The Very Large Array

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

The Boychick is hosting his cousin D., in from Illinois for a two-week visit.
The first week was a tour of the skate parks of the Greater Albuquerque area, but at the beginning of the second week the Engineering Geek and I decided that, not to be outdone by Camp Aunt Madge, we needed to take at least one educational field trip somewhere else in New Mexico.

The guys said a decided "No" to Fanta Se and the museums, Old Town, or the Salinas National Monument. But they said "Okay" to the Very Large Array, which is officially part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Featured in many films, it was the setting for much of the action in the movie based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact. I don't know if it was the big machines or the movie that hooked them, but off we went on a jaunt to to the Plains of San Augustin, where the radio telescopes are.

I insisted that we take the back roads, South NM 14 to Mountain Air, and then U.S. 60 to Bernardo and Socorro, Magdalena and the VLA. Here is a view looking south to Chupadera Mesa from Torreon, NM. Chupadera blocked any outlet of Glacial Lake Estancia into the ancenstral Rio Grande, creating salt flats as blow-out dunes. But we were headed for the other big, ancient lake bed in West-Central New Mexico.

A view of the two arms of the VLA from the photo stop on US 60. What is amazing is that each of the dishes is the diameter of a major league baseball diamond, but here they are, almost lost in the immensity of the Plains of San Augustin, an old glacial lake-bed.

Three radio recievers pointing to the eastern sky. The foreground shows a blow-out dune of lake sand and silt, deposited here more than 10,000 years ago, during the Pluvial (wet, lake) period of the Wisconsin glaciation.

And the politicians think they discovered global climate change?

The guys walk and discuss whether or not the radio receivers could be made into senders, in order to make contact with whatever might be "out there."

This summer, the receivers are in the "C" position, the axis of the Y formation being pretty short. This gives them more resolution for detail, but a narrower "view" of the part of the sky they are "looking" at. Here one receiver is "looking" at a different point than the other two.


The radio signals are a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are accustomed to "listening" to, but computers make images of the radio sources, using color to show doppler shifts created by movement.





Each receiver has four orienting/tracking motors, and its own air-conditioning unit to keep the temperature low, which filters out earth-based "noise" in order to better received the faint radio signals from space. Standing under them, one can the faint hum of the tracking motors that keep the receiver oriented to a fixed point in the sky as the earth turns them toward the west.

They are huge, and yet gracefully beautiful in proportion to the vastness of the Plains of San Augustin.

The axes of the Y configuration in the the most outstreached "A" form, would cross the whole Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, stretching in Virginia, Mayland and Pennsylvania. But that is not the logest axis. The VLA is part of a continent wide Very Long Baseline Array, 3,000 miles long. You can "see" detail from very far away with the VLBA.

And of course, the farther out you look, the further back in time you see. One image captured at the VLA showed Quasars 10 billion light years away. The light left them 10 billion years ago. Before the sun was born, and the earth was formed. Space-time is inconceivably immense. And growing bigger every second . . .

What great vision our technology gives us . . .

Camp Aunt Madge

The weeks are flying by, and I realized yesterday that N. will be ending his visit with family in Illinois and leaving for COTE Camp in New Jersey.

Last Thursday, I sent off a box of camping gear by UPS to our favorite cantor in New Jersey.

Tomorrow, she will be picking N. up at Newark, then they will take him to Shabbat Services on the beach courtesy of Temple Miriam. I hope she takes some pictures!

Meanwhile, though, I have been getting an eyeful and an earful about N.'s adventures at "Camp Aunt Madge." My sister, a sucessful graduate of Dad's Kitchen Table University, is not one to let boys merely "hang out." She actually plans activities for them, though she does seem to include plenty of down time for their own adventures.

