matching tracksuits

We’ve been teaching the Girl to share. With no siblings, she’s fairly accustomed to having all her toys all to herself. Yet sharing is not something you can force or even teach like tying a shoe. It’s something in which she needs to see the intrinsic value herself. And the only way to convey that — the joy of sharing, you could call it — is to model it.

“Here, Mama. Would you like some of my cake?” I ask K. She has a slice herself, but she gladly accepts. We smile, but they’re genuine smiles: it’s amusing, the whole process, and it’s difficult to do it with a straight face.

L is beginning to catch on. The other day, she brought me a bit of candy she’d tried, saying, ”Tata, I’m sharing this with you. I don’t like it.”

In “The Childish Person” from the Dhammapada we read:

Childish, unthinking people
go through life as enemies of themselves,
committing detrimental actions
that bear bitter fruit.

Glenn Wallis, in his notes about his translation of the Dhammapada, explains that “childish” in this context as several meanings: “childlike” is certainly relevant, but the Buddha also meant a “person who ambitiously pursues material fortune, being pushed along by an ever-strengthening current of “I, me, mine.” (125) (Other translations render “Bāla-vaggo” simply as “the fool”, but I prefer Wallis’ less vitriolic “the childish person.”)

Later, in “The Practitioner”, we find a similar notion:

Do not carelessly swallow a copper ball and,
burning, cry out, “This is pain!”

All too often, we cause ourselves the pain we’re certain has exterior source. And nowhere is this more evident than the middle school. In that setting, it might sound like this:

Walking down the hallway, I try to smile and acknowledge students as we pass each other.

They say it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but I’m not convinced. Smiling is not always easy: sometimes I want to scowl because of some frustration; sometimes I want to have a blank expression due to exhaustion; occasionally, I don’t want to hide my anger. In spite of all of these competing emotions, though, I still try to smile.

I know I must be doing something right when students smile back at me. It means that we have, at the very least, a pleasant working relationship (though frowns don’t always mean the opposite). And a good relationship is an important part of the foundation for learning.

Oh, whom am I kidding? I’m a mean ogre…

I have the privilege of introducing a group of twenty eighth graders to the unabridged, unadulterated Shakespeare. We began Romeo and Juliet this week, and it is the highlight of my year.

I began preparing a foundation earlier in the year by having the kids write sonnets and wrestle with iambic pentameter. I mentioned that Romeo and Juliet is, for the most part, in metered verse. “You mean he wrote the WHOLE play in iambic pentameter?” they asked incredulously. I got my Riverside Shakespeare, large enough to use in the gym as a free weight. “Not only that — most everything he wrote was in iambic pentameter.”

They were, in a word, terrified.

That’s understandable: the Bard does have quiet the reputation for being inaccessible to many casual modern readers: long sentences that sometime contain clauses with convoluted, inverted structure, and vocabulary that can make one’s toe nails curl.

We took it slowly.

In fact, we took a whole lesson on the prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The next day we spent an entire lesson on the opening fight scene. With some group work, class discussion, and multiple readings, they actually began to find Gregory and Sampson to be, amusingly, “losers.” Laughter in the classroom while reading Shakespeare is musical.

The result: comments like this on our online forum:

• The language isn’t as hard as I anticipated.
• Now that we have taken the time in class to discuss the play in normal language, I find it rather challenging but yet understandable.
• I was scared at the beginning because i didn’t think i would get any of it. Now that we have started i actually understand most of it.
• At first i figured the language would be extremely difficult to understand and read like words such as “tis” or “thy” or “ay,” but if you read the words you can figure them out over time.

The most enjoyable will be observing their reaction as they watch Romeo + Juliet, the DiCaprio version of 1996. Not the best version in cinematic history, but I show it to illustrate the timelessness of the story.

It’s going to be a fun month.

I never really liked card games as a kid. I guess Uno was alright once in a while, but that doesn’t really count as a real card game. Since Windows hadn’t yet come out when I was a kid, I never learned to play Hearts. Spades was popular among some friends, as was — oddly enough — euchre, but I just didn’t get it. What was the point? (Bridge, of course, was out of the question then; now, it’s the only card game I truly enjoy.)

L learned a new game today — “learn” being used in a most generous way. She didn’t quite get the point; she couldn’t quite understand why Babcia took the upturned cards for herself sometimes and sometimes gave them to her.

I can’t remember what this particular game is called in English. In Polish, it’s “wojna” — war. Perhaps it’s the same in English. I can’t really recall. (Another one of those odd circumstances in which I know the Polish but am unsure of the English.)

Most importantly: the Girl enjoyed it (for a few minutes).

“Let’s play it again!” she chimed again and again.

