Now that in the lingua franca of water cooler conversations, developments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe may have replaced sports records, it feels like nerds have hit the Big Time. We can encourage our kids not only to read comics, but to curate a bagged-and-boarded collection without being afraid that we have pushed them too far to the fringes of their friend groups. Even a marginally-interested, rural great-grandpa knows what the inside of a comics shop looks like from watching Big Bang Theory each week.

So, does “nerd culture” — the sort of desperate camaraderie both championed and stereotyped in the 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds — even exist anymore?

Yes, it does. And it’s even more important than ever to fight for it by waving your own freak flag of personal fandom.

Several years ago, I was presenting to a group of teachers and school administrators about using comic books in education, and a woman hit me with a tentatively-worded comment after I finished. “I’ve noticed that the students in my class who talk about anime,” she began, “and read those Japanese comic books you talked about, are of a certain type…” When I saw she was reaching for a question in her mind that hadn’t fully formed, I said this:

Kids who feel marginalized socially often gravitate to art forms that have been marginalized in our culture. They find connections there, and that they can hold conversations about what they saw. As an adult, I have become very proud of the label “nerd” and would not mind in the least if you identify me that way. But don’t call your kids that until you have listened to how they feel, and understand them the same way I understand myself.

I wasn’t trying to put her in her place, but I saw in her eyes that she left with an idea different from the one that would have initially ended her sentence.

Most importantly, this the definition of a subculture. When people find identity and community by discussing a specific set of books, or movies, or games… and their classmates and teachers identify and classify them by the most obvious outward characteristics of that shared interest, then you have culture.

Nerd culture still exists with kids, and as teachers and parents we must defend it.  First of all, kids can be mean, and no one who cares about children wants to see them ostracized. Today nobody will laugh at them for loving Guardians of the Galaxy, no, but the kids who have extensive knowledge and strong opinions about vintage science fiction or coding or progressive politics are used to whispers behind their backs. The next time a student rants about how the protagonist of Legend of Zelda is named Link and NOT ZELDA, watch how her classmates respond.

On a deeper level, what often drives a young person to become obsessively knowledgeable about pop culture or science or politics represents a safety measure that holds together a democratic society. America has always had a strong anti-intellectual strain that should frighten all of us, but especially touches those whom our educational system has singled out as “gifted.” These children know that some few classmates will never fail to seek out nerds — or LGBTQ or immigrants or any perceived “other” — for torture.

But I hope to everything I believe in that these kids come to agree that, when you become part of a culture, that someone somewhere has your back.

Now that summer break has rolled around again, it’s time for me to go in there… I mean really go in there, without ignoring the heap of toys, books, clothes, and art projects that have utterly eclipsed all memory of the floor. I have set foot into that alien landscape, no longer pretending that the plastic Barbie-sized brush, Lego, and discarded earring, all of which are now lodged in my bare heel, don’t hurt. It’s time to clean your child’s bedroom. Are you ready? Here are some tips from a fellow parent to help you along.

#1. Let the kid help.

If you kick Short Stuff out of the room, only to let him or her back in when everything sparkles and fits on shelves, the child gets nothing out of the experience. The room will return to its former state of chaos within days. Without understanding the process of staying tidy, your child has no stake in the game. My older daughter, Chloe, having gone through this process with me many times, has earned passable skill at cleaning and organizing her room completely by herself now that she is 12 years old. (12-year-olds still can’t intuitively clean nail polish out of carpet, but that’s a story for another entry.) Involving my 7-year-old daughter, Emme, I find that she kind of enjoys the activity. I’m not exaggerating the messiness of her room; it takes an entire day to pick up trash, purge unwanted possessions, and find a place for every toy and book. But she has remained cheerful and willing through almost the entire task. When she participates, it becomes her work, not a parent swooping in and laying waste to her precious hoarder-level collection of life’s souvenirs, and that matters a lot. Children are people rapidly learning to assert control over an unfathomable world, and when we guide them, that becomes a less treacherous and more enjoyable adventure.

#2. Make it… fun??

