ENTRY 34

Improvise title here

2月23日 (火ー水) 12:14 am JST

I really shouldn’t make my dad into my teaching role model, but I clearly have. When I was a kid, Dad used to run the occasional Boy Scout meeting or Wednesday night youth group in a very ‘loosey goosey’ sort of way. He’d come at a lesson armed only with his pre-existing knowledge of the subject, trees or knots or guitars or civics or what have you, and just kind of improvise along until he could hit upon a ‘this-is-so-cool’ part to try to sell to us.

I think the lessons I run have a tendency to imitate that. Like my semi-failed English camp haiku lessons. I basically went into that with the vague idea that I found haiku interesting, without thinking through why the kids should also find it interesting. I think some of my presentations over the years have suffered for related reasons. I make such a fetish of spontaneity, that I almost believe my laziness when it tells me it’s better not to rehearse anything. In particular, there was my long, failed trip to the Virginia Beach computing conference. I rode out there without a plan and just sort of hoped that things would work out my way. When I gave my spiel, I enjoyed how I worked out a sale’s pitch over the course of the day through trial and error, but it would have been better for me to just come prepare instead of wasting the half morning figuring out what I wanted to say.

What it seems like I’ve forgotten is just how intimidated by my father I was as a kid. That seems so ridiculous now, but at the time all I could think was, “Is man meant to know this much about birds?” Now, I always catch my father in some slip of language, confusing van Gogh and Gauguin. Authority creates itself through form not content, I suppose.

How many children’s English will I hurt with my pandering grammar? It’s like I’m trapped between being incomprehensible and redundant. I try to jive my way between Scylla and Charybdis, but the channel is just too narrow.