Now, Dad's Kitchen Table University had a REQUIRED summer travel curriculum. You have not lived until you have fought over a window seat while driving ten hours daily for a week through hot and humid southern Illinois in a car sans air conditioning in order to see the exact spot where George Rogers Clark and his men crossed the Wabash river on a forced march from Kaskaskia to come to the aid of Fort Defiance during the French and Indian War. (Dad found this place by reading the very detailed footnotes in Wilderness Empire by Allen W. Eckhart. It's an excellent book, and Eckhart is responsible for my extensive knowledge of the settling of Kentucky, and the former "northwest territories" which in the 1700's meant Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana). "There were no freeways then!" Dad would enthuse, while driving at 15 miles an hour down a winding country road behind a farmer hauling a fully loaded hayrack. "Great," we would think while sneezing and squirming to find comfort on the vinyl seats to which our bare legs seemed permanently attached by sweat. "I like modernity," Madge would sniff, as she poked Bear in the thigh so she could put kleenex between them to soak up the offending sweat.

Aunt Madge has a similar educational philosophy, although she does not feel the need to duplicate the exact conditions of the settlers by sleeping in tents through fierce thunderstorms and boiling coffee in the coffee can on the fire the next morning while waiting for the sleeping bags to dry out. And her car is air conditioned.

N. and his cousin D. have been to Rockome Gardens, near Arcola, Illinois, to see how the Amish Folk lived and still live. There, they learned also about our more primitive ancestors, by purchasing and using an atlatl. They also have been canoeing on Clinton lake, where N. bedazzled his cousins with his canoeing prowess gained in June at BSA camp. The indefagitable Aunt Madge wrote:

"I could tell that D. was really proud of N. today. I suspect he has done some bragging about his cousin N. to his cousin J. and he was absolutely thrilled to get to show N. off on the lake today. N. says that he had a really good time, but he is not the least bit impressed by his own performance. D. went on and on about N.'s wondrous deeds and N. just shrugged and said, "Well, you would have done the same thing if you weren't stuck in the aft position." (Oh, yeah, right, whatever THAT means!)
The boys had a wonderful time today. I'm just sorry that they forgot my request for photos!"

The photos in this post are from the World Wide Web! Top, maps of Illinois from the Illinois Tourist Bureau. Middle, Reindeer Age technology from Wiki (includes atlatls), and bottom, a 'one horse power saw' from Rockome Gardens.

And of course they had the Glorious Fourth mid-western style with a cookout, followed by the town fireworks display complete with simulcast patriotic music played on hundreds of portable radios, proudly sponsored by State Farm World Headquarters.

N. has learned something about quality music, too, versus trash, all because a CD with a parental warning some irresponsible adult sold him at the Denver airport went straight into it (the trash, I mean), after Aunt Madge listened to the one half of one track. But that's another story...

I really want to bring N.'s cousin D. out here for some summertime fun, but you know, the forest was closed because of the fire danger, and, you know, Grandma and Papa don't live just down the street. (Papa is the founder and professor emeritus of Dad's Kitchen Table University).

So...maybe this fall sometime. The Chem Geek Princess will be moved out and I will have a guest suite available.

Summer Plans and Projects

June is here, and early summer has finally come to our rambling Hobbit-Hole in the Sandias.

The scrub oak turned from brown to green while I was in Chicago, and the flowers are blooming in the meadow.Our plans for this summer's homeschooling are project based, just as last year's were.

N. is taking the first weeks of June as a break--which means doing archery and Kamana, and reading on the porch during the long, summer evenings. Taekwondo and Boy Scouts continue.

In late June, N. will be attending BSA camp with his troop, where he will be working on Riflery, Scuba, Advanced Horsemanship, and First Aid merit badges to add to his collection. Merit Badges have specific, rigorous requirements and when a boy has earned one, he has learned both content and skills related to the particular badge.

At the beginning of July, N. will hop on a plane for a two-week visit with his cousins in Bloomington. This is a pleasure trip, but my sister has several day trips planned that will be educational as well as recreational. One is to visit the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, as well as Lincoln's New Salem. The other is to visit the Illinois-Michigan Canal National Trail, where the boys will learn all about how canals were built, operated for commerce, and how locks work.

During the last two weeks of July, N. will get on another plane and fly from Illinois to New Jersey. In Jersey, he will spend Shabbat with our former cantor, and then go to two Children of the Earth Foundation Camp sessions: The Way of the Woods and the Way of the Gatherer. There he will be learning content and skills related to tracking and being at home in the wilderness.

N's summer learning plans are quite uncoventional. The education is not at all academic. However, I am continually amazed at how much he learns from travel and from camp. These experiences seem to cause quantum leaps in his maturity. He is taking greater and greater responsibility for who he is becoming, intellectually, physically and spiritually, from these less conventional learning opportunities.

