I found myself getting irritated the last two mornings due to encounters with people at the opposite ends of the age spectrum.
There is a young girl in my son's highly gifted elementary school class who I can safely say, after being in her presence approximately once a week during the past two school years, should be the inspiration for the next truly awful, spoiled, rotten young girl in the next Roald Dahl-style book or film. She's the sort of kid that I really have to struggle not to take into a corner and have a talking to, because she's bossy, greedy, rude, and lazy. She consistently contributes next to nothing to activities except snarky comments and sloppy work. And she ignores directions. The only person who has some influence on her seems to be the classroom teacher.
All of this really stands out because the other kids in the class are pretty good. Some are silly or goofy or distractible, but after the teacher had a discussion about bullying, there's no one else as mean as this little girl, who is clearly deliberate and careful in her nastiness. Maybe her parents are doing the best they possibly can, but I suspect they could do a hell of a lot better. I really, truly hope she is not in my son's class again for a third year. Probably she'll be the next Sarah Palin.
The other annoying experience was with a white-haired driver. I pulled out of the main library parking lot, making a left turn into the center lane because a lot of traffic was coming the opposite way and I didn't want to block anybody wanting to turn right from the lot, because those lanes were empty. I sat there waiting in the center lane while a line of cars drove by.
Then, as an opening appeared, this old guy pulled out and made a left hand turn around my car. If I hadn't seen him in my rearview mirror I would have pulled right into him. And he's looking at me and shaking his head in disgust as he does so. It took him longer to make the turn than it would have taken me to merge, so the opening that I saw ended up with him cutting off the car behind him--who wanted into the center lane to make a turn.
So I got ahead of that car and then, as I passed the old guy at a light up ahead (I was turning at the light and he was at the back of a line of cars going straight), I leaned over and flipped him and his passenger off.
I'm not proud of that reaction. It didn't teach him a lesson and it gave me only some temporary relief, at the cost of feeding negative emotions.
With the girl in my son's class, I try to keep an even tone and speak carefully around her, even when she's being a brat. But I'm pretty sure she knows I don't like her, because I correct her a lot and she tries to argue, even when other kids agree with my point.
With the old guy in the car, who's much closer in age to me than this girl is, I think I snapped because my mind said, "damn it, he should know better. He's had his chances to learn." Still didn't make it worth my emotional energy.
Don't know why, but bringing it up feels a little cathartic.
Showing posts with label volunteering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label volunteering. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Confessions of a Math Illiterate
This morning I was volunteering in my daughter’s gifted class. The students were given a handout with ten or so tricky math problems on it. Some dealt with deciphering the pattern in an unusual sequence of numbers, letters, or shapes and predicting the next entry. A few involved area estimations for odd shapes. My job was to help the kids out without giving away any answers.
For the most part it went fine, although I have to admit I was thoroughly flummoxed by one of the sequences, which ended up being almost painfully simple: the capital letters written using only straight lines went on top of the line, while those with curves went below. That’s one of those questions that seems like cheating to me, because it’s handwriting, not math! Or more accurately, it’s typography, because you will hard-pressed to find a single capital letter in my handwriting made up of only straight lines.
(Untold episodes of the television show Numb3rs have as yet failed to convince me that everything in the world is simply pretty pictures overlaid upon a skeletal framework of mathematics. Because if that were true, I would be guessing my way through life without showing any of my work. Read on.)
However, one very talented young girl who was all the way to the end of the sheet asked me a question that I could not answer for an equally simple reason: I had no idea what the math-specific terms being used in the question meant. We’re not talking sum and product here, but something edging closer to binomials or some such. I can’t be more specific because the word in question was literally a foreign language to me.
Under the impression that I am more or less competent (a hard-won impression among this group of children), this girl assumed I was just refusing to help her by feigning ignorance. Which left me in that dreaded no-man’s land of an argument with a precocious child: I could pretend to be deliberately unhelpful or admit to being ignorant. I went for honesty. “I don’t know what that means,” I said earnestly.
