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This page is about parenting and child-related topics (it should probably be renamed to "Parenting"), but it does not contain personal stories about John's daughter. Those are on another page that at the moment is not available to the public for privacy reasons. If you are a listener to the podcasts and you just want to look up some specific detail, get in touch and we will work it out. If you just came from Google and want to know more about John's daughter, this is not the place.
Naming a child (RL240)
Merlin's first pick for his daughter's name was Elizabeth, a pretty neutral name from which many other names can be derived. John agrees that this is the ultimate girl's name. The name however got nixed for one good reason: There are very few good women called Liz. Almost every Liz is bad, maybe with the exception of Jonathan Coulton's sister in law. Merlin's wife had been bullied at school by somebody named Liz and she had the ultimate naming rights. Therefore, Merlin's daughter is called Eleanor, an old ladies' name which is now trending again. Merlin's wife is called Madeleine which is quite a popular name as well.
The Snap-to-grid-problem of names is when someone has an unusual name that sounds a bit like a common name and people will call you something else all the time. This problem was defined by friend of the show Marco Arment. Merlin's wife was for example often called Nathalie. Even Merlin often calls wife or daughter for the other and people call his daughter for his wife's name.
It is not a good thing if parents give their kids names that you always have to spell. John's daughter Marla has a name that has three different spellings and suffers from the Snap-to-grid problem. It is very similar to Dan's daughters name: MJ (Marry Jane), named after a Spiderman character. John's daughter's name is also difficult for people because it does not follow the usual conventions of gendered names with certain vowels at the end.
Kids discovering different languages, Hamburger Hamburger Bang Bang (RL177)
John's daughter has grown up in a culture with kids of any kind, so she doesn't think there is a difference between people based on their color, but she does appreciate that people are speaking different language, which she thinks is fascinating. She is just at an age where she is trying to imitate them, which is fun to do, but should be an inside voice while in public. However, John doesn't want to get in her mind and fill it with adult human anger, frustration and bullshit. He doesn't want to start stomping on her enthusiasm with our intermediary problems, even though sometimes in Chinatown she will do some "chun chun chun chun chun".
It is fascinating how people in other countries think an American accent sounds like. When John was at Gonzaga, a friend of him had a room mate from Japan who was learning English in college. He was a bright guy and ended up becoming a really good friend. When he first arrived he did not speak English and John's friend Bob asked him how the Japanese imitate how Americans sound like. After some confusion he replied "Hamburger Hamburger, Bang Bang!" and everybody was so disappointed because that's exactly what you don't want to hear.
The story of Dumbo (RL158)
In the middle of 2015, John started exposing his daughter to more complicated media. Up until then all of her books were pretty much unambiguous, but now they watched Dumbo the Flying Elephant with his funny ears. It is basically the story of the movie Precious. His tribe rejects Dumbo because of his birth defect. His mother who is trying to defend him is taken away by the authorities and put into an insane asylum. Dumbo's only friend is a wisecracking mouse. He is surrounded by evil clowns, forced into being a freak in a sideshow and his redemption comes only during the last minute when he discovers he can fly. John’s daughter was yelling at the screen! Her emotional response was so intense that John wasn’t sure if he should turn it off.
Dumbo came out in 1941 when John's mom was 6 years old. She remembered seeing Dumbo in the theater and she found it to be a kid's movie like all the other kid's movies. John realized that Dumbo's experiences compares to what his mother was going through in her real life, meaning that for her Dumbo was some lighthearted shit. John and his daughter talked their way through the movie, which was emotionally fraught for John. It would have been the same had he watched it by himself. He is not sure anymore what he felt when he had first seen it back in 1972. On the other side, John doesn’t just want to keep broadcasting happy fluff to his daughter, because if she shares John’s emotional nature, it would mean there are many more land mines in the world than for a normal person. Seeing her emotional reaction when she all of a sudden was sitting up straight, trying to avert her eyes, means that she is not dead inside. Others might even be laughing at Dumbo! Merlin and John continue to talk about the emotional elements of the movie.
Old children's books today (RL272)
Both Merlin and John sneak books into their children’s life with the intention to get them on them. For Merlin, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit took hold. They read all the Harry Potter books and A Series of Unfortunate Events. John tried to get Beatrix Potter into his daughter's shelf, but she wasn’t into it. He kept reading her Rudyard Kipling's Just so stories and changed the problematic nouns because those white-man’s burden stories are deeply problematic from the beginning. John grew up having these stories read to him because he was raised by Victorians. All the books he had as a kid were published in 1895 and they all had the pre-Nazi backwards kind of swastika on them, an emblem that conveyed exotic Orientalism. Some of John's favorite stories from "Just so stories" are ”How the Rhinoceros got its skin” and "The Cat that walked by himself” (list of all stories). He could "not not" read those things to her!
