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Chatting

Tuesday 10 November 2020

Living with a thirteen-year-old is a challenge. “I don’t know how I survived your eighth-grade year,” Nana told me when I got my job teaching eighth graders. Now that I’m teaching them and living with one, I see her point. Their astounding knowledge puts to shame everything I ever thought I knew, and often they realize it’s just not worth it talking to an idiot like me.

Until they do.

Until they sit at the dinner table and chatter on and on about their school day simply because I told a story about playing dodgeball as a kid with the hard, unforgiving kickball balls we used.

“Don’t worry,” I tell L when her behavior frustrates me. “You won’t always be thirteen.”

“You always tell me that!” she responds.

“I’m not saying it for you; I’m saying it for myself.”

Those moments sometimes seem like the dominant moments in a family with a thirteen-year-old. And then, out of nowhere, a perfect dinner conversation that’s amusing and warm.

“They turn normal again,” one of my colleagues said to me today when she asked how school was going for our kids and was shocked to realize/learn that L is now in the eighth grade. But this is normal — for her age. And it is frustrating — sometimes. Yet we know we’ll miss this version of L, so we hold on while we can.

Finishing the Toolbox

Tuesday 13 October 2020

Yesterday was the cut day; today we assembled everything. I struggled to figure out how much to do and how much to let him do, to decide how many mistakes to correct and how many to let slide.

“Oh, Daddy, that nail is actually coming out of the bottom.” That’s one to correct.

“Daddy, I didn’t evenly space these nails.” Just pat him on the head and say, “It’s not a big deal, buddy.”

In the end, it wasn’t perfect, but he’d done almost all of it — a good reason to do your best Dr. Seuss character imitation. (“Daddy, why do so many of the characters go around with their eyes closed?” he once asked. I’d never really noticed that.)

Scouts

Thursday 08 October 2020

Coming home from scouts tonight, the Boy and I had a conversation about friendship. He talked to me a bit about what happened to Malfoy in the third book of the Harry Potter series, which K is currently reading to him. Apparently he got mauled by some creature.

"Oh, that's not good," I said.

"But Malfoy is bad!" E clarified.

"Yes, but that's no reason to wish ill of him. Besides, he might not turn out that bad by the end of it all." I knew this from conversations I'd had with L about the series, but I didn't want to give anything away to the boy.

"Yeah, L told me that he and Harry become friends in the end."

So much for not giving it away.

"That's sort of like T and me," the Boy continued. "We didn't use to like each other. Well, we really didn't know each other, but then we got to know each other and decided to become friends."

I thought about that for a moment, pondering the choice of words: "decided" to become friends. I imagined this conversation between the two boys, a negotiation of sorts.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

T might not even be aware that in E's eyes, they "decided" to become friends. For all I know, T might not even consider E his friend but merely an acquaintance.

Kids and adults see friendship differently, I think. I feel I'm more jaded than I can imagine him ever being. That's the magic of childhood, I guess.

Learning

Sunday 04 October 2020

"Hey, there's a grass volleyball tournament in town this weekend. Want to go play?" L asked.

"Sure," her best friend N replied.

That's how it started. So two good friends who both have a couple years' experience playing volleyball but no experience playing two-girl volleyball -- no experience at all, not just no experience playing together in pairs volleyball -- set out this morning to see how they'd do.

It was a learning experience, to say the least.

Not only did they not win a single set, their total points scored for six sets (54) didn't even average out to 10 points per game. To say they got their butts kicked is really quite an understatement.

It's not something she's used to in volleyball. Last year, her school's team won every single match and only dropped three or four sets the entire season. This year, with only two matches remaining, they haven't lost a single set. They are used to delivering the smackdown, not receiving it.

But it wasn't always like that either for the Girl. When she first started playing volleyball, she tried out for the school team in sixth grade and didn't make the cut. We put her in YMCA volleyball and her team didn't do well at all.

As a parent watching my daughter play volleyball, I always have some mixed emotions. During the last season, her team struggled mightily: they didn’t win a single match, if memory serves, and they only won a handful of sets. It was rough. Lots of frustration in the car after games.

“We won’t ever win.”

