Fear and Loathing the School Lunch (Break?)

With my son in the school system now, I am participating regularly in the monthly school council meetings. On Wednesday night my presence as one of the two dads that regularly attend meetings earned me a welcome greeting from the school principal as I came in. By name. (I suppose it is a safe time for principals to know me by name. Right?)

The meeting was similar to previous meetings that I had attended. Familiar topics were covered but an interesting one came up this time around: the length of the school lunch break. It turns out that the students only have a 20-minute break for lunch and at that point it is time for the kids to get outside for a bit of playground time before launching into the afternoon. One of the parents raised the concern after volunteering to join the kids for a visit to City Hall.  During the tour the kids were asked about whether or not they composted food and from that discussion it came out that the kids are composting a good portion of their school lunches because they don't have time to eat. From what I could gather from the discussion, the lunch break is limited, in part, out of deference to the school bus schedules that require the school day to wrap up at a time that squeezes the rest of the day to a degree that limits the flexible use of time throughout the day.

My son only attends school in the mornings at this point, but it still caused me some concern. For all of the signs that the school is doing creative progressive things with the way they are teaching the kids and engaging them in other topics and issues - whether it is in merely retaining a music program for the kids or making empathy a theme for the kids to discuss and learn - there is the niggling feeling that the institutional machinery will impose itself.

It is easy to get your back up against the bureaucracy or other efficiencies that schools embody for the sake of educating kids in the way that they do. I could also crank up my anxieties in the way I could when I had the sense that the system was no better than the most disengaged teacher and that the needs for control over the kids, numeric assessment or measurement of performance, a limited range of perception of children's abilities and interests... I could go on.

But... lunch break?

The impression I got from the discussion was that the length of school lunch -- 20 minutes of eating time -- was a matter that the school administration was aware of and that they just had to come up with the best, most flexible solution. Still, they are hemmed in by the school bus schedule which ultimately sets the tone for the the beginning, end and lunch of the day. The questions this scheduling raises are significant. How structural is this problem? How many people, how up with the school board need to be involved in resolving it? Does the principal have the autonomy to come up with a solution that aligns with what an education ought to be and what our schools were built for? The answer to a lot of these questions may be nothing more than, "Well... uh...," unless of course the suits manage to find the right track to do platitude karaoke to.

There is, granted, a dilemma in the question of how long kids ought to have for a school lunch. The goal is to get the kids fed and given some outdoor time during the time allowed for lunch and ensure that the day ends when it is supposed to. In all of that, there appears to be a lot of rigidity. I would not want me son to have all the time in the world to dawdle through lunch, but at the same time I would not want him hitting the wall in the early afternoon and being less able to learn because he did not have enough time for lunch. While I would respect some expectations that he take responsibility for feeding himself promptly, there is the lingering anxiety about his routine being regimented or mechanized and lunch being the thin edge of the wedge that contributes more than it ought to school success.

I have told myself from the outset that it will be up to me to help my son succeed in school and not to leave it entirely up to him and his teachers to determine what he learns or what skills he develops there. The lunch issue is one example of how the System can -- intentionally or not -- demand conformity in the face of cumbersome short and long-term consequences. At this point I feel that the people I would be working with at the school will want to come up with the creative solutions and I will have to figure out how to counter this and come up with ideas and solutions that may resolve this when my son, who is easily distracted from his food at the best of times, faces that time squeeze September.

Tying Laces

Over the last few weeks or months I've noticed more and more headlines about the bad consequences for young children exposed excessively to smart phones. I might dare to suggest I've been inundated by the articles but I do not believe you can claim to be inundated by something so deftly avoided.

The theme of those articles is familiar, of course. They follow the template of the articles that have talked about the impacts of video games, heavy metal, excessive television, rock and roll and so on back through time. I give the litany not to diminish the validity of the current articles about the cell phone exposure. The one article I actually read said that kids were getting into less trouble because they were content to stay in their room texting or Snapchatting rather than getting into mischief. Actually, the barrage of headlines left me thinking that my son was not getting that much screen time. I suspect though it will escalate. A recent conversation about initiatives aimed at showing families how to eat together and converse enough to develop their children's language skills suggest that the articles are not as alarmist as I might think.

