PHARMACY.UNC.EDU
AUDIENCE NEEDS
Audience Profile
The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s website audience comprises three main groups of people. The first audience group is prospective students, who visit the site for more information on the School’s curriculum and programs. The website’s primary function is to attract these top-notch students to our PharmD and PhD programs. To do this, the website highlights faculty and student achievements and accomplishments. The website also publicizes the School’s ranking and status among pharmacy schools across the United States.
The second audience group is made up of current students, faculty, and staff. These people visit the site for accurate and up-to-date information about departments, programs, and events happening at the School. They also frequent the site seeking contact information for people associated with the School.
The last audience group consists of alumni and people affiliated with national pharmacy organizations, grant-making foundations, and government bodies. These people visit the site looking for information on specific faculty members and their research and certain School programs to determine if these initiatives are worthy of funding and support.
Primary Purpose of Publication
Within pharmacy.unc.edu, the School maintains a current news section. In this section, we publicize recent events, as well as faculty, staff, and student accomplishments. This section is used to inform readers of important happenings and spark enthusiasm for our programs. We hope prospective students read this section and feel excited about the idea of joining our team, and we hope current students and faculty read this section and feel proud of their achievements. Lastly, we hope to impress organizations and people looking to fund our programs and convince them that their support goes toward life-changing research and stellar students.
Frequency of Publication
The current news section is updated regularly and does not follow a strict schedule. Stories are published as events unfold at the School. This section is designed to make readers feel fully in the loop, as if they’re missing nothing that happens at the School.
Competition for the Same Readers/Viewers
Other pharmacy school websites serve as the main competition for the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s site. As of July 2013, 129 pharmacy schools exist in the United States. Last year, more than 2,000 students began working toward PharmDs at accredited pharmacy schools across the country. As more students seek pharmacy careers and the field becomes more saturated, the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy strives to attract the best and brightest students in the country in order to produce the best and brightest pharmacists in the country. The School’s website must stand out against other pharmacy school websites and convince top students to apply to the program and organizations and individuals to support our programs.
The School also competes with national pharmacy organizations—such as the American Pharmacists Association, American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and the American College of Clinical Pharmacy—for readers. Alumni often visit these sites for information on current research and best practices. The School’s site must convince readers that it provides better and more accurate information in these areas.
Style Issues
The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy follows the Chicago Manual of Style. We also have our own style guide here. All writing on the website must adhere to these style guides.
Information Challenges
In order to publicize the accomplishments of our faculty, staff, and students, we need to hear about these accomplishments. Because the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy is spread across multiple buildings and even multiple campuses, one of the biggest challenges facing the School’s website is collecting information. Encouraging participation in social media opens vital conversations and begs input into story topics and creation. Social media also allow us to publicize stories and spread news to all constituents.
FEATURE STORY FOR PHARMACY.UNC.EDU
Next week, Emeritus Dean Bill Campbell returns to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy to discuss the importance of mentoring and collaboration within health sciences. During his visit, Campbell, who served the School as dean from 1992 to 2003, is planning to talk to students and faculty, as well as deans from other health-oriented schools on campus. Campbell is also planning to visit with alumni who graduated within his tenure at the School. All of his visits will serve to unite the various arms of the School and encourage partnership.
To celebrate his return to campus, the School will feature a story highlighting the visit in the current news section of its website. In this feature story, we will explain Campbell’s legacy and influence on the School’s current curriculum. The story will also look at how Campbell inspires teamwork and helped throttle the School to its number two ranking in the U.S. News & World Report list of pharmacy programs in the country.
Because this story will be published on the School’s site, other schools can share it via social media to advertise their deans’ involvement in the visit.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Saturday, September 21, 2013
deploying lists
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a weekBy Karl Taro Greenfeld
Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.
Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone—students, teachers, schools—is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.
Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school.
I wonder: What is the exact nature of the work that is turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many mornings?
I decide to do my daughter’s homework for one typical week.
Monday
By late afternoon, I am tired after filing a magazine article on deadline. I’m not looking forward to homework. When I arrive home, a few minutes ahead of Esmee, I consider delaying my week of homework, but then I realize that Esmee can never put off her week of homework.So I am relieved when she tells me she doesn’t have much tonight. We have three tasks:
1. 11 Algebra Equations
Esmee’s algebra class is doing a section on polynomials, a word I haven’t heard in decades. The math is easier than I thought. We are simplifying equations, which involves reducing (–18m2n)2 (–1/6mn2) to –54m5n4, which I get the hang of again after Esmee’s good instructions. I breeze through those 11 equations in about 40 minutes and even correct Esmee when she gets one wrong. (I think. I may be overconfident.)
2. 79 Pages of Angela’s Ashes
We have to find “three important and powerful quotes from the section with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance.” I am surprised by the amount of reading. Reading and writing is what I do for a living, but in my middle age, I’ve slowed down. So a good day of reading for me, assuming I like the book and I’m not looking for quotable passages, is between 50 and 100 pages. Seventy-nine pages while scanning for usable material—for a magazine essay or for homework—seems like at least two hours of reading.
I’ve never read Angela’s Ashes, and it’s easy to see the appeal. Frank McCourt, whom I once saw give a beautiful tribute to Peter Matthiessen at a Paris Review Revel, is engaging and funny.
3. Study for Earth Science Test Tomorrow on Minerals
The textbook Esmee’s class is using is simply called Earth Science and was written by Edward J. Tarbuck and Frederick K. Lutgens. “The term synergistic applies to the combined efforts of Tarbuck and Lutgens,” says the biographical note at the beginning. “Early in their careers, they shared frustrations with the limited availability of textbooks designed for non-majors.” So they rolled up their sleeves and wrote their own textbook, which reads exactly like every other textbook. “If you look again at Table 1,” begins the section on silicates, “you can see that the two most abundant elements in Earth’s crust are silicon and oxygen.” I spend the next five minutes looking for Table 1, which is 12 pages earlier in the book.
Then come carbonates, oxides, the sulfates and sulfides, halides, and—I am asleep after about 20 minutes.
Total time: 3–5 hours
I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television. In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all.
If my daughter came home and said she had no homework, I would know she was lying. It is inconceivable that her teachers wouldn’t assign any.
What has changed? It seems that while there has been widespread panic about American students’ falling behind their peers in Singapore, Shanghai, Helsinki, and everywhere else in science and mathematics, the length of the school day is about the same. The school year hasn’t been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn time.
