TAZ: Well—
ME: And by the way, I thought you were taking Spanish! How come you're signed up for the trip to France?
TAZ: Oh, don't worry, I signed up for the trip to Cuba, too.
ME: Cuba? It's not even legal to go to Cuba!
TAZ: It would be for educational purposes, or something like that.
ME: Right, speaking of educational purposes, were there any educational purposes related to your trip to school today? Things like, oh, I don't know, math? English? Social studies? Science? You know, the inschool activities. As opposed to the afterschool activities?
TAZ: Oh, math and all that? We didn't get to that today. That stuff is happening tomorrow. But I'm just so happy! This is such a mad fun school!
Yes, it definitely sounded like a mad fun school. But does trigonometry happen at mad fun schools? Does World War I get studied? Or would that be too boring for a mad fun school? I was beginning to worry.
The next day, Taz came home and said that his English teacher was starting them on SAT words. Every kid had to bring in a word that might appear on the SATs, and teach it to the class. And you'd get brownie points if you could use the SAT word in a sentence, or if other people did, during class discussions.
Taz asked if I knew any good SAT words. I was pretty sure I hadn't started studying for the SATs when I was in ninth grade; in fact, I'm not even sure that I knew what the SATs were when I was in ninth grade. But I recognized that the teacher was doing the right thing in building their vocabulary well in advance of the exam, and I thought hard for a minute about a good word for Taz to share with the class.
Suddenly, one popped into my head, along with an image of my old English teacher, Mrs. Laster, and some vague recollection of her using this word to make a point about a James Joyce story.
“Epiphany,” I said triumphantly. “That's a great word. Your teacher will love it.”
“Epiphany? What's that?”
“It's when you're trying to understand something, and then, all of a sudden, you get it, and you're so excited, it's like you had a vision. It's when you realize something, but not gradually. You figure it out all at once, so it's almost like it was revealed to you. You understand?”
He nodded. He seemed kind of into it. “Epiphany,” he repeated. “I think I get it. It's cool.” He grinned.
Over the next few days, Taz had more epiphanies than Sir Isaac Newton. There were epiphanies about cheats in Halo, epiphanies about the dog, epiphanies about pizza. And Taz said that when it was his turn to teach his SAT word, the entire class had an epiphany about the word epiphany. It was a word that described an experience they'd all had, and it was especially useful in English class. The teacher would ask a question about why Holden Caulfield said or did a certain thing, and some kid would inevitably raise his hand to answer, calling out, “I just had an epiphany about that!”
I guess when you are thirteen, epiphanies just pop up in your brain all the time, like dandelions on a lawn. By the time you are forty, though, your reflexes are sufficiently slowed, and your knowledge of the world sufficiently broad, that an epiphany is about as rare as drinking whole milk.
But, eventually, I did have an epiphany. It was about Taz's relationship to his mad fun school. He was going every morning, and coming home every afternoon, but there didn't appear to be any epiphanies related to homework. “Don't worry about it,” he'd say, night after night, when I asked about homework, after observing that none was getting done. “It's under control.”
Even the activities he'd signed up for that first day had mysteriously evaporated. Bowling, he claimed, turned out to be stupid. Tennis was for people who were practically tennis pros. There was hardly any snow that winter, so the ski trip didn't happen, and the Fris-bee team practiced at dawn, which is Taz's least favorite time of day. As for the trips, well, I couldn't afford to send him to France or Cuba— or North Korea, for that matter— so soon after Australia.
About a week before his fourteenth birthday, we got the first report card. The epiphanies flowed fast and furious as I surveyed all those Cs and Ds. Oh, I almost forgot— there was one B. For drama! Wait, let me share with you the epiphany I had about the B he got in drama: Taz is Good at Acting. As in Acting Like an Idiot!
What he did not appear to be good at was a much longer list, a list that included English, history, math, science, and Spanish. Also known as Every Single Subject That Matters.
The day after the report card came home was my flashback nightmare to the old Worst Night of the Year scenario, also known as parent- teacher night. Reluctantly, I dragged myself up to Taz's mad fun school for a meeting that I knew would be anything but mad fun.
There was only one good thing about parent- teacher night at Taz's new school. Instead of having you go from teacher to teacher, to hear six different people tell you how awful your child is, you only meet with one person, the child's adviser, who has collected reports from the other six about how awful your child is.
What's good about this is, it takes a lot less time than the other way, when you have to go from room to room hearing the same horrible stories over and over again. And also, this way, you only have to be polite to one person who thinks you are a Terrible Mother, instead of to a half dozen.
But what was good about the old system, where you did see all these different teachers, was that in each case you could act totally surprised by the news that your child is a screw up. You could sort of hint, or imply, that your child wasn't doing nearly as badly in the other classes. You could even say sly things that suggested, without really saying so, that maybe it's the teacher's fault that your child is doing badly in this particular class, because, well, it goes without saying that he might be doing OK in the other classes.
Of course, it goes without saying because you can't bring yourself to say it, because it would be a Total Lie.
