Work@Character

Yesterday Laura and I had our last face-to-face teacher conference of the academic year for our younger son Isaac. Next year he will join his older brother at one of the best high schools in New York City, and this conference was bittersweet for us.

Both our children attended the Bank Street School for Children starting as three-year-olds. Aaron graduated two years ago, and I’m on the parents’ committee for Isaac’s graduation in two months. Bank Street has been a remarkable school for both our children, and it will be hard to leave it.

But what struck me was how Laura and I reached this point, with two similar, yet also different kids, both who work hard and possess unique abilities, but who also needed to overcome specific challenges. My kids are excellent students at their schools; they have scored at the highest levels in standardized tests to reach their goals. Both are avid readers of very different books, yet Aaron and Isaac share a sense of humor that is light years beyond mine. Do I even have a sense of humor? I am their strict, mercurial father.

What is obscured by this bit of bragging about my kids —who are not kids anymore but young adults— is the years of hard work of parenting to help Aaron and Isaac become the best version of themselves. I believe in learning by doing, Bank Street’s philosophy, but also Aristotle’s. I never did my children’s homework. On the contrary, in recent years, I have hardly seen what they have worked on after coming home from school. But when they have a question or a problem, I teach them how to find the answer for themselves. When they are stuck, I prompt them with questions to guide them to their own revelations.

We provide the space and time to focus quietly on their schoolwork. Friends who are wild or rude, I tell my kids, are not welcomed in our home. When Aaron and Isaac start wavering on the good habits we have encouraged, when they watch too much TV, or have not chosen the next book to read in bed, then yes, I am the heavy. I draw the bright line too many parents fail to draw: to turn off the TV, or to make finding a new book a priority, or to rewrite what they thought was ‘good enough.’ Real pride in your work is when you learn to do it yourself —not when somebody else does it for you— and when you know the work you accomplished was excellent. But often children have to be guided to get there.

Case in point. A few weeks ago, Isaac had brought home two short papers in which the teachers had given him only average marks. Isaac knew it wasn’t very good work, and he showed me the papers with what seemed a mix of fear and shame in his eyes. I read the papers, and yes, they were lightly researched, and his arguments were unsupported and often unclear. I remembered when he had worked on these papers, and I knew he had not given them the time they required, or the focus. Isaac is a bright kid and a good writer, but perhaps that week he had worried too much about succeeding at Oblivion on the Xbox, and too little about the failures of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

We talked about it, and we decided he would ask his teachers if he could rewrite both papers over the following two weeks of Spring Break. I told him it didn’t matter if his teachers didn’t give him different grades, but what did matter was that he should do his best work. And this wasn’t his best work, was it? No, he said, it wasn’t. Yes, I was a bit the heavy. I also told Isaac he wouldn’t play the Xbox over Spring Break, nor watch any TV, until those papers were rewritten, and well.

Isaac asked his teachers about rewriting the essays on the Friday before Spring Break, and they agreed. The teachers also decided to extend that offer to all the kids in the class: if anybody else wanted to rewrite their papers, they could. But, as far as I know, only Isaac would rewrite his papers during this vacation.

Now let me tell you about what happened over Spring Break. Isaac worked from morning until afternoon, for five days straight, rereading and expanding his source material, outlining his arguments, and reconstructing his essays. Sometimes he would ask questions. Occasionally he showed me what he had written, and I gave him my honest opinion. He rewrote page after page.

Whether he was motivated by his desire to get to Oblivion before his vacation ended, to please his mean old father, to show the teachers what he could do, or a combination of these, I don’t know. But Isaac worked independently, and ferociously. I was in awe, and prouder than any father could be.

Weeks later, at the conference, Isaac’s teachers noted how remarkably better the second go-around of his Civil War papers had been. They had given Isaac the highest marks for his rewrites. That was the work they had been accustomed to seeing from Isaac. Moreover, the teachers happily noted that on an in-class essay after Spring Break Isaac had again written a beautifully coherent essay on the Civil Rights movement.

