Author: Phyllis Swartz

It’s coming again . . . my favorite time of the year. For seventeen years now our grandchildren have come to our house for Cousin Week. At first, just three, all in diapers. And each summer we kept adding.

In the early years, we pulled them in wagons and pushed them on swings and changed their diapers and read them stories. They spilled milk and lost pacifiers and skinned knees. They begged to be carried and fought over the favorite red ball.

At naptime, they recharged and we regrouped. And then we’d start over again.

Now, many of them could carry me. And we’re dealing with cars, not tricycles; with sports injuries, not skinned knees; with sinks full of dishes from late-night snacks, not spilled milk. They lose phones instead of pacifiers and discuss the origins of the universe instead of fighting over the favorite red ball. Now we camp and kayak and bowl and ride the bike path and stay up until all hours and sleep the morning away. And eat and eat and eat.

“Are the grandkids coming?” my favorite clerk at Kroger asks.

She knows.

But what I like more than all the things we do together, is that they still come to us, these young people, just beginning to spread their wings. They won’t keep coming, not like this. Their wings will take them other places—to schools and jobs and relationships. They’ll be going on, to make their lives.

But this year, they’re coming, all of them.

Back in our day, we sang these nostalgic lyrics: 

   We have this moment to hold in our hands
	And to touch as it slips through our fingers like sand. . .
	We have this moment today.

Being a grandma, I’m permitted this sentimentality.  

But being a grandma, I also applaud their futures, when our house will no longer be a week-long haven every summer. When, instead, they’ll be out there, somewhere, creating havens for others. And we’ll be watching and praying.

I’m working with my 91-year-old father these days. We’re making slide shows for three history talks he hopes to give this fall.

From his computer, he sends an image to mine. And with a few clicks, the image is where it belongs—in slide number 21.

We’d been doing this for weeks. But on this day, my dad falls silent for a moment. His eyes travel from my computer to his. And back again.

“I’m amazed,” he says. “What path did that photo take between our computers? Where all did it go?”

My dad learned this kind of talk from his dad.

Grandpa used to lean back in his chair after a good dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes. He’d cross his arms and prop his chin in his hand. And he’d marvel as he recalled the first cars on the public road or the first airplanes that crossed their mountains or the first electric lights that dotted the country side.

He had grown up, after all, with horses and buggies and butter churns. He had seen wool shorn from sheep and then and carded and spun and knit into clothing. No wonder he was astonished at the first space travel and the moon landing.

It’s hard, he’d say, for each generation to imagine what the next one will invent. And he’d tell what he read in the World Book Encyclopedia—that in the early 1800s, an employee at the patent office resigned because there would be no more inventions to patent.

If my grandpa could have seen my dad and me working on the slide show—collecting images of log houses and census records and newspaper clippings and church-vote tallies and putting all this together to be shown on a big screen at a history meeting—he would have been amazed once again.

And I’m like my grandpa and my dad, I can’t imagine what my grandchildren’s generation will create. As far as I can tell, there’s only one invention left—a sort of transport that can bring grandchildren across the miles, from their front doors to mine, in seconds, not hours.

When I was a kid, people loved jokes about New Math. Lots of people bought Tom Lehrer’s latest album with a song named New Math.

“You’ve got thirteen and you take away seven,” he sang, “and that leaves five . . . well, six actually, but the idea is the important thing.”

Even Charles Schultz cracked on New Math in his Peanuts comic strips.

“How can you do New Math problems with an old math mind?” Charlie Brown wails.

Sally agrees. “Sets . . . One-to-one matching . . . Sets of one . . . Renaming two . . . Subsets . . . Joining sets . . . All I want to know, is how much is two and two?”

I laughed at the jokes, but I liked New Math. It showed me how numbers fit together in ways that are precise and beautiful

New Math was invented because of Sputnik. Our American brains had gotten lazy, teachers told us, because we’d been given too many answers. But no more. Now we had to figure problems out on our own like the Russian kids. The Russians didn’t mollycoddle their kids. That’s why they were smart enough to launch the first artificial satellite into space. America needed to step it up. And this was why the president started NASA and the Space Race and New Math.

