self-esteem – Experience Has Made Me Rich

I’m Not Committing to Tomorrow. I Just Know He Won’t Drive Today.

I was a skinny kid. That’s my earliest memory. My parents regularly emphasized it. It makes sense, if I project back. They both struggled chronically with being overweight, so my skinniness would be more than incidental. It also makes sense that I was skinny, because I was heavily asthmatic and that made me what the classical authors would call “sickly.” I was in and out of the hospital due to severe asthma attacks. Bottom line, as current lexicon would convey it, I identified as skinny.

My parents were also from a generation of Eastern European Jews who remembered the Holocaust, and more broadly, World War II. My mother was born in Canada in 1940, and my father was born in Romania in 1938. Both had been lucky enough not to have faced the war directly, but nobody of that generation escaped the impact of it. That, and just the Eastern European mentality in general, translated into ideas surrounding food. You do not waste food. If your children are eating, it’s a blessing. If they are eating a lot, it’s wonderful.

When you’re the child in question, you learn that your parents love when you eat. It makes them happy to feed you, and it lights them up when you ask for more. Eating a lot becomes a way to make love surround the home. My asthma and maybe a speedy metabolism afforded me a lot of leeway in this endeavour. Skinny I stayed. For a while.

I remember the first time I noticed I was not skinny. It was my butt. Maybe I was 10? I have a clear mental image of looking at my profile in the mirror and noticing that my butt looked “like a girl’s.” I raised my concern with my dad. He looked me over and pronounced me fine. I trusted him. Sort of. Doubt had started to enter my mind. A kind of disconnect between external input and an observed reality. But that was likely quickly erased when my mother bought a bag of Halloween-sized Peanut Butter Cups after Halloween (reduced for clearance!), and I ate the whole bag reading Richie Rich comics. I still remember how pleased she was.

I was not a skinny teenager. We can fast-forward through that part. Through learning to wear loose shirts, to hold in my gut so much and so instinctively that to this day I have to consciously relax my core sometimes. Through plummeting down the social pole. Through learning that being invisible was much easier than having the Popular-Crowd-Eye-of-Sauron turn my way. Through becoming invisible so much and so instinctively that to this day I have to consciously decloak sometimes.

As an adult, I had some success with weight loss. I think the first time I thought I had Fat-Rich beat was in my early 30s. I had a rock-bottom moment when I carried my son upstairs to his change-table and could not immediately change his diaper because I was too out of breath to do anything but rest my head in my forearms on the pad and wait until my heart rate slowed. I just stood there with my hands resting on him so he wouldn’t accidentally launch himself off the table for about 10 minutes. A few days later I discovered The Zone. It worked. For a while. I went from 225 lbs and a size 40 waist to about 190 lbs and a size 32, as I recall. I felt really good. I felt like I had found the lane I would stay in for the rest of my life.

Turns out I had not.

We can fast-forward through this part. Through discovering the gym, learning that to gain muscle you need to be in a calorie surplus. Through being immersed in a culture that is simultaneously fitness-oriented and body-dysmorphic. Through dieting down for a bodybuilding competition so that I weighed in at 168 lbs and was wearing a size 28. Through “bulking” until I could no longer claim I had left 225 in my rear-view mirror.

Yeah, I was gaining muscle. That part’s a legitimate win. But the muscle-gaining food attitude layered on top of the child psyche that learned that eating is love was not really a recipe for overall health. I got up to 230 lbs.

Then I had a heart attack.

I was 45 years old. As myocardial infarctions go, I was lucky. It didn’t infarct me up as much as it might have. I was actually well enough to start the school year a week later, to the day, from when it happened, albeit sporting three shiny new stents (fun fact: stents aren’t actually shiny). My cardiologist (because I have a cardiologist now) said that I didn’t have any modifiable risk factors. As much as one might think to blame my weight, I wasn’t obese. I don’t drink or smoke. I am not diabetic. Just a genetic win that created an environment of turbulence where plaque could build up in my arteries. But now that we knew, with some light medication and the stents, there was no reason to think I was just waiting for the next one. And as of today, 12 years later, every visit to the cardiologist reassures us that this is the case. There is no permanent damage and no new blockages forming that we would want to address.

We can fast-forward through the next part. Through getting it through my dumb head that I may not have modifiable risk factors, but that doesn’t mean I should keep eating like an idiot. Through realizing that my heart doesn’t go on vacation, so there are no days off from eating properly. Through getting down to 190 lbs, feeling and looking great, and knowing, with absolute certainty, that I would never be fat again. That I could sit down to any meal and make the right choices, and sit in front of a plate of cookies or a bowl of chips and know I wasn’t going to have any, because even though they were right there, for me, they were not on the menu. Through travelling to Singapore for work in 2016 and finding myself alone at a restaurant and ordering a meal I should not have ordered, telling myself that if I was setting a precedent that every time I’m in Singapore alone at a restaurant it’s OK if I have an indulgent meal, I should be good.