Every parent I know in New York City comments on how much homework their children have. These lamentations are a ritual whenever we are gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’ schools.
Is it too much?
Well, imagine if after putting in a full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday through Friday. Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?
Tuesday
My younger daughter, Lola, 11, is a little jealous that I am spending my evenings doing homework with her sister. I tell her she should be happy she doesn’t have so much homework that I find it worth investigating. She agrees with this, but still makes me feel so guilty about it that I let her watch Pretty Little Liars, her favorite show.The co-op board meets—and over my objections makes me secretary—before I can start on Esmee’s homework.
Tonight we have:
1. 12 More Algebra Problems
The algebra is fast becoming my favorite part of this project. I may have picked an easy week, but something about combining like terms, inverting negative exponents, and then simplifying equations causes a tingle in a part of my brain that is usually dormant. Also, the work is finite: just 12 equations.
2. 45 More Pages of Angela’s Ashes
3. One to Two Paragraphs for a Humanities Project
We have to write one to two pages in the style of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the young-adult novel by Sherman Alexie. Esmee calls her project “The Ten Secrets to Being the Only Sane Person in Your Family.”
No. 6: Don’t Listen to Anything Your Father Says.
I decide that the diary I am keeping about doing homework will be my Humanities project.
4. Study for Spanish Test Tomorrow on Irregular Verbs
The Spanish presents a completely different challenge. Here, Esmee shows me that we have to memorize the conjugations of the future tense of regular and irregular verbs, and she slides me a sheet with tener, tendré, tendrás, tendrá, tendremos, etc., multiplied by dozens of verbs. My daughter has done a commendable job memorizing the conjugations. But when I ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.”
She doesn’t know what the words mean.
I spend a few minutes looking over the material, attempting to memorize the list of verbs and conjugations. Then it takes me about half an hour to memorize the three most common conjugation patterns. I decide to skip the irregular verbs.
Total time: 3 hours
One evening when Esmee was in sixth grade, I walked into her room at 1:30 a.m. to find her red-eyed, exhausted, and starting on her third hour of math. This was partially her fault, as she had let a couple of days’ worth of worksheets pile up, but it was also the nature of the work itself. One assignment had her calculating the area and perimeter of a series of shapes so complex that my wife, who trained as an architect in the Netherlands, spent half an hour on it before coming up with the right answers. The problem was not the complexity of the work, it was the amount of calculating required. The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator. Another exercise required Esmee to find the distance from Sacramento—we were living in California—to every other state capital in America, in miles and kilometers. This last one caused me to question the value of the homework.
What possible purpose could this serve?, I asked her teacher in a meeting.
She explained that this sort of cross-disciplinary learning—state capitals in a math class—was now popular. She added that by now, Esmee should know all her state capitals. She went on to say that in class, when the students had been asked to name the capital of Texas, Esmee answered Texas City.
But this is a math class, I said. I don’t even know the state capitals.
The teacher was unmoved, saying that she felt the homework load was reasonable. If Esmee was struggling with the work, then perhaps she should be moved to a remedial class.
That night, in an e-mail chain started by the class parent to seek chaperones for a field trip, I removed the teacher’s name, changed the subject line, and then asked the other parents in the class whether their children found the homework load onerous.
After a few minutes, replies started coming in from parents along the lines of “Thank God, we thought we were the only ones,” “Our son has been up until 2 a.m. crying,” and so forth. Half the class’s parents responded that they thought too much homework was an issue.
Since then, I’ve been wary of Esmee’s workload, and I’ve often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea about the cumulative amount of homework the kids are assigned when they are taking five academic classes. There is little to no coordination among teachers in most schools when it comes to assignments and test dates.
Wednesday
This morning, we attended Lola’s class “celebration” of the Revolutionary War. The class had prepared dioramas of the role women played in the Revolution, the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Yorktown, and other signal events of the period. In hand-drawn murals explaining the causes of the conflict, the main theme was that excessive and unfair taxation had caused the colonies to rebel. The British had run up massive debts in the French and Indian War and wanted the colonists to repay them. The colonies also wanted, several children added, freedom. When pressed as to what that meant, they seemed unsure, until one boy came up with “Freedom to do what they want!”I came home and took a nap.
My older daughter’s homework load this evening:
1. Seven Algebra Equations
This algebra unit, on polynomials, seems to be a matter of remembering a few tricks. Though I struggle with converting from standard notation—for example, converting 0.00009621 to scientific notation is tricky (it’s 9.621 x 10¯5, which makes no intuitive sense to me)—it is pleasing that at some point I arrive at an answer, right or wrong, and my work is done and the teacher will give me credit for doing my homework.
2. Study for a Humanities Test on Industrialization
The upcoming test in Humanities will focus on John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, monopolies and trusts, laissez-faire capitalism, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the foundation of labor unions, the imposition of factory safety standards, and the populist response to the grim conditions of the working man during the Industrial Revolution. My daughter has a study guide she is ready to print out. But our printer has just broken.
We end up borrowing our neighbor’s printer. The logistics of picking up the printer, bringing it over to our apartment, downloading the software, and then printing take about half an hour.
The study guide covers a wide range of topics, from how Rockefeller gained control of the oil industry, to the rise of monopolies and trusts, to the Sherman Antitrust Act, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Esmee and I have a pretty long talk about the causes of the tragedy—the locked doors that prevented the young girls from taking breaks, stealing merchandise, or escaping the flames; the flammable waste material that had been allowed to accumulate—that leads to a discussion about trade unionism and then about capitalism in general. This is, I realize, a logical continuation of the conversation in my younger daughter’s class this morning, which started with unwieldy dioramas and implausible impersonations of King George. Freedom, in the form of unfettered capitalism, also has its downside. I tell her my view: laborers have to organize into unions, because otherwise those who control the capital have all the power.
“That’s why it’s called capitalism,” Esmee says, “not laborism.”
3. More Earth Science
Earth Science is something else. I’ve been dreading returning to Tarbuck and Lutgens since our first meeting. And tonight, the chapter starts in the familiar dispiriting monotone. “Rocks are any solid mass of mineral or mineral-like matter occurring naturally as part of our planet.” But I am pleasantly surprised when T&L take a turn into the rock cycle, laying out the differences between igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock in terms that are easy to understand and visualize. The accompanying charts are helpful, and as I keep reading into the chapter on igneous rocks, the differences between intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks make clear sense.
Total time: 3 hours
My daughter has the misfortune of living through a period of peak homework.
