fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
It's been a while since we had any sports in the front yard. Lately, though, the Boy has been asking to head out to play soccer in the front yard a little. With the time change, this is likely to increase -- at least I hope so.
It, too, will be gone before we know it.
K talked with Babcia again.
The Boy had another soccer game, which they won 6-2.
And spring is everywhere.
A 2-0 win, so now the team is 1-1-1.
An unpublished entry from the end of our 2022 visit to Poland.
The Boy’s stuff is spread throughout the house: toys on the living room, play money in the kitchen, shoes in a variety of locations. My stuff is spread just as widely. So much to remember tomorrow. I’ve got to clean and cover the fire pit in the gazebo. I’ve got to bring two bikes upstairs, remembering to take the pedals off my bike to take back to the States but remember to leave the shoes for next time.
ANd I sit here wondering if I’ve done all I could have here. Have I rolled in nostalgia enough?” Is another way to put it. I met almost no one from my side here—few former students (always a joy) and no former colleagues. It’s the first time that’s ever happened. We often come back just before the end of the Polish school year, and I simply have to drop in at my former school to meet a lot of people. This year, we didn’t arrive until a week or more after the year was over, so it was only a matter of chance whether or not I met anyone.
I did get to meet with my absolute best friend here, which I was unable to accomplish during our last visit in 2017. I’m not even sure if we got to meet in 2015. Still, we had a chance to sit around drinking beer and talking about nonsense like old times. Sort of. E was with me; neither of us touch cigarettes anymore; we didn’t listen to any music (no exclamations about the perfection of the coming guitar solo); it was in the afternoon in the gazebo he built on his parents’ property during his Covid lockdown. “I had to do something” he explained.
Again wallowing in nostalgia, I guess. Looking for the joy of repetition, even in the small things.
“And it doesn’t come back, but I’ll be looking all of my life.”
We've begun yet another season of soccer. We managed to get the Boy with the same coach he had last season, which made his day; several of the same boys rejoined the team as well, which made his day even more.
We received a new student on our team today: a fifteen-year-old boy from Central America who doesn't speak a word of English and has not been in school since the first grade.
I have reservations.
I'm not fussing about any extra work entailed by having such a kid in my classroom. I've already got two complete-non-speakers and a fourth kid who barely speaks English. My reservations are about how effectively I can really help these kids. They are, of course, in my lowest level classes, which means there are a lot of behavior issues in those classes. I'm supposed to create a new curriculum for these boys because they're so low with their English that modified materials don't do anything for them in my class. In science, yes. In math, certainly. In social studies, a qualified yes. In English class, though? It's impossible just to modify the curriculum. This newest student is illiterate in his first language: I can't modify my curriculum that includes standards like "Determine one or more themes and analyze the development and relationships to character, setting, and plot over the course of a text; provide an objective summary" and "Determine the figurative and connotative meanings of words and phrases as they are used in text; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies texts." You can't do this with pictures. Besides, I struggle teaching the native speakers these things because of their low motivation -- teaching a non-English-speaking student with the aid of pictures? Not going to happen. So I'll have to invent a curriculum for these boys.
Is that type of teaching really in these boys' best interest? Wouldn't a part-time immersion with classes like gym and art coupled with a couple of direct English instruction courses be more effective? The people at the district office downtown will say, "No, the data don't support that." But I think that's bullshit. I know from my own experience in Poland that dumping me into an environment where I didn't speak the language without any direct language instruction would have only frustrated me, and that's with me being 22 years old at that time. If I were only 14 in such a situation -- forget it.
The Boy's church league basketball team had their last game this evening, which sadly they lost 22-30. It was a tough season: they went 1-8. But it wasn't the losing that bothered the Boy so much; it was the unsportsmanlike conduct so many of the players on the other teams exhibited. Tonight, for example, there was one boy who screamed at every shot attempt our team made in an effort to distract our boys.
I had some choice words to say in texts to K about this kid's behavior.
"Just keep your cool," she gently reminded me.
"Of course -- he's just a kid," I replied. But that type of behavior doesn't come from nowhere. Either his parents never tried to correct him because they saw nothing wrong with it, or they actively encouraged and/or taught him to behave like that.
Were I to coach such a kid, I'd tell him and his parents, "Look, if you do that, I bench you for the quarter. You do it again, it's for the rest of the game. And every time after that, it's for the rest of the game."
The Boy's inherently empathetic outlook on things means such behavior would never enter his mind. Was that something we had to teach him? I guess we did, but I don't remember doing so, and I suspect his empathy would lead him not to do that even if we didn't explicitly teach him that.