Perhaps the teachers suspected that I, the writer-father, had ‘helped’ him on the rewrites during Spring Break, but the in-class essay confirmed it was Isaac who had done the work on the rewrites. And indeed it was. I just set the bar high. I did not allow him to lower it because I knew he could reach it. I gave my son advice to prompt him to think for himself when he needed it. Isaac learned by doing it, the hard way, the only way. The way toward good character.

Our Children in the World

Today I was teaching twelve-year-old Isaac to get to school by himself, on the New York City subway. This past school year he came home by himself on the bus, about 30 blocks, without a problem. He has reached these thresholds slightly earlier than Aaron, who at fourteen, now gets everywhere he needs to be by himself, and safely. As a parent on Manhattan’s Upper Westside, I have to worry about many more potential dangers than my mother did on Ysleta’s San Lorenzo Avenue. I don’t think I will ever stop worrying about my children in the world.

San Lorenzo was three short blocks to South Loop School, and my old neighborhood did have a few gangs, but they weren’t the real danger as I walked to and from school as a child. Dogs. I hated the Doberman pinscher that once lunged at me from the bushes of the house across the street. We had our own ferocious guard dog, Lobo, who had bitten many passersby straying too close to our fence or unlucky enough to be on the street when Lobo managed to vault the chainlink. And cars. The souped-up low riders and pickups never stopped, for there wasn’t even a crosswalk painted on our dirt streets. I remember seeing Reuben, a neighborhood kid, tumble underneath a pickup as it ran him over during our baseball game on San Simon. Reuben survived with only a broken arm.

In New York, cars are also dangerous, but in a different way. At crosswalks, even when pedestrians have the ‘Walk’ sign, cars do not stop. This happens every day on Broadway, and it’s a particular problem on two-way avenues. You get the ‘Walk’ sign on Broadway and you walk across the two-way avenue, but by the time you get to the other side, impatient drivers on the cross street have begun turning into the avenue, challenging pedestrians to get out of the way. The worst offenders are invariably taxis, livery cabs, city buses, and delivery trucks. Those on a schedule, a match up their butts. I have lost count how many times I have heard that awful screech of rubber on asphalt to avoid metal smashing into flesh at the crosswalk.

Less frequent dangers on Broadway are cars missing the red light entirely and zooming across the intersection and cars screeching to a halt at the crosswalk as their drivers realize they have a red light. If you jump into the crosswalk the instant you have the ‘Walk’ sign, you may be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After you have the ‘Walk’ sign, I tell my children, make sure the cars have actually stopped. Not only do you not have to make mistakes, but you must often catch the mistakes of others to be safe.

Bicycles, of course, never stop at the red light. Messengers, take-out delivery guys, Lance-Armstrong-wannabes. They’re even on the sidewalks.

Parked cars you’re standing next to often lurch backward without their drivers glancing into their rear view mirrors.

SUV-like strollers are battering rams deployed by harried mothers with a passive aggressive smile on their faces. At worst, your toe or shin will be bruised. It’s happened to me twice.

And I haven’t even gotten to the aggressive beggars on the street who follow you for a block, even after you have politely turned them down. The shifty-eyed losers who strike up conversations with young girls alone. The crazed woman I once met on a Number 1 train who, out of the blue, threatened to gut everyone in the car “like a fish.” The wild high school kids who, as four cops stand at the subway platform, push each other at incoming subway cars with snorts and guffaws.

I will do my best to train Aaron and Isaac for this New York City world they must navigate on their own. I will train them by being tough, by teaching them to be resourceful, by being available in case they need me, by going over scenarios with them, by watching them and not saying a word, even if they are making choices I would not make. I will do my best, and I will keep my fingers crossed and hope they learn from experience. The buzz of the doorbell, when they are home, is the sweetest sound of my day.