One thing I am conscious of with technology overall though is that kids are, essentially, getting nudged down the digital path at the expense of any other. There is a clamour to teach kids to code and while I'm not opposed to that I would like to see at least a bit of balance. In his 1979 book Teaching As a Conserving Activity, Neil Postman suggests school take, what he calls a thermostatic approach.  In theory it would be a scenario where educators, conscious and equipped with the barometers to see where society is trending at a certain time, act and educate in a way to strike a balance and avoid overemphasizing what society or the market is pushing for.  In this digital age, more exposure to the  analog would be welcome... (he tapped away on his keyboard.)

I'm conscious of my son's development of skills that I have taken for granted from my schooling. Cursive writing is no longer emphasized in schools and after a generation of velcro, I may be among the last to remember learning to tie shoes as a part of my primary education. In the fall of 1972 everybody in my class put in the time to work on the task.  I remember in later years one of my aunts, a primary school teacher, telling us how she had made it clear to the parents of the kids in a particularly large class that the students would need to know how to zip and tie before the start of the year. I doubt she was expecting 100% mastery before Labour Day, but enough to leave her with a manageable few.

I was still conscious of my experience in days of yore and chipped away at his reluctance to do it. There were struggles and frequent bouts of frustration punctuated by, "I can't do it." There was an hour where we got oh so close before he was truly fed up with the task and I relented. A few days ago, with his head clear of the frustration he encountered with the laces 10 days earlier, he nailed it.  He got it twice in a row, albeit rather loosely, did a single bow a few times and argued about how those single loops would count toward three successes I had requested and then got it.

Apart from saving my back and being a step toward getting him into the laced runners that he aspires to, there are other benefits.  I'm sure the fine work will be a step toward improved motor skills and there are also significant links between knot-tying and mathematics and the sciences.  It has quickly become a point of pride for my son, who asked me to watch him tie his shoes when I dropped him off in the morning and boasted to the nearest adult of his new prowess.  (She responded with the appropriate expression of surprise and approval.)

Cursive may be on my to do list a few years down the road and that, I assure you will be a long battle. Luring him into it with a stylus for a tablet is not the leverage I'll be seeking though.

To Walk Alone

It is just 400 metres. Just.

But it is the walk to school and as much as I want my son to develop the independence he would have in walking himself to school, it ain’t 1972 (when I walked half the distance and crossed only one street rather than three) to get to school when I was in kindergarten. Another factor that may have influenced that was the challenge my mother would have faced of dressing my younger brothers to get them out the door to do the walk along with me.

He made his request to walk to school on his own and, as is often the case, a resolution of sorts emerged before the day was out. Unfortunately, it merely happened to be an opportunity to cop out rather than take the topic as far as we could. The out of school care (OOSC) program he is in, coincidentally enough, sent out an email a few hours after his request to me. In the email, they reiterated their need for the kids to be logged in when they arrive for they day. They did not, however, make it explicit that it was the parents’ responsibility. If I wanted to close down the discussion, I could say that OOSC wants or needs his mother or I to log him in and out when we drop him off and pick him up.  

I want him to have this responsibility and the trust, confidence and independence that would go with it but now it is something that requires a great deal of negotiation with his school, or the OOSC program. It is quite easy to say that times have changed but the institutions have girded themselves with such rigorous caution against liabilities. My wheels are already turning about the negotiations that I could have with either the school or OOSC to discuss him going on his own and, at OOSC, logging himself in. There is a strong possibility that older kids in the program walk themselves there and log themselves in.

For about 2 1/2 years I have walked my son to and from daycare regularly and we put our steps in throughout the week to other destinations, so covering the distance is not a factor and at every intersection my loop of "look both ways, watch the cars" has played incessantly. He actually stops and waves cars through ahead of him, so I now have to coach him up a bit on asserting his own rights at an intersection but at least he is erring on the side of caution. For the third street crossing he has a well-worn pedestrian overpass that takes the concerns of looking both ways out of the equation. At this point, though, I find it frustrating that I have to rationalize this brief walk to the extent that I do because it is unsupervised.

I am confident that the risks, if any, are minimal and that the consciousness of stranger-danger or traffic are in part a factor of our collective fears, being normalized rather than mitigated. The only other people I see when I walk him to OOSC or school are another parent who lives on the same floor on me taking her daughter, and two cyclists coming north on the sidewalk and prompting me to squish to my left as my son walks the top edge of a low cinder block wall he climbs every morning. I know this walk.

