On My Soapbox!

 Brace yourself.  I'm angry.   

Back on March 13th, of 2020, we closed the buildings of schools but kept teaching.   We taught virtually, but we did everything we could to attempt to give them as much as we could in the time we were given.  We taught summer school virtually.  We taught first semester virtually. We're still doing it.  Teachers are trying to teach.   

Multiple vaccinations now exist.  They've been slow to roll out, but they exist.  
We've managed to wait this long, why the push to have us go forward to open before we've had a chance to get the vaccination?  We get that things are hard but here's what I want to bring up as a point.  This is a link to where Corona Virus is spreading more.  

Corona Virus Update across the 50 States

Here's a  site that shows where schools are open.  

Across the States School Openings/Closings

I'll wait.   

As I look at them, where is the spread being contained?  (0-21 per day infection).  
Hawaii, Guam and North Dakota.    Maryland and DC are going down, they're still a rate of 21 and 23 per 100K respectively. 

Where is it exploding?  New York, California, Texas, Illinois, where more schools are open, where there is less continuity of policy across the state, where there has been tremendous pressure to go back to normal.   

The world right now is not normal. 

Next, I looked at the metrics for our county because I've studied that throughout the pandemic. 

In January, the metrics exploded.  Why?   Think about it.   It makes sense the infection rate rose because people got together for Christmas, for New Year's, for Kwanza, for Hanaukkah, and/or took vacations over Winter break.  If you look at the metrics for the rate of infection detected, (here's the link), the pattern emerges.  The infection rate in November rose because of Halloween and Election Day.  The infection rate in December rose because of all the holidays I mentioned.   There aren't holidays in January that involve travel or big events.   The rate has decreased.  

 I also looked at the rate of infection  of now versus the summer, and our current rate, while trending down, is still above the rate observed and recorded during June, July and August.  Past trending is no promise of future, and the major challenge of this pandemic, is as we open up, we increase the likelihood of infection.   The metrics aren't secure at this point or indicative of safety, but merely of where we are today. 

The reality is, right now Maryland looks good because it is more cautious than other states. 

If it jumps the gun, following the Governor's proposals, (which I suspect is putting tremendous pressure on the local municipalities), the consequence will be lives.  I'm not trying to be melodramatic. I'm stating the reality.  We all have family with mitigating health conditions that would be severely compromised by Covid.   

If we're willing to show leadership and finish this year, we should have the time and allocations to ensure everyone who can be vaccinated, get vaccinated by the start of the new school year, and while it won't be popular, we'll be doing what's hard and what's right.   

What's hard and what's right is seldom popular. 

But this decision to force a re-opening is tripping and quitting with the finish line in sight. 

As a school system, county and state, we can get every adult vaccinated, and we can begin again provided we're willing to be patient.  We can even get all the parents of those kids vaccinated as part of the enrollment process for next year.  We just have to decide, everybody matters more than test scores and that we can't have good outcomes if students are at risk by coming to school. 

Let me state the reality.  I get that teaching virtually is hard hard hard hard hard.  I've done it this past year and it's hard.   Let me say, I want to return to the classroom because I want to be engaging my students.  I want to have my kids in school too.  However, I'm not willing to bet their future lives on an impulsive present.  I'm fine with redshirting everyone and going another year. We'll all emerge stronger, smarter and wiser, and alive.   At the end of the day, how many kids families are we betting on being impatient?  Because one is too many, and many more than one will be affected. 

Thank you for listening.  Be safe. Be smart, and let's finish this the right way. 

 

Why Do We Need This?

It's the big question. It's really the only question I ever get while teaching.

Why do I need to read this? Why do I need to answer this? Why do I need to write this? Why do you need to test this?  All of it boils down to why is learning this necessary when I can access the answers, the questions, the essays answering the questions, the summary of the books, the anaylsis of the books from multiple perspectives, and the dissent over the same questions, all with the touch of a button on my phone?

What answers can I give to a reasonable question? Their thinking goes as follows: why do I need to know this when I can know it if I need it?  Why not wait until it is needed? Chances are, I won't ever need to know hyperbole or alliteration or how to break down a story into its parts, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, deneoument. Why do I need to read Gatsby?  Why do I need to read any book?  They're all here on my phone if I want, and I don't even have to read them, I can have them read to me.  It is a serious question, even if asked to simply get out of doing work.  It demands a serious answer.

Why is learning necessary when all knowedge is accessible?

