Tagged: kids

the days are just packed

Calvin: Do you know what day it is?
Hobbes: Nope. Why?
Calvin:Oh, no reason. I was just curious. . . . I sure like summer vacation.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

In the spring, the great beneficiary of my employment situation was the dog. She was guaranteed a long walk every morning, in addition to an evening stroll, and had someone with thumbs available to open the back door whenever she found herself on the wrong side of the barrier.

Now it’s the boys who benefit from having me at home. Not that they’re at home much; since school ended, they’ve been roaming in a semi-feral pack up and down the alley between my house and their friend Pat’s. They check in for food, band-aids, and occasional referee services, but otherwise I know where they are just by the relative volume of boy shouts.

I think it’s generally a good thing for kids to have some unstructured, wild, wide-open time in the summer. Normally, they’d be at the park day camp all summer, which involves a lot of supervised playground time but also swimming lessons, group activities, and field trips. Their unstructured time was in the evening, from about four o’clock until the street lights come on; a good chunk of time, but not the kind of unstructured time I remember as a kid. (I feel sometimes like I grew up in the 1950s instead of the 1970s; my mother stayed home until I was about thirteen, and we usually lived in the safe, clean, subtly-supervised world of military housing, which resembled, and may still resemble, Beaver Cleaver’s subdivision.)

Unstructured time with other kids teaches them important lessons in following rules, making decisions, and sticking up for themselves, in addition to wearing them out. I’ve been called in less and less often to referee disagreements, and they seem happy to have found their spot in the pack: as two of the younger kids on the block, they don’t get to call as many tunes, but the other kids recognize that many games are more fun with more participants, so they get included in most activities. They also have a good sense of propriety–some of it natural, some of it subtly instilled through Cub Scouts (I’m a firm believer in Scouting as “a game with a purpose,” and make sure that all of our den meetings include lessons in fair play, inclusiveness, and good sportsmanship)–so I feel comfortable peeking in on them only about once an hour if I don’t hear screaming or smell smoke. I’m not quite the perfect idle parent, but I lean toward that end of the spectrum.

Alas, some structure will be imposed in the next few weeks, whether I find regular employment or not. They’ll be taking some morning classes at the middle school down the street, maybe a little music camp, and evening swimming and baseball. This imposition of structure has been met with significant unhappiness, of course; once they get to a class, they’re enthusiastic and excited, but there’s a hurdle to climb to get there.

A little structure is good for them, I think, and good for me, too. There’s plenty of summer surrounding the morning and evening activities, and I’ll be pressing them into service on another project that will require occasional field trips. Learning how to manage unstructured time is an important lesson, but so is learning to follow Dad’s recommendations.

The Dowling School Archives

Music at Dowling SchoolI’ve started a project to help with the boys’ school’s archives. The school archivist has wrestled a storage room full of papers, wheel chairs, and photographs into a manageable set of shelves and cabinets, and now I’m lending a hand to digitize the films, slides, VHS tapes, and photographs that chronicle over 75 years of educational history. From what little I’ve seen so far, it’s a treasure trove of documents and images; when it’s done, we should have a collection that students, teachers, and parents can use, with many of the original materials maintained at the Minnesota Historical Society archives.

Dowling Urban Environmental School began as the Michael Dowling School for Crippled Children in the 1920s. It has a swimming pool, built by the WPA and dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt, that was designed to help rehabilitate kids with polio, and an outdoor complex of ramps and stairs used in therapy. Although the school became a place for “regular” kids in the 1980s, it still has a large and respected special education program that is well-integrated into the school; Jack and Peter have helped out in the special-ed classes, and seem quite comfortable around kids who often have severe physical and mental handicaps.

On the grounds of the school is also a community garden that began in the 1940s as a “Victory Garden.” (I’ve taken many pictures there.) An outdoor learning center was built in 1971, which forms the core of the urban environmental magnet program at the school. Kids get fresh air, hone their observational skills, and learn about the natural world.

My first project for the archives is scanning a scrapbook put together by Miss Beulah Taylor, who taught at the school from the ’20s through the ’50s. The scrapbook is full of newspaper clippings about the school and neighborhood; it’s an interesting hodge-podge of human interest stories about plucky kids overcoming their disabilities, Cub Scouts doing service projects, and obituaries of students, teachers, and neighborhood people. The pages are laminated, making them both indestructible and difficult to work with, but I’m up for the challenge.

