin: It's just reverse multiplication.
John: It's reverse multiplication.
John: It's the minus of the plus.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Get it in your bones.
Merlin: Get it in your bones.
John: Yep.
John: Yep.
John: So whether this is Montessori or not, whether it's a lion, tiger, horse, or monkey, or whether whatever, I don't see how during a quarantine, if you learn your multiplication and division, that that's ever going to hurt you.
John: I don't think it's going to get, because the thing is, we're having fun with it.
John: It is not a bummer.
John: Right.
John: We're doing the same thing that my mom did, which was like, Hey, we're working on a project together.
John: Guess what it's called?
John: It's called impress mama who was born in 1977 and doesn't know her timestamps.
John: Oh, she's one of those.
Merlin: Yeah, and she's like... She succeeded in life despite that.
John: Yeah, she's like, I have a calculator right here.
John: And I'm like, uh-huh, okay.
John: You're not modeling very well right now, Mom.
John: Yeah, let's see what happens after the EMP wipes out all the phones.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, have fun with that.
Merlin: You can't even write boobs on your calculator anymore.
John: How many bagels are you going to get if there's seven people and everybody wants four bagels, huh?
John: You don't even know.
John: You don't even know.
John: So it's been super fun.
John: And I think by the end of whatever, that's the thing.
John: At the end of this, all these questions of like, how do we teach our kid and there's no school anymore?
Merlin: The question of how do we live?
Merlin: There's so much stuff where we're doing for the first time.
Merlin: And I was just saying to my lady, like...
Merlin: Again, it's so important that you not email me.
Merlin: But it's pretty wild how there's this Johnson and Roosevelt level shit going on at a state level in these different places.
Merlin: And I said to her, I says, you know, it's almost like keeping the nation healthy, employed, fed, sheltered, clothed.
Merlin: And having meaning ends up being kind of important in the polity.
Merlin: It's almost like that.
Merlin: Isn't that a wild, wild thing?
Merlin: And so you're doing like postgraduate work here.
Merlin: You're not postgraduate.
Merlin: You're doing, what are you doing?
Merlin: It's like a residency.
Merlin: A residency in arithmetic.
John: Well, because what do you remember learning?
John: In third grade, besides being able to hold your P. Right.
Merlin: Like you learn tables and SRAs.
Merlin: I remember SRAs.
Merlin: Fourth grade was Ohio history, but it was a lot of worksheet kind of stuff.
John: Yeah, right.
John: You just multiple choice and stuff.
John: But like if we learn fractions.
John: Oh, this is the other Montessori thing that I just was just I actually I actually called our teacher and asked about this because, you know, we're downloading these packets to work.
Oh, God.
John: And so we're working on packets.
Merlin: Oh, great.
Merlin: You put some stuff out from the internet.
Merlin: Thanks for school.
Merlin: That's fine.
Merlin: I'll have her spend an hour on this.
Merlin: After she's gone to soccer practice or basketball practice and after she's practiced her ukulele, then she can do something you fucking downloaded from the internet.
Merlin: Thanks for that.
John: And downloading it is just...
Merlin: Yeah, it just makes you feel like... After that year of no homework, going back to homework was such a grind.
Merlin: She had a great work ethic about it and all that stuff, and I was real proud of her for how she handled it.
Merlin: Ever since second grade, we've gotten out of the way.
Merlin: Her second grade teacher said to us, look, and we were like, you know, there's a lot of stress with this homework stuff, and she cries a lot.
Merlin: And they're like, well, why don't you make it her thing, and then you just don't bug her about it.
Merlin: And I was like, I guess that's an option.
Merlin: And for our kid, it turned out good.
Merlin: That's not going to turn out good for everybody.
Merlin: But you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Is she self-motivated?
Merlin: She is like her parents, both.
Merlin: One of the few things we all share, I think, is that we don't want to disappoint people and we don't want to be humiliated because we did something stupid.
Merlin: And so she does have a good work ethic, probably out of shame, as you do.
Merlin: She's kidding.
