When a plan doesn't come together

Today, this blog post was published by our superintendent. As of yesterday, my middle schooler has used her Ipod for the following: playing games when she's finished lunch, playing games during lunch and using an app over the Wi-fi to text me. (She doesn't have data yet.)

Over lunch with another mom of a middle-schooler, she told me how many syllabi this year required the use of a tablet. Wow, big difference from our middle school. Her husband bought an Asus tablet for their daughter. Who came home upset upon being directed to download a crucial app for a class that was only available for...Apple devices.

This article proclaims the miracle of Howard County middle schoolers bringing their devices to school, but middle school parents would dispute this. Instead, they’re sitting at lunch with their heads focused on their screens. During classes, kids aren’t using them. At one school, when asked, a teacher said “We’re not sure what we’re doing with them yet. Maybe we’d have them scan a QR code.”

So…there’s not a plan.

Children are allowed to bring any device they want: tablet, Ipod, smartphone or Kindle. My daughter has an Ipod Touch that requires wi-fi for usage. It’s also got a three inch screen. If they scan a QR code to go to a website, her experience will differ greatly from a kid who’s using a tablet. The fact that there's no standard requirement for a smart device indicates that there's no structured plan. And for the kid that does not have a device?

Contrast this to Montgomery County Public Schools. They have been rolling out Chrome Books to their school system on a MULTI-YEAR basis. They have a plan! Our schools already have laptops that they use on a periodic basis. They have a Frequently Asked Questions sections and information on training for teachers. Our system website has information on Digital Responsibility for teachers. Our schools don't even have consistent wi-fi.

I find this lack of plan even more concerning due to a report recently by Anderson Cooper on CNN called Being 13. Kids are spending a lot of their day checking social media to see if they're getting "dissed" or if their friends are hanging out with other friends. If there's no plan, what is the point of them taking their device to school? To continue bullying each other and feeling bad about themselves?

Maybe some teachers have some ideas and that's great. But it seems like there's inconsistency throughout our country as to their usage. Our kids have plenty of ways to waste their time outside of school with electronic devices to the chagrin of their parents. Why inside too?
 

Shh, the baby's sleeping

Last night, I started to shush Lil. It was 9:30 and we were reading our books on the couch in the living room.

Luke was watching something in the family room, but he has his headphones. It's been our little tradition that Lil & I read on the couch before bedtime. I enjoy it as Lil tells me snippets from her day or reads me something from her book.

Something caused her to laugh and I shushed her. An instinctual reaction of Well, it's dark and Lil is upstairs sleeping so keep your voices down. But she's not, because she's in middle school and has inherited my night owl genes. Luckily, she has not gotten my Olympic ability for sleeping and gets up easily in the morning.

It just felt surreal. Where have the past 11 years gone? What will it feel like when she isn't here?

Regardless of those answers, it doesn't matter. We just have to enjoy everyday we have with each other. Wishing for her cute little baby feet means I'm not focused on the present. Nostalgia is not always a productive place.

But please do be quiet, Baby Disney is sleeping on his back next to me and from the jerks of his paws, I think he's dreaming of chasing critters.

Back-to-school worries

This will be more of a purr, than a meow. A happy, contented purr. I write this as Disney falls down to sit down next to me.

Last night, Luke & I attended the Wilde Lake back-to-school night. As I left the building, I had tears in my eyes.

Lil had come home from her first day a couple of weeks ago, saying how awesome middle school is and how awesome her teachers are.

After last night, I agree. A bunch of us from the elementary school chatted after meeting the fifth teacher. "They have so much energy." "It's just as great as Running Brook." "They are all such characters!"

I had thought about not going...Tuesday had been a very long day and I couldn't fall asleep until after 2 so I was struggling after 4-5 hours of sleep. I really, really, really need seven. I figured it would be another weird schedule with BTS. But I thought about the PTSA meeting the night before and wanting to see the awesome teachers.

In all honesty, I did not meet her health and French teachers. But her chorus, geography, science, math and English teachers were AMAAAAZZZZING.

So my tears were mostly of happiness, but there was a twinkle of sadness. That some people in this county say mean things about this school. But it was the same way at Running Brook and I saw through that. It's all about parental involvement and I'm going to try to be and stay involved during our three years at Wilde Lake.

But I am taking tonight off from any community involvement. It's my birthday!

Escaping Reality

Becoming a mother changes one's outlook on life. There were times during the Iraq War that I saw pictures of children and felt immediately dizzy with grief at what was happening around them. And disgust at my relief that my daughter was not there.

In the days following 9/11, two co-workers of mine got into a disagreement. One, a middle-aged African-American woman, and the other, a Syrian refugee/immigrant married to a Palestinian woman with family still there. They disagreed on which was worse, the violence of our American cities that disproportionately affect the black community or living with the daily threat of religious extremists blowing up buses in Israel. I just sat back and listened to two persecuted people who have lived lives I cannot imagine.

I think they were both right. I dislike my reluctance to come down on either side because I can see both points. Nobody should live in fear of losing their life, wherever they live.