There seems to have been a trade-off between low-probability tragedy and in favour of the guaranteed loss of independence and autonomy, not to mention a higher probability risk of a child getting hit by a car given the number of parents drive their kids to school now. There is also the spectre of parent-shaming looming on this matter of letting a child venture out on their own.  It is easy to say that it is not that much time each day for a parent to drop off their kids and it is a good time for my son and I talk each day.  The city, however, is not as dangerous as we convince ourselves it is and having my son develop the skills to navigate himself through the city on foot or by transit are things that would give him the autonomy that I had when I was his age.

When I raised this with him on our walk home he had forgotten about it but I doubt that it will be for long. I will likely wait until it is light in the mornings again and venture carefully toward ramping him up toward this walk or similar walks and assure myself that he can do it and assure him that I want to give him this independence.

On Kindergarten Eve

As I write this post, I am contemplating the browser tab for the Google search, "inspecting for lice" and wondering whether I should bookmark it or just leave it open.  I had to do a search last night after a flurry of text messages and a phone call from friends we camped with over the weekend, and it made for a little baptism for mother and father heading into the heart of September.  The flashlight inspection last night, the lack of even a single scratch of the scalp and a good hair wash tonight provide some reassurance that we are all clear.

We hope.

The lad heads on the next stage of the journey tomorrow. Kindergarten is a little more than 13 hours away and I pause to look in all directions.  He will be headed to an old sandstone building still older than the one I started school in in days of yore.  It is not the red clapboard single room school of one stereotype but the creak of the wood floors, the wide-yet-cluttered hallways and tall windows give a sense that this is a school that gives some comforting associations with the word.  With the school being only 400 metres away, there is the chance to see him build some independence in the weeks and months ahead as well.

Today, it was a challenge to give the sense of significance that was appropriate for the occasion of starting school. An afternoon at a trampoline centre, an early bath and a bit of a speech from the old guy (that's me!) was part of the effort to make something of the day, but it is more of a transition for mom and dad than it is for him. New friends, new expectations and perhaps the threat of a little less play than has been the case, but it may be hard for him to identify significant differences between elementary school and day care. There will be lots of new kids and a lot of bigger ones too, but other than that there will be little to overwhelm the boy who so calmly transitioned into day care 30 pounds and 18 inches ago.

There are some questions about how we prepared him, but I try to tell myself that would be the case with any parent. He has an undeniable knack for math and sciences, a mild indifference to art, drawing, and... ahem... printing.  I look ahead to the partnership with his teachers in the years ahead to help us set goals for him and I anticipate the challenges we will all face with some degree of excitement.  I can picture him sitting down at the kitchen table - not necessarily tomorrow night - working on the things that he is struggling with where I can bring something to his growth, but I will dread -- just as I did during junior high school -- the Science Fairs that loom.

Apart from the scholastic aptitudes that are yet to be measured more precisely, there is the boy that we are sending off into the world.  He is an affectionate boy who can be a goofball and enjoys the role of the clown.  There are moments when he can withdraw when he is not getting his way, but there is a chance that he is more sensitive to the needs of others when he is in a big room. From day one we have been conscious of his size.  I recall seeing other newborns when he was just two or three weeks old and gaping at my wife with the question, "Was he ever that small?" We are more than a little anxious about how the expectations and perceptions of him are altered because of his size and while we may have done him an advantage academically by waiting an extra year before sending him on to kindergarten, there may be greater expectations of him as he towers over the other kids in his class.

Ultimately though, he is a prodigious hugger and (if they allow that in school) I think he is the kind of kid that can help bring together a room of kids.  We that thought and the insistence that we want, above all, for him to be a good, kind sensitive boy and man, we send him into the world.

Childhood and The Zone

Two weeks ago, my son had his first serious opportunity to play the guitar.  After years of standing in front of me and beating on my strings, he has had his turn to embrace an instrument of his own and find his way through the deep roads of the fretboard, the strings, bridge and pick.  There is much ahead in his journey to even determine if he wants to play the guitar but for now he has one of his own to lean over or hug as it rests on his right thigh.