Turns out that wasn’t precisely the precedent I was setting.

My brain may have thought so. Food-is-love-is-comfort-is-entertainment-is-experiencing-the-world-Rich learned the precedent was you can eat like an idiot and not die. That’s the Fat-Rich “free-pass” gambit. I have learned it’s an opening that Fat-Rich uses to start his sales pitch as he works his way in. Fat-Rich isn’t evil. Fat-Rich loves me. His issue is that he’s operating on a faulty signal that got embedded early. His warning signals light up when we’re not using food for love, or as a reward, or for comfort. And he is a hell of an ad man. When he tells me I deserve the fries, or that finishing the pizza will make tomorrow easier, or that I may as well eat the ice cream because I’m already fat, he isn’t trying to hurt me. When he says “You know what? Just let me drive”, he thinks he’s taking care of me. Apparently he is even more persuasive than a heart attack.

And he is me.

Bring on the slow crawl back up. Bring on a worldwide pandemic. Bring on learning to make potato chips and doughnuts at home. Bring on creating a recipe for deep-fried Wunderbar.

In November of 2025, I weighed 240 lbs. It wasn’t a number I got to without a fight. I saw it coming. I tried things that had worked in the past. I hired two different fitness/diet coaches. Spent thousands on them. The second one had me on a carnivore diet. “If it ran, swam, or flew, you can eat it. If not, you can’t.” Maybe that works for some people. It doesn’t work for me. Any kind of free pass will not work for me. I don’t get full. I’m like a pug whose gene for detecting satiation has been edited out. I can and will eat three bacon cheeseburgers with no bun and still have a bowl of cottage cheese because I see it in the fridge. Nothing would take. The scale kept climbing. I was buying size 40 again. XXL shirts. XXXL shirts. I was depressed. I was sure my metabolism had shifted to old-man mode. I resigned myself to being fat for the rest of my life. After all, my parents were. It was my destiny. I no longer believed anything would work.

But there was this little pilot light in my brain that would not extinguish. A small, tentative voice from the chasm that was crying. We have to do something! What, though? I’ve tried everything. And pizza and fries taste so good.

OK, yeah. But this can’t be it. I can’t be this guy. I can’t.

I searched “weight loss for middle-aged men.” I found a program that I already knew about in Toronto. My dad had tried it and had some success. I literally did not find a single other option that claimed to be specifically for middle-aged men. I filled out the intake form on their website. Answering the questions was an exercise in self-loathing. To make it worse, I knew that the owner of the program was a childhood friend of my son’s and that it was very likely he would read my submission. Fuck it. Who cares. Can’t get any worse than this. They contacted me, and I don’t remember how much it was to join, just that it was in the thousands and I couldn’t bear to throw yet more money at my hopeless cause. I didn’t join. My depression spiralled. I was watching myself from outside myself. I wasn’t the same guy in ways that transcended weight. I wasn’t the same teacher. Not the same friend. Not the same husband. Not the same father. I didn’t recognize me, even as I acknowledged, in open-mouthed horror, that in fact, I did. This was me. This was the me I was seeing. This was the me the world was seeing. And depression is a fun spiral—you’re depressed because you treat yourself like shit, so you treat yourself like shit because you’re depressed, and the whole thing is reinforced by the way you see the world seeing you.

I called the program back. Said take my money. I had no expectation that it would work. I just knew that doing nothing was not working.

We can fast-forward through this part. Through being so overwhelmed by the details of the meal plan that I created a one-day plan that fit the rules and just repeated it every day for the first week. Through attending Sunday morning meetings and feeling some kind of way about being in a room full of guys who had a relationship with food a lot like mine. Through slowly starting to resent the guy who led them because he would confidently make up demonstrably false facts to establish himself as an authority. Through realizing I could not sit through one more meeting listening to him explain that “jacked” came from Jack LaLanne, or enthusiastically nod while guys accepted that getting weaker in the gym was simply the price of eating healthy. Through briefly wondering whether OA might fill the same role and realizing that wasn’t my jam. Through finally stopping the meetings because they were making me angrier than they were helping me.

We can fast-forward through all that because here’s where I am today. I am still eating the exact same meals every day. Sure, I adjusted the macros almost right away. More than double the protein the plan allowed for. About twice the fat. The same level of carbs. I was literally starving. Every day felt like Yom Kippur. But that’s not important.

I EAT THE SAME THREE MEALS EVERY DAY.