It turns out that there is no correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more. Why pile on the homework if it doesn’t make even a testable difference, and in fact may be harmful?
“It’s a response to this whole globalized, competitive process,” says Richard Walker, a co-author of the book Reforming Homework. “You get parents demanding their children get more homework because their children are competing against the whole world.”
The irony is that some countries where the school systems are held up as models for our schools have been going in the opposite direction of the U.S., giving less homework and implementing narrower curricula built to encourage deeper understanding rather than broader coverage.
In the U.S., or at least in the schools my daughters have attended, there has been no sign of teachers’ letting up on homework. According to a University of Michigan study, the average time spent weekly on homework increased from two hours and 38 minutes in 1981 to three hours and 58 minutes in 2004. Data from a 2007 National Center for Education Statistics survey showed American students between grades nine and 12 doing an average of 6.8 hours of homework a week—which sounds pretty reasonable compared with what my daughter is assigned—and 42 percent of students saying they have homework five or more days a week. Esmee has hours of homework every night. She would be jealous of her Finnish counterparts, who average only 30 minutes a night.
Attitudes toward homework swing in cycles of roughly 30 years, according to Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University and the author of The Battle Over Homework. We went from piling on the homework because of fears of a science gap brought on by Sputnik in the late 1950s, to backing off in the Woodstock generation of the ’70s amid worries about overstressing kids, to the ’90s fears of falling behind East Asian students. The current backlash against homework has been under way so long—expressed in books like 2006’s The Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, and in the 2009 documentary film Race to Nowhere—that we may now be living through a backlash against the backlash, at least in elite schools. “We’re in a heavy-homework part of the cycle,” Cooper says. “The increasing competition for elite high schools and colleges has parents demanding more homework.”
Back in California, when I raised the issue of too much homework on that e‑mail chain, about half the parents were pleased that someone had brought this up, and many had already spoken to the math teacher about it. Others were eager to approach school officials. But at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the teacher in question.
As the person who instigated the conversation, I was called in to the vice principal’s office and accused of cyberbullying. I suggested that parents’ meeting to discuss their children’s education was generally a positive thing; we merely chose to have our meeting in cyberspace instead of the school cafeteria.
He disagreed, saying the teacher felt threatened. And he added that students weren’t allowed to cyberbully, so parents should be held to the same standard.
I explained that we never intended for the teacher to read those notes. This was a forum where we were airing our concerns.
What was frustrating me was that the underlying issue of ridiculous amounts of busywork was getting buried beneath the supposed method we had used to discuss the issue.
Even when I showed the vice principal examples of the homework assignments, he didn’t see them as outside the usual in terms of content or time commitment.
I left believing I hadn’t solved the problem.
Yet something did change. Over the next few months, the math teacher assigned a more manageable workload. My daughter now went to bed before 10 o’clock most nights.
Thursday
Parent-teacher conferences at the Lab School are similar to what I imagine speed dating to be like. Each conference is three minutes, and parents can attend an afternoon or evening session. My wife and I choose the afternoon. The conferences are strictly first come, first served. At noon, my wife and I sit in chairs outside each classroom waiting our turn, sometimes for as long as 45 minutes. A student is supposed to be timing each conference, but the students often wander off, and the teachers ignore the parents’ knocking after three minutes.In each conference, I urge the teachers to give less homework. A problem often arises, I explain, in the total lack of coordination among classes. A Humanities assignment requiring the kids to render in words, pictures, or both a scene from Angela’s Ashes, say, can take an hour or two, yet most teachers don’t seem to consider anything creative to be homework. The creative stuff, like drawing or writing a short story or preparing a scene from a play, is all extra, to be completed in addition to the hours of humanities, math, science, and Spanish.
The teachers usually respond in one of two ways. They nod sympathetically and agree that the kids do have a lot of work, as if they have nothing to do with the assigning of it. Or they say that time management is one of the skills that a successful high-school student will need, and if my daughter wants to perform in an elite high school, she had better learn that in middle school. Both answers amount to essentially the same argument: the vast amounts of homework are somehow handed down from on high, and mere teachers can do nothing to tamper with the ordained quantities.
Because I happen to be in the middle of my week of homework when this year’s parent-teacher conferences take place, I am uniquely equipped to discuss the work Esmee is doing. And over the years, I have noticed that the amount of homework does let up, slightly, after the conferences—if enough parents complain. However, there is always a clique of parents who are happy with the amount of homework. In fact, they would prefer more. I tend not to get along with that type of parent.
At a meeting with Esmee’s Earth Science teacher, I find out that my daughter has in fact not been giving me all the work. There is a worksheet, for example, requiring a reinterpretation and annotation of the rock cycle that Esmee never handed over. The teacher finds an extra copy for me. So I have another date with Tarbuck and Lutgens.
When I get home, Esmee tells me she got a C on her math homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page. I’m amazed that the pettiness of this doesn’t seem to bother her. School is training her well for the inanities of adult life.
Our homework this evening:
1. Practice Multiplying a Polynomial by a Monomial
We breeze through it in about half an hour.
2. Translate Song Lyrics from Spanish to English
Esmee’s Spanish teacher already told my wife and me in our conference this afternoon that she can tell when the kids use Google Translate—which is all the time. It’s a wonder: simply type in the lyrics, copy down the translation, and then, in an attempt to throw off the teacher, add a few mistakes. So Si te quedas a mi lado, si te subes en el tren, which Google renders as “If you stay by my side, if you get on the train,” becomes “If you stay by my side, if you go up on the train.”
Done.
3. More Angela’s Ashes
Total time: 1.5 hours
The more immersed I become in Esmee’s homework, the more reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and school-board members who are coming up with this curriculum are earnest about their work. They are making difficult decisions about what to teach or not teach in the limited class time they have. The overall education being imparted is secular, humanistic, multicultural, and intensely quantitative. The math Esmee is doing at 13, for example, is beyond what I was doing at that age. Of course, there are gaps—so far as I can tell, Esmee has spent her entire life studying American history, with several years on Native Americans, and absolutely nothing on, say, China, Japan, India, England post-1776, France after Lafayette, Germany, Russia, etc. Like many parents, I wish there was more emphasis on creative work, on writing assignments that didn’t require Esmee to use eight “transition words” and seven metaphors. This school has clearly made choices—these kids are going to get very good at algebra and maybe a little less good at creative writing. I can’t say I fault them in this, though I know what I would prefer to spend my days doing.
