Parenthood: Week 452 - Figuring Out How To Be a Dad

My children are not scared of me. 

When they do something they shouldn’t do, I can effectively redirect them, but I don’t sense a level of fear or intimidation from them. When I am trying to express anger at them, it is clear that it is not effective. I’m not surprised, as I have found through my teaching experience that fear is not an effective tool for me.

This all stems from really good things. Many men in my generation are doing the best they can to be a better kind of father. We do more chores around the house, support our partners the best we can, and try to be emotionally available to our children. The problem that I have found in conversations with other men is that knowing how to discipline gets confusing. Traditional models of discipline from previous generations don’t work because the relationships we are trying to create require a level of emotional distance that we are actively trying to work against. 

Sometimes I wish I could use a stern tone, and my children would immediately stop what they are doing and change their behavior. But that doesn’t work. What is usually effective is if I come to their level, get them to slow down physically, and calmly talk things out. The best tool I have to get them to snap out of behavior is to take something away (e.g., a toy). This is the only thing that gives them a shock to the system that gets them to pause. 

 
There is a level of aggression with taking something away or removing a child from a room that I don’t like, but it is sometimes the only thing that works. I’m trying to do this less suddenly. Ideally, I ask them to give me the toy, but I’m only there with my oldest right now. 

The hardest thing about disciplining my children is how the quality of my tools has to do with how much I have left in my tank. I am a teacher, and I spend my whole day with young people. A big part of teaching is discipline. While I rarely have significant issues, I am always maintaining a certain level of work and awareness around children. It’s part of the gig. 

 
After a day of teaching, I come home and I have to do often more disciplining.  It’s hard to do this when you’ve been doing it all day. The other difficult piece is that it feels more personal with my children.
Once upon a time, I took it personally when a student acted out in class.  After almost seventeen years of teaching, I don’t take students’ misbehavior personally most of the time. It’s rarely, if ever, about me. 

Honestly, I think it’s the same with my own children. I don’t think they are doing a lot of things “to me.” This is because so much of what they do is impulsive. While I know they love me, they don’t fully see me as a human being all of the time. They don't understand the impact of their actions and what it means to show love is still developing. I’m learning to take less personally when my children misbehave. Because like with my teaching, more often than not, it’s not about me. 

 
As we seek to figure out what it means to be a man and how to make expressions of masculinity inclusive and constructive, the search for how to be a dad persists. I don’t think the fathers in the past who ruled over their children with fear enjoyed that and felt like what they did was effective. I think fathers who used fear to parents felt lost and struggled. Like many generations past, they just wanted to feel connected with their children. 

 
There is a lot of work to be done, but it is good to work. The problem modern fathers find themselves is an opportunity to make fatherhood better for our children and ourselves. Being a parent-focused on love will be the greatest gift we can give our children so they can build off of our struggles and learn to parent better than parents than us.

Year 12 - Week 13: The Best of Us

Where do we go from here? 

Teachers are resigning, and there are not enough people to fill these positions. Republicans have created another boogie-man in CRT, convincing people to fill school board meetings with lies and threats. Schools continue to struggle to figure out how to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic with wide variation policies resulting in rampant inequity. In all of this, our children are suffering.

Like many other professions, the pandemic has helped many teachers understand that they don’t have to accept mistreatment. They’ve learned that walking away from a teaching job that asks too much and pays too little is not letting students down. Is it the administration, the school board, and other systems that have created an unsustainable teaching position that is letting the students down. A teacher leaving for their own mental health, and other reasons that reflect self-care is doing the most important thing: not letting themselves down.

We can’t afford to lose great teachers right now. And if quitting a job now and taking a break from teaching means that you can come back to the profession a couple of years from now, please do that. It’s a much better path than getting burned out from teaching and not coming back.

When I was fired from my first teaching job, my belief in my abilities as a teacher was rock bottom. I couldn’t find a full-time teaching position.  One of the reasons that didn’t happen was that I didn’t believe I could be successful doing one and that I deserved one. So I took an assistant job, and I was incredibly fortunate that I had a wonderful supervisor who built me back up. She believed in me more than I believed in myself. Every day and in every way helped me see the great teacher I was and my potential to grow.

I had that person pick me up when I was down, but many teachers do not, so you got to get out before you hit that bottom. The most important person that teachers save right now is themselves.  I should have taken care of my first job and left it after my first year there as opposed to hanging on for a second year.

