Matching Tracksuits

Month: January 2014

Using What You’ve Got

Tuesday 14 January 2014

I arrive home and the Boy is in the backyard with Babcia, and he absolutely, positively doesn’t want to come in. He’s rediscovered the simplest toy, a found toy: a big pile of dirt. Add a couple of sticks, and he’s positively in a daze of joy.

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He digs a little hole, moves to a new spot, digs a little hole, moves to a new spot, digs, moves, digs, moves, digs — a circle that seems endless.

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Soon L stops illustrating the driveway with chalk sketches abstract and traditional and joins us in our digging. Soon, she has an idea: a stick forest.

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E and I head deeper into the wild of the backyard to find more sticks. He tugs at exposed roots, drags sticks until something else attracts his attention, looks up trees until he loses his balance, picks up rocks and tosses them, and together, the three of us spend almost an hour together laughing, exploring, and playing completely toy-free.

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The common regret of modern life: we’re so spoiled that we’re ruining ourselves. Imagination in kids today sometimes seems to be as illusive as quicksilver, but hopefully not in our children, and today, some evidence.

A stick forest.

Not a bad idea. Progress.

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Monday 13 January 2014

New Park, New Experiences

After the cold, after the rain, after the dark, it was time yesterday finally to take the whole family out somewhere — anywhere — and do something. And so we packed the Girl’s bike, the Boy’s four-wheeler, some snacks, the camera, and Babcia and headed to a new park near Nana’s and Papa’s place. The boy has been doing circles in our house with his four-wheeler, but it’s a route filled with sharp turns and short straightaways. Yesterday he was able finally to rev his vehicle up to its full potential. At times I found myself trotting beside him thinking, “Perhaps we should put a helmet on him.”

We explored, took some pictures, chatted — just what we needed.

Aligning and Sighting

Sunday 12 January 2014

Dear Santa,

You brought L a telescope.

Thanks.

You clearly didn’t do a lot of thinking about how much of a puzzle it’s going to be for all involved.

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And you clearly didn’t care who would be doing the unraveling.

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But it’s not that difficult in the end. Getting the sighting scope aligned was easier than I anticipated, so I guess you know what you’re doing.

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And the excitement later in the evening, when I found and focused in on the moon…

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well, I guess it was worth it.

Moo

Sunday 12 January 2014

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Moving On

Saturday 11 January 2014

For a while, it was Barbie. All Barbie, all the time. Barbie Volkswagen Beetle. Barbie bike. Barbie camper. One birthday, she got five, six Barbies, perhaps more. Like I said, all Barbie. So intense was her obsession that she even saved up all the money she got from grandparents and parents to buy a Barbie bike.

But interests change. Girls grow up. And soon enough the Girl informed us that we could pack away the Barbie camper. “I never play with it,” she explained. It sat at the base of her bed, taking up valuable space. So back in the box — honestly, it ever left, for the box was its garage — and down to the basement.

Eventually, all the Barbies and paraphernalia ended up downstairs.

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Fast forward a few months. Our church’s annual rummage sale — An Angel’s Attic it’s called — was approaching, and K was deciding what to sell. The subject of toys came up.

“You can sell all my Barbie stuff,” the Girl suggested casually one evening. There was of course the question of who gets the proceeds, for the church gets thirty percent of donated goods while seventy percent goes back to the owner.

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Once it became clear that she would get some of the money, she was all for it. And so this morning, while the Girl was off with a friend at the local science center, K gathered all the Barbie plastic and a number of other items and arranged them on the bed.

“Go up and see if you’re okay with selling everything on the bed,” K instructed when the Girl when she arrived home. She bounded up the stairs and returned shortly.

“Yes, that’s fine.”

But not so fine with me: as expected, she’s growing up faster than I was ever prepared to accept.

Intent

Thursday 9 January 2014

Dear Terrence,

I’m really starting to wonder if you’re not doing this on purpose. I mean, you just got back from a long out-of-school suspension today, and yet you didn’t even make it through the whole day before you got into a fight. (When I wrote that, I dithered between “couldn’t make it” and “didn’t make it.” I figured the former was too fatalistic.) You tell me you want to do well in school. We have the conversation about impulse control at least once or twice a week. I explain to you regularly the effect your reputation — created from experience and rumor — has on how teachers treat you. And yet you do it still: indeed, if you hadn’t gotten into a fight today, you still likely would have been suspended, for I know a teacher wrote an administrative referral on you because of your completely disruptive behavior in class.

So I’m wondering what the deal is.

