You Don’t Have to Tell Me What to Do!
Just before dinner, our house was teeming with math.
Dylan’s tutor, an absolute wonder, was working diligently with Dylan to finish his exam review packet. They were sitting quietly at the kitchen table, an occasional question and answer tossed about like murmurs in a Pink Floyd song.
Meanwhile, Shane – who is also in advanced math class – brought in his homework to where I was sitting in the office.
It’s geometry. I see angles of varying sizes. Shane says something about a protractor and I say, “I haven’t used a protractor since 1976, so I’m not sure I can answer your question.”
Luckily, Bill – my mathematically-inclined genius of a husband, came home from work at about this time. He helped out with the protractor.
But it soon became clear that Shane was missing a very important component of measuring angles: the concept of angle – its very definition. He seemed to believe that angles were just two lines – and had nothing to do with the space between the two. So I drew pizzas and “cut” them and made them into “angles” to give him a broader idea.
He didn’t get it. So I got out yarn, and Shane chopped off a piece. I used the yarn and the carpet to explore the concept further. For 10 minutes, I tried to explain the concept of an angle, and measurement, and how you could tell if something was more or less than 90 degrees.
Shane was almost in tears when I was done. “You didn’t have to say all that,” he told me. “It took you 10 minutes just to tell me that one thing!”
Apparently, he understood more than I thought – and in my zeal to explain the greater scheme of things, I bored him to tears.
Shane finished his homework, the tutor left, and we broke for dinner.
Then we checked Edline for Dylan – the computer’s way of sharing grades and assignments with parents and students. He had raised his grade in algebra from 34% (failing) to 62% – a D!
We high-fived and danced around like crazy people. A D! Dylan brought his algebra grade up to a D!
“I never thought I’d be this excited about a D,” he said, still dancing.
“Neither did I,” I said sincerely.
We then took a brief trip through Dylan’s binder trying to find lost work. He made a list of the things he needs to do tomorrow: turn in his forms for SSL hours, talk to his social studies teacher about missing homework, turn in his missing English homework, finish retaking an algebra quiz at lunchtime, talk to his science teacher about his missing lab work, turn in his football paperwork that was due in early December, and bring home his P.E. clothes that he’s been wearing every school day since Thanksgiving.
By the end of this process, he was yelling at me, “You don’t always need to tell me what to do! You act like I would fail if you didn’t tell me what to do!”
Of course, I am only pointing out missing work that he hasn’t been able to notice for himself, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I screamed back meaninglessly about how he can make his own lunch, talk to his own teachers, go to his own IEP meetings – blah blah blah – still hoping he will find all that lost work and finish his papers without me reminding him to do it.
But anyway, the high-fiving was over, and we went back to our normal disagreements. Shane’s homework is still on his desk – not in his folder where it should be. So after all that hard work, Shane probably won’t turn in his homework tomorrow.
And Dylan’s SSL form (which has to be turned in tomorrow or he loses credit for enough hours to graduate from high school) is sitting idly on his desk while he eats ice cream, alone at the kitchen table, at an unnervingly slow pace.
And here I sit, typing. Quietly. Not telling them what to do.