Family – Page 2 – Experience Has Made Me Rich

Grief vs. Misery

During a conversation with a friend today I had occasion to think about the grief and misery I felt when my mother passed away almost five years ago, and also when the very young son of a close friend of mine passed away about two years before that. Grief. Misery. Two highly emotional words. I never really thought about them separately before, but they are quite different.

In both experiences the grief of the loss was immediate and profound. And in both cases the misery was painfully intense. In my conversation today I realized how separate these two emotions are when it comes to loss. Grief is a natural emotion stemming from losing someone you love. It’s that feeling of having something critical to your existence removed, violently and without your permission. It’s a feeling that combines powerlessness, loss and anger. It’s natural and even essential for continued survival. It paves the way for acceptance and growth.

When I think of my mother these days, I think of her beautiful soul, her love, and all that she gave me that makes me who I am now, and who I am now is someone I like. I owe her that, and my grief over her loss provided an intensification of my understanding of that.

When I think of my friend’s son, I remember how happy he was, how much joy he brought with him into a room, and the way he played with my kids when he visited from out of town, as if they’d been friends forever. I remember the way his passing brought so many people together – people who unquestioningly put aside any issues they may have had with each other so that they could be there to support the family and show that in times of extreme despair there is a community whose arms you can fall into when tragedy buckles your knees. To him I owe my ability to see past the petty sheen of casual interaction through to the deeper beauty of humanity. My grief over his loss brought me there.

Both losses still make me sad. That does not make me angry. I accept the sadness as part of my understanding of myself and others around me. The sadness is completely intertwined with my gratitude for having known them. When it surfaces, I feel the gratitude and joy right there with the sadness and I smile. The emotions coexist, as they should.

But then there’s misery. Misery doesn’t teach you anything and it doesn’t help you grow. Misery is a manifestation of your desire to punish yourself as a way of dealing with grief. When you lose someone, your helplessness can overwhelm you. It makes you want to hurt yourself as punishment, and misery is the device your brain will use to that purpose. When you let your grief bring misery, especially prolonged misery, what you are doing is enabling a self-induced torture to atone for your inability to recover the loss, and/or for your guilt at survival. Because you can neither bring a lost loved one back, nor justify emotionally your survival over theirs, you invoke misery as a way of evening the cosmic scale. But it’s a false need and it blocks your grief. Your loved one does not want you to suffer the misery. They want you to absorb their legacy and use it to be bigger and better than you were.

So accept your grief and let it wash over you, but resist the temptation to fall into misery. Nobody can control whether an emotion surfaces or not, but you can use your rational brain to evaluate the source. Experience the grief, and it will pass into something more. Reject the misery.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Choose Your Memories

Short blog today based on a conversation I had recently.

I was talking to a graduating student about how he is going to choose a university. He has been accepted into his two top choices and he doesn’t know how he will decide which one to attend. One university is more widely recognized but would mean moving far from home, where none of his friends will go, and has a more difficult program. The other university is closer to home and has a slightly easier program. Both offer the same degree. After discussing that this was a nice problem to have, I gave him the advice I always give myself. Choose your memories.

Choose your memories

The simple truth is that all you are is your memories. The present is a fleeting instant, and the future is unknowable, so your whole life experience – and how you view yourself – is based on your memories of the past. In fact, there is an interesting perspective that points out that since it takes a small amount of time to process what your senses are perceiving, our “present” is in fact already past, which is pretty weird to think about. But that aside, too often people think about a choice like the one my student must make in terms of how the choice will affect their future. The truth is it’s much better to think about how it will affect your past. I asked him which memory he wants.

Which memory do you want?

He didn’t know what I meant by that. I said, picture yourself 10 years down the road. Right now I know that whichever university you attend you will finish the program. So 10 years from now, looking back at your decision, which one will you want to be glad you made? Who would you rather be? The dude with the memory of university A or the one with the memory of university B?

Choices are an opportunity to build the memory you want, which ultimately means to build the person you want. In this way they are very exciting. Every choice is your chance to be more awesome. Take control of your character and choose the memories you’ll be glad to have, so that you can be the person you want to be.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

On Excellence

Yesterday I was having a conversation with a few of my graduating students about their post-secondary plans. It came up that many students are making choices about which schools to attend and which courses to take based on how easy they think it will be to get high grades, so that they have a better chance of getting into programs like medical school. This is not something I was surprised to hear, as I’ve heard it many times. There are schools in our province that have the reputation for being “hard” and those that are reputed to be easy. Go to an easy school, get high grades, then coast into med school.

My question has always been “Ok, and then what?”

The answer?

“Then I’ll be a doctor.”

That’s when I always want to know what kind of doctor they plan to be. I don’t mean what area of medicine – I mean what level of competence. Very very few students say they want to be mediocre. They all plan on being excellent. I can’t help but wonder how they intend to make that true. I have questions.

What is the path to true excellence? Is it an easy one? Is it possible to simply do whatever it takes to get there as easily and quickly as possible, and then once there reap the rewards? Many think so, but it’s not true.

The path to excellence does not exist. Excellence is not a place you go. Excellence is a mode of travel.

So while there may be no path to excellence, there is a path of excellence. There is also the easy path, and they are very much not the same journey. If you want to be excellent – if you want to live on that path, then you need to work at it. It’s hard, and there are way more people choosing the easy path, but excellence is the most rewarding path there is. Yet so many people spend so much effort trying to look excellent instead of actually working to be excellent. And this is a source of great stress. When everyone around you appears to be perfect, and you know you are not, it can make you crazy. So students do what they can to appear perfect. Taking easy courses, engaging in academic dishonesty (that’s modern speak for cheating for you old-fashioned folk out there) and essentially making diligence and discipline the last resort.

