The more things change

During a tour at my son’s new school this summer, another father struck up a conversation. He asked about my son’s reading and described his efforts to get his child to pick up books more frequently. A key problem, he insisted, was that kids weren’t instructed as they had been when he and I were young: no more recitations and writing drills, among other things. He had hired an outside tutor in order to make sure that his child was learning the way he thought they should learn.

Perhaps it’s because I have friends who are teachers or perhaps it’s because I spent some time working in an elementary school, but his approach struck me as ridiculous. Teachers in public schools have spent years learning about teaching methodologies before they even get into a classroom and then hone their techniques as they teach. They necessarily have a much better sense of effective teaching methodologies than does some guy who hasn’t been in elementary school since he was a student during the Reagan administration.

This exchange has popped into my mind sporadically over the past few months, and I’ve come to believe that my response to his insistence wasn’t really a function of who I knew or my experience. It was, instead, a recognition that the world evolves and changes and that how things were is never necessarily better than how things are.

It takes a long time for people to recognize that the world isn’t static. Some probably never do. We are born into a world and learn how the world works as we age and then feel as though we have a handle on things. But the world, frustratingly, has kept on changing and evolving, until the world that we understood has new tweaks and gaps and systems that we don’t recognize or immediately understand.

That’s not what we don’t recognize, really; everyone knows that things change. What we don’t recognize for a long time, if ever, is that even the static world into which we were born was itself a product of change. The static reality that we had a firm grasp on by the age of 10 or 15 was someone else’s bizarre new way of existence that made no sense and was probably not all that sensible. We plunked into a constantly shifting timeline but only really recognize the shifts that diverge from the world we first learned about.

I suspect — and I’ll admit to probably being somewhat parochial here — that this understanding of having been plunked down into a roiling, churning reality probably comes more quickly to people who live in environments where such change is a constant. My wife and I took our kids down to Soho this morning, a Manhattan neighborhood near where she and I used to live. Walking around was a constant stream of “this used to be X” comments about buildings and storefronts. The places that hadn’t changed were the exception.

This is the nature of New York City. I imagine that it is much less the nature of, say, a small town in an agricultural region. I imagine that in such places, with fewer things to change and change happening at a less rapid pace, it’s harder to see change as the constant and easier to see it as anomalous.

I could spin this out into some observation about politics and American culture, but it’s Dec. 31 — about seven hours, as I write, from the new year. I’m writing this in part because the trip to Manhattan reminded me that things change but that the ship of Theseus is still the ship of Theseus. This year has been one of personal change extending far beyond my son’s new school. It is reassuring to remember, to recognize that the universe is chaos, not order. Change is eternal. And it is not necessarily change for the worse.

So trust yourself. And, for God’s sake, trust your kid’s teachers.

Photo: Goldberger’s Pharmacy on 1st Avenue, as it looked in 2016 (and photographed by me). Below, via Apple Maps, what it looks like today.