Of course the internet connection at home goes completely haywire when finally we have a chance to Skype with K for more than ten minutes before school.
Month: April 2013
Effort
Dear Terrence,
There’s really only one thing that’s required to pass my class: effort. There’s really only one thing required to be successful in life: effort. There’s really only one thing necessary for happiness: effort. There’s really only one recipe for healthy relationships: effort. There’s really only one path to riches of any sort, be they fiscal, emotional, intrapersonal: effort.
Yet you don’t tend to put forth any at all. I have to fight with you to keep your head up. I have to fight with you to keep a pencil in your hand. I have to fight with you some days even to look at the paper you’re working on.
“You won’t be able to do this in high school and pass,” I explain one day. “Certainly not college. And you won’t last a second on any job with this level of effort.”
“I know,” you respond. You say you’ll put forth effort in high school.
But you’ve created for yourself a habit that will be difficult to break. You certainly won’t be able to do it all at once, “cold turkey.” You’ll need to set milestones and achieve them, moving the goal line a little further back each time. And you have to begin now: high school will be too late. You’ll get so far behind so quickly, and you’ll reach an age at which you can make the decision for yourself about continuing your education, that I’m afraid you’ll just drop out.
And then what?
Concerned,
Your Teacher in Room 302
Gathering Clouds
We’ve had a mysterious leak in our basement every time we’ve had significant rainfall. It can be a torrential downpour or a simple three-day gentle drenching: the results are the same. Well, that makes it sound like it’s happened several times. It’s only happened twice. We think it’s coming from the deck flashing: I suspect it’s like so many other things in the house: poorly installed.
With forecasters saying a huge — absolutely mind-blowingly large — storm is on the way, duct tape appears and we compromise on a quick fix. Or rather a quick temporary fix.
The storm clouds build, darken, and spit a little rain, but nothing terribly significant. Perhaps it was all in vain?
I hope not — a good shower to wash the pollen from everything would be just about perfect.
Handful of Hair
Dear Teresa,
I cannot imagine what it’s like to feel the kind of uncontrolled rage you felt today. To be so out of control, so boiling with rage, that you don’t pay attention to who is around and whom you are swinging at that you strike not one but two teachers — that would terrify me. I would be afraid about what I might do to those around me, to those whom I love, to those with whom I work. And yet afterward, you were so calm, so matter-of-fact about it.
“That girl said such and such,” you explained as I escorted you down the hall to the office, “and so I,” and your arms began swinging wildly in imitation of how you initiated the fight.
It scares me to think of what your life might be like if this is your reaction to something as petty as a literal “he said that you said” situation. Gossip brings out violence in you? What a miserable life you’ll have, then, if you can’t foster at least some slight self-control.
Worried,
Your Teacher
Tabula Rasa
Dear Terrence,
I handed out report cards today along with the notices to your parents about which classes some of you guys are failing for the year. Of course we only include the core academic classes in that list: English, science, math, and social studies. You’re failing all four.
Why?
I think we all know, but you provided eloquently ironic commentary on this when I asked you guys to do your quarterly grade assessment. Three simple questions:
- What are your grades like?
- Are your grades what you expected? Why are/aren’t they like you expected?
- What specific actions can you take to change this for the fourth quarter?
When I took up the papers, yours was blank. Just your name in the corner. Nothing else.
This has your modus operandi throughout the school year. When I ask you about it, you always respond the same: “It’s hard. I don’t get it.” Surely you can’t say the same thing about this, though. Surely you understand this. It’s simple. But it’s hard: self-reflection, honest self-reflection, always is.
As I was thinking about today’s letter to you, I was helping my daughter with her homework. She gets monthly homework tables, and she’s trying to get the whole month done in a single week. Today she had to do the following:
Remember your 3-D shapes. Draw a sphere, cylinder, cube, cone, and pyramid. List something around your house that is shaped like each one.
“Daddy!” she exclaimed, “I can’t do pyramids!”
We looked online, found a drawing of a pyramid, talked about the lighter and darker lines, and she said, “Okay, I can try.”
That’s all you need to do. I’m not looking for perfection; no teacher is looking for perfection. We just need effort. You just need effort, because you’re creating such dangerous habits for yourself with this chronic underachieving.
If I could, I’d sit by you all the time, like I sat by my daughter, but I can’t. No one can. It’s the tragedy and beauty of growing up.
