Regarding Teachers

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. 

 — Henry Adams 

(1838-1918)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are teachers and those who are not. 

Some of my best friends are teachers, including my mother, who has never really forgiven me (or my brother) for not following in her footsteps. 

If you are lucky, you will experience at least one truly wonderful teacher in your life. If you do, you will carry that memory and those lessons with you forever, even if you didn't recognize the gift at the time.  

We've all heard the claims about the cushy lives teachers lead: short hours, great vacations, summers off and autonomy in the classroom. Don't you believe it. Teaching is hard. How do I know? Well, my mother and my teacher friends have told me their horror stories. As a parent, I've observed nearly 100 teachers who have had the herculean task great pleasure of trying to meet the disparate learning needs of my four very different children. And now I'm experiencing it first hand as a newly minted substitute teacher. Let me tell you, it's been an eye-opening experience.

While I have taught before — everything from preschool through graduate-level adults — I am not a teacher in the traditional sense of the word. My formal ed school experience was limited to one disastrous semester my sophomore year (don't ask). 

In many ways, teaching is like parenting: it's the constant, all day, every day nature of the thing that will drag you down. In the course of any given day a teacher, in addition to educating her students, will be called upon to act as: manager, nurse, cop, judge, disciplinarian, mediator, secretary, parent, social worker, guidance counselor and confessor, to name just a few.

Unlike parenting, teachers don't have the biological or emotional imperative to work toward the success of their students. They must summon from within themselves the dedication, perseverance, sense of humor, and something else — a certain je ne sais quoi — that enables them to try to reach a new group of students every year. You can't pick and choose your students; all are strangers in the beginning and some are very hard to like. From all reports, it's the ability to touch a student in some profound way that keeps teachers coming back September after September, despite mediocre pay, little respect and lots of contagious diseases.

I don't think substitutes get those same kinds of warm fuzzies. Substitute teaching is like babysitting — your primary responsibility is to keep everyone safe and busy until the real deal returns. In just a few days of subbing, I've learned that group dynamics are everything, you have to set the tone in the first 60 seconds, and that the most important asset for a teacher (substitute or otherwise) is a sense of humor.

As I started on this journey, I sought advice from a variety of sources. My mother told me not to be late and to dress professionally. My 17-year-old daughter told me to be sure to introduce myself and:  "Don't pretend to know something you don't know. You'll just look like an idiot." My teacher friends told me not to complain about anything. Absent teachers don't want to know that Johnny was throwing spit wads, or that Sally and Amy wouldn't shut up, or that A.J. tried to scam 15 extra minutes of recess. Unless the building burns down, the absent teacher just wants to pick up where she left off.

I also had the opportunity to learn from a 20-year veteran, Phillip Done, an award winning teacher who recently published 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching. Whether you're a teacher or a principal, a parent or a truck driver, whether you've had a third grader or only been one, this witty little treasure will keep you laughing while teaching you everything Mr. Done has ever learned.

Mr. Done is a real teacher. He knows this because he has sung "Happy Birthday" 657 times; he can fix zippers that won't zip; and he can make a totem pole out of oatmeal boxes. In these short, clever tales that cover the school year, Done takes us from pie-eating contests through third grade musicals. He laments his annual first-day-of-winter-break virus:

"Why does this happen to me every December? I was so careful this year too. I handed out Kleenex every morning when the kids walked through the door … Next year this will not happen. Next year if I hear so much as a sniffle, I'm not letting any of them into the classroom without a note from the surgeon general."

He extols the value and virtues of garage saling for teachers:

"I walked over to one of the boxes, put down my coffee mug, and started to shake. The boxes were filled with Madelines and Babars, and Encyclopedia Browns and Nancy Drews in almost perfect condition! This was better than Vegas!"

He admonishes the late, great Roald Dahl for using the word "ass" in chapter 6 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

"Do you know what it's like having a classroom full of third graders read that word? Do you? Let me explain what happens … This year was one of the worst. Melanie said she's telling her mother that I swore in class. And Justin? Justin had to be rushed to the nurse's office for oxygen. Quite frankly, Mr. Dahl, I'm trying to have a nice reading hour, and you're ruining it!"

I cried when Katie, who was to be a tree in the class musical, reminded Mr. Done why he does a musical with 90 third graders every year. I was touched when Phil took French lessons and learned all over again how really hard it is to be a student. And I'm still laughing at his passionate, but tragic love affair with the laminating machine. 

