Second grade class play

It’s a busy week of end-of-year school events. Tim’s concert was Monday; Holly’s class play was yesterday.

Everything about my kids’ classrooms, year after year, reminds me of how nurtured they are at our local public school. The bulletin board displays; the carefully organized schedules the teachers post; the classroom libraries; the art supplies; the accessibility the students have to all of it. And I just can’t believe my children are so lucky, so well cared for and so much cared about. I know how much I love and care about them; I’m their mother. But it’s so much more than I expect from a school system, and yet the message is irrefutable whenever I’m on campus: this is a place where we help children learn and develop.

It goes without saying that you really can’t watch a second grade play without a touch of weepiness. The kids are just so genuinely proud of themselves, and the play itself represented such a rich and multi-faceted learning module: they studied folk tales, they learned songs, they designed sets and costumes, they practiced one of the songs in sign language. It’s not just a performance; it’s a display of cross-curricular education. Putting on a play requires other skills when you’re in second grade too. You learn to listen carefully as you wait for your cues. You practice working together with your classmates to create something that involves everyone. I think it was even a little workout for their organizational skills, as they learned to keep track of all the different pieces of their costumes and store them properly after each performance during the week-long series of shows.

Every school year ends with some kind of classroom event, and every year it’s hard for me to face the fact that another school year is over. I always feel like the kids have learned and developed so much in each respective class; I’m reluctant to give up the rapport they’ve developed with their teacher and classmates, even knowing that it will all start again in another three months.

Sitting on a diminutive molded plastic seat watching the kids dressed as rainforest creatures and acting out a folk tale, I felt all of these things: the nostalgia, the sentimentality, the admiration for all they’d learned, the bittersweetness of saying goodbye to another great school year. And I also felt the unfairness of it, the injustice that my children and their classmates have so much that can’t possibly be distributed where it is most needed. While Holly and her peers prance their way through the rainforest of their classroom, children in Haiti are still living in mud-drenched tents. School is becoming a distant memory for them; now they don’t have homes, they don’t have schools, many of them don’t even have parents. And here we are with the most wonderful second grade teacher and campus and resources a family could ever want. It’s so hard to face the fact that most children have so much less.

Holly knows this only very vaguely, I think. She was proud of her class’s performance of their rainforest folk tale, and she was excited that she got to take her monkey costume home at the end. She doesn’t understand what a rare gift all of this is: a comfortable well-furnished school, a caring and expert teacher. Even parents to fill up the seats in the audience. Someday she’ll know; she’ll see it from an adult perspective. Someday maybe she’ll work to lessen the injustice just a little bit. For now, she’s happy that I took a video of the performance for Rick to see. And for now, that will have to be enough.

Lunch/recess duty on a rainy Tuesday

One could argue that my having volunteer lunch/recess duty for both the second grade and fifth grade yesterday smacked of divine justice. After all, what I did back in September was subversive. Each parent who is available to volunteer for lunch/recess duty is urged to sign up for one regularly recurring day a month: say, first Tuesdays or fourth Fridays or whatever. Parents like me, who would rather have gum surgery than be lunch/recess volunteers but still believe deep in their hearts that school volunteering is the price we pay for the luxury of being self-employed and working from home, sign up first – and grab the coveted fifth days. The fifth Monday, the fifth Tuesday, and so on. Most months, there’s only four of each day; fifths of each one come along only a few times a year, and some of those months are bound to be during vacations. So we grab the fifths and consider our responsibilities fulfilled.

Rather like gum surgery, when I noted fifth Tuesday lunch coverage in my appointment book last fall, March seemed as far off as the next millennium. Eventually, though, it was time to pay the piper. And it served me right for my sneakiness that my day to supervise lunch and recess along with a paid aide and a few other volunteers fell on Day 2 of a massive three-day rainstorm at the end of the rainiest March in Massachusetts history. Little kids cooped up for lunch and indoor recess when it’s been pouring for days on end? Some might say I got just what I deserved.