John had inherited all the TinTin books in French when he was a kid from his uncle Al. They gave them to his daughter in English after they culled the ones where TinTin goes to China, the Belgian Congo issues, and any episodes where TinTin interacts with anyone from Asia. She even has a poster on her wall with TinTin going to the moon, but that one is in French, because it shows the book cover from Belgium.
Merlin is reading his daughter from Bennett Cerf's Houseful of Laughter, a humor-book with a compilation of short-stories like The Night the Bed Fell by James Thurber, which Merlin loves very much.
Mainstream children’s cartoons today seem mostly designed to sell figurines, but there is a decided lack of actual material in them. The story beads are very simple and plain, while there is so much noise and so much Sturm und Drang! John wants stories, not characters with unnaturally large heads and eyes screaming at each other. They continue to talk about books and cartoons for children.
Because John was born on Friday the 13th, other kids ascribed magic to him and he was thought of as a little bit of a kid sorcerer, which he loved! As he grew older, he started to think of himself as actually being some kind of magic user and he thought about conjuring an orb. It did occupy a lot of his imagination and he felt always a tinge of disappointment that he wasn’t actually magic and couldn’t actually create spooky action at a distance, as John Siracusa would say. For that reason John is hesitant to introduce his daughter to the idea that there are magic kids and non-magic kids, like there are in Harry Potter. They continue to talk about different movies.
2017-August: Going to a baby-shower (RL256)
John was on his way to a baby-shower later that day and they had something on their invitation like "Don't worry about gifts, but if you insist, here is a link to a list of gifts" Clearly, the list had been compiled by a large group of people who all said "You are going to need THIS!" The couple is part of a group of maybe 20 close-knit friends who have all coupled up recently and are all in their early 40:s. They are the first from that group to have a baby and John expects maybe 15 babies delivered from this group in the next 1,5 years. There are things on this list like baby-wipe warmers and crazy stuff that you honestly don't need. You should take it off the list immediately, because otherwise somebody will buy this for you and you will feel the pressure to use it and feel like Chewbacca with C-3PO on his back pushing a stroller. When John and Merlin were raised, their parents asked them to hold their cigarette and "The first thing you need to learn is how to mix a Bloody Mary!"
Brushing their daughter’s hair (RL256)
Merlin’s daughter’s hair needs to brushed 2-3 times a day and you need to get all those little knots out. John is much more in the ”let it ride”-family of ”how is her hair doing”. His daughter is still at an age where he is in a position to bathe her and shampoo her hair. John has an elaborate hair-conditioning regiment. Marla has long thick fine hair and it gets easily tangled. As part of putting the conditioner in, John is combing her for a long time while she is in the bath and playing with her toys. John’s mom’s policy is ”Sit in the god-damn chair, I want to brush your hair”. She is good at not hurting her, but she does also not brook any sassafras. ”You are not going to yell at me and you are not leaving without your hair being brushed!” When Marla’s mom picks out a brush across the room, she immediately starts to cry.
Kids being drama queens (RW71)
Dan's daughter once got nursemaid's elbow. She was at an age where she still had diapers, but was about to not need them anymore. When John's wife layed her on the ground to change her diaper, she was holding her arm and leg sliding her closer to her, not even with a jerking motion, just very gently. They had done this 1 milion times before, but this time the elbow pulled out of the socket, which can only happen to very small children and takes a very minimal force. Aparently this is more painful than the shoulder coming out, because the moment it happened, their daughter started screaming and screaming and was just inconsolable, holding the arm by her side like it was dead. The doctor knew exactly what it was and was just touching her to get it back in, followed by instantaneous relief. There was no swelling and no soreness - she was just fine. This kind of accident often happens when parents are disciplining their child. Because Dan's daughter is a total overreacting drama queen, it might possibly not have been that painful.
In June of 2017, John was with a group of 6-year olds and at that age, the amount of pure drama that is inspired by even the tiniest little event is pretty impressive. He was with a group of other moms like himself and they were just laughing about each successive child that would come up dying. Within a childhood development framework there is surely something going on that we developmentally should be aware of, but children are probably primarily trying to figure out if we will take their fake wound seriously. John's daughter understands the story about crying wolf, but it has not quite translated into her not crying wolf and John was spending a lot of time in that turf at the time.
