Parenthood: Week 502 - Managing Fight Club?

It’s like there is a timer. 

Sometimes the timer can last as long as forty minutes. Other times, it can last five minutes. Whenever my children play together, it’s like there’s a finite amount of time they will play together until there is some fight or disruption that I need to address.  

The reality is that most of the time, my children play well together. It’s really wonderful having a house filled with the energy and love of brothers being together. Ollie, my oldest, will read a book with Ethan. Lucas and Ethan, my two youngest, will play chase around the house. All three of them manage to play together at times, which is pretty incredible when you think about the fact that there is almost a seven-year age difference between my oldest and youngest children. It truly is one of the most wonderful parts of my life: seeing my children playing together.  

And one of the most annoying parts of my life, especially in the past week, is when things start falling apart, and someone doesn’t act their best. Often the issues are around sharing. For example, someone wants a toy someone else wants. So someone takes it without asking, and it goes downhill from there. Then there are moments of physicality which I have to interrupt. Sometimes it’s when wrestling seems too active, or someone pushes someone out of frustration instead of using their words. 

Sometimes my sons have spent too much time together and need a break from each other. This is expressed in little disagreements. They don’t know how to manage this, and someone actively fights my suggestion, which fast becomes an order for them to play in different parts of the house.  

This is tricky to manage because I want them to learn to work out disagreements themselves. But, sometimes, they do, and it’s not always clear when is a good time to step in and when to give them time to work something out.  

All of this happens in the tension of modern life. Last week was a busy week. There was a lot to do in preparing for Thanksgiving and cleaning up afterward. I don’t think we were fully 100% done with cleaning up from Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday night until Sunday morning. There was a fair amount of time we were trying to take care of this stuff when my children played with each other. And I sometimes think when my children have issues getting along, it’s because they want attention from me, and I’m not always able to give them as much attention as I would like.  

It can feel like all I’m doing is being a referee with my children. Still, when I remind myself that we are all in this together, playing and figuring things out for ourselves and each other, the work feels less like a burden and more like an opportunity for us all to learn and be a family.

To Cook - Part 7: Turkey

I don’t know if I will ever completely understand the tradition of Thanksgiving turkey. As a child of Taiwanese immigrants, Thanksgiving, like many American holidays, was confusing for my family. 

Even in the 1980s, the mythology around Thanksgiving felt off to my family. Maybe it was because we were an immigrant family, but it never really made sense to us. Then there was the turkey itself.  

Growing up, turkey wasn’t in our regular rotation of protein that we ate. When I was around eight years old, I remember thinking that the main meat we ate was beef, pork, chicken, duck, and fish. So turkey wasn’t something I even thought about as something to eat. However, my mom did make a great turkey leg soup once in a while.  

Like other American traditions, my parents gave the Thanksgiving turkey thing a good go. Like people in the 1980s, they got a turkey, put it in a pan, probably with stuffing (which we now know is not a good idea), trusted it up, and cooked it whole. I remember one year, our oven broke, and my dad finished it on the grill. We did this for a couple of years, and then mom decided we weren’t going to do a turkey. She decided to do a fish dish or a prime rib roast for Thanksgiving dinner.  

My mom didn’t like turkey all that much, and the the traditional Thanksgiving turkey preparation didn’t work all that well. For the turkey to be cooked, it had to be in the oven for a long time, resulting in dry breast meat. The other thing that bugged her was the patriarchal idea of the man of the house carving a whole turkey that the women prepared.  

Flash forward to college. I helped a turkey for the first time in a friend’s sorority house. A group of us were around for Thanksgiving break, and we tried to make a Thanksgiving dinner happen. I was responsible for Turkey with a friend for a couple of hours. The pan broke, the turkey grease hit the bottom of over, and smoke filled the basement floor. I ran outside to get help, got locked out, and had to sneak back in by squeezing in through an open window. It was a thing, but somehow we made it work. This was a self-basting, turkey-in-a-bag method, which did work. The meat was moist, but the trade-off was that the skin wasn’t crispy.  

Over the past ten years, I’ve hosted Thanksgiving at least seven or eight times and made a turkey. I went with cooking the whole turkey once, and I was like, “NOPE, there has got to be a better way.” It took too long, and the results were not that good. After some research, I went with the spatchcock method:  

 

This method solves a lot of the problems with cooking a turkey whole. For example, the breast and thigh meat cooking more evenly, the skin can crisp up because you can cook it at a higher temperature, and the cooking time was WAY less than cooking the turkey whole.  

