Tough Love Alternative

A little something for my colleagues in education.


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Brown Paper Packages

It was the first week of school. Our car crept through morning traffic in the school drop-off chute. To my pleasant surprise, my nearly-nine-year-old daughter selected My Favorite Things from a playlist on my iPod; a jazzy, scatting rendition from an obscure, 1965 Al Jarreau record. She’d have probably preferred Julie Andrews, but I like my show tunes with a little soul. She’d been obsessed with the song for a over a week, since we watched a rousing performance of The Sound of Music at an outdoor amphitheater in the mountains above our California home. Her younger brother watched her worshipfully as she sang along in the backseat. “Raindrop in roses and whisperon kittens, bricoppaettls and warm wooom mitten, round paper packages tied up wiffstin, thee or a few of my favorite things.” A double smile crossed my face. Nothing amuses me as much as my normally shy daughter’s willingness to mangle songs in the backseat when she doesn’t realize anyone’s listening. But my smile a
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Self Discovery

I was recently searching for eponymous urls at godaddy.com. As one does. I was not surprised to discover that JessePearson.com was “already taken!” I searched a few other domain variants; jesse-pearson.com, jpearson.com, jwpearson.com. (I wanted something that ended in .com because I am old and frightened of newness and change.) I settled on jessewpearson.com . The “w” stands for Bill, which stands for William. I was satisfied with this result. I like to publish under my full name anyway. I think it sounds more writerly or, at least, more publish-y. I spent a few minutes contemplating how many years I wanted to own this piece of virtual real estate. (I settled on three and saved a couple bucks. I could have saved more if I’d gone for five, but I’ve joined 24-Hour Fitness one too many times to fall for that trick again). Then I began to wonder. Who is the other Jesse Pearson? Do people find him when they are looking for me? And what do they find? A few Google-mome
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The Sibling Bucket

Notes from today’s HIKE… We’d been hiking for 90 minutes when the counting started. “One, two, three, four…” My five year-old son began verbally marking each of the steps required to get home. He was tired. I didn’t blame him. The HIKE (as the WALK is known when kids are involved) can be stretched to several miles. There’s a lot of up and down, especially when your legs are the length of a stick of salami, and not quite as muscular. As kids go, mine hike better than most, particularly if they don’t realize they’re hiking. I tend to say things like Let’s go look for banana slugs in the woods or Want to go find a good tree to climb? I don’t think of this as lying. It’s more like clever packaging. By the time they realize they’re exhausted, we’re an hour away from home and they’ve got no choice but to hike back. I am either building their stamina or teaching them not to be so trusting. Either way, a win-win in my book. Unlike her brother, the eight year-old fancies herself
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