Empowered toddlers (RW80)
Pre-schoolers are now taught about body autonomy, which means that the child's body is their own and they need to know their limits and dictate what kind of touch they want. It feels very well-meaning on the surface of it because you want children to grow up not feeling like their bodies are subject to other people's hands or authority. It is also presented as a path to female empowerment, teaching girls from a young age that they can't just be grabbed or man-handled. One of John's friend was trying to get his daughter into her car seat in the parking lot of the grocery store and she screamed "No daddy, bad touch!" and people started looking at him. Since he believes in this concept, he stopped touching her and was trying to get her to agree to go in her car seat instead. She was not doing it and an hour went by where he was afraid that somebody would come over and call the police. He is not saying that he is expressing any doubt about this doctrine, because it has been proposed incredibly well-meaning. We do want to raise a generation of empowered daughters and we do not want them to feel man-handled just as part of their birth-right.
This concept has been adopted by a lot of people and John has seen it promoted in a lot of different places. It is even part of the curriculum of the Montessori school. John doesn't know whether his friend is applying this philosophy completely and whether the people who are promulgating it allow exceptions in cases where your child is in danger or when you need to get them into a car seat at a grocery store, but if you teach a 3-year old to say "No, bad touch" to their father who is trying to fasten her seat belt, you reap what you sow. Nobody wants to weigh in on this, because if you say that a toddler wants to feel safe, it means that the parents need to be in control. No 3-year old wants to be making decisions about what their father and mother is able to do in terms of picking them up. Making a 3-year old feel like she is in charge is a terrible thing to do to a child! You want your parents to feel omnipotent when you are little!
There may even be someone listening to the podcast right now who will accuse John of saying dangerous things because he is encouraging raising a generation of dis-empowered women or something. In fact, this is a theory without a way of testing it. We have not yet watched a generation of children grow up under the doctrine of toddler body autonomy in order to see if it in fact creates a generation of empowered people or if it in fact creates a generation of people who feel further estranged from other people. From the time they were very little, they were dictating their reality to grown-ups before they had any capacity for judgement at all. Empowering toddlers or children of any age to be making decisions about how their parents interact with them seems like a very destructive idea to John. It is the inverse of how decision-making should flow!
This idea is now out there on Twitter and some people are saying that if your kid is screaming in the mall and you pick them up and carry them outside, you are violating their body autonomy! John will get avalanched if he argues with it, but he also feels he needs to argue with it because it is bad thinking. John is not a child psychologist and there are surely child psychologists who are onboard with this, which means he is pushing against the tide of a culture that is no longer thinking straight. He is going to get lumped in with antivaxers or conservatives or people who are against female empowerment. People will draw parallels like "You know who else said that?" in this strange bedfellows world.
Questionable merchandise for kids (RL159)
John’s friends attitude about kids and technology is to just let them have it because the future is going to be written in those new words and these new technologies. You shouldn’t protect your kid from videos or Disney, because they are the new language. Don’t raise them to be weird hermits! John has the instinct that he cannot loosen the dogs of war like that and he doesn’t know if he is doing his daughter a disservice by not already having a VR helmet on her and training the different hemispheres of her brain.
John is not an overly cautious or conservative person, but he does have a good gut-check in his own mind for First, do no harm and there are certain things he is trying to avoid. It is okay to be bored and it is okay to be a little bit behind or to be different. Ultimately, John is very suspicious of the fast pace of corporatization of everything. When he looks at the movie Frozen, he perceives it to be tied to a global marketing campaign of music, dolls, stickers, dresses and events. Somewhere in Hollywood there must be a big team sitting around a table, saying the word ”Monetize” over and over again. The line between them and the creative team, who is sitting in a separate room around a separate big table, is purposely obfuscated, even within the same company. That way, the creatives can convince themselves that they are artists and they are working in an artistic medium. They are building a positive thing that has its own merit, communicates good values to kids and all that stuff.
