Dear Parents, Please Listen

Another school year is beginning, for some it already has. I am in my 9th year of teaching, not counting two years of subbing, student teaching, and several years of teaching classes at The Henry Ford. It’s safe to say that I’ve been working with kids for a long time. There are some things I’ve learned along the way to help you and your kid have a successful school year. I’m not trying to be harsh, but I hate sugarcoating so here we go.

1. Make reading a priority in your home. I have SO many kids who do not come from a reading background and it shows. Read to your kids when they’re small and continue it as they get older. Reading is so incredibly important in school, so put the electronics away and make them read. Start small and gradually increase the time they spend on a book, it doesn’t matter what the genre is an show them that you read, too. Your example is the most important thing.
2. Help them improve their attention span. I have middle schoolers who can’t focus for more than a couple of minutes on a daily basis. Do they have ADHD? No, they’ve just never been taught to stick with something. Now, I do have kids with ADD and ADHD who legitimately have trouble focusing, but a lot of the kids I teach don’t have an attention span because they’ve never been taught to have a work ethic. Give them jobs at home that they have to complete until the end, until they get the job done. Life skill.
3. Teach them to respect. We teachers can handle a lot of things. Your child is struggling in English, math, science, social studies? We can handle that, it’s our job. It’s what we do. But when we have kids who routinely curse us out, I’m talking daily, openly talk back in class for no reason, and shamelessly lie, it makes our job ridiculously difficult. If you allow your child to be disrespectful to you at home and or to other people, they will be disrespectful at school.  Please, please, please teach your child how to speak and act respectfully, not just to adults, but to everyone, including you. I don’t mean that you should teach them to be a submissive little mouse, but if I had a dollar for every time a child openly challenged me at school, I’d be a rich woman. Learning how to treat others and situations with respect is a HUGE life skill. Look, kids are going to test limits, we teachers know that, but when you don’t back us up or worse, you take your kid’s side when he or she has been an absolute brat, you are teaching them that it’s okay to abuse people. Chances are, by the time we call you, we’ve already tried a lot of strategies. I’ve actually had parents tell their children, right in front of me, that they believe their child over anything I had to say and that’s true for a lot of my colleagues, too. That only teaches your kids that they have the power to behave any way they want and won’t receive any consequences. The trouble with that is a boss or, God forbid, a judge won’t see it the same way. Actions have consequences, good and bad.
4. Don’t blame the teacher for your child’s shortcomings. I had a kid one time, 5th grade, who did not turn in any homework. When his parents came in to see the principal and me about his Es, his father rifled through the mess under his desk, fished out a paper, shook it in the air and said, “All she had to do was look here!” No. One hundred million percent not okay. Students are responsible for turning in their own work. Period. Responsibility is a life skill; teach your kid to own their mistakes. Again, life skill.
5. Let. Them. Fail. It’s not the end of the world if Junior forgets their homework or forgets to study for the test. It will be okay, they will learn. Stop saving them; it will help them stand on their own two feet. Don’t make excuses for them. I once had a dad who caved and did his 5th grader’s homework for him because he cried if he didn’t understand it. I asked him if he would be doing his child’s calculus in high school. On the other hand, do encourage them! Ask them about school, what projects they have, tests, grades. Ask them about their day. Do you have a kid who won’t talk about it? Email the teacher! We’ll be happy to fill you in.
6. Don’t take a phone call from your gynecologist and have a conversation about vaginal suppositories during a Parent-Teacher Conference. Seriously. I cannot scrub that from my brain and it’s been about eight years. Just… no. Not kidding.

We know your kids aren’t perfect, mine definitely aren’t. Youngest and Middle Child had some “fun” school moments last year, oy, but we learned from it. In my case, I need to check ParentConnect more often. Teachers don’t expect kids to be little angels, but for a child to have a successful year, we need the cooperation and help from you, the parents. It’s a partnership.

It’s more important than you’ll ever know.

Have a great school year!

 

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What Are Your Hobbies?

Everyone has hobbies, right? We need hobbies to explore our passions, to relax, to stay sane in a crazy world. Normal ones, weird ones, who cares? As long as your hobby doesn’t hurt anyone or anything, they’re fine. My hobbies include writing (duh), reading, history, theatre, music, travel. sewing/crochet, running, my garden (when it’s not a million degrees outside), and learning about the supernatural. It’s safe to say that I have a lot of interests and that I’m always busy.

Now, you may look at one or more of my hobbies and wonder why the heck I’m interested in that. Maybe, God forbid, history bored you to tears as a kid or the thought of running anywhere makes you anxious. Whatever the reason, you probably don’t share all of my interests and that’s okay. Life would be boring if we all liked the same things.

