Be the Bridge

You’re running through the jungle with your kids, being chased by an angry tribe after one of your kids accidentally broke the statue upon which their entire religion is based. The tribe is really, really mad. 

You emerge from the jungle at the edge of a narrow canyon, which is spanned by a rickety bridge. There’s no time to lose. You can hear the tribe gaining on you, so you start across the bridge with the kids, only to realize that there is a span bridge that is missing slats, and revealing rocky canyon floor some seventy feet below.

What do you do? Well, realizing that the span is just about your height, you hook your feet between the slats closest to you, then lay yourself out in a way that you can grab on to the other side, now spanning the gap. Thus situated, you tell the kids to go ahead and run across your back and get to safety.

“Use me as a bridge,” you cry out!

That is the type of parent you are. It is the type of parent I am. We parents are amazing! I am tearing up thinking of our wonderfulness.

Especially given the fact that we likely plummet to our death after this selfless act and then the kids move on, literally and figuratively! They get over our demise. And I am tearing up because I see, in the wake of my plummeting, my spouse starting to date and move on with her life far earlier than I would have in a similar situation!

(Quick aside. Use me as a bridge is an homage to a family joke that goes back to the days when my daughter was easy to pick up and wave around, as I would when we were wrestling on a bed with her brother. She would call out, “Use me as a weapon, use me as a weapon!” I would pick her up and lightly hurl her at her brother. The phrase stuck. Use me as a weapon!)

Now that I have us all thinking about bridges, and me slightly irked at my wife, let’s get to the reason I have us thinking about bridges. It has do with the insight that has been among the most helpful and liberating for me as I have gotten increasingly involved in trying to supplement my kids’ education

One of the challenges of getting more involved is the reality that few of us are trained as teachers and there are thus plenty of moments of feeling impotent as we shift into a space typically filled by trained educators.

While I don’t yet have complete answer for this predicament (beyond hoping it gets better with time), I have noticed that there is a type of learning I can help with without professional training and it calls to mind the image of us parents laying ourself on those broken bridges.

I first stumbled on this type of educational support when I was playing a recording of a lesson on geology for the kids that I had purchased from Great Courses. It was a great lesson, bringing to life the drama of all the fire and movement within the Earth, but it was also aimed an adult audience.

I found was that I could periodically pause the lesson at different points in order to interject with some basic adult-to-kid translating anytime I sensed the lesson had gotten too technical or could otherwise use a few words of context. And this seemed to make a huge difference, my quick interstitials being just enough so the kids could enjoy what was good about the lecture without getting frustrated.

I am playing a similar role in reading Great Expectations to my daughter.

There is a reason Charles Dickens was so wildly successful and famous during his lifetime—not just an author of literature, but a writer who was great with humor and plots and so many other elements that make reading fun. But he was writing well over a century ago and, while much feels modern, there are times the book is tough sledding for the modern reader.

Once again, I started offsetting the parts that were likely to leave a kid behind with quick bits of explanation and context. Nothing I am offering requires a teaching background or gift of pedagogy, just having the life experience of an adult who has some education and experienced reading. That, it turns out, can be enough to bridge the gap for the kids.

The result is that my daughter is pleading for Great Expectations, which I compare that to my memories of struggling with the book in middle school, enjoying parts but then so often being lost or put off by the dated parts .

My sense is that this bridging effort is freeing my kid to experience much more of what is so amazingly contemporary and entertaining about how Dickens writes. Were she reading it on her own without the explanations, the pleading would be me trying to get her to stop hiding the book and read it.

I could go on about these bridging moments. There is a great class on Khan Academy that was created by Pixar and explains storytelling. Once again, we are watching it, then pausing for daddy explanations, then continuing on, so that the kids get the good, while I bridge the gaps.

While there is obviously lots to be said for the skills that teachers bring in terms of being able to fully deliver the content that they are responsible for covering, I think this ability to be the bridge is a great way we parents who are looking to supplement our kids’ education can use our combination of life experience and availability for one-on-one time with our kids to be most useful.

Be the bridge. Fill in those gaps. Let those little, and not so little, feet scamper over your outstretched body to get the other side. It’s what we parents are good at.