My students say, “But if I take harder courses I’ll get lower marks and I won’t get into med school.”

I say, ‘Not true! Take hard courses and get high marks! It can be done. There are people doing it. Be one of those people. Be the person everyone is afraid they have to compete with instead of the person taking easy courses to compete.”

If you choose to take the easy path to get where you want to go, then once you think you’ve made it you will discover that there’s no way to leap the chasm to the path of excellence. You will be a walking fraud.

On the other hand, if you dedicate every step to being excellent then when you become a doctor (or whatever else it is that you want to be), you will be an amazing one. Having dedicated yourself to the path of excellence you won’t have to pretend to be excellent, because you will be the paradigm of it.

My message is simple. If you want to look excellent, then be excellent. Maintaining a shell of excellence draped over a mediocre core will erode your spirit. Be bulletproof. Don’t look excellent. Be excellent. It’s way less stressful.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

The Death of the Mistake

(Disclaimer: NOT ALL PARENTS are guilty of what I describe in this blog, so please don’t take it personally. But many are. Far too many.)

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I imagine you have too. Some of mine are pretty indelible for me.

Like the time my friend and I were playing with fire (literally) and almost burned down a hotel. We were scared to death and actually grateful we got caught.

Like the time I decided I could get through that intersection before the car coming from the left got there. Result? One totaled car that wasn’t even mine. It was my girlfriend’s car.

Like the time I thought I could get away without studying for my final exam in STAT 331 and still scrape a credit in the course. I earned a 42. I asked the prof to remark the exam which he did. The mark went down.

I didn’t like any of these or the countless others when they happened. Actually they felt pretty miserable. Yet each one has had an impact on decisions I made later in life and each one of those failures thus resulted in bigger successes. This is not a revolutionary concept. The phrase “we learn from our mistakes” is not new. But have you ever considered exactly how true it is? We aren’t born with an abundance of knowledge. In fact we are born with almost none. We know how to do things like breathe and cry and fill diapers, but we can’t even control those actions much. At first, all the knowledge we accrue comes from our innate curiosity and willingness to take risks. What’s funny is that as babies we don’t even know we are risking anything. We’re just really curious. Watch all the stuff a baby is willing to put in his mouth. You’ll know exactly what I mean. So babies try things and sometimes the result is pleasant or satisfying and other times its not. Each experience whether success or failure goes into the data bank and both guides subsequent experiments and imbues us with confidence regarding our ability to reproduce successes. In this way it is completely correct to categorize both “success” and “failure” as positive outcomes. And yet we have attached so much negativity to the word failure that it has become a thing to be reviled and feared … avoided at all costs. Which is a true tragedy, because success in the absence of failure is yin without yang.

As time passes the culture we grow up in imposes a formalized education, mainly because there is value placed on certain nuggets of knowledge. This happens in the form of school. And that’s where I come in.

Sort of. I teach high school so I guess I come in about 10 years later. After 10 years of a system which has sadly killed the mistake. Kids are no longer encouraged or allowed to experiment. They have to “get it right” the first time. Many parents spend insane amounts of energy making sure their children never experience failure, defeat or mistakes. A friend of mine calls this phenomenon “the snowplow parenting” model. The parents walk ahead of the child, plowing all obstacles out of the way, frantically making sure that no failure is ever experienced. As the child grows and the potential obstacles increase, parents run themselves ragged continuing to pave a smooth way. The effect this has on the kids is incredibly frightening. The child grows up not ever really experiencing a failure, but watching parents become more and more neurotic making sure this “failure monster” never has a chance to get near their kid. It’s a doubly-bad edged sword. First, no failure is ever experienced so there is no chance for the best kind of learning and second, the children pick up on this deep fear of failure and when they find themselves faced with the potential for a mistake they freeze in terror at the possibility. In short, they are simply not equipped to deal with anything but a smooth road, and lack the understanding and confidence that comes from having failed.

So what I see in my math class is kids who are petrified of assessment. I have seen kids cry when they earn a mark in the 90’s on a test. Worse, I’ve seen kids with marks in the 90’s crying when they come in to write a test because of how afraid they are that they might make a mistake. And I’ve had to defend marks to parents who insist to me not that their child earned a higher mark, but that their child needs the higher mark. In grade 9. A grade that no university or college even remotely cares about. A grade for which no scholarships are awarded. Yet the child needs the higher mark. Lest they experience failure.

This phenomenon may actually be the single biggest threat to our culture. Thanks to Snowplow Parents we are raising a generation of kids who have never had a chance to experiment and fail. Never a chance to pursue curiosity, which is the spark for innovation. So what we get is anxiety-ridden underperformers with huge self-esteem issues, fostered by parents who have made it clear that the child is not capable of fending for themselves and thus needs the parents’ involvement every step of the way.

Parents, please. Take a step back. Watch them do it themselves. Watch them fail and celebrate the failure. Mistakes are critical for evolution. Let’s bring them back. Let’s start the Mistake Revival.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Cell Phones and Independence

The other day my wife and I were doing some grocery shopping when her phone rang.

Side note: Before I continue with my post, I had to stop and read that first sentence over again. Read it again yourself. Now if you’re old enough, imagine it was 1988 and read it again. In 1988 language that sentence is pretty much a total non-sequitur. Today it is perfectly sensible. Funny how time-dependent the reasonableness of some assertions are.

Ok. So I was talking about my wife’s phone. She picked it up and saw that the call was coming from home. Conclusion – it’s one of the kids. She answered it of course. You don’t ignore calls from your kids who are home alone. Right? It was our 11-year old daughter on the phone. She was calling because our 15-year old son was on his computer Skyping (a verb that didn’t exist in 1988) with a friend and was unwilling to help her get something down from a tall shelf. He’s 6 feet tall, she’s 5’4 or so. In our house things on tall shelves are retrieved using my son or myself (I’m 5’11). In her mind, he was failing to uphold a sacred duty and as such, she was unable to continue with whatever plan she had that required the thing on the tall shelf. Crisis.

