We received our spring mailing from the local lawn service in March asking what we wanted to sign up for this year. Due to significant competition, having your lawn mowed in our town is ridiculously cheap--$20 per week. Three guys come using commercial mowers, edgers and weed whackers and are done with the whole thing in 15 minutes. It is one of the few services in Chicago that seems to be a real bargain. If you ask me, it is well worth saving the hassle of firing up the mower, getting gas, having the mower serviced, sweating it out in the yard, etc.
So when the lawn service flier sat and sat on our kitchen counter for weeks, I asked Joe "what gives?" He confessed that he was thinking about doing it himself. As I blogged about last year, Joe has a vivid memory of watching his dad mow the lawn and following behind him with a toy mower. Since Joe works long hours, we hire out a lot of things that he saw his dad do around the house, like cleaning the gutters and the windows. So it is important to Joe that his kids see him doing real work around the house and learn that they need to be involved in taking care of our home. How can you argue with that?
At the same time, I was instilled with a healthy respect for the danger of a mower. My mom's mother had a piece of wire shoot out from the back of a mower and pierce her ankle, so my mom was always vigilant about making sure that we were far from the mower when she was operating it. So I had some reservations about whether it was a good idea to make lawn mowing a father-son bonding experience at age 2. But Joe was insistent and I relented.
And so began what I thought would be the great lawn mowing teaching demonstration. On day 1, I quickly realized that Joe and I had different ideas in mind, and it underscored the different ways we interact with AJ. When I have AJ "help" me with a task, I tend to be more focused on his experience and letting him try things. For example, when AJ helps me with the laundry, I get him to sort the clothes, throw the socks into the washer, boost him up to pour the soap and turn on the buttons, etc. When it comes time to fold the laundry, I have him help me sort the socks and put the folded clothes in the basket. Because I am so focused on getting him involved and the experience of helping, we often don't finish tasks as he loses interest halfway through the basket of clothes and wanders off. Joe will come home to find a basket of laundry half folded or a washer loaded with clothes but no soap and shake his head. I would describe my style as hands-on teacher.
I am coming to the realization that Joe is more of a demonstrator. In short, his style can be described as letting AJ watch him do things and learn from the watching. For example, Joe always has AJ help him with laundry on the weekends. This involves Joe efficiently sorting the clothes into piles, loading them in the washer, loading the soap himself and maybe letting AJ push the start button (if AJ is paying attention and asks) while AJ plays nearby or wanders in and out of the laundry room. But the laundry most certainly gets completely done, folded and put away. If AJ loses interest, Joe lets him wander off into his room to play with other toys. If AJ whines to do something else ("Dada, we go downstairs!"), Joe ignores him or tells him that he has to wait until the laundry is finished.
When I first observed Joe's interactions with AJ, I would get frustrated and try to coach him--"You have to be more hands on. Let him help you more." Joe would (wisely) ignore me. It didn't seem to me that a lot of teaching or learning was going on.
And so we come to the great lawn mowing experiment. One Saturday morning in May when the grass was going to seed, Joe announced that he was going to fire up the mower for the season. "Okay," I told him. "But you have to keep a really close eye on AJ. He needs to be a safe distance from the mower and you are going to have to pay close attention to him and what he is doing. Explain to him how the mower turns on, how the blades go around, how it cuts the grass."
The mower was rolled out of the garage and fired up. AJ rolled his bubble mower out of the garage and loaded up on bubble gas. There was no explanation of how anything worked. And off they started with AJ following closely behind his Dada. "Too close!" I called (or perhaps shrieked). "Explain to him what you are doing! Isn't that the whole point of this lawn mowing thing?" "If he is too close, then he needs to get out of the way!" Joe shouted over the noise of the mower. He promptly put his headphones in and resumed pushing the mower around the yard. So I huffed and grabbed AJ and his bubble mower and took him over to the other side of the yard while stewing to myself about what a waste of time this teaching experience was since Joe wasn't bothering to teach AJ anything. And I retreated to the patio with David while I kept an eye on AJ working on a corner of the yard and Joe plodded along in the middle. And as I sat and fumed and watched AJ, I started to realize that he was watching his Dada and mimicking what Dada was doing. As Joe pushed his mower in a straight line and turned a corner at the end of the row to head up the next one, AJ watched. And then AJ pushed his mower in a relatively straight line, got to the corner, made the turn and come down the next row. And as Joe went in a circle around our one little pitiful Charlie Brown tree in the backyard, AJ started to push his mower around in an arc, too. It helped me to understand that Joe and I just have different teaching styles, and AJ learns differently from both.
The top picture is of AJ watching Joe from afar. The pictures after that are of the "too close!" phase of lawn mowing, plus one pass through the flower bed.