Several matches, they were swept, three sets to nothing. There was nothing immediately redeemable about that. I said what any parent would say: “You’re getting stronger.” “This is building character.” “This shows how tough you are, that you keep at it despite the challenges.” (Source)

Still, even then they weren't getting beaten brutally.

Today, they were. Completely outclassed. Completely and mercilessly beaten by girls who had much more experience than they do.

Point after point, set after set, game after game, they kept playing. They lost by scores like 21-7 and kept playing. They made silly mistakes and went for several points without actually earning a point but gaining points only from unforced errors and still, they kept playing.

I'm not sure when I was prouder of L.

As the morning progressed, they improved. They figured out some of the little strategic differences that pairs volleyball demands. They worked together more. Their game became a little more analytic. They grew.

What's more, when we asked the girls if they'd enjoyed it, they insisted they'd had fun. And I believe them. So a successful lesson on many levels.

The Doll

Wednesday 02 September 2020

I don't remember where the doll came from -- some aunt or other gave it to us, or maybe Nana. It's fairly lifelike in its size and features. Enough that when we first put the doll's box in E's closet (far back on the top shelf), he fussed quite about about how terrifying it was to think that such a thing was lurking inside his closet.

Today, K got the doll out to practice for a shoot she did for a friend who just had her first child.

As the Boy was cleaning up his room before bed, I noticed the box on his bed and went downstairs to retrieve the doll. I tried to sneak back in without him noticing because I feared a little breakdown when he realized the doll was going back into the closet.

"Oh, are you putting the doll up?" I heard behind me.

"Yeah. Mama was using it to practice pictures with today."

"Oh." Pause. "That doll -- I used to be so scared of it."

Sleepover

Wednesday 29 July 2020

Remember your first sleepover? Not staying at your grandparents’ house — staying with a friend. Did you make it through the night without calling home? Without going home? I didn’t.

Tonight, E’s best friend is sleeping over in preparation for a hypothetical camping trip with us next week. So far, so good.

And a random picture…

K in 2002.

Day 71: Playing and Counting

Monday 25 May 2020

Games We Play

This morning, E and I decided to play a game we hadn't played in ages: Pentago. It's a simple concept: Get five marbles of your color in a row. But the challenge is that each of the four nine-by-nine quadrants can be rotated. It's a great game for the mental manipulate of objects because players have to turn those quadrants in their heads and make plans to try to surprise their opponent with an unseen 5-row connection.

At first, the Boy just tried to connect five in a row. I showed him quickly how easily stopped that could be, and how I could simply build on my efforts to stop him and create my own row with a twist here or there. Then he got it.

Did I "let him win"? Well, not so much. Once he figured out the importance of the twist, I played a while without really paying attention to anything other than his obvious efforts and he sneaked one or two by me.

After each game: "Can we play again?"

In the afternoon, the kids brought the old Rummikub satchel out: "Can you teach us how to play this?" they asked.

Indeed -- I could barely remember myself. Something about runs and threes- and fours-of-a-kind. That was about all I could remember, and there were no instructions in the game.

It's moments like that which make me really appreciate YouTube. A quick search, three minutes of watching the video, and off we went, playing a game I hadn't played in decades.

I last remember playing it in Nashville with Uncle N and Aunt L over the Thanksgiving weekend. We might have played it the last time we were there for Thanksgiving, which would have been 2005. Though we could have just played dominoes and Uno -- that's all I have photographic evidence for:

Uncle N passed away less than a year later from ALS, and we never went back there for Thanksgiving. So it might have been even longer since I played Rummikub. At any rate, the kids loved it. The Boy, less so because he couldn't see all the combinations and such. L, however, fit into the game perfectly: that type of kombinowanie is just what she does best.

Yesterday

We watched last night the 2019 film Yesterday, in which a failing musician somehow enters an alternate reality in which only he knows anything about the Beatles. He subsequently recreates their catalog as his own. As expected, there are lots of Beatles songs in the film.

"Is that a Beatles song?" L asked as one started.

"Is that a Beatles song?" E asked with the next one.

"Yes, they're almost all Beatles songs," I explained.

"How many songs did they write?!" the Boy asked incredulously.

As a result, we listened to a lot of Beatles music this afternoon. They kind of liked it -- we kind of encouraged them.

