25 November 2009 - Fall Report

It’s been almost a year since my last family update. How can that be possible? Where has the time gone?

For me, most of the last year has been spent nailed to my chair. For eleven and a half months, I worked on a complete rewrite of a major software product, producing about 600,000 lines of code in only 14-18 hours a day for 325 days. My eyes blurred, my back ached, my blood sugar control went loopy, and I became intimately familiar with fatigue in a whole new way. At the end of the ordeal, I emerged triumphantly, the prize held high overhead, laurel leaves and confetti everywhere, bands playing, and fireworks lighting up half the hemisphere. Actually, I just said, “Well, looks like it’s done,” and went to sleep for a day. Of such are men made.

Despite my workload and my seeming inability to recognize my own children for weeks at a time, we managed to get away occasionally. In March, we drove to Orlando to visit Universal Studios. In June, we took off for the northern wilds of Wisconsin and spent a couple of weeks rusticating grandly amidst the gangly birch and straggly pine. The boys have developed a taste for the Renaissance, so in May we visited the Scarborough Festival (near Waxahachie, Texas), and in November we attended the big Texas Renaissance Festival (in Plantersville, Texas). Starting ’way back about thirty years ago, my father and I used to go once a year to a festival on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. I can’t help but recall those trips while toodling around with my own boys, watching people gnaw on turkey legs and spend fifty cents per arrow to practice archery.

Speaking of turkey, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Nicky still loves the idea (but not the labor) of full, multi-course meals, so we’re once again doing printed menus, days of preparation, seven courses (not including the amuse-bouche , which is just cheese and crackers this time), and the full regalia. Nicky drapes a folded linen towel over his forearm and does his best impersonation of a French waiter.

Speaking of French waiters (see how a clever writer leads from one topic to another?), Nicky (and, to a much lesser extent, Zack) have been learning French. Texas middle schools require students to take a foreign language and study a musical instrument. While this sounds good on paper, in practice it means “learn Spanish” and “join the school band.” For those who were raised without a full Texas appreciation of burritos and football, this is somewhat disappointing. However, if the child is already studying a language and taking music lessons, there’s some leeway to avoid frito farts at the game: if one pushes, the school will ungraciously concede that other languages and instruments exist and are (perhaps) worthy of study. So we’re doing French and piano, starting now instead of next year. Given the lack of celerity with which Nick learns to appreciate new things, a year of prep and familiarization is hardly excessive. If he ever wants to learn another Romance language, knowing French will come in handy. In the meantime, he can jolly well curse Gallic spelling and practice sounding as if he had a deviated septum. Piano gives him a good grounding in music theory and helps train his ear to composition and production.

Nicky is halfway through fifth grade, his last year of elementary. He’s taller than ever, excelling at art and language, stumbling a bit with science and math, and learning how to fall more carefully when swinging between desks in his classroom. I lost the bet that Zack would be the first child to break a bone. Only a couple of weeks into the school year, Nick fell and landed on his shoulder while goofing off. He broke his arm—a classic proximal humerus fracture—but fortunately didn’t damage the growth plate or tear the rotator cuff tendons. There was no swelling or discoloration, full range of motion, and indeed no external sign of the break at all, yet the pain persisted despite acetaminophen and a good night’s sleep. I took him for an X-ray and sho’nuff, a nice bright line halfway through the bone showed up. He got six weeks in a sling and a fairly cheap lesson on his lack of invulnerability.

Zack is doing well in third grade. His dyslexia and hyperactivity continue to make studying onerous, but he’s plugging away and keeping up with his class. He has several accommodations written into his IEP for test-taking, and has pull-outs throughout the day for individualized remediation, but is doing the same coursework as the rest of third grade, and expected to achieve the same goals. As long as one isn’t paying attention to spelling or reading, one notices that his command of English is growing appropriately. His articulation, on the other hand, is backsliding somewhat. Although he has been receiving speech therapy at school all along, we may need to go back to a private therapist for more intensive help. I’m holding off on that for now, because his abilities are a moving target. It’s so hard, with him, to know what’s laziness, what’s sheer cussedness, what’s simply delayed maturity, and what’s a genuine problem. Things he breezes through one minute are insuperable obstacles the next (and yes, I mean “minute,” not “day”).

In general, both boys are doing okay academically. I could wish for more curiosity, more love of learning for learning’s sake, but I’ve got fairly normal boys who just want to play and can’t understand why anyone would care about all this school stuff. There’s time yet for them to develop into proper students. Between now and then, they’ll do their homework and have a minimal understanding of each subject, despite the school’s uncaring attitude toward cognition. Texas schools, like many others and not through any particular fault of their own, pretty much only devote attention to passing tests. The only way to ensure that No Child is Left Behind is to make sure that No Child Gets Ahead. Their salaries and facilities budgets depend so heavily on test results that there isn’t much room left for teaching things that aren’t on the test, or teaching how to think or how to solve problems. As long as the kids pass tests, attend school rallies, and don’t listen to the President of the United States exhorting them to excel, everything’s fine.

Homeschooling beckons. What kid could fail to appreciate an hour or two of translating Caesar before breakfast, trig and calculus until lunch, creative writing, art, history, and music in the afternoons, and writing book reports all night? Weekends are for special projects—thing like designing computers, writing plays, or attending seminars on physics. You know, the fun stuff. The boys would love to have me as their teacher. (Actually, that reminds me: I wrote a one-act play for the boys a couple of months ago. They loved everything about it—the production, the acting, the costumes, the props, even learning lines.)

More seriously, the attitude of the schools does bother me at times. How can they give an “A” in math to a student who misses one out of ten questions? Yeah, maybe that’s superior work in the public school system, but would you want to drive on a bridge designed by an engineer who gets one out of every ten calculations wrong? And that’s an “A” student. The school will happily pass a child who gets only six of ten questions correct, in any or all subjects. I wish the school would abandon relative marking altogether and concentrate on mastery—or at least competence. Any kid who can’t make change, or who can’t write a coherent sentence, should not pass the class. Yet they do, and they feel good about it, because self-image is at least as important as actually being able to do the work.

Old farts like me have always made these complaints: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers” (attributed to Socrates by Plato).

Plus ça change, eh, Nicky?

Well, on to Thanksgiving. We have a lot to be thankful for again this year. The recession hurt, but didn’t drive us out of business. My project is done. Health is generally good. We have a nice house, plenty of food, clothing, and toys. My project is done. We get vacations every now and then. We enjoy most days—happiness, the art of being satisfied or pleased with one’s circumstances, is no stranger to our lives. My project is done. The boys are learning and growing and turning into pretty good guys. These last few years of their childhood are going smoothly, and they’re building up wonderful memories to sustain them in the turbulence to come. We love each other more than ever, and although my big programming project is done, my real project, bringing up Nicky and Zack, is a work in progress about which I’m quite pleased. They are wonderful kids, and I fully trust they will be wonderful young men someday soon.