When we reduce the need for knowledge to use, any knowledge which does not have an immediate use, is deemed useless.  Functional knowledge becomes not merely the baseline, but also the limit. Nothing further need be explored or explained.   We will become cave men in the electronic age, relying on machines to manage everything, we'll forget what we should not.  There is a beauty and a value to learning to play an instrument, master a sport, reading a book, or discovering the depth of a discipline.  We can only discover it by plunging in deeper, rather than skipping along the surface of all things.

Beauty has a purpose, but not use.  While moving the heart and growing the mind can be the goal as an educator, it cannot be the stated objective.  How do I argue with the reality of holding a library in one's phone?

I argue the reality.  You have a phone with a libary in it.  I have a manual for my washing machine.  I Having not read the manual, I can only do a fraction of what the machine is capable of doing. I've limited my capacity by my wilful ignorance.

Likewise, I have a piano.  I have enough knowledge to play decent pieces.  However, I've not practiced, ergo the skill lies atrophing.  The music is there, the knowledge, all that is required of me, is will and time.

What we can do, is limited by our willingness to encounter it, to wrestle with it, to struggle and suffer with it, to practice, to fail, to try and try and try again, and allow ourselves to be shaped and refashioned by the process.   I become a writer by writing, a pianist by playing.  We become what we're willing to invest ourselves in becoming.

So to my students:   Why do you need this? Because you do not have yet sufficient broad based knowledge to have uncovered all you are called to be, all you could be, and all you might yet want to be.  Such discoveries will require you explore places you would not go, and read books you did not pick, hear opinions you do not favor, and encounter thoughts you did not think.  Everything you take in, helps you take on more.  I want you to be able to take on all the more that comes from everyone else having access to that same library in their pockets.

Part of the why  is rational, functional, even practical. Those with a broader knowledge of that more, and more facile use of that more, will adapt to the moreness better than those who simply view it as the equivalent of a spare tire they might one day need.  I want you armed for the future.  A tool, like my washing machine, works only as well as the person programing it.  It works better for the one who reads the manual.

However the deeper reason is more ambitious on my part: I want them to be able to conduct the symphony, rather than merely listen to it, to write the book and craft the law, rather than simply be affected by it, or have to obey it.   Creation, whether of art or law, requires craft and skill, and such craft and skill only comes by work. Discovering all the ways in which what you know and how you know it affects how you can manage the world in which you operate is the process of becoming educated.    

I learned proper fingering for piano at eight, at fifty, my hands won't let me do otherwise.  We do not understand yet, and yet, it is only by going through things not understanding, that we will come to know what we should, and more than we planned.  This is the why of any education.  We must endure not knowing, and trust the coming to know has innate value in addition to practical and obvious worth of the knowledge won.

My goal is to expose every student I encounter to something beyond their experience; something true, something beautiful, something which tells more than a story. Hopefully, we're uncovering the unspoken truths about ourselves in the process of plunging through Gatsby and Shakespeare, and any other authors we encounter.  "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio," holds for each of us all the time.   Read and recognize, there might be something in this text speaking to your classmate.  Tomorrow, the text might speak to you.   It might be years before you grasp what struck you.  It might be never, but since we cannot know what will stir each soul, we keep presenting all these things in real time, in tangible ways, and asking you to turn over the prose and poems like jewels, to see each facet, in case one of them catches the light in your eyes.

Why do we need this?  Because I firmly believe all good stories are about more than what we think they are. They reveal who we are, when we encounter them.  The story we read as a child, means something different when we read it to  a child.  The romance we couldn't comprehend, now makes sense.  The mystery haunts whereas before, we were just in a hurry to get to the conclusion.  We need to create layers of understanding and that takes time.  School, and in particular, the arts, are a way of creating those layers which will come into play in later years.  So yes, I will make you read the book. Yes, I will make you write about it. Yes, I will correct your grammer and ask more of you than you want to give.  I hope one day, you will understand, I wanted you to dig deeper, because I knew as you cannot, there are treasures to be found, but only if you're willing to put in the effort.  It's my job to keep you interested in the meantime, and somehow content with not knowing why something is valuable, until you know enough to recognize its value.  

Stop Already! Or At Least, Let Them Eat Cake.

I have had children in the school system for 15 years.  In that time, I have watched academic creep. What was for third and fourth graders, is now taught in second, what was first grade is now expected of kindergarten.  What my children do in high school, I remember struggling to master in college or opting to avoid all together.

