Tag: teachers

Life Lessons List

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This post is in response to the Writing 101, Day 2 prompt to write a list. I currently have three teenagers, but I have spent my entire adult life working with teenagers. Hence, my list:

Things I’ve learned from teenagers…

  1. Don’t get bogged down in the present. Just keep pushing on.
  2. Have fun. Laughter and fun are important to fostering a healthy outlook.
  3. It’s okay to be silly sometimes.
  4. It’s okay to be sad sometimes.
  5. Always have food on hand. Good food will bring friends. And you never know when you might be hungry.
  6. Other people will have their opinions. You don’t have to agree with them.
  7. When your “friends” don’t treat you right, move on. It’s better to have a handful of good friends than a crowd of superficial ones.
  8. Being nice is an important skill in getting through life. You may want to say something mean, but sometimes it’s best not to.
  9. Look forward to the future. It is full of promise
  10. Young people have good ideas. Sometimes, they have great ideas. Listen to them. They are the future.

   10½. Did I mention food? It’s always about the food.

Food heist

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One day, out of the blue, my daughter said to me, “I am not going to be a good mother because I would never be able to give up a good sandwich for one of my kids.”

Well then.

Giving up food items started is something I have done on many occasions. I can very distinctly remember summer mornings ten or so years ago when I would get up early and enjoy a moment of quiet reflection with a cup of coffee. Then I would make myself breakfast.

In the summer, one of my favorite breakfasts consists of a bowl of fresh fruit with vanilla yogurt. Usually, I start with watermelon, add strawberries, blueberries, grapes, and sometimes raspberries or peaches, depending on what is in the fridge. When I am done washing and cutting the fruit, and my bowl is an array of bright and fresh color, I add a dollop of yogurt, usually vanilla.

When the children were little, inevitably, just as I sat at the table and pulled up an article on the computer, a little person would appear next to me, jammie-clad and rubbing sleep from its eyes. The child would ponder my breakfast briefly before stating, “That looks good,” or the tougher, “Can I have some?” And my bowl would be usurped, slid across the table to the spot in front of another seat, and the child in question would consume the entire bowl while I created a new breakfast for myself.

While this was a common scene at the breakfast table, over the years, it has not been limited to the morning meal. My children descended from a long line of hunter/gatherers, and they can sniff out a good sandwich from two floors away. Nowadays though, I am more likely to point the kids in the direction of the ingredients than to pass them my own food.

So when my daughter says she doesn’t want to give up a good sandwich, I know where her thought originated. Being on the receiving end of the process is great, but the other end… maybe not.

Even still, I’m pretty sure my daughter will make an excellent mother one day. The truth of the matter is that if the sandwich [fruit bowl, etc.] is good enough, I’m not giving it up, either!

Baking

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I was making fresh strawberry scones the other morning.

I dumped a small pile of flour on a piece of waxed paper so I could flatten the dough and cut it into scone-sized triangles.

“Is that your bench flour?” C asked.

“My bench flour?” I looked at him, unsure of his reference. “You mean this pile here? Is that what you call it?”

“Yeah. And you save it when you’re done.” I spread the flour with my hand and plopped the dough onto the flour where it (hopefully) wouldn’t stick. I rolled it into a ball, worked it for a minute, then started to spread it out.

“You save it?” I asked, a bit incredulous, knowing what my ‘bench flour’ looks like when I’m done. In fact, as the dough stuck to my hands, I would rub little bits of dough off my fingers and into the ‘bench flour.’

“Why wouldn’t you save it?” C asked. “It’s just flour and little pieces of pie crust.”

“Well, not really….” I thought for a minute. “What if you are making chocolate scones? Then your ‘bench flour’ has little bits of chocolate dough in it. When you roll out your pie crust, it gets chocolate in it.”

“That’s half the fun,” C replied, mischief creeping into his tone. “It’s like a treasure hunt. ‘What will I find in my bench flour today? Oh look! A whole blueberry!!’”

“That’s gross,” I stated, but I laughed in response. “I think I’ll throw out my bench flour. Thanks.” Funny or not, there will be no “treasure” traveling between my baked goods.

But from here on, every time I eat something from a bakery, I will wish there were some things I did not know.

Perspective

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Every now and then, we catch a glimpse of our children’s lives through reflection on our own experiences, past and present. Recently, I had one of those moments… when my thoughts on my children’s attitudes suddenly clicked into place in a new and unexpected way. It was an “ah-ha” moment, of sorts.

Over the weekend, I was introducing my sister to some people who grew up one town over from our own hometown. Since it was a small town in a rural area, growing up in the next town implies that we shared a fair degree of history. We knew some of the same people, competed as rival schools in sports, hung out at some of the same places, frequented the only local movie theater, and shopped in the same stores.

As we briefly discussed the fact that my sister graduated from a different high school, my mind wandered back into the past. My sister and I had different teachers. And just like any school, a handful of teachers were known to be “difficult,” more in their behavior and attitudes toward students than in their educational expectations.

For the most part, I had teachers who were memorable in positive ways: they wanted to teach, and they genuinely liked working with students. However, there were exceptions. There were teachers for whom unflattering nicknames had been passed from one class to the next for near generations. And it was one of these teachers with just such a nickname that I stumbled over while I was taking my ‘mind journey’ down memory lane over the weekend.

And after stumbling, I sat sprawled on memory’s path, realizing that we hadn’t been very nice back in high school. And then, I was pulled to the present, to the words I had recently said to my son when he called one of his (male) teachers a diva. “You shouldn’t be disrespectful to your teachers, C. They have a tough job teaching you guys all the things you don’t think you want to know.”

Gulp!

There I was, stuck straddling a line. As a teacher myself, I would normally advocate for the teacher in this instance. Getting up in front of a classroom full of apathetic, sometimes ungrateful (insert year here: sophomores, seniors, you name it) day after day is not an easy task. It can be brutal.

Then again, being a kid in a class with a teacher who has forgotten what it is like to be a teenager—a teacher who hasn’t updated his or her approach to teaching since the age of the dinosaurs, and chooses not to (ever) smile—is not easy, either.

Suddenly, I realized that what I perceived as “disrespect” was really something of a rite of passage. As we work to figure out our relationship with the world and how to deal with people we don’t necessarily want to get along with, but need to get along with, we seek to find a comfortable place to fit them into our experiences. We use nicknames to diminish these people so they are slightly less intimidating and they fit more neatly into our experience. For teens, this can be the way they survive the classes that otherwise threaten to bore them, annoy them, or terrify them.

And straddling this line between kid and teacher is the constant battle I face as a parent. This is the battle that determines if I am successful or not. I am constantly faced with the need to remember what it was like to be in my children’s shoes—whether they are teenagers or toddlers, while still teaching the skills necessary for them to function in a world which requires an ever changing mix of diplomacy, sensitivity, and candor.

For the most part, my children are respectful and polite when they walk out my door and into the world. Perhaps then, they really are learning what they need to know to make their way in the world. Perhaps a little name-calling, in the right context, can help to put relationships in perspective.