And I love it. It’s liberating. Not one of the meals I eat is a chore. I look forward to them. I’m just slightly above 190 lbs and wearing size 32. That’s about 50 lbs of fat lost. My lean mass has stayed pretty constant. My strength is up in some areas and constant in others. I gave away about $5,000 in clothes. There are no “in case I get fat again” options in my closet.

I eat the same three meals every day.

I do not recommend this plan. I do not think it’s a terrible plan. It’s a great plan. For me. I’m a compulsive eater. Food for me is like booze for an alcoholic. Knowing what I am going to eat each day, and knowing that there is no room for choice or judgment, is why it works.

But I’ve been here before. In this place where I thought I had Fat-Rich beat. He has shown me he doesn’t get beaten. He doesn’t go away. He is content to wait. He doesn’t have the wheel anymore, and maybe he’s not even in the front seat. But he’s there in the third-row bench seats. He’s content to wait. And I can’t promise he won’t make it to the driver’s seat again. He has before, and it would be naïve of me to assume it can’t happen again.

But he won’t make it there today.

I’m me again. My jokes are back. My smile is back.

The Power of the Parental Promotional Campaign

Wow. An alliterative title that I didn’t even plan. I feel so clever. Which is ironic…

I’m 55 years old. By all accounts an adult. 55 is to human age as medium-well is to steak doneness, so I guess I’m the right side of middle-aged. Yet it seems nobody has informed my psyche. The child never left, and I don’t imagine it ever will – nor do I want it to. The only thing I can claim as I’ve aged is that I recognize the child in me, and I have no desire to evict that element of my psychological makeup. I simply want to work to understand its complexities and nuances, and see when my behaviour is more strongly guided by its influence. One aspect of this, and perhaps the only aspect that matters, if you dig deep enough, is the lasting effects of what I call Parental Promotion.

I have come to realize more and more clearly that my path in life has been strongly guided by what I think of as my parents’ promotional campaign, specifically about me. My parents, my mother primarily, never missed an opportunity to tell me and anyone who would listen that I was amazing. For example, according to my mother I was, among many other things:

The smartest kid.
A true mensch (this is a Yiddish word that essentially means a decent person).
The most talented singer. This is minor but illustrative, as I will discuss shortly.

They were also able to find ways to go on about my amazing “deficiencies” too, as though they were miraculous. I was, for example, among many other things:

The most intensely shy kid anyone ever met.
Exquisitely careful. I would come home from a day of playing outside with my friends and my clothes would be as clean as when they came out of the dryer.
Deeply quiet. While other kids would be talking, shouting and making noise, I’d be silently observing.

I believed all of it. Not “believed” as in they had to convince me away from a different opinion. Believed at my very core, without even the thought of questioning. I took it all as generally accepted fact. I was the smartest. I was the best singer. I was intensely shy. To be explicitly clear here, I’m not listing these as my own evaluations. They were not observations I made about myself. I didn’t decide these were true based on judgment or comparison. I am saying that because my parents told me they were true it meant they were axiomatic, and thus everyone would know it. It was my childlike perspective that if a fact is a fact then it must be universally known. Like the sky being blue. You don’t have to talk about it – it’s given. You assume everyone knows it. And if it comes up in any context, you don’t consider that it might be contentious or a matter of opinion because, well, look at the sky. It’s blue. Certainly, you don’t stop to consider how it will make you look to others when you act like it’s true.

From my earliest memories, and stretching even until today, this had objectively interesting effects on my interactions with people. Here are just a few (possibly obvious) results.

One, believing I was great (again, I stress, this was not a judgment of myself but taken as fact since it was what my parents told me), and believing that everyone knew this, and also believing that I was quiet and shy and that everyone knew that, I was most commonly seen by others to be snobby and aloof. As I aged this morphed into snobby, aloof and intimidating. Because none of these are internally true about me, and not remotely what motivated my behaviours, I was constantly taken by surprise by people’s reactions to me, which were consistent with their perception of me but so totally dissonant with my inner thoughts and motivations. I really never understood how I could be so misunderstood.

One immediate and persistent impact this had was to make me even more quiet and withdrawn, socially. That may have amplified some incorrect assumptions, but at least it didn’t create openings for discordant reactions to me, which I never learned how to reconcile.

To this point, I grant that I’ve certainly painted an unpleasant picture of the effects of my parents promotional campaign. But it’s not as simple as that. For example, believing that I was smart, I just assumed I could always figure something out. That if I was confused, or frustrated, then it was temporary and just meant I wasn’t thinking hard enough, or more likely was approaching a problem from the wrong direction. This attitude is self-fulfilling. It’s not news to anyone that confidence is a key – maybe even the most important – ingredient to success. Taking your innate ability as axiomatically true is a clear manifestation of confidence. It has led me to success professionally as a math teacher, and in many side pursuits such as visual arts, weightlifting, and sometimes, writing.