With hope,
Your Teacher
Just the Two of Us
A Sunday morning that begins like this is likely to end as a somewhat sad Sunday. Not enough baggage for the whole family. Someone’s staying. In this case, the Girl and I as K and the Boy head to Poland.
We try to make the best of the morning. There’s more tadpoling — it’s a new term for us — and some experimentation.
We try our hand at making a dam, but it is only moderately successful. The child in me begins scheming how we could reinforce the dam, make it more nearly water tight, soon enough the Girl loses interest and we begin looking for flowers.
Some day. Some day, we’ll build that dam.
Off to Polska
The packing, the worries, the planning, the repacking — getting ready for a transatlantic flight can be more tiring than the flight itself.
Tadpoles
“Daddy! Look! I see fish!”
The small stream that forms behind our house after heavy rain has always been a source of fascination for the Girl. At first, it was fascination mixed with a hefty dose of trepidation. As she grew older, more comfortable with the water, and taller, she realized that it posed no threat and in fact could be a wonderland right in her own backyard. Still, it is only a small trickle through most of the year, and I initially chalked up her discovery to imagination.
But sure enough, small creatures stirring. Tadpoles.
“Daddy, can I get in the water?” was only a question of time. “I want to catch a tadpole.” With the temperatures of late, though, that was of course out of the question.
Yet nothing makes a guy feel like a real dad like building something, spur of the moment, for his daughter. Some scrap lumber, a handful of screws, and we have a bridge.
“But you might find,” I explain as we’re walking down the hill to place the bridge over the small spring stream, “that catching tadpoles is a little trickier than you imagine.”
And so it was. Today.
Playing Cinderella with the Girl
“We can play Cinderella!” And so we play Cinderella. “We can tell a story!” And so we tell a story.
Cinderella Around the House
I got my book to clean. I got the laundry and put it in the washing machine. It got me stressed out because it was hard. I did a lot of work to do it.
I cleaned the toilet after I read the page in my book. It told me to get the cleaner, and I got the brush and cleaned the toilet.
I read the page of my book and it said to scrub the mirror, scrub the floors, and mop the floor.
While I was cleaning, my stepmother was resting, playing a game of chess on the computer, and taking a nap. She was eating and telling me chore after chore.
Park
Dear Terrence,
I took my kids to the park today. Yesterday, too. “Daddy, can we come back tomorrow?” my daughter asked just before we left, so it looks like we might be heading back tomorrow as well.
It’s a real privilege to be able to spend so much time with my kids. It’s one of the perks of being a teacher: I get spring break off too. And so I spend it with my family.
I wonder how many times you got to spend the afternoon at the park with your dad. I know you live with your mom, and for all I know, your dad could be out of the picture altogether. It’s not at all uncommon these days.
I know you’ll likely say, “It is what it is.” Perhaps. It is, but it shouldn’t be. I’m always a little taken aback at how cavalierly some of you guys take the fact that your parents are divorced. I cannot image my parents divorcing; I cannot imagine divorcing my wife. We’re in to for good — there is no problem we won’t work out somehow. And so I’ll always be able to take my kid to the park on sunny spring afternoons. Because it’s important — the smallest things always are.
I hope you’ll take this to heart when you start your own family. It’s likely to be difficult for you, not having any solid role model to serve as a pattern. Still, it’s possible. Just say to yourself daily, “My child will have a more stable family life than I did.” Say it now. Say it again. There — that’s a start.
Tired but satisfied,
Your Teacher
Old Ball Game
I never really played baseball as a kid. Due to various other commitments, Little League in all its guises was always out. Except for softball for the men, the church league in which I often participated didn’t really offer ball/stick sports.
Riding a bike — I did a lot of that. I lost a lot of skin in various wrecks and came to accept the fact that strawberries are always in season. The Girl, bless her heart, has not yet come to accept the fact that skinned knees are a part of the bike riding experience. The dreaded turn at the park notwithstanding, there really have been few occasions for the Girl to get bloodied up. In a sense, I’m thankful for that. Still, a bit pain, some skin left on the pavement — what doesn’t kill us and all that.
The Boy gets a hefty dose of pain on a daily basis, with slips and bonks, miscalculated head motions, blind ignorance. It all comes with the job of being a normal ten-month-old. His pain is a little more difficult to deal with as a parent: we can’t simply explain, “Rub it out — it will make you stronger. Just tough it out.” In fact, we might not even always be sure what is causing the pain.