I don’t know how we will solve all of these problems in education right now. But I do know that we have no hope of building back better in school for our students if the best of us are not there to greet the students in the morning and engage in the essential work of education. And we can’t be there if our budgets are too small, we have too many children in the classroom, and we are burned out.

Teachers, please take care of yourselves. We need you in the game. Don’t let recommendations of “self-care” from your administration be lip-service. Don’t be hard on yourselves because you can’t do the impossible, and don’t give too much of yourselves. Because when all is said and done, when you give a teaching job too much at the detriment of your own mental and physical health, you will only lose.  You will never get back what you give, when you give too much. 

Love teaching, love your students but most importantly, love yourself.

Parenthood: Week 451 – Lucas' Explorations

Lucas now can teleport. 

I will walk by and see him playing in the living room, and then I'll go into the kitchen. I walk out of the kitchen a minute later, and Lucas is now in the den, standing on top of the coffee table. 

Ethan and Ollie both hit this stage when I underestimated their ability to move quickly, reach higher, and get into stuff. It feels like a slow process from birth to walking. However, the process from walking to running, reaching, and climbing goes quickly.

Lucas is enjoying his new mobility, and it's adding a whole new dimension of "fun" in our house. Beyond climbing onto the coffee table, he can get onto the dining room chairs and the sofa. Lucas can also climb up onto our bed which is pretty incredible to watch. He grabs onto the duvet with one hand, swings one leg onto the bedside table, and manages to climb up onto the bed with his horizontal body. It is adorable how proud Lucas is of himself when he does this. He smiles and giggles to himself after he's on the bed. It's like he thinks he is being sneaky and loves getting away with getting on the bed.

Lucas has found freedom in the kitchen step stool. Diana and I are short, so we have a folding step stool we keep by our refrigerator. Someone Lucas figured out how to carry around the house and set it up. This step stool gives Lucas access to a whole new world in the kitchen. Lucas loves exploring the silverware drawer and other places in the kitchen previously out of reach. Yes, part of me is annoyed how he now gets into more stuff he shouldn't, but mostly, I'm proud of his ingenuity.

Now his ability with the television is something else.

Lucas will walk up to the television and turn it on using the button on the side of the television. Then, he will find the Roku remote, sit down and start moving through the Roku menu. On more than one occasion, he has figured out how to start a show or movie that he really shouldn't be watching.

Lucas isn't really a daredevil right now. He doesn't throttle himself off of things like Ethan did when he was at this age. However, he does periodically fall off of things. For example, the other day, he rolled over on the sofa and ended up falling on the floor because he misjudged the depth of the cushion. Also, like other toddlers, sometimes his core muscles fail him, and he will flop out of a chair.

It's fun to see the world open up to Lucas. He is at an age when the world is an adventure. He is often the first of my three sons to be ready to leave the house for an outing. Whenever I take Buffy for a walk, Lucas usually runs over, puts on his boots, and wants to join us.

The world must be an excellent place through Lucas' eyes. He's got two older brothers who provide entertainment all of the time, the warm presence of a cute dog, and a life where there is something new and wonderful every day to experience.  

It is one of the great joys in my life to see the world through Lucas' eyes.  

Year 12 – Week 12: Taking a Break From Teaching Christmas Songs

For the first time, I'm not teaching any Holiday music this winter. We've had to make some changes to our Winter program because of COVID-19 mitigation. Instead of doing a JK-5 Winter Program for parents, we do two smaller assemblies for just the students. Because of the format of these programs, it didn't seem logical to do an assembly that featured music representing music from many different cultures, as we have done in the years past. It's a weird feeling, but it doesn't feel wrong. 

As someone who is not Christian, growing up in America, the "Holiday season," which, let's be honest, is the "Christmas season," is challenging. America started as and continues to be a Christian-centric society. As a result, overtones, implications, and direct inclusion of Christian quotes, themes, and ideas are in almost every part of our society. Add in the fact that a significant percentage of Christians flagrantly misinterpret the teachings of Jesus Christ as oppressing people, and the Christmas season is a mixed bag.

Cultural American Christmas with its mythology that has loose to no associations with the birth of Jesus Christ (e.g., Flying reindeers, elves on shelves, and Coca-Cola's Santa Claus) is really confusing. I have thoroughly enjoyed the more secular aspects of Christmas, like buying gifts for people, and the religious traditions, like singing Christmas hymns in church. But I have also felt left out and isolated during this time of year.

