A Stay At Home Dad

While the boy was getting ready for school this morning, he happened to glance at the thermometer and saw that the outdoor temperature was 3 degrees. His reaction?

“YES! No outside recess today!”

My reaction, “Huh?” I was only halfway through my first cup of coffee, so I wasn’t sure what I was hearing.

“If the temperature is less than 20 degrees, we don’t have outside recess,” he explained.

So, I’d heard right. The boy didn’t want to have recess. That seemed, completely wrong.

He went on to explain that the 4th grade boys had gotten in trouble because of the actions of a few. Apparently, “the few” were throwing snowballs. Not at anyone, mind you (and the boy says he wasn’t involved), just throwing them out into a field. The teachers then yelled at the boys, rounded up everyone (including some 3rd graders whom the teachers told “Blame the 4th graders, it’s their fault”) and cut the recess period short.

This isn’t the first time the boys in his grade have been singled out for this kind of treatment under seemingly flimsy or even dubious circumstances. There have been other lunch related incidents where, in the Wife’s and my judgment, it was merely the action of 4th-grade boys being 4th-grade boys.

That’s not to say that 4th-grade boys are cherubs or entirely without fault. I’m well aware that I’m getting 1 side of the equation here.

Recess was, quite possibly, my favorite thing about elementary school. That was the one chance during the day to run around and be basically free of the classroom until I got home. I can’t imagine it not being a favored time for any 4th grade boy. And yet, here’s the boy saying just that. For the moment, he’s more worried about getting in trouble at recess than having fun.

I’ve read often about this notion of “a war one boys” but I’ve often dismissed as a result of oversensitive political types trying to whip-up partisan frenzy. But some of the things the boy has had to deal with this year in how teachers and his school have dealt with disciplinary items bring the notion a lot closer to home. The simple fact is, I’m starting to not trust the school’s judgment where these things are concerned.

And that’s a problem. How it gets resolved remains to be seen.

A little over a week ago, the boy scored his first hockey goal of the season.

This past Sunday, he scored 2 more and helped lead his team to a victory over the other top team in his league.

The first goal was the more pedestrian of the two, but demonstrated some of his growing understanding of how to play offense. He camped out in front of the goal and a teammate fed him a pass. The boy finished the play from there.

The second one, the boy created all on his own.

There was a scrum at center ice, with a bunch of players poking at the puck. This happens a lot in these games. Typically, the teams as a whole are smart enough to figure leave a few players out in case the puck squirts out unfavorably.

In this case, the boy was on the outskirts of the scrum. Occasionally, he’d half-heartedly poke his stick into the scrum. To my eye, it initially looked like he was loafing. Instead, he was waiting for an opportunity or, more correctly, trying to create one.

A few seconds later, he had it. He’d reached in a poked the puck out and towards the opponents goal and he was able to pounce on it before anyone else could react. He got to the puck first a punched it ahead into the offensive zone, splitting a couple of defenders. At that point, there were 3 players who had a chance to get to the puck, to opposing players and the boy.

That’s when the boy hit a gear I hadn’t seen from him before. I was situated behind the goal and could see the three of them racing for the puck. The boy simply powered ahead of the two defenders and caught up to the puck at full speed half-way into the offensive zone. At that point, it was him and the goalie with no chance for anyone to catch him. He steered the puck towards the center of the goal, coasted in close, and then lifted the puck into the left-side of the net, cleanly beating the goalie’s glove hand.

That score pushed his team to a 4-2 lead with half of the third left to play. While no lead is necessarily safe in hockey at this level, this one was and proved to be the final score.

Aside from his goals, I’d still say it was his best game of the season. He was more assertive than I’d seen him before. When he was on the ice, he was constantly flying to the puck, especially putting pressure on opposing players with the puck. When they were in the offensive zone and a teammate had the puck, he worked to get open for a pass and frequently went to the front of the net. He was clearly playing with confidence and a purpose, like he finally understood what to do, where to be and when to get there.

When the game ended, I congratulated him on his goals, particularly his break away. But I also to time to emphasize that he played well all around, hustling around the ice and skating hard every moment he was out there. At this point, he seems to be getting better with each game. I don’t know if he can keep it up, but if he does he’ll be a real asset to his team when the playoffs come up in a couple weeks.

The boy and I were killing time while the lass was at her dance class. He was reading and I was checking some thing on the web when I offered to work with him on his math. He’d asked me if we could practice it some more this morning. I think he’s getting bored with the current math curriculum at school.

I’d been helping him learn how to do long division as well as perform multi-digit multiplication. The nice thing about these two are the reinforcing nature of their operation. In order to multiply multi-digit numbers, he has to know his single digit multiplication cold, plus he get practice with addition. Same thing for division, which covers the other 2 operations.

The experience working with him was most unpleasant.

He griped about the problems. He was constantly looking for short-circuit answers rather than practicing the algorithms for performing the multiplication or division. He snapped at me. He kept making simple mistakes with his multiplication and addition. He kept forgetting the steps to take.

The Wife called while we were doing this stuff and she almost hung-up on him.

Mercifully, the time arrived for us to go get his sister. So I told him we’d try again after dinner.

When that time arrived, the difference was amazing. No grumpiness or moodiness. He remembered how to perform the operations. When he made a mistake, he took the correction constructively and without complaint. The simple math errors were gone and the only mistakes he made were process ones. And even those were associated with the curve ball problems I gave him, which I wouldn’t have bothered with earlier. In fact, I was actively trying to simplify things earlier, whereas now I felt I could increase the challenge a bit for him.

It still amazes me the difference a little food can make with them.

“Dad, did you ever play on uneven teams? Is that something that happens all the time?”

In typical the boy fashion, he posed a question completely out of left-field. No segue to speak of, no hint it was coming. Not that this was a subject that I have difficult dealing with. It would just be nice to have a heads up for once.

So the deal is they were playing Capture the Flag. When the teams got formed, all the fast, athletic boys were on one team while the boy’s team had a couple of girls and other less athletic boys. Frankly, it was a fairly classic situation on school playgrounds around the country that I’m sure has been happening ever since the first recess was held at a school. In this particular case, the other team formed because they are a group of boys that hang together a lot and they basically just declared themselves all on a team.

The problem came up because the boy put up a stink. He started arguing with the players on the other team and he ultimately ended up calling them “big, fat, sore losers” which, in my book, rates about a 2 on the insult scale. But, it’s a new generation and apparently that’s pretty serious stuff. I’m also not quite sure the other team was the “sore loser” in this instance, but I’ll ignore that.

So the games were played and ultimately the incident was resolved when a couple of the offended boys told their teacher about the incident and the boy apologized.

So what was the boy after? I think mainly, he wanted some kind of affirmation that he was in the right. He wanted to know that he’d been correct to confront the other team like that. But, I also think he suspected he could have handled it better.

One obvious angle was him losing his temper and calling them names. But that was easy and even he understood he shouldn’t have done that. Another possible angle was sportsmanship. Yet another possibility was to remind him the best way to deal with people you think are cheating is to just beat them.

He’s heard all that before, though. So I wanted to come up with a different angle.

I asked him if, if he complains about all the “best players” being on the other team, how does he think that makes the players on his team feel? By arguing so hard about the unfairness of the teams, he was basically saying the players he had on his team were worthless. I went on to try and explain that to be a leader and to try and get the most out of teammates, he couldn’t start by insinuating they were worthless.

He was quiet for a bit.

Which was a good thing, because I knew that meant he was thinking about what I’d said. At that point, it was the best I could hope for.