Singing in the Choir

            Pip likes to sing. Within two weeks of entering kindergarten, he was performing “This Land is My Land” every chance he got. When the big winter show came along, he put the songs on a loop in his head and constantly brought verses to the dinner table. In the springtime, Eva cobbled together a soundtrack of the 1980’s pop songs in that year’s end of the year show and we belted out “I Just Called to Say ’I Love You’” and “Beat It” whenever we went anywhere in the car.

Interestingly to me, this attraction to singing wasn’t something he talked about in specific terms. He didn’t consciously identify himself as being good at singing and didn’t look to show it off as something he knew a lot about. He just enjoyed doing it and gravitated towards doing more when opportunities arose. He tried out for solo parts when he could and when he didn’t get them, he didn’t go on to something else. He kept coming back and trying again. Last spring, when the school did an arts evening and invited kids who were interested to perform a short piece of music, Pip signed up. He sang God Bless America and did so with a sweet joy that made me smile.

            Back at the end of September a note came home from Pip’s music teacher at school. She and her husband are the conductors for the music program at one of the churches in town, and the note invited Pip to audition for the boys’ choir if he was interested. We like the music teacher – she is one of those people who manages to be serious without being mean – and were willing to let Pip check things out. A strong musical education isn’t one of the priorities we had for our children, but we liked the idea of Pip working in a situation where excellence was expected and performances were taken seriously. For his part, he was very interested in seeing what it was all about though it was hard to separate the privilege of being invited from a true interest in the choir itself.

             So a week ago he went to a trial practice. It was a full one, starting at 4:30 and running past 7:00 with a short break for dinner in between. It was a full exposure to the grind of a choir practice and when I picked him up, he was ecstatic. He talked about the numbering system for following the music and the psalm the choir was working on for that Sunday. Then we took him back on Friday for another practice, and he came out happy once again. There was this whole new world of symbols and structures for him to absorb. He spent the weekend asking what a perfect fourth meant and what were the differences between major and minor scales. He was ready to keep going back as much as he could.

           

***

            I’m glad he’s excited. Performing music is one of humanity’s more life-affirming acts. It requires concentration, finely detailed workmanship, and persistence in the face of failure. It can bring one a special awareness of the world’s myriad contours and emotional striations. Plus, it’s expressive, energetic, and fun to turn one’s body into an instrument of beautiful sound.

            With all that said, I’m not yet completely onboard with Pip doing choir. For one thing, we’re suddenly trying to insert a three-to-four-time-a-week activity into an established schedule of eating, sleeping, doing homework, and playing that has been working quite well for us. Meals are getting out of whack. Schoolwork and play expectations are not properly aligned. We are ferrying him back and forth a lot while trying to figure out what to do during the time in between. While there is nothing extraordinary about all of this in the grand scheme of things, I just wasn’t ready for it yet. I’d had the idea that we’d gradually ease into a busier schedule as Pip moved into middle school, and I don’t like having that timeline blown to smithereens.

            But, more importantly, there is a growing up moment here for Pip that makes me irredeemably and irrevocably sad. For almost nine years, Pip has been a constant presence in my life. We did little situps together when he was an infant. We watched construction equipment demolish and rebuild a school when he was two. I wrote a large chunk of my dissertation with him sleeping in my lap. I mowed the yard with him on my back. I taught him to read. I taught him to ride a bike. When Polly was a baby we entertained her together with stories and stuffed animals and silly games. All three of us went on runs together, me pushing a double stroller while Pip and Polly pointed out wildlife along the way.

After kindergarten started, our time together was reduced, but we still have time to run around outside, play ball-tag and hide-and-seek. Pip kicks balls around as I rake the leaves or the two of them will play with the hose while I wash the car. The shouts, giggles, thumps, and whirls of Pip and Polly’s play is the soundtrack of my working life.

Now suddenly I’m losing another large chunk of the time we have left together. On Wednesday and Fridays now it’s come in from school, have a snack, do some homework and then go back out the door. When Pip gets back he eats dinner and goes to bed. Sunday mornings will be much the same.