That’s not ego, although it can be perceived that way. I am reminded of a Bruce Lee quote: “If I tell you I’m good, probably you will say I’m boasting. But if I tell you I’m not good, you’ll know I’m lying.”

In any event, what I mean is that it’s just an understanding of your own capability and what that means you can do. For my whole life, to this very moment, I have always believed that I can excel at something if I want to. And often, but not always, I prove myself right. I no longer believe this is simply how I was born though. Now I recognize that my parents made me believe it was, and that is enough. When I don’t succeed, I have also realized that my confusion about that was a result of it being in conflict with the notion that it could never happen. I will illustrate with an example that often comes to my mind often. It was the first time I auditioned for a part in a musical.

For background, I was about 40 years old. I hadn’t been on a stage since school plays. Through a friend I discovered a local theatre program that put on amateur musical productions. The way it worked was you paid a fee for the program, and anyone could join. It was a way for adults to experience the fun of performing in musical theatre. Rehearsals happened once a week, and for the first two rehearsals parts were not yet assigned, although you can bet that everyone was assessing everyone else, and how they stacked up against the others, and people were making it clear which parts they were aiming for. The third rehearsal was auditions, and everyone would audition in front of everyone else. The director would let you sing whatever song from the show that you wanted to sing, and then usually ask you to sing and perform a few other numbers. Later that week he would send out the casting, and from then on the rehearsals were more focused. The experience culminated in two performances that were always well attended by family and friends. It was a lot of fun. I did many plays with this company, but that first one was Les Misérables.

After the first two rehearsals, it was clear (to me) that I was one of the best males in the room. It is clear to me now that I was not. But even at 40, that belief that I was great still guided much of my self-evaluation. I was hoping that I would get the part of Javert. And after the audition, I felt sure that I would. There were other cast members who told me they thought I had done well, and the feedback I was getting after each of my songs seemed to confirm that too. What I wasn’t able to filter though, was that people in that environment, wanting to be nice and supportive, compliment everything. Which incidentally is something I have learned not to do, because then the genuine, deserved compliments get lost in the sea of politeness, but that’s another story.

The point of this example is to tell you that I did not get cast as Javert, or any male lead. I was cast as sailor #3, prisoner #1, policeman #2, and a few other similar roles. I wasn’t devastated when we got the casting. I was confused. I also never resented any of the other cast members, because why would I? They didn’t make any mistakes, the director did, although because my parents emphasized being a mensch, I wasn’t angry with him, only grateful for the process he had created. However throughout the rest of the rehearsals, and for a very long time afterwards, I wondered what went wrong. And I started to realize this was a manifestation of the long-term impact of my parents’ promotional campaign. Eventually, after many, many more shows, I developed a more realistic understanding of my abilities as a singer. I am decent. That’s it. No more, no less. Nobody is going to think I have a great voice, but they won’t complain about it either, and that’s fine. But it took a while to see through the filter of the lens of my parents’ praise.

If I can simplify a very complicated concept, what I’ve learned is that believing what my parents told me has been at times a good thing, and at other times a difficult thing. It has led me to excel in many ways, and also led me to confusion and hurt when it conflicted with a more austere reality. But truly, the lasting gift is that at my core, I always believe I’m worthy.

It has been said, by people wiser than me, that the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice (a quick google search tells me that this sentence may have originated with Becky Mansfield). My parents’ campaign became my inner voice, and my inner voice is kind. That’s powerful. It has brought me great things, and hard things. In my case, it’s been a net good, and I am grateful for it. But I have seen the results of more destructive campaigns on many of my adult friends, and on many of my students (as I alluded to above, I am a high school teacher and tutor). So my final message is this:

To children (and that means all of us). Reflect on how your parents’ campaign has guided your path. Try to see it clearly. Tease out the good it has brought, and work to understand the bad. The process is very healing.

To parents. Think deeply about your campaign. Remember that your children do not have the context of a lived life to apply to what you tell them about themselves. They may believe high praise, or they may wonder why what seems ordinary to them is generating high praise. They will believe harsh criticism. Tearing them down does not “build character”. It builds a cruel inner voice that it will take them years (if ever) to understand is not their own, and does not speak truth.

Campaign honestly. Campaign proudly. Campaign positively.

Thanks for reading,
Rich

Want Good Grades? Then Forget About Getting Good Grades!

Ok, I admit it. I have a habit of creating titles that create a disconnect. And are a little click-baity. But to be honest it only happens because I often like to write about misconceptions, and so by definition the title will appear counter-intuitive. Today I am going to write about something that over the course of my teaching career has met with perhaps the most resistance from students and parents, but which has also met with the most success when embraced.

If you want good grades, stop trying to get good grades.

Scandalous, I know. And trust me, I have heard all the rejoinders. So as you can imagine, I will explain.