So, instead, you resort to saying things that are slightly misleading, yet face- saving, without being Utter Crap. Things like “Well, you know, I think his major interests probably lie elsewhere— history's not really his thing,” and “Huh, I guess he just doesn't have an ear for foreign languages— some people don't, you know,” or “It's funny, I was never very good at math either, and when he asks me for help, I'm just clueless.”
What's bad about the system where you only see one person is that you really can't get away with all this equivocation. You walk into that room, the adviser has evidence from six teachers to make her case about your child. You can't pretend there are no patterns. There's no place to hide.
And in Taz's case, the pattern was clear. He wasn't doing his homework. He wasn't studying for tests. He wasn't learning the material. About the only thing he was doing right was that he was showing up for class. Thank goodness for small miracles— at least he wasn't a truant! Although apparently when he got there, he forgot to turn his brain on. At least there were no complaints about the type of disrespectful behavior that got him in so much trouble in eighth grade. No soda cans, no confrontations, no calling teachers a “retard.”
There was one nervy attempt to backpedal, however. After the adviser went over the reports from pretty much every teacher about how Taz hadn't turned any homework in, he began to insist that he had actually done all the homework, but he'd left it on the floor of his room.
For all the assignments.
In all his classes.
The adviser just stared at him for a moment. “I guess the floor of your room is a pretty messy place, huh?”
Taz nodded and smiled idiotically, and the meeting went even further downhill from there.
The grades were so bad, and the conference was so depressing, that Elon was pretty much stunned into silence. You have to understand something about Elon. He is the smartest person I have ever met, but unlike some people who are really smart, he doesn't think everyone around him is stupid. In fact, he thinks the opposite. He starts out assuming that everyone else is smart, too, so it's always a terrible disappointment for him to
find out that the rest of us can't multiply four-digit numbers in our head. We don't all know the population of every country in the world. We can't all convert kilometers to miles, Fahrenheit to Celsius, and euros to dollars. If he were a dog, he would win the Stupid Pet Trick contest every time, but the problem is, he wants the rest of us to win the contest with him, and we just can't.
Plus, he went to Yale. He was number two in his law school class. His brain is so big that we have entire teams of people playing Boggle against him, but even when two grown- ups and four kids add up all their scores, we still can't beat him. We're all making lists of words from the board like hat and pen, and he's offering up words like conundrum. We had to give up playing Scrabble because if you came up with a crappy word, he'd want to look at your letters and help you find a better one. Even when the only letters available were Q and Z, he could think of words (quiz). Eventually, we realized he had memorized a Scrabble dictionary when he was eight.
So to have a son getting Cs and Ds— this was a terrible letdown. He was quiet and sad, shaking his head and sighing. I could see the question going through his head over and over again: “What are we going to do with this kid?” I had the same question, and no answer, so I couldn't think of anything to say to make him feel better.
But in addition to dealing with Elon's reaction, I had to deal with the adviser's reaction, which was, quite simply, to tell me that it was my responsibility to make sure Taz did his homework.
How was I to do this? Well, the school had a website, and most of the teachers put their assignments on it, so you could never say you lost the assignment or you were out sick as an excuse for not doing your work. The adviser told me that when a kid wasn't doing well, it was the parent's job to log on to the website every night and download the child's homework, then check each subject individually to make sure he had completed it.
I found this advice somewhat shocking. I had been under the impression that the trend now among educators is that they want parents to back off. I had read in The Wall Street Journal about how some students, when they get a bad grade, hand their cell phones to professors and ask them to explain it to their parents, and how college grads now bring their parents along to job interviews.
I just couldn't imagine myself fetching Taz's assignments each night, and I had incorrectly assumed that high school teachers wouldn't want me to. I had thought that they do not like so- called helicopter mommies, who hover over their darling's every misstep and try to fix it. I had naively been led to believe that it was better, at this age, to let your kid figure out how to solve his own problems, or allow him to suffer the consequences, rather than intervene and solve his problems for him.
OK, I did make a fuss when the middle school said Taz couldn't come in to pick up his report card. But hey, when he dropped his cell phone in the toilet, no way did I run out to buy him a new one. (Instead, I went out and celebrated with Elon, because we realized we were going to save so much money now that Taz wasn't racking up cell phone charges, we could now afford to go out to dinner!)
When confronted with the bad grades, it seemed to me that this, too, was Taz's problem to solve. I could, in fact, do as the adviser recommended, and check the high school website every night for his assignments, then demand to see them in order to confirm that they were done.
But really, I just didn't want to go there, and I didn't want to go there for all kinds of reasons, the most important of which is that I already went to ninth grade. And when I was in ninth grade, I did all my homework. And my mother didn't even have to check it for me. I really just don't feel like it's fair to make anyone on this earth responsible for ninth grade more than once in a lifetime.
Besides, once you check for the homework, and demand to see that it's done, you are bound to follow through by screaming and yelling or devising some type of punishment if it's not done. And the problem with Taz and punishment is that it never works. He's like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. You can take everything away from him, and throw him in a dark cell over and over, and it just doesn't matter. If he wants to break rules and get out from under your thumb, he'll find a way to do it.
