Light and Dark

It was the usual Monday afternoon gathering on the woven mat, with the kids and me sitting around the low, peeling veneer coffee table. Tomtom is in fifth grade, but this year he has no homework. He says he gets it done in school. Noah, who is repeating second grade, has a couple of worksheets that he whips through with my help. They’d be easy if he knew what a moat was, or if he had ever experienced mowing a lawn, or if the drawing of a tree trunk floating in water was clearer. With that picture he said, “Tree” which was a good guess. The word he had to circle was “float.” Once his homework is shoved back in his backpack, he pulls out a drawing book and pencil. Several weeks ago told him to let me know whenever he runs out of drawing paper so I can get him some more. He loves to draw and is very good at it. Lately his drawings are all about Christmas. He draws snowmen, Christmas trees and candy canes.

Sonny, the high school kid, likes to draw, too. His drawings are always of the camp that they used to live in. From his drawings, I know that the school was a cluster of small buildings near a river. There are trees in his camp. The church is on a hill. The Karen flag is proudly displayed. His drawings depict a beautiful landscape.

Malati, a close neighbor friend of the boys, has been coming over regularly to get help on her homework. She is also in fifth grade, but in a different class than Tomtom, and is assigned pages and pages of homework a week. Tonight she had ten pages of homework that included editing paragraphs, math problems, grammar worksheets and science essays to read and answer questions. Most of it is irrelevant to her. Today the paragraphs she had to read were all about Mark McGwire hitting his record-breaking 70th homerun, beating out Sammy Sosa that season. Baseball is very American, and therefore a familiar subject to most kids. Not so in the neighborhood that the Phans live in. It is a refugee/immigrant neighborhood with over 30 languages and countless dialects spoken. The elementary kids may play baseball as part of P.E. but most likely don’t know anything about home run records, the Baseball Hall of Fame or the importance of stats in baseball. It may be hard to capture a common interest and familiarity of such a diverse student body, but I think that giving them homework that they can relate to would not only make it easier, but would make it more relevant and therefore would actually teach them. You may think that new information is challenging and rigorous. That is true, but if there is no context, then it is irrelevant and foreign. There are no hooks in the brain for the information to attach to, so it goes nowhere.

Right now it is much easier for me to supply the answers than to try to explain everything to Malati. She had essays on weather, with terms like barometric pressure, high and low fronts, condensation, evaporation and temperate climates. It really is impossible for me explain any of it to her. I distilled the essay down to simple terms: Weather is about temperature like hot or cold; it includes rain, wind, sun and snow. There. That was as much light as I was going to shine on the meaning and definitions of weather. From that point, I just told her the answers on questions like “What does a barometer measure?” or “If it is 85 degrees out and the relative barometric pressure is 85 percent, what does the barometric pressure tell you?”

One question really seemed off base even for native American children. It was an analogy that went like this: Horses : Quadrupled, Humans : ________. This is fifth grade homework. And yes, the word Quadrupled is in the past tense. Can you get it? Leave a comment if you think you have the answer.

It gets dark early now, and especially in the Phans’ apartment. There are no ceiling lights and the only lights in the living room are the strand of Christmas lights taped around the wall and a flimsy floor lamp that they bring out and plug in near the coffee table. Malati’s homework was taking a long time and the boys were getting rowdy. Kay Lee joined in. She and Noah were throwing a tennis ball at each other. Pluto through it pretty hard the time it bounced off the table and hit me in the neck. He said, “Sorry” and came over and fell into my lap. I could tell he felt bad about the ball hitting me. His leaning on me and trying to fit into my lap was his way of making sure I was all right.

I was helping Malati with a page of homework and switching off with Tomtom. Tomtom read a page of a Babar the Elephant book for each page of Malati’s homework. As the three of us were working away, Kaylee and Noah were ganging up on Sonny. One of them accidentally collided into the floor lamp and knocked it over. Somehow it shorted out the living room, kitchen and bathroom. May, the mother, was in the windowless bathroom washing clothes in the tub. She came out furious at Sonny, even though it wasn’t his fault. They had a yelling match and May raised her arm to strike him. I am not sure if she did because I had gotten up to look for a fuse box or breaker switches. Luckily, I had downloaded a flashlight app onto my phone. I turned it on and immediately went into the bedroom to look for a breaker box. It was in the closet. I called Sonny over to show him what I was doing, and also to diffuse the situation with his mom. I showed him how there were many switches and some were labeled kitchen, bathroom, etc. All of them needed to be in the “on” position, I explained. Once I switched the triggered lever, the lights came back on. I returned to the living room and helped May change the bulb. The cheap lamp was bent where the bulb screwed in and when we plugged it back in, the lights went out again. This time I showed May the breaker box and which switch was off. A desk lamp was brought out and placed on the coffee table, since the floor lamp, with its twig-like trunk, was broken and irreparable.

The sudden outburst of May’s anger was a darkness I had not witnessed. To me, she is sweet and shy and laughs a lot at her mistakes when trying to speak English. She is hard-working, keeping the family fed, clothed, and clean. Sonny was very upset and left the house. It was dark out and I worried about him walking around in that neighborhood.

I tried to finish up Malati’s homework and Tomtom’s reading without making a big deal about what had just happened. I had seen May blame Sonny even though it wasn’t his fault. I knew she threatened to hit him. Sonny came back a few minutes later and we all carried on as if nothing had happened. Malati and I finished her homework. Tomtom finished reading his book. I gathered my things to leave. The goodbye hugs were a little tighter tonight.