School Days - Fatherhood - Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART IV

Fatherhood

20

School Days

Here’s the good news about when your children get old enough to go to school: you don’t have to go with them.

Until back-to-school night, and then anything that you didn’t like about your childhood school experience will come rushing back to you. You might even be asked to sit on those kid-sized chairs.

Schools seem to require a lot more from parents now than they did when we attended—and I don’t just mean tuition for those who choose to send their kids to private school. Maybe there was never a golden era where parents could send their kids to the neighborhood public school and rest easy knowing they would get a fine education that would prepare them for college and the workplace. But it certainly feels like relying on the neighborhood school is a much bigger crapshoot than it used to be. Over the past four decades, Gallup respondents have become increasingly likely to say that today’s students receive a “worse education” than they themselves did.* In 1975, more than 60 percent of respondents said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools. By 2014, only 26 percent of respondents said the same.

Catherine Rampell, “Actually, Public Education Is Getting Better, Not Worse,” Washington Post, September 18, 2014.

Whether your child goes to a public or a private school, you’ll probably find that the teachers expect you to be a lot more engaged with what’s going on than your parents were. This is likely terrific for your child, but it’s a lot more pressure on you.

My younger son’s preschool teacher is perhaps the nicest, sweetest soul imaginable. And yet, quite a few mornings this year, we have had the same uncomfortable exchange:

“Good morning! Did he bring it?”

I stare blankly and wonder what memo in the backpack I have failed to examine. Remember that feeling in grade school when you didn’t bring your homework? All of a sudden, at age thirty-something, you’re right back with your deer-in-the-headlights expression, square in the sights of a disapproving teacher.

“Did he bring the …”

She’s gently repeating the question, but she already knows I haven’t brought it. We’ve done this dance before. Mr. Geraghty never reads the memos.

It’s not just once-a-week show-and-tell, although we’ve forgotten that one plenty of times, too. No, now preschool and school revolve around class projects, which all involve bringing in something from home.

“Did he bring the coat hanger?”

“Um,” I say, wondering if there’s some way I can somehow magically will the coat hanger into existence. Or I can claim I left it in the car, run back to my car, drive home, and pick up the forgotten object.

Did I get that memo? Did my wife mention the memo? Was there a memo? Was there an e-mail? Did some carrier pigeon get shot out of the sky?

“Coat hanger?”

“Yes, it is for the class project that we talked about in the memo,” she will explain patiently, with only a few stray molecules of disappointment in her voice, “because all the kids are bringing a part to class to build a scale model of a nuclear reactor, and we plan on building one like MacGyver.”

Ugh. So now the class project that was supposed to end with a controlled mushroom cloud—or a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano eruption, or transforming lead into gold through alchemy, or something else spectacularly educational and mind-expanding—is on hold because I didn’t know I was supposed to bring in a coat hanger.

I got the kids out the door on time; packed a lunch; got them into the necessary jackets, hats, gloves; brought the necessary pocket change for the weekly give-to-charity exercise; brought the freshly laundered sleeping mat for nap time; got them into the car; made sure their seatbelts were on; fought traffic; battled the idiots who check their cell phones while sitting at a red light in the left-turn-only lane, but don’t bother to look up at the light, and use up half the window of the green light before they get moving—and all of that is moot, because it’s 8 a.m. and I’m already a bad father because I forgot the coat hanger.

The other parents who arrive simultaneously and I communicate entirely through facial expressions. There’s the I-remembered-my-child’s-coat-hanger look, which I notice tends to come from moms. The other dads give me a variation of the “can you believe we pay tuition for this endless list of assignments?” look.

School now involves a lot more “projects” than I remember. My friends’ child had a class project that was meant to teach them about foreign cultures; they had to bring to school ten objects from the same foreign country. Ten? What, are they opening up a Pier One store in the school cafeteria? Running an import-export business? As they lamented their sudden search for Japanese objects, I asked, “Is it too late to change to China or Taiwan? Because everything’s made there.”

Assured that the choice of Japan was incontestable, I offered, “How about ten Pokémon cards? What about going to the sushi place and getting ten sets of chopsticks?” (As you can imagine, my friends find me enormously helpful.)

It’s fascinating to hear the teachers’ “don’t do your child’s homework for them” warning coupled with project assignments that are pretty unimaginable for grade schoolers to complete on their own. (“To complete your project display, borrow your dad’s hot glue gun and some turpentine … if you run out of turpentine, steal the car keys and drive to the nearest Walmart.”) Still, if project-mania is a teacher’s passive-aggressive way of attempting to mandate parental involvement in a child’s schoolwork, I can’t begrudge a teacher that much.

