Youngest: I need to make something medieval. He says, referring to a summer project that he has chosen to wait until the night before the project is due.
Father: What do you mean medieval?
Youngest: From the Middle Ages.
Father: What do you mean the Middle Ages? From the fall of Rome to, what, 1400? That’s a thousand years.
Youngest: I want to make a mace.
Father helps son by providing a poster shipping tube and by pointing out you don’t have to make the ball completely out of aluminum foil, but he can instead make a ball of crumpled newspaper and cover it with foil, saving his parents $20 in aluminum foil.
Youngest: I need some string to attach it.
Father comes up with some twine and envisions the boy tying the head of the mace onto the shaft like a thong holding on the stone head of an axe.
But the boy makes clear that it he is going to tape the twine to the end of the shaft and then to the mace head.
Father: Oh, you’re making a morning star.
So I told the boy the history of the mace and its application in warfare. Part of the return to school is signing of the syllabi, where the parents and students review the content of each class and what they will cover.
And I thought, hubrisly, I might know more about history than the history teacher and more about literature than the English teacher.
I mean, I only have a bachelor’s degree, but I have continued to read for the, erm, couple of years since then. Which is, in many cases, longer than the teachers have been alive.
Granted, I am quite the outlier. But I would be happy to help my boys with their studies, at least in these subjects. When they come to me three-quarters of the way through the year with advanced algegra problems, though, I guess it puts me back into my place.