It did inspire some musicality from them. The Boy has a little guitar that he suddenly became interested in. However, it is missing strings, so I suggested he play my mandolin, which I bought in high school because R.E.M. had released Green, which featured the mandolin on a number of tunes. It's a $100 plywood job that's a perfect size for him.

Tonight, I worked with him on some basic ideas: pressing down strings just behind a fret to change the pitch. Chords? They're a long way off. (Besides, I can only remember four or five chords on a mandolin.)

The Girl, who has been toying with a ukelele from time to time, gave it a try only to be shocked at how very different it was tuned from her uke. (When she first got the uke, I was surprised to find that, like a five-string banjo, the highest string is actually in the position where the lowest string is for most other instruments. They both just have that one out-of-place string that always gives me fits.)

We'll see how this develops, but hopefully, the interest will remain.

When do I stop counting?

When is this quarantine officially over? When do I stop prefacing every post with "Day X"? I started the first day we were supposed to go to school and yet didn't -- March 16.

Day 1: Achievement Gap

Yet because we don't have any coordinated national approach and since every state is easing restrictions step-by-step, there's really no firm date for me to stop doing that. When we head back to school on a normal routine? (Will we do that in the fall?) I've decided that the most logical date to stop doing that is June 4, which would have been the last day of school were this a normal year.

On the other hand, I'm fairly certain that we will see an enormous uptick in cases after states have eased these restrictions. Just look at Cocoa Beach in Florida this weekend:

It's concerning, to say the least:

On the Sunday talk shows, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said she was "very concerned" about scenes of people crowding together over the weekend.

"We really want to be clear all the time that social distancing is absolutely critical. And if you can't social distance and you're outside, you must wear a mask," she said on ABC's "This Week." (Source)

If we have an explosion of cases, the very thing we were trying to avoid, then this entire 70+ lockdown will have been for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Are we smarter than that as a species? Most days I have my doubts.

Counting

I'm on a run: I've never posted so many consecutive days on this site. Not even close. I've posted daily since December 21, 2019. Counting roughly, that's 130+ consecutive days. Why? Why not?

Not only that, but for the month of May, I've written an average of 1,047 words a day. That's like my journal writing when I first arrived in Poland and everything -- everything -- fascinated me endlessly.

Of course, I have cheated a few times: I included long quotes from books I'm reading, in part because I was honestly interested in writing a little something about them, in part (at least once) because I just wanted to reach that arbitrary number (like I just did in this paragraph). One thousand words. At least. Every day.

I can't possibly keep that up. The quarantine is helping with that. But daily posts? Could I make it a full year? Probably. Will I? No idea.

Day 68: Training Death and the Maiden for Exploring

Friday 22 May 2020

Death and the Maiden

My friend M grew up on a farm with his grandparents. His father passed away; I never really knew what happened to his mother. But from the time I met M, he lived with Ma and Pa as he called them, and as I came to call them.

Their farm was just outside the city limits, a place in the county that felt so different and distant from my suburban, cookie-cutter neighborhood that I felt I might be in a different state. In a different country.

We spent a fair amount of our time there shooting .22s and shotguns. We'd shot at birds and usually miss. We'd shoot at squirrels with the .22s and miss; we'd shoot at them with the shotguns and, well, it wasn't pretty. We were stupid -- what can I say?

One Sunday afternoon in 1990, just before I started my senior year of high school, Pa gave us a task. "There are raccoons that are just givin' the garden a hard time. How about sittin' up on the hill above the garden and seein' if you boys can take care of the problem?" He needed to say no more. We took a bottle of Mountain Dew, Pa's double-barrel 16-gauge shotgun and Papa's bolt action 20-gauge (a bolt-action shotgun? really?) and took positions on the slope just behind the garden.

About an hour before sundown, the raccoons made their way into the garden. We waited until they were among the cornstalks, reasoning that they would sustain the least damage from stray pellets, then fired away. Papa's shotgun had a two-shell clip and held one in the barrel. I discharged those in short order then reloaded as quickly as I could. M fired one then the other barrel, broke the gun over his knee, tossed out the spent shells, and was firing again before I knew it. I think we reloaded twice. M might have reloaded thrice.

All told, we killed three raccoons that afternoon and earned the gratitude of both Ma and Pa. And we had a hell of a good time.