There’s a broad cultural consensus that teachers have an extremely tough job, but for the wrong reasons. A teacher gets access to a child—well, dozens of them—for about six, maybe seven hours a day. They don’t get to control what happens to that child after they leave the school grounds. Maybe the parents are really invested in their child’s education, maybe they aren’t. Maybe the neighborhood between school and home is safe, maybe it isn’t. Maybe the kids came to school well-rested, fully fed, and given a steady cultural diet of books and educational videos and field trips; maybe the home life is an unstable, chaotic mess. Teachers rightfully ask just how much they can educate a child with insufficient support on the home front.

My older son’s first grade teacher had the good idea of stopping by the homes of every child in the first month of school; she wanted to get a sense of the home life for every child—do they have siblings? How do they behave at home? Do they have a lot of books in the house? Okay, it’s possible that she just wanted to get home decorating ideas, or she was extremely nosy. But I liked the concept. Parents see their kids as spectacular geniuses and creative prodigies, just waiting to be unlocked. I think every parent desperately hopes for a teacher who will see that same unrealized potential, and devote a portion of the school year to unleashing it.

The home visit from my son’s teacher couldn’t have gone any better. I am not making this up when I say my older son, entirely unbidden, went and got out the chess set and started teaching his little brother how to play chess. We could not have created a more idyllic image of our home life if we had rehearsed it. Best of all, as the teacher described her active role in the local chapter of a national teachers’ union, she didn’t notice the picture of me with Dick Cheney, my pile of National Review magazines, and all of my other professional knickknacks that might as well say “THIS MAN DESPISES ALL TEACHERS’ UNIONS AND EVERYTHING THEY STAND FOR; GRADE HIS SON ACCORDINGLY.”

My son has had good teachers and not-so-good ones. If a good teacher can be a miracle worker, a bad teacher can be a weapon of mass mind destruction.

How the hell do you make human history—with its heroes, madmen, wars, betrayals, world-changing inventions, dramatic twists of fate, and epic story leading up to today—boring? How do you make the world of science—with praying mantises eating their mates, mysterious black holes deep in space, long-lost monsters of the deep sea, and chemicals that can explode—dreadful drudgery? How do you make literature—the realm of Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, and H. G. Wells—a joyless chore?

Look at the nonfiction bestseller list: it’s history, science, autobiography, philosophy, politics. There’s a special place in hell for any teacher who can make a kid hate reading.

The late genius Andrew Breitbart declared of the perpetually sputtering Republican Party, “If you can’t sell freedom and liberty, you suck.” If you, as a teacher, can’t sell any aspect of the entire far-reaching and fascinating realm of human knowledge—your subject matter! The professional role you chose!—to a young mind … well, you stink, too.

Bad Boys … or Bad Teachers (or Bureaucrats)

As my sons grow older, I’m particularly on alert for schools and teachers that simply don’t know how to handle boys. I’m too much of a layman to offer a definitive take on whether American parents are over-medicating our kids, and whether a lot of diagnoses of attention deficit-disorder are merely high-energy boys being shoehorned into the conformity of a society that doesn’t know how to accept them as they are. I do know that, by and large, boys like to run around, play in mud, climb things, occasionally hit each other, pick up bugs, stick things up their nose, and do other things that a lot of professional middle-aged women educators find rambunctious and uncouth.

I know not every public school teacher has turned into a hypersensitive panic-inclined ninny, but sometimes it seems that way. In 2013, a second grader in Baltimore’s Park Elementary School was suspended for two days after he chewed his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun. In 2014 in Columbus, Ohio, a ten-year-old boy was suspended for three days for pretending his finger was a gun. Same thing for a first grader in Colorado the following year. In 2011, a thirteen-year-old was allegedly handcuffed and hauled to juvenile detention for burping in class.*

“Student Arrested for Burping, Lawsuit Claims,” CBS News, December 1, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-arrested-for-burping-lawsuit-claims/.

In 2010, the principal of the junior high school in Forest Hills, New York, called the police after a twelve-year-old girl doodled on her desk in class. No threatening message, just “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)” in green marker.