Obviously, as a writer and a history and photography buff, I’ve got ulterior motives: I want the archives to be easy for the school community to use, but I also can’t wait to dig into the deep history collected there. So many stories!

My scanning is going to be slowed down a bit by field trips, though. I was informed on the way home yesterday that I’ve volunteered to go with the second grade on three end-of-the-year trips (Peter let me know by asking if I would be taking the bus or driving myself; after a quick talk with his teacher, we decided I’d take the bus). I can think of worse things than spending three days with the second grade, so I’m happy to be pressed into service.

Hats

When I was eight,
I kept a picture on my wall
of my father, another man,
and a sea of smiling children.
Behind them was a helicopter
(black in my picture, green in Asia)
and in front of them
(though not in my picture)
were little homes of straw and mud.
In my picture,
he was not much older than I am now.

Not much older,
as I walk along Caille Duarte,
stepping over goat shit and mango pits,
greeted by four little boys
yelling, “Hola, Miguel! Miguel!”
I lose my straw hat to them,
I juggle stones and mangoes for them,
I chase them over cracked pavement
and past rusted barbed wire
covered with wet clothes.
They chatter at me,
as they must have chattered at him,
and I am powerless against their talk
and their tugs and their laughter.

Little Juan took me home one day–
grabbed my hand and my hat after Mass
and led me from the church to the river
on the edge of town, where his mother
kept a tin-roofed shack.
How proud he was of his, pig, his puppy,
his swing made of a stick and a rope!
He climbed into trees for fruit to give me,
and he threw round stones to knock mangoes loose
then led me back to the pastor’s house
and I gave away all my mangoes
walking back to Caille Duarte.

My hat always disappeared during Mass,
as though it crept stealthily
from under my seat and then flitted
from head to tiny head like a yellow-brown parrot.
I always retrieved it from a little cabellero
who wore it nearer his chin than his ears.
Now it’s torn and cracked in places
where small fingers plucked it roughly
like a hard yellow mango.

When I was eight,
I asked my father what had happened
to those children who hung on his arms,
and passed his green hat from head to head.
When I was eight,
he told me that they had to lock him in a room
when that village was burned,
and that he still feels rage at that fire.
If they had lived,
they would be not much older than me.

When I was in the Dominican Republic, I was a favorite of the little kids, who stole my hat and gave me fruit; I could juggle, sing silly songs, and was always up for a game of tag. Kids are great: fearless, funny, and resilient.

My father loved kids, too, and I had a picture of him, snapped for the Stars & Stripes newspaper, playing with a bunch of kids in Vietnam. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that many of those kids were later killed by the Viet Cong, because the village had been too friendly to the Americans. Of course, a good many kids were also killed by the ARVN or American bombs because their villages were too friendly to the VC. One of the many horrors of war is that friendliness can kill you.

I suppose I have a somewhat rosy view of American soldiers because of my father (and my grandfather, who passed out chocolate and gum to kids in Belgium and Germany during the Second World War); at their best, they’re overgrown kids themselves, even though they’re often called upon to do things horribly un-kid-like. The soldiers in the Dominican Republic were a different breed entirely: they swaggered around, swinging their rifles, buoyed by their unquestionable power, bullies every one. Thuggery in arms is a terrifying thing to see.

Of all my leftover poems of twenty years ago, I like this one the best, and I think I’ll end the series with it.

Unemployment Diary: A Mob of Solid Bliss

They storm the earth and stun the air,
A mob of solid bliss.
Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
For such a foe as this!

Saturday Afternoon by Emily Dickinson

March 27, 2009

Today was a good day. There were no “leads” from recruiters, no “updates” on “opportunities” that had suddenly dried up in the harsh sun of fear and trepidation, no new job postings on the Internet. Instead, I spent the afternoon with a bunch of second graders.

In the boys’ classes, each student has a week of being the “star,” which culminates in a visit from a family member. Usually, Kelly and I take turns on the visit. In Kindergarten, I read a book about moose on Peter’s day, and Kelly presented areal photos of the school on Jack’s; in first grade, I showed scale models of mountains and talked about Mount Washington to Peter’s class, and Kelly showed storm sewer plans and pictures; and this fall, I gave a knot tying demonstration to Jack’s class. Peter’s day should have been Kelly’s turn, but given my current situation it made sense for me to do a repeat performance.

