I got a part-time job working around 20 hours per week, and I find that if I give up watching Twins games on TV, a sacrifice like swearing off the picking of scabs, I have as much time as before to read, sleep, walk the dog, and do my best to help with 6th- and 9th-grade math homework in the evenings. Lots of math, actually, since my gig is working as a math tutor at an elementary school in Columbia Heights, the suburb I grew up in.
First impression: lots more Spanish spoken than when I was growing up—I guess it's the first language, and the one still spoken at home, for around half the kids in the school, which is called Valley View. It's not the one I went to more than 50 years ago, but the building footprint is identical to the one I did attend less than a mile away, and the experience of being in there is the flip side to what I felt recently when stopping at an exurban Target with the same layout as the one by my house: it all seems familiar, but it's weird that everyone in the store is white.
Today at Valley View I helped a girl take a math assessment on a laptop. She's black, wore a head covering, and, though I noticed on a form that the language spoken in her home is supposedly Somali, her English was fluent and unaccented. Very fluent. Perhaps another Norwegian would call her an over-sharer, one of these kids who, every time the teacher asks a question, has her hand in the air: "Oh, oh, me, call on me!" For her math assessment, she sat with one leg crossed over the other, neither one reaching the floor and the foot of her top leg vibrating rapidly as she gave her attention to each problem. After every answer, a new problem would flash up on the screen, and I'd hear her whisper to herself, "Oh my God!" Once, when she said it with particular vehemence, I peered over her shoulder to get a look at the problem: adding not two, not three, but four numbers together, and requiring (it soon developed) a fair amount of what is now called "regrouping."
Kids crack me up. After an elementary career spent scoffing at school, my new middle-schooler now walks with friends to the neighborhood Caribou, where they do their homework together. At least that's what they tell me they're doing. They bring their backpacks and money for smoothies, so it's either largely true or a somewhat elaborate ruse. She has called me a "school nerd" but, honestly, I did my homework alone, in my room and at the last minute, if at all.
Comments