Except I had a pretty good time. It turns out when you work by yourself six hours a day, immersing yourself in elementary school clamor for two hours is a fine diversion. Normally I dread the lunchroom. Our school cafeteria, though well-lit, spacious and relatively clean, always puts me in mind of that urban myth that pervades at universities all over the country about architects who designed the library without taking into account the weight of the books, so the structure is supposedly sinking into the ground by several inches a year. I’m convinced that the team who designed and built our school cafeteria neglected to think about the noise generated by 200 kids eating lunch together at once. The acoustics are deadly; the volume at times barrier-breaking.

But yesterday it didn’t seem so bad, and neither did the indoor recesses I supervised, one in the fifth grade classroom and one with the second graders. When I arrived in the fifth grade room, the teacher had just started showing an animated film about the build-up to the American Revolution. I was amused at how the kids seemed glued to the screen. Maybe it was the Disney-ish visuals, but they appeared compelled by the movie. And they knew their history, too. When a slim African-American woman was asked who she was and her companion replied tartly, “Only the first-ever African-American to publish a volume of poetry!” at least half the kids called out, “Phillis Wheatley!” When Benjamin Franklin’s apprentice described how his mentor’s lightning rod had saved his life during a storm, the audience cheered.

The children had use of two connected classrooms; those who were not watching the film were in other room talking, reading or playing games. I dropped in there to see what was going on and found my son and three other boys batting a beanbag ball back and forth with their hands. “Hi, Nancy!” yelled one of Tim’s best friends, dispensing immediately with the typical classroom formalities of Mr. and Mrs. I was pleasantly surprised to get such a warm welcome.

The second graders were a little less resourceful in their use of indoor recess, but they won me over anyway by making me feel useful. Two boys were tossing a nerf football when it arced up to a high shelf and got stuck behind a folded blanket. They asked me to get it down. Only in a roomful of second graders do I have the honor of being the tallest person in the room, but I felt terribly useful as I climbed onto the chair one of them brought me and fumbled around until my fingers located the nerf ball. They cheered when I tossed it down. And that wasn’t the end of my usefulness. I used my well-honed mediation skills to head off an imminent fist fight over Legos (“The fact is, Jeff, even if you think the red one was in your pile and Ryan says it was in his, there’s five hundred others just like it in this bin”) and solved another child’s problem by proving myself able to sound out the word toboggan. A useful lesson for me: If you want to feel clever, strong, physically capable and generally important, go spend an hour with a classroom full of second graders.

Plus I got presents. While the boys played with Legos and nerf footballs, the girls were coloring. And to my great surprise, many of them gave me artwork to take home. One made a flowered bookmark for me. Another made a picture of a pink cat, and a third drew a sketch of herself throwing up. As I mentioned, it was pouring outside, so I can’t say any of those gifts survived beyond the school parking lot, but I was delighted with my haul.

So maybe next year I’ll be more generous and sign up for a real commitment, not the Cheater’s Fifths as I like to think of those fifth days. But maybe I won’t. I wouldn’t want the novelty to wear off. And once the kids grow tall enough to reach their own nerf balls down from the upper shelf, I might find myself far less in demand during indoor recess.

Family homework: not my favorite part of second grade

Family homework. The bane of my existence these days.

Most weeks, the kids come home with straightforward assignments they can do on their own, and my job is to make sure they apply backside to desk chair and execute the required task: researching Malcolm X, say, or filling in a multiplication table, or logging the reading they did for the week. Once in a while, though, they arrive from school brandishing the dreaded “family homework” – which means me giving up my evening for something their teachers insist will be fun for all of us.

I adore my children’s teachers – every single one they’ve ever had, in fact – and it’s very unlike me to vent so irritably about anything done by the faculty or staff at our school. After all, not only have my children had six and three great years there, respectively, but it’s the very same school that generated me, so how can I complain?

Well, if you saw the condition of the inside of my microwave this morning, you might understand.