Her reaction was one of shock. “You’re a grownup. Don’t you need to know this?” The unspoken questions being, “Didn’t you go to college? Don’t you have a job?”
Having taken the first step on the slippery slope and feeling my footing giving way, I went for broke. “Truthfully? I haven’t used any of this stuff in years. Not even in graduate school.”
Her eyes were narrowing. I saw wheels turning behind them and began to hear the angry ringing of parental phone calls in my future. “Now, if you are an engineer, or a scientist, or a computer programmer, or maybe even a doctor . . .” I qualified hastily.
“My daddy is an engineer,” she nodded. The relief I felt washed away the details of her mother’s career. Based on this girl’s mind, mommy is probably a nuclear physicist.
“Well then, if you want to do something like that, then this is very important.” She didn’t seem fully convinced. Still sliding down that slope, I went for the most shameless ploy available in a grade school setting.
“Plus, all your test scores will be part of your permanent record. Where did you say you wanted to go to college?” There are some children under the age of ten who have actually considered where they might want to go college. At that age I wanted to be an officer on the Enterprise or a Rebel X-wing pilot.
“Harvard, maybe. Or Stanford.”
Of course. “Well, those are very selective institutions. Your knowledge of this kind of math lay an important foundation for excelling at the kinds of tests that will get you where you want to go.” She sighed. I saw the folly of my honesty in her eyes, resigned to the necessity of years of boring tests and jargon. “Or you could always skip this problem and work on one that seems more interesting,” I offered.
“Okay.” Her face brightened. “Neat, a graphing problem!” I retreated to the safety of a child using a calculator.
Those of us who aren’t comfortable with math like to make up and then perpetuate all sorts of stereotypes about the people who enjoy equations. They can't or don't read anything complex. Human emotions confuse them. They're physically awkward. Over the years I’ve found that most of these aren’t true. The starting center on my junior high basketball team was math whiz and the only one on the team who could dunk.
Some stereotypes do ring true at the extremes. Those that are true are not exclusive, however. You are just as likely to find a socially dysfunctional fanatic/lover of literature, religion, music, guns, or art who speaks about daily life in a foreign language as you are a number-crunching nerd who does the same. They all just dress differently and register at different degrees of "cool" on the popular culture thermometer. At a certain level it’s all about the obsession with perceiving reality through a particular lens.
What does set the math folks apart is their insistence that their obsession describes the world in empirically concrete terms. (Well, some of the gun fanatics are pretty confident of this as well and more than happy to demonstrate.)
I’m willing to concede the "math explains reality" theory for pretty much anything involving electronics, mechanical parts, or laws of nature that I can actually feel. (Okay, and x-rays and hard radiation as well. I grew up on White Sands Missile Range and everything in the category of "invisible rays that pass right through you" still scares the crap out of me.) When you get to dark matter and alternate quantum universes, the process moves into the self-referential realm of math proving or disproving other math as far as I can tell.
I simply try to muddle through with my mathematical dyslexia, with the full knowledge that in a few years my daughter will be working on math problems I do not understand. This knowledge hangs over my head like a polygonal sword of Damocles. (Oh yes, I went mythological on you—that’s just one of my own conceits. We’ve each got our boulders to roll.)
Until then I enjoy my Sudoku and marvel daily that a calculating machine capable of thinking only in ones and zeros can be such a diabolical pain in my ass.
For the most part it went fine, although I have to admit I was thoroughly flummoxed by one of the sequences, which ended up being almost painfully simple: the capital letters written using only straight lines went on top of the line, while those with curves went below. That’s one of those questions that seems like cheating to me, because it’s handwriting, not math! Or more accurately, it’s typography, because you will hard-pressed to find a single capital letter in my handwriting made up of only straight lines.
(Untold episodes of the television show Numb3rs have as yet failed to convince me that everything in the world is simply pretty pictures overlaid upon a skeletal framework of mathematics. Because if that were true, I would be guessing my way through life without showing any of my work. Read on.)