I did this method a bunch of times, and I was happy with the results. The one issue I had with this was the gravy prep. You do not have adequate time to make a stock from the turkey carcass for gravy after it’s done before people expect to eat. So, this year, I went with the most logical and easiest to manage method of cooking a turkey: just cut it up into smaller pieces.  

 

I loved doing this method this year. Cutting it up the day before meant I had to plenty of time to make an outstanding turkey stock and gravy. Dry brining, which is way better than wet brine, is very effective with smaller pieces. The key thing I love about this is that the breast pieces are separate from the thigh pieces. If one piece is done sooner, you can take it out of the oven. Going from cooked pieces to presenting on a plate was much easier than carving meat off a whole cooked turkey, and it tasted great because it had minimal cook time at a relatively high temperature. My fifteen-pound turkey cooked in less than an hour.  

Is there something lost when you don’t present a whole turkey to the table and carve it up? Yes. Is it important? Not to me. Yes, cooking is about tradition, but more importantly it's about values,. Cooking a turkey in separate pieces puts less of a burden on the cook, so they can be less stressed and more present and place a priority on the quality of the preparation. Cooking a turkey whole puts value on an image, which may be impressive to some, puts an unnecessary burden on the cook.  

Thanksgiving survives as a holiday because we have changed what it means. For most Americans, it’s not about the racist mythology of the “first Thanksgiving.” It’s about family. We have changed this holiday’s meaning, which is a good thing. So let’s consider changing how we cook turkeys. If the point of Thanksgiving is cooking a whole turkey, then it’s not a holiday worth preserving. 

And if you don't want to cook a turkey. Don’t. If cooking is not your love language, don't try to speak it on Thanksgiving. Cater it in or go out to eat. Order pizza, or do whatever makes you happy. If you don’t like cooking, don’t cook on Thanksgiving. However, if you want to have fun cooking a turkey, go for it. Buy one that is in the smaller size and just cut it up into pieces. It’s the easiest and most effective way to go. And if anyone misses the carving ceremony by the man of the house, they can sit in the corner and have a sad while you enjoy moist turkey meat with wonderfully crispy skin.

Parenthood: Week 501 - Ollie & Hamilton

My children generally listen to whatever music I'm into. In the car or around the house, I'll put on a podcast they enjoy, or I'll listen to music. At some point I thought about deliberately exposing Ollie to certain musicians or artists. It was a nice idea, but with all the other things to do with Ollie when he was a baby, I ended up just playing whatever music I wanted to listen to. 

Most of the time, my children put up with the music that I play. I generally listen to the same thing for a week or two, sometimes even a month. My brain likes to dive deep. So when I was really into "Play With Fire" by The Rolling Stones for about a week, all my children heard that song a lot. They thought it was a really funny song and learned most of the lyrics.  

I'm really into the new Springsteen album Only The Strong Survive right now. Ollie has learned a bunch of the lyrics to this song just by overhearing me play this music in the car and around the house. It's hard to know how much they pay attention to the music I play, but it's a nice surprise when I realize they do. Ethan and Ollie know "Crowded Table" really well because of the couple of months when I was playing that song all of the time.

When Hamilton hit its peak popularity, Ollie was 3 or 4 years old, and I listened to the soundtrack every day for like six months. It was cute to see Ollie getting into this show, and it culminated in taking Ollie to see the show with us, which was a wonderful experience.  

I'm not going to get into it, but I had an experience with Hamilton that pretty much closed that chapter in my life, and I haven't been interested in Hamilton ever since. I watched about ten minutes of the movie version and was like, "yeah, I'm good." I still respect it as a piece of art. I'm just not into it right now.  

Interestingly, Ollie has gotten back into Hamilton. A couple of weeks ago, he was singing a song from Hamilton, so I reminded him that we had the book Hamilton's A Revolution with all of the lyrics. So for the next few days, he had his head in that back trying to learn lyrics. Then I showed him how to access the soundtrack album on an iPad, and he would spend time listening to the songs and trying to recite the lyrics.  

Every few days, he proudly proclaims that he had learned a song and is starting to learn another. I was doing the same thing when I was about his age. Instead of Hamiton, I was learning all the lyrics to The Little Mermaid, carrying around a book with easy piano arrangements of the songs; however, I was primarily interested in the lyrics. So I worked hard to find the lyrics to "Under The Sea." 

So yes. That is what Ollie is doing with his free time right now. It's fun to watch him dive deep and explore the lyrics, the structure of the raps and the vocabulary. I love that he's finding his own way in, and taking the time to go deep.

