Sometimes, everyone gets a little frustrated with homework.
Month: January 2019
Wednesday Virus
The Boy wanted to go to school today. He really wanted to go. Mainly because they weren't going to be in school -- it was field trip day to the local science center where they have a Tesla coil, explode hydrogen balloons, and generally thrill kids of all ages. But the rash he'd gone to bed with, the little splotches on his cheeks, had spread all over his body.
"E, we have to go to the doctor," K explained.
"But it's nothing. Look -- it will go away in no time."
She tried to explain to him the risks of passing something on to other children.
"They won't get it! I know they won't!"
In the end, he lost. The doctor said it was a virus going around. "He's through the worst of it, but you should keep him home today."
For today's pictures -- fifteen years ago in Budapest and Poland with Nana and Papa, when they came for our wedding. I was going through pictures this evening, revisited these, and did some editing.
Monday
When I got home from work, I asked the Boy if he wanted to go play outside -- to go exploring or something similar. With the coming cold spell, we have to make the most of the relative warmth while we have it. He was eager to go, and he was eager for L to join us.
He's always talking about doing things as a family. "When can we go on a family bike ride?" "When can we watch a family movie?" "Can we go on a family walk?"
L, now twelve, is starting to show typical teenager behavior, like a reluctance to hang out as a family all the time. She enjoys it, but she also loves "alone time" as she calls it.
Today, though, we were able to talk L into going exploring with us. The Boy, utterly thrilled, took the lead and instructed L how to cross the creek, how to scale the bank (of course she found her own way), how to navigate the thorny places.
Standing Still
Coming home this evening, L was playing a life simulator game on her iPod and mentioned that she was now forty-seven.
“You’re older than I am,” I laughed.
“No,” she explained, “you can change your age at the click of a button.”
“It’s a good thing you can’t do that in real life,” I replied.
What I had in mind was what I thought at her age: I can’t wait until I’m X years old. That always looking forward, always longing to be a little older, which struck around age six or so. “When will I be big?!”
“No, it’s a good thing,” she agreed. “I’d never press the button then.”
She was taking the opposite option, to which I replied, “Well, at some point, I’d just click the button for you.”
“Why!?” came the incredulous response.
“Because you’re not going to mooch off me for the rest of your life.” We both laughed a bit, but I got to thinking about what it might be like if we could have that option, if we could just stay one age for as long as we wanted to.
On the one hand, the nostalgic in me would love that, but what moment? While looking at the “Time Machine” posts at the bottom of the site, I discovered this shot from 2013:
The Girl was just a little younger than the Boy is now, and I hadn’t thought about how much different she was then than she is now. A six-year-old and a twelve-year-old are completely different people in many ways. Looking back, I can see traces of personality traits she now exhibits all the way back then, but the reverse wasn’t true: I had no idea how much she would change in six years (and, of course, how much she would stay the same).
Yet, within that little clump of nostalgia is a nightmare: if I chose that moment, then what about all the wonders that have happened since? Being stuck in one moment, after all, is what Bill Murray’s brilliant Groundhog Day is all about. But it’s more complex, because that film is really about being stuck in that moment without enjoying that moment, being stuck in a moment when all one does for one’s whole life is look toward other, more exciting moments.
I think I’ve lost the thread of where I was going with this, and that’s kind of the point perhaps. The key to life, rediscovered once again, is getting stuck in the moment by enjoying the moment so much that one doesn’t want to move forward but accepts the simple fact that that forward motion is, in fact, the moment itself. Axiomatic. The present doesn’t exist — it’s a sliver between the past and the future. That old chestnut. Living the moment means accepting that it’s just that — the moment.
So what to do in the moments of this afternoon? Go exploring, of course. Play in the backyard, of course. Enjoy the short bit of time we had between visits to Nana and visits to Papa and trips to church and more trips to church and cooking and lesson planning and everything that makes Sunday Sunday.
Last Game and Pinewood Derby
The Boy played his last game of his first basketball season today. He didn't make a basket, though he took a shot. He had a couple of turnovers. At one point, he was defending his assigned player even though his team was on offense. All signs of a new player still finding his way in a game that he really doesn't fully understand. But he played with such heart. He did everything his coach told him (coaches at this level are allowed on the court, as soccer coaches at that age group are allowed on the field), and oblivious to the above facts, he enjoyed it, which is what counts most.
"I know what I'm saving up for," he declared earlier this week. "A basketball goal for our house." The only problem: we don't really have a place to put a goal. But our neighbor has a small court set up on his driveway -- we'll have to find the time to go there more often, K and I decided.
