Frat Boy: Kerry - Part 1

Click here for link to my other posts about my college fraternity life.  And that time Kerry and I “cooked” thanksgiving dinner: part 1 & part 2.

I wasn’t fully asleep when the phone rang. Even though most people in college went to bed around midnight, it was rare to get a call this late night especially on a weeknight. After the first ring, I didn’t move, but then I panicked.  Maybe it was my mom and that there was some kind of family emergency. After the second ring, I rolled out of bed, stumbled to the phone at my desk. At the other end, it wasn’t my mom.

It was Kerry.

She was angry, sad, confused and in disbelief. Kerry’s boyfriend had just broke-up with her. When you are on the other end of a line when someone is in this moment, part of you is glad from the feeling your friendship affirmed. However, the rest of you, most of you, feels powerless, frustrated at that the fact that while you are there over the phone, you can’t physically be with them in person.

I listened to her, trying to make sense of the situation between her sobs and as soon as the story became clear, I got angry. Her boyfriend Josh told her that he wanted to break up with Kerry because he was into another girl. Josh wasn’t just some other guy he was my fraternity brother. The crude saying “bro’s before ho’s” seemed more hollow than ever.

Kerry was part of our marching band, PMA, and SAI social group. I don’t remember how we first became friends. It may have been through Molly who took me in and took care of me who was one of Kerry’s best friends. Most likely, we were sitting at our social group’s lunch table and I said something sarcastic, Kerry as she often does, probably complemented my comment with a her own layer of wit and flash that smile at me.

Kerry had a beauty that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, with a gentle curve of her cheekbone and her intelligent eyes. This combined with the directness and the intelligence of Holly Hunter’s character from Broadcast News fascinated me.


 (BTW y’all, people really need to this movie).

Kerry loved being Kerry and she embraced facets of her life that didn’t go along with people’s expectations. She had no shame of her love of the greasiest Philly Cheese steak sandwiches and Bugle corn snacks. Kerry freely mixed expletives in her sharp comebacks and commentaries.

Kerry wasn’t fake. When we were eating lunch and someone said something that was offensive or stupid, while everyone else at the table was processing how to react, I would look over at Kerry and without fail, her face would express annoyance, disbelief, or disgust that would confirm my own feelings and make me laugh. Some people may have seen this as being rude; I saw it as being real.

As Americans we are conditioned to smile no matter how we feel on the inside. I’ve found that the women in my life who defined what it means to be a strong women don’t give out their smiles for free. It’s about not compromising one’s own feelings for the sake of making other people feel comfortable. Kerry didn’t smile all of the time, so when she did smile to me, it was significant.  Her smile was an affirmation of that I meant something to her as she meant something to me.

I remember her smiling when she taught me how to take a shot of alcohol. It was Southern Comfort, straight. Then she handed me my second shot of alcohol, another shot of Southern Comfort. At this point she was laughing uncontrollably as I steadied myself against the wall

I remember her smiling when she came to my room as the beer fairy. A couple days earlier a guy who liked Kerry, who she only liked as a friend, asked her what she was up to the next night. Kerry said, “nothing.” So when he invited her out to a movie, she had no way of rejecting him. While Kerry was direct, she was very kind. So she accepted his invitation.

A couple hours later Kerry pulled the same line on me. When I told her I wasn’t doing anything that evening, she invited me out to a movie and even though I had no plans, I told her no. I had homework to do and I didn’t feel like going out on a weekend and I wasn’t interested in seeing the movie she suggested. Kerry sighed and explained her situation and pleaded with me that I go out with her and this guy so it wouldn’t be a date. I hesitated, and then she said that I would get a visit from the beer fairy if I agreed to go. So I sat awkwardly between her and this other guy in a half empty theater. I don’t remember what we watched, but I remember it was long. I’m not sure if the beer was worth it.

I remember her smiling through the crowd in that ballroom.  Even though Kerry was away on her internship she decided to fly in and come to her sororities formal.  As Kerry walked into the ballroom disheveled and carrying her luggage, her sorority sisters huddled around her, screaming in delight to see her and giving her hugs.