Like Lehrer and Schultz, some of the teachers didn’t like this new-fangled math, especially Mrs. Brandt. Sometimes she’d go on a rant. Just tell a kid that eight times seven is fifty-six, she’d say. No need to reinvent the wheel. And what do bases and sets have to do with the real world? If someone needs to figure out how much carpeting is needed for a room, they sure don’t need to know how to count in Base 5. Real arithmetic—that’s what kids need.

But sometimes I wondered. Maybe Mrs. Brandt said these words because she didn’t really understand New Math. She’d explain a lesson, but when we had questions or got stuck doing problems at the board, she’d act confused and start telling us it was our job to figure it out, not hers.

I’d look at Mrs. Brandt, with her white hair and her forehead knotted up with thinking, and I’d remember Charlie Brown wailing about doing New Math with an old brain.

This made me sorry for Mrs. Brandt, but not sorry enough to stop liking New Math.

He never knew I saw what he did.

It was long after the school day ended. The winter sky was already darkening, and the teacher parking lot was empty, except for my car. I was working late.

From my desk, I saw the superintendent carrying a stack of paper from the middle school across the parking lot toward his office in the administration building. These were pre-computer days when everything in education—teacher evaluations, lesson plans, board minutes, long-term planning—all this and more generated mounds of paper.

The surfaces in Dr. Froning’s office might have been lined by stacks of paper, but he hated litter. He bought into the Keep America Beautiful campaign. He installed trash bins around school buildings. And he sent a clear message across the district: Be part of the solution, not the pollution.

Just as he passed the bus garage, a gust of wind blew a piece of crumpled paper across his path. It caught at the edge of a curb.

Dr. Froning stopped and stared at the paper. He took three more steps toward his office and stopped again. He turned back. Balancing the stack of paper he already carried, he bent to pick up the litter. He carried it to a trash bin and tossed it in.

I had watched Dr. Froning stick to his principles as he wrote policy and led meetings and addressed teachers in school-opening convocations. Decades later, I remember few of these public words. But I do remember this private act of integrity. And I recognize its call to me as a young teacher—to take the high road, even when no one watches.

In many ways, we become what others teach us at odd moments, when they don’t know they’re teaching. We’re shaped by bits of wisdom people drop along the way.

And little do we know that while we watch, others are watching us.

“Don’t shout down the stairs,” I ‘d tell my kids when they were young. “Come and find me.”

But until I understood about upstairs and downstairs brains, this is how I interacted with my students. In my teaching, I’d stay upstairs in the thinking brain and call them to come up to learn.

The trouble was, they couldn’t always get there.

In kids and teenagers, the downstairs brain, which houses the limbic system, is fully built and functioning. It keeps them breathing and blinking and feeling alive—full of joy and laughter and frustration and anger. And ready with quick impulse to show what they feel.

The upstairs thinking brain, on the other hand, is unfinished, still under construction until well into the twenties. No wonder many young people struggle to plan and prioritize. No wonder they make decisions without rationale.  

A stairway, made of a network of neurons and synapses, connects the two brains. But because the upper brain is not fully functioning, the lower brain flounders.

“Think!” the partially-constructed upstairs brain advises. But the message isn’t clear enough or strong enough. And the lower limbic system doesn’t get the message.

Especially when the stairway is cluttered, as it often is when a kid is stressed. The hormones released during fight and flight episodes block messages from the upper brain to the lower brain, preventing logic from modulating emotion.

Kids don’t need adults shouting down from on high, telling them to think. They need someone to clear the stairs by giving them simple strategies for regulating—counting backward from ten, putting feelings to words, and walking off angsty energy.

The more kids use the neurons and synapses that connect the thinking and feeling brains, the more passable the stairway becomes and the better the two brains can collaborate.

Last week, my husband lost his little sister. Though they didn’t share genes, she called him Brother. Afterall, she lived in the Swartz home for almost four decades, having arrived when she was six years old. She came out of the Lapeer State Home, first known as the Michigan Home for the Feeble-Minded.

At the funeral, the word feeble did not come to mind. Dorell created her own definition of Down syndrome. Not a victim, she saw herself as the maker of her fate, always looking for ways to revamp reality until it corresponded to her dreams of how things should be. 

And so she took a developmental education course at a community college. She worked on the hospitality team at Taco Bell, greeting customers and wiping tables. Wanting to be a mother, she adopted a child from Compassion International. And she celebrated her own heritage, decorating her room with Cherokee-style blankets and pillows and wall hangings.