At the same time, the schools go merrily on discussing how our kids should 1) volunteer 2) get 8 hours of rest 3) exercise 4) read for recreation 5) join at least three clubs or 1 club and do a sport and have a social life that includes at least 5 friends and regular-get-togethers.  They should also feel free to let the teacher know they couldn't finish an assignment if they needed to rest but know ahead of time, they'll probably be penalized for not turning it in on time.  They also are informed that high school is a time to try out new interests, but if you do poorly, know that this will affect college applications and there's no mercy for mess ups.  It's goofy. Apparently, if you are not carpe the hell Diem out of every moment, you're flunking parenting and childhood. 

I protest.  I was a teen. I remember being stupid.  I remember not getting 3/4ths of what I was supposed to do.  I remember listening to the same record over and over again, playing video games until my quarters were all gone and having nothing to do.   I remember being bored.  We have become a society that does not value rest or down time or non online time.  Every moment is caffinated and stimulated and saturated with live stream and twittering and email and wi-fi. 

As the parent, I wrestled with the desire to tell her to blow it off.  Honestly. I wanted her to just relax about it and go to bed.

This was not a case of a girl being irresponsible, this was a girl who had done homework over the weekend to get ahead and now was working on new assignments that arrived this week. She took a 30 minute break but was still working at midnight only to receive email notification that two of the assignments were no longer due the next day even though they'd been assigned as due.  So she lost sleep and time to work that was no longer immediately necessary and had the unfortunate situation of still having work that was due which she had not yet done as it was supposed to take only a few minutes of time.   I know because I got to hear this rant last night when the strung out teen couldn't find a paper she was supposed to correct.  She'd done the work, it had been graded, she'd made two small errors but the paper was missing.

It was physics. 

Rather than allow me to send an email explaining the mishap, she redid the entire thing.  She explained, "Yeah, maybe I lost it but that won't mean I won't be penalized."  I understood she was partially correct, there is a tyranny of policy that sometimes seems to trump common sense and sensibilities. And while I thought her teacher would probably be reasonable, she didn't feel she could take the chance. She also explained she wouldn't be able to sleep knowing it wasn't done.   

Being incompetent in physics, I did the only thing I could do, I brought her cakes and milk. 

It made me wonder how and why there hadn't been push back against this demand to make children master what we did not, to demand they know more than we ever did, sooner than we did.  I know why. Part of it is ego manifested in vicarious pseudo virtue competitive parenting.  You know what I mean, "my kid is an honor student who takes physics and is on the highly selective competitive team of whatever that wins and is better than all those other...blah blah blah."  Part of it is the desire of school systems to win that battle on the district level.  Our children are foreign policy experts, Olympians, multi-jointed multi lingual TED talk worthy thinkers with steve jobsian inventiveness and oratory skills that put the founding fathers to shame.  They can assemble a plane from a bicycle just like MacGyver and have memorized Pi out to the 1,000 number (9).  Next year, we're making them expand it to 2000, but with a calculator and by hand.     

As a society, we keep demanding more without  ever pausing to consider what we might be losing in the process of demanding that kids act as something other than kids.  It started with the death of recess and shortening of lunch, the professionalization of parenting and extra curriculum activities, the banning of sweets and treats and firm denial of the reality that there is always a bell curve in every class.  We've decided as professionals and a people, the definition of success is the highest standard deviation.  In statistics, these numbers are supposed to be thrown out and not applied towards one's generalizations that might come from the data.  The question becomes, when college students have to produce Ph.D. work, what will the doctoral students do?  I don't know about you but I'll cry foul when I can't adequately assist with Kindergarten homework.  The authorities will probably declare me unfit and make me return to preschool at that point though. 

My daughter finished her work. She chatted happily over her snack, buoyed by the little something and the knowledge she'd finished.  She said it was a good thing I'd shown up, or she was prepared to break out a journal and start writing how she hated the world and everyone because it was just so hard.  But the little dessert, that was enough to take the edge off of everything. 

I learned something they don't teach you in any grade.  Midnight snacks and milk even cure the ills of physics and high school. 

Surviving Summer Projects Assigned by the School

*Saturday will be rerun blog classic day.  This first saw daylight July 8, 2008.

Every parent’s favorite game with children in the summer is "Time to do your summer enrichment program." and the subsequent corollary, "What's My Motivation?" When the time honored and irrefutable “Because I said So…” doesn’t work and that summer reading list looks more daunting than the latest 360 Vertical Drop Over 55 mph Double Loop Roller Coaster at the park, what’s a parent to do?