I stood back from the group, giving her space to have a moment with her sisters. I was about to walk away, and then through a gap in the crowd she caught my eye. She opened up her arms to me, smiled, and we embraced.

Sunglasses

Parenthood: Week 216 – Fear Itself

While Ollie’s little body shuttered, he squeeze me around the neck tightly as I held him, I reminded him that the life-size dinosaur animatronic robots were just pretend. He repeated to himself, “this is just pretend” as I carried him through the Jurassic World exhibit at the Field Museum.

Ollie was awestruck by the dinosaurs, but he also expressed a lot of fear. The darkness of the first couple rooms made him come him walk close to me and ask me to hold him. I carried him through the different rooms, through the exhibit and felt him cling to me with each roar and sudden movement of these big mechanical creatures.

Part of me wanted to get him out of there, and relieve him from feeling of fear, but when I asked him if he wanted to leave, he shook his head no. Ollie chose to be brave, so I let him lean into the fear and hang on to me for comfort.

My wife, Diana assured me afterwards that this exhibit wasn’t too scary for Ollie, but I was still worried that we had pushed him too far. I was reassured of this fact when the next day, Ollie asked to go back to the exhibit. I asked him about being scared, and he said that while he was scared it was okay, because it was pretend and he had fun.

We have been very conscious and deliberate about helping Ollie embrace all of his emotions. The lesson from Inside Out, that emotions like fear ad sadness, often avoided and considered “bad” emotions are just as important as joy. However this is a lesson that me as an adult have yet to fully learn. My instincts when Ollie is sad are just try to make him be happy as soon as possible or when he’s fearful to make this emotion go away. Instead, I force myself to hold back and help him articulate what he feels and experience them as part of his whole wonderful emotional self.

Teaching joy is one of the first things we do as parents from early smiles and giggles. There are parents who literally throw their kids in the deep end to teach them how to overcome fear, but I’m not that kind of parent. All of the times that we have brought fear to Ollie, it’s been inadvertent. Ollie has been scared when watching in movie theaters and in some museum exhibits, but he’s always worked through these moments and reflected that he wanted to have these experiences again.

Helping kids learn about fear is hard, because while you can’t make a kid too happy, you can bring too much fear to a kid. Emotional scars are real and children are far less resilient than pop culture psychology would like us to believe. I’m not sure how best to help him explore fear, I just know that I’d rather be overly careful in exploring this emotion than regretful.

In being afraid, Ollie comes to know that he can find comfort in others, that the way he feels about experiences can change and that as we love him regardless of what he feels, he will learn to love himself.

Summer Camp - 5 Years Done

Camp. Done.

I’ve been working at this summer camp for five years. I started this gig the summer after Ollie was born and it’s been part of my life ever since. I’ve seen a lot of the same kids year after year and over time, this experience has helped me grow as an educator.

The way the camp is set up is that the campers have two sessions each morning and then they have afternoon activities. For example, a camper might have survival skills as their first session in the morning and then music for the second session. The campers have these classes four days a week, Monday through Thursday.

I’m one of the people who teach sessions in the morning, I see two groups of kids, put together by age groups for 50 minutes each. The size of these groups varies from as low as 7 or 8 to maybe 15, and the kids range from rising 1st graders to 6th graders. There are camp counselors who accompany these groups and often help out during the sessions.

I’ve played with a lot of different formats over the years, but I’ve settled on this sequences that works well. Kids come in, I invite them to sit on the carpet and I lead them in singing a camp song. Usually I do an add-on song like “Hole In The Bottom Of The Sea,” and go off script and stack up weird things on the log like dinosaurs and race cars. I love doing “She’ll Be Coming Around The Mountain,” and have her bring robots, lions, dump trucks, and magicians. The motions the kids come up with and their sound effect are often hilarious.

Song time is followed by drum circle. Depending on the kids' age, the activities on the drums vary. I make sure to weave in time for us to jam together, opportunities for students to be leaders, space for the them to explore, and activities that have encourage them to compose.