            And what makes me even sadder is that he’s doing it without me. One of the things I loved about having him do soccer is that I could be there with him, coaching and playing. My favorite moments from soccer were always the ones where we had a few minutes together to kick the ball or shoot before everyone else arrived or after everyone else left. Choir doesn’t allow me to do that. I have to drop him off and pick him up. I have to watch from out in the audience and let someone else have the joy of helping him learn. I don’t like it. He’s my kid. Ava and I worked hard to get him to be the kind of person we want to spend time with and now that time is getting siphoned off by other people. It’s the way life works, but it still sucks.

            Now, I know that just as with school, we’ll get used to the new patterns and find new joys within what Pip learns and does. (In fact, it’s happening already. On Saturday morning while Polly went to gymnastics, Pip sat down at the piano and played for fun. Then we played some short duets together. He was focused on the rhythms and cognizant of the various markings in the music in a way he had not been a week before. It was a really wonderful hour.) But for all the good things about school – and there are lots of them – I’m still tempted from time to time to pull both kids out and teach them at home. At this point it isn’t even about the speed or efficiency with which they could learn. I’d do it to grab as much working time with them as I can. I like this time in our lives together, and I can see it slipping away. Choir practice is only a symptom of a much larger pathology. 

Pollysaurus Rex

            For the last several days, Polly has been in a tonal funk. Everything she says seems to come out with an edge of shrillness, whininess, or disdain. Her attempts to be funny come off as mean. Her patience for anything that does not go her way exists somewhere in the range between very limited and non-existent. She has teared up at not having as much pepperoni on her pizza as she might have liked and has complained frequently about being tired or cold or hungry - though not for the food that’s in front of her. And she’s been pushy about being right, making an issue of silly things such as the time being 6:47 instead of 6:45. On the whole it’s been a rather unpleasant week.

            This kind of harshness is symptomatic of a person who feels a bit off, and Polly has certainly had her share of annoyances to manage. To start with, she has a tooth in her bottom jaw that is exceptionally loose. For the past week, it’s been flopping around in her mouth and jabbing into her gum whenever she tries to bite into something. At least once at every meal she’s been giving a small yelp of pain and having to swish blood out of her mouth. On top of that the replacements for the two front teeth she lost a couple of weeks back have started to push their way into view. While this kind of cutting doesn’t keep her awake at night like it did when her baby teeth came in, it seems to be enough of an irritant to disrupt her sleep from time to time. She got up in the middle of the night last Thursday to use the bathroom, something that she never ever does, and spent an hour or so after that rolling around trying to get back to sleep.

            On top of the pain from teeth going out and teeth coming in, Polly is also dealing with a case of the sniffles. She had a mild fever during the middle of the week and a hacking cough towards the end that led us to keep her home from school on Thursday. (We dealt with an extended cough this past spring and wanted to head this off before it got too established in her lungs.) The cough hung on throughout the weekend, and Polly still felt off enough on Saturday to skip out on her gymnastics class.

            Lastly, amidst all the off-kilterness of being sick and having a mouth in pain, Pip had his last two soccer games of the season. Polly enjoys the idea of going to watch Pip play soccer, but I think she feels left out as well. It isn’t an immediate or conscious reaction because she gets excited for him and asks to go to the games. However, I think the waiting around and watching, the feeling of being outside of the main action of the day, wears on her in subtle ways that wind up making her feel unfulfilled and anxious. As a result she often gets snippy and short towards the end of a soccer day. When you combine this with an already volatile situation, it can make for a very unhappy child.

***

            This is not the first time we’ve cycled through such a situation with either kid and in the process we’ve found that the only real solution to all of this irritation is patience. The loose teeth will fall out. The new teeth will come in. Her cough will subside. Pip’s soccer games will end. Polly will get a couple of good nights of sleep and she will return to being the happy, effervescent sprite who draws animal pictures for friends and sprints joyfully out the doors of school each day.

            The challenge is what to do in the meantime. The habits of making mean faces and using harsh words have a tendency to hang around long after the irritants that initially triggered them are gone. If you’re not careful they can become normalized to the point where no one in your immediate circle even realizes how ugly they are. At the same time, we know that constant correction only grinds everyone down and runs the risk of grounding in a child the idea that they just don’t do things right. This latter result is the worst of all worlds in that the child may stop even trying to do what you ask of them because at some level they’ve come to believe they’re incapable of it.