While my wife was dealing with the situation, I pulled out my phone to check Facebook. Naturally. I mean, you don’t just check Facebook while you’re on a grocery date with your wife but if she’s otherwise occupied go ahead, right? Of course. Everyone knows this. It’s smartphone etiquette 101 (try that one in 1988). So I pull out my phone and lo and behold, 2 missed calls from home. Guess I didn’t feel it vibrating over the hum of the freezer section while I was selecting a bag of frozen perogies (ok, that one works in 1988, but back up to 1903! Hmmm …). After my wife hung up, she noted 2 missed calls from home on her phone as well.

In case you’re wondering, the solution she offered was for my daughter to climb up on the counter and get the thing on the tall shelf, which is precisely what happened and everyone survived.

So my first instinct was to be mildly irritated that my daughter would need to bother us in the middle of a romantic stroll through the produce section with this issue. There was a simple solution and there’s really no reason why she should not have just done it without 5 phone calls. I had a plan to go home and have a chat with her about independence. She’s 11 and old enough to know better. I was laying the blame for this admittedly minor situation completely at my daughter’s feet. Then I realized what you may realize already. It’s not her fault. It’s ours. But maybe not in the way that you would think.

See, my kids have grown up with cell phones as a thing. When my wife and I go out we are always reachable. Now if we were home and some similar crisis were to arise, one of us would resolve it as parents tend to do. We resolve a million little things every day without really thinking about it: “I can’t find my shirt”, “There’s a spider on the wall in the bathroom”, “The dog threw up on the carpet”, … the list goes on. It’s a natural knee-jerk reaction for a kid to notify/defer to a parent with these things. Then at some point we either realize the kid is old enough to handle it on their own and let them know, or preferably the kid realizes that on their own and we never even find out the crisis arose and was subsequently averted.

And you know what occurred to me? That as I was growing up, I most often realized it on my own. And you know what kind of situations made me realize it? Situations when there was no adult around. Situations that needed to be dealt with and my only option was to deal with them on my own. I didn’t always deal with them the same way my parents might have, and I didn’t always deal with them very well the first time around, but deal with them I did. Because if my parents were out of reach I had no other choice.

And that’s it right there. With cell phones we are a generation of parents that are never out of reach. Like never. So that same instinctive reaction to turn to a parent for help is easily satisfied even when the parent is not present. And as parents we don’t always think about it. It takes a second to say “climb up and get it yourself”. It seems like no crime has occurred. But it has. The child has been robbed of the opportunity to solve a problem independently. And those opportunities are critical. Critical.

I have lots of stories but I’ll tell you only one more. It happened a year ago during a parent-teacher interview. At the time the student was in the tenth grade. 15 years old. She was going downtown to meet someone to job shadow for the day since there was no school for her. During the interview with her parents she called twice. They took the call of course. How do you not take a call from your 15-year old daughter when you know she’s downtown alone? So what did she want? Well both times she wasn’t sure which direction to go. The first time was when she got off the subway and didn’t know which street exit to take. The second was when she got to the street and didn’t know which direction she wanted to go so she didn’t know which bus to wait for. She’s a very bright girl. I’ve taught her for two years in a row now. She could have figured it out. What’s more, if her dad had not answered the phone she would have figured it out. Because her only other choice would be to curl up in a fetal position on the subway platform and wait for doom. And I have to tell you, she would not have made that choice. The smart money is on her asking someone in the subway. Like someone who works there. Imagine such a thing.

So what am I saying? Throw away the cell phone? Stop taking calls from the kids? Buy a step-stool?

Actually, none of those things. Cell phones are good for a lot of things (and step-stools around my house just end up being something for me to bark my shin on). But like any tool they can be used for evil too. So here’s my proposition, and we’ve already told our kids about it. I don’t expect them (especially my daughter) to know right away which things they need to consult us on and which they don’t. Some are obvious. If a Mongolian horde is descending on the house then yeah, give us a call. If there’s no toilet paper in the bathroom then maybe that’s one they can field on their own. Somewhere between running to the laundry room (where we store the big Costco package of toilet paper) with your pants around your ankles and positioning soldiers on the parapets with cauldrons of hot oil lies a range of solutions, some of which need a consult and most of which do not. So I’ve told them to think before they call. If they’re not sure, call. But if my wife or I know they can handle it on their own our only response will be “Handle it on your own. Love you. See you later. The oil is under the sink.”

In this way I hope to speed up the independence-gaining process which really seems to have been delayed by years in the younger generations.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Parenting From the Bow

I have two kids, and it is definitely true that along with my wife, there is nothing in this world more important to me than them. At the time of writing, my son is 15 and my daughter is 11. So between my wife and I we have a total of 26 child-years of parenting experience (plus 4 dog-years and 9 budgie-years). This hardly qualifies me as an authority on the subject, but I do think about the responsibilities of parenthood in general and fatherhood specifically quite often, and I thought I’d put some of my thoughts into pixels today. I will borrow a little from the speech I made at my son’s Bar Mitzvah, and I will also use some quotes from an early twentieth-century philosopher named Kahlil Gibran as the springboard for my take on things. As it turns out, Gibran and I agree on very many things when it comes to kids.

Children are the mirror to your soul.
~ Kahlil Gibran

That sentiment is the simplest way I can express what my children mean to me. When I look in a mirror, I see my face. When I look at my children, I see my soul.

