My son was sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, hands bracing the sides — the classic pooping toddler pose. I was leaning against the sink, thinking about whatever it is parents think about when they are trying not to think about the fact that they have to be present while their kids are pooping. Probably penguins. (It’s usually penguins.) You can’t look straight at the kid, that makes him nervous. You can’t wander out of the room, he gets upset. You just have to be present and sort of stare into the bathtub for a few minutes.
“What’s that, buddy?”
“Daddy, are you proud of me today?”
I’ll confess that I don’t put a whole lot of planning into the words I use around my kids, outside of course of trying to stay away from the Sharknados and Mother Truckers that inadvertently bubble to the surface when they, for example, dump entire boxes of cereal on the floor, or throw freshly laundered running shoes into toilets. I mentally replay the conversations I’ve had with the boy in recent months. Surely I’ve told him I was proud of him a few times, but never made a big deal out of it. Oh, you counted to ten. I’m so proud of you!
But here he is, mid-deuce, asking me if I’m proud of him.
“I’m proud of you every day, sprout.”
“Well, are you proud of me TODAY?”
He has this funny way of asking a question where he sort of smiles but forgets to turn his mouth up at the corners. Just bares his teeth at me. It’s adorable but unsettling. He leans his head to the side a little when he does it, sort of like a Cheshire Cat that fails to vanish.
“Sprout, I’m always proud of you.”
“Today, daddy?”
“Yes, of course, I’m proud of you today.”
“Okay.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He focused on the task at hand for a moment, a tiny vein popping out in his tiny forehead as he strained.
“I can’t go poop, daddy.”
“That’s okay, sprout. Sometimes you just can’t. We’ll try again later.”
“Okay. Daddy?”
He thinks, I think, that if he doesn’t address me every time he speaks to me, I’ll forget he’s speaking to me. I’d be willing to wager that he says “daddy” over five hundred times a day. Easily 50% or better of his daily lexicon.
“Yeah?”
“Are you still proud of me?”
“Buddy, I will always be proud of you, all the time. No matter what.”
I held up my hand for a high-five and he gleefully obliged, and we went downstairs. He wanted to complete a puzzle for the fifth time of the evening. Sure, kid. No problem.
If only we could all ask so guilelessly for approval for such small accomplishments.
Our kids go to daycare, and my wife and I both work in education. So perhaps we’re a bit more sensitive than the average individual to the herd mentality and group dynamics that can sprout up in kids of all ages in a common setting. I don’t, however, think we’re smarter than the average person, or more capable of seeing obvious problems associated with otherwise everyday actions.
Our daycare has a pretty strict and pretty clear policy on bringing in food from outside for your kids: you can’t do it. To say nothing of the obvious danger for kids with peanut allergies or similar maladies, having one kid who brings in a hot sub while the rest of the class is having overcooked nuggets and sad, limp green beans is just a recipe for bad news, especially with kids who don’t even have the vocabulary yet to explain why they’re mad that Johnny’s chowing down on a delicious sandwich that probably cost as much as the lunch for the other fourteen students in class combined. So food from outside is disallowed.
This regulation is posted pretty clearly all over the building.
And yet.
The teacher in my son’s class told me about a parent who, earlier in the week, dropped off her child at 7 AM — while the rest of the class is sitting down for a breakfast of fruit and toasted english muffins — with a McDonald’s bag. Then tried to hurry back out the door.
“Ma’am, he can’t have that in here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, you can take him out and sit with him in the lobby while he eats, if you like, but he can’t have outside food in the classroom.”
“I can’t stay; I have to go to work. This is his breakfast.”
The (severely underpaid) teacher then had to explain to this woman (who is presumably in her thirties and has, also presumably, learned at least a little bit about the way the world works) why they couldn’t allow her son to sit down and eat a McDonald’s breakfast at the same table with the other kids. You don’t have to use your imagination, really. Kids get jealous. Arguments start. Whining breaks out, then outright screaming. Pretty soon, one kid has impaled another against the wall with a lance made of Legos while the other kids are crowning a hash brown Harvest King with a diadem of braided hotcakes. Lord of the Super Size. Preschool pandemonium.
Honestly. It’s really not that hard to get this aspect of your parenting life right. It takes getting up an extra ten minutes early to make sure your kid has something to eat in the morning, or — or! — you can just let the kid have breakfast in class with the rest of the kids. Either solution fits just fine into the accepted social order and — let me put a fine point on this — necessary routine that dealing with a room full of three-year-olds requires.
Or, you can be a to-hell-with-the-rest-of-the-world, me-first and my-kids-only jerko scumbag and send your kid to school with a bagful of grease and gristle. Which will promptly be thrown in the trash.
And then there are the parents who can’t be bothered to send their kids with show-and-tell items from home, so the kids feel left out. Or the ones who can’t do the simple homework assignments like tracing their kids’ hands on a sheet of construction paper so they can make turkeys in class. Or the ones whose kids go to school biting and scratching at the faces of other tiny humans. Or the ones who rant anonymously about other parents on their vicious little blogs.
