Admittedly, parents use many different methods to push their children for school success. In my family, my mother used storytelling to motivate me to do well in school. All it would take was one complaint – one comment – one word – about the difficultly of an assignment and…more often than I want to remember, I would be told about how mother’s father, my grandfather, had been sent away from his home in Donegal, Ireland at 11 years of age to work in coal mines in Scotland.
Years later after emigrating to America, my grandfather continued this type of mining work as a “sandhog” in the public works tunnels in New York City. Although he was able to successfully raise his family in Brooklyn, this hard dangerous work took its toll of my grandfather’s health, as well as many of his fellow tunnel diggers. In fact, his brother was crushed to death in a tunnel accident in the late ’50s.
My mother would continue providing the details of the intolerable working conditions of the sandhogs; in fact, she would go into detail of the impact of decades of working hundreds feet below the city sidewalks in stale, suffocating air — silicosis lung disease, arthritic joints, hearing loss.
Then the inevitable open-ended statement – Well if you think your schoolwork is too difficult I can call my cousin Danny in Brooklyn and he’ll be able to get you into the sandhogs union. She made the work of these tunnel workers so appealing I don’t know why I ever went back to my homework, but I did each time.
In truth, most schoolwork is rather benign – yes, from time to time, it can be tedious — and mind numbing, but with a little effort, time and application to task, most kids have the ability to do rather well. Even more important, no matter how difficult schoolwork may be there is little chance that a 470 million year old chunk of bedrock will fall on your head while studying. The choice to me was a pretty easy one.