Chords remain a work in progress.  The fingers and the spatial arrangement have not visited each other frequently enough for him to feel adept at putting together a chord and his hands still have a bit of growing to do before we get into a discussion of bar chords or the challenge of reaching the furthest strings.  For the time being he has beaten on his guitar along with everyone else, a contribution of vibe or passion to the more structured strumming and chord progressions the rest of us follow.  While we were proceeding through Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" his head was tilted back, his eyes were closed and his pick-hand was well over his head - a tribute to Pete Townshend before he even discovered the man's technique of idiosyncrasies.  He seemed to be in complete rapture and lost in the moment.  As I beamed at him, his eyes opened and he dissolved into a state of self-consciousness.

"What?", he asked, his rapture dissolved and chased by a newly discovered timidity.

I assured him that all was well and did my best to assure him that -- as far as I was concerned -- that moment of lost bliss was just what the guitar was about.  Since that moment, however, I have wondered about what it would take to introduce him to the concept of the zone or peak performance. I recall my own efforts to get into the zone when I was learning to ride the bicycle. My first was a gleaming green with a long banana seat and high handlebars like you'd associate with a chopper. There were no training wheels in the effort.  This was strictly old school and the effort to find my balance was a lengthy one.  History would probably say that the learning was briefer than I recall but I rode up and down a stretch of yard that ran next to the house, wobbling along until I completely fell over until, bang, I had it.  For some reason I fell upon the word "Cordoba" (after the Chrysler) and ran that word through my head repeatedly until gravity pulled me off the bike and dislodged my mantra.  I would resume again and again, the word stuck in my head until I was balanced and able to bring myself to a controlled stop rather than a fall.  I do not recall if I did a full lap of the yard or if I just felt that I, after going all of 10 metres without falling over, just assumed I had the bike thing all sorted out.  It was, however, a stretch where I was in the zone as I tried to master the bike.

The guitar was much later for me and while self-taught, there was a bit more self-critique and a lot more inner dialogue than I would have had if I started as early as my son.  At this point, he is not too concerned about precision or proficiency - he just wants to bang on the guitar and enjoy the social aspects of sitting amongst "the men" to indulge in the time they share.

I want to find a way to make him familiar with that peak experience.  Regular experience of it will provide him with the compass to his passions and his purpose.  It will also clarify his definition of himself and the things he does well or may be meant to do.  It does not have to come from playing the guitar or music.  I just want him to be familiar with it and have the conversation with him about what it is, how he got there and what it might mean.  I suspect that it will wait, but in the meantime, I'll file moments like this one to tell him about these experiences and ask him to reflect on how he felt during those moments.

Holding Him Back

"So, what have you decided?"




I'm in the dentist chair, puzzling over the question. My dentist adds that he read my post about whether or not to send Gabriel to school this year and I muster a nod of recognition. The topic of when to start a child in school is an exhaustively discussed one and, for the most part, the advice I've received is a chorus of, "What's the rush?... I waited... My daughter was fine early but... my son was... well... uhm..." Or struggled, or what have you.  Parents of the autumn-born who were particularly experienced and informed on the subject and the advice was all valuable. There was also a serendipitous barrage of articles on childhood and education that advised us to sit tight and hold him back a year more. Last week, we even encountered a parent who had found her 18-year-old son foundering and dropping out of his first year of university -- an account that made me ponder the math if her son was still only 18 years old in the spring after his freshman year.

Unwittingly, he is looking forward to the graduation from day care that the rest of his classmates will celebrate.  He is not, however, going to graduate with his friends. The social disruption for him will be a challenge. Close friends that he has had a lot of history with will be moving on and his friendships with those kids may end or require a lot more work to maintain as routines change. The social connections are already changing form as this fork in the road emerges.

Still, we have to look long term rather than reinforce the social expectations.

As great as he is in our eyes (except for when he is too tired to listen to us or insists that his diet consist exclusively of starches, or as I put it, "his whites") we would rather not have him spend the rest of his childhood and adolescence pressured into playing catch up. If we made the move to include him with the older peers who are moving on over the next little while we will be doing him an injustice. With an extroverted only child, who is at turns a nurturing leader of younger kids and displays great vulnerability trying to find a random kid to play with or be accepted by, we suspect that he will play to his strengths if he stays behind with kids who are a little younger than him.

While his daycare suggested there was a risk of Gabriel getting bored while in the same room for another year, I recalled a concept from my studies in Education - over-learning. If he is covering similar topics or themes in the coming year, I am fine with that. I get the impression that Gabriel is more of an analytical mind and that he may continue to process familiar knowledge in different ways. (Recently he wanted me to "play" with his Hot Wheels with him. For some reason our play consisted of sorting out all his dinkeys and separating the Hot Wheels from the non-Hot Wheels cars.