This morning's Washington Post had the second scene of a photo I saw yesterday. A Turkish police officer is shown approaching the surf. Where a little boy lies face down, arms at his side in the shallow waves. How often have I seen my daughter like this, fast asleep? But he is not going to wake when the officer touches him.

The photo they printed is less disturbing and I disagree with their editorial decision. Yes, there are people who read the paper over their morning coffee and they don't want their children to see something like that.They'll probably still get pushback over the "gentler" photo of the officer carrying the tiny child. The refugees living that life don't have a choice over hiding their reality.

Apart from Piers Morgan, who wrote a scathing column this morning, hardly anybody in my Twitter feed was talking about this crisis. Instead, the majority of my feed, even politicos that usually talk about Trump, are talking about Deflate-Gate and Tom Brady. For a while, the Post had Brady on the left and a picture of refugees being manhandled. That story is the third most read as of 1:40 PM today. The refugees? Didn't make the top five cut.

Listen, I like football. And football does bring Americans together in many ways. But talking about Tom Brady's footballs for hours on end and not just on ESPN makes me sad.

Summer camps of content

As usual, Lil has been enjoying a range of summer camps from the long-lived Columbia Association Nature Camp to a couple weeks doing Ballet Intensives at her dance studio, Ballet Mobile. I loved when she achieved the next level of canoe instruction, which means she doesn't need a counselor.  I love the music and history from ballet that she brings up in the car when hearing a piece of music on the radio.

But when we arrived at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY) last week for the ending open house, we received a book of essays as the final product for Big Questions. Since the kids were doing presentations on various philosophical elements, I didn't get a chance to read it until that night. This isn't perfect, but it's pretty awesome to see what's turning over in her mind. We had fun discussing time travel, but I didn't know she had picked it for her essay topic. It turns out her instructor, Andrew Fyfe, had also written about time travel in a collection about J. J. Abrams, discussing Lost and Star Trek.

As I did, Lil is enjoying her time at CTY each summer. Sandy Spring Friends School is a great venue for it and she can't wait to return next year for her final year as a "Young Student." Maybe she'll head overseas like I did when I was 15 for an amazing summer abroad - SANS parents!

You Can’t Change the Past

Lily Coombs

§1. Introduction

There is no scientific consensus on whether time travel into the past will be possible for us in the future. But in this paper I aim to resolve the following question: “If time travel into the past turns out to be possible one day, will that mean we can change the past?” After all, if I could travel back into the past, it seems like I could then affect and change the past.

Before I get started answering whether backwards time travel makes changing the past possible, I need to lay out the several ways time travel could work. Then I will discuss in Section §3 whether on any of these methods changing the past would be possible.

§2. Methods of Backwards Time Travel

Here is a list of the three ways in which backwards time travel might turn out to work:

Method 1. It might turn out to be true that there exist parallel universes. Parallel different universes that unfold all the ways ours didn’t. If this turns out to be true, there will be parallel universe that are only slightly different from our universe and others that differ radically. One form of what we might consider backwards time travel would be to travel to a similar one of these parallel universes but arrive in their past. For example, to leave our universe in 2020 in our time machine and arrive at a similar parallel universe in the year 1939.

Method 2. Time travel might involve alternate timeline rather than parallel universes. Suppose I leave 2050 in a time machine and travel back to the year 1939. In doing this, I may cause a new timeline to splinter off from my original history. Now there will be two ways out universe unfolded, the original way from which I departed in 2020 and the new way which includes me arriving in my time machine in 1939.

Method 3. Maybe there don’t exist parallel universes for every possible way the universe can unfold. Maybe it isn’t possible for there to be more timelines beyond and alternate to the one we already know about. There is just this one universe and just this one timeline. If that is the case and if time travel turns out to be possible, then time travel would involve traveling back into the past of our own universe and our original timeline.

These seem to be the three possible ways backwards time travel could logically work if it turns out to be scientifically possible. Now I will turn to my central question concerning whether it could ever come to be discovered possible to not just travel back into the past but change the past. I can now answer this question by examining whether changing the past would be possible on any of the three methods time travel might turn out to work if time travel turns out to be possible at all.

§3. You Can’t Change the Past

It is clearly the case that you wouldn’t be changing the past if time travel turns out to work either in the way described by Method 1 or Method 2. The problem with these two methods of backwards time travel is that you are not changing your own past. In Method 1 you are changing the present of the parallel universe you went to. In Method 2 you are creating a new timeline with that new difference. But in each case, your original universe or timeline would still exist exactly as it always was before you engaged in your “time travel” antics.

So the only chance for changing the past is Method 3. In Method 3, time travel would involve traveling back into the past of our universe and be contained in the one and singular timeline of our universe. If time travel of the sort described by Method 3 turns out to be possible, couldn’t I then travel back into the past of my universe and timeline and change how it originally went? Couldn’t I go back in time from 2020 and delete the Holocaust from the history of the universe by assassinating Hitler in 1939? Sadly, no. Even on Method 3, changing the past would still be impossible.