Wait, what?
Okay, this rant is over, because I’m in serious danger of falling into a rage-spiral over the parents at our daycare, To be fair, I actually really like our daycare. Our kids have fun and they actually seem to be learning things. It’s the other parents I can’t stand.
Sartre said it best. Hell is other people.
And their snotty, sticky, smear-finger-paint-on-your-trousers-while-you’re-leaving-for-work kids.
Also, I’m a dad whose son is going to be headed off to the hallowed halls of learning soon, so Common Core is doubly my jam. Apparently, lots of parents in my generation struggle with the way they’re teaching math now, and that’s a problem, because math is hard enough for kids without coming home and seeing that their parents can’t do it either. Which is not a situation that I want my kids to be in. So I did a quick search to see if I could get a handle on this “new math” thing.
And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. For clarity, here’s what I read:
Notice how many occasions for error and how much switching between addition and subtraction is required. This is a system built to fail.
Now here’s Carney explaining the new way subtraction is taught:
They key to (new way) is realizing this subtraction problem is asking you to measure the distance between 474 and 195. You do that, in turn, by measuring the distance between landmarks (easy, round numbers). It’s turning math into a road map.
So 474-195.
Starting point is 195. How do we get to 474? Well, first we’ll drive to 200.
(1) 200 is 5 from 195
(2) 400 is 200 from 200
(3) 474 is 74 from 400
(5) 74+200 = 274.
(6) 274 + 5 = 279.
Not only are there fewer steps, the steps are far less complex. You aren’t carrying, or worrying about adding 10 then subtracting the other thing, then remembering to subtract one from the other column. It’s much straighter.
Now, if you’re like me, you probably read that and experienced a bit of skepticism. The way we learned it is simple; why complicate it by bringing in addition?
Except that the way we learned it isn’t simple. It isn’t any simpler than any other way. It’s only simple to us because that’s how we learned it, and we have, god, I dunno, maybe about ten thousand repetitions of it throughout our educational careers reinforcing that way of doing it? Of course our way is simple and this looks like gibberish.
But our way of doing math is no more intuitive for a child than this “new” way is. One way or another, kids have to be taught subtraction, and whether they do it this way or our way or some completely different way entirely (let’s come back around to this discussion in twenty years or so), the important thing is whether they get the right answer or not.
Come to think of it…
I seem to recall there being some argument about the way math was being taught around the time I was being taught math. Lots of parents couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Tom Lehrer even had a song about it:
Which is great for making you feel very, very confused if you never learned how to do math in base 8. (What, you didn’t learn how to do math in base 8? That’s okay, NOBODY knows how to do math in base 8.)
Back to my point: there’s pushback on the current state of affairs in math classrooms. So the fargo what? There is always controversy about what’s going on in classrooms. Like it or not, our kids are in those classrooms, and no small measure of their success in life depends upon their success in their classrooms. So, to my way of thinking, digging in your heels and saying “No, this new math is stupid, I don’t get it, and I don’t see why my kid has to learn it” is a little bit like a dinosaur shouting at the oncoming meteor that if it’s all just the same, he’d like to get on munching on these palm fronds.
Boom.
This iteration of mathematical thinking is here. It’s time to get on the train, whether it makes sense to you or not. Guess what? If you’re a parent, it’s your job to make sure you understand at least some part of what your kid is learning in school. And I’d much rather take a little time to learn something myself so that, when my kid comes home with a math problem he doesn’t understand, we can work through it together, than the alternatives: he flunks out since he sees dad doesn’t care enough about math to learn it, or we hire a tutor because dad can’t be bothered.
If you struggle with the way they do math, I’m not judging you.
But if you are sitting here insisting that Common Core math is bad and needs to be repealed because you don’t understand it, then I am judging you.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. Common Core in all disciplines has no shortage of flaws, but holy cheese doodles, at least educators are trying new things to fix our abysmal test scores. Point is, for the moment, this is the only train running. You can either hop on or walk.
Now.
This is a writing blog, as I said before, so — is there a tie-in here to writing?
You betcha.
Because the person who can’t — or won’t — wrap his or her mind about the “new math” is in a rut. They’re stuck in a routine that’s comfortable, that they see no reason to change. Which is all fine and well as long as they stay insulated in their own particular corner of the world.
But, short of living out your life on a mountainside, draping yourself in the skins of the animals you slay for food, the world has a funny way of not allowing you to remain insulated. You have to interact with other minds, which means interacting with other ways of thinking.
The good writer will embrace this inevitability. He’ll adapt his craft based on new things he learns, he’ll absorb and experiment with ideas from the world outside his bubble. He’ll continue to craft stories and characters and worlds that reflect the changes going on in the world around him rather than rowing his boat backwards against the current. The good writer — hell, the good human — will see something that challenges his way of thinking and examine it, poke at it, see what makes it tick, rather than casting it aside as a foolish diversion.
To do otherwise is to live in the past.