So, thank you Mr. Done, for teaching me about being a teacher and a student. I'll carry you with me on my next substituting assignment, laughing all the way.

Tell me about your favorite teacher or what made you laugh in Phil Done's book by clicking here.

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Help, My Son is Morphing into an Avatar — CMB Post

This was originally posted on the now defunct Chicago Moms Blog.

There is something familiar about the figure slouched in the office chair, face aglow in the eerie light of the monitor. I can still see traces of that sweet little boy who used to talk my ear off, but it's hard to recognize him, since I only ever see him in profile anymore, and his earphones tether him to his computer. There is an occasional deep-voiced giggle over the latest Dane Cook video, but otherwise just the quiet, rhythmic tap dance of keyboard and mouse clicks.

I know I'm not the only mother who fears losing her teenage son to screens, but I'm kept awake at night with visions of him actually falling into his monitor and becoming an avatar. If I look closely, I swear I can see the edges of his face turning into thick dark lines, while his visage flattens into two dimensions in Web-ready colors. The sad thing is, I think this is a fate he would welcome.

My son, now 17, was born 16 weeks prematurely. While he is doing great given his desperate prognosis at birth, he struggles with ADD, a short-term memory deficit, delayed social skills and a few other learning disabilities. It's ironic to me that a child who has difficulty concentrating can become utterly engrossed in the artificial world of video games, but this is a common scenario. According to Larry Silver, MD, video games hold particular appeal to kids and teens with ADD: "A child who's bothered by distractibilty in the real world may be capable of intense focus, or hyperfocus, while playing," says Silver. "For children who struggle with social skills, or lack the skills to play team sports, these games entertain and level the playing field. Computer games are emotionally safe."

That's my son in a nutshell. So, what's a mom to do? We recognized early on that technology was this particular child's friend. With poor graphomotor skills, he needs the computer to communicate his thoughts. His handwriting is large and difficult to read and we have discovered over the years that he actually produces more writing, both in terms of quantity and quality, when he types. With poor organizational skills, the capacity to email work back and forth between home and school has greatly improved his ability to complete assignments and turn work in on time.

But it is his poor executive functioning abilities, those areas of the brain that allow you to monitor yourself in goal-directed behavior, that stymie our efforts to help him use the computer to its greatest advantage while setting reasonable limits on screen time. We've tried everything:

We moved his computer into a public space in our house. It used to be in his bedroom and we never saw him. He'd hole up there, with the door closed and lights out, clicking away all hours of the day and night. Moving his computer into the dining room has allowed us to monitor the time he spends online, see exactly what he is doing and get his attention when we need him to do something else.

We have tried timers over the years for a variety of purposes, with little or no success. The best timers are programmable ones, where we set his computer with a password that only allows him access for certain times during the day. This works fairly well, since there is no arguing about "five more minutes" or "wait until I get to the next level," but with a high schooler who has legitimate school-related computer needs, the passwords can get in the way in a busy household. We are working on a system that will allow him access to some Websites all the time, while limiting access to other sites except during proscribed hours.

• We have tried to use screens as a carrot, rather than always chasing them with a stick. This, too, has had limited success with a child who has no sense of time and no goal-setting abilities. The first consequence is always loss of screen time; the first reward is always extra screen time. This is the only reward or punishment that has any meaning for him.
• Screen time is measured in aggregate: computer plus video games plus television equals your total allotment of screen time. It used to be that we would shut him down on one screen and he would simply move on to another.
• No handhelds allowed. It has been nearly impossible to monitor and limit this child's screen time when he is plugged in to a wall socket. I cannot even imagine how difficult it would be to get his attention if he was allowed to carry a mini-screen around with him all the time.
• We have provided plenty of opportunities for him to interact with other human beings, including an agonizing year of Cub Scouts, several successful years of sleep-away summer camp, day camps, swimming lessons, music lessons and lots of family activities. It is almost always a struggle to get him to participate, but he almost always has a good time when he does. We've learned not to ask him if he wants to do something — we just tell him what he is going to do.