            Being aware of this balance Ava and I have made it a habit to frequently tell Polly that she’s a “good kid” even in the midst of another line of whiny complaints. We work with her to come up with non-inflammatory ways of correcting unwanted behavior such as asking her to tell us what kind of signal we should use when she’s doing something wrong. Her current choice – a single finger tap on our chin - is a good one because it’s wordless and allows us to smile at her while also providing the necessary reminder about how we want her to act. We’ve also used taps to our noses and talked about throwing a hurtful phrase or negative attitude “out the window.” She seems to particularly like this image.

            How much of this effort really matters in the long run is difficult to discern. As with any parenting technique, we don’t have a control group against which to measure the true effectiveness of any of these interventions. At the same time, it feels better to be doing something positive than just sitting around waiting and wondering when things are going to get better. Perhaps keeping ourselves from grinding down is what really matters in the long run.

Not swinging for the fences

            I’ve missed writing an entry over the past couple of weeks because I’ve been working on a short story for a journal. The deadline for the story was October 15, and I got started on the story a bit late in the game. As such much of the time I would usually dedicate to putting together a blog entry was turned over to developing and refining the short story instead.

            The reason this particular story took on such importance for me is somewhat complicated. I finished a novel this spring and over the summer began figuring out how to get it out into the world. In the process I have come to understand what people mean when they say the work of writing a book is only half finished when the writing is done. After that you have to convince several layers of people that what you have produced is interesting enough and marketable enough for them to dedicate their resources towards publishing it. Not having any immediate contacts, I went about trying to stir something up. I identified over one hundred agents that were open to queries from new authors. I put together the requisite materials to send to them along with a letter that was both professional and inclusive of some individualized details. I mailed out the queries ten at a time and then waited, hoping someone would take a flyer on me.

After going through this cycle a couple of times, I began to feel like I was playing the lottery. There is a big prize out there and to get to it you have to play the game, but the numbers are such that your odds of breaking through are ridiculously small. It’s not a matter of quality. There are many stories out there. Some are great. Some are horrible. Both types get through the process and into publication. But for a person like me without any other contacts, credentials, or previously published work, it’s mostly a matter of dumb luck.

This is a horrible position to be in because you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again with the hope that at some point it will produce different results. This creates a feeling of powerlessness that leads people to consider all kinds of desperate measures: phone calls to agent and publisher offices despite explicit instructions not to call, ambushes on agents at writers’ conferences, repeated spamming of agents and publishers in hopes of getting through. Some agents used to exploit this desperation by charging fees for even reading a query and its associated materials. While this practice has faded, it seems that they can still get away with charging for face time at writers’ conferences (one in my area was advertising fifteen minutes of one-on-one time with an agent for $25).

In September I began looking for ways to change the balance of power. Agents and publishers need good material from authors. They can’t make money without it. The question is how to become known as someone who is producing good material and thus someone the agents and publishers want to have working with them. The answer, I’ve decided, is to get material out almost anywhere I can and then use those publications to leverage further publications. It’s basically finding the bottom of the writing ladder and methodically working my way up. One could also think of this in baseball terms as going for singles and doubles instead of swinging for the proverbial home run.

What this means practically is that I am backing away from my agent query efforts in favor of two other strategies. The first is to find a smaller regional publisher for the novel I’ve already completed. It isn’t doing me any good sitting around on my computer. Better to get it out and have a few people in my area read it than have it grow stale waiting for a big break. The second strategy is to try to publish short stories in journals of increasing importance. This strategy is a long term effort, but it has the upshot of getting me more practice at creating and crafting stories and regularly engaging in the process of publication. Whether this will ultimately get me where I want to go is uncertain. However, I like the idea of working on something much more than sitting around hoping that someday somebody will stumble upon me.