If he grows bored with too-familiar lessons and stories, perhaps there is an opportunity for him to play more of a nurturing or empathetic role. Since making our decision to keep him in daycare for another year, we told the daycare that we are prepared to adapt what we do at home to ensure that we are on the same page as the staff at the daycare in encouraging the leadership, empathy and social development that we would like to support in the coming year.

We have been conscious from day one of Gabriel being big for his age and my wife and I still tell one another that he was never that small when we see newborns. We have always seen his size as presenting a mixed blessing when he is in school and it is probably better for us to embrace that and get him accustomed to that size distinction rather than try to get him to blend in with a group of kids who are three to nine months older than him. When he is with younger and smaller kids we can prompt him to be gentler with them and perhaps he will get the sense of the responsibilities that come with being the big kid and take the opportunity to protect with his size and maturity.

All in all, we have concluded that it is better and lower stakes to hold him back now rather than pressure him throughout his school years to keep up or hold him back later in life when the stakes are a little higher than they are now.

Instead of Anger

Once again at daycare, I caught a more stern countenance from the staff as I arrived to pick my son up at the end of the day.  There is an element of performance or ostentation to the communications and the most important or obvious part of the dialogue at this point communicates to me, "Something's up," or "We didn't have a good day." I brace myself and call him over as I'm told there is a report for me to sign. I review the report and add my ink in my assigned task. My face is all scowls and furrows as I shed all desire to nudge in an additional few minutes of play time before we roam home.

He has bitten one of his classmates. I have edged toward livid but know that a rant is not going to get me anywhere. I still approach the border of rant, with the litany of the base questions that get me through the walk home. Does Mom bite you? Do I bite you? How would you like it if N bit you? I dread writing them down again for their utter lack of originality or constructiveness, but that is what I was left resorting to.  From there I get a sense of needing a different approach, a strategy that will give him a different approach or outlet rather than urging greater and greater levels of self-control.

The conversation turns and we get into the details of what happened, which I already gathered from the report. Earlier on in the day, he bit a girl in a fight over a spoon. For clarity and context I have to add -- despite it making me sound like a 4-year-old -- that he had it first. For whatever reason he was expected to give the spoon over and in the escalation over said spoon, he bit the girl. The conversation lead to the topic of sharing, but it was clear to me that sharing was not quite be what I would be encouraging. In reality it would be capitulation that I would be insisting upon: keep giving you her her way and... well... she'll walk all... over you. Everyone would. 

No Gabriel, sharing is a little more complicated than you'd like or hope it to be. Your conflict-averse father knows that all too well at his age.

By the time we got home my mind was onto the topic of what he ought to be doing.  I ushered him to his spot at the kitchen table and brought out the green plastic IKEA spoon that is core to his breakfast rituals - green being his favourite colour.  I gave him the spoon and tried to role play what happened this morning. He didn't play his role with the emotion that he had in the morning. It was loosely gripped and it was easy for me to pluck it out of his relaxed fist rather than take him the brink of the conflict he was in prior to the bite.  I never quite got him to act it out as vividly as I would have liked, but I did make the case that it was time to inquire when something was leading to conflict or disrespecting his boundaries.  (The boundaries conversation will be for another day.) I tried to instill in him the question, "Why are you doing that?"

In the role play, however, Gabriel didn't abstract well enough to pose the question to me. Instead he felt compelled to answer it and he never quite got around to asking it.  We discussed it again when my wife got home and tried to coach him on using the question throughout the evening and we will do it over the coming days and weeks as well. Hopefully he will be able to employ it and make the effort to defuse a situation before it gets to the point that it did in daycare yesterday morning. My hope is that the question will bring about another level of consciousness on the part of both protagonists in this rite of childhood. I would dread Gabriel merely receiving the response, "Because I want it," and flounder with the challenge of coming up with the appropriate follow-up question. Perhaps the question would give his friend the chance to ask herself the same thing or give him the time to tell her to get another spoon elsewhere rather than insist on the one he had.

On the topic of daycare, I hope this is not too jarring a transition, last night I wrote our daycare to inform them of our desire to keep Gabriel there for another year to ensure he is more developed before thrusting him into kindergarten and onto a gerbil wheel of perpetual catch up throughout his schooling.