A hobby that I have trouble understanding is maintaining the perfect lawn. I just don’t get it. My lawn is green and made up of a lot of different things: clover, dandelions, a bit of grass, and some other unidentifiable stuff. I mow it once it week and that’s the extent of my lawn care. Some of my neighbors have beautiful meticulous lawns and they spend a lot of time and care to make them look that way, but I can’t see myself doing that.

Another hobby I don’t get is watching sports. My husband and sons love to watch football and baseball throughout the year. I would rather watch paint dry, unless it’s an important U of M game. Then, it’s a matter of principle. They love it when I have rehearsal because that means they can watch whatever game is on that night. It’s just not my thing.

So, what are some hobbies that you could not see yourself doing? Rock climbing? Skydiving? Fishing? Now I don’t mean things that harm others or the environment, just ordinary hobbies that you are most definitely not interested in. Don’t be shy, put it in the comments.

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Parenting Fails

After dropping my son off at jazz camp yesterday morning (yes, that’s a thing), I went to Greenfield Village for a walk before it got too hot outside.

I love the Village in the summertime. It’s delightfully busy, there are a lot of programs happening, and there are visitors from all over the world. When my boys were small, even though I worked there, I frequently brought them to visit on my days off. One of their favorite places was the 1885 working farm with the horses, cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs. They liked to get close to the pig pen, squeal, “Ooooh, stinky!” and run away, dodging chickens. They loved walking through the dusty barn to see which animals were inside for the day. Pointing out the piles of horse poop in the street after the carriages went by was also a popular pastime. It’s a great place to take kids, even if they don’t understand the historical aspect of the buildings yet, and lots of parents do just that.

Yesterday, just after I entered the gate, I saw an older couple with a young boy. The boy was probably around 6- or 7-years-old with white-blond hair and glasses, a real cutie. He was clearly excited to be there, especially when he caught sight of the horses in the paddock next to the carriage barn. What caught my attention first, however, was the mother roughly yelling at him to, “Get back over here!” when he was only a few steps away.

“Mama, Mama, look at the horses! Mama, look!” He wasn’t yelling, he was within a reasonable distance of his parents, and was simply being an excited little boy, wanting his mama to see what he was excited about. His parents were having none of it, though. I could hear them snapping at him as I passed, things like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this.” “I knew this was going to be a bad idea.” “I can’t believe we paid all this money…” “Get over here!” The father physically took him by the shoulders and moved him exactly in between the two of them. “You have to stay here“, to which the little boy said sadly, “I’m not having very fun”, just like that. The way he said it about broke my heart, since he had been so very happy only seconds before. His dad then told him, “Well, that’s because you make it not fun.” And that did break my heart, not just because that’s a mean thing to say to a little guy, but because it made me think of times when, as a parent of little guys like that, I had said something unkind to them in frustration or anger.

It takes a lot, and I mean a lot, of patience to be a parent sometimes. It can get to you, the messes, the crying, the tantrums, the schedule, and sometimes you say or do something that you’re not proud of. I’m not talking about being abusive, I mean that sometimes good parents have bad days and we don’t react as well as we should. We are definitely supposed to correct our children and teach them to be good humans, but we need to do it in a way that does not crush them. Should they feel guilty when they’ve done something wrong? Absolutely, but they should also know that making a bad choice doesn’t make them a bad person and that they are still loved even when they mess up. We don’t always model that well.

It still happens to me sometimes. I have a teenager who knows how to push my buttons. While I try to be calm when he tests his boundaries, I can lose my cool, especially when it’s blatant disrespect and I’m exhausted from a long day. It’s not easy, but we as parents have to remember that children’s brains are not done growing yet. They act out of emotion because they don’t know how to respond appropriately to emotions like anger and frustration, even when it has nothing to do with us. It’s our job to teach them how to handle those emotions in a non-destructive way, but it’s hard to keep that perspective when it feels like we’re being personally attacked. We have to, though. It’s our job and when we mess that up, we need to fix it.

I thought about that little boy and his parents a lot yesterday. As I had mentioned, his parents were older, I’d say early 50s. Were they tired? Is he a high-energy child and they have a difficult time coping with that? Had they had a rough morning? Were they at the end of a vacation and the parents were just done with it all? Or was that normal for them? I hope not. I have so many questions. I don’t know their story, but I hope that this was just a bad morning, that their day got better and this little boy doesn’t live with those words all the time. I hope that when they went home or back to their motel yesterday he got some snuggles, hugs, and kisses from his parents. I hope he went to bed feeling happy and good about himself. I hope he feels loved.

If you have kids, think about what you say before you say it. Words are powerful and what you say stays with them for a long time. Parents are human, we make (lots of) mistakes. The trick is to learn from them and make sure our kids know that we will always love them, no matter what they do.

Love to you all.

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Life Changes

Proud mama moment: Oldest Child has a grown up job. Well, he will as soon as he graduates in May, the next week, in fact. He went through the interviews, the stress of not knowing, all that jazz, and he succeeded. He has a big boy job on the other side of the state doing something that he loves and finds interesting.