Holly’s homework last night (and, in fairness to her teacher, I have to admit she brought home the assignment four days earlier, but no, we didn’t actually get it started until last night) was the ever-popular “giving specific instructions” exercise. I remember doing the same thing in elementary school: the kids called out instructions for making a peanut butter sandwich while the teacher generated hilarity by sticking the bread peanut butter side down on the counter, thereby pointing out the gaps in specificity (“We forgot to say ‘Use a plate!’ We forgot to say which sides of the bread to stick together!”). Now it’s a written, take-home assignment rather than an in-class one, and I think I know why. Why should the teachers get themselves covered in messy ingredients that they then have to clean up if they can stick the parents with that job instead?

I know this all sounds unduly cynical. My kids have truly wonderful teachers and they learn so much at school. I’m just crabby because Holly decided for her “recipe” to have me make her favorite chocolate-coconut haystacks, and the homework sheet she brought home encouraged parents to take the kids’ words as literally as possible and, yes, to “be silly with it.” So when Holly said to put a half-cup of chocolate chips in the microwave but didn’t mention a mixing bowl, I dumped the chocolate on the bottom of the microwave and pressed start. Yuck. When she said to mold the melted chocolate into balls but didn’t refer to spoons, I stuck my hands on in. Yuck again. And when she incorrectly said to sprinkle on the shredded coconut after cooling the chocolate lumps rather than while the chocolate was still molten, I watched coconut drift all over the kitchen counter.

Ah, family homework. I don’t mind helping with the big projects – the Native American village dioramas or the photograph-local-landmarks assignments – because I understand a seven-year-old couldn’t do those alone, and the school always gives us several weeks for those projects. It’s the regular weeknight assignments that frustrate me. I routinely come across quotes from college administrators complaining about so-called helicopter parents – and yet how much can they blame parents for being overly involved with their college-aged children’s work if the precedent is set in grade school that schoolwork is a family affair? As I grumble to my kids, I don’t ask for their help writing articles; that’s my job, and homework should be theirs.

Our pediatrician sympathizes with my griping. Fortunately for me, she has kids the same ages as mine. She told me that in a recent fit of pique during a family homework exercise that she didn’t feel she had time to do, she said to her daughter, “Guess what? I’ve already done second grade! And I passed it, too! It would have been really hard to get into medical school otherwise!”

In any case, Holly completed her homework. And as soon as I finish scrubbing burnt chocolate off the inside of the microwave, I know we’ll both feel a great sense of accomplishment. I just hope we get a really good grade.

Does self-publishing my 7-year-old's book make me the Biggest Helicopter Parent ever?

In my experience, children learn very young that it can be more fun to give than to receive, even around Christmas time. Children love to make projects and present them to adults, buoyed with pride at their artistic accomplishments as well as the excitement of surprising a parent or grandparent with something special.

Even knowing that, I admit that what we did this holiday season was a little bit extreme. After Holly spent several weeks this fall dictating a chapter book of her own invention to me, I was faced with the decision about what to do with the final, 11,000-word, 72-page, 19-chapter opus. I decided to self-publish it on Lulu.com. Giving copies of her newly published – and absolutely professional-looking – novel to librarians, teachers, friends and family this month was surely a thrilling experience for Holly, and I admit that I looked on with plenty of pride of my own. But I also have to admit that in some ways, I feel like this makes me the biggest helicopter parent ever. Holly made up some stories, like lots of kids do. But I paid money to have her stories cooked into a professionally produced book, and in all honesty it does feel a little weird.

Primarily, I wonder if it gives her the wrong idea about what it means to write a book. I’ve been writing stories since I was her age and have been a professional journalist and copywriter for nearly twenty years – and I still don’t have a published book to my credit, though I’m working hard at it and so’s my agent. But in a way, that’s why it feels all the more duplicitous. I spent two years writing and revising a book, signed with a terrific literary agent, and am still seeking a publisher – whereas Holly wrote a book and two weeks after finishing it had a box of ten beautifully styled copies arrive in the mail. We cheated, I sometimes feel like telling her. It’s not really that easy.

