Helicopter Confessions

Cheers to Judith Newman for her charming honesty about who really does her son's homework:

“Listen,” I hiss. “People pay me to do this. I have a master’s in literature from an Ivy League school.” I continue, pathetically. “I write for all the major magazines. I write for The New York Times, for God’s sake.” Oddly enough, this doesn’t mollify him.

How I found myself justifying my career to a 12-year-old was this: I wanted him to ace his “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay, and I was nervous. I am always nervous; you might be too, if your son’s highest intellectual aspiration involved beating his friends at their daily lunchtime poker game. He usually won’t let me near his homework. But this time, after much pressure, he did. Because, as I calmly explained, I knew just what this essay needed.

I read the whole piece with a knowing smile. One of my favorite things to watch when I taught piano lessons was parents, while their children were engrossed in an activity. Take, for instance, the aptly-named Solitaire. The child is patiently making stacks of note and rest cards, building down on the bottom and up on the top. If he makes a mistake, I will correct him in time -- that's the way he learns. But while he dithers, or if he misses a move -- oh, my, how the mothers squirm, knowing they should keep quiet but unable to avoid a "Honey, look carefully, now . . . " and the fathers tend to just blurt: "You've got a sixteenth note there!" I would give them my best Patiently Suffering Teacher look and they would sheepishly zip it up.

On one hand, as a recovering perfectionist / control freak, I totally understand why it must be hard for parents to allow their children to miss something -- a comma splice in the essay or a key move in a card game. But on the other, it really isn't missing anything; it's simply learning naturally. Somehow the child will grasp the concept in her own time, using her own methods. When I'm tempted to intervene with that process, I remember the thrill of working something out on my own -- tying my shoes in elementary school, or using a table saw in college -- and I watch the student calmly, waiting for the moment she figures it out alone. A triumph.

The Monopoly Personality Test

Trips out of the classroom have been more and more plentiful in recent weeks, so to curb the urge to wander I devised what I think is a fair system: each student gets four hall passes at the beginning of the quarter to use at her discretion, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.  They just place the pass on my desk when they leave, so I know where they are — no more calling on a student in the midst of an insightful discussion only to hear, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

Rules tend to rub teenagers the wrong way, so I decided to have fun with the passes and called them “Get Out of Class Free” Cards.  I even found a little graphic of the Monopoly guy in black and white stripes.

Why am I telling you all this?  By way of an explanation for this link to the Monopoly Game Piece Theory, which contains some blasphemous language but nevertheless reduced me to a pile of giggles.

I honestly never had a preference about my piece, except that I didn’t want to be the iron.  If you did have a favorite, try to remember it before you click — I think it will be much funnier!