Merlin: She's got roots in colonial America and the Midwest, so she's got all that stuff going on.
Merlin: But I guess what I'm trying to say is there definitely was one year after the year of no homework, there was this year of like, holy shit, this is such bullshit.
Merlin: I mean, I love you, teacher.
Merlin: You're such a great teacher.
Merlin: But it's so insane to just give this kid this monkey-ass version of stuff they did in school today.
Merlin: Oh, guess what?
Merlin: Now you do that for an hour tonight, too.
Merlin: For what?
Merlin: You're not really reinforcing this.
Merlin: You're mostly just creating something where they can disappoint you with how they didn't do it right.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: That's my opinion.
Merlin: You might feel differently, but that's how I feel.
John: Oh, I mean, I absolutely had... I loved school until I got to a point where homework...
John: And turned into doing worksheets and doing the same problem over and over and over 25 times.
John: And at the point that that happened, I bailed.
John: I bailed out of school.
John: I kept going to school all the way through high school.
John: I kept enjoying the social aspect of it.
John: I just was like, I'm not, I can't, why would I do that?
John: That was me in eighth grade.
Merlin: In eighth grade, I'd had straight A's all the way through seventh grade.
Merlin: I had the best, uh, as we said, military school, best deportment in my entire company of a couple hundred kids.
Merlin: The only kid who never got, I did not ever get a single demerit and I had straight A's for the whole year.
Merlin: And then I went to public school in Pasco County, Florida, and there was some mix them ups with where I got placed.
Merlin: And I got basically put in consumer math, like got put into the, like how to, how to write a check class.
Merlin: It was very remedial.
Merlin: And I was tuned way the fuck out.
Merlin: And I have no one to blame but myself.
Merlin: But when I should have been in pre-algebra or algebra, I was in consumer math.
Merlin: And then that did lead to a series of events where I had to take algebra twice because I did a really bad job with it.
Merlin: I didn't get that high enough grade.
Merlin: I had geometry when I was a senior.
Merlin: A senior.
Merlin: I was in a class with ninth graders.
Merlin: It was really embarrassing.
Merlin: But there's also this other problem that I'm just tossing this out a little bit from left field.
Merlin: I do feel like sometimes we struggle when we get into an institution like school especially.
Merlin: We struggle with these two sort of warring impulses without acknowledging or at least two.
Merlin: But there's these different things we're trying to accomplish here.
Merlin: And if we don't clarify what a desirable outcome of this is, there's going to be a lot of trouble.
Merlin: Because that's how life works.
Merlin: The way life works is that we do different things for different reasons.
Merlin: And if we think we're doing it for one reason, but don't really know why we're doing it, it gets stupid.
Merlin: And so the because I said so attitude of, let's say a little bit in elementary school.
Merlin: Okay, so you're in preschool, and it's mostly like you have juice and a nap, and you wash your hands, and you learn basic social stuff and how to get along and not hit somebody with a truck or a shovel.
Merlin: You get that.
Merlin: You get into second or third grade, and there's a lot of because I said so kind of stuff.
Merlin: And I do think at a certain point, you cross over from this is purely about socialization and being able to be away from your mom and dad into something where we are moving toward the sort of education that's going to be valuable to you in middle school and beyond.
Merlin: That's really important.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I mean, you tell me what you think, but I do feel like if you've got whether you've got a philosophy, everybody has a philosophy, whether they realize it or not.
Merlin: It's just that a lot of people's philosophy is I tell kids what to do and they do it or they get in trouble.
Merlin: And, you know, there will be points hopefully in life where that's something they don't have to face.
Merlin: But like if if John Roderick is handed a worksheet.
Merlin: That says, you know, that's been mimeographed so many times you can barely read.
Merlin: We stole this from Scholastic at the bottom.
Merlin: And like, so that's what you do now.
Merlin: What you do now, we're going to evaluate you based on how well you hewed to our command that you go and do this and not complain about it.
Merlin: And like, that's a great way to take a pretty smart kid and turn him into a real asshole.
Merlin: It worked for me.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: These warring sort of impulses.
