Lessons That We Learn From the World

The school called at 7:58 a.m., but I missed it.  It was Mr. Shelton, the disciplinary principal.  I returned his call and was sent to voice mail.  The phone rang again at 12:36 p.m. and Mr. Shelton asked me to come up to the school.

When I got there, he met me in the lobby and directed me into his office.  There was Ben, sitting quietly, looking as if he had either recently cried or was about to.  Also present was his resource teacher Mr. Boss, and a police officer.

Mr. Shelton slid a paper across the desk at me.  It was a Math test with a small pencil drawing of a pirate cutlass in the upper right hand corner.

As I had been in the office not three weeks before for this same incident, I turned on Ben.  "Ben, why did you do this?"  Following the first incident I had had a lengthy discussion with Ben, both in the office and at home, about today's climate, and how teachers are responsible for hundreds of kids and are obligated to follow up on anything and everything that might be considered a threat, no matter who the student, no matter how trivial.  "I just...did," he shrugged a little sheepishly.


What is the matter with this teacher that she takes a pencil drawing of a pirate sword straight to the principal?  What is behind this?  Yes, Ben gets frustrated in Math and, yes, he sometimes expresses that frustration in sullenness and responses that this teacher labels as 'rude'.  But...how did we get THERE to begin with?  The frustration, the sullenness?  Certainly we didn't start out on Algebra Day One with this attitude and behavior.  Where is the teacher who will reach out, teach  and re-teach with humor and patience?  Does this teacher truly feel threatened by my 5-foot nothing child and his pencil drawing of a pirate's cutlass????

Mr. Shelton went on to say that he had actually called me for a second incident:  another student, a reputable student--MY child is NOT reputable?--had come to him and said that Ben threatened him by saying, "I'm going to murder you."  This was somewhat more serious, so I turned to Ben again and he denied it.  "I didn't say that, Mom."

 Today's language is laced with violence.  "I'm gonna punch you."  "I'm gonna beat the shit out of you."  Very common, even in our household, where there are no guns or weapons.   The term 'murder' did not sound like language that Ben would use.

"Ben, what did this kid do to upset you?"  Ben related a story from his history class where a student was leading a review session, asking questions and passing out candy for correct answers.  Ben explained that he usually opted out of these review sessions and sat and drew, but today he decided to participate.  He said he answered three questions correctly, and the student in charge didn't give him candy.  He said that he named a Hindu god that he had heard about from an adventure movie but since it wasn't on the review sheet, the kid denied him correctness.  He said he answered correctly the name of one of the holy cities, but the kid-in-charge gave candy to a girl who responded with, "I'm don't know for sure, but it begins with an 'A'..."  Ben went on to say that the kid-teacher kept calling on his friends and some of them left the classroom with pockets FULL of candy.

Who set this up?  What TEACHER allowed this blatant opportunity for bullying to take place in his classroom?  Where a KID is in charge of the review session?  Where a teenager decides who is allowed to answer, who is right and who is wrong, whom to reward and not to reward?  Really?  REALLY???  And I thought of my child, who stepped up and forward, in good faith and innocence, to participate in this.

I turned to Mr. Shelton.  "So...in cases such as this, when you have 'he said, he said' situations, what is the usual outcome?"

During their public school years, I listened to both of my children's encounters with bullying.  Depending on the seriousness of the incident, I would recreate the situation and replace my child's hurt response with a funny, off-the wall reaction that seemed to lighten things up and send them to bed with a smile.  If it sounded more serious, I would tell them, "You don't have to put up with that.  Do you want me to come to school?  If I don't, then it will continue and you'll have to live with it.  If I do, then you may have to deal with some sort of revenge after the bullies get in trouble." I felt that this was a realistic approach to rampant bullying that the school simply cannot manage.  I visited the school for bullying issues only twice.

Mr. Shelton completely sidestepped this and once again slid the knife-adorned math paper towards me.  "I SHOULD have suspended him for this the first time, but YOU said YOU would handle it."

"Oh, so now it's going to be MY fault because I didn't discipline him in a way that kept it from happening again????  You turned it over to me and I handled in the best way I knew how.  I told you then that as a former teacher, I completely understood that teachers can't take chances.  I sat right here and talked to Ben about it extensively and again at home.  I'm surprised that it happened again, but it's not because, as you think, I didn't handle it properly!"

