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A Tale of Two Books

About a year ago I read Treasure Island to the Boy. It took us a long time because I read the original, unabridged version. E loved it.

“Daddy, can we read Treasure Island again?” he asked the other day. I thought it might be a good idea to try to read another classic adventure tale instead of re-reading that one, so I suggested Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I read the opening to him:

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.

For some time past vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.

He was hooked.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Well, that’s what the whole book is about.”

In the course of the opening pages, the longitude and latitude of various sightings. I tried to explain to him what the coordinate system was, but he was a little lost. This evening, after dinner, we looked on Google Earth and mapped out the precise locations of all the sightings of the mysterious creature.

While he was eating his snack, I read another chapter to him. It’s kind of slow going: he asks for definitions of a lot of words, and the sentences are so long, with so many embedded subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, that it’s hard for him to follow. Here’s an example:

Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times–rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length–we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all.

That’s one sentence — it would give my own students fits.

It is in these sentences, though, and the challenging vocabulary that I find the lasting value in the reading. Sure, we’ll have great memories to share; certainly, we’ll enjoy the book. But when it’s time to tackle things like this on his own in school, he’ll have some experience with it because he’ll have heard me reading Jules Verne and Robert Stevenson and eventually Twain and Dickens.

After the Boy was in bed, I was in L’s room, talking to her about the books she’s reading. I’d had in my mind that I wanted to start reading to L again, and I thought A Tale of Two Cities might be a good start. So I asked her if I could read her something.

“Sure,” she said fairly emotionlessly — it’s a thirteen-year-old thing, I’m discovering.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

As I was reading, she jumped up, skipped over to her bookbag, and dug out her social studies notes. “We went over that in class!” she said excitedly.

She looked through her notes and I saw a heading “The Reign of Terror.”

“That’s where it will be,” I said.

We talked about it for a bit, and that was it. Will we go through with this reading? Does she even want to? I don’t know. I understand less and less of her thirteen-year-old mind, but I know that just being there is often enough. Do I do that enough? It’s the worry of every parent, I suppose.

Boxing Day 2019

I’ve never really been a fan of Monopoly. After about the age of ten or eleven, I determine that there was too much chance involved, and I just found it frustrating. I never played it after that.

As an adult, though, I’ve come to recognize that there is a fair amount of chance in life that just sucks money from one’s bank account. Medical emergencies, car repairs, accidents, home issues, and the like — all unplanned, all expenses.

When the Girl got Monopoly for Christmas this year, I knew I’d end up playing it with the kids. I didn’t realize how much fun it could be as an adult who can simply look at it as a game that is a fairly accurate reflection of the frustrations of adulthood and, more importantly, as a game that can provide lessons to kids and time together as a family.

We played twice today. The first time, it was just the kids and I. It only took a moment for me to realize the value for a seven-year-old. He had to read, to count money, and occasionally make change.

L dominated us, and the Boy was hemorrhaging cash to a degree that he declared he was going to quit. We talked him down, but then K returned home and we set about to preparing and eating dinner.

Afterward, the kids wanted to play again, so we sat down as a family and began. I had a little strategy in mind that I wanted to test: quality, not quantity. I bought a bunch of properties quickly, then traded at exorbitant cost to myself three or four properties for the final street to make the orange set:

  • New York Avenue
  • Tennessee Avenue
  • St. James Place

I then set about to building them up to two houses each as quickly as possible. The result: I was getting a couple of hundred bucks every few cycles of the board.

The Boy took a similar route: he ended up with all the railroads and soon was rolling in money.

Poor K was getting hit left and right: bad luck with Community Chest/Chance cards, bad luck with the dice (she must have landed on the luxury tax four or five times), and soon she was down to little cash and few unmortgaged properties.

Then I bought one more house for each of my properties and drawing $550-$600 from every poor player who landed on one of them. K finally landed on one, and it just about wiped her out.

Her reaction: she laughed. Our reaction: we laughed with her.

On our walk this evening, then, we were able to help E see that the most important thing in a game like that is just to have fun. “It’s just a game!”

Loss

The Boy was the goalie when it happened — the break, through the pack that always orbits the ball, past the last defenders who have spent most of the year looking on, that left the Boy basically one-on-one with the attacker.