1) Assess your child' learning style. Physical? Kinetic? I admit it’s drastic but with eight books left and only six weeks of summer, radical solutions may be necessary. At least, that’s what I tell myself as I have bartered 30 minutes of reading for an hour at the pool as a standard deal.

2) Re-evaluate communication methods. By mid-summer, the parent voice is on permanent mute status with kids unless key words are tagged –ice cream, park, movies, mall and swimming. Verbal exchanges should no longer be considered an effective medium for letting offspring know what needs to be done on a given day. The following techniques are offered as viable alternatives to speaking aloud.

a) Post-it notes with a task on each post it. Special Tip: Color code by child. Every three notes or so, put a treat or prize or compliment. Quarters, Klondike Bars and bubbles for outside work well.

b) Mystery Mom Madness Game: Want your kids to listen? Declare yourself silent. Respond to every request and need as usual, but say nothing. See how long it can endure. Gestures to get in the car did not work well, but loading the car with the babies and honking the horn was emotionally satisfying. By not listing the errands, one avoids the caterwauls of protest for the usual stand-by need to dos, dry cleaning, pharmacy, bank and grocery store. Handing out worksheets and holding up pencils in one hand and chocolate bars in the other got the job done for the day. Sure it was passive aggressive, but exceptionally therapeutic.

c) Contracts: Posted sheets on the fridge. Wanted: Room Cleaned, vacuumed, laundry placed in bag and beds made, will pay top $$$. Call 301-Clean ME! For more details. Also wanted: summer book reports completed, typed double spaced and proof read. Unrestricted access to Wii obo. My teen aged son called on his and his sister’s behalf to negotiate prices. We settled on a trip to the book store where they could use their gift cards. Negotiations for homework remain an unresolved issue of dispute.

3) Family dynamics don’t matter. Power and authority are insufficient to guarantee obedience or competency. The problem remains that parents consider summer projects to be like homework, status quo behaviors that require neither rewards, nor reminders, like not fighting with one’s sibling more than once in any given three hour period. Parents are unreasonable this way, as kids view any time spent studying as ruining the entire purpose and spirit of summer, and fighting with sisters, a protected right under the constitution.

Rational explanations do not fly in such a situation. Showing a chart of fights with the time, duration, nature of the offense and participants do not move said recalcitrant children to alter patterns of behavior. Documenting that the same time would have been sufficient to finish two chapters or four workbook lessons does not work, as it reveals why the parent wants the job done, not why the kid should or must.

Emotional appeals also fall flat. Suggesting major carnage will occur if the bad behavior (determined sloth) does not stop must be backed up with sufficient force to ensure compliance and that's hot hard work in the dog days of August. Again, the maximum labor is foisted on the parent. One must remember this is the child's responsibility, not the parents. Ours is but to nag and remind and supply the opportunity.

So what does work?

POLICY WONK APPROACH: Take the curriculum rationale stated for summer projects and enrichment from the school/district web site, and thrust it in front of the children to read, or read aloud if the offspring in question is not yet literate. If it doesn’t motivate, it might induce sleep, giving the parent 2 to 3 hours of peace.

KID SWAP: Explain that you love summer projects as much as they do, then, offer to switch. You can clean their rooms and do their math. They can change the diapers, do the dishes, fold the laundry, make all the beds of children not able to do so, clean the bathrooms and cook the meals. No backsies for 48 hours. Be sure to tell them, you’ll do as good a job as they do.

NASCAR approach: Point out that they can finish the 60 pages of math in 30 days doing 2 a day each or make it drag out all summer. Offer a big prize for finishing first. Stand back and have plenty of sharpened pencils.

Play Kid Chicken. Post the number of days left of summer to finish the projects publically. Keep the countdown to school prominently displayed at all times. Do not mention projects again. If it comes up, shrug and say something along the lines, “Your project, your grade, your problem. If you want help...” Warning, this takes a firm belief that the kid cares more than you do.

Should the summer program studies still loom unfinished, unloved and untouched…push the Nuclear Red button of parenting.

“You’re right. This is dumb. Tell you what, I’ll home school you this year. We’ll start today.”

Now, If They Could Do a Follow Up for Devotees of Lord of the Ring

Because we all know, it's important to get the facts straight from the beginning and those facts come best from the parent in the home in the proper context...



P.S. I want the Yoda hat.

When Mom Was a Kid..

