Jewish Musings, Monday, April 10, 2017

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Angelika
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting - you are welcome to do that but you are also welcome to chime in!

[peachymom1]

Good morning! I wish you all a healthy, happy and meaningful Pesach! FYI, I will not be posting for Tuesday, in honor of the holiday, but I will post for Wednesday.

For many years, it has been our custom to attend the first seder at the home of our best friends. Our kids have grown up together and shared many simchas and difficult times. This year we will not be sharing the first seder with them, because one of them is having surgery today to remove a cancerous tumor from his colon. If you would like to add him to your thoughts or include him in a refuah shleimah, his name is Michael Skelton. He and his partner have been together for 45 years, and we have been blessed to know them for 37 of those years. We will be thinking of him and waiting for news today, and tonight, my family and I will remember past seders as we celebrate the holiday without them.

One aspect of the haggadah I wrote that was a popular last year was about the Four Children. Here’s the excerpt, and I welcome your comments:
A story is told about four children: the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who does not know how to ask. Which ones are we? Can you think of a time when you asked intelligent questions? Have you ever been arrogant, impatient or patronizing when asking for information? Has a subject ever seemed so far beyond comprehension that you could only ask the most basic questions about it? Has something ever been so overwhelming that you didn’t even know where to start to ask about it? How did you end up learning?

When I wrote this, I was thinking about my own children, because one thing I found fascinating as they grew up was the fact that they learned in such different ways, even though they went to the same schools, had the same parents, and had to follow the same house rules. You just can’t force a square peg into a round hole, as I found out with my one son, and we had to reach far outside our comfort zone in helping him find what would work for him. By the time he got to college, he’d figured himself out, and he managed to navigate the university by himself and get a degree, often by quite unconventional methods.

What about you? How do you, your children, or someone else learn that might be different from conventional means?

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well. Happy Passover in advance!

Re today's topic: I have never talked about this, but the way I remember things is unusual. I picture a blackboard in my head and write what I need to remember. Once I see it in my mind, it is much easier for me. I've never heard of anyone else doing this, but it works for me.

As for DS, since he has Asperger's, it's been a long road for us to figure out the best ways for him to learn and remember things. A lot of times, especially when he was younger, we had to try several different methods. We have found that the clearer and more specific instructions are, for example, the easier it is for him to comprehend them and follow through.

I'll be back later. Have a peaceful day, Lee

[louise]

Peachy I am so impressed by your haggadah and your posts yesterday and today. I'm too overwhelmed to give this proper thought today - have to go finish up at the synagogue and then finish up at home. I will try to think about this later.

In the meantime the NY Times had a tiny bit about 10 modern plagues www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/nyregion/new-york-today-passover-seder-plagues.html?emc=edit_ur_20170410&nl=nytoday&nlid=3594758&_r=0
One person compared darkness to modern misperceptions that obscure our view of people different from us. Locusts = mosquitos/ Zyka virus; killing of firstborn compared to situation in Syria.

Other news - Welch's grape juice has partnered with Manishewitz to enter the kosher grape juice market.

[happysavta]

I have to see things in writing to learn. When I'm given oral instructions, I space out and drift mentally. When I was in college, I had to take notes to remember anything from lectures. If I just sat there and listened to the lecturer, pretty soon I would be inside my head, thinking of other things entirely and blocking out the speaker's voice. I would be terrible as jury member, I think. I have to make written lists to get anything done, including cooking for a party.

Of course, DH is strictly an oral person. Why would it be otherwise? Sigh. I'm sure he was made that way on purpose to drive me crazy. He refuses to write, text, email. So I get verbal requests from him, and I immediately forget them, which drives him crazy in return. Or I ask him to write me an email, which also drives him crazy.

Lee, with our Aspie, he's an oral learner, but relies on lists for follow through, because his retention is poor. He doesn't like to read and write; he absorbs information from listening to the TV, to conversations, to music, to the radio. He walks around with earphones most of the time, which also helps him screen out background from foreground. But for instructions and tasks, he has to make lists. You can't verbally give him a long string of instructions; you lose him at the first "and". "Martin, would you please take out the garbage and put the cans by the curb and then help me vacuum the floors?" He'll take out the garbage and come back in the house to ask what else I wanted.


As to Peachy's original question about the 4 sons. I think I always ask intelligent questions. I'm sure my adult children would challenge that statement. "Have you ever been arrogant, impatient or patronizing when asking for information?" Who me? Of course not. Never. I'm just "challenging." Perhaps a touch stubborn. LOL.

"Has a subject ever seemed so far beyond comprehension that you could only ask the most basic questions about it? Has something ever been so overwhelming that you didn’t even know where to start to ask about it? How did you end up learning?"

For me, the world of computers is another galaxy. Nothing about any program is ever "intuitive" for me. And that's complicated by the fact that computer technology is constantly changing. With each new operating system, I groan and moan. I'm equally challenged by hardware. A smart phone, a tablet, an IPad, IPod are all too much information to absorb. I'm lucky if I can turn the mouse on and off.

To make matters more embarrassing, my DS#1 got his first degree in computer science at Stanford. Oy. He's the software guy. His children are already programming. And DS#2 had a profitable business at age 14 making computers to people's specifications and wrote a book about WiFi. He's the hardware guy. He was always on the floor under the desk, pulling wires. I have 5 boxes of wires in the garage, connectors, power strips, I don't even know what they are called or what machine they belong to.

And DH buys every new technology gadget the moment they are available for sale. He juggles between an Apple Mac and a desktop, a laptop. He has 5-6 computers. When he travels, he takes 2 computers with him. He's taught himself dozens of programs, makes videos, edits, you name it. He spends half his waking hours with Tech Support people. He's like a kid with new toys.

When the two eldest boys talk to each other, it sounds like this,"Did you get a BXl42 with flight wings to add to your hard drive? Does your fit bit has mega2lslg capacity? You know, I gave Ari my old laptop because it's only a DG900 with no gigafitabyte. You should get Addison started on JavaLava language and enroll her in a magnet school. Skip the Spanish immersion." You can't understand a word they say when they talk to each other; it's all in code.


I'm the son/daughter in the Hagaddah who doesn't even know what to ask. Completely clueless, that's me. And I have no desire to strain my brain to learn all this gibberish.

[hollygail]

Wow. Just wow.

I, like Lee and Frieda, am a visual learner. When I meet someone and hear his/her name, I automatically see it written in my head (I don't have a chalk board or a white board in there like Lee does, just the letters next to each other). If I'm not sure, I ask how the person spells his/her name so I get it right. Like s/he's ever gonna know, right?

When I was a young teenager, my piano teacher would sit with his back to me and play something on one piano and have me listen, then I was supposed to play what he did on the piano in front of me... I wasn't great at that, but I wasn't terrible either. So as an adult, in front of a classroom, I was aware that not everyone is a visual learner as I am, but some are aural learners. Neither is difficult when teaching a brachah, for instance. However, it turns out there are also kinesthetic learners... Boy, was that difficult for me! I knew how to teach visual learners, and I was able to figure out how to teach aural learners. But tactile? Oy. Well, little by little by little (and let me tell you, INCREDIBLY slowly) I did learn how to reach them. Luckily for me, they're in the minority...

[happysavta]

Why aren't tortillas and lavash are in the same catagory as Matzo? I mean, they're unleavended breads; they don't have yeast.