Merlin: And even in the most gracious sort of Waldorf or Montessori sort of environment, you can still really screw things up.
Merlin: Some kids really need structure.
Merlin: And maybe that's the wrong school for them battling the parents.
Merlin: But I'm just saying, even the best intentioned people will tend to do the thing...
Merlin: that covers up their own fears and amplifies the things that they don't hate doing so if you're the kind of person who likes managing people but you don't like people who are uppity that's going to make you a certain kind of boss in life and there's a lot of teachers and the teachers work pretty goddamn hard a lot of them can't afford to live in san francisco they live in the east bay our principal lives in the east bay like it's they're working real hard to do this but they're super constrained and all it takes is a couple kids who are a little rowdy to
Merlin: Like, have the whole classical tits up.
Merlin: Nobody gets to hear, like, oh, good job.
Merlin: What you hear is, like, did you do the worksheet right?
Merlin: Because now you're like the bad kid if you didn't do that.
John: I don't know.
John: I hate it.
John: The thing that no one ever did for me as a kid...
John: was explain ever, really, what all this was in service of.
John: Right?
John: I mean, they would say, you're going to need this one day.
Merlin: It's just abstraction on abstraction over and over and over.
John: Yeah, but I was going to need it when what happened.
John: And it wasn't just the argument of like, there are calculators, I'm not going to need my times tables.
John: But in general, right?
John: And I think the problem was...
John: That the schools and the whatever the institutions convert your parents into thinking that they the parents are working on behalf of the schools and the child is the enemy.
John: Right.
John: The child is the thing that the schools and the parents and the culture and the city are allied with.
John: against.
John: Yeah, get on the team.
John: Let's get this kid in shape.
John: Let's get this kid in shape in this way.
John: In this way.
John: And my attitude with my daughter has always been
John: You and I are on the same team.
John: We're not against the school necessarily.
John: But if the school puts us in a posture where we need to be against them, we are against them together.
John: We are along with what they're doing together as long as it makes sense.
John: But every question that comes across our bow, I try to explain to her what it's in service of.
John: Like, here's why they ask us to learn this.
John: Because at some point, it's not just a question of when there are seven people and we need to get bagels.
John: Sometimes it really... The answer is 56.
John: The answer is always 56.
John: Sometimes it's in service of an abstraction.
John: And some of those abstractions are...
John: Like waiting your turn is an abstraction because ultimately like saying, ultimately trying to tell a five-year-old to respect other people's feelings, it's useless.
John: You're just saying words because the five-year-old doesn't, it doesn't know that other people have feelings, doesn't understand.
Merlin: So why would they, it's like getting mad at a baby over lack of object permanence.
John: Right, right.
John: So with her, I'm all, and you know, and one of the things, and this is part of the Roderick credo is,
John: It's like one of the things that you learn in life is to suffer for a time quietly.
John: If you can suffer quietly for a time, you can survive.
John: You can survive anything.
John: If you cannot suffer quietly, I'm not saying suffer quietly throughout your life.
John: My God, we don't do that.
John: But if you cannot suffer quietly for a time, then you're going to be in a load of shit with everybody all the time.
Merlin: So it's really it's your own kind of education or your own sort of philosophy is like, right, is like, well, here's here's the constraints of how we're going to be dealing with this information.
Merlin: And like you, you get a, you get a period of time where we're going to just go, or we might not even say, we'll just keep showing up and doing your goddamn worksheets.
Merlin: But like, don't count on us doing this for six years and don't try to turn us against each other because we're not going to, it's not going to happen.
John: Yeah.
John: No, we're good.
John: If a, if a worksheet, well, that's what happened today.
John: It was like horse, monkey, tiger, lion.
John: Well, at a certain point we were inventing our own game about this because what is the point of this?
John: The point is not to be right on this stupid question.
Merlin: Maybe it's a Kobayashi Maru.
Merlin: Oh, shit, dog.
Merlin: What if there's no correct answer?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: There can't be.
Merlin: They just want to see how you handle an unsolvable problem.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You're Kirstie Alley.
