A birthday, a school success, and a recipe

 We celebrated Chuck's 66th birthday yesterday. He is one of four extended family birthdays on that exact day. According to Google, more people are born in August in any other month. We don't fit that pattern. 

Chuck chose pork chops for his birthday supper, and chocolate cake with caramel frosting for dessert. No surprises there. He enjoyed all the greetings and phone calls and the disc golf that happened on this warm December afternoon.

 Do you want to build a snowman?

Well yes, even if it takes rolling up nearly every bit of snow in the yard! Remote school went pretty well Thursday. We quit early for lunch and then used most of our lunch time outdoors. 

It had gotten warmer so only our wet hands were cold, and the snow was very sticky, making it not too hard to make quick progress. The only hindrance was that there was not a lot of snow and there were a lot of leaves, so we had to do a lot of rolling to make a couple of small snow people.

Learning from school

We had a win the other day in our tiny remote schooling world. The day went on mostly as usual, but better. With the younger two, the small adjustments we have made on our own, combined with the adjustments the teachers have made, are finally becoming comfortable most of the time. 

There is still a bit of flurry for me in managing one child’s individual school work while a second child is in a google meet with their teacher. Paying close attention to one means I often miss important information given by the teacher of another during their live meet. So I bounce back and forth between rooms to try to manage both.

Meanwhile, the oldest is left fending for himself. That has not worked so well. I think I’ve mentioned before that I have had a pretty big learning curve in understanding how the middle school curriculum and web accountability worked. The administration and teachers have made big changes, in order to make themselves more available to the students and parents. These seem to be good changes. Adapting to the change has its own challenges. Now, however, we are seeing results. My grandson started that day with some hard, but honest, feedback from a teacher on a project, and managed to pull himself out of his disappointment and into his work. By the end of the day he had made real progress in several areas. He was able to genuinely say that he really enjoyed school and almost didn’t want to quit for the day. 

It was the difference, in my opinion, between uncertain learning and confident learning. 

It seemed to me that possibly we were all (students, parents, teachers) working in an atmosphere of uncertainty about how this would work, whether we were able to make it work, and whether we were ‘the problem’ if it wasn’t working. That last bit is probably the most influential. When dealing with some shame or embarrassment about it possibly being my fault for not being good enough to make this work, it is pretty easy to slip quickly into a lot of unhelpful coping skills. Blaming others, for example. Or worrying that I might be 'the problem'. .

The temptation to blame takes the focus off what I might be doing wrong. But neither focus is as helpful as recognizing that most of us are trying hard to make a hard thing work.  

With my grandson, in the weeks leading up to this change, I wondered why he felt so defensive. Suggestions from me frequently were met with a list of reasons why those suggestions were impossible and would not work. I began to recognize that my suggestions were likely reinforcing the perception that he was “the problem”. He is NOT the problem.

In my mind, things began to turn last week, when we  were talking about learning styles. We were brainstorming what study technique would work for him better than the method I was asking him to use. Suddenly it was not about what he was doing wrong or whether he was trying hard enough. It was about what tools were available to make his goals easier and more attainable. It was about his style of learning and how he could use it to his advantage. He was so responsive, and took initiative to do more than I’d asked of him. He became more himself. It was a good day. Since then he's been eager to show and tell me the next things he has mastered.

Lastly, I tried a new recipe this week. I've always loved these cookies but never tried to make them. When King Arthur Bakery put a recipe up in their feed, that was the tipping point I needed.