From the moment the break started, I fear for the worst. And a few short seconds later, there it was. The first goal of the game. The only goal of the game. The team’s first loss. With E manning the goal.

I knew he would be distraught about it. “I’m no good at defense,” he declared.

The question is, will this affect his love for the game? Can we help him move past it? How long will this bother him? These were the thoughts I rehearsed on the way back to the house.

By the time we got home, there was no real mention of it. No mention of it for the rest of the day. But what about Tuesday, when it’s time to go to soccer practice?

With Papa

“We don’t say that to anyone, though, because we don’t want them to laugh at us.” The Boy was describing to me, as we drove home from his school, a new game he and some of his friends had invented. Apparently, they have a graphic design company (of course, he didn’t use that particular term) because they all love drawing, and this weekend, they all have “a lot of work” to get done for the firm. However, they’ve kept it a secret from their non-drawing peers to avoid mockery.

How much of this potential mockery would become actual mocker, I do not know. E is sensitive, and simple, one-time, childish comment from a peer might feel like persistent, tormenting mockery to him. Still, I found his words both encouraging and discouraging. On the one hand, they suggest a certain awareness of what’s out there, an understanding that the world can be a nasty place that doesn’t smile on things that appear out of place. That’s much better than a simplistic naivety. On the other hand, he deals with that by hiding that part of himself from others to avoid it all. Of course, he’s just a second-grade boy: I don’t expect the kind of emotional fortitude that would lead someone to say, “Look, we enjoy it, and that’s all that matters,” to potential tormentors.

When he got home, he talked to Papa about it and a few other things. He always has a captive discussion partner when talking to Papa: it’s the number one duty of grandparents, I suppose. Parents can say, “Not now, sweetie — I have to X” but not grandparents.

Afterward, they built a few paper airplanes together.

Reading

“You probably need to take the Boy: he’s getting fussy about it,” said K as we were making plans for the busy day ahead. Who would take the Boy to his summer reading academy and who would take Papa to meet with the estate liquidator? Originally, I was going to do the former, but K’s comment made me realize she was right.

The program, developed by Clemson University, has bounced around conversations with various mothers, and it comes highly recommended. E’s not a bad reader, we thought, but he’s still a developing reader: there’s always room for improvement.

The Boy had his own opinion about it. He did not want to go. “I’m a terrible reader!” he lamented during the drive over to the university center. “I read so slowly. And A, he’s reading XYZ” (can’t remember the book, but I’m reading it to the Boy now) “all by himself!”

“You don’t need to compare yourself to A; just compare yourself to E.”

“But there’s no other E. How can I compare myself to E when I’m the only E I know?” He’s at the age that I’m not quite sure whether he’s joking or not. Sometimes I get it wrong, and he gets mildly frustrated that I didn’t catch on and play along.

We got to the university center and found probably a dozen kids waiting with a parent or two. He nestled into me as we stood there, which is common when he’s in an unfamiliar situation, and I was beginning to worry anew about how it would be when I tried to leave. After all, it was a nearly-two-hour course, and I didn’t want to sit there with him when I had so many other things to do. But those worries were for naught: he settled into the classroom easily, and when the teacher dismissed the parents after the various, expected preliminaries, he was completely calm when I walked over to him, hugged him, and said, “Have fun.”

I knew what he was thinking: “I won’t have fun! I don’t like reading!” We’d had this conversation in the car, too.

“I think that’s just because you’re not so confident about your reading.”

“Maybe,” he conceded.

“This class is designed to help you build your confidence by giving you new tricks for reading,” I explained.

So when I went to hug him goodbye, I was expecting a bit of panic, a bit of frustration, a bit of reluctance that just wasn’t there, which made it all the easier to leave and do the various chores around Nana’s and Papa’s place (at what point do I stop call it “Nana’s and Papa’s place” and just “Papa’s place?” Probably never, because it will always be “Nana’s and Papa’s place”) like replacing a couple of broken door knobs and sundry repairs to get it ready for selling.

I got back to the class with five minutes to spare, just as the teacher began making final announcements: “And I would like to the parents of K, W, R, and E before you leave, please.” The short version: she’d done preliminary testing on everyone today and felt that our kids would be better served in the rising-third-grader class.