If Esmee masters the material covered in her classes, she will emerge as a well-rounded, socially aware citizen, a serious reader with good reasoning capabilities and a decent knowledge of the universe she lives in. What more can I ask of her school?
But are these many hours of homework the only way to achieve this metamorphosis of child into virtuous citizen? According to my daughter’s teachers, principals, and administrators, the answer is an emphatic yes. Certainly, they have told me, all the homework does no harm. As I watch my daughter struggle through school days on too little sleep and feel almost guilty if she wants to watch an hour of television instead of advancing a few yards in the trench warfare of her weekly homework routine, I have my doubts. When would she ever have time to, say, read a book for pleasure? Or write a story or paint a picture or play the guitar?
I can’t imagine there will be a magical reduction in homework assignments anytime soon. But what I will continue to do at every opportunity is remind teachers that if each is assigning an hour of homework a night, and the average kid is taking four or five academic classes, then that is simply an unrealistic cumulative workload. Give the kids a break. Once in a while. I don’t expect teachers to drastically curtail their assignments, just to occasionally lighten the load. Of course, I may just be balancing the scales against those parents asking for extra assignments for their child.
Has this worked? Well, it did in Brentwood, even if it took parental pressure. And though I can’t draw a causal line between my day of speed dating—I mean, going to parent-teacher conferences—at the Lab School and a reduction in homework assignments, it did seem to me that in the months afterward, Esmee was able to get more sleep. At least a couple of minutes’ worth.
Esmee just started high school. She has told me she feels that the many hours of homework in middle school have prepared her well. “There is no way they can give me more homework,” she reasons.
I have my doubts.
As for Lola: When it came time to select a middle school, she took the admissions test for Lab and listed it as her first choice, despite my telling her that in my view, the school is too rigidly focused on academics and assigns too much homework. Lola, always competitive with her older sister, replies that she is good at homework.
She’s going to need to be. She was accepted at Lab.
Friday
Lola is sleeping over at a friend’s house. Esmee hasn’t started her weekend homework yet. Instead, she’s watching episodes of Portlandia on her computer.My wife and I decide to go out to dinner, and on our way up Hudson Street, we run into another couple we are close friends with. This couple’s oldest daughter also goes to Lab. She’s at home doing homework.
We stand on the sidewalk for a few minutes, chatting. The husband is smoking a joint, and he hands it over. I haven’t smoked in a few months, but it’s Friday night and I’ve been doing homework all week. I take a few tokes. We part ways, and my wife and I go to a Japanese restaurant, where, as soon as I am seated, I regret smoking. It’s going to be hell trying to do algebra tonight with the head I have on right now.
Nonetheless, when I’m home, I sit at the dining table and attempt to work my way through homework:
1. 15 Algebra Equations
Esmee has an algebra midterm on Tuesday. I tell Esmee that this seems strange—didn’t she just have an algebra midterm? She says that in her class, they have more than one midterm every term. the polynomial worksheet. I am immediately lost in all the 2x(–3y5+ 3x2)6s. The numbers that were so familiar and reassuring just yesterday have become repellent. I realize, sitting there, failing to solve my algebra homework, that I have inadvertently yet perfectly re-created my own eighth-grade homework conditions: getting stoned, attempting math, and failing at it.
2. Study for a Spanish test on Monday
3. Of course, More Angela’s Ashes.
I consider my daughter, who to my knowledge has never smoked marijuana. That’s a good thing, I think in my hazy state. I wouldn’t wish this condition—attempting algebra when high—on anyone.
One of the reasons I believe my daughter hasn’t yet tried marijuana is because she simply doesn’t have the time.
I decide to give up on algebra for the night. It’s only Friday, and I have until Monday to finish my homework.
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
Growing Up With Grandparents
In her grandparents house, a little girl finally found a home.
By Randall RobertsFrom age four to seven, I lived with my grandparents in the Morningside Addition on the south side of my hometown.
Vaguely similar homes dominated the blue-collar neighborhood, tricking you into wrong turns and dead ends. My grandparents’ three-bedroom, split-level house was the type you’d drive by and not even notice: white, void of accent colors, and only one sparse tree in the front yard.
My parents were divorcing. My mom moved me to my grandparents’ house to both literally and figuratively shelter me from the pain of watching that event unfold. In that nondescript house, with only a child’s idea of my parents’ separation, I was intensely happy for the first time in my short life. New memories of a safe home pushed aside painful memories of a broken one. Kind and gentle words replaced hostile yells.
Through the Garage
As is typical in the Midwest, we entered the house through the garage. Grandpa’s workshop consumed the far corner, though he rarely used it by the time I lived with them. Sometimes he refinished furniture, and sometimes he tinkered on a car with my uncle. Grandpa couldn’t do much. Severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, he barely walked, though only in his 60s at the time. His hands, a necessary tool for his occupation, a picture framer, were deformed. His fingers bent painfully inward, and his neck bowed slightly to the right.
Despite these limitations, Grandpa never complained. Instead, he moved slowly and purposefully, never shirking responsibilities. “We’re off like a herd of turtles,” he'd say, grateful for his still lingering mobility.
The garage attached to the basement, which contained everything a child could want: an old trampoline, an out-of-tune piano, a bright orange divan, and boxes of my mom and uncle’s toys. I spent hours rummaging through boxes and creating obstacle courses. Huge in proportion to my small stature, the room felt like mine.
Sixteen steps separated the basement from the living room. Grandpa counted each one on the way up, stopping at the landing by the front door to rest. He'd placed one misshapen hand on the door checking to make sure I closed it the last time I ran outside. If I didn't, which was most often the case, he'd playfully yell out at me, “You weren’t raised in a barn.”
Once at the top of the stairs, Grandpa hobbled into the living room. His box television overwhelmed one corner of the open space; the sofa ran across the wall adjacent to it. Grandpa’s destination, a worn recliner, sat somewhere in between. Grandpa was hard of hearing, and even though he wore hearing aids, he still sat as close to the TV as possible (and Grandma allowed).
Grandpa watched true crime shows, and I sat next to him on the brown wall-to-wall carpet, listening to his commentary. When something spooky happened on Unsolved Mysteries, he'd ask if it scared me.
“No,” I'd say.
“Good, It shouldn’t scare you if it’s not in front of you.”
 |
| Grandma's messy kitchen. The dishwasher no longer worked, rather than replace it Grandma taped a butter tub over the buttons to remind Grandpa and guests not to run it. |
Into the Kitchen
The living room opened into the kitchen, where Grandma scurried across the linoleum baking brownies, cooking meatloaf, or listening to Dr. Laura on the radio. I'd poke my head in, and she'd undoubtedly invite me to join her mess—never too busy for her first granddaughter.
