Apple to Apple

I’m sitting again in my little brother’s hospital room. Fewer lights blink, fewer alarms beep, and fewer tubes link his body to bags. His heart is repaired and cleaned of infection. His numbers are good. And his post-surgery delirium is gone.

He’s been sleeping soundly. And long. And this deep sleep seems to be healing him of the past week’s damages, building him up and making him new.

When he wakes between naps, his mind is clear, and his eyes are bright.

My little brother is back again.

When he was a baby, he woke from his hard-won naps looking refreshed and ruddy and ready to go.

And now he is ready to get out of ICU, get out of the hospital, and get home for Christmas.

God willing, he’ll make it.

We are grateful.

I sit with my little brother in ICU. On monitors around his bed, lights blink and alarms beep. The infection causes his body to convulse and the bed to shake.

I am taken back almost six decades. He’s a baby in a carriage. It is my job to jiggle him to sleep. And what a job!

He was a high-gear baby, his motor stuck in fast. And so alert that he missed nothing. A wrinkle in his diaper, the flick of a light switch, the scrape of a chair across a floor in the next room, a dog barking in the next block—any of these could jerk him back from the brink of sleep.

If I got the jiggle wrong, his fists clenched and his back arched. And what came from his mouth was more than a cry. It was an urgent demand. It was as if he was announcing to the world that he was going to be a handful.

And he was. A delightful handful.

One of the joys of my childhood was to teach my little brother to read. It wasn’t hard. Being a teacher, I decided, as we bent together over Dick and Jane books, would be easy and fun.

Perhaps he led me into my life-long fascination with how people learn. His mind seemed to be in a constant firestorm of mental activity. Already as a toddler, he showed early signs of his ability to think rigorously and skillfully. And this propensity to actively question every step of the thinking process turned him later into an editor, and still later into a professor.

Tomorrow, surgeons will open my little brother’s infected heart. They aim to clean it of infection and rebuild the parts infection has destroyed.

But now, infection shakes his body. I wish I could pick him up and wrap him tight. I wish I could put him into a baby carriage and jiggle him, just right. And help him into a peaceful, healing sleep.

***

Postscript: My little brother’s surgery is complete. His heart is repaired. Now for the difficult healing.

Mr. Mitchell reminded me of a chipmunk—short and squat with puffed-out cheeks and a thick neck. Even the suit he wore everyday looked like a chipmunk—tawny brown, streaked with chalk dust, and flecked from chemical stains.

He brought no excitement to chemistry class. So students stepped up by setting off stink bombs during labs and dropping calcium metal into a pen to make it explode like a firecracker.

Mr. Mitchell lectured in a monotone and in circles. And if we managed to butt in with a question, he repeated what he had just said or contradicted himself or told us we should have found the answer in the textbook chapter he had assigned us to read.

Nevertheless, Mr. Mitchell made a way for us to succeed. Well, at least to earn an A.

His testing pattern was consistent. On day one, Mr. Mitchell would announce a test and conduct a review that no one understood. The second day, we’d take the test. On the third day, he’d turn back our graded tests, which we’d all failed, and harangue us for stupidity and indolence. We endured because we knew what was next—the right answers for the test, which we would retake on day four.

In study hall, we’d drill each other.

“Number 13?” John Jenkins would ask.

“Single replacement reaction.”

Donna Boyd beat me to the answer. But neither of us knew the question for the answer.

Not that this mattered. When we took the exact test the next day, we’d all earn A’s. And without even reading the questions.

Mr. Mitchell taught me exactly how not to be a teacher.

***

Read about other, more excellent teachers in my memoir Yoder School.

In a moment of self-disclosure, I once told a class about a devout childhood prayer of mine. I prayed it every night for maybe a year. Not wanting to appear self-seeking, I’d say the regular bedtime litany first, asking God to bless my parents and sisters and brothers and all the children around the world who had nothing to eat. But with that out of the way, I’d turn to begging.

“Please, please, please,” I’d implore with my eyes squeezed tight, “before my childhood ends, help someone invent a jump-rope turning machine.”

Jump rope was my sport. Too short to make a basket and too light to swing a bat, I was always chosen last for those teams. But with jump rope, I had the chance to be a star—to skip hot peppers faster than the brawny kids and to catch them in jump-rope tag and to beat them by jumping to higher numbers during the jump-rope jingles.

I loved jumping rope, so much that when I wasn’t jumping, I often dreamed I was.

But I had a problem. It was hard to convince my brothers to stop riding bikes and shooting baskets and come turn ropes. And my sisters were too young to turn steady or fast. If I only had a jump-rope turning machine.

Back then, I didn’t understand my passion for jumping. I didn’t know that jumping increased my feel-good hormones and pumped oxygen through my brain and acted as a metronome to develop my coordination. I only knew that, after jumping, the world felt right, and that fears of riots and kidnappings and communists coming and the world ending were less likely to creep into bed with me.