John saw a collection of merchandise from the Tron reboot in its original packaging in a thrift store the other day. From the way it was packaged it was evident that these characters were supposed to be so popular with kids that they would be able to differentiate between Rod's flying disc and Chip's flying disc, the disc you should never lose because it contains your brain and that you also use as a weapon. It is like putting your brain in a sock and hitting somebody with it. It was evident that the marketing team expected those to be as widely understood as lightsabers. The difference between Luke’s light saber and Darth Vader’s light saber is a really clear distinction and if you want one you probably don’t want the other. These Tron discs were connected to the characters in the movie and although John was the target audience for the first Tron movie and knows the Tron world pretty well, he doesn’t give a shit about these toys and no-one ever did. That is why they were in a thrift store in their original packaging.
The mechanisms behind things distributed as being "Good for Kids" these days trumps any message of positivity and togetherness. There is so much secondary writing about the My Little Pony universe and its message, but it is stacked up against all this merchandise. Which instinct are you supposed to follow? The one that sees this pile of merchandise and goes "Yuck!" or the secondary writing about how Friendship is Magic that might tell a different story which John should be more curious about? This goes all the way back to Adventure Time: All of John’s grownup friends say it is amazing! It is smart, caring, it is good for you, made by real people who are legitimately good and weird people that we actually know. It is difficult to decide how much of this to let through. Then John turns to episodes of Mister Rogers made in 1972 and he knows what he is getting there. Mister Rogers never tried to sell him anything. John doesn’t know how to continue to be a good marshal.
Everything John just said about entertainment properties also applies to sports. Merlin finds it strange how obsessed adults are with sports and sports culture. People are strangely privileged to piss from the high ground, because: Sports! Merlin is the weirdo for not feeling the same way and it is weird he has to defend his position. You are soaking in the hegemony yourself, if you can’t see how weird it is that you can say from that position that Merlin didn’t make a very good case about sports. Why should he have to make a good case against sports? Why does John need to make a good case for not wanting his daughter in the princess business? Then you end up being the weirdo!
As John walked out the door of the very same Goodwill thrift store, he saw a thing near the entrance that looked like a pink 4-foot tall kid’s coffin. It turned out to be a toy object that was somehow connected to vampirism, but it wasn’t branded Twilight. There is a kid’s show and franchise about vampires in High School who have big eyes like undead bratts. John has actually seen that show for 3 minutes when he walked in on some kids watching it, and he thought that it was the most polluted entertainment he had ever seen. This was soul pollution! These kids have to go outside immediately and splash their faces in a bird bath, bury themselves in the dirt, poke themselves with things, get infections and fight with sticks in order to cleanse their soul from this garbage! Merlin mentions Dog with a Blog as a similarly awful program. As John was staring at this 4-foot tall pink coffin with a heart cut in the door, he was reflecting about vampirism as a children’s fetish culture. That pink undead coffin was meant to be used as a dresser. It had shelves in it and was designed as a decorative element for your 6-year-old goth vampire princess.
Imagine all the different board rooms where people pitched story ideas that eventually resulted in this coffin being made real in the world. It didn’t seem to be that old, instead it seemed to be a brand new confluence of ideas where a child would even know what a vampire was and would want to be one, but would at the same time want to maintain a princess status or be connected to princessism. There was also a little Victorian era in it, because it had some little steampunk decorations that John was marveling at. He imagined all those people in J. Crew suits approving these ideas and asking themselves how they could capitalize on both vampires and princesses at the same time. By the time you are at the receiving end of that garbage hose you have been hit with a cultural meat tenderizer so many times that you feel that this of course makes sense, because your kid likes being a princess and she is old enough for vampires. Then you come to this place where you are literally living in a garbage hose and you don’t even know it. You think you are being a good parent, but it is so hard to even take that tiny little step back and ask yourself: ”Did I just buy my daughter a coffin?”