See, in the current system of education, grades stopped being a measure of progress some time ago. What they have become instead is currency. A commodity that is pursued, traded and leveraged with as much vigor and ferocity as the dollar, euro, or yen. And I am not using hyperbole here. Schools these days have come to be viewed by many students, parents and even teachers as a marketplace. Teachers have the grades, students want them. And in this marketplace the end goal is to get as high a grade as possible. To very many – but to be completely fair, not to all – how that happens is not nearly as important as that it happens. To this category of student, the goal of school is not to learn, but to get grades. And this paradigm shift causes a fundamental change in how the entire process is viewed. I will list just a few examples:

Bargaining
It has become standard operating procedure now that when teachers return graded work, the immediate next phase is the negotiation. Students dissatisfied with the magnitude of their grade will question, cajole and even harass the teacher about the grade, with the common theme that since the student believes the grade should be higher, the teacher has assigned a wrong grade. There are even times when the guise of reason is dropped completely, and the student will actually say things like “I need a 97% to get into <insert elite university program here> so can you raise my mark?”
Academic Dishonesty
Academic dishonesty (aka cheating) is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is the pervasiveness of it, and the total lack of ethical struggle involved in making the decision to use it as a tool for getting high grades. After all, if the only purpose of school is to get a high grade, and if cheating accomplishes that, then where is the ethical problem? And so we see rampant use of things like plagiarism, paying others to do work that students then submit as their own, or gaming the system so that assessments like tests are skipped, then done at a later date after getting information from other students who were present at the time about what was asked.
Grade Mills
Countless “schools” have popped up over the last decade or so who’s sole purpose is to guarantee official credits and high grades. The thinly disguised mission of these schools is to create a means by which, for a price, students can get a credit on their high school transcripts and also get an absurdly high grade. What separates a grade mill from a more legitimate private school is how accurately the student’s grade reflects their knowledge on completion of a course. I have taught many students who received a grade mill credit in a prerequisite course for the one I am teaching, with a grade of 100%, who do not possess the most basic skills meant to be learned in that prerequisite course.
Cramming
This is definitely not a new concept in academics, but it has spread to more and more students, who in fact no longer recognize that it is not actually a means of learning. In courses where there are scheduled tests/exams, students do little to no work during times where there is no assessment looming. They attend class, possibly take notes, and otherwise devote minimal attention to the lessons, because “this won’t matter until the test.” They do not see this as an ineffective strategy at all. The belief that drives this is that the only time the subject knowledge will matter is when they are tested on it (and thus in a position to get grades), and so the plan is to study as much as possible the day – or even the night – before a test. Cramming all the information into their short-term memories just long enough to unleash it onto their test papers, to be promptly forgotten as they leave the room after writing the test.

These are not the only examples of what I am talking about, but they are the most common. And it is clear that none of these appear to give actual learning more than the slightest courtesy of a head nod. They are completely and totally about getting grades.

Sometimes, they even work. But that’s a trap. Because even when they work, they are only short-term solutions to a lifelong endeavour, and they all create stress and anxiety in the process.

Bargaining for grades, when it works, teaches that it is not about what you earn, but about what you can badger people into giving you. It shifts the perspective about where the effort should be placed. Rather than placing effort on producing good work, the effort is placed on convincing the teacher to assign a high grade. This creates an internal tension that results in generalized anxiety, because the student ends up in a position of having to convince the teacher of something that is not actually true, and for which there is no evidence.
Cheating works for its intended purpose (when you don’t get caught), but like grade mills, perpetuates the “appearance over substance” philosophy, and also imbues dangerous long-term values that erode at the ethical fabric of society. The stress this creates is clear – fear of getting caught, and the consequences. Additionally there is the gradual accumulation of anxiety brought on by creating an academic avatar that is more and more fraudulent and removed from the person who wears it.
Grade mills teach that appearance matters much more than substance – if you can appear to be someone who earned a perfect grade in calculus, it does not matter if you actually are someone with a deep understanding of calculus. It is hard to even wrap ones head around how many ways this is wrong. First, the injustice of potentially securing a spot in a college or university over someone who earned a lower grade, but actually knows much more calculus. Then, the fact that with the label of “100% in calculus” anyone who checks that label will assume that you are a calculus genius and expect that you are, creating significant stress on the person masquerading as the calculus prodigy. Finally, the pressure that the very existence of grade mills places on legitimate schools, who have little choice but to begin awarding higher grades so that their students can remain competitive when it comes to post-secondary offers of education, which is a non-trivial contributor to grade-inflation. The stress created here is very similar to that created by cheating, and has the added anxiety-producing bonus that at some point there won’t be a grade mill offering credits and grades for money, and that the student will actually have to perform as the person their grades have indicated that they are.
Cramming is arguably the lowest offense on this list, because in its purest form the student is not misrepresenting themselves at all. However it is fraught with disadvantages, from the fact that many students struggle to absorb and then reproduce the knowledge in a meaningful way, to the fact that when needed later – in the same course or in a subsequent one, the knowledge is no longer accessible. It also creates a great deal of stress and is a common cause of test-anxiety, which is a very real issue for many students who find they “totally knew this last night” but can not recall it when test time comes.