However, one very talented young girl who was all the way to the end of the sheet asked me a question that I could not answer for an equally simple reason: I had no idea what the math-specific terms being used in the question meant. We’re not talking sum and product here, but something edging closer to binomials or some such. I can’t be more specific because the word in question was literally a foreign language to me.
Under the impression that I am more or less competent (a hard-won impression among this group of children), this girl assumed I was just refusing to help her by feigning ignorance. Which left me in that dreaded no-man’s land of an argument with a precocious child: I could pretend to be deliberately unhelpful or admit to being ignorant. I went for honesty. “I don’t know what that means,” I said earnestly.
Her reaction was one of shock. “You’re a grownup. Don’t you need to know this?” The unspoken questions being, “Didn’t you go to college? Don’t you have a job?”
Having taken the first step on the slippery slope and feeling my footing giving way, I went for broke. “Truthfully? I haven’t used any of this stuff in years. Not even in graduate school.”
Her eyes were narrowing. I saw wheels turning behind them and began to hear the angry ringing of parental phone calls in my future. “Now, if you are an engineer, or a scientist, or a computer programmer, or maybe even a doctor . . .” I qualified hastily.
“My daddy is an engineer,” she nodded. The relief I felt washed away the details of her mother’s career. Based on this girl’s mind, mommy is probably a nuclear physicist.
“Well then, if you want to do something like that, then this is very important.” She didn’t seem fully convinced. Still sliding down that slope, I went for the most shameless ploy available in a grade school setting.
“Plus, all your test scores will be part of your permanent record. Where did you say you wanted to go to college?” There are some children under the age of ten who have actually considered where they might want to go college. At that age I wanted to be an officer on the Enterprise or a Rebel X-wing pilot.
“Harvard, maybe. Or Stanford.”
Of course. “Well, those are very selective institutions. Your knowledge of this kind of math lay an important foundation for excelling at the kinds of tests that will get you where you want to go.” She sighed. I saw the folly of my honesty in her eyes, resigned to the necessity of years of boring tests and jargon. “Or you could always skip this problem and work on one that seems more interesting,” I offered.
“Okay.” Her face brightened. “Neat, a graphing problem!” I retreated to the safety of a child using a calculator.
Those of us who aren’t comfortable with math like to make up and then perpetuate all sorts of stereotypes about the people who enjoy equations. They can't or don't read anything complex. Human emotions confuse them. They're physically awkward. Over the years I’ve found that most of these aren’t true. The starting center on my junior high basketball team was math whiz and the only one on the team who could dunk.
Some stereotypes do ring true at the extremes. Those that are true are not exclusive, however. You are just as likely to find a socially dysfunctional fanatic/lover of literature, religion, music, guns, or art who speaks about daily life in a foreign language as you are a number-crunching nerd who does the same. They all just dress differently and register at different degrees of "cool" on the popular culture thermometer. At a certain level it’s all about the obsession with perceiving reality through a particular lens.
What does set the math folks apart is their insistence that their obsession describes the world in empirically concrete terms. (Well, some of the gun fanatics are pretty confident of this as well and more than happy to demonstrate.)
I’m willing to concede the "math explains reality" theory for pretty much anything involving electronics, mechanical parts, or laws of nature that I can actually feel. (Okay, and x-rays and hard radiation as well. I grew up on White Sands Missile Range and everything in the category of "invisible rays that pass right through you" still scares the crap out of me.) When you get to dark matter and alternate quantum universes, the process moves into the self-referential realm of math proving or disproving other math as far as I can tell.
I simply try to muddle through with my mathematical dyslexia, with the full knowledge that in a few years my daughter will be working on math problems I do not understand. This knowledge hangs over my head like a polygonal sword of Damocles. (Oh yes, I went mythological on you—that’s just one of my own conceits. We’ve each got our boulders to roll.)