I am glad we can continue to widen his horizons through these travel adventures.

And at the same time, I will miss him. Every summer when I send him off, I know I am saying good-bye to another piece of the little boy I knew forever. Every August, when he returns, he has incorporated another part of the man he is becoming.

The pictures above are all from the meadow behind our home. I am amazed at how summer snuck in while I was gone!

Update Illinois and Thoughts on Gifted/Twice-exceptional Children

Supposedly, N. has been taking a lot of pictures while he is in Illinois, but he has not downloaded very many to send to me so that I can vicariously enjoy his trip.

In fact, he doesn't seem to think about me much at all! Hummmmp!

I have been getting updates about once or twice a week from my sister, however. And he has called a few times, too. On Friday 6 July, I called him. He had not called before that, so I got the ball rolling and wished him Shabbat Shalom via message machine. On Sunday 8 July, I got this e-mail from my younger sister:

Hey Big Sis,
I could tell you were a wee bit worried about your boy when you called this afternoon. Some "mother's intuition" must have been working it's mojo on you because we got your message at the exact moment that N. most needed to hear your comforting voice. If you had seen the way he hovered over the answering machine listening to your message you'd never doubt for the rest of your life that your baby boy loves his mama!
You know that anyway, of course, but sometimes the teenaged versions of our beloved sons go ten miles beyond sunset out of their way to avoid letting us know they still need us.
They say things like, "YEAH, whatever!" and "Mom, I KNOW, okay?!"
They roll their eyes and shrug helplessly at each other, as if having a MOTHER is a unique scourge visited upon their generation as a sort of unavoidable social disease.

Well. They do become an alien species on the way to manhood.

And my sister has some interesting observations about "da boyz" as she calls them. She wrote:

N. and D. were approaching a potential fight about a stupid BB gun they'd basically stuffed up with spit-wads when you called. D. didn't care about it at all anymore, but N. was obsessed and would not let go of the thing, the project, whatever it had become in his mind. N. was all about getting back the glorious joy of shooting NOTHING BUT AIR out of that pump-action toy gun. D. was sick of the whole thing, and probably jealous of N.'s devotion to what he (D) saw as a stupid broken air gun that he'd discarded as no longer useful years ago. It was sort of interesting watching them work this thing out between themselves, these two mildly autistic boys.

D was far less obsessive than N about the BB gun, but he seemed to intuitively understand N's compulsion. D was WAY more patient about it than my 14 year old self would have been in a million years. D sat watching and offering assistance for HOURS while N worked on the useless BB gun. N was obviously aware of D's irritation and he felt guilty about it but couldn't help himself. At one point I heard N say to D, "Hey, you don't have to sit here forever." D replied, "No, that's okay, I gotcha."

My sister caught a difference between the two boys right away. They are both on the Autism Spectrum. And she is right that N.'s obsessiveness can be partly explained by that. But there is another valid explanation as well. N. is twice-exceptional. His intellectual potential is very high, which also can explain his hyper-focus. Despite what some well-meaning people say, this kind of giftedness is not "as common as dirt." And it is a mixed-bag. N. does not have the kind of intellectual giftedness combined with proclivities and talents that would make him the "A" student in school. In fact, D. is probably the better student in the classroom, even with his mild autism. He is more patient and more willing to "go with the flow." N. is not. He thinks visually, and gets from A to Z so fast that the rest of us are often only at B,C, or D. But to translate his process into words is so difficult for him that he generally just gives up. Like Moses, he is "slow of speech." He makes profound associations but gets frustrated to the point of melt-down or shut-down when he tries to communicate them. He has an astonishing visual memory coupled with extreme sensitivites to sensory input. Imagine the difficulties for him and his teachers in a classroom!

A truth about profound intellectual giftedness is this: The majority of profoundly gifted people are not the world's most successful people. They are unlikely to become presidents or prime ministers, or even famous research scientists. They are outliers. And the world of schools, universities and corporations was not set up with them in mind. They are more likely to have learning disabilities*, social difficulties, extreme sensitivities and psychological illnesses. To put it plainly, their nervous systems function differently. The field of the neurosciences is just beginning to investigate these differences and we do not really understand them. But we know they are there. These kids are truly the square peg in the round hole.

