Reading
I give the students the same information every year, but this year, I decided to break it down in a letter. Dear student, you recently took the MAP test, which measures your reading progress. And so on and so on. It's a mail merge, so "student" is replaced with the kid's name, and all the details are individualized. Like the winter score. Like its grade-level equivalent. It's bound to be a disheartening moment for some: I'm not sure they've ever been told point blank, "Your reading scores indicate that you're reading at a second-grade level." How do you take the news that your skills are six years behind where they should be?
There are a number of reasons one could posit for this, and for each, a exception: For some, it's a question of limited English exposure at home. But I have Latino students in my honors high school courses as well. For others its a question of limited access to books. But I have such students in my honors high school courses as well, and they solve the problem by basically camping out in the school library. No role model in the immediate family to provide the support necessary. But I've had students in my honors high school courses who'd never even met their biological father.
At times they seem like excuses, at times they seem like legitimate -- and tragic -- explanations. Whatever the case, they're my charge, and I'm tasked with reversing the trend. Some days, though, it just feels like I'm making the situation worse still.
Sunday in the Park
The patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía, spent the last days of his life under the chestnut tree in the courtyard of his home. Even when villagers carried his body to his bed as his end became increasingly obviously near, he woke and went back to the tree every morning as "a habit of his body." Thus Marquez describes it in his classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I am re-reading some twenty or twenty-five years after I first read it. The idea of a habit of one's body stuck with me all these years, and tonight, when I finally read that scene, I smiled. It was one of the passages of the novel I couldn't recall where exactly it fell but read eagerly in search of it.
Part of the joy of watching children, I think, is that they have no habits of the body yet. They don't get up at five thirty and make the morning coffee without thinking about it. They don't come to an intersection intending to turn right but pulling into the left lane out of habit. They don't have a routine they follow in which they suddenly become aware they're half-way through the routine. Every action is new. Every action has a certain uncertainty to it that demands their attention and their care. Every act brings forth a joy of the novel.
Family Reunion
Not quite a family reunion, but a gathering of folks who haven't been together for a long time. And where are the pictures? Quite simply, I was too busy chatting. An opportunity lost.
Peeling Eggs
The Boy is always eager to help, especially when it comes to cooking. Any time K is standing at the stove, E bounds over to the dining table, grabs a chair, and slides it across the whole room to the stove.
"I want to help!"
Most often, that's just stirring. It's simple, difficult to mess up, and difficult to make a mess doing. Today, though, as I was rinsing the boiled eggs we'd be putting in our żurek later, he decided he wanted to learn how to peel the eggs. Rather, having just woke up from a nap, he was encouraged to learn. Bribed, for he's awfully fussy when he's awakened prematurely.
"Want to help me cook?" I began.
He was reluctant at first, but the words "learn" and "something new" seemed to pique his interest, and soon enough, he was peeling an egg.
When it came time for dinner, he was quite insistent that he got the egg that he had peeled.
"Bardzo słuszna koncepcja."
Why a Jet?
First Day Returning
The first day back can always be stressful: you walk back into the school wondering what kind of day the kinds have packed in their book bags and hauled to school from Christmas break. Some years, they unpack a chattiness and an unwillingness to work that in a lot of ways is understandable. Other years, they haul out their books and their attention and make the day slide by almost effortlessly.
It occurred to me that I could help them pack their bag by having them leave on a good note, hence my opłatek efforts at the end of the year. Through most of the day, I thought that perhaps it had worked, that perhaps ending the year on a deliberately positive note helped bring them back with a positive outlook. They worked brilliantly, and not a complaint as I introduced and modeled a new weekly assignment, the article of the week, based on Kelly Gallagher’s ideas.
The final period of the day rolled to a close, and one young lady who was absent the final day asked me if I’d saved a cookie for her.
“Excuse me?”
“The cookies you gave everyone before the break.”
Here it was — definitive proof that what we’d done together had made an impact, for someone had clearly told her about the experience. Obviously it had struck something in their souls, made them resonate as one for a moment, showing them the oneness of humanity and all the hopes and dreams of everyone who has ever set out to create a utopia.
“Oh, yes,” I replied. “How did you hear about them?”
“Oh, everyone was just saying they were really tasty.”
A utopia for the taste buds, I guess, is better than no utopia at all.
Final Sunday of the Break
Just as predicted, we blinked twice and it was Christmas Eve; another two blinks and it was New Year's Eve. And now, it's all over again. Another Christmas break is little more than memory. But that's not a bad thing: Most of our lives are memory. The present is just a passing phase that disappears as soon as you acknowledge its existence. The future is relatively uncertain. So it's our memories that make up the majority of our life.
Today was glorious, but we were all tired, so we stayed home. It was a lazy day from the beginning: the alarm went off at seven, and it took only a moment for K and me to decide that the eleven o'clock Mass was a better option than the nine o'clock Mass.
We were thinking about going for some afternoon outing, perhaps hiking somewhere, but soon after Mass, as we were heading to the car, I think I'd decided that even going to a nearby park might be too ambitious.
So in the end, we spent the day at home. There was an abundance of trampoline time, including the fun game of Charge Yourself with Ample Static Electricity by Shuffling Around the Trampoline with Your Socks On Then Discharge It All Onto Daddy's Bald Head. A fun game, that.
New Year’s 2016
For someone as obsessed with the passage of time as I am, I am strangely ambivalent about New Year's Eve. When I was younger, it was just an excuse to go to a party. As I grow older, it's just an excuse to get together with friends.
Then, as our children grow older, it's become an excuse for them to stay up as long as humanly possible.
And a last stab at ice cream and chocolate overload.
Last night, I children did both. For L, it's not much of a feat -- she managed it last year, and probably the year before. For the Boy, though, to stay up that late. This is the kid that fell asleep at his normal bedtime at our Christmas gathering last week.
But he made it. And he survived the fearful experience of his first near encounter with fireworks.
"Daddy, I want to go back inside," he said, a slight panic in his voice.
"What's my job?" I asked him.
"To protect me."
"So I would never put you in a dangerous situation, right? I would never put you somewhere that you could get hurt, right?"
After a few minutes, he was a different little boy.
"Daddy, I love fireworks."
Overcoming a fear -- a good way to start the year.
2015