John: It's like a Google job interview.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: How many?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: How many angels fit on the head of a pin kind of thing?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, so we downloaded some packet and there was a long division problem.
John: And I said,
John: do you have you done the have you seen this little diagram long division she was like no no i said because they're because they're teaching you with beads and pieces of cake and half half a seagull right and she was like she was like yeah i don't i don't know what this is so i was like all right well here's how you do long division in order to show their work they have to go to the kitchen and do a japanese teaser
John: So I was like, here's long division.
John: It's pretty simple.
John: You just do this, and then it's like this, and it's basically like it's minus.
John: You're doing a minus problem, but it's just a minus problem that kind of recapitulates over itself three or four times, and she's like, uh-huh, okay.
John: But the long division problem was long.
John: It was a two-digit number.
John: It was like a four-digit number divided by a two-digit number.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: That's way beyond her bailiwick.
John: That's crazy.
John: But I'm like, I don't know.
John: So we start doing it.
John: We start working on it.
John: She's like, yeah, okay, all right.
John: And we get down there.
John: And the answer is a repeating decimal.
John: What is happening?
John: And I'm like, I don't.
John: So I do the problem again in my head, and I'm like,
John: It's a repeating decimal.
John: This is insane.
John: Did you even use your baby mama's calculator?
John: And so, no, it just was like, I know how to do long division.
John: So I sat with her and I was like, this is a fraction.
John: It's the same as fractions.
John: It's just we're also, fractions can also be represented in decimals.
John: And I'd explained that to her before and I was trying to give her an example of what this was.
John: But I was like, this is insane.
John: This is not how you don't just put one of these on a packet and never have taught them.
John: So I called the teacher and I was like, what's the deal with that?
John: And she said, oh, well, the Montessori philosophy is that we give all kids access to all material information.
John: At all times.
John: So, you know, if she's in a class with a bunch of fourth and fifth graders, the material is there if she wants to explore it.
John: If she wants to put half of a seagull and a piece of cake down and go teach herself.
Merlin: Move the other boy's coat to the next hook.
Merlin: Get your nitroglycerin.
Merlin: Who's been rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant.
Merlin: And learn algebra too.
John: Oh, discover your algebra.
John: God damn it.
John: I said, well, but that's kind of weird to put into a packet.
John: It's not like it's in a magic drawer marked...
John: Oh, fifth graders only.
Merlin: Oh, daddy's daddy's forbidden closet of long division.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: It's, it's, it's on a packet that we're trying to fill.
John: We're trying to do because it's homework.
John: So, and then the teacher said, and this was the crazy thing.
John: I had completely forgotten that she said, well, you know, if you get something like that, we would just do a remainder of,
John: And I was like, remainder, remainder.
John: I hadn't thought about a remainder.
John: Remember remainders?
Merlin: You did a little R, a little lowercase R, right?
John: Yeah, probably since fourth grade.
John: I was like, remainder.
John: I mean, as soon as you learn decimals, you never do a remainder again.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I walked around the house in like a 10 minute long days, like, because all of the remainders came flooding back and like remainder.
Whoa.
John: And it does make sense to a kid.
John: You're like, and it has a remainder of two.
Merlin: It's almost like a little asterisk of like, well, this is close enough.
Merlin: Like I got to the thing.
Merlin: I have this little bit here.
Merlin: You know, it's like when you put a, when you're putting your Ikea furniture together and you got like some improbable, like three, not, not two, not four, but three bolts left over.
Merlin: And you're like, what did I do wrong?
Merlin: That's your remainder.
Merlin: You do an R, and then you put the three bolts next to your seagull cake.
John: It's like if you have 21 donuts.
John: 21 pilots.
John: You have 21 donuts, and you have four people.
John: Okay.
John: There's going to be a remainder.
John: Oh.
John: Right?
John: There's going to be one.
John: I think you should get those, John.
John: You should get those donuts.
John: That's the thing.
John: Daddy always gets the donuts.
John: Daddy gets the remainder.
Merlin: And Daddy gets the three bolts.