When my wife Marla and I discovered we were going to have our first child, we started doing what I imagine just about every couple does at that time. We started planning how we were going to make our child into the most perfect human the world has seen. We were going to make sure he was the smartest, most charismatic, most athletic, and most well-rounded person imaginable. We were going to mold him into a superstar. We read all the books, watched all the videos, and attended all the seminars. We bought all the best stuff. We were ready.

Then he was born. And then we learned how it really works.

The truth is, you don’t get to tell your children who they are going to be. That’s not at all what raising a child is. It turns out that what raising a child is really about is paying attention as they tell you who they already are. And if you’re wise, and lucky, you find out that who they are is the exact kind of person you love to know, and to be around. And that’s exactly who my children are. They are the best parts of myself, and of Marla, and a good dose of all those who came before us in the ancestral tree. They are the soul of all of us.

Before our son was born, Marla and I thought we could make him into the perfect person, but we were wrong. He’s not the perfect person. He’s better than that. He is the perfect him. And our daughter, who could not be more different than our son? You guessed it — she is the perfect her.

As a teacher I am fortunate to work with kids all the time. I spend a large part of my days with other people’s children, and it is absolutely the best part of my job. When people find out I teach high school they always ask me what I teach, and my response is always “kids”. They laugh as though it’s a joke but it’s really not. Because while I love math, and that is my subject area, teaching any subject in high school is really about helping kids grow into adults. So I really pay attention to my students, because I find I have so much to learn from them about who they are, and then I in turn can help them grow into the best version of themselves possible.

Of course I know that it is their parents who are primarily responsible for that, and a lot of what I have learned about parenting comes from looking at my students and then looking at their parents. And I can tell you this with 100% certainty: The students I have taught with the highest self-esteem and who are the most comfortable with who they are are the ones whose parents allow them to be who they are. Conversely the ones with the most issues regarding self-worth and academic performance are the ones whose parents are working extremely hard to turn them into something they are not. Imagine growing up in an environment where your most loved and trusted people — your parents — are constantly working to steer you away from who you are and what you want. As a math teacher, I see it most commonly in kids who are being forced to stay in the maths and sciences because their parents have decided that there is no future in the arts. However it goes beyond that. There are parents who seem determined to shape their kids into something different than what they are. It’s sad. As parents we need to see our children the way sculptors see their sculptures — as something that already exists in the rough, and our job is to help reveal that magic to the world.

Here’s another Gibran quote that I love:

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Even if you are not religious the quote is wise. What Gibran is saying is that once a child is born, they are their own person. Children do not belong to anyone but themselves, and the future is theirs to make. Parents are the stable bow. We are the home base and the place our children come from, but the journey they are on, where they go in life, belongs entirely to them. We can guide and encourage, but we can not, nor should we, change the flight of the arrow once it is loosed from the bow.

When it comes to my children, Gibran was right. I don’t seek to make them like me. I strive to be like them.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

My Champagne Anniversary

So today is my 19th anniversary. December 19th. I never knew this was called the Champagne Anniversary but my wife told me the other day. Pretty cool. I’ve been married to my best friend for 19 years and we’ve been together for 26. I am so blessed I can’t even begin to express it. But I thought in honour of my wife and our anniversary I’d do a blog about marriage. Here it is.

A lot of people these days ask me how we’ve stayed married for so long. I usually tell them they should ask someone who’s been married for 40-50 years, since we are just babies in the marriage department really, but the other day someone asked and I took the question seriously. I think it boils down to three things really, Compatibility, Commitment and Communication.

(Side note: I actually just this moment thought of a way to say it using three things that start with the same letter — gosh darn I’m clever. Of course now I’ll Google it and find out it’s the oldest thing ever and feel suitably humbled again. Then again, maybe I won’t Google it just yet, and live under the impression I’m all that for a just a little while longer …)

So where were we? Oh yeah, “The Three C’s of Success” … wait … success actually only has to c’s … ah crap. This needs work … oh but wait, I was talking about my marriage. Allow me to continue then.

My wife Marla and I met in high school. She was my first real girlfriend and so she is the only girlfriend I’ve ever had. I therefore don’t have a ton of experience with women or with relationships. For this reason I generally feel unqualified to give relationship advice or judge the relationships of others, and that’s probably why I usually have a hard time talking about what makes a relationship or marriage successful. But then again, maybe that makes me uniquely qualified. I’ll let you be the judge.

First, let me tell you about why I fell in love with Marla. It’s simple. She saved me. I was an awkward, quiet, socially invisible teen. Marla didn’t care. She saw something in me and she wanted to be my friend. We spent hours and days talking about anything and everything, getting to know each other and she was never put off by my nerdy awkwardness. To this day I am not entirely sure why she was interested in me or why she still is, but I am eternally grateful. We learned through that early friendship that we are compatible (check it out – that’s the first “C”!) and the friendship grew into love. I was 17 and she was 16.

Laugh now, because what couple that age can have any clue about compatibility? And yet we were never presented with any reason to think we weren’t right for each other. It never occurred to either of us that there might be something better out there, or that we needed to play the field, even though I will say many of my friends believed their adolescence and early twenties were designed for nothing else, and never entered into any relationship believing it would last. I never understood that. What’s the point of starting a relationship you are convinced will end? Never got it, never will. So Marla and I were always committed to our relationship (the second “C” — are you keeping count?). Another thing that Marla taught me was that things need to be discussed. I grew up keeping quiet about feelings. I learned to deal with my emotions internally, and developed very strong rationalization skills. I wouldn’t say I swallowed my feelings, just that I always found ways to resolve issues by myself without really talking too much about it. Marla taught me to talk. It was like she opened a floodgate. I couldn’t believe there would be someone interested and caring enough to listen and absorb and respond. We talked about everything, and still do. Communication. The third “C”.

