The Light Switch

I call it the light-bulb moment.   That split second when someone I am teaching or training suddenly moves from confusion to oh-I-get-it.  The brow unfurrows.  The eyes twinkle with the light of understanding.  The smile lights up the room.

The middle-school student I have been tutoring this semester came to me after the winter holidays with a truckload of excuses for his uncharacteristic series of failures in the classroom.  The Social Studies teacher disliked him because of his dark skin, he said.  The detention he got for goofing off in math class was unfair because the teacher only saw the spitball after he had thrown it back to the guy next to him who had thrown it at him first. 

It wasn’t long before I knew exactly what was going on with Jordan.  A perfect storm of things totally out of his control gathered at once to send him spinning off into a pre-adolescent twilight zone.  He woke up one morning someone completely different from the boy he was when he fell asleep.  A hormonal haze had addled his brain.  His priorities shifted, putting concerns about his appearance and the quality of his breath far ahead of whatever the teacher was droning on about.  He was willing to do almost anything to keep the girl of his dreams from thinking he is *lame,* a term that refers to everything from an ugly face to the wrong swoosh on his sneakers.

One day we were having one of our heart-to-hearts before we dove into the lesson for the afternoon. 

“I have to read eight chapter books longer than 150 pages before the end of the semester,” he whined.

To me, that sounded like a sentence to heaven. 

 “So what’s the problem?”   I asked this with the most innocent look on my face I could muster, but I already knew the answer.

“I’m not much of a reader.  I don’t enjoy it at all.”

I taught him to read when he was only four.  He went to his first day of school knowing how to read at almost a second grade level, because his mother paid me to prepare him for school.  He was a natural.

“Well, that’s only because you haven’t been selecting the right books, Jordan.  With a little effort and an assist from the librarian at school, I believe you could find books you will find hard to put down.”
The look on his face is one I see often, the one that translates “Yeah, right.”

Parents, if you are new at this business of dragging your once darling little son or daughter through the bog known as puberty, I have a news flash.  You will say something as profound as the above statement I made to Jordan and in return receive the blankest stare you have ever witnessed.  You will be convinced your child has morphed into Charlie Brown or Lucy enduring the wah-wah-wah of adultspeak. Do not despair.  They heard you; in all likelihood, they heard you. 

This past Tuesday Jordan’s assignment was to read his library book for an hour.  Expecting to have a battle on my hands, I suggested it might be fun if he read it aloud to me.  To my utter amazement, he said okay…with enthusiasm!

The book he had just checked out is by Richard Lewis, an American ex-patriot living in Bali, Indonesia who has written four books for young adults.  Jordan chose The Killing Sea, a story about young characters who survived the 2004 tsunami created by a 9.0 earthquake in the Indian Ocean.  Based on the three chapters Jordan has read to me so far, Lewis writes with the voice of a mature 12-year-old.

Jordan has been mesmerized by this story.  When he got to a part where a young girl finds her mother tangled in fishing net, drowned, his eyes glistened and his voice quivered.  Jordan was on that beach with Sarah!

And there was my moment.  There was the instant for which every good teacher lives.  Jordan was enjoying a book.  He was seeing the movie version of the story in his mind’s eye.  He was feeling the terror, the despair and the fear of those fictional characters.  

Life is good.