There are two options, both frightening, but one is positively terrifying. The first option is that all this is intentional, that you’re trying to get into alternative school. Don’t laugh — it’s not so far fetched. One of your colleagues just down the hall has expressed that intention openly. Still, you insist that’s not what you’re up to when I ask you about it. That leaves the second option. The terrifying option: you honestly don’t have a clue how to control your impulses. You’ve built up such a habit of just going with whatever wild thought enters your head that that’s your standard operating model now. What’s terrifying about that? People like that usually don’t meet with a lot of success in life. People like that usually end up bouncing in and out of jail, spending some time in prison, collection welfare while not incarcerated, completely unable to hold down a job, and if they happen to be male, leaving several fatherless children in their wake. (Yes, I know, it does take two to do that particular dance, but that simple fact does nothing to negate your responsibility.)

At its heart, your unwillingness to control your impulses is a kind of immaturity. Toddlers don’t control impulses well, but with guidance from parents, teachers, and other adults, they learn how to curb those crazy compulsions. So your refusal — and at this point, I’m not sure how else to describe it — to reign in these urges is at heart a refusal to grow up. Sure, that’s not fun in a way, but I would imagine it’s a whole lot more fun than a lifetime of incarceration, joblessness, dependence, frustration, and anger.

I end reiterating what I’ve said to you many times: I’m here for you. You drive me absolutely nuts in class, but I’m still not giving up on you. Your decisions today, though, make me wonder if you’ve given up on yourself.

Sadly,
Your Teacher

In the Text

Wednesday 8 January 2014

Socrates
Socrates

In all my classes, I emphasize the importance of being able to back up assertions about a given text with information from the text. “Where do you see that in the text?” It’s a typical question in the classroom.

With one group today, we were doing a Socratic Seminar on the question of who is ultimately responsible for Juliet’s fake death at the end of act four in Romeo and Juliet. Our discussion skill focus was on backing everything up from the text and, equally important, recognizing when others have made claims that aren’t necessarily backed by the text and calling them on it.

“Where do you see that in the text?”

“Show me from the text.”

“I don’t see that in the text.”

At the end of the day, a young lady came back to inform me that during math class, she’d felt the teacher was wrong and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. M, could you show me that in the text?”

Leave Your Best Shot

Tuesday 7 January 2014

Odd day today: three hour delay for students but a normal arrival time for teachers. Due to the cold, the district didn’t want people out waiting for the bus; due to the lack of snow, most parents would be going to work and would have no way to arrange care for their children. (What do they do on snow days? The whole city doesn’t shut down? They still have to go to work many times students get to stay home.) That was the thinking: delay school for those who have to wait for a bus but open school for those who have no way arrange care.

The result: an odd day. No student at all during first period. One student during second period; three students during third period, though technically I’m supposed to have no students during third period because it is the first related arts period for eighth grade. Fourth period we returned to semi-normal for the rest of the day.

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One for the hallway?

So I arrived home and Babcia jokingly asked if we teachers did a little drinking during the morning when no one was there. A shot or two. Only, she wasn’t really joking: until recently, it was fairly common in Polish schools.

“No,” I said with a smile, imagining the horrors that would produce in an American school.

“Why not?”

“Because you can get fired for that. Or possibly even face some jail time.”

“I don’t believe it! Not even a little something? That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she pontificated.

Like so many cultural differences, I just let it slide at that.

To be fair, the trend of drinking in the teachers’ room was noticeably on the decline when we left almost ten years ago, and at that point, it had already diminished significantly in frequency compared to what it looked like in 1996, when I first arrived. Then, the teachers’ room looked like any other office when it was someone’s name day or some date of similar significance: cake, coffee, tea, a bottle of vodka, perhaps some wine, maybe some champagne. Indeed, in one of the most ironic scenes I’ve ever witnessed at a school dance, one teacher took a shot of vodka, stood, squirted his always-present breath-freshener into his mouth five or six times, and said, “Come on, Tadek, let’s go check the students for alcohol.”

By the time I’d left, a bottle of this or that was a relatively rare occurrence in the teachers’ room. It happened, but seldom, and more and more people begged off when offered a drink. As Poland has looked more to the West and less to the East, they seem to be leaving this cultural oddity — something which likely strikes the average American as unspeakably unprofessional — behind.

First Day 2014

Monday 6 January 2014

I’m always a little bit nervous about the first day back to school after a long-ish break, and today was no exception. I’ve had some absolutely splendid days after Christmas break and some absolute nightmares. Every year, as I go to bed the Sunday (most often) before we head back to school, I find myself wondering what kind of day tomorrow will be.