Year 13: Week 11 - Time

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

- The Doctor

One of the most important teaching tools that teachers have is time.

Education in America is very much about time. Students have schedules that they follow throughout the day. There is a priority on these schedules, sometimes even over student learning. There are benefits to this when you think about how we help students learn to organize their lives, but there are drawbacks. Life isn't always about being "on time," I've experienced some of the best moments in my life have been when I've forgotten about time and prioritized being in the moment.

As a music teacher, I'm very aware that music "decorates" time. Work in music class, like the music itself, can make time feel like it's passing slower, or faster. It's always interesting to me when I start wrapping up music class, and students are surprised at how fast the class seems to go by.

Teachers are very much managers, and trying to help students understand when they need to change tasks before they become unproductive or spend longer on a task is tricky. I do want students to learn how to press "pause" on their work. However, I love it so much when students are deep in their work and don't want to stop. Sometimes I stop an activity too early or too late, and some moments, I stop it at precisely the right time. There is some science in this, but it's more art than anything else.

One of the aspects of time in education is how learning evolves over a couple of days or a week. For example, I started a song with my 5th graders last week, and it didn't go well. I was almost at the point of dropping that song from my curriculum. However, I was wisely advised not to make any decisions that day.

For most of last week, I was out with the flu, and while my students did some work on this song with the substitute, I wasn't expecting much growth. It was just a lesson or two. However, what I heard from my students was a huge improvement. While I credit the substitute teachers and the students for doing some good work while I was gone, this was a good reminder that sometimes students need time.

The process of musical learning, like other learning, has to occur over time. If you spend five hours on one day learning a song, you will sound less good than if you spread those five hours over a week. Stepping away from a piece and letting your brain process the music is essential to learning music. It's one of those seemingly magical things that's easy to forget.

The other piece of this is just trusting the students and the process. One reason I kind of freaked out last year is that this program that I'm preparing my students for is the Winter program that we haven't put on since 2019. I'm more nervous than I'm allowing myself to feel about preparing myself and my students for this performance. I've done a lot to set my students up for success. We are starting the music earlier than I have in years past. I'm keeping the arrangements simpler and prioritizing finding fun and joy in the process. Yeah, we'll be fine, but it feels like a lot.

I need to trust my students that they can do this. I need to trust myself that I know what's best, and I need to trust in the process, and most of all, I need to trust in time.

I can pass the time by worrying about the time I don't have, or I can find peace in the time that I do and the choices I make with the time that I do have.

I'll work on getting the latter.

It might take some time.

Parenthood: Week 500 - An Opportunity For Lucas

“C’mon, buddy.” 

As I carefully got into bed, my knees and hips aching, almost throbbing, Lucas ran around the room, picking up some books for me to read to him. It had been a couple of days of this flu. The headache was bad, but the muscle aches in my lower back, hips, and knees were most unexpected and made life really challenging. I’m an active parent who sits on the ground, moves around with my children, and moves around the house with them. So asking kids to bring things over to me and not feeling comfortable lifting them makes this situation even more difficult.  

My two oldest kids understand what it means when I’m sick. They’ve been sick themselves and are old enough to remember what it feels like to have some empathy for me. They don’t completely understand what this all means with my patience and my moods, but they seem to be giving me a break. When asking for help, Ethan was waiting for me to come by, and Ollie seemed to understand that I needed a couple of extra seconds to answer him or get him something.  

On the other hand, Lucas seemed to have no clue that I wasn’t feeling well. He’s about a month shy of 3-years-old and sweet as can be. So when he noticed that I was sitting down and spending more time in bed, he saw this as an opening. A large human sitting down on a couch or in bed is someone ready to read a book to him.  

I finally got myself into bed. I got a pillow propped up behind me and motioned at Lucas to come on over. He hurriedly came over, put one book on my chest, ran away, grabbed another book, and before I knew it, I had four books piled on my chest. Then, someone, Lucas, managed to get on the bed. Leading with his head, he somehow balanced a leg up on the side table and climbed in.  

Awkwardly I pulled him across my body and positioned him to the right of him. After some challenging maneuvering, Lucas was cuddling right next to me with my right arm around him. I looked down at him, and he smiled with silent satisfaction. Next, I picked up a book and read it to him.  

I was tired, and my brain was still foggy, so reading to him took far more effort than expected. My expressions weren’t great, I messed up some words and skipped some sentences, but Lucas didn’t mind. After each book was done, he got up, grabbed the next book, and then cuddled up for the next book.  