And I can’t help but wonder if some of the other kids who have seen her book – or their parents – wonder at our ethics. In an informal discussion recently about the popular second-grade trend of eraser trading, her teacher referred to the “haves and the have-nots,” and I have to admit those words are echoing in my head as Holly proudly wraps and distributes copies of her new book. The cost really wasn’t much – with shipping, it comes out to about $8 per copy – but the fact remains that this was something we were able to pay for; we paid for the opportunity to have our child feel like a published author, where other parents possibly couldn’t spend money on that particular luxury.

In the end, my defense is that I’m rewarding not Holly’s talent but her effort and her commitment to this project. Lots of kids write stories – in my experience, just about all kids her age like to write stories – but not many are able to stick with one (albeit loosely formed) plot and one set of (albeit highly derivate) characters for two months as the nineteen chapters unfolded. And true, not every seven-year-old has a mom willing to sit at her desk night after night taking dictation, but the whole process was so delightful for me – I have a glass desk, and Holly lay on her back under it, staring up at me and letting the narrative bubble forth so that I had to type my fastest to keep up with her dialogue and plot turns – that I know I’ll remember those evenings for a long, long time.

Yes, it’s a charming but not brilliantly crafted book. As my twelve-year-old niece, a budding book critic in her own right, pointed out, the main character wishes she had a dog on the first page, doesn’t say a word about dogs for the next 71 pages, and then gets a dog on the last page. And those familiar with children’s literature will probably be able to guess with a significant degree of accuracy what three books Holly read most recently before she started writing “Louise and Mindy” (Did I already say ‘highly derivative’?).

But I think in the end, it’s okay. Holly has started her next book, but not with the same passion; we work on it a couple of times a week, not every night, and I doubt we’ll turn it into a published masterpiece when we’re done. In fact, we might never self-publish another work of hers. But this time it was worth it. For one thing, I’ve been casually investigating the idea of writing a commemorative volume for a corporate client, and it was useful for me to learn how to work with Lulu.com. Holly has a keepsake to remind her of fall of the year she was seven, and so do ten of her closest relatives, friends, teachers and librarians. Self-publishing is controversial in the literary world for these very reasons: in some respects it bestows professional status on a work that hasn’t earned that status, although in many contexts it certainly has an appropriate role. But for Holly, I’d like to think it’s a taste of things to come. Someday maybe she’ll get published for real, and if that happens, my hope is that she’ll look back and see this as at least part of her motivation for reaching that milestone.

Crazy Hair Day versus the Nobel Peace Prize

The timing struck me as particularly amusing. I had just finished listening to a re-broadcast of President Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize when the e-mail arrived from Holly's second grade teacher. "Because the children have done so many good deeds and acts of kindness recently, tomorrow is going to be Crazy Hair Day," she wrote. I submitted to the impulse to reply immediately. "Crazy hair day? And all President Obama got for his good deeds and acts of kindness was the Nobel Prize!" Of course, his deeds are still a little incomplete. Maybe crazy hair day at the White House is yet to come.

I have every confidence that the teachers at my kids' school know far more about children than I do, but I'm frequently surprised by how they reward large-scale good behavior. I think one reason this has become such a prominent issue recently is that a couple of years ago, our school made significant advances toward becoming a snack-free classroom zone. With the start of a new school year, it became widespread policy that classroom celebrations -- ranging from individual kids' birthdays to Halloween and Valentine's parties to classroom plays -- bypassed any kind of refreshments. As a result, the teachers now seem to strive harder to find ways to mark celebrations that once would have simply required cupcakes or mini chocolate bars.

It seems that every few months both of my kids' classes earn a special celebration for good behavior. Holly's classroom uses the term "compliment chain," which means that a paper link is added to a chain whenever a child earns a compliment. (I think it would be kind of fun to do the reverse as well -- ruthlessly rip paper links off the chain when a child deserved an insult -- but as far as I know, that is not considered an effective classroom discipline method.) Little did I know, when I wrote to Holly's teacher after having indoor recess duty one day last month to say how impressed I was with the kids' resourcefulness and lack of rowdiness during the half-hour I supervised, that they would earn four compliments as a result. I'm not sure exactly how my words were parsed out into four compliments (though knowing me, it's altogether likely that I used four complimentary adjectives, and probably at least that many adverbs), but I was happy to be an agent of their success as they worked toward the next big event.