Mr. Shelton then went with that age-old deflection:  "Why are you yelling at me?  I'm not yelling at you."

"Because I feel like it and let's not change the subject and make this about me.  It's about HIM!"  I gestured to Ben.

And then I took a breath.  I looked out the window and at the cop and Ben's resource teacher and back to Mr. Shelton and said, "What is the consequence for this?"

"Five days suspension."

WHAM.

"What?  FIVE days?  Mr. Shelton, it's a drawing!  Five days?  I can understand one...or two even, but five?  He'll never recover from that.  He's struggling now!"

Stony-faced Mr. Shelton said, "He can make up the work."

"He can't keep up with the work NOW!  This will put him so far behind that he'll never catch up.  You know his grades!  He has Ds and Fs!!"

I told another breath.  "Let me ask you something.  When there is an actual fight, a physical altercation, where two students intend bodily harm on each other, and they accomplish that with actual punches and blows, what happens then?  What's the consequence?"

"They get five days."

"The same consequence for fighting and for a drawing of a sword???  There's a HUGE difference between an actual fight and a pencil drawing of a weapon on a math paper!"

Old Stony-Face replied, "I see no difference."

I looked at him, and then I crossed the line:  "I've got you backed into a corner, don't I?  This doesn't make sense and you know it, but because you've said it, you can't back down, can you?"  I looked down at Ben and said, "I'm sorry.  I just mishandled this.  You're getting five days because I yelled at him and backed him into a corner and I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Mom," Ben said.  "I love you, Mom."

I looked back at the sanctimonious person of authority, who knew he was wrong, and asked, "When does this suspension start?  Today or tomorrow?"

He looked at Ben and asked, "When do you want it to start?  Today or tomorrow, Ben?"

Are you really going to take the chance of sending this dangerous threat-to-others back to CLASS????

Ben said, "Today."  So we packed up his books and left.

I have never been a Mama Bear type, never sided with my child against an educator.  I've always believed that my children need to reap the consequences of what they sow and learn from their actions.  But this is so much different.  If I am not on his side, then who is?  Certainly not his teachers.  Not his resource teacher, Mr. Boss, who said NOTHING in Ben's defense during the office discussion.  Does Ben see that the deck is stacked against him, the odds are not and have never been in his favor?  He is but a freshman and I know he wants an education, but he is struggling.  How can he continue against such adversarial conditions?  I can only imagine the discouragement he must face every single day.  His poor grades, peers who mock him and tease him, and teachers and administrators who are so quick to put him out of the classroom and out of school like like some of misfit, out of sight and out of mind.
***************
We both cried the whole way home.  I watched Ben in the rear-view mirror.  Every time he seemed to be getting control of himself, he'd come out with another choking sob.  He said, "I hate that school!  I hate the kids!  I'm not going back!  I'm done with that school! I want to quit!!"

He is 16.  He could quit if he wanted to.  How in the world will I ever be able to convince him to go back and why would he ever want to?  Oh, the damage done here.

After awhile he said, "I should have stayed at Connections Academy [the online school he attended the year before]."

I said, "But Ben, you were lonely at home."

We talked a little about the drawing and he said, "I know I shouldn't have done that.  I take full responsibility for that."

And then he said, "Well, one thing I learned.  I learned not to like Mr. Shelton."  We cried some more.

If that is all you learned, my child, then I guess there's still hope.  In your innocence, you still believe that the world is a fair place, and that your teachers are your friends, and that everyone is still good at heart.  But what I fear you will eventually learn is that not only does the school hate you, but the world hates you, too.  My five-foot-zero-inches-at-16-years-old child, as non-athletic and as geeky as the day is long, with no friends, NO friends at all, besides his dog, and his drawing pad. Walking through life, alone, trying to make the best of his physical differences, his unique personality and his interests--a funny child, a sensitive and loving child, a smart child, a gifted artist, but absolutely and undeniably alone in this world, frustrated, confused and sad.

My Great 'Game of Thrones' Dream

I dreamed I was in 'Game of Thrones'.  No, I wasn't an actor in the TV show, I was IN it, living it.