I've long ago lost touch with M. I last saw him in 1998 during the summer I came home after two years in Poland and one more year waiting. He'd made some bad decisions, and the place of our meeting was something out of an O. Henry short story. After that, we corresponded a few times, but the last we communicated was in late 1999.

That was almost thirty years ago now, and I still think back on that day fondly. Not because of the death we dealt but because of the innocent friendship lost. I don't feel guilty for killing those 'coons, though: they were doing real damage to the garden, and we took care of the problem in the country-folk way. Sure, we probably could have trapped them and released them somewhere else, but Pa was not a sentimental man, and he would have regarded that as a waste of time.

Years later, I thought of this day when I read the poem "The Early Purges" by Seamus Heaney:

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.

'Sure, isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:

'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Today, the Boy made his first kill. Birds were in our blueberry bushes, and the Boy had his bb gun. Somehow, he was close enough that one shot dropped a robin that was making an evening snack of our still-unripe berries.

The Girl was furious about it. She was literally in tears, shouting at him that he had no right to kill an innocent bird that had done nothing to us.

"In this time of the pandemic, we have to share," she muttered as we ate dinner -- fish our neighbor caught a couple of weeks ago when the governor let boat ramps open again before reclosing them due to a general failure to follow the newly-established guidelines.

I didn't point out the obvious irony, nor did I point it out when she popped chicken nuggets into the toaster oven for her evening snack.

Training

The other day was Clover's birthday. I think it was her birthday. L insists -- positively and passionately insists -- that it is the 21st of May. Or the 20th. Or maybe it was the 19th. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about her certainty. But we celebrated Clover's third birthday this week nonetheless by getting her an agility course.

She's already got a few new tricks up her, well, I guess tangled in the long hair on her hindquarters. (Cliches sometimes break down, I suppose.)

Exploring

E talked K into doing a little exploring after dinner. While K was still in her good clothes.

He was keen to show her how the plastic box his survival gear came in is, in fact, watertight.

Day 60: Eighth Birthday

Thursday 14 May 2020

A proper birthday has to start with a proper birthday breakfast and a phone call from Babcia. For E, this meant an omelette for breakfast. Never mind that this was only the second time he's ever had an omelet, a proper omelette, but he fell in love with it earlier this week, on Mother's Day, and decided that it was his favorite breakfast of all time. Making omelets though is a time-consuming task, so although I layered the sauteed onions, sauteed peppers, and bacon bits very carefully for the Boy, the rest of us got it all mixed up in scrambled eggs.

"I could have it that way, I guess," he confessed. "It's the same thing, just all mixed up."

The phone call from Babcia was a little less fluid. E is reticent to speak Polish, so although he understands everything Babcia says, he usually responds in English then turns to K, expecting a translation. Today Babcia tried to help him out, tried to ease his anxiety. She asked him simple questions like, "Are the flowers blooming?" or "What color are the flowers?" Yet he was still reluctant to speak Polish.

School today for him was relatively simple. At first, he wanted yesterday to complete as much of today's work in addition to yesterday's work as possible. But yesterday in the afternoon he decided that was not the best plan after all. He was ready for some free time. This meant of course that he had all the work for today to complete.

At the beginning of this quarantine, a day's worth of work was just that: a day's worth of work. The amount was greater than it is now, to be sure, but he fussed incessantly how about the frustrations he was feeling, about the difficulty of the math problems, about the length of the readings. We are half expecting such antics today, interspersed with cries of, "But it's my birthday. Why do I have to work on my birthday?" However, he plowed through his work with relative ease, making it through math, which was subtracting three-digit numbers from three-digit numbers, each problem requiring regrouping and then word problems, in less than fifteen minutes. He wrote two more chapters of his frog/toad book and was done.

In the afternoon, we headed back down to the spot where we'd caught and inadvertently killed a minnow yesterday. I thought perhaps we might have a repeat, feared it in some ways -- who wants to just go around killing little fish? Yet E was keen to try again. We did try again, and caught three fish. Two of them made it back to the water fine.

One of them -- well, we didn't quite hook him in the mouth but somehow hooked him through his body. He was already bleeding when we pulled him out of the water.