*A word on learning disabilities in the gifted: The higher someone scores on the IQ curve, the more likely they will have what we call "learning disabilites." And yet, these kids learn very well-- in the right environment. But that environment is not the public school general education classroom for most of them. Are these kids really learning disabled? Well that depends, I suspect, on how you define your terms. Maybe they are. And maybe our increasingly cookie-cutter standards and curriculum make them appear so. And maybe its a little bit of both. I don't know.

And for N., Asperger's Syndrome complicates matters further. Or maybe it's part and parcel of his profound giftedness. We don't know that, either. What we do know is that N. has an unusual cognitive phenotype. He is an outlier. He has a million-dollar brain. And yet, if most of us could go to the brain shop and if we had a million dollars to spend, we would not choose to buy a brain like his. It is too different. Too difficult. So maybe "gifted" is not the right word. But we have to call it something. The phenomenon of giftedness is real. Intelligence is a continuous trait in human beings. Like height. And weight. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. Some of us fall below average. And some of us above. Some are far below. And some are far above.

For those whose intelligence falls either far below or far above the average, there will be different educational needs. We recognize and provide for this for children with low cognitive abilities. But for many reasons, we often balk at the thought for children who are outliers at the other end of the curve. For a profoundly twice-exceptional child like N., the need for a qualitatively different education is even more pressing. And if the majority of children, those whose intelligence is somewhere near average, are having difficulties with our current educational practice, then gifted and twice-exceptional children certainly will.

Despite all of the talk about "diversity," the public schools have by-and-large abandoned the concept of individualizing educational practices to meet the needs of all of their students. No Child Left Behind has, in practice, been developed as a system of lock-step standards and goals that demand that all children demonstrate the exact same skills at the exact same age in the exact same way. There are many political and ideological "reasons" for this; but reason itself plays almost no role at all in this educational debacle.

So we opted out. By bringing N. home we can deliver to him an education that is truly individual. We can change strategies as we go, keeping what works, getting rid of what doesn't, and developing innovative techniques to meet his needs. We do not have to wait for somebody somewhere to notice that N.'s needs are not being met. We do not have to lose opportunities because "programs don't exist" for a child like N. At home, we can give him what he needs as the needs become apparent.

At home, N. does not cease to be profoundly gifted. He does not cease to have AS. He is still a twice-exceptional child. But he also gets to be something at least as important. Just a Kid. He gets to ponder and look for shapes in the clouds. He gets to tie knots and he gets to go from A to Z without words. At least sometimes. He gets to do what needs doing at his own pace and in his own time. He doesn't have to worry too much about how he differs from the other kids. We don't need to make comparisons on achievement and growth. We are not in competition with anyone. We are simply meeting the unique needs of of one kid. We didn't start out planning to do it this way. We started homeschooling in order to solve a problem. In N.'s case, we couldn't fix the public education system in order to make it work for us. So we had to solve the problem by doing something different. And we discovered that it is also lots of fun!

When we bring twice-exceptional kids home for school, this does not mean that "giftedness" and all that it entails disappears from the earth. The "label" is still useful and the differences are still real. Homeschooling is simply an unconventional way to meet the needs of the gifted or twice-exceptional child. And for us, it has been highly effective.

And what happened with the problem of the useless B.B. gun? "Da boyz," with a little help from my phone call and Aunt Madge, figured it out.

They had just about had it with the whole BB gun thing when we got your message. Luckily I found a bow and arrow set in the garage that caught their fancy and got them focused on something different. After talking to you N was in a much better humor and they both seemed to relax into their evening. They ran around the neighborhood making fools of themselves pretending to be savages and they loved it. They tried to "stalk" me and would have succeeded easily except that I happened to walk past them on my way from the patio...

Sometimes solving a problem takes you in a completely different direction than you planned. The solution sneaks up on you. And you end up having lots of fun.

(The pictures in this post are the few I have received from Illinois. One is from Allerton Park and Mansion. One is from the Prarieland Aviation Museum. The maps and the New Salem picture are from the Illinois Department of Tourism).