Today by Billy Collins
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
Yep, today was just that kind of day in western Oregon. Spectacular.
A.A. Milne wrote
Now We Are Six
When I was one I had just begun.
When I was two I was nearly new.
When I was three I was not quite me.
When I was four I was not much more.
When I was five I was just alive.
But now I'm six.
I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now
For ever and ever.
And I wrote
Now We Are Three
Today I'm a pirate
Fierce, proud, scary!
Tomorrow, round and red
I'll be a cherry.
Yesterday it wasn't me
Who got out of my bed.
It was a cow instead.
I went into the kitchen
And mooed for some toast.
Mommy cow smiled at me.
She understands how cows can be.
When I'm a bat
I flap my wings
And let my tongue hang down.
Bats fly in crazy circles
And their tongues are fuzzy brown.
One day I didn't move at all.
I was a leaf. Green and small.
I wasn't fierce. I wasn't tall.
Just very leafy me,
Growing quietly.
Sometimes I roar and show my claws
And Grandpa says, "Now who are you?"
A lion doesn't say his name,
So I just roar and shake my mane.
Last week when we went to the store
I was a worm upon the floor.
Mommy looked at me and sighed.
It's hard to wait for a worm.
They don't walk; they squirm.
I can be a frog. Or a barking dog.
A bug in a bog.
But today I'm a pirate.
Fierce, proud, scary.
Tomorrow round and still,
I'll be a cherry.
In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I am reposting an account which was the inaugural post of my now defunct blog, The Principal's Prattle. Leprechauns never get old.
The school day was punctuated at either end by wide-eyed children with extra bounce in their step. At 8:35, 3rd grade Aileen, dressed in a lime green flare skirt and shiny green tennies, burst into the copy room asking if there were footprints to be found.
"They're all over our classroom! They're everywhere! Any in here?"
And out like a flash with an undulating tail of jibbering followers.
At 3:30 I entered the staff room to check on the St. Patrick's Day pot-luck clean-up crew.
1st grade Xochitl announced, "There were leprechauns in our classroom! They messed up the traps, left fingerprints on the window and one even left his boots behind!"
I followed her to the room to verify the scene of the melee, tsk-tsking all the way that they hadn't managed to catch even one.
Oregon got a sunny day yesterday.
As I raced to the gym for a Battle of the Books assembly, I walked by a kindergarten teacher nestled into a corner of the dusty, lumpy blacktop of the courtyard, bordered by the rusty chain-link fence. She was reading a children's book to her attentive charges seated there in the sun. She wore sunglasses as she displayed the lovely illustrations and read aloud to them.
After the assembly, classes were filing out of the gym and into the gilded daylight. I held the door open, high-fiving kids and commenting on what a respectful audience they had been. A fourth grade boy pointed and said, "Look! The sky looks like a movie!"
We turned and raised our sights above the shrubs to a cerulean sky and its floating cotton ball clouds.
"Yes, Luis. That's a lovely sky. In some parts of the world, you don't have to watch a movie to see a sky like that. In Oregon, it's a special event. Sometimes we see a shooting star at night. Sometimes we see a clear blue sky in the daytime." What a moment.
Character keeps popping up in educational and leadership news lately. In this NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& the writer describes an elite New York private school where standardized tests are eschewed and character again made king. It’s an odd anachronism in the post No Child Left Behind era. George Bush’s sweeping educational law reauthorization ushered in a golden age of entitlement for learners. “My kid gets the grade or else.” As the NCLB vice grip has tightened and schools threatened with increasing sanctions for less than perfect student performance on standardized tests, the competitive frenzy of Obama’s Race to the Top has actually appeared to be an attractive alternative for beaten down and confused educational institutions. Politicians have hit the motherlode: as they perennially characterize schools as failures, their grand coming to the rescue remains a top of the charts hit.
The article quotes Riverdale School’s headmaster, Dominic Randolph. “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure. And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
What? I thought everyone was failing everything.
Yesterday, as another mother rushed to complain about a teacher hurting her son’s feelings by rebuking him, I was again reminded of how things have changed. The new generation of over protective parents and cloistered kids is upon us. As a mother, I have that over-blown impulse too. I want to throw my weight around when a teacher fails to recognize the special talents of my amazing boy and, even worse, dares to miss counting one of his assignments in the grade book, or unfairly scores his quiz. Yep. Guilty.
But who did that for me as a child? No one. At best Mom was un-involved, and at worst either sided with the teacher or engaged the teacher in an embarrassing argument. Which incidentally was never about my specialness. Dad was completely disengaged from my life at school; his job was at Lockheed and mine was at school. His work was classified – he could not have talked about it if he wanted to; and mine at school might as well have been the same. I rode my bike to my own softball practice, and when my catcher’s glove caught in the spokes, took a head-first spill, scraping my thigh and hip raw. I got up, wiped away a tear or two, and continued on without ado. Neither parent ever watched me play any sport. Nor did they peruse my homework. The envelope with my report card could sit on the counter with the junk mail for a full week before anyone bothered to open it.
Flash to now: I’m on the sidelines of every soccer game, yelling words of encouragement and unauthorized advice. Email to teachers prevents the report card from bearing the slightest surprise. I’m engaged.
Which of these approaches is more likely to build character? We all know the answer, don’t we?
Somehow the responsibility meter went haywire in my generation and we’ve all turned into insufferable bosses, unable to relinquish the slightest bit of control to the small extensions of our identity we so smotheringly love.
