11 loves it when I’m wrong. He gloats over it, counts the ones he got wrong against the ones I did. He remembers and catalogs my mistakes as easily as he forgets his own.
A lot of kids like it when I make mistakes, actually. Helping 11 with his stack of homework today makes me remember my first group of school kids, who took as much delight in correcting my occasional spelling/grammar mistakes as I did in catching theirs. The first time it happened, I was kind of defensive. I was supposed to be the teacher. As time went on I learned to see the fun in it, and eventually I even started to admire the crazy proofreading and literary skills of my 6th graders. But to this day I still haven’t forgotten one girl’s accusation at the end of a grammar lesson on the past tense of see. “You say ‘I seen a moose.’ just like the rest of us.” I had just finished cruelly attributing this exact phrase (a personal pet peeve) to local dialect. I was in denial about my grammar at that point, but have since tried to Listen to myself speak occasionally. Spoiler alert: she was right.
Another class, most of them driven athletes, liked to call my raises and off side mistakes in hockey. It didn’t happen a lot, but when it did I felt the way they must’ve felt when I yelled “take 100” at them across the ice when they forcefully lifted a little kid’s stick -Defensive and a little angry. In the school dynamic, the line between respectfully correcting a teacher and outright insolence can be a fine one, and it becomes even thinner outside on the ice. I’m not saying my kids crossed that line; it was the rare time when any of my students were outright disrespectful ever, maybe even never. But when it was me with 10 ruffians on hockey skates engaged in an intense and incredible game of hockey, my guard came up immediately at any hint of defiance. Again, I know these kids were right. I was so busy making sure everyone else kept the puck below head level and yelling at the uber confident kids to “PAAAAASSSSSSS!” and keeping the slacker from playing in a snowbank that most of the time I forgot to watch my own stick. I’m sure I made a lot more mistakes than they ever dared point out to me.
There’s another group of kids that loves to comment on my clumsiness and tell me how much less clumsy everyone else they know is. Kids being who they are, this is never done is a cruel way. It’s a guileless statement of facts and nothing more. Every time I pour Lexus a glass of water she nags me good naturedly about the 3 drops that inevitably fall beside her cup. She even told a random lady we chatted with the other day about how clumsy I am. And, just like my former students and their grammar corrections and sports advice, this girl is not wrong.
All this is to say that I make a lot of mistakes in life and, weirdly, have found this makes adulthood more relatable to the kids in my life. Maybe this is a universal thing, a bridge between all humans, not just between children and adults. I’m still learning and learning and also sometimes failing to learn to admit my mistakes and acknowledge the things I’m bad at, but the kids in my life are doing their level best to make me humble.
This is relatable stuff.
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