Over the Thanksgiving Break, I helped my son put together a 4 foot long, 3200 piece, Star Wars themed Executor Star Ship Destroyer model. I wasn't willing to pay the $1000 LEGO version price tag, so we opted for a knock off instead. It took over a month to arrive, but when it did, my son dove in head first and began putting the model together. It was tedious work because it involved so many pieces that were either grey, dark grey, or black and the instructions were such that you had to squint really hard to figure out what color piece actually fit in the appropriate spot. Couple that with a young bulldog that likes to get his nose into everything and really has no spacial awareness when it comes to bumping into tables and chairs, and you have a recipe for disaster. In the end, the model was completed I have a whole new appreciation for the concepts of patience and perseverance.
It truly is amazing how a knock off LEGO model can spark a blog post, but when you have giant nubs for fingers and you are put into a situation where you are putting tiny little pieces together with said nubs, you have a lot of time for colorful language in your head and thinking about your next #OwnYourEpic blog. I had given my son a deadline for getting the model together because the pieces were spread out over our table that I wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner on. I put my teacher hat on and felt that 5 days was ample time for him to complete the project, but I didn't take into account that he is a teenage boy on Thanksgiving break who has many other responsibilities like gaming with his friends on his PS4, checking out YouTube videos, and sleeping in. If you can sense the sarcasm thus far, that's good, because I am laying it on pretty thick. I realized that my deadline was not going to be met, so I jumped in to assist so we could get this behemoth model completed.
As I was working on my portion of the model, I glanced at the instruction manual to see how many pages the section I was completing would cover. I was delighted to find out that it was 15 pages for one side of the model. As I followed the steps, I got to thinking about why my son exhibited some avoidance tendencies when it came to this model and why he wasn't too keen on my deadline. It was the same type of behavior that I had seen from him regarding his school work during this pandemic and it hit me like a ton of knock off LEGO bricks. I have heard so many stories from parents who are struggling with their children during the pandemic as it relates to their school work. These are the types of stories that pull at your heartstrings and make you really think about the purpose of education. While this situation was not one of those stories, it does however, follow the same pattern of what our kids are experiencing during this pandemic education experience and how we as educators can help them navigate through it.
Patience and perseverance are skills that our kiddos learn over time. They are not born with these tools and they rely heavily on us as adults to model them consistently. Unfortunately, in a global pandemic, these skills get tested and even adults struggle with them. This is where I learned a lesson from my son and really felt a proud dad moment. My son wasn't avoiding the model, he was avoiding frustration and took regular breaks from it to do things that he enjoyed doing. This allowed him to come back to the model at another time with a fresh perspective and a positive outlook. His focus was on patience and perseverance because he knew that he would get it done, but it wouldn't necessarily meet my arbitrary deadline. Ultimately, he did finish the model two days after the deadline I gave him and the sense of accomplishment in his face was amazing. He made it through a big project without any major breakdowns or colorful language and he taught his dad something along the way.
The lesson learned here is that our kids are watching us all the time. They want to please us and they want to feel a sense of accomplishment. They are not avoiding or trying to drive us crazy, but rather, they are working through a pretty significant ordeal with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and trying to make sense of it in their own way. As educators, we need to afford them this opportunity and practice patience and perseverance with them, because this is a lesson that will stick with them long after their formal education ends.
#OwnYourEpic #ONWARD
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