Sep

19

All hail the good teachers

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During the summer I made a promise to myself that once school got underway I’d volunteer in both Dylan and Riley’s classrooms. I haven’t done this before, and to be completely honest the prospect didn’t particularly hold a ton of appeal, but I know teachers need the help and I’ve got the availability now. Riley’s teacher wasted no time in scheduling me for a couple hours every Thursday, and yesterday I went for the first time.

I was oddly nervous about it beforehand. I mean, I know there’s no real reason to be scared of a bunch of third graders, but … I kind of was. I don’t know, I guess I just had no idea what I was in for, and felt unsure I was up for the task.

When I got to the classroom Riley’s teacher gave me a bunch of little books the kids were supposed to read, and I was assigned to bring small groups to the library and work on reading and comprehension with them. The first group was a little bumpy — I quickly learned that once we were done taking turns reading the book out loud and were supposed to discuss it for the remaining fifteen minutes or so the kids could get pretty distracted and rambunctious. By the second and third groups I’d worked out a better system: I brought them to a section of the library where we could sprawl in a reading nook rather than sit around a table, and once we were done with the books and I’d asked a few questions, I had the kids put on a little play and act out various concepts from the story.

They loved this, and thankfully the library had emptied out by then because they were pretty energetic about it. I don’t really know if that was an acceptable thing for me to do or not, but it really seemed like they needed to move around and shake things off after sitting there listening to their classmates laboriously work through their pages. God, I remember hating that as a kid, the seemingly interminable amount of time it would take slower readers to mumble each word.

So I guess that’s what I’ll be doing each Thursday for a while, at least in Riley’s class (I’ll be helping in Dylan’s in a couple weeks), and that one experience sure gave me a taste for how hard teachers’ jobs really are. Out of one relatively small group of kids, the sheer spectrum of personalities — the obnoxious one! The goofy one! The one who can’t sit still! The one who’s easily distracted! The somewhat rigid rule-follower! (That would be Riley, by the way) The one who’s incredibly shy! — required me to multitask to a degree I’m completely unfamiliar with. Quieting one kid, gently drawing another out, giving one a quick burst of the attention he clearly craves, praising another, and on it went. I went home with circles of sweat under both arms, no kidding.

I ended up thinking how deeply unfair it is to teachers and kids alike that classrooms are so crowded these days. With 30 kids in a room, how can one adult possibly give kids the one on one focus they need? When you have even one kid like the one I met yesterday who I’ll just refer to as the Energy Suck, how is there any space left to really help a kid who’s failing … or just stays under the radar?

I don’t know, but I’m blown away by the folks who can do it. Riley’s teacher is firm, funny, and seems to be able to spin fifty plates at any given time, and it’s goddamned amazing there are so many like him.

Sep

15

Dis-cord

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We’ve been traveling a lot during the weekends over the summer and this past weekend was the first time in a while we’d decided to stay home and relax. Or more specifically, I decided to stay home and relax, while JB decided to tackle a bunch of projects. He’s been working long hours during the week so he had some backup, like stacking a massive amount of firewood in our recently-build structure.

He worked on this at various times during both Saturday and Sunday, while I pulled up a chair nearby and sat with a book. It wasn’t until late yesterday afternoon, after I’d closed my eyes for a half-nap and idly complained about our September heat wave that I sort of realized I hadn’t bothered to help at all. Like not even once did I pick up a single piece of wood. Meanwhile, he was coated head to foot in splinters and dirt while the woodshed steadily filled with fuel that would help keep my lazy ass warm during the winter.

I apologized, more for not even thinking of helping than the fact that I didn’t actually do so, but then I thought of something a friend had told me recently that I greatly enjoyed. She said she’d had a fling with a hot MMA fighter. Nothing serious, but he had this super-smoking body straight out of a men’s magazine, abs you could play in an old-timey jug band, that kind of thing. She said, “You know how sometimes when you’re sticking to a healthy diet and you’re working out and you just get that tantrumy sort of feeling about it all, like where’s my damn medal for having fucking salad? Linda, he was my medal.” This made me laugh and laugh, and that’s how I ended up justifying not helping with the firewood. I pictured every thankless, cyclical household task that I’m solely responsible for — laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping, cooking — and I decided having three cords of wood put away while I essentially reclined with a box of bonbons was my medal.

It turns out I was wholly justified in my inactions, too. Later I found a dirt-smeared towel just sort of tossed over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom and when I asked JB about it, he said he was sorry but he didn’t know where to put it. You guys. My HUSBAND didn’t know where to put a SOILED TOWEL. I’m running that stove 24/7 this December just because.

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