After all the stress, tears, punishments and rewards, my question is this: should we be limiting his screen time at all? What is the benefit of setting screen limits at this stage in his life? As long as he gets his homework done and helps out when asked, is it important to continue to restrict the time he spends at the computer? True, if left to his own devices he would probably always choose "virtual" over "reality", but when we insist, he does participate in other activities.

Chances are that any work he pursues in life will involve computers. While it's true that he does play a lot of video games, he also uses his computer for a wide variety of purposes. For example, he recently joined a graphic arts chat forum. This is the kind of social networking he never would have done in the "real" world, even though there is probably a graphic arts club at his high school. To join would require finding out where and when the meetings were held, signing up, remembering to go, and putting himself into a difficult social situation. It just wouldn't happen.

He also subscribes to several news feeds and, consequently, is pretty up on current events. He reads (and I believe sometimes even writes) fan fiction. Why is it any more valid for him to read newspapers or books than online news sources and fiction Websites?

Here are my moral dilemmas: Why should I limit his computer time to, say, an hour a day when I certainly spend more time than that on my computer? If I am constantly forcing him to do something else — anything else — besides computers, will he ever really enjoy those things? Can you, or should you, force someone into social situations that do not appeal to him?

Why should I limit his computer time when I don't limit his twin sister? This is a particularly difficult question for me, as she, too, spends a lot of time online, multitasking away at a lighting pace — IM-ing with six or eight of her closest friends, downloading music, researching her history paper, creating graphic collages and shopping for new boots — all at the same time. But, and this is a big but, she has a big life away from her computer, and he does not. There is also the fact that she spends little or no time playing video games, and that somehow seems to make her time online better or more productive. When I look at that in the clear light of day, I can see the double standard.

Finally, this teenage boy has two younger brothers who have just as much interest in gaming as he does. I have to be careful with any precedent I set, for I will have to live with the consequences of that decision for many years to come.

This is an original Chicago Moms Blog post. When Susan isn't busy being a computer cop, she also writes about Two Kinds of People, as well as about pets on The Animal Store Blog.

Photo credit: "Slaves" by Cleopapu via flickr.com.

Lousy Lice — CMB Post

Originally posted on the now defunct Chicago Moms Blog post.

When I was a kid, before the F word stunted my vocabulary, we used far more descriptive language to express our feelings. For example, if the ball went over the fence during a kickball game and it was your turn to retrieve it, you would mutter "Dirty, rotten, stinkin', lousy fence." Those four words, in that order, seemed to cover all the negative bases. It wasn't until this weekend that I connected "lousy" with "louse" and then "lice."

This will teach me to be a good Samaritan. I took care of an ailing friend's two boys on Saturday, one of whom ended up spending the night. Sunday afternoon, I got the call. "Don't scream," she said, "but K (not his real initial) has lice. Don't use the chemical stuff. We read on the Internet to use a combination of petroleum jelly and tea tree oil." I did not scream, but dutifully stopped at the drugstore to pick up the necessary supplies, all the while thinking: "Dirty, rotten, stinkin', lousy, f-ing lice."

My two youngest boys share a room and both had played closely with our infested guest during his overnight stay. While I did not spy any of the creepy critters when I searched the boys' skulls, I thought we should go ahead and treat them just in case. So, I mixed up a batch of the glop and slopped it onto their heads, rubbing it right down into their scalps. The crabby 11-year-old complained every minute, while his 10-year-old brother embraced the situation with humor, fashioning his goo-laden locks into his first-ever Mohawk. Then began the four-hour wait.

In the meantime, I stripped the beds, washed the linens and mattress covers in hot water with the extra rinse cycle on, and sprayed down the pillows and mattresses. Just before bedtime, I put one of the guys in the tub to wash out the gunk. Or so I thought. It turns out that it's not so easy to wash out petroleum jelly. I knew it wasn't water soluble, but my friends had assured me that a couple of wash-rinse-repeat cycles with a clarifying shampoo and a final rinse with white vinegar would do the trick. Not so much.

I washed that boy's head seven times and marinated him in vinegar. It didn't even make a dent. Next I did a quick Web search for remedies to remove petroleum jelly from hair. I had just gotten to the part where it read "… if that doesn't work, try corn starch" when the phone rang.

"Um, have you been able to get the jelly out of their hair?" asked my friend sheepishly. NO. "Don't try the cornstarch," he said, "it just makes a bigger mess. I think it would have been better to use mayonnaise. Let us know if you find anything that works."