While we were down there, L came to the balcony and yelled across the yard, "You guys need to come back! Now!" At first, I was afraid that something had happened to Papa. Of late he's been spending afternoons on the deck wallowing in nostalgia by exploring songs he hasn't heard in decades, all thanks to Spotify.

Instead, we all got a pleasant surprise:

E's best friend's mother drove him by our house to wish the Boy happy birthday.

As for our celebration, we played a trick on him that Nana and Papa played on me a couple of times: give him something that's relatively worthless without the other item. Like a cable to hook up a laptop to something suggesting that it might work with an old laptop, then giving a new one as a surprise (a la Nana and Papa).

We gave him a tablet case and screen protector. He'd been asking for a tablet for some time, and we thought we'd see what would happen if he got only the empty shell. "You can keep and maybe you'll get a tablet next year," I suggested. "Oh, that's great," he said very calmly -- not really upset, not really thrilled.

Then, when he opened Papa's present, lo and behold -- an Amazon Fire, just for him.

Finally, there was the cake. L began working on the cake yesterday and decided to add to it today. A two-tiered cake, each with two layers.

The slices were impressive to say the least. K and I split one: she took the top tier, and I worked on the bottom one. The Girl is getting the flavors down -- she's still not thrilled with the presentation, though.

"Patience and practice," K said to her. Though perhaps not quite so much practice while we're all locked down.

Previous Years

Happy Mess Day

Second Time Around

Third Party

Celebration Day

Birthday

Fifth Birthday Party

Sports and Ice Cream

Seventh Birthday

Day 53: Changes

Thursday 07 May 2020

Schedule

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my principal. It read, in part,

We are working on the schedule for next year, and I wanted to run something by you. In an effort to simplify people’s assignments and avoid teachers having 3 preps, we are looking at the possibility of you teaching all of the English 1 sections. [...] My one hesitation is that 4 sections of E1H is a lot for one person. A lot to grade and be responsible for.

English I Honors is indeed a handful. Each class is about 30 students usually, and whereas 60-65% of students in English 8 turn in a given assignment, it's something like 90% in English I. Many English 8 students often have issues with time management and apathy, so it's rare for a student in those classes to turn in all assignments in a given quarter. English I is exactly the opposite thought: it's rare to have more than two or three students in a given class not turn in a given assignment.

Another element adding to the E1 workload is the simple fact that, compared to English 8, it's two classes combined into one: reading and writing are separated into two classes for English 8, and I have always taught the reading/literature portion. English I isn't, so I have to teach both, which means a lot of writing to assess.

So I was hesitant to accept such an offer. At the same time the idea of working with students who have almost no serious behavior problems, who are all working hard most of the time, who all see the value of education, is pretty hard to resist.

My other concern was regarding the fact that having all the English 1 classes would mean Mrs. H, the other English I teacher, would have none. I knew how she enjoyed teaching that class, and if the tables were turned, I would not want to give up English 1 even for the tempting offer of having only one prep. I expressed my concerns to the principal, and he, in turn, discussed those concerns with Mrs. H. It turned out that for her, the thought of having only one prep was indeed enticing enough to give up English I. In fact, she was somewhat worried about the workload that I would be facing, and she emailed me about those concerns. Receiving this email and having assurances from my principal that Mrs. H would not feel as if I were somehow taking these classes away from her (because that's how I felt: if I to take these classes, that means she loses them, and I can always say no), I agreed to take the 4 English I classes.

Yesterday the official master schedule for the 2020-2021 school year was released.

And there I am back-to-back-to-back-to-back English 1 classes.

I'm happy about this for a number of reasons, not the least of which that I will have very few behavior issues to deal with. It's also a great joy to work with students of actually do want to learn and you actually do put forth their best effort on a consistent basis.

On the other hand, working with a class that includes a significant number of at-risk students has its own rewards. I often feel I have the opportunity to teach them even more important skills like anger management, delayed gratification, empathy, impulse control, and appropriate self-efficacy.

The change will be significant. The increased workload will be noticeable. The rewards? Well, it is indeed a trade-off.

The Fort

L decided today that she wanted to get involved in the fort.

"You guys did the hardest part," she said, "But still -- I want to help."

She brought an interior design eye to the project, bringing ground covering (old towels), decorations (old silk flowers), entertainment (books, a chess board, and more), and snacks.

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