matching tracksuits

fun in threes, sometimes fours

g

A Mess

Thursday 13 June 2019 | 0 Comments

I've been working to clean out our basement this week. Because of some shoddy renovation work -- well, shoddy cleanup -- we had a fair amount of concrete dust coating many things as well as the usual chaos that comes with leaving your basement to grow its on labyrinth of apathetic misplacement of tools and storage bins for four years.

Monday and Tuesday I worked on the metal and wood storage shelves that hold our plastic storage bins filled with camping items, old photographs, clothes the Boy has not yet grown into, and mysterious "why do we still have that?" items. Wednesday was the work bench as well as a few more shelves. (Everything takes so long because each item -- every single one -- needs to be wiped down, and the shelves took a long time because I moved them to one location temporarily to clean them and then had to move them back.)

Today, I began working on the other half of the room and final touches to the work bench. The after picture, as a result of not having time to put everything back in its place, looks worse than the before picture above.

In order to clean a mess, we often have to make one first. It's truism for most things in life, I think, but I often forget it. I want things to move ahead without ever moving back; I want lesson plans to come out perfect the first time; I want first drafts to be good enough to be final drafts; I want our kids to perfect things instantly. It's in the mess that we figure things out, though, and making a masterpiece always involves a mess beforehand.

I forget that when I come into the kitchen as K is cooking, though. I tend to clean things as I go along; K, not so much. The kitchen is a complete wreck when she's done cooking. Yet out of that mess comes little slices and ladles-full of perfection.

Reading with the Boy

Wednesday 12 June 2019 | 0 Comments

We try to get the Boy to read a little every night. Tonight we worked on L's old book about spiders. I found the place we'd left off, but the Boy insisted that he'd finished with K last night.

"Well, it doesn't hurt to read it again," I said. It might have sounded like I was just being lazy, but being able to read a tricky passage fluently will build his confidence. We learn by repetition, especially recognition of new words.

"The back part of a spider's body is called the abdomen," he began.

"Wow -- you read that tough word like a pro," I added.

"What word?"

"Abdomen."

He sighed. "Daddy, I recognized the word."

"I know. And that's a long word to know. How many letters?"

He counted: "Seven."

"You recognized a seven letter word!"

"No, wait," he said, counting hopefully again. "No, just seven."

He continued, stumbling a bit: "It has the spider's hear -- hear?"

"Heart," I helped.

"Heart and the spinnerets, which make silk," he continued.

"Spinnerets?!" I gasped. "Are you kidding? You read that like a pro as well!"

"But daddy, I stumbled over a" and he paused to count. "A five-letter word." He often stumbles over words, words that sometimes surprise me.  And he recognizes and reads fluently words that sometimes surprise me. It's part of learning to read.

"That's okay," I reassured. "You stumbled over that word, but you nailed 'spinnerets.'"'

Many of my students over the years have face similar struggles, and struggling readers are not confident readers. I've sat with kids who were reading, asked them to read aloud, and heard difficult passages come out like this: "It has the spider's hea hear -- whatever -- and the spin spin -- I don't know -- which make the silk." If that's what's going on in their head as they read silently, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't be, it's no wonder they don't feel confident with reading: the struggle produces nothing but a confusing text. And they're likely to anticipate all this: before they begin reading, they've convinced themselves that they won't understand it. And all of this builds and calcifies into not a mere reluctance to reading but a positive aversion to it.

Confidence eliminates those "whatevers" and "I-don't-knows." And so I have the Boy read books a second, third, and fourth time.

"But I already know this book," he complains.

"I know -- that's the point," I think.

Fifth Grade Questions

Tuesday 11 June 2019 | 0 Comments

This week’s project: clean out the basement. Again. To be fair (to us), the last time I did this was in 2015 when I was alone as everyone else cavorted in Poland. It’s a bit more time-consuming this time around because everything has a layer of concrete dust on it from having our windows replaced. Why didn’t they clean it up? Why did I raise hell about them not cleaning it up?

In today’s work, I made a few discoveries, including several pictures stuck in bins that had nothing to do with photography, memorabilia, or anything similar. One was my fifth-grade class picture.

I look at the faces of my classmates and realize I can remember more names than I would have expected. Granted, I went with most of these kids from first grade through high school graduation, but still, my last memory of them is of them seven years older.

In fifth grade I got in trouble for cheating. We traded test papers with a peer, marked it, then went back over it with our own tests to make sure there were no mistakes in the marking. Lo and behold, Brett, who’d graded mine, had made more mistakes than he’d gotten right — so naive was I that I didn’t think. So little experience did I have cheating that I didn’t even give such things as thought. How do you cheat without making it obvious? I had no idea. I still remember the conference with the teacher and both my parents. I don’t remember the punishment; I remember the tension of the meeting.

I look over the faces, remembering names of kids, then look at the teachers. There’s Dr. Hale on the far right. Beside her? I can’t remember. At the other end is Mr. Eades, the first male teacher I ever had. And beside him? My mother.

“How did Nana get in that picture?” I think she was a class mother or something like that. And then it happened — I realized that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do most: ask her about it.

How many times will this happen? Doubtlessly, countless.

Building

Monday 10 June 2019 | 0 Comments

A legacy of Nana: she kept so many of my old toys, and we’ve recycled them, giving them to our own kids. L was never interested in most of them; the Boy, though is a different story.

What does that say about gender differences? Our son is interested in his father’s old toys; our daughter isn’t. Is that nature? Nurture? Both? We’ve never told our kids “this is a boy’s toy” or “this is a girl’s toy,” but they’ve gravitated that way. Perhaps it’s so saturated in our culture that it’s impossible to escape.

The Boy’s latest interest: my old Girder and Panel building set. I was about his age when I got it, and I loved it immediately. The Boy had a similar reaction.

It took him a while to get the hang of snapping the girders together, and the windows were as frustrating for him as they were and still are for me, but his verdict was unequivocal. “I love it.”

10 Years Ago

Sunday 09 June 2019 | 0 Comments

Zab Walk

Saturday 08 June 2019 | 0 Comments

The Neighbor

Friday 07 June 2019 | 0 Comments

Exploring with the Boys

Thursday 06 June 2019 | 0 Comments

L

Wednesday 05 June 2019 | 0 Comments

L headed to Poland alone today. I still am surprised that she doesn’t look like this anymore.

Another End

Tuesday 04 June 2019 | 0 Comments

Tomorrow I will say goodbye to 110 or so eighth-graders I have been teaching, comforting, battling, frustrating, encouraging, and 147 other -ings for the last 180 days. The tears will be flowing, the end of the world approaching, and there I'll be, smiling at their innocence.