The Best Graduation Gift Parents and Teachers Could Ever Give Their Kids

One spring towards the end of my teaching career, I had a parent request a meeting. All educators know that when parents request a meeting, it usually means that they want to complain about something that you did. I didn’t know what this parent wanted to complain about, but I braced for it. She handed me a blank piece of paper and asked me to write a letter to her daughter. She explained that she had started doing this for her daughter in kindergarten. Every year she had the teacher write a letter to the daughter as an eighteen-year-old. She was compiling the letters in a binder, and as a graduation present, she would give her the binder with letters from her thirteen years of school. Anybody who knows me can guess that I shed a tear, both at the thoughtfulness of this mom and at the honor to be able to write a letter like that to a student. I decided then and there that when I had kids I would do the same thing.

Somewhere along the line we decided that, instead of just doing letters, we would get a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! for each of our kids. I would have their teachers

How to Make the Most of Summer: A Guide for Educators

Before I became an educational administrator, I spent 8 years teaching. Four of those years I had summers off without kids, and four years I had summers with kids. Before we had kids, I usually spent my summers doing some sort of house project. Summer was a time to re-tile the house, put in French doors, cut off my thumb. Yeah, I really had the summer thing down. Summers with kids were the same, except there were kids in the house. So essentially I would find time to get projects done around being a dad.

 But I learned several things throughout the years, both as a teacher and as an administrator. It is very easy to let a summer slip by. Summers can easily sail past rather quickly, and the last thing I want is to be starting a new school year feeling not rested. In fact, I have discovered that no matter how long a school break is, the majority of teachers come back to school stating, “I could have used just one more day.” 

So here is a guide that I have compiled both through experience and through conversations that will help you make the most of the summer.

The Beginning of a Secret Garden

I love gardening. I know that this statement is pretty obvious, but I'm not sure if you understand how much I enjoy gardening. Mowing the lawn is one of my favorite chores. I can get lost in time trimming trees. I start to get a little giddy in the fall, anticipating the hours that I get to spend spreading seed and shoveling manure to put in a winter lawn. If I go for a couple of weeks without doing yard week or gardening, I start to feel like I'm losing my soul.

So when my eight year old daughter recently read The Secret Garden and then could not keep herself out of the garden, my heart beat with the joy of 1,000 angels singing. She has been weeding, digging, planting, watering, and doing whatever she can in the garden day in and day out. So of course a Renaissance Dad wants to continue to encourage this type of behavior.

Behind this row of oleanders...will be a secret place.

Enter the corner of my yard.

We have a row of oleanders at the back of our yard, and behind them is my workshop. There is a small triangular hunk of wasted space sitting back there. I have always thought about this as a great place for raising chickens, if and when my city ever lifts their ban on chickens (don't get me started on that one). But my wife and I started talking about this little corner. What if we made it a secret garden for the kids? What if this became the area where they could dig and plant whatever they wanted? What if the kids had a place to make mud pies, look for worms, grow and pick as many flowers as they wanted. And what if I pulled out an oleander or two and built a secret door for their secret garden?

So while the secret garden is merely in its infancy, I could not contain my excitement to share the early stages of this project.

Stay tuned for the next phase of The Secret Garden project.

Let It Go: Struggles of a Type-A Parent

Like most educators, I have a type-A personality. I like things in order. They may not always seem to be in order to others, but my order makes sense to me. I like routine. I like plans, especially my plans. And like Hannibal Smith from "The A-Team", I love it when a plan comes together (hmmm, "Type-A", "A-Team". Coincidence? I think not...).

I struggle with this when it comes to my kids. They don't like order. They like to throw wrenches into plans. They like chaos.

This may be hard to believe for people who have read this blog, but for anybody who knows me, this probably comes as no surprise. I often get frustrated when my grand master plan starts to unravel.

So let me tell you about last week. My three year old son was very sad because his sisters had a decorative cross hanging in their room and he didn't have one. So we decided to make one together. I have pieces from an old organ, and we searched through to find a piece of wood that we thought we could use. So far, everything was going according to my plan. And I was spending some great time with my son.