But so far all I’ve talked about is the beginning of our relationship, and that was 26 years ago. A lot has happened since then (2 kids and a mortgage to name a couple) and we are still together. How is that? Well … it’s the three “C”‘s. We never forget them.

Compatibility. We are immensely compatible. It doesn’t mean we like all the same things, or have similar personalities. In fact we are very different. But we fill the spaces for each other. I’m a big picture thinker – she’s a detail specialist. I am introverted – she loves to socialize at parties. When I go to the fridge to get milk for my cereal, I open the door and then forget why I’m standing there – she remembers every single person’s birthday. I love to make speeches in front of a large group – she hates presenting to more than one person at a time. The list goes on. At our core though, we share the same values about family, friendship and finances (Hey! The three “F”‘s … and don’t you go telling me there’s a fourth “F” … this is a family blog). Some people believe that there is one special person out there for you. Marla and I have never thought so. For me, the mathematics just don’t pan out. If there is only one right person out there, what are the chances you would meet them? What if the right person for you is a Nepalese goat herder? Nah. What I DO believe is that you have to be the right person. Find someone you are compatible with, someone you fall in love with, and then make yourself right — not by changing who you are but by being committed to the relationship. And there it is, the second “C”.

Commitment. Be committed to the relationship. There will be hard times. Some extremely so. Marla and I have had some fights let me tell you. But never … never during any one of those fights, has either of us considered that the fight wouldn’t end. We always know that we will work it out. It’s very hard sometimes to get there, and I won’t lie and say we always make up before the day is done, but I will say that we always make up. We know that we will even when the fight is at its worst. We are committed. And we know that even though it’s not always the best, as long as we are arguing we are communicating. See how I did that? The third “C”, and maybe the most important one.

Communication. Communicate always. I have learned that when one of us is feeling that there is something to keep to ourselves then that is probably the most important thing to talk about. Sometimes the reason you don’t want to bring something up is because you know there will be huge backlash. But I feel as though there is already backlash when you swallow what you want to say, because resentment builds. And then what happens is your partner senses the resentment but can’t pinpoint the cause, and the resentment is returned in a spiral of unproductive silence. So we always talk, even when it seems hard, and even when we know it will lead to an argument, because the argument can be resolved but only when both sides know there is an issue. Now of course communicating problems is not the only kind of communication, nor is it the most common. Not by a long shot. Marla and I spend a lot of time just talking. She tells me about her day and I tell her about mine. We listen actively — not just waiting until the other finishes talking so you can have a turn but respecting them by listening to what they are saying and digesting it. At any given moment Marla is the person I most want to be around, and she feels the same way. So we spend a lot of time just being together, enjoying each other’s company. And we communicate our love too. I tell her at least 70 times a day (OK, maybe less than 70 … but not much!) and so does she. I know some people feel they don’t have to say it because they show it, but it’s not true. You have to say it and show it. Say it when it occurs to you. I often just look at her, get happy because she exists, and then tell her that just happened. Communication. It’s the key “C”.

So that’s it. A blog dedicated to my wife, the love of my life, on our 19th anniversary. She is my best friend, she is my love, and she is my partner. I love her.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Sometimes, the Door Is Down the Hall

Today my blog is about one of the most important things I’ve learned as a teacher, and specifically as a teacher of math. I’m going to start with a story about a kid I tutored for a while, many years ago.

When I was younger and just starting to realize I had a passion for math and for teaching, I firmly believed that anyone could understand math and be good at it. Some people took to it more readily than others, but I was certain that given enough time and effort, every single person could excel.

Then I met Lief (not his real name).

Lief came to me when he was in grade 6, and our first tutoring session was about math questions involving time. The question we worked on was something like “Harry leaves home at 12:05 pm and arrives at his destination at 1:30 pm the same day. How long did the trip take?”. Lief was really struggling with the question, but I knew that I could explain it in such a way that he would not only be able to determine the correct answer he would fully understand how we did it and be able to answer many more similar questions. As my students would say, I have mad skillz when it comes to explaining math.

Boy was I wrong. I spent an hour with Lief and I used all my powers of teaching and explaining to no avail. Strewn about us were diagrams, pictures of clocks, number lines, a watch and even part of a model Volkswagen Beetle (don’t ask me why, I don’t remember). Lief just could not understand what the question was asking and why the answer was 1 hour 25 minutes (see how I threw that in there so you’d know if you got it right? 😉 ). I learned a valuable lesson that day.

Some people just aren’t wired for math. And that’s totally OK of course. Contrary to popular opinion, math is not a critical life skill. Aside from people like me I can’t think of a single person that needs to be able to complete the square of a quadratic function given in standard form in order to determine the coordinates of the vertex of the parabola. Proof? You most likely have no idea what in the world I was talking about there and I bet you do just fine. I know at least that you own some sort of electronic device capable of connecting you to the internet. That says something.

So why is this blog titled “Sometimes, the Door Is Down the Hall”? What am I talking about, you ask? Well you wouldn’t be the first to ask that. Allow me to explain.

Where I live in Ontario, Canada, students attend high school for four years — grades 9 through 12. During that time, in order to be awarded their high school diploma, they must successfully earn three credits in math. For most students, that means a grade 9, grade 10 and grade 11 credit, though some do grade 9, grade 10 and grade 12. It means that math is optional in grade 12, if all you want is a high school diploma. If you want a post-secondary education however, like college or university, you will most often need to take math in all four years of high school, and also be sure to choose the right math courses for your intended post-secondary program.