And now they've reached their big reward: Crazy Hair Day. This is the first crazy hair day they've had this year; other analogous rewards in both kids' classes over the years have included pajama day, stuffed animal day and movie hour. Pajama Day has never been a favorite of mine. First of all, every year I assume it's the last grade in which this reward will be bestowed; but so far we haven't aged out yet. Aren't fifth graders too old to wear pajamas to school? I also think it's unsanitary to have pajama pant cuffs drifting across the bathroom and cafeteria floors, although I can see the argument that it's no different from other clothing in that respect. Pajamas just seem more porous somehow. And I'm always concerned my kids and I will forget they wore those same pajamas to school and go to bed in them that night, cafeteria crumbs and all. Ick. Stuffed animal day is fine with me -- innocuous and cute, in my opinion -- but a recent lice outbreak put an end to any extraneous items with soft, absorbent surfaces in the classroom.

Naturally, all of these rewards are optional on the kids' part. Holly said last night she couldn't decide whether she'd do Crazy Hair Day or not, and when she left for school this morning it looked to me like she'd made a compromise along the lines of Uncombed Hair Day. But it made me think about all the rewards I could benefit from, if my friends and I decided to start rewarding ourselves with theme days rather than with whipped-cream-topped coffee drinks. Frizzy Hair Day would be great in the middle of August. I Feel Fat Day would suit me just fine in early January, and Wear Your Oldest Clothes Day would make me feel a little less insecure about my wardrobe.

President Obama looked pleased with his Nobel Prize, but his acceptance speech underscored how much work he believes he still needs to do in order to be truly deserving of it. Holly had no such reservations about Crazy Hair Day. She seemed certain that her class earned its one hundred compliments. I hope Crazy Hair Day is enough fun that it serves to motivate Holly and her classmates ever onward onto greater accomplishments. Who knows, maybe someday she'll accept a Nobel Prize of her own. And maybe that will even inspire her to comb her hair. Or maybe she'll just ask the King and Queen of Denmark if they'd consider proclaiming a nationwide Pajama Day instead.

First day of school

The first day of school was wonderfully satisfying for all of us. I wish I could replay every day this year the scene in which Tim told me all his news. He was exuberant, which is so unlike him. He was gasping and his tongue was tripping over the words as he tried to tell me all the highlights of fifth grade so far -- most of which simply seem to involve the kids having an increase in autonomy and responsibility.

I wish the enthusiasm and sense of novelty he was experiencing today could never wear off -- he is just so thrilled about being a fifth grader, which in Carlisle means more variety in teachers, classrooms and classmates than the elementary grades have, as well as the option of "homework club" after school and the freedom to leave campus at the end of the day under their own steam. As far as Tim is concerned, the most exciting part of the whole curriculum is the daily planner each student received, in which there are spaces for them to record their homework assignments, due dates, completed dates, etc. To see him brimming with excitement, his pale face beaming and his dark eyes flashing, just delights me to no end. Over a daily planner, no less. As Rick said, "Imagine when he gets his first PDA!"

Meanwhile, Holly kept interrupting him to interject tales of her first day of second grade, most of which involved how much she adores her new teacher and how happy she was to see her two first grade teachers during the day. I feel so fortunate that they are both happy in school. Yesterday I was replete with anxieties all day, anxieties about a new school year, ranging in magnitude from whether Holly's new book bag would be too heavy for her (it's not) to the potential for violence on campus to the likelihood that I would forget to pack a snack or lunch money to the daily challenge of getting out the door on time. Everything was worrying me yesterday. Tonight I know they are both happy to be back at school, and it is enormously reassuring. My children see school as a place they are cared for, nourished intellectually and emotionally, and granted a degree of importance, and that makes them see it as their home. I so hope that there are children everywhere who are just as lucky as they start school this fall.

Running Streak Day 753 - I did 2.5 miles in the bright sunshine of late morning.