John taking his daughter to Washington DC (RW81, RW82, RL259)
John’s daughter’s mother is frequently traveling around the world doing web security work because this area has become quite a cause célèbre. At the end of September of 2017 she was in America’s capital and monument city Washington D.C. for a couple of weeks and rather than having her separated from their darling daughter for that amount of time, John agreed that he would come out to DC with the baby for a long weekend. They would see the sights like the pencil monument (as she calls it), the room at the Natural History Museum with the bird skeletons, the Lincoln Memorial (which she knows quite a bit about) and all the other hot-spots for little kids. Being separated for 5 or 7 days is fine, but 15 days is just too long because time moves so slowly for small children and her mom is obviously very important to her. There is nothing keeping John from traveling. (RW82)
The Seattle school district is no longer very forgiving about getting time off from school and her school was very concerned about absences and truancy. When John was a kid, his dad would just come into class, take him out and nobody cared! His daughter's school sent a lot of paperwork and some pretty dramatic emails about unexcused absence and if she has more than 10 unexcused absence days, they will put her in Child Protective Services. It is not unexcused! John is excusing her! In the old day, ”excused” meant that your parents said it was okay, but now the school decides if it is okay. John has half a dozen trips planned during her first grade year, like Washington DC and Hawaii. If he goes for work, he will take her with him. Her mom is going to a conference in Korea and it is a good thing for a first-grader to go to Korea for 10 days! She will miss some course work, but an awful lot of that is coloring. (RW81, RW82)
The school makes it seem like their concerns are on behalf of your kid and they will show you statistics about kids who didn’t attend school and ended up in a bread line in 1932. She is a first-grader! Do they think she is not going to graduate from High School? The real reason is that schools receive money from the legislature based on who is enrolled and based on daily attendance. If your kid is out of school for five unexcused absence days, the school gets $600 less. John is of the opinion that taking her on an exciting adventure into the world where she is learning stuff is not necessarily better than school, but she is going to do homework at night and she will keep a journal of what she did that day and draw a picture into a book. (RW81, RW82)
John went to see the principal and her teacher to do the real talk and got a very good response from them both. Essentially they are talking about a first-grader and they are not worried about her missing 5 days of school going to Washington DC. However, they do have to make a show of it and report some of the absence. John knows all about this theater and they agreed on the procedure. If you are a stickler for the rules, you don't care that this is going to be a very educational trip. John has been in contention to sticklers his whole life and he has been in plenty of situations where a stickler made a stand over something that seemed to benefit no-one. Can you really say that her first-grade class work is more important for her? A stickler might say it is not only the attendance that matters, but also learning that attendance is important! (RW82)
John and his daughter visited the following places while in Washington DC (RL259):
- They walked around the neighborhood to the East of Capitol Hill with those little old-timy diners and town houses of brown stone. When John lived there in 1989, it was only beginning to be gentrified. Today the neighborhood has been transformed and you will find beautiful homes the whole way. There are still a couple of little stores and little diners that have been there since before the neighborhood even went into decline, diners with just one counter and five tables and a very limited menu. John and his daughter had breakfast at one of those places.
- They walked around the Library of Congress and looked down on the reading room.
- They went to the Jefferson Library. After the British burned the Capitol during the war of 1812, they also burned the library. Thomas Jefferson donated his entire library, which was at the time the biggest library in the states. There was another fire that destroyed some of it, but they have the majority of his books set up in a circle like he had his library built.
- They toured the Capitol.
- They went down to the Smithsonian.
- They walked all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. His daughter was a super trooper! Already on the other side of the Washington Monument she said that this was a long walk, but then she understood that this was on the back of the penny. She knows all about Lincoln, because she had heard John lecture about him. It was great and they had a wonderful time!
- They went through the new WWII memorial, which is not too far from the Vietnam memorial and it has pride of place.
- John was also at the World Trade Center memorial. (RL259)
The School System in America (RL256)
Main Story: School System
Merlin and John talk extensively about the issues of the school system in America.
The smartest kids in the world, reading in the bathroom (RL281)
John is reading a book called The smartest kids in the world, written by a reporter (Amanda Ripley) who went around the world to write an entire book about how kids learn best and how we can raise kids to be problem solvers and not just dumb test-takers. As the results came out from these studies and Finland was way up top of the list of schools that were producing problem-solving kids, the Fins were completely surprised, because they thought that they were doing it wrong. Because it has been so widely reported, the people in Finland have developed a Scandinavian smugness about it (Finland is not part of Scandinavia, but of the Nordic Countries) and are now prepared to teach America. As with so many things, America once again is an embarrassment and is doing it wrong. We spend more money per child than anywhere else, like we do with healthcare, and it seems to be the American model to spend more and get less. You get a little drunk and you end up in jail.
The author talked about a young woman in Oklahoma. She was a little awkward and because nobody else thought the word Onomatopoeia was interesting she couldn’t make friends, but she got invited to a summer program at Duke because she got a good grade on a test. She told her mom that she wanted to go to this summer program that only cost $100 million where she could be with kids like her. The chapter ended with the writer saying that she was too young and her mom didn’t want her to be away for a month and so she said ”No!” It broke John’s heart! That is why John thought he had to set up streamers for his daughter's 7th birthday because he didn’t want her to come home and say ”Dad didn’t decorate for my birthday!”, but she was not impressed.