At each grade, there are choices of which math course to take. There are different paths and they don’t all lead to the same place. For example, a student who intends to study math or science at university will take what’s called “Academic” math in grades 9 and 10, then “University prep” math in grades 11 and 12. Conversely a student who intends to go to college to learn a trade will likely take “Applied” math in grades 9 and 10, then “College prep” math in grade 11 and maybe also in grade 12, depending on the requirements of the college program. Some students take what’s called “Essentials” math in grades 9 and 10, then “Workplace” math in either grade 11 or grade 12. These students are either not planning to attend a post-secondary institution or else are planning to go into a field that has nothing at all to do with math.

Phew! So that was kind of boring to read, right? But if you read it you may have noticed the glaring flaw in the system. A student must decide on a career path in grade 9. When they are 14 years old. Actually they have to pick their grade 9 courses when they are still in grade 8, so they and their parents have to make the call when the student is 13 years old. Who the heck knows what they want to do with their lives at the age of 13? When I was 13 I wanted to look at girls, play video games, eat steak as an afternoon snack and look at girls. And then look at girls. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. As a matter of fact now, at 43, I still don’t know what I want to do with my life (except for the looking at women part — I still do that and am lucky to have a wife that is exceptionally fun to look at). But I do know that I am happy with what I’m doing right now. Maybe that will change, maybe it won’t. But the key to my happiness is that I am doing something I am good at and that in turn makes me good at it. Read that last sentence a few times. It seems confusing but it isn’t. Try doing something you suck at for a long time. Keep telling yourself that you’ll get better if that makes it seem worthwhile. But I think you’ll find out that when you’re not good at something you are miserable doing it and then you are not good at it.

So how does this manifest in high school? Well it may seem obvious that since very few 13 year old kids have any clear idea about what they want to do when they finish high school — let alone as a career — that they choose the option that keeps all the doors open. In Ontario, that means that they will usually choose grade 9 academic math, because if they don’t they are closing the door to a post-secondary program that requires math. They do it again in grade 10, 11 and even in grade 12. I can not begin to count the number of students I have taught who have struggled mightily in math who then sign up for the hardest math course the following year because they don’t want to close doors. I’ll illustrate with an example. Good ol’ Hanz.

You might remember Hanz from “Steer With the Skid”. Hanz is a hard-working kid who does not have a lot of natural ability in math. By not a lot I mean he’s terrible at it. And please, before you object and say nobody who works hard can be terrible at something, look around. Some people are wired to be awesome at certain things and terrible at others. Some kids are born athletes, some are born artists, some are born mathematicians and some are born poets. You can improve your abilities in almost anything but that doesn’t mean you can excel in almost anything. Personally, as hard as I might have trained, I would never have been an Olympic sprinter. My legs are too short and I don’t have the reflexes. I’ve made peace with it.

So back to Hanz. Hanz doesn’t want to close doors, so he takes Calculus in grade 12. Currently in Ontario the course is actually called Calculus and Vectors. It’s the two hardest math topics in high school grouped together in one spectacular ride. Hanz has been miserable in math class ever since grade 9. He works hard, and puts in the time, but the most he can muster are grades in the 60’s, and it eats him up. His hard work is constantly rewarded with what he considers to be mediocre grades. He’s miserable because he’s convinced that he can’t be successful in life unless he’s successful in math and his definition of successful in math is marks in the 90’s, something he’s never been able to do. In trying so hard to keep a door open, Hanz has missed the fact that for him, there is no door marked “math”. He can’t see that if a program requires Calculus and he takes it and earns a 51% he won’t get in anyway. It’s a fruitless exercise. Yet every time I talk about this with Hanz or his dad Franz, they both insist that Hanz has to stay in Calculus so that he can keep his doors open. That’s when I shake my head and say “Sometimes, there is no door. Walk down the hall.”

See, if Hanz could recognize that there is no “math” door for him, he would be compelled to walk down the hall and see what other doors there are. If Hanz would spend more time in situations where he has natural strength, he’d know what those doors are and what lies beyond them, and he’d be so much happier. Unfortunately it’s extremely difficult to convince Hanz of this, and he spends all his energy working at something he was not wired for, spiraling further and further into self-loathing and often depression. I’ve seen it many times. I’m not exaggerating.

Now please, before you go off wondering how I can call myself a math teacher and be so willing to write kids off, understand that’s not what I am saying. I teach all levels of math. I am just as happy teaching someone like Hanz how to plan a family budget and the evils of credit card interest as I am teaching him how to take the derivative of a sinusoidal function that has been composed with the square of a logarithmic function in order to determine the instantaneous rate of change on the curve at the place where it intersects with a given exponential function. I work just as hard either way, and my reward is always Hanz’s success. It just pains me to see kids like Hanz convinced that they will end up “homeless under a bridge” (this is a saying my students have when they decide they are going nowhere in life) if they can’t do the derivative question. Honestly though, how many people can? And why on earth would most people need to? The derivative question is an exercise in abstract thought that is beautiful in its way, and critical for people going into a field where they have to solve high level math or science problems all the time, but it’s not the definition of intelligence or success.

Students like Hanz often ask me what courses they should choose when they are picking for the following year. I always say the same thing.

Me: “What are you good at?”

Student: “Well I’m good at <insert non-math or science discipline here> but that doesn’t get you anywhere so I need to take <insert completely inappropriate math or science course here>.”

Me: “Why would you take something that makes you so miserable?”

Student: “Because I need it to be successful. I need to keep my doors open.”