Still in English, though…

People write about what they know. One of the prime motivations of confessional poetry was that we theoretically know more about ourselves than about anything else.

When you ask a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to write poetry, there is one guarantee: the boys will write about video games. In one portfolio of ten poems, one young man wrote two poems about games (including a haiku about “Call of Duty 5″), two poems about sports (one about playing, the other about watching), and one about hunting.

I mentioned this to a colleague this afternoon. She thought for a moment, then made a suggestion: “Next year you could tell them that each poem had to be about a different topic.”

“Then they’d simply say, ‘Well, they’re two different games, so that’s technically two different topics.’”

L has an absolutely astounding memory. She can “read” many, many books — at least fifteen, I would say — from memory. She turns the page and quotes almost verbatim the text on the page.

And she corrects me.

“‘That’s what you said yesterday,’ shouted elephant,” I read from one of L’s favorite books, Goose Goofs Off.

“No, Tata! Elephant snorted!” comes the reply.

A daily game of Candy Land has wiggled its way into our routine. L has mastered the concepts: she knows what the cards are for and she generally knows which direction her piece needs to move.

The problem is that Candy Land is unimaginably dull: draw a card, move your piece, wait. Repeat. While L was learning, it was a pleasant game: actually playing the game was not the objective, and as I love teaching, any educational activity is enjoyable.

Now that she knows how to play the game, though, it can drag.

I feel a little guilty about that. I should adore every single moment with her, but let’s face it: there are only so many times you can feign surprise at having to go back to the Gingerbread House.

When I was working with autistic children, Candy Land was a popular free time choice. I got so utterly sick of it that I — and I am somewhat ashamed to admit it — stacked the deck to make sure the kid I was sitting opposite got all the good cards.

“What!? Another double-purple? Well, you’re well on your way, aren’t you?”

I haven’t done that with L yet. In the truest sense of “stacking the deck.” I might have switched the top two cards after a quick peek at my own, making sure she got another double-purple, but that’s not really stacking the deck. That’s helping.

I work in a time machine. Each and every day, I’m transported to my middle school days as I see bits and pieces of my eighth grade year reflected by my students. Times have changed — there’s certainly a lot more hugging going on these days, for one — but the gravity-bending, end-of-the-world trials of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds remain. Students charge up and down the hall, furious about this or that, certain it’s the end of the world. Love blooms and the infatuation they’re now experiencing is the one to see the young lovers through the rest of their natural days.

I see myself in this or that student. I see peers in his peers. I watch experiences that I had, and I wonder if they will shape the young people in the same way the events shaped me. Broken hearts, unjust accusations, careless comments — I look back on these things with calmness now, though I felt nothing but anguish then.

Occasionally this gets me to wondering about how I would handle middle school differently were I suddenly to return. Would I have been calmer? Would I have realized that this or that disaster was nothing of the sort? Certainly, but then, twenty-some years later, I’d be wondering the same thing again. “Knowing what I know now, after two times through, would I…”

Part of growing up is growing out of this kind of thinking. Yet spending seven hours a day with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds makes it easy to wallow in the nostalgia. For about three seconds.

Our school has a dress code that in effect creates a school uniform. It is, in short, relatively strict. Regarding shirts, it reads, in part:

• Navy, red, black, or white (solids only)
• All shirts must have a collar and sleeves
• No shirts made of 100% Lycra or Spandex
• Shirts may not have stripes on the collar or armband
• All shirt tails MUST be long enough to be tucked in at all times while on campus or field trips

The county dress code is somewhat more lenient, and on occasion, students are able to come dressed in the less restrictive, county dress code.

For all involved, it usually turns into more of a nightmare. Such esoteric concerns as “Should this shirt be tucked in?” and “Is this accessory permissible?” take up much of the first minutes of the day.

A few weeks ago, we had such a “county dress code day” and there was much emotion and worry about whether the fashionable, down-to-the-bottom-of-the-crotch tee-shirts had to be tucked in or not. County dress code states that shirts that are designed to be tucked in should be tucked in, so it was a reasonable assumption that this particular style shirt didn’t have to be tucked in. Other styles caused problems, and a general rule was implemented just before first period: if it’s a rounded seem, tuck it in.

It occurred to me that a clothing designer could create a dress shirt (i.e., with the rounded shirt tail) with the intention of it not being tucked in. And walking back to the classroom, I shook my head and laughed aloud at the amount of energy we expend on such trivial things as whether or not to tuck in a shirt.

And the experience made me quite thankful for our strict dress code. The kids complain about it and about my enforcement, but I can simply respond, “The dress code is out of my control, and I will get reprimanded if I don’t enforce it. So if you have a problem with it, you should talk to the principal.” In short, it allows me to pass the buck.