We were getting ready to throw a grand feast.  I was looking down into the court yard from my room, which was mid-way up the height of the castle, and saw people coming and coming and coming from all the seven kingdoms.  I turned to Rachel and Meghan Batka, who were my sisters, and said, "This is when trouble starts.  When there's fun, and entertainment, and too many people, something bad is going to happen.  We need to get knives to protect ourselves."  [My wisdom and insight into this situation must have come from my years of reading the series and watching the program.]

 We left my room and began looking for some kind of knife.  We found some old bronzy ones, but they were too big to conceal.  We finally ended up in the kitchen, where I found a blue velvet box (like the kind that holds expensive jewelry) and opened it.  [Don't ever let anyone tell you we don't dream in color.  It's not true.]   Inside was a row of six gleaming silver knives, like the dollar-sized filet knives that Pampered Chef used to sell, except they had pewter handles instead of plastic.  We each took one and hid it in the blousy part of our bodices, and returned to the window to watch.

Looking down into the courtyard once again, I noticed a row of six horses enter through the gate, each of them in a full canvas sheath, like race horses, of a bright solid color:  red, green, blue, yellow...  There was something about them that signaled danger and I turned to the girls and said, "This is it.  It's starting.  We've got to hide."

I gave some sort of warning cry, an alert to everyone in the castle and we began to seek out the tunnels and secret rooms that were in the utmost top of the castle.  The entrances to these tunnels and passage ways were hidden behind loose stones. The passage ways were small and smooth--you had to crawl, like the tunnel we used to crawl through at the Egyptian tomb exhibit at the Indianapolis Children's Museum--but the color of them was reddish, like adobe or terra cotta.  The tunnels opened up into larger, but still small areas where we bunched together and hid, all of us, the inhabitants of the castle, our knives and weapons at the ready.

We could hear them looking for us, moving throughout the castle, and eventually coming into the areas adjacent to the hidden rooms.  They hadn't discovered our secret hiding places yet, but it seemed as if they would.

All of a sudden, a large shadow passed over us.  We saw it move across the floor of our hiding place.  How we were able to see it through the walls and ceiling of the castle is anybody's guess, but hey, this is a dream, right?  It was a dragon's shadow!  Oh, yay!!!  Just like the one in the trailer for the next series!  And the top of the castle, where all of our safe rooms were began to dislodge and slide off of the rest of the castle.  The dragon had pulled free the entire section of the castle where we were hiding and was flying us to safety!

The end.

Just 40 more days.

Gen Con Dreams

It is Monday morning, the Monday after Gen Con.  In case you don't know what it is, you can check it out here:  http://www.gencon.com/.

It truly is, as they say, 'the Best Four Days in Gaming'.  In gaming, yes, and in people-watching and costume flaunting; four days of fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, heroes, damsels, elves, mages, clerics, daemons, Doctors and Deadpool; four days of attack points, strength, plus and minus, card-flipping, dice-throwing debauchery.  It is four days where society's 'Unnoticed' (in high school, at the office, in life) lift their voices as one and say, "We are here.  We exist.  We are 40,000 strong."   Four days of pure unadulterated joy; in short, an unabashed and much-needed celebration of geekery.

I'm a 54-year old mom, the mother of 22- and 16-year old boys.  I don't know how long we've been going to Gen Con. Long enough to remember checking the 16-year-old into the Training Grounds and walking around with his older brother.  Like many, we first came on a Sunday on a Family Pass--and that was enough to hook us.

Now, every year in January, we register for our 4-day passes.  In May, we sit by the countdown clock and hit 'Enter' as soon as it hits zero, waiting to see if we get all our events.  In June, we start on our costumes.  My boys, in past years, have been 'L', a steam-punk Zombie, Clu from 'Tron', the Black Hand Lantern, Roxas from Kingdom Hearts, Sasori from Naruto and this year, Evangellion (whatever that is--all I know is that the costume was a b****....).  In past years, I've gone as 'generic medieval'.  This year, I was Catelyn Stark.  Next year, considering the feedback I got on my costume, maybe Tyrion--since he's probably closer to my height....  8-/