Perhaps most tragically, this issue causes stress and anxiety not just for the students engaged in them but for the many students who are not, because it creates an unlevel playing field that places incredible burden on the ones who are doing things the right way. Grade inflation is a real and dangerous phenomenon, where just like monetary inflation, a loaf of bread is still a loaf of bread whether the price tag says $0.75 or $2.99. The difference is that because we use percentages as grades, there is a ceiling, and so we are starting to distinguish by decimals. And that means that for any student mistakes cost much more than they ever did in the past.

Ok. So I’ve devoted the article to this point (approximately 5 minutes of reading time, if the algorithm that tells me how much I have written so far is to be trusted) outlining the issue. And maybe I’ve made it seem like hope is lost, because we do in fact live in a system where grades matter for universities, colleges, academic awards, and sometimes for that first job, and all of these vehicles by which students are getting the grades are either unethical or riddled with stress and anxiety. But hope exists! Because there is very good news.

To get good grades, all you have to do is actually learn the material!

Revolutionary, I know. It almost seems like I am joking. I assure you I am not. This simple fact is lost on more students and parents than I wish was the case. Clearly it would work though, right? Of course it would. Students, you can take all the effort you are devoting to “getting grades” and shift it to “learning material”. Immerse yourself in class. Ask questions of the teacher. Engage in discussion. Pay attention. Do work in increments (that is, homework), instead of cramming the night before a test or exam. Decide that you will be a master of the topic and use your teacher as the resource they are. Develop a love of learning – trust me, this is not as hard as you think – and as you grow into this person who legitimately strives to learn, the grades will automatically follow, as an afterthought!

Now I know from experience that this message lands differently on everyone. Some people roll their eyes, either inwardly or outwardly, and decide that the game as it is being played works just fine for them. Others hear me and know it makes sense, but feel that it’s too hard, and getting grades some other way will be the way to go. But, there is a significant portion of students I have talked to who have taken the idea to heart. And without fail they are the most academically successful, as reflected both in their grades, and in their facility with the material they have learned. These students inevitably report back to me that once they stopped their pursuit of high grades, and shifted their energy to the learning, they began earning higher grades than they ever had before. And their confidence grew as their anxiety atrophied. Because so much of the mentality of getting grades involves somehow gaming the system into awarding false credit, that when they shift into the person who actually has earned the credit they are receiving, they feel bulletproof.

And what a great feeling that is!

Thanks for reading,
Rich

Let Your Child Fail

Depending on the perspective of the different people in my life I am many things: a son, a father, a brother; A student, a teacher, a mentor; A friend, a colleague, a training partner. And yet, in all these capacities I have learned one lesson well, and seen it play out repeatedly. Failure is critical for growth, and letting loved ones fail is one of the hardest manifestations of loving them that there is.

This is never more acute than when it comes to your child. It is one of the most painful struggles in normal parenting. Seeing that a child is making poor choices and is therefore on a path to failure, letting it happen, and watching the fallout is heart-rending. And yet, the alternative is worse: Letting them believe that there is always a safety net.

As parents, it is our job and our duty to give our children all the tools and guidance they need to succeed as they grow. But it is not our job to give them success. It is not our job to undo their failures, or to mask them as something else. In fact, any “success” that is not earned is not a success at all, and any part we play in delivering these false successes is, in fact, failing in our duties as parents.

Repeatedly and consistently rescuing a child from failure teaches them that failure is not on the table. It teaches them that life will be fine regardless of poor choices, lack of knowledge, or lack of skill. It’s like giving someone voice lessons and using autotune to correct their pitch before playing back their singing to them and to the world, letting them believe they are the next Freddy Mercury or Whitney Houston, and then letting the world watch their train-wreck audition for American Idol. It not only sets them up for confusion later in life, it inhibits self-awareness to the point that life in the “real world” will for them will seem like walking through a minefield, where the reactions from others are so completely out of line with their internal measures (calibrated in their youth) that they can, at times, feel like they never really know what is wrong with them or why they get the responses they do. Consider those American Idol auditions where the singer is so clearly awful, and yet they think so highly of themselves that they tell the judges it’s the judges who are terrible.

