Is the relationship between Israel and Palestine the same as Iran or Turkey and Kurds? I can not make the one to one correspondence, it looks like the Israelis are under this impression, and they feel like that!

This morning we were watching Sesami Street, before my son went to school, the subject of the show was the family and what families do together. One thing that I like about Sesami Street is the multi racial and multi cultural approach they have got by showing people from different backgrounds involved in American life, not just the blonds. This morning when they were showing kids and families they showed a gay couple with their kid as well. I don’t like that; I don’t know how you could explain it to your kid, what is normal and what is not? It all depends on who you are and how you think about certain things; a gay family is not a fact unlike "brushing your teeth is good for you", which is a fact.

I believe that it is very important to make kids understand that not everything, which is shown on TV or told in school, is right and kids always should be critical and use different resources to deal with different concepts and especially new ideas,

Meanwhile in case my son asks about the kind of reunion we saw on TV this morning, I will tell him that a gay family is fake, is not true.

At the same time we continue to watch Sesami Street that is a great program.

Unlike Canada, here I am not feeling I can write about all my reflections, just like good old times in Iran. I self-censored some part of the last post I did, then I felt bad about it, here you go:

One thing that bothers me is that all the antiwar campaign even from the leftists, is focusing on the American army casualties and the war expenses for the tax payers, to some extent that makes sense, it is the natural way you can connect to American public opinion, at the same time the Iraqi civilians are suffering as well, as a result of a war that is not their choice. I would mention that as well.

Last night I was watching a TV documentary on PBS about the brain injuries that American soldiers sustain as a result of a nearby explosion, and the fact that almost always such conditions are not paid enough attention to. I remember the same phenomena during the Iran/Iraq war and we had lots of these people coming back from the fronts and even though they looked alright they behaved strange and screwed-up, we used to call them Mouji (translates into Wavy, referring to the explosion wave), there was so many jokes and funny stories about them, after lost night I admit I feel very bad and I don’t feel it is funny anymore (a few days ago in Tehran, one of these guys took hostage all the students of a girls' school, including his own daughter! ).

My son Danial is in grade one, there was a great deal of medical and language proficiency tests that he had to pass before he could start school in California. His Iranian background (non english speaker) and the fact that prior to coming to US he was in a French school were the reasons for the language test, fortunately he passed it. One thing that I am seeing here is that the educational system in this specific district is very similar to what we went through in Iran. Very strict and lots of tests and work are administered even for first graders. That was not the case at all in Canada, even though Danial was going to a French school in an English dominated region, and they are known to be stricter than the English schools, the curriculum was relatively relaxed, specifically for the first graders the stress was on the development of social skills and the interest in school and learning.

In contrary, here they are doing serious math stuff and reading, I would categorize the American system (where we are living) more traditional and the Canadian system is more liberal.

I really don’t know which system is better, I did not like too much pressure back in my school years,

Long live MIT!!

I have been looking for an opportunity to study a little bit; taking a course may be or study books…

Yesterday I found out that MIT has an online service called open courseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html) and the course materials of many of the officially offered courses in MIT are available on this website. I picked up a few and am planning to follow through…

That is a good Idea, why the rest of Universities don’t do that?

We had a two-day holiday last week, including the weekend it added up to 4 days which was nice. Thanks giving is much more serious here than Canada, I am not sure why that is so, it might be because of the religious aspects of thanks giving and the fact that the Canadians in general are less religious than Americans.

Another interesting thing to see was that even the Iranians are into it, we were invited to a thanks giving lunch which had turkey on the table and so on and so forth. Not a bad Idea.
One good thing about southern California is that you can feel you are at home because of the all Iranian stuff you have there and the land itself, it looks more like what we had in Shiraz and most parts of Iran.