Sometimes life’s best lessons come with a rake

Why, yes, of course the world has gone crazy. The monkeys are in charge of the zoo. The center cannot hold. Will the last sane person out please turn off the lights?

Pick your metaphor.

The point is, much of modern life makes no sense at all. Common sense is no longer all that common. And nowhere is this truer than in the way in which we now bring up our kids.

For thousands of years, each generation of children was raised in much the same way as the generation which preceded it. Good behavior was rewarded, bad behavior was punished.

A parent’s job was to feed and clothe the child until such time as that child got a) a job, b) married, or c) drafted. An educator’s job was to make sure the child could a) read, b) write, and c) figger numbers.

Beyond that, the kid’s fate was in his or her own hands.

Then came Dr. Spock, self-esteem, organized pee-wee football, baseball, softball, professional piano lessons, soccer, karate, ballet, gymnastics, swimming, upscale preschools, upscale pre-preschools … the list goes on.

Good behavior was still rewarded. So was bad behavior. And mediocre behavior. And no behavior at all. Why? See Dr. Spock and self-esteem, above.

Parents were too busy driving junior to all these “fun” organized activities to actually do any parenting themselves. So teachers were asked to do that job in their stead, and to fit in the teaching thing whenever they had a few spare minutes.

It’s a great system, assuming you’re trying to churn out a generation of pathological narcissists devoid of any sense of personal responsibility. In his later years, Dr. Spock himself backtracked on many of his child-rearing theories, but, oops! By then, the damage was already done.

Too many people had been brought up worrying WAY too much about parenting issues that previous generations had never even considered. There are those, even now, who still contend modern child rearing techniques are vastly superior to those of their parents’ or grandparents’ day.

To which I say, really? Do your kids treat you with the same respect you showed your own parents?  If the answer is “yes,” I’m betting you raised them pretty much as your parents raised you and you’re wondering who this Dr. Spock person is that I keep mentioning.

I love my old man, but as a child, I feared him, too. He put up with exactly zero BS from myself, my brothers and my sisters. I often thought he was unfair and sometimes he was. 

But with him, I knew where I stood. I had my part to play in the family and he had his. If I was bored, he didn’t rush to the psychologist’s office to see what he, as a parent, was doing wrong. He handed me a rake and put me to work in the back yard until I wasn’t bored anymore.

If I was angry or upset, I was encouraged to say exactly what was on my mind, just as soon as I was out of earshot.

My old man didn’t feel an urgent need to make sure my every waking moment was filled with educational activities designed to bolster my self-esteem. Hence, I learned how to make friends, join pickup softball games, climb trees and figure out for myself how to enjoy life.

Why am I on this particular soapbox today? Well, I just read an article about a school in England that has banned the game of hide and seek.

Hide and seek promotes “secretive play,” administrators say. It sends “mixed messages,” they say. It exposes children to “dangerous situations.”

I only wish I was making this up.

My own son, many years ago, was sent home from third grade for breaking the playground rules. He and a friend were playing cowboys and Indians, using their pointed index fingers as six-shooters.

Such brutality, such mindless violence, I was informed, would not be tolerated on the playground.

It seemed crazy to me then and it seems crazy to me now. But then again, I was raised by a man who handed me a rake when I got bored. So what do I know.

Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com. 

Public education; maybe it’s time to suspend Socrates

Have you read about Natalie Munroe, the Philadelphia high school teacher suspended for posting unflattering blogs about her students? Ms. Munroe identifies neither herself nor her school in her blog, but a couple students recognized themselves and went whining to school administrators, who did as school administrators always do: they wilted like salt-covered garden slugs.

According to Munroe, she was only telling it like it is.

“My students are out of control,” Munroe wrote. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

How dare Ms. Munroe say such dreadful (and undoubtedly accurate and applicable) things about the blameless angels she must contend with every day?

And how typical that the school’s administrators should penalize her for her words, rather than consider the possibility she’s right and that it is virtually impossible to actually teach in many modern classrooms, owing in large part to the fact that students really are “rude, disengaged, lazy whiners.”

It’s so much easier to simply shoot the messenger.

Besides, shooting the messenger makes parents happy, the same parents who created and coddled the rude, disengaged, lazy whiners in the first place.

If the ‘80s really were the “Me Generation,” today’s youth are the “Me Me Me Now Now Now and Nobody Else, Ever!” crowd. The chimps are in charge of the zoo.