Maybe John was supposed to raise the smartest kid in the world but make her believe that she is the dumbest kid in the world? That is how you get a serious James Bond villain going! All true achievers have terrible stories about how they were tortured as kids and you don’t want to torture your kid! John should write a book about how to torture your kid without seeming that you torture your kid. It would be like a little mini-Cheney. Kids are not gaslit nearly enough anymore! Instead we are afraid we are going to scar them or something. For example, John is going to buy 40 different pillows at IKEA and change the pillow in her pillow case every day. She will think it is the same pillow every night, but in fact it is a totally different pillow of a different firmness and a different constitution, so she will never be 100% sure and will think that she is the crazy one. It is hard!
John has three bathrooms in his house. He leaves one book in each bathroom and then leaves the bathroom with the book, wanders around the house, lays on the couch or goes around the garden, all while reading the book that he found most recently. He will put it down at some point and it will get into the living room mix. Then he will find another book and starts off that one. Now John is reading three books, the third being by Malcolm Gladwell where he is learning about matchsticks (called The Tipping Point), the matchstick man and the rubber band man. John does feel vindicated by some of the information in these books, but you don’t just want to read books that vindicate your position.
John visiting a Montessori school (RW142)
In April of 2019 John was late to talk to Dan, which the listeners could not possibly know, because he was touring a Montessori school. He had friends in Montessori for many years, his sister’s Alaskan best pal is a Montessori booster and teacher, but there had never been a convenient Montessori for John's daughter until now when he was about to move to a different neighborhood. John doesn’t really know what a Montessori school is, but it is a concept of education and the school would be where that concept of education was practiced. It is open plan classrooms, it is very tactile, it is very ”work at your own pace” and John’s daughter is self-directed.
Montessori is based on the presupposition that children are naturally craving experience and naturally seeking knowledge. If you give them an open, nurturing and supportive learning environment, they will naturally want to learn, almost like if you gave them a playroom where the toys were all educational and you said ”You are here to learn stuff! We don't have math hour, but we are going to do some math. We don't have an English test, but you are going to learn to read and write in a way that is fun!”
They mix all the ages together and you can have three year olds all the way up through six year olds, usually it is 3-6, 6-9, 9-12 in one class. Instead of instructing them ”You will learn this this way” it is more ”Here is some stuff that will teach you this thing and maybe you want to do that now!” The teachers are supposed to be really good at observing children, learning how the child is going to learn, and providing the child with the best stuff to learn the way that child learns. Neither of Dan’s kids are in a Montessori school and neither of them would do well in that environment.
John thought that his little babe would do well there and Dan agreed! John knew some people there and he had a good conversation with everybody this morning. He dropped his daughter off at her school and he knew he was going to be driving by the Montessori school on his way home to talk to Dan and he was just going to drop in. A lot of people in the world don't like people dropping in, but John is a dropper inner and he is just going to pop in there and if they would say he will need to make an appointment then he will accept that, but if they let him drop right in, he will do that.
The principal opened the the door and said they only kept the door locked to keep the riff raff out. John said ”That's me!” and he looked at John surprised for a second until he got John’s joke and he was like ”Haha, I know right?” Then he asked ”Are you here for the tour?” - ”The tour? Yes, I am!” He asked John to fill out a form and John realized they were giving tours to prospective parents because the application deadline for this school was next Friday. John tried to play it off, like ”Yes, I am here for the scheduled tour!” and they were already set up to give John a tour all around the school. He saw every classroom and talked to every teacher. The school is smaller than the school his daughter is in now and John really enjoyed the experience and liked everybody he met.
A little eight year old girl came up to John and asked ”Would you like a cup of tea?” Then she turned on the tea pot, made some tea and brought it to him ”Thank you, little tea making girl!” - ”No problem, let me know if you need more!” This is not something that you are going to find at a public school. Maybe that little tea-making girl was some thing they do and every time a parent comes they will get one of the kids to make them some tea and the parent will think ”Wow! I wish my kid knew how to make tea!”
It might be a loss-leader, but John doesn’t think so. From all appearances it seemed like learning to make tea was actually one of the many ways that they were taught to do things. If you asked John’s little girl to make you a cup of tea, she would be absolutely dumbfounded. Where would one even begin? It is not because she is not capable of making a cup of tea, but it never came up in conversation. "Hey, should you learn to make tea?" It is the type of thing that they would teach you in Montessori!