Every day when I pick him up, it’s the same: “How was camp?” I ask. “Great!” he answers, still sweaty from the pickup football/soccer game he and his pals have just been playing.

Camp these last two weeks has been Future Builders, the everyone-can-come version for middle schoolers of Bridge Builders, which is something high schoolers need to apply for and be sponsored to do. I am always on the lookout for places for Tomas (and me, too) to meet people who are different from him, racially, economically, socially. I mean, this is Memphis, after all. But in 2011, we all need to know how to do that.

With Future Builders, we hit the jackpot. What a terrific program.

As with everything these days with my rising seventh grader, I sometimes have to wait for the good stuff. The other night over dinner, I tried again: “So, what do you talk about at camp?”

Well, racism, he said, and began to tell me how sometimes people “stereotype other people,” and think they know about them just because of how they look. He was obviously quite clear about it, and eager to explain how it happens.

“Are you a racist?” I asked him at one point. It’s a tough question, and one I heard the great Lucius Burch once say everyone ought to consider.

“Sometimes,” he said. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

It took moving to Memphis, a city in which I am a minority, for me to finally understand the corrosive power of the snap judgments we make about people because of their race, their politics, the way they look, where they live. I am so grateful that my son, a Memphis native, is able to learn how to ask the tough questions at the tender age of 11. And isn’t fazed one bit by whatever answers he comes up with.

Thanks, Future Builders.

As many of my friends know by now, we have struggled this year with the fact that Tomas’s grades aren’t what they could be for reasons that seem really dumb to me: He often forgets to turn in his finished assignments, and loses points (and sometimes entire grades) because he doesn’t put his name on his paper, round to the correct decimal or otherwise follow the directions.

I have read all of those books about 11-year-old brain development, and I know boys are generally late to the organization party, but the fact that he continues to do this stuff makes me really mad. There, I said it. I know that being mad isn’t helpful for anyone, especially at 9 at night when homework needs to be finished and sixth graders need to be in bed. (I don’t really understand it, either — I never haven’t turned in my homework IN MY LIFE — but that’s beside the point for now.)

I also hate being angry with him: it hurts him, and makes me feel crummy, too. So I channeled one of my own sixth grade memories, and we have begun to read “The Hobbit” out loud every night before bedtime. (Yes, back at Orchard Park School in Kettering, Ohio, the estimable Mrs. Huffman read it to us for a half-hour every day after lunch.) I still remember the peaceful feeling of letting my imagination dream up the outlines of Middle Earth, and I thought it would be a good way for us to end our day. Boy, was I right — even when we only read for 10 minutes, the whole atmosphere changes, he holds my hand … it’s bliss.

But here’s the second — and much tougher — part of our new strategy. We’re going to try to totally take our hands off his homework and organization issues. The only requirement we’ll enforce: That he look every night at his grades online, so he gets immediate feedback from his day/week at school. We won’t ask him what’s due, what he’s done, etc., though he can ask us for help whenever he feels like he needs it.

To say he is thrilled with this new turn of events is an understatement. But as his dad said, he probably will want to be careful what he wishes for. Taking responsibility for your own work is way harder than I think he realizes. We’ll talk about the details of this strategy with his teachers next week, and the plan is for this to continue until spring break, or mid-March.

I think this will be REALLY tough, for all three of us. Way tougher than the Tiger Mother approach, which I also briefly considered.

Wish us all luck. Especially Tomas.

So my column Sunday really touched a nerve — I have gotten lots of responses (a few below) to my observations about how Barack Obama’s Inauguration has changed the way our kids will see the world. I hadn’t really thought of it as a confession, but now that I think of it … it was. And I can’t agree with CLJ, below. Even if we eventually leave Memphis, the things we’ve learned here have literally changed our lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to everyone who has called or written me to tell me how much they enjoyed my column Sunday about my pal Lydia and her struggle to understand her autism; I’m sorry it has taken me so long to post about it. As I wrote, ballet is Lydia’s passion, and fortunately her parents have found a wonderful teacher, pictured here, to keep Lydia dancing. Pointe shoes, for those of you who know about dance, require more strength than Lydia probably will ever have, so she’ll only dance en pointe with help. But one look at her face, and you can see just how much it means to her.

As you know, autistic kids aren’t stupid, and are often quite a bit more perceptive than we might think. Lydia wrote the following story the week after the incident I described in my column. Her mom added some punctuation to make it more readable, but the story is all hers. (FYI, Yakko Warner is a character on the cartoon Animaniacs.) Read the rest of this entry »

OK, moms, you know we get scary e-mails all the time about dangers to our kids, recalled products, etc., etc. But this one is real, and given that Halloween and Hanukkah are coming up, really scary. Seems that the Sherwood brand Pirate’s Gold milk chocolate foil-covered coins come from China, and contain the melamine that has been sickening (and killing) Chinese babies this summer and fall. These coins are sold in bulk and individually at dollar stores and variety stores, mostly in Canada, but also in the US. Find more details here at Snopes (a favorite rumor-debunking site). And look through that Halloween candy with an extra-careful eye.