I did two things today. Well, two major things. I spent my
afternoon in a marathon faculty meeting from which we emerged, I am proud to
say, with a kick ass syllabus for this semester. The lectures are all assigned,
the paper deadlines align with necessary deficiency report and midterm grade
dates, all of the readings are accounted for, and we even planned in a few
writing workshops and catch-up days. I can’t wait for the fall.
Slightly less productive but certainly as passionate was my
morning mission to help my son learn to crawl. It’s hard, as an adult who has
been walking for over thirty years and is far too evolved for crawling, to
remember or have patience for how difficult it is. My little guy wants to hold
your hands and walk around the house for hours. He’ll hold your hands and reach
down to pick something up, bend his knees to sit down, even reach out to pet
the dog. But he won’t do any of it on his own. Yes, he can hold himself up on
furniture, but you have to put his hands there first. And he hasn’t figured out
that if he lets go, he will fall. This always surprises him. (Thankfully, he
rarely cries, just gives you a confused expression that says, “How did I get
down here?”)
My husband and I have heard plenty of stories about children
who never learned to crawl, so on some level, it’s not that important to us.
But we do want him to be mobile. So much of his development—being able to pull
up on furniture, to lower himself to a sitting position, even just to get some
good exercise—depends on it. So every day we do the same thing: put him on his
tummy, place some toys out and a pacifier out of reach, and wait. And every day
he responds the same way: he flips to his back and cries. Screams, rather. All
the while wearing this confused expression that makes you feel like perhaps
you are traumatizing him and it may come back to bite you later.
Patience, in general, has never been my strong suit. Perhaps
this is why I love working with college students. I know they have developed
the cognitive abilities to comprehend what I am teaching them, and the skills
to immediately follow and adapt my instructions, honing their talents until
they have come up with a finished product all their own. I love witnessing this
development over the course of a semester-long writing class, and if I am lucky
enough to have these same students in class again, it is an added treat.
Teaching a person to write doesn’t happen overnight, of course, but there are
so many more benchmarks to celebrate.
Babies, on the other hand, seem to go from seem to go from
not crawling to crawling everywhere, from being too scared to walk on their own
to taking off and never stopping. I’m sure there are far more stages that I
just don’t see, probably because I’m not trained to see them. It is frustrating,
though. I spent two hours with three fabulous colleagues and we solved every
scheduling issue and came up with a great syllabus. It’s a strange position to
find yourself in when you realize that the reason your son can’t crawl is not
because you haven’t demonstrated the positioning well enough, or because you
haven’t given him enough incentive—it is simply because he’s not ready to crawl
yet. At school, my job is not about waiting for students to decide they’re
ready to attempt a daunting task; it’s about instilling them with the
confidence to do things they’ve never done before, and encouraging them along
the way. I can certainly encourage my son, but somehow smiling and squealing,
“Come on, you can do it!” just seems to piss him off.
Then again, my students were made ready for college by
countless dedicated teachers before me, teachers who taught them to write in
cursive on that funny lined paper, to follow the adventures of Nan and Dan and
their dog Spot, to underline topic sentences and circle supporting sentences
and use commas and spell (well, sometimes) and I’m sure at times those teachers
felt like I do—that they will never see the end result of all their hard work.
But maybe each step is an end in itself. A middle school teacher will never be satisfied
if he expects to see a college-level research paper. But a soul-baring personal
narrative with correct paragraphing and dialogue? Now that’s something.
My son will progress at his own pace. This I’ve learned. He
will reach for toys in front of him, pulling himself onto his tummy and for a
few optimistic seconds I think he might just do it … but then he flops his
knees behind him and lies whimpering on his tummy while his pacifier remains
ever so slightly out of reach. I’m learning to appreciate these moments for
what they are—steps in a gradual process—rather then viewing each one as a
failure on my part to help him crawl. It’s a learning process for both of us, and
I am learning to see and celebrate these small victories a little more each
day.
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