All of this has been with me when I've taught Christmas music to my students over the years. I have felt it was important when teaching "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" to help all students understand the origins of Santa Claus and understand the secular nature of how many people in America incorporate this myth into their Christmas celebrations. I think one way of helping students who are not Christian find something to enjoy in the Christmas season is to understand that so much of what people do in the name of "Christmas" in America isn't religious at all.

At the same time, it has always felt frustrating. We, as Americans, struggle with Holidays. We can't do Halloween without racist and sexist costumes. We can't do Thanksgiving without propagating racist colonial myths, and we can't do Valentine's Day without pushing heteronormative ideas about gender and romance. Yes, we can honor Veterans on a certain day, but we don't honor them when they need us the most in their times of need. I can't think of one Holiday which does not reveal a flaw in our culture. 

I want my students to be able to rock out to "All I Want For Christmas Is You," but it's really hard to explain how this song expresses the "Christmas spirit" featured in many places in American popular culture. Because if, from reading," the "Christmas spirit" is about giving, love, forgiveness, and community, then why does this spirit seem so lacking in a significant minority of Christians who celebrate Christmas?  And most importantly, what does it mean to a student who is not Christian to sing a song about Christmas? 

I don't have good answers for these questions, but I'm glad that I have this month ahead without teaching holiday music to reflect on the inclusion of holiday music in my curriculum. We have to embrace our culture for what it is and help our students understand it. We have to do this in a way that empowers more than confuses. I hope I've been doing that, but right now, I'm not sure.

Parenthood: Week 450 – Buffy & Ethan

As Ethan is going to bed, sometimes he asks if he can "sleep somewhere else." This means that he wants to sleep in my bed. Since he goes to sleep a couple of hours before me, and more often than not, he goes to sleep pretty quickly after settling in my bed, I don't mind. However, at some point in the night, I will move him to his bed.

This happened the other night. As I was getting ready for bed, I picked up Ethan to carry him to his room as he slept. I opened the door and found Buffy lying on her side, completely asleep on Ethan's bed. Maybe, she decided to keep Ollie company, who shares a room with Ethan. Maybe, she liked the scent of Ethan and wanted to snuggle up into his covers, or maybe she had settled there because it was a bed, like hers, that was close to the ground.

I awkwardly put Ethan in the top corners of the bed so that he wouldn't bother Buffy. Then, I carefully picked up Buffy and placed her on my bed. I went back, rearranged Ethan on his bed, and put the covers over his body.

*****

I figured that Ethan would catch up. He was going slowly around our neighborhood on his scooter. It had been a while since he had used his scooter, and he was stubbornly trying to hold a Lego Mini-figure, which was hindering his progress. I tried to move Buffy ahead of Ethan, but she refused.

Buffy is a small dog; she always loses in a game of tug between her and me, though I am cautious not to pull her hard unless she is in danger. She's older, and while I sometimes push her to go on a long walk, I try to take my cues from her. Sometimes she wants to go for a shorter walk and head home, and more often than not, I let her take the lead.

Buffy kept looking back at Ethan and refusing to go forward. I walked back to Ethan, and held his handlebars, and started pulling him along. At this moment, I felt Buffy's leash go limp, and she started strolling along with us. As soon as Ethan stopped, she stopped.

There are times on walks when she doesn't seem to notice or care about the boys' pace, but on this walk, she felt it was important to keep her pack together.

In the past, Ethan has tried to ride Buffy like a horse, he has tried to push Buffy off the couch, and he has yelled at Buffy to wake her up while she was napping.  In the most challenging times of Ethan's sleep training journey, while Ethan cried loudly, I remember Buffy groaning loudly and leaving our room to go downstairs and try to get some sleep.

This morning, Ethan got up early. After I fed him breakfast, he wanted to go upstairs. I told him to be quiet because everyone else was still sleeping. Ethan quietly walked over to Ollie and kissed him while he slept. Then hearing Lucas crying, he went over to his room to say good morning.

Buffy noticing the movement, slowly lifted her body out of her bed and stretched. Ethan went over to her, gently petted her, and said, "Hi, Buffy!" He walked closely next to her as she walked out of the room. As she went down the stairs, Ethan said, "bye, Buffy."

I'll never fully know what Buffy means to Ethan and what Ethan means to Buffy, but I have seen in moments that they see each other as family, and continue to share a life with and for each other.

Year 12 – Week 11: Feeling Inadequate

When you are teaching a group of students show to sing or play an instrument, sometimes your assessment of how they sound and are progressing can be distorted. 