I blame it on the death of Sister Sulpischia, about whom I’ve written before, and other teachers like her. Sister Sulpischia (known to her students and fellow faculty members as “The Moose”) was 200 pounds of black-robed, rosary-thumping fury who ruled over her fourth-grade charges with a ferocity rarely seen outside rabid wolverine attacks.

I was one of her students and like most kids my age, I was by nature a rude, disengaged, lazy whiner. But not in the Moose’s class. Sitting only two rows from the good sister’s watchful eye, I was attentive, polite, engaged and determined to live to see fifth grade.

Sure, there were some kids, even back then, who had the guts to smart off to Sister Sulpischia. We all missed them during their protracted convalescences.

Do I really wish teachers were still allowed to clobber students? Well, no, I guess not. I mean, I do still remember the perve-o gym teacher I had in ninth grade who should have been in A) therapy, B) prison, or C) the Ninth Circle of Hell.

But I do wish there were at least a few administrators willing to back their teachers, stand up to the sort of parents who think their innocent babies can do no wrong, and insist that students who prevent other kids from learning be sent packing.

One of the greatest teachers of all time, Socrates, is credited with saying, “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”

Good thing he didn’t post this on his blog; he’d have been suspended.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. BUY MY BOOK!! at www.mtrealitycheck.com.

Accept the compliments and you may wind up with your head on a stick

I’m a sucker for a compliment. Tell me I’m wonderful and I’ll hand over my wallet, credit cards and banking information. Maybe I’m insecure, maybe I’m just a big, dumb male. Whatever the case, I pant like a happy dachshund whenever someone tells me they like my work. If I had a tail, I’d wag it.

So when the letter from Collins Elementary School teacher Marnie TenCate arrived last week in my electronic in-box, I was immediately taken with her altogether accurate, 100 percent spot-on review of this column.

I have been using you for the past few years and you haven’t even known it! writes Ms TenCate. I teach second grade and clip your article just about every single week because you always have such fabulous writing with voice! I especially enjoy the lead, and so do my second graders.

Ms. TenCate goes on to say she uses my column as an example of good writing. My column! I know, I couldn’t believe it either. But she certainly had my attention.

Ms. TenCate adds she spends an hour each day writing with her students; a teacher after my own heart. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they come up with … or maybe you would, she writes.

I would indeed. Some of the most honest writing I’ve read has been penned by elementary school students. It’s only in later years we learn to water down our thoughts; to “soften,” to “spin.” We build little walls around our feelings and lose our ability to use words in an unashamedly truthful manner.

If Ms. TenCate and teachers like her can help stem that sad tide, I’m behind ‘em all the way.

But I try to stay waaaaaaaaay behind them. Away from the students.

Why? Because kids scare me. Don’t get me wrong, I love children … as individuals. Sometimes even in groups of two or three. But a whole classroom full of apple-cheeked, toe-headed, sneaker-footed second-graders? Yikes!

I’m not afraid they’re going to hurt me, exactly, like some angry Transylvanian mob storming Castle Frankenstein. I just don’t understand them. Looking out over a group of second-grade kids, I can’t tell if they’re thinking about the corn dogs they had for lunch, marbles, Barbie, Play Station II, or the possibility of reenacting a scene from “Lord of the Flies” with me playing the role of the decapitated pig.

So I snapped back to reality in a hurry when Ms. TenCate asked if I would visit the school and speak to her second-graders.

I was wondering if you would come in some day so they can meet you; a real published author! Ms. TenCate writes.

She then mentions – by way of sweetening the deal – that her husband works for Hershey and could probably set me up with some free chocolate. Ms. TenCate knows all my weaknesses, apparently, for she goes on to relate the fact that there are several cute, single teachers plying their trade at Collins Elementary School. I like teachers, and cute, single ones rank especially high on my “things of interest” list.

It has been a week now and I still haven’t responded to Ms. TenCate’s letter. I hate to disappoint a reader (since I have so few of them), but I’m chicken as all get-out about appearing before those kids.

What would I say? What if they ask me questions I can’t answer? What if they suddenly light torches and rush me, yelling, “Kill the pig! Kill the pig!” I’m not sure I can handle that kind of pressure.

But I’ll probably do it anyway. After all, Ms. TenCate called my writing “fabulous.” That doesn’t happen often.

Maybe I could just send her my credit cards and banking information.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.