Bills, receipts, and recipes blanketed the counters. Items Grandma planned on repurposing—mayonnaise jars, butter containers, and bread bags—seeped out of the cabinets. As Grandma cooked, the kitchen exploded. Every cabinet door opened, and every utensil appeared on the counter. But she scrupulously measured every ingredient, and when she finished—and not a second before—she scrubbed the kitchen clean. “A good cook is messy, but careful,” she'd say.
A long hallway connected the kitchen to the bedrooms. When I moved in, Grandma and Grandpa converted their spare bedroom, the first door on the left, into my room. That didn’t mean doing much. No furniture was replaced; no knickknacks were cleared. I slept in a queen bed. Grandma’s collections, as she called them, remained tucked away in dresser drawers and stuffed in the closet. Grandpa’s prints—tokens from a life as a picture framer—still hung on the wall. Child-size clothes offered the only clues the room belonged to a little girl. None of that mattered to me. I knew no different, and I spent little time in my room.
 |
| Grandma and I pose with our pumpkin. |
To burn off energy, Grandma and Grandpa pushed me outside. I hunted four-leaf clovers and daddy longlegs, and when Grandma came out with me, we played follow the leader.
Grandma’s garden filled the back of the large and otherwise bare yard. Raised on a farm, Grandma took pride in her garden. Together, we watered and weeded it. As long as I took care of it, I could grow what I wanted. One summer, I chose a pumpkin, and after a few months of caring for it, Grandma and I picked it.
“You did it,” Grandma said. Under her praise, I never felt so big.
Grandma and Grandpa moved out of that house about 10 years after me. They’re both gone now—a fact that will forever cripple me. I drive by that house, and despite its muted exterior, I see Grandma’s mess in the kitchen and smell her brownies in the oven. I see Grandpa relaxing in his recliner and maneuvering the steps. But what I see doesn't compare to what I feel. Inside, I feel deep gratitude, unconditional love, and enduring respect for my grandparents.
headline practice
To practice writing to specification, write three different headlines for the following story fragment. Make the first headline eight words and the second exactly six words. For the third headline, write a two-part headline separated by a colon.
The story fragment:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – New York Yankee closer Mariano Rivera is not ready to hang up his spikes for good.
"I am coming back," Rivera said Friday afternoon in the New York Yankees' clubhouse. "Put it down. Write it down in big letters. I'm not going down like this. God willing and given the strength, I'm coming back."
Rivera's announcement was the second surprise he has delivered over the past two days, the first being his stumble and crumble to the turf while shagging flies before Thursday night's Yankees-Royals game, a mishap that resulted in a season-ending knee injury.
But this surprise was of the happier variety, and Rivera, who was emotionally distraught speaking of the injury in the clubhouse on Thursday night, was practically giddy a day later.
Asked, half-seriously, if he planned to come back with the Yankees, Rivera said, "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They will want the old goat."
GOAT, of course, is the acronym for Greatest of All Time, a title Rivera carries among his particular class of ballplayer, the closer.
And Rivera's decision to attempt, at 42, to continue a career that already has accrued just about every accolade that can be bestowed upon a ballplayer, seemed to energize the 18-year veteran.
"Miracles happen, guys," he said. "I'm OK. I'm a positive man. Everything is good. I feel sorry that I let down my teammates but besides that, I'm OK, and the team will be OK, too."
Headlines:
The story fragment:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – New York Yankee closer Mariano Rivera is not ready to hang up his spikes for good.
"I am coming back," Rivera said Friday afternoon in the New York Yankees' clubhouse. "Put it down. Write it down in big letters. I'm not going down like this. God willing and given the strength, I'm coming back."
Rivera's announcement was the second surprise he has delivered over the past two days, the first being his stumble and crumble to the turf while shagging flies before Thursday night's Yankees-Royals game, a mishap that resulted in a season-ending knee injury.
But this surprise was of the happier variety, and Rivera, who was emotionally distraught speaking of the injury in the clubhouse on Thursday night, was practically giddy a day later.
Asked, half-seriously, if he planned to come back with the Yankees, Rivera said, "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They will want the old goat."
GOAT, of course, is the acronym for Greatest of All Time, a title Rivera carries among his particular class of ballplayer, the closer.
And Rivera's decision to attempt, at 42, to continue a career that already has accrued just about every accolade that can be bestowed upon a ballplayer, seemed to energize the 18-year veteran.
"Miracles happen, guys," he said. "I'm OK. I'm a positive man. Everything is good. I feel sorry that I let down my teammates but besides that, I'm OK, and the team will be OK, too."
Headlines:
1. Yankees' Rivera Vows Return After Knee Injury
2. Knee Injury Won't Sideline Yankees' Rivera
3. Yankees' Rivera Ends Season with Knee Injury: Despite Age, He Vows Return
P.S. Go Royals!
headline rewrites
Find three examples online of poor headlines and provide their solutions. In other words, fix the headlines, showing both the problem and the solution. Be sure to include the source for each bad headline, including that source’s URL, where applicable.
Headline: Sudden Lottery Fortune No Panacea
Problem: Questionable grammar. (All lottery fortunes are sudden.) Difficult word for most readers (panacea). Awkward.
Solution: Lottery Winners Suffer More Than Thrive
Source: CNN.com, September 21, 2013
Headline: Somali Militants Say In Touch with Gunmen in Nairobi Mall
Problem: Confusing. Verb choice is strange.
Solution: Somali Militants Contact Gunmen Responsible for Mass Shooting at Nairobi Mall
Source: Reuters, September 21, 2013
Headline: One-Third of ACT Test-Takers College-Ready in Four Subjects
Problem: Lots of hyphens. Inaccurate. (The story is only about Iowa students.)
Solution: One-Third of Iowa Students College-Ready in All ACT Subjects
Source: Des Moines Register, September 20, 2013
Headline: Sudden Lottery Fortune No Panacea
Problem: Questionable grammar. (All lottery fortunes are sudden.) Difficult word for most readers (panacea). Awkward.
Solution: Lottery Winners Suffer More Than Thrive
Source: CNN.com, September 21, 2013
Headline: Somali Militants Say In Touch with Gunmen in Nairobi Mall
Problem: Confusing. Verb choice is strange.