In the early evening, we went for the Boy's second pinewood derby. We'd been working on the car this week, and the Boy went into it with a lot of confidence. At the very least, he was sure, we would have the best-looking car. He'd decided on a humvee, which made for easy painting and it looked pretty good when it was all said and done: I did the cutting and some of the sanding; he did the painting and some of the sanding.
When the racing started, his car finished consistently in fourth place out of the six cars racing. That meant he wasn't the fastest but wasn't the slowest either. A more competitive spirit would equate those terms with "best" and "worst," but I try not to look at it that way because I'm only somewhat competitive.
Sometimes I wonder, or rather fear, that his lack of competitiveness comes from a lack of confidence, that he feels he has no chance of winning anyway and so why not cut one's losses and not appear to be terribly worried about the results of inherently competitive events. That's how I was, I think, when I was a child and teen. It wasn't that I worried about losing; I just didn't want to get embarrassed, to get beaten into the ground, so to speak. In gym class during high school, when we had basketball, I was reticent to participate because I was never all that good. I even refused to dress out some days, making the excuse that because I was on the swim team and got plenty of exercise that way, I really didn't even need the activity. Swimming was different, though, because I had success in the pool and felt more confident there.
Is that compensation or something more concerning? I don't really know, and I'm honestly not terribly worried about it. I think in the end, all of us with a little competitive spirit in us do that.
Zab Revisited
Reworking a couple of shots from 2013.
Lunch with Nana, Dinner with Papa, and Work
With Nana still in rehab and Papa alone, we take care of them the best we can. Poor Nana has to put up with institutional food, which, she claims, is not terrible, but which I also know is not great. Poor Papa can cook eggs and warm things up in the microwave, but he's never done much more than that.
This afternoon, since it was MLK Day and the kids and I had the day off, we took over a favorite chicken sandwich for Nana and cheered as we saw evidence of an ever-increasing appetite.
In the evening, we went to make dinner at Papa's. We either cook something here and take it over every night or take everything there to cook.
Other than that, an uneventful day. I spent an hour in the morning planning lessons for the next several days (this week and a little beyond) for one class and another hour in the afternoon planning for another class, plus half an hour in the evening grading papers.
This year, I've kept track of all my out-of-classroom hours -- planning, grading, going to meetings, etc. For this first semester, I've spent 115 hours above the 40-hour work weeks. That's just a little over half a day shy of three full work weeks. If I keep this pace up -- and I see no reason why I wouldn't -- I'll have spent close to six weeks' worth of time outside the classroom doing work. Add to that the half-hour morning duty I have every third week, which makes 2.5 hours a week or 30 hours for the year, and I'll have 260 hours of additional work on top of my normal work week. That's six and a half weeks of work. I have about nine weeks off during summer break, but I probably spend an additional 40 or so hours over the summer planning for the coming year. (I'll keep track this summer.) That's seven and a half weeks of work, which means my summer "vacation" is really not much of vacation -- I've just put in the hours in advance.
I don't say this to complain. Much of the time I spend grading is because I try to push my kids as hard as I can, which produces a lot of material for me to assess. I have a reputation to keep up, after all: students tell me that they've heard since they entered the school in sixth grade that I'm the most demanding teacher in the school. I don't know about that, but it certainly doesn't hurt one's sense of self-worth to hear something like that. In other words, I could do less work and get by, but then it wouldn't be the Dread Teacher Mr. Scott's.
Finally, I must have been under a rock, but I just learned of Mary Oliver's death tonight, listening to the news in the car. A poet of fairly simple verse, she's always a great choice for thirteen-year-olds. In past years, when I had students put together annotated portfolios as their culminating poetry unit project (which is not to say I have my students read poems for one dedicated unit and then neglect poetry for the rest of the year, but I find it's good to spend three or four weeks focusing on what makes poetry poetry to equip them for the rest of the year), almost every student included an Oliver poem, and they all said they liked her because she's easy to understand. I personally have always liked poems that require a bit more digging, but that's not to say I'm a big fan of someone like Louis Gluck, someone who writes poetry that is almost impenetrable. My favorites -- Bishop, Heany, Levine, and the like -- require some thought, require a bit of effort, but always reward with a moment of stunned epiphany.
And since I've been talking about work, why not include Levine's poem on the same subject:
Five Years Ago
What For Dinner?
Rainy Saturday
The Boy finished his Jurassic Park Lego play set yesterday. Today, it fell apart, in part because of a poor design. K helped him put things back together; I added some stability to make sure it doesn't happen again.
In the afternoon, we finally took down the Christmas tree while watching ski jumping from Zakopane.