At that point I generally ask them how they intend to become successful in a field that requires them to be good at something that makes them miserable. They really never have an answer for that. Except for the door thing. My advice then is for them to take courses they enjoy, and that they excel in. Happy people who excel at what they do are always successful. Find one and ask them. You’ll see what I mean.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Steer With the Skid

When you learn to drive in Canada, one of the most important lessons is what to do when your car enters into a skid. It’s not a question of “if” really. In Canada, it’s definitely “when”. Usually it will happen in your first winter of driving, so you’d better be prepared. The technique is to steer with the skid. It means that you have to fight your natural urge to steer in the direction you’d like for your car to go, and instead actually aim your wheels right at that concrete median your car has suddenly decided to crash into. Then, once you and your car agree on the direction you want to go, you gently steer the car away from disaster. It works, and in fact it’s the only way to handle the situation, except perhaps throwing open your car door and launching yourself out onto the pavement.

The physics behind why it works are fairly straightforward. When you enter into a skid your car has momentum which is carrying it in a direction that is usually not conducive to healthy living, and there’s nothing you can do about it because the friction between your wheels and the road has suddenly been reduced significantly by ice, water, gravel or some other non frictiony substance. This means that gross corrections where your wheels are pointed at an extreme angle to the skid won’t work, because the momentum of the car is overcoming the minimal friction at the wheels. So by pointing the wheels in the direction of the skid you force the momentum to cooperate with your goal of non-disaster, and then make relative small corrections which work because the little bit of friction you do still have is only slightly off from the massive momentum. Baby steps of correction eventually get you out of trouble. And it happens pretty quickly, as anyone who has ever done it can attest to. When you don’t understand the physics, it almost seems like magic.

The reason it has to be taught though, is because it’s so counter-intuitive. Aiming in the wrong direction so that you can go the right way feels like slowing down so that you can speed up. As it turns out, this driving lesson is actually an incredibly important life lesson as well. It shows up in so many ways. I’ll illustrate with a few examples of skids.

Skid 1: The Determined Daughter

Imagine this scenario. It’s 5 minutes before you have to leave the house to walk your daughter to school, and she is insisting that she does not want to wear a jacket. The problem though, is that you happen to know it’s 3° Celsius outside. If your daughter is anything like mine and she has her heart set on not wearing a jacket then you have 5 minutes to fight and win World War III. Good luck. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide skid. Your car is careening into two kinds of barriers. Frostbitten Child and Late Slip. Solution? Steer with the skid. Instead of fighting the momentum, agree that she does not need a jacket, but bring it with you and leave. If you really want to be fancy, don’t wear yours either. You carry hers and she can carry yours. Or you carry them both — it’s not really important. Once again if your daughter is anything like mine she will have a true aversion to discomfort, which is something she’ll start to feel within about 20 steps. She’ll ask for the jacket. If you didn’t wear yours, you can ask her for yours before she asks for hers. That will make it okay for her to ask for her own and still save face. Skid averted. No frostbite and no late slip.

Skid 2: The Quadratic Quandary

Here’s another scenario that I often encounter at school. Let’s say I’m helping a student solve a quadratic equation (apologies for this if you don’t know what that is — feel free to skip this part). Take this one for example:

x² − 5x − 14 = 0

If you’re a math teacher you know that a goodly portion of students unused to solving quadratics are going to try and isolate the variable the nice old fashioned way. You also know that it won’t work – totally destined to fail. You might be tempted to intervene before they try, and suggest a different method, but if you do then in the back of their mind they’ll always be wondering why not just isolate.

The best strategy pedagogically is to let the student try it. Agree that isolating the variable is a good plan. Help them with the operations – steer with the skid. As you work with them to isolate the variable generally this will happen:

x² − 5x = 14

At which point you can have a very valuable discussion about why we are stuck. The student may try some fancy footwork here, but thanks to you being on their side, you can navigate it with them and they’ll see that there’s nowhere to go. Then you can gently steer them toward other options. What do we know we can do with quadratic expressions? Factor them. So what? Let’s find out. I won’t get into the actual solution here, because it’s not important right now and in any case if you were following until now I’m fairly confident you can finish up. But for those who need to know, the solution is x = 7 or x = −2.

Skid 3: The Perturbed Parent

Once more this scenario is one I encounter as a teacher, but in fact it generalizes to any customer service industry. I actually really learned this well in my previous life as a software engineer when I would spend quite a bit of time on the phone with our users who would call when they were struggling with our software. Readers who are teachers will understand this situation pretty well. It goes like this:

Hanz is a student in your class who has written a math test for you and earned a fairly low grade – say, 54%. Hanz has plans to go to university (or college if you’re American – here in Canada college doesn’t mean quite what it does in the States) to become a doctor. Hanz needs a high school average of 91% to get into medical school. Thus the 54% on your test is a somewhat sub-optimal result. The next day you get a call from Hanz’s father, Franz. Franz opens the conversation by informing you that he is a lawyer, and that he has a real issue with the mark you gave Hanz on the test. Franz tells you that Hanz is extremely gifted in math and has always earned grades in the 90’s until your class. Hanz worked extremely hard preparing for the test and his tutor guaranteed that he was ready to ace it. Franz concludes that the whole mess is therefore your fault, because you are an unfair marker, a bad teacher, a horrible human being and quite possibly a chronic hater of children. Franz insists that you raise Hanz’s mark so that it is consistent with Hanz’s abilities and also consistent with his goal to become a neurosurgeon.

At this point it is incredibly tempting to get defensive, or be offensive. After all, Attorney Franz has attacked your professionalism (unfair marker, bad teacher) and your motivation for being a teacher (child-hater). Furthermore, if you know Hanz you know that “gifted” and “math” are not two words that you would put together in a sentence describing him, unless you could liberally sprinkle said sentence with the words “extremely” and “not”. However there is nothing to be gained by this response. All it will do is exacerbate the situation.

Instead, steer with the skid.