What did work, at least modestly, was to go over their hair with a fine-tooth comb (ah, now you know from whence that saying came). We combed and combed and combed. "My hair is falling off," yelled the complainer. "It feels kind of good," said the sport.

I checked the Web one more time. "If that doesn't work, try using a blow dryer and then blotting the hair gently with a towel." The complainer was done, so we just covered his pillow with a towel and sent him to bed. But the sport and I thought the blow dryer method was worth a shot. Armed with a couple of towels and my 1875-watt turbo hair-straightening big gun, I set to work trying to melt the goo out of his hair.

"Mom," he said, trying to get my attention over the roar of the blower. "Mom! I think the oil is starting to boil my head! Hot, hot, hot!" Poor boy. Now we were done. "I think we should just get a pet monkey so he can groom us and eat the lice," he suggested. I'm seriously considering it.

My friend called back one last time. "How are you doing?" she asked. "We're done," I said. "Did you get it out?" she asked. "No, we're just done." In the background, I could hear her poor ailing husband: "Does she hate us?" No, I don't hate them.

Unless I get lice.

When not hanging out here on Chicago Moms Blog, Susan tries to figure things out at Two Kinds of People and The Animal Store Blog.

Photo credit: "I Say, Damn Boy, You Eat Up With The Lice !!" by bamakve via flickr.com.

Why I Love Digital Cameras

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who get things right the first time and those of us who need a few do overs. Our 2008 holiday photo took 23 do overs, but who's counting.

This year, in an effort to save both money and dollars, I'm sending out fewer cards the old fashioned way and trying my hand at a little modern holiday fun. When you click on the video below, you will have a pretty good idea of why I believe the digital camera was invented by someone with a large family after years of trying to get the perfect holiday shot.

We've been doing this holiday photo gig for nearly two decades now, and when I think of the time, film, paper, chemicals, money and sanity expended on most of those pictures, it's a little nauseating. Getting one good shot of one child is a relatively painless process, but each time you add a child into the photographic mix, the potential for disaster increases exponentially. It's clear that in our family everyone needs at least one second chance (with the exception of and apologies to the girl, who you will see is smiling prettily in each and every shot).

Best wishes to all of you and enjoy the show. Then click here and tell me your photo horror stories.

Music: "Dreidel" by Erran Baron Cohen from the CD "Songs in the Key of Hanukkah".

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Time for New Traditions — CMB Post

Originally posted on the now defunct Chicago Moms Blog.

I admit it — I'm a sucker for tradition, and when it comes to holiday traditions, the more the merrier. It all started when I was a little girl. Until I was 13, I was blessed to have four living great-grand parents. Our holidays in the Detroit area were a mad relay of staccato car trips that hiccoughed us from the east side to the west side and back again, visiting relatives who pulled quarters from our ears and fed us horrible cookies.

I loved it and could never understand why my mother was always a nervous wreck. Now I know too well the stress of trying to keep sugar-doped children clean in dress-up clothes, cook and schlep food all over kingdom come, and find gifts for people I barely know. No wonder her favorite holiday memory was the year we went to Jamaica.

As my generation grew up and spread out across the country, our traditions changed. The 60-mile radius of my childhood seems like a luxury in the face of two-day car journeys, long train trips and expensive plane fares. We don't all always make it. When we do, we are holed up together for days on end, which brings its own delights and stresses. Our family has become more complicated, as well, blending and extending in many directions — but we've adapted pretty well, adding new people, new celebrations and new traditions to the mix.

Adding on has been adding up, however, and the travel alone costs a fortune. More people mean more gifts, more food — just more. The entire family is guilty of overly generous gift giving, but these days everyone is feeling the pinch. Over the past couple of years, we have tried to create a few new traditions to make the holiday experience a little less taxing (both financially and physically) without losing any of the joy.