This, of course, is awesome. He’s worked so hard, he’s always been an amazing kid, and he deserves every bit of good that’s coming his way.

There’s only one teensy thing that’s just starting to sink in. This is his fourth year of college, he hasn’t lived “at home” full time in almost four years, but now, this is where the feels get a little jumbled.

He’s not coming home anymore.

I don’t want to go totally melodramatic. Of course he’ll come to visit sometimes, Christmas, if we’re lucky, or the occasional weekend, but he’ll be living two-and-a-half-ish hours away. Living, not going to school, but living. He’ll be going to work, going, ulp, home, and will do it all over again the next day. No more Spring Break, no more summers off, he’ll be really and truly adulting now. Marty and I were just talking the other day about how we’ll take him off of our insurance as soon as his kicks in. Again, ulp.

It’s starting to hit home as I clean the empty bedroom where the college kids stay when they come home. I’ll be making up two beds, but only one will be slept in this summer when Middle Child comes home. We’ll move his basement storage boxes to him, the extra clothes that he’s left behind in the bedroom, his stuffed puppy, Sadie. He’s on to building his own life.

As well he should! This is what we raised him to be able to do, this is the job of parenting, to make them independent so that they can survive on their own. (Coming in second only to being a good person. Raising kids to be good humans is always first on the list, but self-sufficiency is a close second.) He’s following the natural order of things and doing a damn fine job of it: working, paying his own bills, buying his own car and paying for repairs. He even has a cat of his own, for crying out loud!

But my mama heart is cracking a little tonight as I remember the baby who loved to cuddle and whose hair smelled so sweet, the inquisitive toddler who made friends with everyone and everything, the studious tween, the social butterfly of a high school student, the proud graduate. Those are just memories now, and precious ones. He’s going to make his own memories now: his first place, his first real job, and all of the adventures, good and bad, that go with them.

It’s okay, it’s supposed to happen this way. I’m just a little leaky, is all.

First year of preschool, three years old.

Hug your babies, new parents. It goes by fast.

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Writing Truisms

So true…

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Do Over

I love the show, Mysteries At the Museum, on the Travel Channel. If you haven’t seen it, the show features odd and interesting pieces from museum collections all over the world and the stories behind them. Some of the stories are inspiring, such as the cat who assists the NYC Fire Department, and some are sad or creepy, like haunted houses or lost loves. They’ve even featured items from The Henry Ford, like Thomas Edison’s last breath. (Check it out.)

They’ve branched out a little, too, to focus on historical sites or people. Last night’s episode was all about Pompeii.

To refresh your memory, Pompeii was a city during the Roman Empire near modern day Naples that was completely wiped out by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Because Vesuvius buried the city in layers of volcanic ash, archaeologists are able to understand life back then in a much more complete way. There are actually homes preserved with their original painted walls and mosaics, body casts of the people as they tried to flee, and even bread that had been baking in the oven at the time. There’s also at least one brothel, a very popular tourist attraction. There’s a very long line to get into the brothel these days. I wonder if it was the same 2,000 years ago.

Pompeii fascinates me, I had the opportunity to actually go there a few years ago, and I was absolutely glued to the television set last night. (Well, I was also running in place in my living room because it’s too freaking cold to go outside, but I was still glued.) When the show was over, it made me think (again) of how much I love anything like Pompeii: old historic sites, and why I took the path I did instead of follow my passion.

I didn’t have a lot of guidance, as a teenager, about what I wanted to do. I loved acting, but it was made clear to me that I would have no support if I went that way and that scared me. History hadn’t come “alive” for me just yet, it was mostly names and dates that I had to memorize, which is a complete shame. Kids hate history because of that and there’s no reason that it can’t be taught in a much better, relatable, way, but I digress.

Beginning with modeling for a dear friend’s period clothing company and through my job at The Henry Ford, I discovered just how much I loved working with the stories and objects of the past, but by then I had been putting myself through community college a class or two at a time for teaching and felt that I would be wasting my money if I switched majors, especially to a field where full-time jobs are scarce and money is uncertain. I stayed on the teaching track because it was safe and predictable. If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would become a historian, hands down.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful and happy to have a job in teaching. I worked hard for my degree and will be paying off my student loans for the next thirty years, unless I win the Megamillions or become a best-selling author. That is not an exaggeration; my student loan calculator says so. Teaching pays my bills and it’s (mostly) enjoyable working with kids, but it’s not my passion. History is my passion.