Until then I enjoy my Sudoku and marvel daily that a calculating machine capable of thinking only in ones and zeros can be such a diabolical pain in my ass.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Being/Loving in the Moment: The Children's Gift
Every Thursday afternoon I volunteer at my son's class. He's four years old and has been diagnosed as a high functioning autistic, most likely with Asberger's Syndrome. If you are told that your child is autistic, that's about the best diagnosis you can hope for, so my wife and I feel very fortunate. He's a very loving, very intelligent, very wonderful little boy.
My son is in a developmental preschool program with nine or so other children whose diagnoses fall along a similar spectrum. Some have greater physical challenges, some greater speech and mental challenges, and some you would not suspect have issues at all until you see them emotionally disturbed.
Generally I assist the physical therapist in working with small groups of children from the class and help the teacher and her aide run the classroom. This involves helping children with craft projects, doing some individual occupational therapy with them, and a lot of taking kids to the bathroom.
I also volunteer every other Tuesday morning for my daughter's Highly Gifted 3rd/4th grade class. This is also a small group of ten children, but these kids are considered to be on the high end of the spectrum, with skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic far above their age peers. At the same time, these children are also fragile in their own ways. Some have trouble making friends, some have attention deficit or sensory overload issues, and some (like my daughter, in many ways) are simply young children struggling with expectations of social maturity based on their academic achievement rather than their real age.
I find these volunteer experiences very rewarding. The specific nature of my interaction with these two sets of children is very different. In my son's class he is the only child who can read. Some of them have trouble with identifying basic colors and shapes. In my daughter's class there are children who can multiply in base three and read at a very high level.
But my basic goals in each class are basically the same. I help the children individually, I praise their achievements, I try to ease their self-consciousness about their eccentricities by accepting them as they are, and I try to make them laugh. Sometimes it is challenging and frustrating. But it puts my mind in a place that is very healthy.
The teachers have a much greater challenge than I do. They need to think about the overall progress each child is making, which with these children is typically a very individualized set of benchmarks and goals. In much the same way I have to keep a careful eye on the progress of my own children in and out of the classroom. I have to be prepared to meet and advocate for their special needs on a constant basis.
But when I volunteer, all I do is think about what will make this particular child happy or successful right now. And I find the easiest way to do that is to love them for that moment as selflessly as I can. I just try to accept them, because in many ways these children are outsiders. Yet they are still young enough that if you treat them with kindness and patience, they will let you in and tell you what they need or want.
There is a girl in my son's class who can't really speak, at least not intelligibly. She's quite shy and has some sensitivities to touch and temperature that can make her uncomfortable at times. But she watches the world around her closely. One day I stumbled across a little game I could play while swinging her on the therapy swing at the start of class that would make her burst into peals of laughter like the chiming of little bells. Now she smiles at me and asks me for help in her singsong voice whenever I am in the class. I can't always help her. Sometimes I'm not allowed to, because she needs to master certain self-reliance skills. Often I can't even understand what she wants from me. But she trusts me, and that trust is a wonderful gift.
A boy in my daughter's class is somewhat emotionally fragile. He's prone to stepping away from the group and isolating himself when he feels embarassed about a situation. During a school Christmas party I saw him pull away to the corner of the room. So I went over to sit by him. We sat next to each other in silence as I tried to think about what to say to console, encourage, or cheer him. Then it dawned on me that for the moment being there was enough. After a while I asked him about the pattern on his shoes, then the picture on his shirt, giving him a chance to be the expert, to teach me, to feel a little confident again. And then I thanked him for sharing with me. He went back to the group and started to play with the others.
And the thing was, I was grateful to him for sharing with me. Being helpful was the best feeling that I had that entire day. And not just because I gave to someone else. It was as though I reached back through time and gave encouragement to the lonely and isolated little boy that I often was.
I try, with limited success, to remind myself on a daily basis to embrace the people I love with love in my heart. To see their frailties and mistakes with compassion and understanding. To see myself and my own mental and emotional challenges in the faces of my children. To try to be helpful because, in truth, it simply isn't always possible to help another person, though you want to with all your heart. So the opportunities to help those you love are little gifts that make life more meaningful.