At the first Swartz reunion after our two children were married, Dorell asked my husband to call our family together.

“Got something to tell the new ones,” she said.

As Dorell directed, we sat in chairs facing her.

“You need to know,” she told our new children-in-law, “that I’m the aunt and you’re the niece and nephew. That I am in the generation above you, and you’re below me. And that you should treat me with respect.”

They agreed. And to record the promise, she brought out a paper for them to sign.”

Dorell came to the Swartz home in the early seventies when the Department of Mental Health began downsizing state institutions like the Lapeer State Home, which at its height housed over 4000 residents, making it one of the largest such facilities in the world.

It was Dorell’s fortune to move from this segregated asylum into the Swartz home.

But it was also the fortune of the Swartzes, as anyone could tell by the tributes at her funeral.

And if she had heard what we said, she’d have nodded her head, accepting the truth that she showed us all how to take courage in hand and think big and reach far.

A few summers ago, I visited the fighting swamp. When I closed my eyes, I could feel, once again, the charge in the air just before a fight. I could hear it: fists thudding, fighters grunting, and bystanders cheering.

“We’ll take this to the swamp,” Frank would say to Jerry after sharp words at school.

And Jerry had to show up. Otherwise, kids would call him a chicken all week.

The fighting swamp was five blocks from school, on the corner of Webber and Columbine—far enough to keep the teachers away, even though the muck and snakes and poison sumac should have been enough. Word of the fight always spread, and dozens of kids would ring the swamp, waiting for the fight.

Just before the first punch, the fighters would circle each other, fists bunched, jaws clenched, chins up.

“Come on. Give me a punch. Throw me one!” they’d taunt each other.

And finally someone would. It was during this circling phase that I once stepped into the middle. And it’s because Frank was taunting Tommy.

Tommy was my friend. He carried my books, and wrote nice notes, and back in third grade, offered me a plastic ring he won from a toy slot machine. I didn’t take it. Not because I didn’t like Tommy. I just wasn’t ready to get serious in third grade.

Fighting Frank in the swamp was the last thing Tommy wanted to do. And just as Frank bunched up his fists, something came over me. I stepped in between Frank and Tommy.

“This is stupid,” I said to Frank. “You only fight if you aren’t brave enough or smart enough to settle it some other way.”

There I stood. I was a little Mennonite girl with long braids, a modest skirt, thick dark glasses, and associated with God. I was quite certain I wouldn’t get hit.

The swamp grew silent. Tommy’s fists went down. So did Frank’s. Nobody, including me, knew quite what to do next. So we all went home.

In the sixty years since that day in the swamp, many of my peacemaking efforts have failed.

But that day, my friend Tommy didn’t get punched.

Our grandsons knew exactly where they were going. We followed them, down the aisle of the sanctuary to the pew that seemed to be theirs.

My husband broke protocol and leaned over me to whisper to them.

“Cows know where to go for their milking,”

And though our grandsons have never worked in a dairy barn, they knew what he meant.

We talked about this later at lunch. It’s not just at church that people seem to own their seats. On the school bus, in the lunchroom, and in classrooms, people claim places, even if they aren’t officially assigned.

Most students care where they sit. And they have a plethora of reasons. They want front seats to focus, back seats to see the whole room, middle seats to be among their friends, along-the-wall seats to feel safe.

No matter the desired vantage point, people like to establish personal territory in shared spaces. Usually, others tacitly assent. But when this unspoken rule is broken, I’ve seen students nearly come to blows.

Not all students have altruistic motives for seating choices. Some want to sleep or chat or daydream. But I’ve found that usually students are glad to be guided to the place where they learn best.

Some of my students stood at a counter in the back of the class, others pushed a desk up to mine. After some false tries, one of my seventh-grade students found his place under my podium. Closed in by three sides, he churned out excellent work, raising his letter grade by two in one marking period.

Cows in my grandfather’s milking barn knew their stanchions to be good places. There they found chopped grain in their troughs, water when their noses pushed a lever in their bowls, and relief from the heavy bags of milk they carried. In their stanchions, they could let go and breathe easy. 

And this is how students settle in when they find ideal spots for learning.