Solution: Somali Militants Contact Gunmen Responsible for Mass Shooting at Nairobi Mall
Source: Reuters, September 21, 2013
Headline: One-Third of ACT Test-Takers College-Ready in Four Subjects
Problem: Lots of hyphens. Inaccurate. (The story is only about Iowa students.)
Solution: One-Third of Iowa Students College-Ready in All ACT Subjects
Source: Des Moines Register, September 20, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
a new home
From age four to seven, I lived with my grandparents in the Morningside Addition on the south side of my hometown. Vaguely similar homes dominated the blue-collar neighborhood, tricking you into wrong turns and dead ends. My grandparents’ three-bedroom, split-level house was the typed you’d drive by and not even notice: white, void of any accent color, and only one sparse tree in the front yard.
My parents were divorcing. My mom moved me to my grandparents’ house to both literally and figuratively shelter me from the pain of watching that event unfold. In that nondescript house, with only a child’s idea of my parents’ separation, I was intensely happy for the first time in my short life. New memories of a safe home pushed aside painful memories of a broken one. Kind and gentle words replaced hostile yells.
Here are a few of those memories.
Through the Garage
As is typical in the Midwest, we entered the house through the garage. Grandpa’s workshop consumed the far corner, though he rarely used it by the time I lived with them. Sometimes he refinished furniture, and sometimes he tinkered on a car with my uncle. Grandpa couldn’t do much. Severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, he barely walked, though only in his 60s at the time. His hands, a necessary tool for his occupation, a picture framer, were deformed—his fingers bent painfully inward—and his neck bowed slightly to the right.
Despite these limitations, Grandpa never complained. Instead, he moved slowly and purposefully, never shirking responsibilities. “We’re off like a herd of turtles,” he said, grateful for the mobility he still had.
The garage attached to the basement, which contained everything a child could want: an old trampoline, an out-of-tune piano, a bright orange divan, and boxes of my mom and uncle’s toys. I spent hours rummaging through boxes and creating obstacle courses. Huge in proportion to my small stature, the room felt like mine.
Up the Stairs
Sixteen steps separated the basement from the living room. Grandpa counted each one on the way up, stopping at the landing by the front door to rest. He placed one misshapen hand on the door checking to make sure I closed it when I ran outside. I didn’t. He playfully yelled out at me, “You weren’t raised in a barn.”
Once at the top of the stairs, Grandpa hobbled into the living room. His box television overwhelmed one corner of the open space; the sofa ran across the wall adjacent to it. Grandpa’s destination, a worn recliner, sat somewhere in between. Grandpa was hard of hearing, and even though he wore hearing aids, he still sat as close to the TV as possible (and Grandma allowed).
Grandpa watched true crime shows, and I sat next to him on the brown wall-to-wall carpet, listening to his commentary. When something spooky happened on Unsolved Mysteries, he asked if it scared me. “No,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “It shouldn’t scare you if it’s not in front of you.”
Into the Kitchen
The living room opened into the kitchen, where Grandma scurried across the linoleum baking brownies, cooking meatloaf, or listening to Dr. Laura on the radio. I poked my head in, and she invited me to join her mess—never too busy for her first granddaughter.
Bills, receipts, and recipes blanketed the counters. Items Grandma planned on repurposing—mayonnaise jars, butter containers, and bread bags—seeped out of the cabinets. As Grandma cooked, the kitchen exploded. Every cabinet door opened, and every utensil appeared on the counter. But she scrupulously measured every ingredient, and when she finished—and not a second before—she scrubbed the kitchen clean. “A good cook is messy, but careful,” Grandma said.
Down the Hall
A long hallway connected the kitchen to the bedrooms. When I moved in, Grandma and Grandpa converted their spare bedroom, the first door on the left, into my room. That didn’t mean doing much. No furniture was replaced; no knickknacks were cleared. I slept in a queen bed. Grandma’s collections, as she called them, remained tucked away in dresser drawers and stuffed in the closet. Grandpa’s prints—tokens from a life as a picture framer—still hung on the wall. Child-size clothes offered the only clues the room belonged to a little girl. None of that mattered to me. I knew no different, and I spent little time in my room.
Outside
To burn off energy, Grandma and Grandpa pushed me outside. I hunted four-leaf clovers and daddy longlegs, and when Grandma came out with me, we played follow the leader. Grandma’s garden filled the back of the large and otherwise bare yard. Raised on a farm, Grandma took pride in her garden. Together, we watered and weeded it. As long as I took care of it, I could grow what I wanted. I chose a pumpkin, and after a long summer of caring for it, Grandma and I picked it. “You did it,” Grandma said. Under her praise, I never felt so big.
Grandma and Grandpa moved out of that house about 10 years after me. They’re both gone now—a fact that will forever cripple me. I drive by that house, and despite its muted exterior, I see Grandma’s mess in the kitchen and smell her brownies in the oven. I see Grandpa relaxing in his recliner and maneuvering the steps. But most importantly, I feel deep gratitude for my grandparents.
My parents were divorcing. My mom moved me to my grandparents’ house to both literally and figuratively shelter me from the pain of watching that event unfold. In that nondescript house, with only a child’s idea of my parents’ separation, I was intensely happy for the first time in my short life. New memories of a safe home pushed aside painful memories of a broken one. Kind and gentle words replaced hostile yells.
Here are a few of those memories.
Through the Garage
As is typical in the Midwest, we entered the house through the garage. Grandpa’s workshop consumed the far corner, though he rarely used it by the time I lived with them. Sometimes he refinished furniture, and sometimes he tinkered on a car with my uncle. Grandpa couldn’t do much. Severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, he barely walked, though only in his 60s at the time. His hands, a necessary tool for his occupation, a picture framer, were deformed—his fingers bent painfully inward—and his neck bowed slightly to the right.
Despite these limitations, Grandpa never complained. Instead, he moved slowly and purposefully, never shirking responsibilities. “We’re off like a herd of turtles,” he said, grateful for the mobility he still had.
The garage attached to the basement, which contained everything a child could want: an old trampoline, an out-of-tune piano, a bright orange divan, and boxes of my mom and uncle’s toys. I spent hours rummaging through boxes and creating obstacle courses. Huge in proportion to my small stature, the room felt like mine.
Up the Stairs
Sixteen steps separated the basement from the living room. Grandpa counted each one on the way up, stopping at the landing by the front door to rest. He placed one misshapen hand on the door checking to make sure I closed it when I ran outside. I didn’t. He playfully yelled out at me, “You weren’t raised in a barn.”