Peter’s favorite thing in the world is visiting his grandfather in Maine. We ride his little Koboda dump truck in the woods, build tree forts, go kayaking on North Pond, and search for the elusive moose. So he wanted me to give a talk about Maine to his class.

I talked about some of the similarities between Maine and Minnesota: the climate, the wildlife, the geology. They had covered some American tall tales earlier in the year, so I told some Paul Bunyan stories (Paul being a native of Bangor, Maine, who came west with the lumberjacks). I talked about some Maine writers they might know about: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Portland native, gave his name to our Minneapolis neighborhood, and wrote about Minnehaha Falls, though he never visited; E.B. White, whom they all knew through Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, summered in Maine; and Robert McCloskey wrote two of his best books about Maine–Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine–and big drawings from Make Way for Ducklings are on the walls in the downtown St. Paul Library. The kids, who sat on the rug in front of me, were engaged, often raising their hands with comments and questions, and it was a fun back and forth.

When I brought out some rocks and minerals from Maine, though, the floodgates opened. As I learned at a Cub Scout meeting about collections, kids love rocks. Everyone had a favorite kind of rock, many had rock tumblers, and all of them had really good and astute questions about geology; I was well out of my depth, and I asked them as many questions as they asked me. Kids are really smart about the things they love.

After my talk, which took about half an hour and flew by quickly, I was invited to join them on the playground for recess. Peter usually spends his recess spinning a jump rope with his teacher–he doesn’t jump himself, but he loves turning the rope. But he insisted that we play tag, and joined in for a rollicking session with more than half the

kids in the class while the rest jumped rope or played on the slides. I was surprised at how good natured the tag game was: no shoving, no yelling, no arguing about who was “it,” just a lot of running and laughing with an insistence on full participation by everyone. I was the main target of tagging, maybe because I’m old and slow, but I did my best to keep up with them.

When the whistle blew, I was out of breath, probably red in the face, and sorry to have my recess come to an end. I helped herd them inside for a drink of water and their last lessons, and scurried off to the coffee shop down the street to catch my breath and wait for the end of the school day.

I like kids a lot more than I like most adults, especially elementary school kids. There’s no pretense or bragging among second-graders; if they tell you they like something, they mean it; if they boast about an accomplishment, it’s because they’re sincerely proud of it. They also don’t hide their boredom; if you’re not interesting them, they’ll let you know, with no subtlety or attempts to protect your feelings. Kids live on the edge, with their emotions always close to the surface, and, at least at the boys’ school, they still have their curiosity and sense of wonder intact. They’re eager to learn, and if you can present the material in an engaging way that aims to their level without talking down to them, I’m convinced they can be taught anything. And with that boundless energy behind them, a gang of second-graders with a purpose is unstoppable.

After school, we went to the library to look for books about the Titanic–the boys’ current obsession–and pick up Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary which I had ordered a couple weeks ago. We ran into another of my Cub Scouts there, and the three of them lay down in the middle of the floor to pore over a pop-up book about the doomed unsinkable ship. (It’s a great book, by the way, very cleverly done and packed with facts, but it does seem a grim topic for a pop-up …) If I didn’t have to get home to fix supper, I’m sure they’d be there still.

I’ve given some thought to making a career change, and becoming a teacher. I’ve always been a “kid magnet,” even before I had my own, and I love my Cub Scout den and pack. Teaching is hard and exhausting work, and far too poorly compensated (why is it that we pay people so well at AIG and CitiBank to so badly manage our money, but pay teachers so poorly to educate and nurture our children?), but it’s work that means something. Finish a software project on time and on budget, and you’ll get a little praise, maybe a raise, but the world won’t likely be any better or worse than it was without that project; teach a kid to read, or work with fractions, or about the life cycle of the moose, and if you’ve done it right you’ve changed a life.

I used to approach software with a sense of wonder and excitement, and in my last job often had a chance to be creative and playful, but the fun has really drained from it in the last few years. Even though I was tired after my brief visit to second grade, and was kept on my toes with questions that came faster and more insistently than in any technical interview, I came away from the school energized in a way I haven’t felt for years.

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