We decided to plane the piece down to remove the old varnish, stain, and marks. And here is where the metaphorical wheels fell off. As I was straightening up the workshop, Little E decided that he was going to work on a project of his own. He found my bin of irrigation supplies, and his engineering spirit took over. He started constructing a machine. And he had a description of everything that this machine did. I started to get irritated. After all, he was the one that enlisted me to work on a project. I was doing this for him.

And then he held up his machine, and my heart melted. He was having so much fun. So what if the cross did not get completed that day. Actually, the cross didn't get started that day. But Little E and I got to play with PVC pieces, build machines, and laugh. I was reminded, not for the first time and definitely not for the last, that my children will not necessarily remember our output, but rather the quality of our time together. There will be plenty of time for me to build things for and with my kids. But when their engineering spirit, or creative abilities, or gardening minds take over, I should embrace that. After all, parenting isn't just about bringing my kids into what I am doing. It's also about the time that I spend doing the things that they love.

From Cluttered to Classy - Organizing a Homework Station

Before my wife and I had kids, we were really cool. We would regularly go out on dates, we vacuumed and mopped our house every two weeks whether it needed it or not, and we had a wine rack on which we kept bottles of wine. Yes, actual bottles of wine, stored on horizontal holders. It was fantastic.

Cut list - good for four medium sized baskets

And then the kids came. They just started showing up until we had three of them. The bottles of wine were apparently consumed, or just moved away from little hands that seemed to pull down everything below the three foot line. As the kids got older, that really cool wine rack started to fill up with baskets of kids things. Coloring books, pencil boxes, hair band kaboodles, and all kinds of kid things started piling up on our once-cool and appropriately-named wine rack. And the thing about kids is that, no matter how much things are organized, they have a tendency to undo it. I have a theory about this, something along the lines that they want to see if parents can get better and more efficient with their cleaning and organization.

Then one day my wife and I looked at each other and silently decided that we were going to take back the organization in our kitchen. Actually, it sounded more like my wife saying, "What do you think about building a wall rack to organize all of this junk?" And so one of the easiest, quickest, and aesthetically pleasing projects took shape. As with most of my projects, this was done on the cheap. I used scrap pieces of 3/4" maple plywood to build the shelf unit. Twelve inch boards could also be used, or, if you need to buy the plywood, the size pictured can be cut from a half sheet of 3/4" plywood. The baskets were $5 each, and the paint was fairly inexpensive, resulting in an organization project that was less than $30.


I started by cutting the plywood according to the diagram. I used pocket holes and wood glue to attach the horizontal pieces to the vertical pieces. If you don't have a pocket hole jig, you could also use screws driven from the outside into the shelves, with a little wood filler to hide the holes.

Once the shelf was assembled, I attached a cleat to the back of it, under the top shelf. Since I was only planning on storing school supplies and hair do-dads, I was not anticipating too much weight, so one cleat seemed sufficient. The cleat allows the bracket (receiving cleat) to be leveled and hung without needing a helper or two.

At this point, everything was ready for a coat of paint. Since all of our appliances are stainless steel and black, we decided on a black shelf with grey baskets. Once the paint was dry, the cleat was positioned on the wall and screwed to the studs (make sure your kids are around when you calibrate your stud finder - point it to yourself, wait for it to beep, and let your kids know that it has found a stud. This never gets old). With the wall cleat secured, the shelf cleat can slide into place, with two additional screws attaching the shelf cleat to the studs.

The last thing to do was to transfer all of the junk from the wine rack into the new baskets. Actually, this is a great point to realize that you do not need 50 outlet covers, to find the missing shelf pin, and to put the 27 half burned tea lights in with the fireplace starters (we used to light candles when we had wine). Baskets organized and set up, and the kitchen goes from cluttered to classy.

With a project this easy, I might need to design and build a wine rack that can be attached high on the wall. Maybe I'll even attach some candle holders. Time to bring back the class!