For us, as a family, it is four days of heaven.  We've been going to Gen Con often enough that we now have Gen Con traditions. As we live in Greenfield--so lucky are we to be in driving distance of this awesome con--on Wednesday, we get in the car and come down together to get our passes at the Will-Call window.  We could have them mailed to us, but it gives us a chance to grab the event guide and study it before Thursday morning.  And it's like Christmas Eve.  We get psyched up.  We make our plan for the days for getting up early to park in our 'usual spot'.  Where we will meet for food (usually hitting our favorite Johnny Rocket's more than once over the four days).  We review our event schedule.  We spend the rest of Wednesday on last minute touches for our costumes.  We try and fail to go to bed early.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday--up early, drive, park and then, games and walking, walking, walking.  We love the exhibit hall, we love the auction room, we love the costumes.  We play our favorite games and demo a dozen more over the four days of the con.  We see people we know (more so every year....).  We take a ton of photos; sometimes we get our OWN photo taken.  We watch the progress of Cardhalla.  We make lists for purchasing.  We watch the costume parade and sometimes the Zombie Walk.  We attend Hickman's Killer Breakfast.  We comment on what's trending at Gen Con, what's new this year, and what's changed from last year.

Sunday is our calm day (so to speak).  No costumes today for us.  Just normal, comfortable walking-around clothes.  No obstructed vision.  No one is over-heated.  We wander through the exhibit hall and make our final game-purchase decisions.  We buy a t-shirt.  I get a new pair of earrings.  And when the hall closes, we meet at the info desk and make our way to PF Chang's, another Gen Con tradition.  We are bone-tired.  Carrying heavy bags.  We sit and eat rice with chopsticks and talk about what we've seen, and done, and what we want to be sure we fit in for next year.  Another Gen Con has passed.  The fastest four days of gaming for sure.

We've been to Disney as often as we've been to Gen Con.  It's hard to say which we enjoy more.  We talk about Disneys past and Gen Cons past equally and with equal nostalgia.  Gen Con, Disney, Christmas....it's a toss-up.

Epilogue:  several years ago, my oldest son and I stayed late on a Friday night...later than we usually do.  We went to the Mayfair game hall to find someone to teach us Catan.  (Yes, at that time, we'd never played before.  Disclaimer:  Catan is 'a gateway game', be forewarned....).  We found a father and two sons who were willing to instruct us.  The father lived in Indy, but his grown sons lived in Texas and Seattle.  Every year, they met up at Gen Con and spent four days together playing games, catching up on each others' lives, and enjoying the heck out of the time spent together--at, of all places, Gen Con.

This is my hope for me and my sons, now a college sophomore and high school freshman.  That, wherever they are in life, wherever they go in this world, that come the first of August, they will come home to Indiana, to GenCon, and we will be like this father and his sons:  reunioning, playing games, people-watching, and enjoying the heck out of the time spent together.

To me, this is the legacy of Gen Con.  There are no restrictions in gaming, like there are in sports and many other things in life.  You can get too old to throw a football, to play one-on-one in the driveway, to hike the Grand Canyon, but you're never gonna be too old to play Settlers of Catan.  Gaming is ageless, sexless, universal, and eternal.  Long live Gen Con.

In My Father's House, There are Many Rooms....

I had an epic dream last night.  I dreamed that I was in the house of my childhood--except that it wasn’t really.  It wasn’t a house that in my waking life I had ever been in before, but the feeling of the big old rambling house was that it was ‘home’.  It was a huge house, full of many, many rooms, each room full of things, the belongings, the accumulated memorabilia and ephemera of a lifetime.  

The house, which had been added on to and added on to over the generations, was a house of the accumulations of centuries of living and rooms of memories of a long and full life.  And we--the relatives with whom I was wandering through the house--had been alive a long, long time. 

We wandered from room to room, looking at things, toys, games, photos, items and rooms that evoked memories and places.  In some of the rooms were other relatives, old, still, but not really dead, just…part of the furniture, part of walls, the room itself in the particular room where they had chosen to finally take a rest.  And that’s what we, the relatives I stood with, were looking for--the room to finally take our rest.  

You see, we’d been alive for a long time, much longer than normal--like hundreds of years--and it had been a long, full and wonderful life.  And we were thinking that perhaps, it was time to stop, sit, and rest and we were looking for the room where we wanted to spend the remainder of our time.  