What it was like when I was a kid

On Sports and Games

Growing up, we strapped metal wheels to our shoes and fell on our knees on bumpy concrete until we learned to stop falling. Turns were tricky so you either held on, or in my brother's case, got down on your hands and knees and crawled through the turn, or you decided you knew what you were doing, tried to make the turn and fell at least 50 times before you got it.

When we played on swing sets, teeter totters and monkey bars, they were made of wood and steel and sometimes gave us splinters, particularly when we would ride with two or three at a time.

Tag and hide and seek, dodge ball and freeze tag had winners and losers. We played them often. In fact, we loved them. Even when we were mad about being picked last, it just meant we hoped next time, we’d be captains or picked first, or at least not last again.

Sports had b-teams and sometimes, you didn’t even make that one. You only got a trophy if you won, and sometimes, you got skunked. People kept score but the teams for grade school and the like, were not posted in the paper. It wasn’t important. These were kids’ games.

On School and Education…

There were three channels on television if you didn’t count the educational one, which we didn’t.

The library was a place to check out books, a week in advance of the science project that was mandatory.

The science project was a big deal, complete with a hand written four page report and five references, none from the web. Everyone had to make a poster and a project. People would know if your parents did the art work, and you wouldn’t win.

We’d get pop quizzes at school and worksheets that had been freshly run from the ditto machine, and smelled like ink. We loved those, and I think sometimes, the ink made us dizzy.

You got grades. You got grades every day. Most of the time, it was a number or a letter. The grades included C’s, D’s, F’s and the less common, C-, D+ and D-. Your parents got called if you got these grades. Every time. Forging your parent’s signature got you in bigger trouble.

If you didn’t do an assignment, you got to do it during recess while everyone else was outside playing, which stunk.

They made us memorize Kipling’s “If,” our multiplication tables and say the pledge. We often had to read aloud or do problems on the board for everyone else to watch.

They showed us videos of “The Red Balloon,” and “Chicken Soup with Rice” as treats. We saw each every year at least once.

At noon, We’d get kicked outside to play, we had recess. It was after lunch and lasted a decent amount of time. It didn’t matter if it was hot or cold, muggy or raining, we were on our own after lunch for that half hour. Recess lasted long enough to form cliques, to organize a kick ball game, to braid hair or play a no prisoners game of speed solitaire.

On Grown Ups…

People disagreed on politics, as they always have, but it wasn’t acceptable to insult someone just because they held a different political affiliation. No one was considered heartless or brainless for being a Republican or a Democrat; these were party denominations, not the solutions to every problem under the sun requiring absolute religious fealty.

Being kids, we didn’t even know what politics really were until Mom caught us one day having uprooted all the political signs and repositioned them in our front yard because we thought they were cool. These Vote for…posts seemed like some form of mushroom that had sprung up overnight. We were busy dismantling them to make swords when Mom found us.

Television had a family hour which was boring and grown-ups watched the news, which was boring to us, but then the alternative was bed.

There were uber parents out there who made their kids compete in every sport and activity, but most of the grown-ups knew that these people were wrong and encouraged all of us to pick what we loved and do that first.

Grown-ups drank things like beer and wine, ice tea, diet soda and coffee, all of which tasted terrible. They also had weird clothing rules like no shorts after Labor Day and no white in the winter. They ordered foods with dressings and sauces on them and used “Sweet and Low.” They would make us eat the crust on breads, the stumpy parts of broccoli and occasionally, liver.

For Fun…

Swimming lessons and camp took care of maybe two weeks. The rest of the time, we were on our own.

We’d troll the neighborhood to amass as many at home minors as possible. It didn’t matter who, if you were a kid and you were home, we were knocking on the door asking, “Can you come play?”

Then, we’d ride our bikes until dark, no helmets. We’d pin cards to our spokes with clothes pins to sound like motor cycles. On a dead end street, we’d hold races all afternoon until someone announced they were thirsty. There would be a run on the hose, with each person jockeying to be later in line, so as not to get the first swig of heated by the sun water that came out of the end.
Then the beep beep beep of the mosquito spraying truck would be heard and everyone would clear out to their homes as fast as possible. We didn’t know DEET was poisonous, but it sure smelled bad.

When it was too hot, we’d play monopoly in doors until someone won or was called home. We sometimes made card castles, trying to use all 52 cards before the thing fell. We loved fresh boxes of crayons and coloring books. The coloring books were almost always of animals and never had stickers.

Come fall, we’d gather pecans from every yard, filling up two trash cans. Then we’d offer to rake leaves for a dollar all over the block and try to sell the pecans.