First, tell Franz that you understand why he’s upset. In fact you are upset by the grade as well – who wouldn’t be? Ask him about the hard work Hanz put in to prepare. Commiserate with Franz about the difficulties of watching young people work so hard and then not have it pay off. I am not being facetious here, and neither should you be in a situation like this. Put yourself in Franz’s shoes. Hanz worked hard, and hard work is supposed to equate with success. So why didn’t it? You and Franz can discuss this question. You can provide Franz with some questions to ask the tutor about the work he does with Hanz. You can recommend that Hanz come and see you to go over the test to see where the disconnect was. After all, since Hanz is so talented in math, there must have been a disconnect. When Franz sees that you have no intention of fighting him, his momentum joins yours and you can then steer him in the direction he needs to go, which is ultimately to realize that you did not “give” Hanz his mark – Hanz earned it. And getting to the bottom of why he earned a mark as low as he did is what you both want so that you can both help Hanz. This will ultimately help Franz see that it is Hanz who was at fault, and will also eliminate the need to address some of the more insulting parts of Franz’s opening tirade. It is entirely possible that during the conversation Franz will admit that the “marks in the 90’s” comment was not completely true, and referred to 2 quizzes Hanz wrote when he was in the 3rd grade. By the end of the conversation, Franz will know that you are on his and Hanz’s side, and that the energy of all three people is channeled in the same direction – not the direction of the skid anymore!

There are countless other scenarios I can come up with, all of which I have experienced personally (no, I never taught anyone named Hanz …), but the theme is always the same. A situation arises and the temptation is to fight against it, but fighting only escalates the problem. The solution is counter-instinctive and often requires strong self-control but pays huge dividends. Leverage the momentum of the skid for a quick and successful course correction.

Works in cars, works in life. Steer with the skid.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Dare To Be Exceptional

I’m kind of a strange guy, in that most of my favourite movie quotes come from animated films or sci-fi, or both. Yoda, Master Oogway, Jean-Luc Picard, Optimus Prime … all have wisdom to share. But today’s blog is about one of my very favourites, from Mr. Incredible himself, when he found out his son was going to be part of a graduation ceremony at the end of grade 4.

“It is not a graduation. He will be moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade. It’s psychotic! They keep inventing new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but when someone is genuinely exceptional…”
–Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible

How sadly appropriate in today’s society. Our children are bedecked with meaningless medals, they stare at shelves lined with trophies for participation, and they are celebrated in ceremonies commemorating inevitability. Society has decided that recognition of excellence must not come at the expense of the runners-up. So everyone wins. Every moment is a photo opportunity. When my son finished Kindergarten the photographer at the school put him in a cap and gown and handed him a fake diploma for the portrait! How proud we were meant to be, I wonder, that through hard work and dedication he had earned his Kindergarten diploma? I mean truly, how many parents can say their kids have managed that milestone?

We manufacture their success and then we celebrate it. Then we lament the fact that this new generation comes off as underachieving, entitled, and uninspired.

Thankfully we are wrong about them. But sadly the reason young people often come off this way is because we give them little choice. How is a child who is constantly rewarded in the wake of mediocre performance to learn the benefit of striving for excellence? What will inspire them if, having put forth little to no effort, they are lauded as champions? Because that is what we do. And for those children who truly shine, what is their reward, when all the others are painted with the same glorious brush? How long should we expect those kids to put in all their effort when they watch their peers work half as hard, accomplish half as much, and get praised twice as often? Because the other sad truth is that for fear of hurting those who under-perform, we under-reward those who excel. Are we doing anybody any favours with this?

Of course, it’s not always like this. Happily younger generations still have the human condition, and still want to truly excel. They are inspiring, they don’t all think life is a free ride, and many of them achieve their potential. And I know many teachers – myself included – who still push for excellence and reward it when we see it, and who do not praise mediocrity or manufacture success. That may sound harsh, but it is not. Kids know when they have put forth their best effort. They know when they have broken past old boundaries. In short, they know the difference between success and failure. And when they feel that nothing special has occurred, but the world around them still celebrates their “achievement”, it is confusing for them and makes them feel like a fraud. In other words, in trying to build self-esteem by making sure everyone gets a trophy, we really reduce it significantly. By recognizing true excellence, we foster it. We dare kids to be exceptional.

There is another quote I love, this time from a real-life person. It’s actually often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela, because he quoted it in a speech, but the original author of the quote is Marianne Williamson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
–Marianne Williamson

I have read and reread this quote to many of my students, and often just to myself. If you’ve never heard it or read it, spend some time reading it over a few times right now. If you have read it or heard it before, read it again now. Think about what she’s saying. I think about it all the time. Every time I am tempted to, say, dumb down a sentence because I think maybe the audience won’t understand it. Or every time I am singing in public and catch myself deliberately about to use my “I don’t really think I’m a singer” voice so people won’t think I’m showing off. Every time a student asks me about how I did in math when I was in high school, and I almost lie because I don’t want them to feel bad about the mark they are getting. Every time these things come up, I remember that I should dare to be exceptional, so that others will too. So I use my full vocabulary and let my students use context to figure out what I mean, I sing with intent every time, and I tell them that I was very good at math and that I had an average of 97% in my last year of high school, which was only as low as that because my English mark brought it down.

So my advice is this:

Parents – love your kids but please don’t confuse love with empty praise. Challenge them to be better and praise/reward them for true excellence. Don’t be afraid for them to try something and fail, because failure feeds desire.
Teachers – let’s continue to raise our expectations and celebrate when the students achieve at these higher levels, rather than lower them (as current culture would have us do) so that everyone can “succeed”. Let’s breed true success.
All of us – don’t shrink from your own brilliance. Go all out every time, and watch how everyone around you starts to do the same thing. We can be so impressive when we want to.

Let’s want to.

Thanks for reading,

Rich