Last year, for example, my parents came up with the idea of putting each couple in charge of one meal: planning it, buying it, preparing it and cleaning up after it. Even my three boys took on a dinner (spaghetti, jarred sauce, frozen garlic bread and a simple salad). It was great and a new tradition was born. Here are a few more ideas — some we've tried successfully, some that will be new this year:

• I've cut way back on the number of holiday cards I'm sending this year (good for the planet as well as the wallet), opting instead to create a little e-video card. I'll have to get back to you on the results of this experiment.
• It's not the cost that counts. My boys have a blast at the dollar store. Last year, my dad got a lifetime supply of toothpicks and couldn't be happier. He's even taken to giving dollar store hints: "Gee, I could really use a new fly swatter this year."
• I'm encouraging creativity. Last year, my daughter made some great calendars using family photos that were a big hit. Our oldest son's girlfriend knits up a storm every year, creating beautiful, warm, personal gifts that we all treasure.

I think our favorite family tradition is the story behind the gift: who got the best buy, where one of us found that little shop with the crazy owner, and how someone snagged the most amazing freebie. Even lost luggage stories are fun when we're all together. Last year, lost luggage resulted in stringing out the gift giving for days.

Given our passion for storytelling, I've decided to inflict introduce something new this year. I fully expect the family to hate me for this, but we're going to try creating a progressive story (sometimes called an add-on or round robin story). The idea is that some poor sucker lucky raconteur (i.e., my brother) will be chosen to start a thrilling holiday tale, writing a paragraph or so before sending it on (don't you just love email?). Each family member will add a new paragraph, and we'll have a big story fest when we all gather later in the month. Wish me luck.

It takes time to develop and absorb new traditions. Change is hard. I thought the toughest part of a scaled-down holiday would be explaining it to the children, but it's not. The hardest part is accepting it myself. This year — and probably for a number of years to come — we can't have it all, buy it all, give it all or do it all. But we can still have fun, as long as we're together.

This is an original Chicago Moms Blog post. When not tinkering with tradition, Susan can be found tinkering at Two Kinds of People and The Animal Store Blog.

Graphic credit: Blessed by Billy Alexander.

New Traditions on CMB

Check out my new post on the Chicago Moms Blog about developing new holiday traditions in these tough economic times. It's part of another topic day, where everyone in the group is posting on the same topic. 

Share your traditions, new and old, by clicking here. 

Graphic credit: Blessed by Billy Alexander.

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A Question of Recession — CMB Post

Originally posted on the now defunct Chicago Moms Blog.

News agencies around the world reported Monday that the U.S. economy is officially in recession. Actually, they reported that the National Bureau of Economic Research finally admitted that we've been in recession since December 2007. Duh. Why on earth it took a year to reach this dazzling conclusion is beyond me.

When I say "we've" been in recession for a year, I mean the country at large. My personal "we" — our family — has been in a downward-spiraling recession for years. As small business owners, we've been slammed with everything you've been reading about in the news: outrageous healthcare premiums, ever-climbing energy costs (and all that implies), and a contracting credit market that feels more like a noose than a belt tightening.

Rumor has it that I've used up my complaining quotient, so I'm not complaining — really I'm not. Like everyone else, I'm just trying to figure things out. If we and other families have felt under the financial gun for years, what does "official" recession mean for our immediate and long-term futures?

Here's what I know:

It took a long time to get our family and our country into this financial mess and it's going to take a long time to get us out of it — one step at a time.

We're going to have to make some tough decisions — decisions we no doubt should have made sooner.

Some things are my fault and some things aren't. Woulda, could, shoulda. Who cares? The real question is: now what?

It is not my responsibility to spend our country out of recession. If my incredibly short American memory serves, that's one of the things that got us into this mess in the first place.

Every year we say we are going to watch our spending over the holidays. This year I mean it — it's going to be lean.

I want better for my kids — not better as in more, but better in terms of making better decisions, paying better attention, being better stewards.

Here's what I don't know:

I don't know how to be concerned, vigilant and proactive without worrying myself into a coma.

I don't know how to turn off the worry so I can sleep at night, so I can make good decisions and take productive steps during the day.

I don't know how to teach my children to be grateful for what we have, while understanding what we can't have.

I don't know how to keep them informed and teach them financial responsibility and independence without transferring the weight of my stress and worry onto their slender shoulders.

I don't know how to make them feel safe and confident about the future, while keeping them grounded in the reality of the present.

I know I'm lucky. I'm healthy, educated and able-bodied. I have a strong support system. And I have hope, if not confidence, that the new administration will ask these and other important questions so we can begin to find the answers together.

When Susan isn't feeling queasy about credit card debt, she can be found worrying about other topics at Two Kinds of People and marketing the family business at The Animal Store Blog.