History has already happened, you can’t change it! After all, if you were successful in changing the past of this universe and our timeline and thereby eliminating the holocaust from the history of the universe then why did you come back from the future and kill Hitler in the first place? If you kill him there would be no Holocaust and so no reason to kill this random person! You came back from the future because the Holocaust did happen (in some universe or some timeline) and you wanted to stop it for some other universe or in some other timeline. But it makes no logical sense to eliminate it from your own universe and timeline. It must exist in your universe and timeline because that’s why you are time traveling in the first place!

So how would time travel work if it turns out to work in the way described by Method 3? Wouldn’t it have to be possible to change the past if I could travel back into the past of my own universe and timeline? So let’s imagine that backwards time travel turns out to exist and that time travel turns out to work as described by Method 3. Further imagine that you enter a time machine in 2050 on a mission to stop Wilkes from shooting Lincoln. You come into the Ford’s Theater booth with your period revolver in order to fit into the era. Wilkes is getting his pistol ready. Then Wilkes gets ready to shoot, but notices something wrong with his pistol. He cocks his head to the side just as you shoot. You miss. It turns out that you shot Lincoln this whole time. Historians got it all wrong because Wilkes fled the scene. Wilkes just didn’t want to be blamed for what happened.

As my example shows, you might be able to travel back into the past of your own universe and timeline to try and change the past by preventing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but whatever you do will inevitably end up being something you already did in history. If you go back to stop the assassination of Lincoln, we know you fail because we know how the history of our universe and timeline unfolded. But perhaps we have it a little wrong. Perhaps it was a time traveler with bad aim that killed Lincoln. But no time traveler can change the past even if a time traveler might already be a part of our past.

§4. Conclusion

In conclusion you can’t change the past when you time travel. You can only do what you were destined to do (or else you must be really changing the past of some other universe or timeline). In the Lincoln case you were destined to kill Lincoln instead of John Wilkes Booth killing him. Also even if there aren’t alternate timelines or parallel universes, time travel can still exist but any way time travel turns out to work then it will still turn out that changing the past is logically impossible.     

More Growl than Purr?

At last night's blog party, I was discussing what to write next with a woman who's trying to gear up her blogging. I said I didn't know what to write and said that last week's post was kind of depressing. She suggested writing about something happy.

But I spoke too quickly about my previous post being sad. Yes, it discussed the sadness of loss but I hoped it focused on the positivity of the community response to loss. And it made me feel happy to share that community.

Now I'm watching the coverage of the Louisiana shooting. The anchor just mentioned being sick of having these conversations but the bright spot is learning about the heroes that emerge. It's the only bright spot.

Sometimes I think we should bet on the next spot a mass shooting will happen. Because it will. Anti-gun control nuts will say "Guns don't kill people" or "Knives kill people too, should we ban those?"

So I'm feeling grumpy and distressed.

But remembering the good time I had with fellow bloggers last night - I'm still a newbie to the community, I think I started in 2010 or 2011? - having wide-ranging discussions from Mickey's dogs to ruminations on the 2018 elections and being sad about Claire returning to Blighty.

Because I really only have control over my participation in my community. And that participation has been really meaningful and uplifting over the past few years.

I'm childless tonight, which means you can probably find me where you usually find me most days of the week that end in "day."

And hug your kids and tell them you love them as often as you can.

Community Caring

Yesterday (Tuesday), was a difficult day for the Running Brook community. But let me rewind a few years first.

When our daughter was a preschooler and we were thinking about sending her to Running Brook, a terrible tragedy occurred very close to the school. It made me nervous. There were other things, lower test scores, high transience, that bothered us.

Very simply, we were wrong. And we knew that within minutes of setting foot into that school. Maybe the test scores aren't the highest in Howard County and Lil did have a couple friends that left. Yes, it has a high FARMS percentage. But statistics don't matter and way too many people use those numbers to make snap judgments without even opening the schoolhouse door.

The last six years have been wonderful. For many reasons. Mainly teachers who love their students and their colleagues and a great principal who loves his school and his students. I am very sad that Lil is moving onto middle school.

Back to yesterday...

One of Lil's best friends lost her daddy. Very unexpected. Very shocking. Heartbreaking and too soon. He loved his daughter so much. He was always at school, smiling his joyful smile. It is a mark of his character that the church was so full, it wasn't even standing room only. More like fire code violation crowded. The overflow parking lot overflowed.

After the service, I saw one of Lil's teachers, Melissa Peyton, who accompanied our guardian angel, Ms. Bailey, on her first field trip at age 97 and her subsequent White House visit. I gave her a hug and thanked her for all she does to make Running Brook a special community. She is such a joyful person and is such a cheerleader for the school. (To be clear, MANY of the faculty were in attendance.)

She smiled in a regretful, kinda sad way and recalled the call to action the pastor had just made during his eulogy. He had talked about the need to be good to each other and showing joy to others. Being family and keeping up relationships.

My goal is to continue being part of the Running Brook community in some way and not leaving it behind. Because it has been such a part of Lil's growth for the past six years and MY growth too. It's a special place.