As we walked out, I asked E, “She was taking quickly; did you understand everything?”

“Yes.”

When we got back to Nana’s and Papa’s, E burst in and told K immediately.

The Boy so often suffers from his lack of confidence in some things. He realizes he’s just not as fast as many of his friends; in soccer, he sees that he doesn’t play nearly as well as some of his teammates; and reading — well, he’s never felt great about that.

Maybe now, he does.

Fossil Hunting

The Boy watched a documentary with Papa about the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. His verdict: “I think I want to be a paleontologist now.” He thought about it a moment before amending it: “Well, I have just been thinking about it since yesterday, so that might change.”

Cleaning our finds

Still, this evening after dinner, he was keen on going fossil hunting. After I told him he couldn’t just randomly dig holes in the backyard — “We have a dog to do that; we don’t need more.” — I suggested we look in the creek. We found nothing, as I expected, but it didn’t dampen his enthusiasm. “After all, we found some really cool rocks.”

That we did.

Stone Ax

The Boy, like all children, imitates what he sees. When the folks on his favorite YouTube show, The Axel Show, tried using a stone as an ax, he did the same thing.

“I’ve been making spears,” he explained. “I think I’ll sell some of them on Ebay.”

He’s come up with his own design as well — the two-ended spear. By “own design,” of course, I mean something he’s never seen. “This way, I can attack like this and like this,” he explained, waving the strick around furiously.

The Dog has her own interest in sticks.

Hatchet

It’s all the Boy has been talking about for the last few weeks.

“Daddy, can we get a hatchet?”

He was thinking about buying it with his own money; he was thinking about splitting the cost with us; he was thinking about it, talking about it, probably dreaming about it.

Today, we finally got it. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to pay any of his money for it because he’s got his eye on another Lego set, but when, after buying nails, concrete screws, pegboard hooks, and other things on the list, we finally headed over to the gardening section, his excitement brought a smile to both K and me.

The highlight of the afternoon, then, was teaching him how to use it.

Reading with the Boy

We try to get the Boy to read a little every night. Tonight we worked on L’s old book about spiders. I found the place we’d left off, but the Boy insisted that he’d finished with K last night.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to read it again,” I said. It might have sounded like I was just being lazy, but being able to read a tricky passage fluently will build his confidence. We learn by repetition, especially recognition of new words.

“The back part of a spider’s body is called the abdomen,” he began.

“Wow — you read that tough word like a pro,” I added.

“What word?”

“Abdomen.”

He sighed. “Daddy, I recognized the word.”

“I know. And that’s a long word to know. How many letters?”

He counted: “Seven.”

“You recognized a seven letter word!”

“No, wait,” he said, counting hopefully again. “No, just seven.”

He continued, stumbling a bit: “It has the spider’s hear — hear?”

“Heart,” I helped.

“Heart and the spinnerets, which make silk,” he continued.

“Spinnerets?!” I gasped. “Are you kidding? You read that like a pro as well!”

“But daddy, I stumbled over a” and he paused to count. “A five-letter word.” He often stumbles over words, words that sometimes surprise me.  And he recognizes and reads fluently words that sometimes surprise me. It’s part of learning to read.

“That’s okay,” I reassured. “You stumbled over that word, but you nailed ‘spinnerets.'”‘

Many of my students over the years have face similar struggles, and struggling readers are not confident readers. I’ve sat with kids who were reading, asked them to read aloud, and heard difficult passages come out like this: “It has the spider’s hea hear — whatever — and the spin spin — I don’t know — which make the silk.” If that’s what’s going on in their head as they read silently, and there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t be, it’s no wonder they don’t feel confident with reading: the struggle produces nothing but a confusing text. And they’re likely to anticipate all this: before they begin reading, they’ve convinced themselves that they won’t understand it. And all of this builds and calcifies into not a mere reluctance to reading but a positive aversion to it.

Confidence eliminates those “whatevers” and “I-don’t-knows.” And so I have the Boy read books a second, third, and fourth time.

“But I already know this book,” he complains.

“I know — that’s the point,” I think.