But as we wandered, looking at toys, photos, out the window, the stacks and piles of collected souvenirs of a lifetime of living, thinking through the memories that the plethora of belongings in each of the rooms evoked in us, one of us said, “There’re so many things I’d like to do just one more time before we rest.”  “We haven’t played this game in awhile.”  “I’d like to walk along the shores of Lake Superior again.”  “I need to get back to Street Fair just one more time.”  “I haven’t talked to so-and-so in ages…I should call her….”  So we kept walking….walking through the rooms, the many rooms of the age-old mansion….

Writing the Research Paper--another educational adventure with Ben

Hi, Mrs. Goble--

Here is a more coherent email about Ben's progress on the research paper.

I think I've told you what an 'difficult' child Ben can be.  He's probably, what do you call it, Oppositional-Defiant (?), ADD,  and OCD and most days it's a daily battle just to get him clean, clothed, and properly fed.  Then, we come to school work.  It's kind of amazing that I'm able to push him as hard as I push him to get the grades he gets.  He basically failed the 7th grade at his Brick & Mortar school, so I'm really very pleased with the progress he's made this year.

First of all, we're doing fine with the topic of researching a higher education option.  I know we had talked earlier about having him do last year's topic of researching a legend (Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.), but two things happened:  1) he was looking up fantasy characters like Chuthulu (from HP Lovecraft) and Japanese anime gods and other amazingly obscure (and fictional) stuff....I decided that he needed a dose of reality, rather than more fantasy; 2) after the discussion about what he should DO a legend paper on, I made a second executive decision that I wasn't up to fighting my way through TWO research papers with him.

Second, we've turned in the first form of the first assignment where we listed our sources, the proper MLA form and a description of each source, but we have not turned in the second assignment where we list questions, list the source and write the answers in small boxes.  As you may or may not know, I preview a good number of the lessons and portfolio projects for Ben to try to find ways to approach the project in concrete and linear ways that won't overwhelm Ben (or me).  He gets frustrated with jotting things down on an organizing worksheet and then having to recopy it on an electronic form and then taking the notes and copying it again into research paper language.  It seems redundant and I don't blame him.  Sometimes I am amazed at what he can and can't process.  For example, we were looking at a list of campus organizations and clubs for BSU, and Ben was writing specific clubs HE would be interested in.  That is fine, but what were trying to do is come up with some general, blanket statements about the variety of opportunities for involvement at BSU.  In short, he was unable to look and read and come up with something like, "Ball State has a huge variety of student organizations including the Chess Club, the Anime Club, Belly-Dancing, and Intramural Sports."  It was interesting to see that.

In any case, what I'm getting at here is that neither one of us found the "Brain-Storming:  Research Questions and Notes" form to be useful to the project.  He's very easily frustrated and I didn't want to frustrate him more by trying to complete a form that didn't seem to fit into the flow of what we were doing.  So...I wanted to tell you what we ended up doing, if that is worth anything.

[This is a strategy I learned from the National Urban Association when they came to do a three-year project in IPS.]  Before yesterday's Live Lesson, I had had him make a list of ten questions he wanted to answer during the course of the research.  I copied all of those on to post-it notes.  We then added some questions after sitting through the Live Lesson yesterday.  Then, I had him look at the post-it notes and think generally about what kinds of questions we were asking.  We grouped them into these categories:  What You Need to do to Get Into the College, Basics about the School, What You Can Learn, and Living at College.  We went to the library this morning and proceeded to work on answering the questions one at a time, which he did in paragraph form in a Word document, which can then become a part of his final paper.  Using this strategy, we are now 1/3 of the way done with the entire paper.  I have to say that he and I are very pleased with the progress we've made.  We had fun researching Ball State and picking out some books about careers in animation and film.  It was a great morning.

So...anyway, if you need to count off on the project because we didn't fill out that form, that's fine, but I did want you to know that we learn the skill that the the form was teaching.