Not last night but the night before,
24 robbers came to the door.
As I ran out,
They ran in
How many policemen came around?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .

Mother, mother, I am sick.
Call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.
Doctor, doctor, will I die?
Yes, my child, but don’t you cry.
How many folks will bury me?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .

As we chanted about violence and death in the circle of the rope, life seemed less dire.

My prayers about the turning machine went unanswered. But several years after I told my class about those nightly pleas, a former student stopped by after school. She was waving a newspaper clipping.

“They did it, Mrs. Swartz,” she said. “They invented a rope-turning machine.”

She handed me the advertisement.

“They missed your childhood by a bit,” she said. “But still, you could buy it.”

She threw me an impudent smile and left me standing there, holding the tardy ad.

Three times this week, I’ve been asked the same question. And in much the same way. Before asking, each questioner studied my face, seeming to notice lines across my forehead and wrinkles around my eyes. And each hesitated for a moment before asking.

A new father, who had just eaten at my table, asked it this way, “Of all the years you’ve lived, which was the best?”

A few days later, a mid-life couple staggering under responsibility sat in our living room.

“If you could have frozen time,” one of them asked, “what age would you have chosen?”

The next day, I took my ninety-five-year-old mother to a podiatrist. Next to my mom, the podiatrist and I looked young. Still, our hair color matched. And so did the sag of our faces.

“You know,” he said, looking up at me from my mom’s feet. “I wonder sometimes. If I could go back to a younger age, what age would I choose?”

He paused for a moment.

“Do you ever think about that?” he asked me.

So I told him what the young father asked and the middle-aged couple. And I told him my answer to their questions—that I would choose my age, right now.

We talked about it, the podiatrist and I, how at this age we have less to prove, how we are more okay with what we can do and can’t do, how we feel more levelheaded and less pressured, and how people look at our silvered hair and make us sages by default.

We talked about feeling sorry for the young with all the hurdles they have to jump and the uphill battles they have to face.

“Still,” the podiatrist said. “I remember how I felt when I wrestled in college, so toned and agile and fast. When I moved, nothing creaked.”

He fell into silence. His hands kept working my mom’s feet, but his mind seemed to have flown to a long-ago gym.

“You know,” he said, looking up again. “What I’d really like is to have my old body back and keep the head I have now.”

All this time, my mom sat listening. She’s lived twenty-some years longer than me and the podiatrist. But neither of us thought to draw her into our conversation.

Though silver is in our hair, we’re apparently not as wise as we appear to be.

The poster in the dentist’s waiting room conjured up some memories. A smile, it said, is a curve that sets everything straight.

And those words on that wall took me back to the late sixties when Bob Dylan was singing “The Answer, My Friend, is Blowing in the Wind,” and we were all letting it all hang out and telling it like it was.

In my group of friends, we tried to be real—to rid ourselves of the armors our parents had taught us to wear and be completely candid with each other. In this way, we hoped to discover our best selves. 

So we’d sit in an honesty circle, maybe twenty of us, and give each other the right to interfere with our lives. One-by-one, we’d speak, each of us telling all of us what we didn’t like about the person to our left.

Maybe this exercise is what wiped the smile off my face. Or maybe it was the war in Vietnam and the riots in the cities and the assassinations. Or maybe I didn’t know how to be a teenager in that time and that place. Whatever the reasons, gravity just seemed to pull my mouth down.

And they called me on it.

Smile, they said in those circles. Get out of your head. Chill. Show some feeling. Hang loose. Quit being uptight. Get a groove. Lighten up.

So a smile became my armor. And though I never want to sit in such a circle again, what I learned helped me then and continued to benefit me years later as I taught.

I found that in the classroom, smiles made good things happen. Smiles won students over and helped me stay positive, even on bad days.

There’s science behind this.

When you smile, your brain gets the message that all is well. This sends feel-good chemicals through your brain, lifting your mood and lowering your stress.

And smiles are contagious. So when students smile back, good things happen to them. And their brains sync for learning.

I doubt my long-ago friends understood this science. But I’m sure they would have agreed with the dentist’s poster—A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.

To connect to teens, take a lesson from DJ Pryor, comedian and toddler dad gone viral. If you haven’t already, you can see him in action here. While you watch, notice how Pryor uses a strategy called Serve and Return to talk with his son. This strategy is fun, like a lively game of ping pong, but it’s essential in brain building.

And it works with teens.

Toddlers and teens may be on opposite ends of childhood, but the brains of each are reformatting as they build new synapses and prune unused ones. And since both toddlers and teens are in a fierce fight for independence, it’s a tricky time to say connected. But the Serve and Return strategy can help.

This strategy has three parts.

Notice the serve—the signal to begin a conversation. Toddlers are effusive with serving signals, but teens make you work harder. They often serve without saying a word. All you may get is a tapping foot or a long look or crossed arms or a slouch or a general edginess. Whatever the signal, you’ve been served. And it’s your job to notice.

