Everything I Ever Needed to Know

Everything I ever needed to know about my children’s education I learned from Pop Leary. How can that be when he died more than twenty years before my birth? Through the stories my father shares: Pop was a hard labor sort of man, as the story goes, he kept his boys busy with chores, but not just any chores, they had real chores. At one point, Pop bought a house that had burned to the ground in a hellacious fire. The boys dug all of the rubble out of the basement, then Pop helped them build a roof over the basement and it became their home, they called it the “hole in the ground.” One may think, after all of that work, they have a home, so all is well, but Pop wasn’t done yet. He bought a cinder block maker and every day the boys came home from school to make blocks. When enough blocks were made Pop would jack up the roof of the house and the boys would add a layer of blocks to the basement. This process was repeated until they added a first floor onto the hole in the ground. There was another time that the family moved, Pop bought a horse carriage, but not the horse, they loaded up the carriage and the boys pulled the carriage to their new home. Again, the process was repeated until the job was done. What does all of this have to do with education? Well, my father would come home from school with a mountain of books claiming he had a ton of homework, thus avoiding the hard labor his brothers endured. Not only was he intelligent enough to think of this, but his constant “homework” made him even more intelligent. Here’s the thing though, maybe Pop assigned that hard work hoping all the children would respond like my dad did. What makes you say that? I just got done having an hour long conversation with one of my children about missing assignments in several classes. No doubt, she’s a smart cookie, but chooses not to do the work. I told her what Pop did with his children and she said, “If I had to do all that when I got home from school I’d bring home a ton of homework too!” Bring on the cinder block maker; my daughter is going to build us a house!