Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Napkin Notes-- X-1 2/24


Our son's attention has switched to rockets after a recent opportunity to launch rockets at the local airfield.  Like with most of his interests he has an intense focus and eagerly takes in as much information about the topic as he can.  For this reason we let him watch "The Right Stuff."  

"The Right Stuff," wouldn't be the right choice for all families because of the bad language, but our son, TsukiMoon  will say, "They shouldn't use that language."  It opens up a conversation about appropriate ways to express frustration.  We use movies to teach; values, problem solving, and to expose Boo to new ideas and ways of living.  

"The Right Stuff," taught how some people have "ice-water" in their vains, like the Chuck Yeager character.  It also showed the importance of being gracious and how to be a team-builder.  It also told the story about of John Glenn's support of his wife, Annie Glenn who had a stutter.  

We take time out of the movie to discuss the parts of the movie to teach values we support.  We will also stop the movie to explain the emotions of the actors and how TsukiMoon can recognise the emotions by looking at the faces of the actors.

TsukiMoon really took to the story of Chuck Yeager, played by Sam Shepard and now considers him the best of America's test pilots.  The Chuck Yeager story, as illustraited in the movie, hints that Chuck Yeager might have liked to be an astronaut even though he castigated the Mercury 7 as "monkeys."  In the story it suggests that Chuck Yeager wasn't given a chance at the astronaut program because he hadn't gone to college.  We discussed about how there are people who are excellent at what they do, who haven't gone to college, which might preclude them from all the opportunities they might like.

This explains today's Bell X-1, which was flown by Chuck Yeager and was the first manned airplane to exceed the speed of sound.  The X-1 was an experimental rocket plane-- hence the "Rocket Man!"

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