Pain and baseball (finally) don’t often together either. Unless you count frustration — the steep learning curve that’s necessary for even simple catch. Though I biked more than I baseballed, I always enjoyed a game with kids of the neighborhood. Some of them played real ball — and were good — and I often felt a bit out of the loop. If we were picking teams, I was almost always selected last, for I was as ignorant of the concept of a strike zone, swinging at most anything, as I still am about the infield fly rule. But I enjoyed playing catch with Dad, and I enjoyed play baseball well into the late darkness of a summer night, with both teams taking occasional timeouts to catch new fireflies to smear the ball with florescence.
Now I’m on the other end of things, the teacher, not quite sure if I can really teach something I don’t know how to do well myself. I can at least teach the Girl to throw overhanded, to snatch a ground ball, and to pound her fist into her pink and purple “Girlz Rule” mitt.
And we can share the evolving joy of a game of catch after dinner.
Balance
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
For the first few months of our lives, it’s our goal, our solitary goal, though we’re not even aware of it. Trying to calm that sloshing inner ear so we can crawl, stand, walk, run — it’s all we struggle for during our first months. In truth, it’s what we struggle with our whole lives, always upping the challenge, always looking back at our earlier miracles of balance as if they were simple magic shop card tricks all nine-year-olds revel in. They are miracles because all motion, not just walking, is controlled falling. Coordinated near-disaster.
The Boy, lately a master of scooting who is graduating slowly to crawling, nonetheless likes to press his luck and try the stairs. It strikes him suddenly, this urge that, like Everest to George Herbert Leigh Mallory, inspires him to climb simply “because it was there.” Often he’s on the other side of the room when he realizes he hasn’t ascended the stairs in some time — usually a few minutes — and with a shout of recognition, flings his entire body forward, catching his whole upper weight with his chubby arms, lowering himself into position, then crawling like some new army recruit scooting under the barbed wire of an obstacle course. There’s not much question of balance in this scooting, but the force with which he throws himself forward from a sitting position to all fours rivals an Olympic tumbler’s dismount of the high bar: a loud thud after moments of seeming almost to hover in the air, most of us holding our breaths even though we know, most likely, he will make it.
The slick torture of our hardwood floors (with the old linoleum of the kitchen) has made crawling an exceptional challenge. Knees slip out from under the Boy faster than he can cope with, and after a few feet of crawling, he usually resorts to his scooting. Balance.
For her part, the Girl has taken on new challenges of the inner ear. Ballet would be the epitome of these new contests between self-control and inner ear, but it’s only weekly. Limited. But never mind: she finds new tests of balance daily, like twirling seemingly endlessly to transform all possible potential bubbles to kinetic bubbles. Her ability to turn in circles, evidenced by so many pieces of playground equipment, makes most sane adults dizzy at even the thought. Yet there she is, turning, turning, turning, turning, turning.
Her latest balance challenge: roller skates. They might more aptly be named “roller walks” or “roller slips,” but that’s the nature of learning to keep ever-moving feet, unpredictably moving feet, under us. She hangs on with white knuckles to the stroller, demanding that we come to a full stop before she’ll even consider –Â consider — letting go.
It’s been so long since I had anything with small wheels under my feet that I can’t remember what to do, what knees, arms, thighs, arms, waist, or anything else should be doing, but I’m pretty sure that those locked knees are disaster in the offing.
“Bend your knees,” I suggest. “Bend your knees a bit. Don’t keep them so straight, so locked.” She bends her knees to approximately 110 degree angles and promptly flops backward. She looks up at me with a hint of a glare, a hint of frustration, a hint even of betrayal.
“Not so much,” I smile reassuringly, remembering that each question of balance consists of yet more, seemingly smaller mysteries of the inner ear.
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Park and Ride
It’s the second day of Easter, and if we were still in Polska, everyone would have the day off. As it is, the twist of luck that gives L and me the day off due to spring break isn’t nearly so kind to K: she heads off to work while I stay behind with the kids.
The clouds subside by the time E goes down for his first nap — easy, gently, for he’s so tired that he doesn’t even have the energy to fuss. After lunch for us all, we head to the park.
The Boy gets on his four wheeler and sits and inspects the playground. The kids at the swings are out of control; those darting around the jungle gym are perhaps worse.
After a few moments of thought, he heads off to a somewhat deserted corner of the playground.