My son Ro, who is four, just started in a soccer league. Four year-olds don't know attention is a thing that can have a span-- their coaches have to mix it up to keep them engaged. When their sweet Coach N explained, "Now I am a shark, and you are fish crossing my ocean, and if your ball gets away from you, I'll eat you!," they took him very seriously. They didn't want to get eaten on the first day of practice. Who does? Also four year-olds excel at being literal. When It Comes to Sports, Love (and Writing), Mix It Up! The lead coach, who has been coordinating community soccer leagues since I was four, watched from the sidelines, and played rapturously with my 1 year-old. He was chatty, and did not stop talking if you were within reaching distance. At the end of the clinic, while he watched Ro eat peanut butter and honey, he waxed on about the league he started in New Jersey for Orthodox Jewish (OJ) kids on Sundays. They couldn't play on Saturday, regular Soccer Day, because of observing the Sabbath. Turned out local Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) kids also couldn't play on Saturdays because THEY also observe the Sabbath. So eventually some SDA kids migrated onto the OJ team. Then parents showed up to watch. Turned out a number of the parents were widowed or otherwise single (the divorce scene is opaque). Slowly, mutual romantic interests developed--"mixing" between the adults. The kids didn't get eaten by sharks, made goals and dirtied knees across religious lines, and god didn't smite anyone. Meanwhile, the parents flirted and paired off. A Good Story is Still Good the Millionth Time! I could tell the coach had told this story a million times before. But Ro didn't mind, because he was eating ALL the peanut butter and honey and admiring his shin guards. And Aria didn't mind, because she was busy trying to pick up the cones that marked the sidelines and cigarette butts on the astroturf (really?). And I generally like people telling stories Continue Reading …
Wisdom
Parents, Don’t Lose it Over the Essay
Last year I was a contributor at TeenLife Mag and got to offer some advice on one of my favorite subjects: relationships. In particular, how parents and kids can avoid losing it over the college essay. I'm a parent and step-parent now, and I really get how tricky it can be. We all need reminders that our relationship with our kid is faaaaar more important than anything we might want for them to accomplish. It doesn't always feel that way-- when our kids don't want our input. It doesn't always feel that way-- when our kids act annoyed that we parents seem so focused on a deadline. It doesn't always feel that way-- when we parents worry about the future. It doesn't always feel that way-- when we parents think our kid might be too focused, too stressed, and we want them to take a breather. An Interactive Talk For Parents (Let's Not Lose our Shiz!) If you're local to Brooklyn, you can come to an interactive talk at Bee Tutored-- register here. If you're not local, we can book a phone session. This might be the most important thing I have to offer, and that you have to offer: love, love, love. It looks different in every family system, just like every family looks different. I'll offer tools to help your inner world when the outer world is just a tad nutty. Please come be part of the conversation! We can take back the college essay! Continue Reading …
Power of mixing
When stakes are high in writing (like, say, is true for the college essay) we can forget how much joy there is in mixing unlikely things together. This is a form of play young children know well, and shed reluctantly. Only after enough adults have said, "You can't do X with Y!" a la "You can't put a POTATO on the TRAIN TRACK!" does the kid eventually "get it" = the adult world is full of arbitrary rules, and really missing out on the power of mixing up. We need our poets to keep our language lively This morning, the power of mixing tackled me from the first lines of Terence Hayes's poem "When James Baldwin & Audre Lorde each lend Stevie Wonder an eyeball/ he immediately contends with gravity, falling either to his knees/or flat on His luminous face." I mean, lend an eyeball? Thanks, guys. We know right away we're in the presence of a player. In mixing surprise with pragmatism, absurdity with serious verbs (lend...contends...falling), Terence says: get in on this, it's going to be good. I'm not going to give you what you expect, because you don't want me to. And did you notice the rock stars in my poem? Be the kind of player who mixes meanings Speaking of players; There were plenty of the other kind of player in my high school and college (both elite institutions, GULP!), the sort who slept with girls and then thought nothing of ranking those experiences on a scale of crap to Cardi B the next morning in public lounges. The only reason those guys were fun to be around was the same reason anyone wound up the topic of their conversation: they kept it light, everything, even themselves, was a joke. I mention them because they were mean: but the player of words is not mean, though perhaps slicing. The poet players are truth-chasers. When Terence plays, we have to play along. The poem is full of nouns, and potential white-people repellent. Nods at lyrics and artistic endeavors, "inner visions" of Wonder are now populated (purpled!) with Continue Reading …