And maybe, in the end, to become a better person. Because for all the ascetic teachings in the world and the tales of lone artists pursuing their passion, I don't think you fulfill your true promise as a human being on your own.
My son is in a developmental preschool program with nine or so other children whose diagnoses fall along a similar spectrum. Some have greater physical challenges, some greater speech and mental challenges, and some you would not suspect have issues at all until you see them emotionally disturbed.
Generally I assist the physical therapist in working with small groups of children from the class and help the teacher and her aide run the classroom. This involves helping children with craft projects, doing some individual occupational therapy with them, and a lot of taking kids to the bathroom.
I also volunteer every other Tuesday morning for my daughter's Highly Gifted 3rd/4th grade class. This is also a small group of ten children, but these kids are considered to be on the high end of the spectrum, with skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic far above their age peers. At the same time, these children are also fragile in their own ways. Some have trouble making friends, some have attention deficit or sensory overload issues, and some (like my daughter, in many ways) are simply young children struggling with expectations of social maturity based on their academic achievement rather than their real age.
I find these volunteer experiences very rewarding. The specific nature of my interaction with these two sets of children is very different. In my son's class he is the only child who can read. Some of them have trouble with identifying basic colors and shapes. In my daughter's class there are children who can multiply in base three and read at a very high level.
But my basic goals in each class are basically the same. I help the children individually, I praise their achievements, I try to ease their self-consciousness about their eccentricities by accepting them as they are, and I try to make them laugh. Sometimes it is challenging and frustrating. But it puts my mind in a place that is very healthy.
The teachers have a much greater challenge than I do. They need to think about the overall progress each child is making, which with these children is typically a very individualized set of benchmarks and goals. In much the same way I have to keep a careful eye on the progress of my own children in and out of the classroom. I have to be prepared to meet and advocate for their special needs on a constant basis.
But when I volunteer, all I do is think about what will make this particular child happy or successful right now. And I find the easiest way to do that is to love them for that moment as selflessly as I can. I just try to accept them, because in many ways these children are outsiders. Yet they are still young enough that if you treat them with kindness and patience, they will let you in and tell you what they need or want.
There is a girl in my son's class who can't really speak, at least not intelligibly. She's quite shy and has some sensitivities to touch and temperature that can make her uncomfortable at times. But she watches the world around her closely. One day I stumbled across a little game I could play while swinging her on the therapy swing at the start of class that would make her burst into peals of laughter like the chiming of little bells. Now she smiles at me and asks me for help in her singsong voice whenever I am in the class. I can't always help her. Sometimes I'm not allowed to, because she needs to master certain self-reliance skills. Often I can't even understand what she wants from me. But she trusts me, and that trust is a wonderful gift.
A boy in my daughter's class is somewhat emotionally fragile. He's prone to stepping away from the group and isolating himself when he feels embarassed about a situation. During a school Christmas party I saw him pull away to the corner of the room. So I went over to sit by him. We sat next to each other in silence as I tried to think about what to say to console, encourage, or cheer him. Then it dawned on me that for the moment being there was enough. After a while I asked him about the pattern on his shoes, then the picture on his shirt, giving him a chance to be the expert, to teach me, to feel a little confident again. And then I thanked him for sharing with me. He went back to the group and started to play with the others.
And the thing was, I was grateful to him for sharing with me. Being helpful was the best feeling that I had that entire day. And not just because I gave to someone else. It was as though I reached back through time and gave encouragement to the lonely and isolated little boy that I often was.
I try, with limited success, to remind myself on a daily basis to embrace the people I love with love in my heart. To see their frailties and mistakes with compassion and understanding. To see myself and my own mental and emotional challenges in the faces of my children. To try to be helpful because, in truth, it simply isn't always possible to help another person, though you want to with all your heart. So the opportunities to help those you love are little gifts that make life more meaningful.
And maybe, in the end, to become a better person. Because for all the ascetic teachings in the world and the tales of lone artists pursuing their passion, I don't think you fulfill your true promise as a human being on your own.
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