Once at the top of the stairs, Grandpa hobbled into the living room. His box television overwhelmed one corner of the open space; the sofa ran across the wall adjacent to it. Grandpa’s destination, a worn recliner, sat somewhere in between. Grandpa was hard of hearing, and even though he wore hearing aids, he still sat as close to the TV as possible (and Grandma allowed).
Grandpa watched true crime shows, and I sat next to him on the brown wall-to-wall carpet, listening to his commentary. When something spooky happened on Unsolved Mysteries, he asked if it scared me. “No,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “It shouldn’t scare you if it’s not in front of you.”
|
| Grandma's messy kitchen. The dishwasher no longer worked, rather than replace it Grandma taped a butter tub over the buttons to remind Grandpa and guests not to run it. |
Into the Kitchen
The living room opened into the kitchen, where Grandma scurried across the linoleum baking brownies, cooking meatloaf, or listening to Dr. Laura on the radio. I poked my head in, and she invited me to join her mess—never too busy for her first granddaughter.
Bills, receipts, and recipes blanketed the counters. Items Grandma planned on repurposing—mayonnaise jars, butter containers, and bread bags—seeped out of the cabinets. As Grandma cooked, the kitchen exploded. Every cabinet door opened, and every utensil appeared on the counter. But she scrupulously measured every ingredient, and when she finished—and not a second before—she scrubbed the kitchen clean. “A good cook is messy, but careful,” Grandma said.
Down the Hall
A long hallway connected the kitchen to the bedrooms. When I moved in, Grandma and Grandpa converted their spare bedroom, the first door on the left, into my room. That didn’t mean doing much. No furniture was replaced; no knickknacks were cleared. I slept in a queen bed. Grandma’s collections, as she called them, remained tucked away in dresser drawers and stuffed in the closet. Grandpa’s prints—tokens from a life as a picture framer—still hung on the wall. Child-size clothes offered the only clues the room belonged to a little girl. None of that mattered to me. I knew no different, and I spent little time in my room.
|
| Grandma and I pose with our pumpkin. |
Outside
To burn off energy, Grandma and Grandpa pushed me outside. I hunted four-leaf clovers and daddy longlegs, and when Grandma came out with me, we played follow the leader. Grandma’s garden filled the back of the large and otherwise bare yard. Raised on a farm, Grandma took pride in her garden. Together, we watered and weeded it. As long as I took care of it, I could grow what I wanted. I chose a pumpkin, and after a long summer of caring for it, Grandma and I picked it. “You did it,” Grandma said. Under her praise, I never felt so big.
Grandma and Grandpa moved out of that house about 10 years after me. They’re both gone now—a fact that will forever cripple me. I drive by that house, and despite its muted exterior, I see Grandma’s mess in the kitchen and smell her brownies in the oven. I see Grandpa relaxing in his recliner and maneuvering the steps. But most importantly, I feel deep gratitude for my grandparents.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
growing old young
Audience:
Adults remembering their grandparents.
Parents struggling to connect with their children.
Grandparents raising their grandchildren.
Abstract:
A little girl’s soul grows older and she grows wiser while living with her grandparents.
Keywords:
Grandparents, divorce, child, grandma, grandpa, parents, mom, arthritis
From ages four to seven, I lived with my grandparents in the Morningside Addition on the south side of my hometown. It was a blue-collar neighborhood where all of the houses looked vaguely similar—just enough alike you could easily get lost in the side streets and cul-de-sacs. My grandparents’ three-bedroom, split-level house was the type you’d drive by and not even notice. It was white, no accent color to draw your attention, and it had only one tree hardly worth the bother of climbing in the front yard.
My parents were going through a divorce. My mom moved me to my grandparents’ house to both literally and figuratively shelter me from the pain of watching that event unfold. In that nondescript house, with only a child’s idea of what was happening to my parents, I was intensely happy. There, I learned lessons that only grandparents have the patience or wherewithal to teach. In each of those rooms, I learned something invaluable.
BEDROOM
When I moved in, my grandparents converted their spare bedroom into my room. That didn’t mean doing much. No furniture was replaced; no knickknacks were cleared. I slept in a queen bed. Grandma’s collections, as she called them, remained tucked away in dresser drawers and stuffed in the closet. Grandpa’s framed prints—he made a living as a picture framer—still hung on the wall.
The only sign the room belonged to a little girl was the closet full of child-size clothes.
“There’s no sense in making a fuss,” Grandma would say.
LIVING ROOM
Grandpa watched his shows in the living room. The box television sat in one corner of the open space; the couch ran across the wall adjacent to it. Grandpa’s recliner sat somewhere in between. Grandpa was hard of hearing, and even though he wore hearing aids, he still sat as close to the TV as he could get (and Grandma would allow).
True crime programs were his favorites. I’d sit next to him on the brown wall-to-wall carpet, listening to his commentary. He’d ask if I was scared when something particularly spooky happened on Unsolved Mysteries, and I’d bravely say, “No.”
“Good,” he’d say. “If it’s not in front of you, it shouldn’t scare you.”
KITCHEN
The kitchen was my favorite room in the house. Grandma never seemed to leave it. I’d find her scurrying across the linoleum baking brownies, cooking meatloaf, or listening to Dr. Laura on the radio. She’d look up and invite me to join her mess. That’s what she called it: her mess.
The countertops were covered in bills, receipts, and recipes she wanted to try. The cabinets were overflowing with mayonnaise jars, butter containers, and bread bags she planned on repurposing. And when she cooked, the kitchen exploded. Every cabinet door opened, and every utensil ended up on the counter. But every ingredient was scrupulously measured and added to the bowl, and when she was done—and not a second before—the kitchen was scrubbed clean.
“A good cook is messy, but careful,” Grandma would say.
BASEMENT
The basement was my jungle gym. It contained just about everything a child could want: an old trampoline, an out-of-tune piano, a bright orange divan, and boxes of my mom and uncle’s toys. (It is worth noting that Grandma always called that particular couch a divan, but she referred to no other couch as a divan.) I’d spend hours rummaging through boxes and creating obstacle courses. The room seemed huge in proportion to my small stature, and it felt like mine.
If Mom questioned their lack of oversight in the basement, Grandma would say, “She can’t hurt anything. There’s nothing we can’t replace.”
