fun in threes, sometimes fours
My students are about to embark on a paired-down version of the short story project I've been using for years. Paired down is hardly accurate: it's radically changed. Instead of reading The Tell-Tale Heart and writing three analytic paragraphs about it, they're adding on to something they did earlier this year. More choice. Less grading. Seems like a win-win situation.
Less is sometimes more for everyone.
Why couldn't this have been on a Friday night? Why didn't the schedulers realize the entertainment value of this debate? Still, I think back over the years and can't understand how we got here, and yet I understand perfectly how we got here.
Yet how did our family get here?
Ten years ago, we lived in Asheville.
Fifteen years ago, we lived in Poland.
And yet that's just us -- the two of us. What matters now is the four of us.
The last Sunday of the month -- Polska msza. Among many other things, it means a lazy morning with perhaps a bit of outside time. During the summer, it was the only Sunday we could do much of anything outside because by the time we normally got back from Mass, it was too hot to do much of anything. There was the pool, that's true, but even that gets a little routine after a while, I guess.
In the late morning, then, L, E, and I headed to the backyard to do some exploring. Our exploring of late is limited, though, by the fact that we have new neighbors whom we rarely see, and I haven't yet had a chance to ask if they mind us tromping through their backyard. I'm certain they have nothing at all against it, but I still don't want to do it until we've actually discussed it.
That leaves us limited to our own backyard, which we all know perfectly well -- harder to pretend-explore there than it was in our neighbors' yard. I struck upon the idea of tracing the stream that runs through our backyard. We'd waded up the stream one morning this summer, but we hadn't gone the opposite direction. The Boy was interested; the Girl headed inside.
We followed where it passes under the road and winds through more backyards, but soon we reached a point where we couldn't go any further. If we had long pants on, we could have braved the weeds and wild for probably another hundred and fifty feet, but not much more than that. Suddenly, the Boy had a question.
"Daddy, what if we're lost?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what if we can't find our way home?"
I thought of what we'd just done from his forty-some inch perspective and his four-year-old mental development and realized that he might indeed have no idea where we were. I took him back to the road and pointed out the back of our house.
"Oh, neat trick," he replied.
But could he really not know where we were? I doubt it. He has such an incredible memory for the physical layout of things, where things are located in the house, where things are located in the larger environment.
Once, K told me, they were on their way to Nana's and Papa's house in the morning and there was a huge snarl of traffic on the four-lane road we normally take to their place. I'd done some exploring on Google Maps before to map new routes to ride by bike and had discovered a way to cut the corner where the snarl was, and once I'd taken it when I was taking the Boy to Nana's and Papa's. E remembered it just as K was contemplating where that road off to the left might go and explained that it was a short cut. Between those two events passed probably several weeks.
So it's likely that he really wasn't as lost today as he thought he might have been. It's possible that he could have figured his way back home. Instead, he just took me by the hand and said, "Daddy, let's go home."
The recently-caught tadpole needs more room to grow. L did some research about what they might eat and how to best provide an authentic environment for development, and she’s determined to see it through to frog-hood.
Sometimes an hour more sleep is more important than one more post…
I’ve begun a chess club at school. Today was our informational meeting, and around twenty students showed up, including three girls. We set up a meeting schedule — first and third Mondays of the month — and I had them take a little “quiz” to see if they knew how to use algebraic notation, had the instinct to do more than take the “free” pawn in the King’s Gambit, could recognize the next move of the Sicilian Defense, and knew what stalemate means.
One small problem: we don’t have any chess sets. PTSA to the rescue. And as I was talking to someone about how to fill out the paperwork to request the funds, I had an epiphany: why not use chess in the classroom on a regular basis? The benefits are manifold, especially the thought of encouraging such dedicated, focused attention for some period of time, weighting options and making a decision, and overall critical thinking. So with some careful planning, I might actually be able to pull it off.
Coming home, I discovered that the Boy wants to play soccer. A good sign. And out of the blue, he wants to play chess.
Sometimes life gives you zugzwang — a situation in chess in which one player would rather not move but has to move. And occasionally, it gives you the opposite.
We parents wait for it all our lives, I imagine: confirmation that all the teaching we've done has somehow taken root and flowered. It comes sometimes in those little notes scribbled on our children's school papers or comments on report cards. We hear about it from grandparents or neighbors. And then sometimes we see it.
K arrived home with the Boy from a short trip to the grocery store and the pizza place only to find it had started raining. It wasn't raining hard enough for me to hear it, so I hadn't brought in the laundry drying on the back deck. (Truth be told, I wasn't even aware of it being out there, but that's an entirely different issue.) K rushed in, pizza in hand, tossed the box on the table and darted out through the back door. "My laundry!" Following a few moments behind, E appeared at the door, shopping in hand, car door closed, struggling mightily with the two bags of groceries.
He'd taken the initiative all by himself.
Coincidentally, one of the words in L's Polish lesson for the evening was "dżentelmen," the Polishized spelling of "gentleman," which has the same denotations and connotation.
In the end, I couldn't care less about how well he plays soccer. I'm more concerned with how he plays life. And while at the moment he seems destined to be darting around all the action in a soccer game, he seems to be diving right in to life.