Get a farshtunken** grip, educators. You’re supposed to be the grown-ups here. In fact, if public school teachers and principals feel like they’re not treated with sufficient respect by the rest of society, it’s probably oft-shared tales like this one that drive the derision. What some idiotic principal deems a commonsense, consistent application of a “zero tolerance” policy looks to us like either politically correct hysteria or a pint-sized dictator mad with his power over our children.

Yiddish for “stinking”—a useful substitute for the other F-word.

Boys like playing all kinds of games with “guns”—Star Wars, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Ghostbusters, cowboys, pirates, spacemen and aliens, hunters … why have we decided to literally criminalize this once-common aspect of boyhood? Do we really think that by clamping down on finger guns and sandwich pistols, we’ll prevent the next school shooting? Will we next ban Matchbox cars to prevent car accidents?

If a seven-year-old with a peanut butter sandwich gun frightens you, then you really don’t want to see my reaction to the news that you’ve decided to turn my child into a national headline over your ammophobia. Even if we parents acquiesce to this philosophy that anything resembling a firearm—even appendages—must be treated like Voldemort, the common object that must not be named, you as a teacher or principal have a whole arsenal of disciplinary options in front of you! (I know, I know, that martial metaphor just frightened you because it’s a trigger word—whoops, did it again!) What’s with the knee-jerk suspensions? Is there some trapdoor built into the floor of your office? You’re a middle school principal, not NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. That office chair under your tush ain’t the Iron Throne.

Even aside from the disciplinary policies, parents of boys run into nagging doubts that some corners of the school system treat them as some sort of alien creature. I remember reading a perhaps apocryphal tale of a father attending a back-to-school night and hearing a high school English teacher lament that all of the girls in the class were doing well, while all of the boys were performing poorly and barely paying attention in class; she lamented that they all might have attention deficit disorder. The father asked to see the curriculum for the year and was given a list of works by Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf… .

Gee, why would teenage boys seem bored and uninterested with a selection of works about social propriety and etiquette in England a century ago?

Why do some teachers of literature seem determined to avoid any works that young men might actually want to read? Sherlock Holmes? Huck Finn? Treasure Island? Brave New World? Lord of the Flies? Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid twists? If you’ve instituted some sort of “only dead women authors” rule, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein! Most of Ayn Rand’s novels are longer than a Peter Jackson film adaptation of Robert A. Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biographical volumes,* but at least her Objectivist philosophies would spur a passionate debate in class.

I’m kidding, of course. Scientists have determined that for director Peter Jackson—who created an eight-hour film trilogy out of a three-hundred-page work, The Hobbit—to make a film out of Robert Caro’s three-thousand-page, five-volume biographical series, production work would have needed to start before the Big Bang.

I’m sure most teachers do their best. We’ve given them one of our society’s biggest responsibilities, and they’re forced to work in a system that is bizarrely antiquated and vociferously defensive of the status quo. Sometimes it seems like the only innovation we see in some school systems is their new, groundbreaking ways of resisting innovation.

The modern form of education doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead of encountering grown-ups and witnessing all the various ways that they work and contribute to society, most kids encounter only a handful of adults each day: their parents, maybe the school bus driver, their teacher, and maybe their soccer coach, dance instructor, or karate sensei. We wall kids off from the rest of society, so they marinate in the no-holds-barred social circle of their peers—particularly in junior high and high school. We all know kids can be gasp-inducingly cruel to each other, and those malicious pack instincts only intensify during the hormonal hurricane of puberty.

You’ve probably witnessed the recent pop-cultural spate of dystopian science fiction showcasing teenagers largely living on their own—the Divergent series, Maze Runner, etc… . What makes these stories dystopian isn’t the post-apocalyptic setting, crumbling buildings, Orwellian rules, or hellish landscapes. No, it’s that the teenagers are in charge of themselves, with that thin tendril of adult supervision removed, and every teen impulse fully unbridled from bullies, teenage crushes, social hierarchy and ostracizing of outsiders, tsunami-force sex drives, and inexplicable waves of confusion and anger. Teens devour these books in part because they relate to those struggling but determined protagonists.

It’s amazing that anyone comes out of the teenage years with a good head on his shoulders.

You might be lucky and your child will get good teachers almost every year. You’re almost certain to get at least one stinker in there. You certainly remember yours. It can be a pain, but it always passes. And the biggest educator in your child’s life is you.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

Ward lived before the collapse of public education, so he could send his kids off to school pretty confident that they would learn something and that he wouldn’t have to turn up at class every day with whatever assignment the teachers had given the parents. Glory days.