To do otherwise is the antithesis of growth.
To do otherwise is the root of so much conflict in our world it absolutely makes my head spin.
Give the new stuff a try. Just because it’s strange to you at first doesn’t make it wrong. It just means you haven’t tried it yet.
This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.
For the third time now, we’ve had to sign a form acknowledging that one of our kids was damaged in day care.
First, it was a tumble on the playground. Okay, that happens. It’s a rare day that your kid doesn’t come out of a visit to the playground with a shiner or a scrape.
Then, it was a bite to the cheek. Look, kids bite. Literally and figuratively. Especially little ones. I’ve had more than a few chomps taken out of my own shoulder in my time. My wife’s nipples have been chewed on like a Rottweiler’s rope knot. Little kids are gonna bite each other.
Now, the kids in Sprout the first’s class were doing some activity (and bear in mind, of course, that something as simple as washing your hands or singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” qualifies as an activity) and, while getting up from the mat, they got tangled up and my kid got kicked. IN THE FACE. Sure, it was an accident. Sure, he’s only got a tiny little red mark on the thumb of his jaw.
But dude. DUDE. He got kicked in the face.
It’s a different world, putting the kids in day care. Time was when I was the only one getting face-kicked or stomach-bit or junk-stomped by lunatic rugrats hopped up on applesauce and 2% milk from a carton. Now, they’re getting a taste of their own medicine, and rather than them freaking out about it, it’s me.
Because kids are made of rubber. Anything short of a compound fracture or blood-spilling mouth or head wound, and they bounce back within minutes if not seconds. Sprout couldn’t even tell me how he got hurt; his teacher had to tell me. A few hours later, he didn’t even know what I was talking about when I asked him if his face hurt. The hits keep on coming, and they bounce off like golf balls in tile bathrooms.
My wife and I are another story. We’re trying hard not to be the over-protective mama grizzly and papa… what’s the male equivalent? Anyway… we’re trying, but when you have to sign paperwork three times in the space of a week and a half acknowledging the dings and dents your brood have picked up in the care of (conceivably) qualified adults, you really start to wonder just what the hell is going on in these places.
Look, I know. Every three-year-old is a Tasmanian devil on a Starbucks triple espresso coffee bucket, and every newly-learned-to-walk one-year-old is a terrified jackrabbit bouncing full-bolt off the walls and furniture. It’s next to impossible to watch them every minute, even between my wife and me when it’s just our own two kids in our own house. So what can I expect from a couple of people charged with watching a dozen of the rugrats for eight or nine hours every day? Of course they’re going to come away with some scratches, with a bit of paint on the fenders.
We’re trying to focus on the positives. Certainly, there are positives. The kids are learning to get along with (and follow directions from) adults who are not my wife and myself — a necessary life skill. They’re learning to play with other kids, to share, to take turns. These are things it’s hard to learn in your own house when it’s just you and your sibling. They’re learning that mommy and daddy go to work during the day and that this is how life works. And it’s hard to put a price tag on that stuff.
As with all things, there is good and bad in this.
Usually I like to use the SOCS prompt to write about my writing process, but given that the prompt for the week is “four-letter words”, there’s only really one thing I can think about.
Plague.
No, wait. Disease.
No, sorry. Too fancy.
Sick.
We’re all sick. Everybody in my the house. Sprout the first is sniffling and snuffling and coughing his brains out. Sprout the second has a perpetual river of snot running down her face. Poor wife has been snagged by the grasping claws of the sore throat that I shook off a couple of days ago, and I’ve got the stuffy-headed feeling of a skull stuffed full of mucus. So, we’re all a little bit miserable.
And maybe that’s why this week seemed to stretch out for eternity, as my wife and I both agreed it did. In addition to the regular tribulations of the day, we had to come home to runny noses and coughing fits and the general bad humor of little kids suffering from sickness. Which is enough to take the wind out of anybody’s sails.
And as much as I like to find an inspirational or motivational spin to put on any hurdle to writing, it’s hard to think of much that’s positive to say about this one. There’s no positive to mopping snot off faces and having millions of germs coughed into your face holes by kids who haven’t got the motor control or consideration to even conceive of covering their mouths.
So writing on the project has been at a bare minimum this week. Posts here on the blarg have been next to non-existent. The plague going around the house has taken the mustard right out of my sails. And for all I write about powering through the crap days, writing even when you don’t feel like it, and embracing the work for its own sake for its therapeutic and uplifting properties, even I recognize that there are some days when that just isn’t the case. When you’re sick — really afflicted with something nasty, something physical or chemical that’s keeping you from firing on any of your cylinders, let alone all of them — the only thing to do is to hunker down, chug back a bottle of Nyquil or Pepto or whatever, and wait for the storm to pass.
Luckily, it feels like the storm might be breaking. I feel much better today than in the past couple of days, Sprout the Second’s face is not nearly so crusty this morning, and Sprout the First… well, he’s still coughing fit to serve as the percussion backbeat to a dubstep track.
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Accidentally Inspired 