Return the serve—as sign you’ve received the signal. Even though Pryor doesn’t understand a word his toddler says, he tries to match his response to what he’s been served. A teen may not say a word. But if she’s just hanging around, she may be signaling for time with you. Invite her for a bike ride, a walk, a trip to the grocery store, any place you can talk without eye contact. Give slouching shoulders a squeeze. Offer a cup of tea. When you get served, do something.

Keep taking turns. Notice how Pryor returns a serve and then waits. Both toddlers and teens deal with thoughts and emotions that stretch their abilities to articulate. It’s easy to pull the adult card, filling the silence with advice. But waiting is crucial. It respects teens as players in the game, giving them time to think. And it keeps the turns going.

It appears that DJ Pryor’s made it big in the toddler leagues. And I wish him well for what’s coming!

The trip was a nightmare. Always before, I’d taken the bus and found it a good way to get to my grandkids. Instead of fighting highway hypnosis and dodging dangerous drivers, I could write or read or listen or sleep. And meet some interesting people.

But this bus made people edgy. It was late, cold, dirty, and crowded. And the driver was fed up from the start. He didn’t want to hear about the Wi-Fi not working or the lack of power outlets or missed connections or unkempt bathrooms.

It was a traffic jam, though, that unhinged us. Toward the back of the bus, a ruckus erupted. First, words flew across the aisle. But soon people lurched to their feet, arms flailing and fists clenched. Over the intercom, the bus driver threatened to call the police. When the uproar continued, he hit the brakes. Though the speed was slow, we all jerked forward.

Across the aisle from me, a young man moaned. I had been watching his heightening agitation. He’d been rocking in his seat and jiggling his legs and sending wild looks around the bus. Now he shot straight up, dropping his headphones to the floor. Turning toward the back of the bus, he shouted words I never say.  And for a moment, I thought he’d walk back there and join in.

My bus mate reminded me of some former students, those who were easily overwhelmed by sensory and social stimulation. He seemed to be in what educators sometimes call the “rumble stage,” where there’s still a chance to prevent a full meltdown.

I gathered my courage and my blanket and slipped across the aisle to sit in the empty seat beside him. He sat down and began rocking again.

“It’s loud,” I said to him.

He didn’t answer, but his rocking slowed. I fished his headphones from the floor.

“I wish I had headphones,” I said, as I handed them to him.

He put them over his ears.

I pulled the hood of my coat over my head. He pulled his into place. I spread the blanket over him. And we hunkered down.

By now, the bus driver had nosed over to the berm and stopped. His phone in hand, he stood at the front of the bus and glared.

Everyone sat down. Everyone was quiet.

No one called the police.

No one went to jail.

You probably cut your teeth on the rule of three—on mitten-losing kittens and house-building pigs, and wise monkeys who saw no evil, heard no evil, and spoke no evil. You memorized the story of Goldilocks finding three bowls and three chairs and three beds. You shouted ready, set, go and learned the red, yellow, and green of a traffic light.

The rule of three kept showing up—in science (solid, liquid gas), famous speeches (blood, sweat, tears), historic documents (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness), safety slogans (stop, look, listen), literature (ghosts of Christmas past, present, future), sports (three strikes; you’re out), and food (bacon, lettuce, and tomato).

And if you came to believe that it’s as simple as one, two, three, you’d be right.

Our brains like patterns, especially trios, the smallest possible pattern. We find groups of three satisfying and easy to remember. We watch for them in books and movies. Even in casual conversation, we instinctively wait for the third item in a list before taking our turns to speak.

Educators know that brains can process three “chunks” in short-term memory. More than three, students tune us out.

So how can you tap into the three-loving brain? Here are—you guessed it—three ways:

• Three Ideas—When I led tours at the Columbus Museum of Art, I noticed how quickly visitors’ eyes could dull in front of a painting. “Let’s find three contrasts in this scene,” I’d say to them. And their eyes snapped back into focus. Try it in all the disciplines—three achievements of Dorothea Dix, three literary devices in To Kill a Mockingbird, three traits of the sun. Give them three, there’s a chance they’ll remember.
• Three Times—Repeat it to help them keep it. And intensify each round—they hear it, muck about in it, and teach each other. Most people remember 5 percent of what they hear, 75 percent of what they do, and 90 percent of what they teach.
• Three Ways—Pull in the whole brain. Give students something to see (Venn diagrams, paintings, objects, timelines), something to hear (a lecture, excerpts from a speech, chants from a demonstration, songs from the Great Depression), and something to do (label a map, assemble a chart, peer through a microscope, prove a theorem, debate an issue).

In the mid-300s B.C., the famous teacher Aristotle wrote the three-word phrase Omne trium perfectum, translated toEnglish as what comes in threes is perfect.

So try it—three ideas, three times, in three ways.