Mrs. Goble, thanks for being a good an understanding teacher.  I'm not saying that just so you'll excuse Ben from that paper, but I really do feel grateful to you and to INCA for providing a way for my son to be successful and for me to take an active part in his achievement.  It truly is a daily battle here, but I honestly think that he is making some progress, gaining some skills and so forth.  I don't know yet if college is in is future, but it's heartening to see, every once in awhile, a spark of interest from him in something academic and in his future.  :-)

Christine Schaefer

Grandmother's Wrapping Paper

I'm taking special care to wrap my mother's Christmas presents in what she and I would both call 'Grandma's wrapping paper'.  What is that, you ask?  What is Grandma's wrapping paper?  It's difficult to explain, to describe, but you would know it if you saw it.  It's Christmas wrapping paper that could double as wallpaper--a repetitive pattern of wreathes, or presents, or Santa faces--printed on a thin paper:  sometimes red, sometimes green, sometimes on a beige background.  Nowadays, it's the kind of stuff that you'd pick up at Big Lots and the Dollar Store, but there were no Big Lots or Dollar Stores back when my grandmother was wrapping gifts.  Over the forty+plus years, I unwrapped gifts given to me by my grandmother, her style in wrapping paper was unwavering.  One would almost think that she had two or three never-ending rolls of the stuff; for sure it was easy to pick out which gifts under the tree came from Grandma.

I know when I present the gifts to my mother, she'll comment on the wrapping paper.  She'll take them and say, "Ooooh...that looks like the kind of wrapping paper Mother used to buy."  She'll notice.  I know she will.  And I will say, "I know.  That's what I thought of, too."

I smile to think that something as silly and disposable as wrapping paper can bring forth such warm and gentle memories.  And I ponder that the wrapping paper that reminds me of MY family's grandmother came from another family's grandmother, who no longer needs wrapping paper and whose gifts, also, are now of the memory kind.  I suspect there must be a grandmother code--all grandmothers must use rose-scented soap, hang plaster casts of fruit in the kitchen and buy the same kind of wrapping paper.

And all grandmothers, both present and not, are remembered at Christmas.

Rethinking Education, Part I (Decision Made)

So we decided to enroll Ben in an online school.

The think-through of the decision went like this:  we got a postcard in the mail about the Indiana Connections Academy.  Hmmm.  Never heard of it.  So I registered for and attended an online information session.  Within two minutes of logging on and starting into the slide show presentation, a communication window opened up and a Connections Academy teacher was live and online to answer ANY questions I might have.  I conversed with her throughout the slide show and the longer we talked, the more impressed I was.

I talked with John about it and we signed up to attend a live info session at a local hotel.  I was bound determined that if we decided to sign Ben up for the Indiana Connections Academy, the 'blame' wouldn't be entirely on my shoulders.  ;-)

We were among the first to arrive.  As we sat waiting for the presentation to begin, more and more people began to show up.  Before long, the room was full.  Before long, they brought in more chairs, and finally opened to folding wall behind us.

As this was quite awhile ago, many of the fascinating and impressive things we learned have escaped me, but one thing that has stuck with me was this:  enrollment for the Indiana Connections Academy jumped 600% last year.  WOW.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Over the years of trying and failing, trying and failing to be a successful inner-city teacher, my compatriots and I have long discussed what might be the Solution. What is the solution to the kids who don't want to be there, who literally destroy the classroom environment, disrupt the learning, and demand attention for behavior--keeping the teacher from teaching and the ones who care from learning?  How do we solve that problem?  My radical idea then was to discontinue mandatory school attendance.  Yes, we would lose a generation or two, but those who wanted to be there, who wanted to learn would learn and those who didn't, oh, well.  My thought was that little-by-little, society would come around again to valuing education, like our parents and grandparents--valuing it the way it isn't valued now.

My introduction to the Indiana Connections Academy changed my thinking on this.  Sitting in that room, I felt I was looking at the future.  Online education--no behavior problems, no disruptions, individualized instruction--is the future.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

When the meeting was over, and all our questions answered, John and I looked at each other and nodded.  Yep.  This would solve so many of our problems--mainly, never really knowing what Ben was doing at school.  He never brought home homework, never studied, we never knew about tests.  He claimed to have no idea what happened to papers, why he got certain grades.  With this, we would know everything.  We could see what was happening, what his strengths were, what his weaknesses were.

Of course there would be trade-offs.  We knew that.  School-at-home (NOT home-schooling) would create an entirely NEW set of problems, but our most pressing ones would be taken care of.

Decision made.