Evolving identity

Over dinner last night I learned that Graham needed to focus on Latin homework rather than starting season 3 of The Wire with me because he had gotten a 40 on a Latin test. Not a quiz, a test. Now, this teacher is known for giving hard tests and for letting kids make up their mistakes, but a 40?

We are paying $80 a week to an executive function coach to help Graham with issues around studying and being organized, and a few weeks back she came and found me after their session to tell me that Graham was on top of his Powerschool, which I interpreted to mean that I should get out of his jock. I perhaps shouldn't have backed off as far.

Then I sat with Graham to help him with his Latin, a language which I only took 1 year of, 35 years ago, more or less as a lark because it wasn't an honors class and it was super easy. Needless to say, despite years of Spanish and French and traveling in Italy and Brazil and also knowing Russian and other Slavic languages so I am comfortable with a language with cases and declensions, it wasn't easy. Particularly since they were translating pretty abstract passages from freaking Cicero.

And Graham did not have a handle on it. He was struggling pretty mightily.

So now Graham is on the cusp of getting at least one B in his first semester in high school. Which would axe his chances of being a valedictorian, i.e. being in the top 10% of his class. Sigh.

So I guess I need to be more attentive and offer more guidance. Mostly around the structured process of how to study, the need to put in the work, and making choices (maybe not staying at Robotics Club till 9 several nights a week).

Over the course of our lives we learn to distinguish between the things that come to us more or less by nature -- in our case (me and Graham) great memories, curiosity, persistence in searching down answers -- and the things that come to us by adjusting our natures to the demands of the world so as to channel our gifts towards accomplishment. In some real if paradoxical sense, it is only the latter -- what we become by learning the Way of the World -- that can really said to belong to "me," because it reflects intentional effort on my part. Which is to say, to extend beyond the logic of Descartes' cogito ("I think therefore I am"), that my truest "I" is the part of me that overcomes the tendencies bequeathed me at birth.