Enter the Great Recession. Schools are threadbare, yet continue their sweatshop labor under the NCLB lash, pushing the standardized test scores higher, and yes, more students graduate. The college entry stats inch upwards. Everyone believes in himself and his dream, and nothing can stand in his way. Not GPAs, not admissions policies, not tuition costs. We push them through and they graduate, eyes shining and expensive degree in hand, only to land on the doorstep of the real world without the slightest inkling what to do next. No jobs. Housing market in the basement. I guess one way or another, failure eventually comes.
We built our grit and determination as eight year olds in the meandering reaches of the neighborhood, exploring on our own, and taking our licks where we got them. Our children have been pulled indoors by the irresistible allure of bright screens, and protected by an out of whack parental instinct in an increasingly scary world. They will make it to adulthood with children’s lessons yet to learn.
So what’s wrong with advocating for your child? With supporting him in his endeavors and helping him feel good about himself? Nothing. It’s just that when these impulses take honesty hostage, the formula goes sour. A good thing gone rotten. Neglect is not a parenting strategy, no. But healthy boundaries mean exhibiting the self-control to let your child struggle, to let him find his own path, to allow him to experience losses as well as wins, and yes, to allow him to fail. We can empathize without rescuing. We can console without going to war with the loss. Loving your child means believing he can develop the character and grit to overcome obstacles, hone muscles, spark brain cells, and discover his own talents and joy. Loving your child means getting out of the way and letting him become someone. It’s not so much that No Child be Left Behind, but rather that each child have authentic opportunity. That each be allowed to discover his path, in his way and time. Just like we did.
Valentine's Day 2013: the usual elementary school melodrama. Girls come to school in fancy dresses akin to the finery they wear for Fall Picture Day. Every funny little awkward kid believes he will magically have scores of friends for one amazing day. And every year such hopes are cruelly dashed by an imperfect reality. Expectations are in the stratosphere. Yet he still gets out in foursquare. Doesn't get to be line leader. Misses his turn at read aloud because he wasn't paying attention. And the lunch table with the cool kids was full by the time he got there with his tray.
Feelings get hurt. Emotions boil over. Sugar adds volatility. Recess is more of a melee than usual. Hallway lines cannot contain the bursting emotion of the day. Insecure mothers overdo the goody-bags, hoping to ensure their child the popularity they didn't enjoy as a kid. Some even send ostentatious heart balloon bouquets and FTD flowers. It's a mess.
And then on the home front.... boyfriends everywhere choke on the high stakes test. Girlfriends demurely hope for an outlay that perfectly captures their emotional investment. (The only thing worse than failing to get the right attention from someone exciting is getting the wrong attention from someone who is stalking you.) Husbands tread lightly, never sure they will strike the right note. Wives say they don't need any fuss made ... which could either be true or the lie of the year. Stores lose their tenuous hold on any sanity, filling their aisles with red and pink bags of hard brown sugary wax they pass off as chocolate. I don't know if Hallmark really did invent this "holiday" but we have done what we always do in America, we have utterly over-consumed it.
I wrote cards to my loved men, and told my beloved that what I really wanted was simply a card with a heartfelt message from him. (Which was - surprise - the complete truth!)
We went to dinner at Mireille's Bistro - an inspired choice. In a world of mass-produced digitalized schlock, it is original, local, analog - a sensory delight. The food is real, exquisitely prepared, and consistent in quality. A talented accordion player performed live music that imbued the cozy interior with yet more soft delight. I sat next to my husband and we talked while living every moment of the experience.
When one can share such an experience after 19 years of marriage, that is the best Valentine a person can hope to receive. You really do have that one amazing friend on this one amazing day, and even better, more days to come.
On July first, Oregon's new restraint law took effect. Public educators can no longer restrain a child unless the child poses "serious bodily injury to himself or others". Such bodily injury must be of a degree that "a medical doctor would verify injury". No more gripping the hand of a child prone to straying from the ship-shape line. And those tiny runners who like to bolt out of the classroom in the earliest years? No chasing, no grabbing, no holding.
On the first day of school, a five year old sat rooted in his seat and clung to the bus window, refusing to get off the bus to start school.
"Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" he cried.
He was new, a kindergartener, so we did not know who he was.
"What's your name honey?"
"Mommy!" he cried with greater vigor.
We could not call home because we didn't know which family he belonged to. Seven different staff members tried every trick in the book - stuffed animals, affectionate cajoling, promises - no go. He stayed there and cried.
The bus driver was held hostage by an incoherent five year old while we all looked helplessly on. The driver radioed in to let dispatch know he could not continue his route. Fifteen minutes into the siege we called the non-emergency Sheriff's number. The only one who could forcibly remove a child from the bus would be law enforcement. (Now there's an enduring childhood memory - remember when a police officer made you go to kindergarten Johnny?)
Absurd? Absurd.
Fortunately, law enforcement is busy. Pulling small children off buses is not their highest priority. We waited a while. And before the sheriff's deputy arrived, the eighth staff member somehow either wore the child down or struck on the right words to say. The little boy held her hand and descended the bus stairs, ending the standoff.
My school sits on a busy road. Since we cannot physically restrain an impulsive child in motion, we must rely on our words, no? Langston's Hughes' brilliant poem comes to mind.
Baby
Albert!
Hey, Albert!
Don't you play in dat road.
You see 'dem trucks
A goin' by?
One run ovah you,
An' you die!
Albert, don't you play in dat road!