After we finished the books, I asked Lucas if he was ready to go to his crib. He pointed to his room, climbed over, and jumped off the bed. He waited for me as I slowly came out of bed, wincing at the pain in my hips. I slowly walked Lucas over to his room, holding his hand. When we got to his crib, I carefully and slowly picked him up and put him in his crib. I took a deep breath recovering from all the effort it took to lift him.  

Lucas then made a sound at me, holding his hands up. “Dude, I can’t lift you out of there. You just got in…[sigh] ok fine.” As I leaned over the crib, he gave me a tight hug around my neck, and then plopped down into his crib and cuddled up with his bellow. I laughed at myself and said, “goodnight, Lucas-bear,” blew him a kiss, and left his room for the night.

Year 13: Week 10 - How This Year Compares To 2020

It’s not like I was all chill and not stressed before the pandemic. 

As we were getting word as department chairs to get our faculty ready for a possible shutdown in early March 2020, part of me was looking forward to the week off. To my knowledge, all we were going to do was shut down for a week or two, the virus would chill out, and then we’d be back. This would give me a respite and time to catch up on work, which felt overwhelming.  

We know how that worked out… 

Then teaching during the 2020-2021 school year was understandably overwhelming. Being in person before vaccines, with students podded, teaching in homeroom classrooms instead of a music classroom, with restrictions to singing and wind instruments, was a lot. Some of what made this year feel like a lot was the great lengths we were taking to get back to “normal.” I remember putting on an outdoor concert that Spring, and working late to figure out how to make it happen.  

Then there was 2021-2022. Teaching during this year, in some ways, was harder than the year before. Yes, we had fewer restrictions due to the pandemic, but we also had a more significant disagreement and less clarity on what COVID-19 mitigations were necessary. Once only a fringe opinion, the idea of not wearing masks was embraced by reasonable professionals based on scientific research. This added a layer of tension. Also, we kept getting tripped up by students being exposed and quarantine rules, which seemed to become less clear as the year went on.  

Now, here we are, months into the 2022-2023 school year, and do things feel? CRAZY. J/K. Not really, but things aren’t simple. So returning to how easy things were before the pandemic is an illusion that has confused me until I remember that things weren’t truly a walk in the park before the pandemic. The challenges were just different.  

Some things feel much easier and like a return to home that I haven’t felt since before the pandemic. For example, my class schedule has returned to what it was before the pandemic. I’m back to teaching a curriculum that I don’t have to make up new every week, which I had to do when the pandemic first started. Yes, we still have to mask up at my school when there is exposure, which is a pain. However, it is helpful that most kids do not wear masks voluntarily, so how we communicate does feel much better.  

The challenges I’m feeling now are related to two things. First, I am trying to get back to the processes we did before the pandemic that will serve us moving forward. More importantly, the challenge now is figuring out how we have all changed, the students, the faculty, the staff, and the administration. When I look at my students and things aren’t working like I expect, how much of this is how my students have changed, or how much of this is because of how I have changed? 

The pandemic has changed us all and continues to change us. The evidence of this is clear at times, and other times the change is more ambiguous. 

We have a lot of work to do as adults to unpack all that we've been through as teachers as we figure out how to serve our students in a world no one imagined. 

We may feel done with the pandemic, but it isn't done with us. 

Parenthood: Week 499 - Saturday Morning

Still. 

Nothing was stirring, and the house was quiet. I reached out to Diana, expecting a child to be between us, but we were alone.  

I looked over at the clock, "7:15." I sat up in bed, confused. Usually, Ethan or Ollie get up early before they're ready-to-wake-clock glows green at 7 am, especially on the weekends. I closed my eyes and listened, wondering if Ollie had gone downstairs to watch some television, but it was quiet and still.  

It had been a trying week. Lucas had been homesick for part of it, and I had a colonoscopy. The ebb and flow of life with three young children didn't give us any respite to handle these challenges. 

I was about to get up when I heard the doorknob to Lucas's room start to turn. Slowly the door opened, and Lucas peaked into our room. "Hey, baby-baby, come here," I said as I waved him over. I lay down in bed as he approached. Then he plopped down his head on my bed, swung his leg on the nightstand, and rolled his body onto our bed.  

I pulled Lucas between Diana and me. I helped him get under the cover, and he laid his head on my chest. As the rhythm of our breathing aligned, the world again felt quiet and still.  