After drumming, we do story time. I read a picture book that has some kind of musical theme like The Drums Of Noto Hanto or Sing, Sophie! Often I’ll pick a book that relates to the next activity. After the book, there’s a variety of things we might do. We’ve taken drumsticks out the playground and explore making music by hitting monkey bars and slides. I’ll teach them how to play cup passing games, or we might play musical charades. I take a lot of the games and activities I do with my kids during the year and have fun with them with my camp kids. Because there is no set curriculum and I’m not trying to “teach them,” I can take the campers’ lead on their interest and focus more on simply having fun with music.

Kids can choose what weeks they want to go to camp so the kids I get week to week along with the variation in ages I get assigned requires a lot of flexibility. Instead of having one plan, I need to have five or six different directions I can take the session in case I have kids who I’ve seen earlier in the summer or if the children have a unique vibe that requires a different kind of activity. I love the challenge, it keeps me on my toes and gives me the chance to try different things while continuing to be responsive to the needs of the campers.

It’s camp and it’s kids and stuff happens. I had a kid get his head stuck, temporally, in a tambourine. This last summer I worked with a group of Chinese students who I waited ten minutes into the session to inform them that while I didn’t speak Mandarin Chinese, I understood much of what they were saying. They weren’t saying anything all that bad, but they did say a couple things they wouldn’t have said if they knew I understood. There’s been kids who think that I’m crazy, some who respond to me really well, but mostly, I get along with the campers just great and we have a good time.

Year 5 is in the books. I first took on this jog really as a gig, but it has proven to be more than that. It’s an important way I keep up my practice, it’s a privilege to work with these kids, and it’s provided important moments of reflection as I enjoy my time with these campers.

Parenthood: Week 215 – Other People’s Children: Part 2

A while back, I wrote (in this post) about how even though I love my own son and care deeply about my students, I’m not that interested in other people’s children. I would actually prefer that there are no other kids when I take Ollie to a playground of a children’s museum. While there have been really cute interactions that Ollie has had with some children we don’t know (like this adorable one I wrote about in this post), for the most part, other kids get in the way.

There is a group of kids between Ollie and other kids. It includes my nieces (I haven’t written about my new niece, but now I have two!), and the special group of Ollie’s friends. This group of friends started from a social group that was formed out a breastfeeding support group. Over the past four years, Diana and these other women have continued to develop friendships and I have had the blessing of become friends with their husbands.

All of our children are friends and we have continued to get together and be an important support system for each other. Sometimes just the women hang out, sometimes it's just the guys, sometimes it’s two couples out of the group, and other times it’s all of us with our kids. Regardless of the combination of people, whenever we get together, it’s special and really important.

These kids, aren’t “other people’s children” to me. For example, we were at a children’s play area last weekend. One of these kids was walking around and another kid walked up to her and started poking here with a stick. She expressed to him that she wanted him to stop but he persisted. I physically got in this boys face and asked him to stop. He smiled at me and started making poking motions towards her and I told him with the nastiest teacher face I could muster “NO! Stop it, and GET away from her!” Scared, he run off, and then pushed another little kid over. (Don’t worry that other little kids’ mom was on top of it too).  I was ready to go with this boy and his parents.  

I’ve wiped these kids faces, picked them up when they are crying, helped them with juice boxes and watched over them happily.  These kids  are extensions of the wonderful love and friendship we feel from their parents. It’s these families that have in a large part make  parenting the joy that we experience every day. These kids are important to Ollie, they are his friends, and I value them because of what they mean to him and what they mean to their parents who I feel indebted to for their kindness.

When we are all together, it's a kind of family and these kids are all of our kids and they will always hold a place in my heart. 

The Workshop: Part 2 - The Group Lunch

Stop me if you heard this one. A Taiwanese-American, a Filipino-American, a African-American, and a Latina-American walk into a noodle shop for lunch . . .

After my lunch with the African-American teacher, I came back the second day more open to socialize but still feeling introverted. The adventure from the day before put me in a better mind frame to respond more warmly to people, however I chose to retreat into solitude and had lunch by myself.

As we broke for lunch the third day of the workshop, he came up to me an invited me to join his group of colleagues. While I didn’t know him, he was known buy everyone there. Almost every workshop I’ve been too, there’s a younger teacher whose outward expression of enthusiasm hasn’t been dampened by the struggles of teaching. This is the person who always sits up straight when he sings, and is eager to answers questions and participate (even in a workshop full of complete strangers).

