Teach 'Em Whatcha Know

I'm back. Also, I'm an idiot.

Hello, laborers! If it seems I’ve been quiet recently, it’s because I have been. I have many irons in the fire, but some changes are afoot that should provide the space that allows me to get back to writing a bit more.

If this is your first email from me: hello! And thank you kindly for subscribing. I regret to inform you that you have not received a hard-hitting piece of intellectual rigor. No, this is not an essay, but more of a public-facing diary entry. I apologize if that’s disappointing. Even more disappointing yet, I assume that for many this will be very much in the realm of Duh, but I feel that I am journeying into the unexplored land of Oooooh, so bear with me as I stop and stare at the local foliage and read the placards.

I plan for there to be another newsletter sent out next week sometime, a practical follow-up to this one, and probably one in-between summarizing my time at the recent Front Porch Republic Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Please enjoy.

---

Slowing down to teach my younger daughter how to carve a jack-o’-lantern.

Recently, my elder daughter has taken a heavy interest in learning Spanish. Evangeline has friends in her class, one from Venezuela and another from Brazil, who are still in the early stages of learning English. My daughter, “making friends” being a particular superpower of hers, latched to them immediately and is doing everything she can to learn about their cultures and languages. In an effort to immerse herself in the language, she’s requested that we listen to more mariachi, norteño, and Spanish pop music (my Spotify algorithm is, among other things, confused).

We were talking about Spanish and her friends as we walked back to our car from cheer practice a couple weeks ago, and Evangeline turns to me and says, “Daddy, can I be honest with you?”

“Of course, darling.”

“Well,” she didn’t hesitate, “sometimes I get really mad that you didn’t teach me Mandarin.”

No need to hunt down a picture: I’m not Chinese. I studied Mandarin all four years of high school, including Chinese school on the weekends my junior year (a school meant for Cantonese-speaking children whose parents want them to learn Mandarin) and two years of private tutoring after graduation. I spoke fluently enough that when I was a Tour Guide at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, the Chinese tour groups were often given either to the only other Mandarin-speaker in the department or to me.

But by the time Evangeline was born and old enough to begin talking (she was diagnosed with speech delay, so it was longer than expected), it had been a fair few years since I’d been called upon to translate for Disney Security as they broke up a domestic violence situation between a Chinese couple in the middle of Main Street. I was no longer confident in my abilities to pass on the language. I was no longer fluent. I didn’t want to teach broken Mandarin to my daughters, which I thought was sensible enough, so… I didn’t.

Parents, I beg of you: please don’t make my mistake.

Teach ‘em whatcha know. Even if it isn’t perfect. Especially when it isn’t perfect. It’s good for our kids to see us learn, to see that we don’t know everything, to see that growth is always possible, to see us humbly positioned just next to them as co-pursuers of a common goal, to see that we love them enough to be visibly Not Very Good at a thing but try to give them what we can anyway.

My wife is, and I quote, “not a seamstress.” She can bust out the needle and thread for a button here or a Girl Scout patch there, but she doesn’t feel confident doing much of anything beyond that. So what? She will teach our girls to do what she can. What starts with a button can be watered with practice to become a patch, placed in the sun to become a seam, and later reap a harvest of homemade garments. If not with her, then with our daughters; if not with them, then perhaps (Lord willing) with our grandchildren. But you know where it won’t happen? Where the skills aren’t passed on.

Not only did my own insecurity play accomplice to the deskilling of the next generation, but like so many others, my wife and I have been caught in the Not Now trap.

“Daddy, can I crack the eggs?” “Not now, baby, we’ve gotta eat so we can go to practice.”

“Mommy, can I help ______?” “Not now, darling, we’ve gotta move fast so we can ______.”

You know. The Not Now trap. It could be playing. It could be learning. It could be helping. Whatever it is, it can’t happen now for entirely logical, justifiable reasons. It’ll have to wait until later.

But “later” never arrives. Or, at least not the “later” that is filled with time spent with our kids. In my experience, it’s a “later” filled with grief and regret and (to my repeated shock) somehow never the “later” I was expecting.

An example. We often bemoan the fact that our girls don’t put their own laundry away. We feel like the weight is on us to get it all washed, dried, folded, stored. We look at the overflowing hamper, the growing pile next to it, the hillock of dirty clothes in their room, the stinky peak of Mt. Garment that has arisen from the hardwood floor, and weep, unwilling to ascend its heights. In the meantime, this is day three that our progeny have worn the same undergarments.

But we also have quite literally never brought them over and said, “Okay: here’s how to fold a shirt.” “Here’s how to set the washing machine.” “Here’s how to operate the dryer.”

The “later” that I’d like to welcome simply doesn’t happen by chance. If we expect our children to learn things — whether those are things practical and helpful, things fun and creative, or whatever else— we MUST be willing to slow down and teach them. We must intend to resist the chaotic and rapid pace of modern life, to choose the slow plod of pedagogy. It seems true to me that there are very, and I do mean very few good things that happen in this life apart from intention. The Good Life is imagined, aimed at, practiced, habituated. It inhabits space that has been made for it, and that space must be both physical and temporal, interior and exterior. We must take the time and great pains required to make space that the Good might take up residence therein and heal the wounds suffered in its pursuit.

As it happens, I know a bit of Spanish. Not even enough to have a conversation with a child, but enough to get my wife and I through non-touristy bits of Mexico. I won’t be making the same mistake with it as I did with Mandarin: I’ll be teaching Evangeline what I know. I remember less Mandarin than I did when she was younger and while we won’t be learning that language together (not yet, anyway), she and I both have an immediate use for Spanish. And the time necessary to learn it won’t be appearing out of thin air. It will require a significant restructuring of our schedule and even of how we use certain spaces in our home. More on that in the next newsletter.

Here’s where I’ve landed: I think the secret is that, in reality, there is no “later” that wasn’t once a “now.” Don’t let a “later” arrive that is pregnant only with the twins of grief and regret. Do everything in your power to make sure you can welcome into your present a “later” that will give birth to that for which your heart most deeply longs and has been intentionally prepared to receive: the Good.