I was worried that this would be the first of several very difficult days. With no one here to help with the kids (read: E) in the morning, it’s difficult for me to get out of the house very early. This week, however, is my duty week: I get to spend thirty minutes before my contracted arrival time supervising kids on the eighth-grade hallway. It’s loads of fun, but the downside is that I have to leave much earlier than usual. Which created a dilemma: what to do with the Boy. Two options: ride with the neighbor or leave without breakfast and have it at school.

At around 6:15 this morning, the Boy toddled downstairs, still rubbing his eyes, and presented a third option: “I’m just going to eat breakfast now.”

“Are you sure? You could still sleep another half hour.”

“Nah, I’ll stay up.”

And so the Boy proved once again that life is like calculus: there’s often more than one (or even two) solutions to a given problem.

Once at school, the usually peaceful morning duty transformed temporarily into one of those moments when, as a teacher, I see a student’s future and think, “Wow, if this kid doesn’t make some serious changes, do some serious maturing, she’s in for a long, tough life.” And much of that, in most cases, is due to environment: they’re not choosing necessarily to be a disrespectful kid. It’s something that works on the streets and/or at home, and they just bring it into the school as well.

That particular exchange foreshadowed the discussion I was to have with my honors English kids, who read Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” last week as their article of the week. We began with a review via video:

Then the kids went through a few discussion questions:

1. To what extent do you find Socrates’s point about the human tendency to confuse “shadows” with “reality” relevant today?
2. What could be the elements that prevent people from seeing the truth, or regarding “shadow” as the “truth”?
3. In society today or in your own life, what sorts of things shackle the mind?

The common theme that came through in all of these discussions was the role social media plays in creating false realities, in preventing people from seeing truth, in shackling the mind. It’s ironic: I see so many of these kids buried in their phones before and after school, yet they’re strangely aware of the negative effects.

After school, I hopped out of the car thinking, “So far, other than the little issue in the morning during hall duty, this supposedly tough day is surprisingly enjoyable. After dinner, it was even more so: one of E’s choices in his literacy log is to find a pleasant place to sit outside and read for a while.

And after that, a little project: a bird house. Where did this idea come from? I don’t know. The Boy simply talked K into buy him a piece of pressure-treated 1 x 6, and although he originally planned on building a tree house from that single plank, he was flexible enough to realize that a bird house was probably more in the scope of that single plank. So he found instructions on YouTube, gathered tools, and together we built a little bird house.

“Once you’re done, I want to help with the painting,” the Girl declared, and so with twenty minutes to go before the start of E’s evening ritual, they began working.

“Let’s decorate it with birds,” the Girl suggested. They began drawing various silhouettes of birds while I got the dog’s dinner ready, only to discover we were out of dog food.

“Alright kids, you’ll have to do the actual painting tomorrow. E, you’ll have to go with me to the store to buy some food for Clover.” I was expecting a small fit, some protesting at the very least, and I was reluctant to stop the work in progress: it’s so rare that they find something that really engages them both.

Still, the Boy was surprisingly mature. “Okay,” was all he said, and off we went to get some kibble for the pup.

And so at the close of this surprisingly pleasant day that was supposed to be the first of several tough ones, I find myself realizing anew that “tough days” and “bad days” and “rough days” depend more on our perception than anything else, just like Plato’s shadows suggest.