It’s always been one of my favorite songs, Sting’s “Fragile.” But this particular version is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.
Results For "Month: February 2014"
PD
It’s four thirty; no one really wants to be here, yet at some level, we’re all keenly aware of how important it is to be here. Still, we’ve wished our students well for the day, we’re hungry, and really the last thing we want is to sit through professional development — i.e., a Power Point presentation.
In all honesty, it’s a great disservice to the district head of secondary English instruction to reduce down all her research, planning, and background conversations to three words: “a Power Point.” Mrs. B has done a superb job helping us all get a grasp on the changes Common Core mean for our teaching, and without her quarterly professional development (PD), I’d be much further behind the curve than I am now. I walk away from each session feeling better about my teaching, feeling I have a lot of new strategies to implement, and feeling generally more confident in my ability to prepare kids for high school. But in the tired haze of a Thursday afternoon, it can all seem just a bit much.
“You want me to teach for eight hours, then sit for ninety-minutes on the other side of the desk?” You can see that question almost visibly in thought-bubbles above every attendee’s head. Glance around the room and you’re not likely to be surprised at what you see: bottles of various sizes and materials, filled with diet soda, iced tea, water, and various mysteries — no, not those mysteries — as well as coffee cups, snack wrappers, smart phones, laptops, watches, jewelry. It’s like we’re all getting ready for bed and watching television at the same time: we’re all as comfortable as we can be without actually kicking off our shoes. The presentation starts, and you see someone surreptitiously scrolling through messages on her phone, someone else looking at the news on her laptop. You hear someone desperately trying to open a snack — perhaps a bag of pretzels — without making too much noise. You see two teachers huddled together, finishing a conversation that started before the presentation. You think of how tired you are, of how much you’d like to be napping. And then it occurs to you: “We’re just as bad as our own students.”
Barszcz in the Family
What Polish family would be truly Polish if barszcz weren’t a favorite? For as long as I can remember, the Girl has adored it, placed it almost at the very top of her favorite food list — just below pizza, of course.
The Boy has been warming to the idea, and tonight, he decided it was time to get serious about beet root soup.
Somehow he managed to get two spoons, and he did make use of both of them.
That only left one family member: the cat. K, though, solved that problem today, taking a few seconds that L hadn’t managed to finish, running them through a food processor to grind up the sausage (the poor old girl has lost almost all her teeth), and pouring the resulting purple mush into Bida’s bowl.
And so now it’s official: the Scott family, to a person/cat, loves beetroot soup.
Bubbling Sentences
He dashed to the bathroom as soon as he heard the water running, squealing “Bubbles!” He tends to pronounce that final “s” as a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, though; in other words, he says “bubblesh!” Such a mouthful to describe such a simple sound — admittedly, I didn’t even know what it was until I asked Google — seems an apt illustration for how the Boy in fact uses language. Seeing the bubbles foam in the bathtub, he returned to the back top of the stairs and called, “L! Bubbles! Chodz!” Three little words that communicated a whole cosmos of new understanding and excitement.
At it’s most simple level, the Boy’s utterance was a highly simplified, mixed-language group of sentences. “Hey, L! Dad’s running the bath, and he’s put the bubbles in! Come quick!” But the excitement in his voice added more: “Hey, I’m able to communicate a complete thought!”
Gratitude, Redux
Being a parent means seeing constant development, but it’s often so gradual that the moments that really shine don’t as they slip into the continuum of the everyday. But every now and then, I catch a moment, something that reminds me how much I have to be grateful for.
I catch L curled up on the couch, reading. She whispers the words to herself, folds the back on itself, and settles deeper into the corner of the couch.
Upstairs, I play with the Boy as he rolls his many cars about the floor in L’s room. “Eeee–oooo! Eeee–oooo! Eeee–oooo!” he cries, pushing his favorite police car in circles around himself. Then he tries to say “police car.”
I’m grateful for getting to hear sounds like this, that I can witness the slow development of a mind, of a personality, of a worldview, and I can help shape it. And I’m thankful that I’m learning when to back off of this “shaping.”