Sometimes it's because you are listening for something in particular when you teach, so you miss the forest for the trees. Other times you aren't listening carefully, and you miss things because you are focusing on classroom management or the next part of the lesson.

This is why it's really helpful sometimes to get a guest teacher to come in and work with your students so you can sit back and really focus on listening and assess where your students are at, without worrying about being an active teacher.

Sometimes observing your students while someone else is teaching can be inspiring and affirming, and other times it can be distressing.

This week I brought in a colleague to work with my students. She is an educator and a professional singer. At this point in the unit, I felt that my students needed different energy in the music room, and I needed some ideas on how to get my students to move to the music and encourage them to sing with more confidence.

I'm sitting there behind the piano, hearing some really good things from some of my classes. Because I wasn't leading classes, I focused on each student, and it was interesting to see how they were singing. Most of the types were doing some really good work, and I felt that I saw signs of the work I was doing in the students' progress.

Then there was that one class. They didn't sound like how I thought they would. To be clear, this was more about my misperceptions than anything the students were doing wrong. They were singing softer than I thought they would and were very timid. Were they like this in previous classes, and I hadn't noticed? Most likely. Why didn't I see this?

At that moment, I felt inadequate as a teacher. This is a feeling that all teachers know well. Typically, it happens less and less as teachers get more experience. While this is true with me, teaching during the pandemic brought this feeling back in full force as I struggled to figure out how to teach in the worst of times.

Along with this feeling comes reflective questions—some less productive than others. I felt bad that I was letting my students down, that I should know better how to help the students be better singers, and doubted that I could move them along. I tried to push this aside with evidence from past performance that I was, in fact, a competent teacher. It's hard in that space when there is a tension between what is and what you thought was there. 

This experience reminded me that, in some ways, I'm a much more insecure teacher than I want to acknowledge and that I still have a lot to figure out.  There was plenty of good that I saw this week, and I will try to let that excite me as I take the time to figure out how to do better for my students.

Parenthood: Week 449 – The Love In Vaccines

I had no hesitation.

Ethan was going to get his last, and final polio vaccine dose and his fifth DTaP shot (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine)

I had told him that the vaccine would be like a pinch in his leg and that it would hurt, but only for a little bit. I assured him that he is brave, just like his older brother Ollie who had gotten his COVID-19 vaccine just a couple of days ago. This all seemed to assure him about the vaccine experience, but once the nurse came in, she instructed me to lie him down, Ethan lost it.

There are moments to pump the brakes and talk things out, and there are moments to make things happen. This was later, so I forced Ethan’s leg down that was kicking at me, moved his pants, and held him down.  Ethan told me in a shaky voice that he was scared. I told him that it would be over soon. I looked straight into his eyes, and as much as I hated to do this, I thought to myself, “this is better than him getting polio and being paralyzed.”

I felt his body tense up as the first shot that went into his thigh. I told him that he was almost done, and I felt his body shudder as the second shot went in. The nurse quickly put band-aids on his legs, and I swept him up into my arms and wrapped him up in my jacket. I carried him over to the chair of the examination room and held him close. Calming down, Ethan whimpered in a soft voice, “when am I got going to get the vaccines?”

“You just got the vaccines,” I assured him.

“What?” Ethan asked, confused. I laughed to myself and hugged him tighter.

The COVID-19 vaccine has helped me come to no longer take for granted the vaccines that generations of medical researchers have developed for the human race. The amount of pain and suffering that my children have not had to experience because of vaccines is incalculable. My children have never had to endure the pain of hepatitis B, rotavirus, haemophilus influenza, pneumococcal, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and hepatitis A because of vaccines. And if you don’t believe me about how destructive these viruses and diseases are, Google them and read about what they do to children.   It is horrifying.

What's more disturbing is the fact that without the widespread use of these vaccines, one or more of my three children most likely would be dead.

COVID-19 has also brought into our children’s minds the importance of vaccines. Ollie knows that Diana and I have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine, and Ethan has been wondering about it. It’s a very abstract idea to him, which was evident a couple of weeks ago when he asked us if the vaccine would fit in our house.

I told Ollie last weekend how proud I was of him for being brave and getting the COVID-19 vaccine shot. I explained how vaccines are more than something clinical and scientific. It’s something that we can do for ourselves and others at exactly the same time. It’s a way of saying “I love you” to yourself and others.

As I held I told him that I loved him, and I felt gratitude for who people who dedicated their lives to creating vaccines.  I can see their work in the light in my children's and the hope in their hearts.