I loved watching him take in the workshop. He had an energy and an outward expression of optimism, that is no longer inside of me as it was ten years ago, but is something I admire. He was that guy, he was the life of the party, and he was the only other Asian-American man in the room. I’m not sure how we connected, but I think it was singing gospel music next to him and feeling our voices blend together as we picked out harmonies.

His group included the African-American woman I had lunch with on Monday and one more woman, a Latina-America teacher. She wasn’t as extroverted in her participation in the workshop as my Filipino colleague, but she displayed the same thoughtfulness that I had seen in the African-American woman days earlier.

The four of us clicked immediately as we walked to a small café for lunch. We quickly entered into conversations about our teaching practice in relation to our own layers of diversity. Sometimes we misspoke in our use of terminology when talking about identity, and while we were quick to correct each other, the manner at which we did this expressed a belief in the other person’s thoughtfulness and positive intentions.

We had lunch together for the next two days. Feelings about challenging situations at our schools were validated, ideas were shared, and laughter never stopped in our conversations as a way to deal with the seemingly absurd and at the jokes we made to help us cope with our feelings.

Meeting these amazing teachers was the greatest part of the workshop for me. It was so encouraging seeing other teachers of color in a different places in their career sharing the same values, passion, and drive to make education more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

I’m lucky. I get to go back to a school where there is a significant amount of teachers of color with an administration who expresses through their words and actions a belief in the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. This is not the case for all of these teachers, and the time I spent with them was an important reminder of how blessed I am, but also how much things needs to change.

Sometimes all that needs to happen to help make this change a reality is eating lunch together, followed by a joyous toast.

Parenthood: Week 214 – The Need For Another Arm

We went over in this post how Ollie ended up walking around with a Thomas The Tank Engine toy and calling in The Magic School Bus. The story isn’t over.

A couple weeks ago, we visited some friends. They have two children, one a year younger than Ollie and one two years younger. They all got along really well and had a great time playing together. At some point, Ollie found a school bus toy, and he got really excited. As we were getting ready to leave, the older kid offered the school bus to Ollie. After double checking with her and triple checking with her parents, Ollie finally had a school bus toy.

Now Ollie started carrying around both Thomas and this school bus toy everywhere. He seemed to manage it pretty well, but he would sometime ask for help carrying stuff because his hands were full with his toys. He slept with both toys in his bed and played with them together.

A week later, Ollie came home with another school bus toy, grandma got for his during an outing. It was very nice of her to get him this toy, and Ollie was delighted to have another school bus.

Overjoyed, Ollie tried to pick up his two buses and Thomas. Somehow managing to cradle them all in his arms, Ollie explained, “Daddy, I need another arm.”

We thought that maybe Ollie would transfer his love of his Thomas toy to one of the buses, but instead, his little heart grew to love all of these toys equally. With some effort, he manages to carry them around with him all throughout the house. We limit him to only bringing one of these toys out of the house and while we let him play with them in the car, they don’t leave the car when we are out.

So that’s the deal with the two busses, and the little blue train our boy is determined to carry around with him. However, this fascination may have already changed.

Earlier today, we had some people doing some work in the house, so I showed him some footage of a Transformer changing from a car into a robot. Ollie was awestruck by this. When I explained to him that he had a transformer toy he got really excited.

About two years ago, I bought Ollie a little fire truck Transformer. This toy was designed for toddlers and could change from robot to car in one easy step. Ollie showed no interest in this toy for two years. And guess what he’s been obsessed with for the past four hours? Yup, the little fire truck. At least for the afternoon, he has completely dumped his two school buses and Thomas.

It’s been fun watching Ollie make-up adventures with these toys in his imagination. I don’t always understand what he is doing with his toys but it brings him joy. At first the intensity seemed like a bit much, but then I realized it’s not any different than how interested I get into a piece of art, it just looks different. No, I don’t sleep with my Hamilton soundtrack the way Ollie sleeps with this Thomas and bus toys. I can hold this fascination in my head, but Ollie isn’t there developmentally yet.  Holding these these toys in his arms as he sleeps bring him comfort, reminding him that something he cares about, something that gives him meaning is with him throughout the night.