The thing is though, that in the moment failure is happening, we parents want nothing more than to take the pain away. Every parent knows what I mean. Your child’s pain, whether physical or emotional, is about a million times worse than your own. My wife always talks about that moment when a toddler is running to you in the park to show you some amazing treasure they found, with that big toddler smile and enthusiasm, when they trip and fall and start crying miserably. We all want that enthusiasm and joy to be the only thing they ever feel. We never, ever, want them to fall.

But it’s unrealistic. Everyone falls. Learning what caused it, analyzing how to have avoided it, and recovering from it are the real lessons. The lessons that lead to a person who truly can be successful. And so we have to let our children fail. And then we have to be there for them to love and support them as they recover from it. We have to show them that failure isn’t the end of anything, and that even in their failure we believe in them and love them as much as we always have. That is how they will learn to grow from failure, without spending a ton of counter-productive energy and emotion on self-recrimination and shame.

In my years of teaching, I have had countless conversations with parents concerned about their children’s academic success – or lack thereof. And on more occasions than I care to count, a parent has outright asked me if there is anything I can do to raise their child’s grade. These parents are always taken aback when I tell them that there is nothing I can do, and nothing they can do either. However there is everything the child can do. We can give them the tools, we can be there to support their learning. We can be the best parents and teachers there are. But we can not “raise the child’s mark”. That is on the student. And sometimes, the student fails. When I tell the parents that I am willing to let that happen, they often think it means I am a bad teacher. There have been a few occasion where they said so. But my response is always the same:

“I am being the best teacher I can be. I will always be there to support your child. I will give them every tool I have, and the guidance to use it, in order for them to succeed. When they need me, I will be there. I will be there even when they don’t realize they need me. But I will never do the work for them, and I will never assign a grade they did not earn. And if they should fail, I will be there to support them and help them see what went wrong, and how to address that in the future. Given all that, my only hope is that your child will look back on their time as my student and realize the gift I gave them: The gift of letting them fail.”

We want the next generation to be resilient, strong, caring and educated. Failure is the path to all of these. As hard as it is, we need to let our children fail.

And then celebrate the heck out of their successes!

Thanks for reading,
Rich

Thoughts From a Dance Dad

Lately it seems as though the amount of time I have to write is inversely proportional to the amount of ideas I have to write about. But today’s entry is about something I’ve been thinking about for years: Dance.

Early Years

My daughter is a competitive dancer. She’s 15, and has been dancing since she was around 3. She’s gone to countless dance camps, workshops, and of course classes. So I have been a dance spectator for about 12 years. Prior to that I knew next to nothing about dance, save for the fact that I have never been any good at it.

At first, dance was pretty much entirely about how cute the kids all looked executing choreography. They got to wear these elaborate costumes and perform for friends and family at recitals. The teachers and teaching assistants are always on stage at the same time as the kids, and the kids essentially never take their eyes off them, mimicking the movements they’ve all spent months in class learning. It’s exceedingly adorable, and naturally every person who comes to watch immediately rushes to them afterwards to tell them how wonderfully they danced. In short, it’s a typical exercise in getting kids involved in an activity that provides some structure around working toward a goal, and then the kids get congratulated on essentially existing for the duration. And it’s awesome.

As the years progressed, we saw less and less boys involved. I won’t attempt to analyze that or comment on why it might be, but political minefield notwithstanding, it is true. This meant that as the dancers grew, it became – for my daughter’s group at least – a girls-only activity.

Emerging Talents
Starting around the age of 8 or 9, and lasting for 3-4 years, it starts to become obvious which of the girls are well suited to dance and which are not. This obviousness is not lost on the girls. Dance becomes a micro-society where “Haves” and “Have-Nots” start to identify, and the behaviours that result are what you would expect. In a way it mirrors what is happening at that age in school, but from where I sat it was definitely magnified at dance. These can be pretty difficult years for the girls, and perhaps more so for the parents. As I watched from the sidelines, I always told myself that whether a Have or a Have-Not, there are very valuable lessons to be learned from these dramas, and whether my daughter was receiving or giving grief (it certainly seemed she was receiving a lot more than giving, but nobody ever accused a dad of being impartial), my wife and I always did our best to ground her in reality and look for the long-term life lessons that could be taken. I do think, subjectivity aside, that I can safely say my daughter began to show real talent for dance during this time. I can also say, objectively this time, that she emerged from this phase with an inner-strength and confidence that is astounding. As I watch her navigate the social quagmire of the tenth grade, I am exceedingly proud and awed at how well she manages to stay true to herself and her friends, while gliding above the drama that can consume most kids of that age. She never judges others, and always stays honest in helping her friends deal with whatever the current issue is. In and out of the dance world I have watched her handle victories with honest grace and compassion, and failures with resolute determination. She’s my hero, and I firmly believe we have the “emerging talent” years of the competitive dance program to thank for that.