Quantum Leaps

            It seems about every two weeks for the last couple of months I have found myself writing about how Polly and Pip are aging right before our eyes. Much of this has to with the new school year and the changing levels of expectations that occur as they move up from one grade to the next. These moves create quantum leap moments when the kids are suddenly asked to do things they haven’t before, and we have to figure out how to make those things happen in ways that promote good long-term habits. For Polly last year it was adjusting to kindergarten and learning how to manage her feelings after a long day at school. For Pip, it was shifting his expectations for doing homework from the ten minutes every other day of first grade to the thirty minutes every day of second grade. Both challenges were at the time overwhelming and fraught with their share of tears but thankfully in time we all adjusted to these new realities.

            This year Polly’s leap involves spelling words. Polly watched for two years as Pip has done his spelling words – writing them out on Mondays, putting them in alphabetical order on Tuesdays, going through them with me on Wednesdays, and doing a mock test on Thursdays. She hovered over his shoulder through it all and took turns calling out words. She even created her own spelling lists from time to time. So when her turn came around three weeks ago, she was close to ecstatic. The moment she got home she whipped out her list of twelve words and did all the assigned exercises for the week right then and there. Then she brought the list over to me and had us run through them three times to make sure she had them all right. The next day she had us do the same thing again.

            While I was thrilled by her enthusiasm, all of this spelling required me to do some balancing. Pip still had his words to do as well and I needed to figure out how best to split my time among the both of them. This was particularly true on Thursdays when both wanted to do their mock tests at the same time. The first Thursday I didn’t handle their competing pulls very well. In the middle of doing Polly’s words Pip came in ready to do his. Polly got frustrated at the interruption, and Pip got annoyed because I wasn’t ready when he was. This in turn made me upset with both of them for having unreasonable expectations of what I could actually do.

            The next Thursday, after establishing a schedule beforehand, things went much smoother. We started with Pip and Polly reprised her roll of looking over my shoulder while I called out his words. Once those were finished we flipped around on the couch and did the same thing for Polly. The whole affair went so smoothly I happily ran through Polly’s words a second time so she could organize them according to their first letter.

            It was nice having us all working together for a few minutes that day. It reminded me of some of my favorite moments with them: the evenings in the winter when we settle in on the couch and I read to them. Pip leans in at my shoulder to watch the words go by on the page. Polly hangs out on my other side coloring or fiddling with a stuffed animal. It has been a while since we’ve done that with each other and it made me happy to have the spelling words bring that memory back.

***

            Pip’s challenge this fall has been to take greater responsibility for organizing his schoolwork. Every day he come home now with assignments in spelling, reading, and math. At school his teacher expects him to write down his assignment off the board each day, collect the proper classroom materials to bring home with him, and get it all done and returned the next day. While he had the same responsibility last year, the amount of material and the level of attention to these details expected of him are significantly higher. The teacher doesn’t remind him to get his worksheets into his folder. She doesn’t check to see that he’s written things down correctly. She has a formal set of consequences established for those who do  not get their work done on time.

            While Pip is eight years old and it’s probably time for this shift in responsibility, the change is still taking some getting used to. Pip’s already had to use a homework pass after he left a worksheet at school and had to face one of the consequences when he failed to write down his spelling words after he alphabetized them. He’s never been punished at school for absentmindedness, and this new regime is requiring him to recalculate what it means to be a good student. This is all well and good but a touch frustrating for me to watch. I don’t mind having consequences for failing to do what you need to get done. That’s a necessary part of life. However, I like it much better when I’m in control of those consequences instead of the teacher.

The Lessons of Puzzles

            When I was in elementary school I took part in a gifted and talented program at my school. Once a week several of us were pulled out of our regular classrooms to come together and work on things that we might not normally get a chance to do. This program was by nature experimental. The whole point was not so much to push kids further forward through the standard curriculum but to stretch their thinking wider within that curriculum. Exactly what that stretching meant depended both on what the students could handle and what the teacher could imagine.