Every Christmas, we’d have a Christmas program. They never had plots, just grade after grade, alternating between secular and religious music, with the grand finale, always, Silent Night. Then most parents would reconvene across the street at the Carnation Dairy restaurant to praise our performances and buy ice cream.

Why am I telling you this?

So my darlings, you will understand some of the why I tell you often to turn off the television and the DDS and the DVD’s and the IPods and the cell phones and the computers.

I will shrug sometimes when you are not 100% safe and even encourage you to jump off the high dive, draw until you run out of chalk and drink a soda outside while reading comics in a hammock.

I will not rush out to challenge other parents to a duel to the death because your feelings are hurt, though I will offer you a hug and say I love you.

Life is always unsafe and unfair but worth living. Sometimes, it is even unsafe and unfair in our favor.

Skinned knees and even bruised hearts heal. Memorization, pain from learning to learn is part of the process, and not what you will recall when you get to be nostalgic about childhood. Like giving birth, we don’t recall the labor pain itself, only that it hurt and then it was over, and we had this person, and everything was light and wonderful and still is.

Happy Thank You for Making me A Mother Day! And Happy Mother’s Day to everyone out there who has been so blessed.

Next Saturday, You're On You're Own

“Mom, there’s nothing to do.”

“We could go to a museum.”

It doesn’t matter that they’ve been to the Air and Space Center countless times and loved every trip to the Natural Museum of History and spent hours poring over exhibits at various Civil War battle grounds, the answer remains as timeless as it is predictable.

“That’s boring.”

It puzzles me as a adult, for I know the same answer would have escaped my lips at their age every time and yet I know I loved those places with their well done dioramas, ancient texts, odd collection of buttons and tools and jewelry, I loved them, I loved them, I loved them, and so do my children.

And yet here are my own progeny fighting against what suspiciously feels like an “educational” field trip instead of a weekend treat.

Nevertheless, the gauntlet has been laid down, and I have given my marching orders. They said they were bored, so I’m going to entertain them. “Get in the car.”

Like opening a book that I tell them is good, they grudgingly pile into the van.

“Will we get lunch?”

Not wanting a direct mutiny on my hands, I agree. The kids spend the entire duration of the driving time to the museum discussing what they will eat and how much money they brought for the gift shop. “Museums are only fun if you get souvenirs.” My son explained. I smile and pretend he’s right.

Sure enough, the planes hanging from the ceiling, the uniforms behind the plastic casing and the actual rock from the moon they can touch sufficiently shock and awe even my jaded oldest into the wide-eyed-this-is-the-greatest-way-to-spend-a-Saturday-jazzed-by-everything kids that I know them to be. For an hour, all is bliss as we peruse “Women in Flight,” discuss past history of aviation and even reveal a touch of personal history, our own friend that happens to be a pilot in the armed forces.

As hunger pains rear their ugly heads, the glow of the museum fades just a touch, but the onsite Museum McDonalds cures all, even growly attitudes from an eight year old sulking that he couldn’t purchase the $89.00 Lego kit of the Space Shuttle.

Munching on french fries, the kids examine their treasures, plastic planes, stickers, a coloring book and few models and magazines. It takes considerable adult pull to convince the kids not to start assembling their planes in the restaurant.

Like any sensible adult at an education excursion, I throw out an open ended question to facilitate further insight and discussion. We adults are boringly predictable that way. “What did you like best at the museum?”

“The French fries.”
“The Lego Shuttle I couldn’t get.”

“The IMAX movie of Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix which we could go to if you bought tickets.”

“I mean,” I start breathing deeply, trying to avoid becoming annoyed, “of the things we saw.”

“Oh."

"The Shuttle.”
“The Big plane that was the Fastest in the World!”
“I still want to go on the simulation. It looked cool.”

Trying to ignore the technical answer by the eleven year old, after all, she did “see” people waiting in line for the simulation ride, I throw out a different line of thought. “Did it make you think about what you would like to do when you grow up?”

“I’m going to be a pilot when I grow up.” Says my five year old daughter brightly.
“I’m going to be an astronaut.” My son has to up the ante.
“Oh yeah, I’m going to pilot the Space Shuttle to the Space Center.” says one of his two older sisters, trying to win.

“Well, I’m going to run this museum so I can test all the planes.” says the other.

Everyone looks at her in silent envy. “No fair. You got the good job.”

Maybe next week, I’ll let them be bored.



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