Lucas sat up a moment later with a smile on his face. This was his way of telling me he was ready to start the day. I got up, and he followed me to the bathroom. He watched me with a smile as I did my morning routine. As we stepped out of the bathroom, I heard the gentle pitter-patter of Buffy's nails. Her head peaked out of the bedroom into the hallway. As she saw us, she picked up speed and caught up to us as we started down the stairs.  

I changed Lucas's diaper and set up the water kettle so I could make some tea. Lucas walked up to me, holding a full-size bag of chips, and pushed them into my leg, insisting, "chips!" I had no idea where he found these chips, probably someone in the back of our pantry. "Buddy, you can't just eat chips for breakfast," I insisted." Then Lucas pointed at the refrigerator and said, "yu-gert."  

I took the bag of chips out of Lucas' hands and told him to sit down. He hurried over to his chair and climbed up to the table. A couple of moments later, I brought him a bowl with potato chips, strawberry yogurt, and a spoon. I started peeling off the yogurt lid, and Lucas's objective was "NO!" So I backed off and let him get the lid off. He pushed the lid towards me, and I accepted it and kissed him on his forehead.  

Heavier steps came down the stairs, and Ethan walked over to me wearily. H walked over to me with his arms up, "hug?" "Good morning, special one," I greeted him as I picked him up. Even though lifting caused a twinge of pain in my arm, suffering a tendon injury, I still held him close and felt his face bury deep into the side of my neck.  

Buffy whined softly at the back door to our backyard. I carried over Ethan with me as I let Buffy out. I gently put Ethan down, and he remembered about the Lego set he had started the night before. He rushed to his play table and returned to work on putting the pieces together.  

The slower steps of Ollie, my oldest son, approached. I hugged him as he groggily passed me to sit on the couch and turn on the television. He knew it was weekend, and that meant he could start with day with  television.  

After gathering my stuff and putting on my shoes, I looked back at my children. Ollie lay on the couch watching television, Ethan was working on Legos, Lucas was eating breakfast, and Buffy was sitting behind Lucas, watching him intently. The house felt still.

Part of me felt sad that I would spend most of the day away, but I was comforted knowing I was spending my day with a symposium for young men of color. Somehow my children understood the work I was doing was important, and I knew that someday they would be proud of me for the work I did for others boys of color just like them.

Year 13: Week 9 - Away Message

There’s a feeling when you are away from school that is odd and puts you off balance. 

I was away on the 5th-grade outdoor education trip from Wednesday until Friday last week. Then on Monday, I stayed with one of my sons, who had a cold. And on Tuesday, I was out because of a medical procedure. I was hoping to be back at school on Wednesday, but Tuesday night, it was clear I hadn’t fully recovered, so I made the call to take a sick day on Wednesday. It was clear on Wednesday that I had made the right call... 

This meant I was at school for two days this week, Thursday and Friday.  

Of course,  the work of school went on without me. I saw emails come into my inbox. At times I deliberately ignored them, and at other times I was able to take care of some of this business. And, of course, things were fine without me. Some things had to be put on hold, and some meetings had to be rescheduled, but things were fine. I got behind on some work I wanted to do, and my students, while they got some work done with the substitute teachers, were less productive than they would have been if I had been there. But they were fine.  

One of the lessons of the pandemic was that we needed to take time off to take care of ourselves and our families. Unfortunately, there were far too many times before the pandemic when I was sick and went to school to teach when I shouldn’t have. What makes me even sadder is that there were times when I didn’t take time off when I should have been home with my children when they were sick. 

As teachers, we are insecure, and one of the ways that many of us handle this insecurity is by proving we are tough by teaching in a way that is physically taxing, whether by teaching when we are sick or working long hours at school and home. But unfortunately, there are teaching situations where this isn’t a choice, but a feature of having a teaching job, which is absurd, exploitative, and ridiculous.  

It’s strange. Even though I know in my heart that it’s the right thing to do to stay home to take care of one of my children if they are sick and that it will not negatively affect my job, it feels like I’m making a sacrifice to stay home. But what am I trading away? The joy of teaching, having fewer emails to answer, and feeling more accomplished at my job? This feeling makes the job feel all about me. This probably is a good thing because it reflects that this job is fulfilling for me and isn’t just a paycheck, but it also feels out of whack with the fact that me and my family and my priority in my life.

I’m glad that I had time away from school. I did some important things taking care of my family and myself. I didn’t give anything up to make this happen. I made a choice, and I have no regrets.

I think we are better teachers when we are more balanced humans and clearly define our priorities, but it's complicated. So we try and do the best we can. It's not always easy, and it's often complicated, but it's a struggle worth having and a tension worth leaning into.