Later, he plays peekaboo when we are dressing him for bed, spreading his small fingers gingerly over his eyes, peeping through the lattice, probably certain I don’t notice. I remember doing that. Or am I vicariously remembering L doing that? The two kids lives are winding together into my own memories, and others are slipping away — like putting him to bed a year ago. It’s so much easier than in the past, when it meant walking for twenty, thirty, forty minutes (or more) with him on my shoulder. We were hesitant to put him down before he was completely out for fear that he would begin crying, loosening the congestion and send it all flowing out because he was so often with the sniffles. Now it’s a matter of a few moments. Slip the sleeper on, turn the light out, put the music on. He puts his head down on my shoulder. I pat his back. I pace back and forth a few moments, and when he’s ready, he pushes up from my shoulder, gives me a kiss, and says, “Spac.”
It’s that backing off that seems to be leading L back to a lost love of reading, and it’s that backing off that has led moments like our evening prayers with the Girl. We pray half a decade of the rosary, and once again, I show her how to hold the bead lightly between thumb and finger, letting the rest of the beads string out of the bottom of her hand.
With that energy she shows every day, every single day, getting her sitting still, thoughtful, is itself an accomplishment that we are only now realizing will come on its own, only with gentle guidance from us. It’s been K that pushes me to that realization, though.
“She’s just a kid,” she’ll remind with a smile. I’m thankful that sometimes I remember that without reminding.
So I finish up the day, with small thanks in three categories — spirit, spouse, children — and the realization once again that it wasn’t that difficult to find significant markers of grace for which to be thankful. And I find myself thinking, “Maybe I could do this every day.”
Gratitude
The small steps one takes to the greater goal: with the Boy today, it struck me that I don’t do enough with him during Mass to help him develop spiritually. I’d fallen into that silly line of thinking that he’s too young to get it. How ridiculous. We’d begun teaching him how to cross himself after dinner prayer. He gets the head — belly and shoulders, not so much. And he ends folding his hands together for “amen.” “If he can get that, of course he can begin other rudiments of the faith.” So today, during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we knelt together for a moment. He ran his car on the floor after a few seconds, but it’s the small steps.
Small steps can of course grow into gigantic leaps, and Polish Mass today showed that as well. The choir, which began simply as K singing along with the organist, has grown in all senses, so that today the choir boasted seven members including an international accompaniment section that included a trumpet player who’d learned the hejnał played from St. Mary’s Basilica in Krakow hourly. I recorded the final hymn; watching the video, K mused about the irony: “That’s one of our most patriotic hymn, and we had a Latino accompanist and an Irish-American trumpet player.”
I can’t deny that at times, K’s choir involvement bothered me. Not because of what it was but the lengths to which she sometimes went to participate, singing when she was sick, singing when she’d rather do just about anything else. To have such a woman in my life at all could not fail to make me a better man; to have such a woman as my wife often leaves me speechless.
Given the rambunctious nature of our daughter, such a temperament as K’s seems nonnegotiable. It’s certainly not environment and it’s not obviously genetic — at least not in the first generation — but there it is all the same: energy that can be frustratingly exhausting, frustratingly difficult to redirect, frustratingly everything. Yet it’s not hard to see the gifts and wonder packed into her small frame as well. While playing tag after Mass, she reminded me just how incredibly nimble-minded she is. “JesteÅ› berkiem!” one of the boys called out, and she smiled as she ran after him: “I know I’m it!” She lives in the midst of two languages, two cultures, so effortlessly. If only it were effortlessly: it’s another struggle sometimes, but these little moments that show us that it’s not all in vain are welcome.