There have been times in the past where it seemed like Taz really had nothing left to lose— I'd taken away his money, TV, movies, video games, computer games, and time with friends— and he still refused to reform. About the only thing I didn't do was throw the switch on the fuse box and leave him sitting in the dark. (I actually considered that, but the refrigerator is on the same circuit and I didn't want to deal with the spoiled food.)
So it seemed to me that not only was I not personally motivated to monitor this homework business intensely, but I also wasn't sure how to discipline him if he failed to do as I asked. Smacking him was definitely out, by the way— he was way too big by then, and I didn't want to hurt my hand.
But there was another reason, too, beyond my lack of interest in reliving ninth grade and my inability to dole out effective punishments. I didn't want Taz doing the homework solely to avoid getting hassled by me. I wanted Taz to want to do well in school for reasons that had nothing to do with parental approval. I realized that was pie in the sky to some extent, but he had been a good student for most of middle school, at least until the dreaded thirteenth birthday. He knew how good it felt to get an A. I wanted him to want that feeling for himself again. I didn't want him to only get the A (though I would gladly settle for Bs) for me.
The thing is, I have lived long enough on this earth to know that when you do a good job, most of the time, no one is going to notice. No one is going to pat you on the back, or buy you a drink, or give you a raise, or arrange a parade. But if you did the best you could do, and if you are pleased with the result, that is something in and of itself that can give you a certain peace and satisfaction and happiness. It sounds trite to say, but a job well done is its own reward. And that's what I wanted Taz to feel. “Big Mother Is Watching You” did not hold much appeal to me as a slogan for child rearing.
Now, I didn't have the nerve to tell the adviser that I was not actually planning on getting all that involved in the homework checking, nor was I planning to devise some type of torture to compel Taz to do better in school. So I just nodded politely and promised to talk with Taz some more when we got home.
And talk I did. I basically told him there was no Plan B. I knew he loved this school, but I told him that I didn't think I could leave him there if he couldn't get better grades, because he'd never get into college.
But if he wasn't going to stay at his mad fun school, I wasn't sure where he was going to go. There is a high school near our home, but it is a rather scary place, with a high dropout rate. Once, when Taz was little, still in a stroller, we were walking up the block past that school, and a chair came flying out the third- story window, glass breaking and everything. Luckily, no one was injured on the street, but it was a terrifying moment. I reminded Taz that he didn't want to end up at a place like that.
Nor, I casually mentioned, did he want to end up in military school. Taz didn't know what military school was, so I explained it. It was a concept that had been prominently featured in one of The Sopranos episodes that Elon and I greatly enjoyed watching together, the one where A.J. got expelled from school, and Tony said to Carmela: “No more fucking schools that coddle him.”
When they went to tour a military school, Carmela told a school official: “I do not agree with this hard-nosed discipline.”
“Mothers seldom do,” the official said.
At this point in our viewing of the episode, Elon turned to me and said, “See?”
“See what?” I said in an indignant tone of voice.
“Well, you're always making excuses for him!”
“OK,” I admitted, “I'm a wimp when it comes to punishment. But I don't see you coming up with a magic solution!”
If you are married and have children, I'm sure I don't have to continue this conversation for you, because you've probably had one just like it at some poin
t in your family life. Or maybe, as with us, every day is Groundhog Day and like in the movie, you keep having the conversation over and over again but never manage to solve the problem of how to discipline your children.
Meanwhile, back in The Sopranos episode, Carmela was questioning the official about the school's approach. “What about creativity? Independent thought?” she said.
“We've created too many options for our kids,” the official responded.
But options in my world were in short supply as I contemplated what to do with Taz if he couldn't hack it at this high school. One idea I mentioned to Taz was the possibility of going to live with his grandma, who has a perfectly nice high school in her town that anyone can go to as long as they live there.
Taz loves his grandma; they have a special bond. But leaving our neighborhood to live with her was not all that appealing as a solution to the high school crisis. I mean, maybe Taz wouldn't have minded leaving his parents and his brother, but there is no way he was leaving the dog. And his grandma definitely had no interest in adopting Buddy.
Although I had pretty much made up my mind that I couldn't get as involved in the homework as the adviser had suggested, I still worried whether I had made the right decision. I talked to a lot of other mothers, but they were not always comforting. Some were far less involved than I was, and the results were scary— kids flunking classes, going to summer school, sometimes being sent away to alternative schools.
On the other side of the coin, some parents were way more involved than I was, keeping track of assignments the way Taz's adviser had suggested, and guiding their kids to activities in order to “build résumés” in anticipation of college applications that were still more than three years away.
When I talked to parents of younger kids, they nodded sympathetically, but I could tell they thought I was one of those Degenerate Moms with Matching Kid. They simply could not imagine their own darling nine-year- olds, whose homework assignments came home covered in smiley- face stickers from the third- grade teacher every day, getting a D in school.
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