Math and Talking About Feelings
Math and I are old Frenemies. We whisper about each other behind each other's backs-- word problems indeed. In this area, it's hard to talk about my feelings-- where they came from, how gendered they might be. Maybe you can relate, or maybe you can't; maybe numbers make you feel confident, like whatever is quantifiable is also manageable. Maybe you love equations more than, say, a great burrito. For a moment, I'm looking at the other side of the story. I mostly avoid math, though I do run a business (hi!). In that business, I help students write personal essays that must meet unforgiving word or character count limits. So the math I use most on a daily basis is addition (do these words surpass limit?) and subtraction (what can we take out to be under the word count limit?). With these numbers in mind, I pull the gem sentences and phrases from the slush sentences. I'm comfortable with these constraints. I'd happily do that for you. Getting 2,071 words down to 650 doesn't scare me. Tax Day means Math Day Problems All my feelings about math resurface on Tax day, the math-iest day on the calendar. Tax day, thankfully, falls during Poetry Month. Now poetry I get. That's really moved society forward. You can sign up for poem-a-day here. Most, but not all, of my clients & students are too young to pay taxes as head of household, so they (you) are not exactly sharing my pain on tax day (yet). But no one is too young to understand what giant horse-crap taxes are. The less you have, the more you pay. I work with students from families across the economic spectrum. For complicated reasons, and due to unforgiving math, my own economic situation is sometimes perilous. It's good for empathy. If I possibly can, I offer sliding scale as an option for payment. I understand. But at least I wrote off all those books I bought. After Math Day comes Non-Violent Day So April 16th is a great day in the world of ordinal numbers because it means Continue Reading …
When Should You Start Your College Essay?
As a college essay writing coach, I get this question all the time from parents (less so from students, hmmm): when is THE BEST time to start writing the college essay? Writing process is highly individual And my honest answer is: I don't know. That's because I believe and have seen that the process is highly individual. February? April? The Summer? Fall? The minute the Common App releases their questions? To the chagrin of some parents, I really can't tell you. Exactly how long does it take a tide to pull back? Bread to rise? Continue Reading …
Student Essay: Books Are Bombs
Celine Lubin, whose personal essay "Books Are Bombs" appears here, is one of my 7th grade students in my "Word Up" class at the TEAK Fellowship. She chose to write this personal essay responding to my prompt, "What is something you learned that you were never supposed to know?" We had just read Sherman Alexie's essay, "Superman and Me," on his subversive literacy and literary journey. (I also explained his fall from grace for mistreatment of women and abuse of power--perhaps also something we, his readers, were never supposed to know.) Celine always has her hand up and her sharing motor on, but her learning curve was sharper in acquiring craft and polish. This essay, "Books are Bombs," is one of her true composition accomplishments, and also the product of a deeply creative and funny mind. Celine Lubin-- Books Are Bombs My mother has been telling me my entire life, “Education is power.” The first time she brought it up I was but a short little second grader who was scared of her own shadow. Whenever I heard the saying “Books are bombs,” which was ever so often from my reading teacher Ms. Brown, it would send me ducking and heading for cover, sheltering myself under the desk. She explained to me that they weren’t literal bombs, but figurative ones. This only added to my suspicions, that books were bombs that came in many shapes and sizes and were dangerous and could never be trusted. Somewhere along the line within the course of the next two years, I became quite fond of books. Each time I had looked in one’s direction or became daring enough to peek through its pages, I thought how organized, how smooth, how refined, how interesting. With these brave ideas exploding in thought, I became fascinated with how to read. Soon I learned how to read with the help of Ms. Brown and two other reading teachers. Not just how to read, but how hard it was. Unconsciously I felt how lucky I was to receive that opportunity. With each page, I became more enlightened and my Continue Reading …