Back at home, I returned to my morning task, grading essays on Romeo and Juliet. As they’re all turned in online through a course management system, I can see the resulting word-counts in a simple list. Quantity is not quality, but seeing word-counts that average close to a thousand words, I remembered students’ incredulity at the beginning of the year when I told them that by the end of the year, five hundred words would seem restrictively short. And here it was, right on my computer screen: proof that I’ve had an impact. It’s easy to say, “We teachers can only plant seeds,” after days that seem like staying at home and bashing one’s head into the wall repeatedly would have been more productive, but such moments of clarity make those days all worthwhile.
Four things to be grateful for, in four different categories — spiritual, spousal, familial, and career. And the fact that it was so easy for me to think of these four things is itself something for which I can be thankful.
Yard Sale
We see the signs for them all the time, in various neighborhoods: yard sale. It’s an idea that has enchanted the Girl: take your stuff out into your yard and sell it. And earn some money.
So today, on the spur of the moment, she gathered some books she no longer wants, an old toy kitchen, and her bike (which we’re hoping to sell to replace it with a more appropriate model) and set up shop in the front yard with her friend, W. She thought it would be so easy. If you offer it, they will come.
Except they didn’t, to her disappointment. An early lesson in marketing and economics.
The Boy Around the House
Ancient Modern
In English I Honors, we’ve been accompanying Odysseus as he struggles to make it back to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope. We reach Tiresias’s prophecy from the underworld and the confusion starts.
‘Great captain,
a fair wind and the honey lights of home
are all you seek. But anguish lies ahead;
the god who thunders on the land prepares it,
not to be shaken from your track, implacable,
in rancor for the son whose eye you blinded.
One narrow strait may take you through his blows:
denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.
When you make landfall on Thrinákia first
and quit the violet sea, dark on the land
you’ll find the grazing herds of Hêlios
by whom all things are seen, all speech is known.
Avoid those kine, hold fast to your intent,
and hard seafaring brings you all to Ithaka.
But if you raid the beeves, I see destruction
for ship and crew. Though you survive alone,
bereft of all companions, lost for years,
under strange sail shall you come home, to find
your own house filled with trouble: insolent men
eating your livestock as they court your lady.
Aye, you shall make those men atone in blood!
But after you have dealt out death–in open
combat or by stealth–to all the suitors,
go overland on foot, and take an oar,
until one day you come where men have lived
with meat unsalted, never known the sea,
nor seen seagoing ships, with crimson bows
and oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight.
The spot will soon be plain to you, and I
can tell you how: some passerby will say,
“What winnowing fan is that upon your shoulder?”
Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf
and make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon:
a ram, a bull, a great buck boar; turn back,
and carry out pure hekatombs at home
to all wide heaven’s lords, the undying gods,
to each in order. Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
And all this shall be just as I foretell.’
They see the line about being “lost for years,” and with with some guidance, realize that this is Calypso and that the blind prophet says it using future tense (“under strange sail shall you come home”).
“Wait,” they say. “That’s what the Odyssey begins with? How is it in future tense?” (We begin our exploration of the Odyssey on Calypso’s island in book five, skipping all of Telemachus’s search in books one through four.) With some more guidance they realize it’s a story within a story. A prophecy in something like a flashback. Which itself is all set within the larger story: a story within a story within a story.
Notes from the board
“And people liked to praise about Pulp Fiction‘s non-linear storyline,” I say with a smile, but no one gets it.
Pickles and the Giant Slalom
The Girl is odd when it comes to food, to say the least. It’s tempting to say it’s due to growing up in a half-Polish household where we cook a great deal of Polish food. That explains her absolute love of beet root soup, and it might explain why she’s not wild about things like hamburgers. On the other hand, pizza is another favorite, to the dgree that when asked about favorite foods, sometimes she lists pizza, sometimes barszcz.
Snacking and treats seem fairly straight forward: she likes most of the things typical American kinds like. Chocolate. Apples. Ice cream. Pickles. A whole jar. With the juice poured into a cup and savored through a straw.
The Boy sees the pickles, squeals “Pickle!” and grabs one in each hand and almost gets away with them both before K catches him and lets him know that one is enough. The three of them curl up together and watch Ted Ligety work his magic in the giant slalom.