Does life have meaning? I used to think it was a slam dunk it did. But now in the middle of the night, as I stare at the computer, I am wondering.
And then, suddenly, I am not lying: the dog, who is sitting behind me as he usually does, with no reason reaches out and licks the screen and suddenly the microphone turns on. It’s 3:00 AM.
How did this happen? He never licked the screen before, let alone in such a way that a microphone appeared. I don’t even know how he did it. I’ve never ever turned the microphone on for this computer in the seven years I’ve had it.
Well, since he turned it on, the original draft of this post will be spoken.
Three a.m., What Am I Doing Awake?
Now: why am I up at 3 a.m.? Besides wondering does life have meaning. Well, I went to bed at 9 and woke up at 1:30 and started to worry about what Andrew was doing. Worrying about what other people are doing is a longstanding problem with me. I know I’m not the only one, but it still makes me mad when I catch myself doing it.
What happened was this: I had left the ski racks at the kitchen table today and give him instructions to put them on the car for our ski trip tomorrow and he hadn’t touched them when I came home from work and by the time I went to bed I had told him to put them on three or four times and that qualifies as nagging. I knew I was out of line and I was being controlling and that he might even be refusing to put them on just because I was being overbearing. I woke up at 1:30 and shuddered to think the ski racks might still be on the kitchen table.
We had a snow day yesterday and I don’t mind a snow day and just about no one does. But somehow the snow day got used for a bunch of things that were more irritating than uplifting. Working around the house, doing my hair, talking to Tiara about hard parts of her job, finally planning some fun going skiing cross country in the park and then, once I got out there, realizing that despite my best effort to dress warmly 7 degrees was too much for of all things my mittens.
Existential Angst: Does Life Have Meaning? And What About My Job?
I read for a bit on something teachers call the Reading Wars. Emily Hanford is a journalist who this year created her podcast expose’, Sold a Story, and what she has called the Science of Reading. This is basically about how for over twenty years teachers and universities have refused to promote the teaching of phonics to primary students even though there is overwhelming brain research evidence (as well as data) that demonstrates that without phonics 20 to 30 percent of kids will never be proficient readers.
This made me depressed.Because, although finally it’s getting some notice, I have been talking about this very problem for over thirty years, since Scarlett went to Kindergarten in Irvine, California and they said they weren’t going to teach her the whole alphabet, only nineteen letters. My response was home schooling. But it was her brother, Victor, who really set my feet on the phonics trail. He was the one who was in fourth grade and couldn’t read more than three letters in a string. Phonics remediation resulted in a miracle. He could read.
It seems so obvious and every time I hear someone attack phonics teaching, I think of my son a lifetime illiterate and I become violently angry. Of the hundreds of children that I’ve now taught to read using phonics, had someone else taught them, they might never have been able to read. I turn this over in my head.
Did My Efforts to Teach Them Matter?
I have staked my career on doing that instruction but now in my 50s I find myself discouraged. I think this is true of many careers. You help people and maybe you change their lives. And as part of being human they don’t remember to thank you. You wonder if this thing you did needed to be done at all.
Andrew stays up till 2:00 AM every morning but this time at 3:00 AM he is still up and he decides to go out and shovel the walk. It has been snowing all day. He shoveled it once at three p.m. and now at 3:00 a.m. there’s three more inches of snow on the ground. I look out the window and I see him in his bib snow overalls and parka with the fur around his face. It’s now 9 degrees below. He goes around shoveling and makes perfect square corners on the edge of the walk.
He didn’t use to shovel the walk. I had to do it and then over Christmas we had a big argument and I said “look you live here you’ve got to help. I can’t be expected to do everything.”
Andrew Himself Must Wonder Does Life Have Meaning? And He’s Changed His Tune
Since then he’s done the shoveling. As I watch him, I think he is growing up he’s learned you can put these things off but not forever. And as long as you’re out there doing it, you might as well do it well. And as I was there watching shoveling from the bedroom window I felt a little bit of happiness and I thought young people are the hope for the world. He wasn’t refusing to do it, he was asserting that he would do it on his own schedule. Just like his older brother learned to read on his own schedule. But not without help. And, I realize, teaching reading is worthwhile even if the kids you teach never know that they were at risk to become illiterate. Maybe it’s worth a lot that they don’t know.
And when I went to the kitchen, the ski racks had been put on the car. He did it while I was sleeping. When I stopped worrying about it.
I begin to accept that just being here is all I’m here for. I remember all those years of telling my own kids “You don’t have to set the world on fire.” Now I think I said it, but for me maybe I didn’t actually understand. It’s true, I don’t have to set the world on fire. I didn’t have to explain to other teachers that the curriculum they were using was ineffective. I never have to ask for thanks from the kids I taught to read. My grandiose vision of my own importance? It can be shelved. I don’t need it anymore. Maybe I never did. Does life have meaning? Of course it does. It’s just so hard to believe that when you’re in a bad mood.
I think I’ll be thinking about that a lot this week.