From Girls to Women
As the girls mature into women, things change at dance in a way that I could never have understood if I were not so immersed in it. This phase is not something I came to understand only as my daughter entered it – the nice thing about being a dance dad is that every recital and dance competition you attend features dancers from all the age groups. So that long before my daughter was in high school I have been observing this stage of a dancer’s development. I also have the added advantage of being a high school teacher, and so for my entire career have had the pleasure of seeing how dancers take the lessons from dance into seemingly unrelated arenas, like a math classroom, which really is my domain. Having a daughter in dance always made me pay attention to how older dancers behaved, kind of as a way of glimpsing my daughter’s future. Here are some observations I’ve made over the years, and observations I have now had the pleasure of seeing manifest in my own daughter.

Dance is a Language
This is not metaphor. Dance actually is a language. It took me some time to fully appreciate that. Because of my daughter’s involvement in dance, our family has been watching So You Think You Can Dance since season 2. It’s a great show to be sure, but I admit at first I was too absorbed in marveling at the physicality of it to understand what it communicates, despite the fact that the judges on the show really do a great job emphasizing this (I always assumed they were saying it metaphorically). But like a child that learns to speak simply from hearing the spoken word and contextually absorbing meaning from the sound, I began to absorb meaning from the movement. The first thing I realized was that unlike languages that use words, dance doesn’t translate to any other language, and communicates things which can’t be communicated any other way, with the possible exceptions of fine art, or poetry. Really good fine art will enthrall and speak to the viewer through infinite contemplation of something static. Really good poetry succeeds at using words which individually can be quite linear, by combining them in a way to create depth and consequently say something the language the poem is written in was not necessarily designed to say. Really good dance? A different thing entirely. It speaks to our humanity on multiple levels, and the fluidity of it allows the choreographer/dancer to tell us stories no written word could approach.

Words are discrete, and a picture is static. But motion is a continuous medium, and the very continuity of it results in an infinity of expression within a finite frame of time and space. It has been said that dance is poetry in motion, but I honestly have come to see it in the reverse. Poetry is dance stood still. I can’t find words to describe this any better, because words will fail here. If you want to know what I mean, watch dancers. And in the same way that second and third languages improve thought processes and imagination, so does dance – but it does so in a way that is magnified a thousandfold because of its unique method of delivery, and because of the world of thought and emotion it opens up for communication. It also is unique in that you don’t have to be able to speak it to understand it. You only have to watch.

Dancers Make the Best Actors
Because of my passion for theatre, I have had the immense pleasure of being both actor and director in various musicals. And here is what I’ve noticed – not all great actors are dancers, but all dancers are definitely great actors. To me there is no mystery as to why this is. Many actors focus on the words they’re saying or singing, trying to pour all of the character they’re portraying into the delivery of the lines or lyrics. Physicality is often an afterthought, or a simple by-product of the emotion they are feeling about the performance. For dancers it’s entirely different. Because of their fluency in dance, they are simultaneously vocalizing and dancing the performance. By dancing I don’t mean the choreography that often accompanies musical numbers, although naturally a dancer excels there. Rather I mean that they are speaking to us in two languages simultaneously. And even those of us not able to communicate with dance can still understand it. So I have often found myself thinking of a dancer “It’s not a je ne sais quois she has. It’s a je sais qu’elle est une danceuse” (yes, you have to speak some french for that one 😉 ).

Dance is Empowering
Okay. So obviously dance results in physical fitness. You can always spot a dancer by their muscle tone, posture and grace in simple movement. The importance of this can’t be underplayed. But the kind of empowerment I’m talking about here is more than that. I remember once at a dance recital there was a senior acro small group number about to start (see what I did there – Dance Dad knows the terminology). It was clear from the opening positions that one of the dancers was going to execute a crazy trick to start the dance. Before the music started there were hoots and hollers from the wings and from the audience, and one dancer’s voice from the wings rang out with “You GO girl!”. I was momentarily taken aback. I think maybe I had just read an article or watched a show where that phrase was called into question as demeaning to women. And then I looked around. The stage and venue was dense with strong, confident young women, certain of themselves and certain of their power. And the dancer who called it out numbered among them. I couldn’t see anything demeaning at that point about what she had said, but on a deeper level I realized just what dance had done for these kids. It showed them what inner strength, determination and dedication could do. And so naturally I began to think about the dancers I’ve taught in my math classroom and I had this moment of revelation. It is exactly that quality that has always made them stand out to me in that setting. Not that they all excel in math, because not all kids do. But that regardless of their abilities in math, there is always an inner strength and peace that says “I know who I am, I know what I can do, and I know how to commit to improving.” Where many students in high school still need the explicit motivation that our culture seems to thrive on too often, the dancers have internalized their motivation in the best way. I can’t say enough how important that is for success in life.

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

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