My memories of the classes themselves are fragmentary. I know that at some point we did a unit on archaeology that I really enjoyed. In second grade, I remember trying to record notes in my notebook with my left hand after breaking the wrist on my right. I remember the location of the classroom – right off the gym in the back right corner just before you went behind the stage. For one of the projects my group filmed a war movie in my backyard. In another I tried to construct a working model of a maglev train. For her class, my younger sister created a fake episode of the nightly news to talk about what she’d learned in a unit about Australia. It included headlines from the day, a weather report, and even a commercial for Vegemite, a dark, yeasty spread that Australians use on breads and sandwiches.

            My strongest memory from this program, however, came from an exercise that didn’t work. During one unit on puzzles that we did in the fourth or fifth grade, the teacher read us a set of stories in which something mysterious happened, and we were supposed to piece together a solution to the mystery from the clues buried in the story. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t do them. There was a leap of imagination or a trick of logic in them that was beyond our capabilities. The story I remember most clearly involved a man who had hung himself from the highest rafter of an empty room, and no one could figure out how he got up there. The only clue was the presence of a puddle of water underneath him. We conjured all kinds of ways this man might have gotten up there – a pulley, a secret trapdoor in the ceiling, climbing the rope. Our teacher kept leading us back towards the water, clearly annoyed that we weren’t getting it. She kept telling us to think about the water, that the water had to have something to do with it, but we couldn’t think what that might be and thus kept spinning off in other directions. Finally with time running out and all of us tired and frustrated, the teacher gave us the answer: ice. The water had been a tall block of ice that the man had used it to get up to the rafters. After a while the ice melted leaving behind the puddle of water.

            I always thought the teacher could have done that exercise better. There had to be a halfway point somewhere along the way where she could have told us something more than to just look at the water. It was clear this wasn’t enough. It was clear that we needed another step, not just to help solve the problem but also to give us ideas about how to solve such problems in the future. Perhaps if she’d taken us into a further discussion of the properties of water or maybe helped us organize our thoughts in a different way we would have gotten there. Regardless, there was a moment there for teaching something else, for teaching ways to attack a problem when the answer isn’t immediately obvious, but the teacher failed to grab it.

****

            Polly brought home an exercise from her weekly gifted and talented session at school last Wednesday. The exercise contained three challenges, each of which involved taking a shape made from toothpicks and moving a couple of sticks around to make a new shape. They had done the first two problems at school and after showing them to me and having me try them out, Polly proudly told me their solutions, one of which she had come up with all on her own. The third problem was intended for her to work on at home. Feeling confident, she dove in and fiddled with the toothpicks, moving them in and out and around for a good ten to fifteen minutes without success. Eventually she got frustrated and walked away. She said that she’d try it again tomorrow, but I wasn’t sure she actually would. She was stuck and couldn’t see a way forward. I had a flashback to a man hanging from the rafters with a puddle of water beneath his feet.

            The next day after school, I asked Polly if she wanted to try the puzzle again. When she demurred, I knew what would happen. She wouldn’t touch the puzzle again until the following week when the teacher or some other student would present the solution. Then Polly would bring it home to us, and happily show us how it’s done, having learned from the exercise that if you wait long enough, someone else will give you the answer.

            That was not the lesson I wanted her to have, so I had her sit down with me and together we worked through the problem. While I knew what the answer was, I wasn’t that concerned with getting her immediately to it. I wanted to walk her through the process of thinking, to give her some directions about how to map out a systematic breakdown of the problem when her first brainstorming stabs did not meet with success. Ultimately, she already knew what she needed to do – take each stick in turn and move it around until she found the one that made the shape work – but she needed me to help keep her focused on doing that process one complete step at a time.

Eventually we found the right stick. The moment she slid that toothpick into place Polly could see the shape emerge in front of her, and she jumped up from the table to do a little dance. She was so proud of what she’d accomplished, proud that after being frustrated by the problem the day before she came back to it and was able to find the solution, proud of the idea that she was a person who could solve these kinds of problems.

I don’t know whether in that moment of exaltation she consciously remembered exactly how she’d gotten to the solution, that it wasn’t an act of magic but one of systematic elimination that had finally gotten her there. She’s six years old and even for adults such distinctions can vanish very quickly. However, it gladdened my heart to find her working a jigsaw puzzle later on that weekend and filling in the pieces line by line.