I drool over Dr. Lucy Worsley documentaries. During my prep hour, I turn on some sort of documentary on YouTube while I grade, plan, file, clean, or whatever, to listen to in the background. I read detailed, well-researched biographies and other historical nonfiction whenever I can. My writing is all historically based. I’m obsessed with getting the details right, with giving the people from the past the respect that they deserve. I can get lost in an antique store for hours with the most mundane objects because it belonged to someone. Visiting historic sites, especially really old ones in Europe, put me into a state of euphoria. I love decoding, the hows and whys and motivations of people in the past. Ancestry.com is one of my drugs of choice. A theatre friend of mine, who also loves the past, brought in some of his collection for me to see (and hold!) and couple of weeks ago. It’s amazing that a few coins from the Tudor period, a printed piece of vellum from a German psalter, and an eighteenth century periodical could keep me floating for days. Actually, I’m still floating about it all. I would rather roam around a drafty castle in Scotland in the rain than spend a week on a tropical beach. I am, in short, a lost cause.

That also got me to wondering about all of you. Did you follow your passion or did you take the safe route, like I did? How did you decide on your career, your path? I’d love to hear your stories, your reasons why you did what you did to get where you are today. If your career isn’t your passion, what do you do to satisfy that craving?

Life is funny. Sharing is good. Leave your comments here or on FB, Goodreads, and Twitter.

Oh, and if you’re in the middle of this polar vortex, like those of us in Michigan, stay warm.

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End of Summer Musings

“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.” E.B. White. Charlotte’s Web

It’s the end of another summer. Yes, I know that summer doesn’t technically end until September 22, but for me, as a teacher, summer is effectively over. And before anyone says anything about teachers having the whole summer off, blah, blah, blah, let me remind you that we’re working our tails off for ten months out of the year including our “own time”  during evenings, weekends, and holidays, PLUS we attend meetings , college classes, and professional development during the summer, so bugger off about that particular point. There, enough said about it.

I’m not a huge summer fan in terms of weather. I hate hot and humid and I’m an autumn girl through and through, but I enjoy the recovery time from my job.

This summer was incredibly busy, despite being the first summer that I haven’t worked a second job in several years. I think I tried to cram in everything that I’m not able to do during the school year and wore myself out in the process. Here is a sampling of Summer 2018.

• I was able to let my natural body clock have its way again. I’m naturally a night owl and it felt SO GOOD to just sleep and wake up naturally. If only school started at 10:00.
• I painted the living room. It really needed it, having been more than ten years since I had painted it last. While I love the finished product, I forgot how draining painting a room can be. At least I don’t have to do it for another ten years and I bought new curtains to boot.
• Marty and I attended a lot of funeral home visitations and funerals summer, some expected, some not. Either way, it’s a reminder that we only get one shot at this life and I intend to fit in everything I can while I can. That also means staying active and being healthy in both mind and body so that I can do all of the things I want to do before it’s my turn. We said goodbye to some very special people this year. It makes you appreciate loved ones, and your time, all the more. We’re not promised tomorrow.
• I did some spiritual insight seeking, learning to meditate and to spend time looking within, to be spiritually in tune with myself and with God. I believe we are given spiritual gifts, we just don’t use them like we should. I’d like to get better at that.
• We went on vacation. See the July post for details about the “Ocean and Dead People Tour”, which was awesome. Anytime I’m near the ocean, I’m happy.
• Speaking of our vacation, we did a lot more family history research. We’re kind of obsessed, although Marty would argue that I may have an addiction to Ancestry-crack.
• I published my book, Traveler, as a paperback through Amazon.com and donated a copy to my local library. It was kind of a big deal for me. Check it out.
• I read books that were not related to school or schoolwork. Heavenly.
• I wrote. Not as much as I would have liked, but I did write.
• I took Youngest Child to rehearsals and did hair for his show. High school kids are awesome, and I sincerely mean that.
• I auditioned for a show and then I went to rehearsals.
• I made two new adorable kitty friends. They live across the street and come to visit us pretty much every night for pets and treats. I love them.
• We spent family time together, precious these days. The boys are starting to go off in their own directions and the time when they will only come home to visit is approaching quickly. I treasure our family dinners, the boys’ impromtu baseball and football games in front of the house, the flying Nerf darts, even the insults. I hope their memories of these days will be happy, too.
• Marty and I went on lots of dates, including finally going to the Detroit Riverwalk for the first time. This is a good married-person thing to do. Often. I highly recommend it.
• We started watching The Crown. I’m addicted. And Prince Philip is a jerky-jerk.
• I rode my bike, Lulu, a lot. We didn’t get the theatre bike group going again, I was too busy to commit to a night this summer, but whenever I had to go to the library or somewhere within 3ish miles, I walked or rode Lulu. Good times.
• Last, but not least, we took Oldest Child back to school today for his last year of college. Middle Child goes back next weekend. The days of us all together are finished until Thanksgiving. (I’m going to make them take a Christmas card picture while they’re home. Shhhhhhh…)

The crickets are singing, the bats are clicking.

Goodbye, Summer, goodbye. See you next June.

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