Yet I’m also always a bit excited: it’s like a first day of school, a new school year without some of the frustrating awkwardness of an actual first day. There are no schedule changes following schedule changes following yet more. Students aren’t moving into and out of your class. I know all well, and there are no worries about figuring who might be the most problematic student as quickly as possible in order to deal with potential issues proactively.

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Stylized illustration actually of students who are productive in 99% of the time

Today was amazing, in all classes.

I have a couple of classes with several students who have substantial behavior problems, and obviously I was most nervous about these classes, but they amazingly well. Sure, there was a little side talk, but by and large, most students were on task most of the time. People were talking to each other about their work, helping each other, sharing fascinating facts they’d learned in their research process.

Where did that come from? Don’t ask such questions — just enjoy the glow of feeling productive through the entire day.

I’ll have to hold on to that feeling when the third quarter blues begin and I — no we — find myself ourselves wishing it would just be late-May already…

Checkout Line Lesson

Sunday 5 January 2014

080212 (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post) BOYNTON BEACH - Customers check out at the new Boynton Beach Publix in Sunshine Square, which opened Thursday morning.We buy a lot of yogurt: everyone in the house eats it, and so we head to the store on a regular basis on a yogurt run. This evening, L accompanied me after some hesitation: she was probably hopeful that she might get a little treat (we shared a bag of chips on the way home), but I was glad she was willing to go. She is not often.

We were standing in the checkout line, and L watched the customer-side screen that shows an itemized list of all the items purchased, along with the price.

“There’s a lot of things for sixty cents,” she observed.

“Well, what was the item we purchased the most of?”

She thought for a moment: “Yogurt.”

“So?”

“It’s all the yogurt!”

And then the real question I was interested in, for I’ve found myself these last months trying to teach my daughter some of the same things I’m teaching my eighth grade students. One of those skills is both the ability to infer and the ability to recognize when one is doing it. So I asked the question: “What skill did you just use?”

“Math?” A direct-from-observation-to-response answer: after all, she’d seen a lot of numbers clicking by, and it was what she’d paid most attention to.

“No. It begins with an ‘i’,” I prompt.

Nothing.

“Inferring.”

“Oh, right.”

The cashier, a young high school student, just smiled.

Pan!

Sunday 5 January 2014

“Choo choo?” I suggest to calm the Boy as he bubbles and fusses over seeing everyone leave without him. He calms down immediately as we head into the living room to watch a bit of Thomas and Friends while K, L, and Babcia head to the cinema to watch Frozen.

The intro finishes and Mr. Perkins walks into the engine drivers’ common room at Knapford Station.

“Pan!” cries E.

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Ben Forster as Mr. Perkins

Even if I hadn’t known this previously, it would be obvious now that the Boy has been watching this with Babcia. I can see it now, Babcia watching Thomas with the Boy as Mr. Perkins enters.

“O, jest pan!” she would exclaim, “pan” being a general term in Polish for an unknown adult.

And so for the Boy, Mr. Perkins has become simply pan. He’s likely to generalize, though, and while this often results in humorous naming (all small animals are “Bida,” the name of our cat), this time it will actually work out just about right.

Joyeux Noel: The Christmas Miracle of 1914

Friday 3 January 2014

When I was in college, I was not a Deadhead — I never even saw the Grateful Dead in concert — but I was something of a McCutcheon-head, if there be such a thing. John McCutcheon is a multi-instrumentalist folk singer who is equally at home singing his renditions of spirituals and his own songs for children. In college, I saw him in concert a number of times, and there was always one song that left me truly enchanted. He introduced it most times in a similar way, telling of a concert he’d given in the early eighties when an elderly man approached him and, speaking of his song “Christmas in the Trenches,” said, “Young man, I was there.”

This was pre-internet days. One couldn’t simply Google “Christmas miracle 1914,” and it wasn’t a story I heard in history class. And that’s really too bad.

After hearing that story, I thought, “This is a fantastic story — why hasn’t anyone made a film of it.”

Tonight, K and I watched Joyeux Noel, and as I read the Netflix disc-cover summary, I thought, “Is this about that thing John McCutcheon sang about?” Indeed, it is. Well worth viewing.

Side Note

John McCutcheon is best known for his mastery of the hammered dulcimer. I once saw him in concert in Asheville, North Carolina when the power went out in the middle of a hammered dulcimer song. McCutcheon literally never missed a note though it was pitch black for at least thirty or forty seconds.

New Fan

Friday 3 January 2014

thomas

Over the Christmas break, E has become an official and devoted fan of Thomas and Friends. At least half a dozen times a day, he runs to the TV, pointing and saying “Choo choo! Choo choo!”