The Boy has learned a new word: mulch.
It’s the endless pile. I’ve been working on it for two evenings, and I don’t feel I’ve made a dent in it. Jesus had the fishes and loaves; I have a pile of mulch.
Month: April 2014
Reading
The Boy has a developing passion for books. It was one of his early words.
And it’s one of his favorite activities.
Promising.
Read moreYou can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
Sunday Afternoon Games
The Test
I prepared tonight some screenshots of various web sites for tomorrow’s lesson: students will be practicing citing an online article. I wonder if they’ll take this one seriously…
Saturday Lessons in the Yard
Being a parent means learning to let your kids learn. It’s an age-old adage, but some days illustrate it more clearly than others. Or perhaps some days I’m just more aware of it happening around me.
Eight o’clock. The Girl decided she wanted finally to have her yard sale. She’d made the sign long ago, and every weekend, she’d been asking when she could have the sale. This morning, she decided she could wait no longer.
No advertisements on light poles on nearby streets. No cash to make change. Just a girl out in her front yard with some random items for sale: some toys she no longer played with, some books she no longer read, E’s old stroller, the bike she’s decided is too heavy and we’ve decided is too difficult for her to ride.
In the end, she sold one thing for one dollar. K and I of course foresaw all of this, but there was no convincing her, and we realized there was really no need even to try: this was a lesson best learned through experience.
More lessons: all one needs to have a rollicking good time for most of the afternoon is an empty cardboard box large enough to fit a seven-year-old and some paints for decoration. One of the neighborhood kids seems more in tune to screens than his own imagination. I found myself wondering what he would have done if he were visiting when W and L pulled out the box and began working. Perhaps he would have found it boring. Perhaps he would have jumped in and tried. The advantage of spending all your time in front of a computer game is that you can do it alone; the advantages of playing in a cardboard box — more significant. Some of my own students’ lack of imagination is simply stunning, so I was pleased to see so much joy coming from something so simple. Pleased, but not too surprised.
Yet another lesson: building a draining system for the newly installed blueberries was surprisingly quick and surprisingly easy. For once a project took me less time than I was expecting.
The Boy learned a thing or two as well. His obsession with trains has been waning, replaced by an obsession with Bob the Builder. Every single time he sees a dump truck or any other piece of heavy equipment, he begins his mantra, based on the Bob the Builder theme song. “Bob the Builder — can we fix it? Bob the Builder — yes we can!” For the Boy, though, it’s somewhat truncated. “Bob the Builder” becomes “Bob-beaw” while “Yes we can” has mutated to “S-N!”
So as I finished up a little mini-project — so small it was barely worthy of being called a project except for the fact that I had to head to the lumber store this morning — I thought I might make him a little training ground. With some effort, managed to squeeze the trigger, so to speak; with a bit more effort, he managed to hold the drill; managing both at the same time was a bit much for a twenty-three-month-old.
And after lost interest in the screws but before he lost interest in the drill, he relearned another lesson. A fall was probably inevitable, and his tears were more from the frustration of falling than anything else. I knelt down to talk to him — the typical dad “shake it off, big man” type thing — and I realized I was still holding the camera. Click. (Well, not so much a click with a digital camera, and with shutterless digital cameras now emerging it will soon be silent, but I can’t think of a proper onomatopoeic word to describe the sound of the D300’s shutter sliding open and snapping shut.)
“Why would I take a picture of my son in tears?” I thought. And tonight, going through the pictures, I learned the next lesson of the day: it’s a fragment of our daily reality, the tears of a toddler. Something I’ll forget as it morphs into the tantrums that will continue from now until age thirty. Or forty-one in my case.
The final lesson of the day: K and I can get so much more done when Nana and Papa spend the afternoon with us, helping out with the kids, helping out with this or that aspect of planting Asiatic jasmine or sealing a poor construction. The list of accomplishments today is impressive, but more significant, the learning.
Class Portrait
Having a little time at the end of SSR before heading off to lunch, a group of young ladies drew this portrait of the class.
Teaching Eighth Graders
Lord of the Flies
It starts slowly. In fact, Lord of the Flies is a downright boring book for the first little bit, especially for eighth graders. There’s just a lot of, well, buildup. Sure, the Beast is a little interesting, but nothing thrilling.
And then we hit chapter eight: “Gift for the Darkness.”
We do a close reading of Simon’s encounter with the Lord of the Flies, and by the time it’s over, almost all the students are eager to read chapter nine. I find out from their science teacher — most of the kids have science their final period — that all sat in rapt silence the last few minutes of class, reading Lord of the Flies. After school, one by one, the kids come to tell me how horrified and thrilled they are.
Another good time to be a teacher.
Spring Tuesday Afternoon
Everything is finally waking up. Almost all of the raspberry canes now have leaves on them, and buds are poking out of our single blackberry cane. The irises are resurrecting themselves, and the grass has turned a dark green.
“It’s about time!” is just about what all of us would say. I’m not sure I recall being so glad to see winter go in years. The winter months in South Carolina are usually so very mild that I feel we really haven’t had a winter at all, but this year, there’s no doubting it: we had winter. And it hung on for a while. And kept coming back even after we thought it was gone.
With the arrival of spring, though, come new chores, chief among them watering our new blueberry bushes, six here, six there.
In typical fashion, the Boy watches and then quickly imitates. It’s as if he’s constantly thinking, “Oh, so that’s how you do it. I’ll have to give that a try.” He remembers details from previous days, little touches that I’m surprised an almost-two-year-old sees.
Some of it has been simply funny. A few times I gave him his bottle when he was younger, I held it as if I were a sommelier at some fine restaurant; he soon began doing his best imitation just before lifting the bottle to his mouth.
Yesterday, he watched me try to jump-start K’s car. “Try” only because the battery was too dead and my small, thin cables didn’t have the capacity to deliver that amount of power — too much lost in route due to the inefficiencies inherent in current.
And so when he finds the jumper cables sitting out, he does the logical thing: he tries to attach them to his toy fire truck.
The Girl has her own concerns, though, like a budding reading obsession, that leads her to stumble and fall as she walks and reads. Or was that just the dramatic, theatrical part of her personality, pretending?
“She did that on purpose,” K laughs as I snap pictures. Still, the end result is amusing, even if faked.
Later, in the hammock, she reads aloud to me. She stumbles over a few words, proper names mainly, like Ester, but by and large, I just sit and listen.
Words like “gracefully” gracefully fall from her mouth as if she’s merely telling the story herself, from memory, with the inflections and drama of a professional storyteller. Well, almost.