GARAGE
Grandpa had a small workshop in the garage, though he rarely used it by the time I lived with them. Sometimes he’d refinish a small piece of furniture in the corner next to his workbench, and sometimes my uncle would help him tinker with a car. Grandpa couldn’t do much. He was severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and even though he was only in his 60s at the time, he could barely walk. His hands, a necessary tool for a picture framer, were deformed—his fingers bent painfully inward—and his neck bowed slightly to the right. Despite his limitations, he never complained.
It took 16 steps to get to the garage. Grandpa counted each one on the way down, taking them slowly and purposefully, and when he was finally in his pickup and pulling out of the garage, he’d look over at me, smile, and say, “We’re off like a herd of turtles.”
BACKYARD
Grandma and Grandpa sent me outside every chance they got. The backyard was large and empty but for a few small trees and Grandma’s garden. Grandma, who was raised on a farm, would often follow me out. We’d play follow the leader—for which I was always the leader—search for four-leaf clovers and daddy longlegs, and weed her garden.
When Grandma asked me what I wanted to grow one summer, I told her a pumpkin. She bought the seed, but the rest was my responsibility. At dinner, she’d ask, “Have you checked on your garden lately?” I’d bolt out to water it. When the day finally came to pick the pumpkin, I was the happiest I’d ever been.
It was the first time, but not the last, Grandma would say, “You did it.”
Grandma and Grandpa moved out of that house about 10 years after me. They’re both gone now—a fact that will forever cripple me. I still drive by that house, and despite its muted exterior, I see Grandma’s mess in the kitchen and smell her brownies in the oven. I hear a little girl’s laughter, and I feel deep gratitude for my grandparents.
Adults remembering their grandparents.
Parents struggling to connect with their children.
Grandparents raising their grandchildren.
Abstract:
A little girl’s soul grows older and she grows wiser while living with her grandparents.
Keywords:
Grandparents, divorce, child, grandma, grandpa, parents, mom, arthritis
From ages four to seven, I lived with my grandparents in the Morningside Addition on the south side of my hometown. It was a blue-collar neighborhood where all of the houses looked vaguely similar—just enough alike you could easily get lost in the side streets and cul-de-sacs. My grandparents’ three-bedroom, split-level house was the type you’d drive by and not even notice. It was white, no accent color to draw your attention, and it had only one tree hardly worth the bother of climbing in the front yard.
My parents were going through a divorce. My mom moved me to my grandparents’ house to both literally and figuratively shelter me from the pain of watching that event unfold. In that nondescript house, with only a child’s idea of what was happening to my parents, I was intensely happy. There, I learned lessons that only grandparents have the patience or wherewithal to teach. In each of those rooms, I learned something invaluable.
BEDROOM
When I moved in, my grandparents converted their spare bedroom into my room. That didn’t mean doing much. No furniture was replaced; no knickknacks were cleared. I slept in a queen bed. Grandma’s collections, as she called them, remained tucked away in dresser drawers and stuffed in the closet. Grandpa’s framed prints—he made a living as a picture framer—still hung on the wall.
The only sign the room belonged to a little girl was the closet full of child-size clothes.
“There’s no sense in making a fuss,” Grandma would say.
LIVING ROOM
Grandpa watched his shows in the living room. The box television sat in one corner of the open space; the couch ran across the wall adjacent to it. Grandpa’s recliner sat somewhere in between. Grandpa was hard of hearing, and even though he wore hearing aids, he still sat as close to the TV as he could get (and Grandma would allow).
True crime programs were his favorites. I’d sit next to him on the brown wall-to-wall carpet, listening to his commentary. He’d ask if I was scared when something particularly spooky happened on Unsolved Mysteries, and I’d bravely say, “No.”
“Good,” he’d say. “If it’s not in front of you, it shouldn’t scare you.”
KITCHEN
The kitchen was my favorite room in the house. Grandma never seemed to leave it. I’d find her scurrying across the linoleum baking brownies, cooking meatloaf, or listening to Dr. Laura on the radio. She’d look up and invite me to join her mess. That’s what she called it: her mess.
The countertops were covered in bills, receipts, and recipes she wanted to try. The cabinets were overflowing with mayonnaise jars, butter containers, and bread bags she planned on repurposing. And when she cooked, the kitchen exploded. Every cabinet door opened, and every utensil ended up on the counter. But every ingredient was scrupulously measured and added to the bowl, and when she was done—and not a second before—the kitchen was scrubbed clean.
“A good cook is messy, but careful,” Grandma would say.
BASEMENT
The basement was my jungle gym. It contained just about everything a child could want: an old trampoline, an out-of-tune piano, a bright orange divan, and boxes of my mom and uncle’s toys. (It is worth noting that Grandma always called that particular couch a divan, but she referred to no other couch as a divan.) I’d spend hours rummaging through boxes and creating obstacle courses. The room seemed huge in proportion to my small stature, and it felt like mine.
If Mom questioned their lack of oversight in the basement, Grandma would say, “She can’t hurt anything. There’s nothing we can’t replace.”
GARAGE
Grandpa had a small workshop in the garage, though he rarely used it by the time I lived with them. Sometimes he’d refinish a small piece of furniture in the corner next to his workbench, and sometimes my uncle would help him tinker with a car. Grandpa couldn’t do much. He was severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and even though he was only in his 60s at the time, he could barely walk. His hands, a necessary tool for a picture framer, were deformed—his fingers bent painfully inward—and his neck bowed slightly to the right. Despite his limitations, he never complained.
It took 16 steps to get to the garage. Grandpa counted each one on the way down, taking them slowly and purposefully, and when he was finally in his pickup and pulling out of the garage, he’d look over at me, smile, and say, “We’re off like a herd of turtles.”
BACKYARD
Grandma and Grandpa sent me outside every chance they got. The backyard was large and empty but for a few small trees and Grandma’s garden. Grandma, who was raised on a farm, would often follow me out. We’d play follow the leader—for which I was always the leader—search for four-leaf clovers and daddy longlegs, and weed her garden.
When Grandma asked me what I wanted to grow one summer, I told her a pumpkin. She bought the seed, but the rest was my responsibility. At dinner, she’d ask, “Have you checked on your garden lately?” I’d bolt out to water it. When the day finally came to pick the pumpkin, I was the happiest I’d ever been.
It was the first time, but not the last, Grandma would say, “You did it.”
Grandma and Grandpa moved out of that house about 10 years after me. They’re both gone now—a fact that will forever cripple me. I still drive by that house, and despite its muted exterior, I see Grandma’s mess in the kitchen and smell her brownies in the oven. I hear a little girl’s laughter, and I feel deep gratitude for my grandparents.
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