This sounds pretty much impossible, I know. Cleaning? Fun? With a child involved? Forget about it! Or maybe not.  You know your child better than anyone. Can you include some small component of her favorite things? A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down a lot more palatably. Yes, I realize I’m mixing my Julie Andrews musical references. In fact, that reminds me of exactly what my own daughter loves: music. While working, she and I took turns choosing music CDs to play. I played Beth Orton, Steely Dan, Devo, and Whiskeytown, while she spun Annie, Nightmare Before Christmas, Into the Woods, Glee, Wicked, oh, and Taylor Swift. We got to bond and get to know each other’s interests a little better while we got stuff done. Your child may like to dress up in special housecleaning costumes, or take turns naming favorite personages from history or literature. Mix it up and make it a special time!

Oh yeah! Another part of making it fun should be making sure your little one gets plenty of breaks when needed. You want to keep your kiddo going with water or juice, light snacks, maybe even a nap depending on his or her age. My Emme took a 15-minute milk and cartoon break, and then came back on her own immediately after, refreshed and excited to keep cleaning!

#3. Offer choices.

If you and your young one need to make room by getting rid of outgrown toys, clothes, books, and so on, you really want the child to come away thinking that the decision was hers. Absolutely everything in Emme’s room is either a) “my favorite,” b) “special to me,” or c) both, from a picture that a friend drew to a rock she picked up that time at the park. I have to be hard and say, “Don’t tell me the story behind it; make the choice. Keep or get rid of it?” Of course, she would want to keep all of it, but I know we can’t. Sometimes I say, “Out of this pile of stuffed animals you haven’t played with lately, pick five you can do without.” Or sometimes I suggest an item I think should go away and, if she protests, I say, “Okay. Find an object bigger than that to get rid of.” She still sees herself as the one making the choices, the one in control, and so the process is self-affirming for her, instead of an attack on her collection. And hopefully she sees that when we give away a few books, we have room for some new favorites.

You may have multiple children sleeping in the same room, sharing spaces for their possessions,which complicates decision-making considerably. I have a trick I use when both of my kids have to agree, which may help you in situations like this. When allowed input on a family issue, my two girls would choose to disagree every time, arguing to the bitter, bitter, dramatic end. So instead of two options, I give them three, all of which are acceptable to me (“Do you want pretzels, popcorn, or fruit for a snack?”). Each child has to pick two (I usually have them tell me apart from each other). That way, they always end up agreeing on at least one. If they pick the same two, I get to be the tie-breaker, and everyone is generally okay with that. Now, if you have more than two children, you could do a variation by which you simply count up the votes of each proposed choice. You could even have more than three choices, or have the kids assign a rank to each choice, and let the air of democracy lend authority to your own final say-so.

#4. Set time limits.

Kids are not experienced at making decisions. If a clean-out is becoming a dilemma, set a timer for 1 or 3 or 5 minutes. Make the alarm sound loud and definite. In most cases the child will solve the problem before it goes off. Instead of adding stress, the timer frees the child emotionally by creating reasonable parameters, and also takes the focus off the parent. If this time limit does not help a specific situation, respect the child’s feelings and refer back to Tip #3. Is there a different way you can phrase the choice to grant your little one some ownership of the process?

#5. Put the superhero dress-up clothes with the princess dress-up clothes.

This is an important tenet to a parenting approach that seeks to grow confidence with your child as well as happiness. Let me give you my context, and then generalize further. My daughter loves her dress-up. She frequently changes clothes five times in a day, and I try to encourage her to choose outfits from a dress-up box rather than adding to the laundry chores of her “school” clothes. She has capes, boas, tiaras, guns, glasses, heroic robot gauntlets of hard plastic, headbands, tights, hats, and even some Yo Gabba Gabba costumery. She believes she can “try on” any identity with her dress-up clothes. With different combinations, she has become Disney princesses and created her own superheroes, like The Skeleton, and The Power. If you’ve come to The Reading Parent, you already know how important a role imagination plays in a child’s life. Your own child may have dress-up clothes, a shelf of special books or comics, a box of dolls/ action figures, construction blocks, or just a mish-mash drawer of sky’s-the-limit make-believe ingredients. I would like to suggest that every child needs this collection of “no rules until I make them up” gear. And furthermore, but of no less importance, I say there are no gender-specific toys. I read online recently that Toys R Us UK has done away with boy and girl sections of their stores (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/08/toys-r-us-uk-gender-marketing_n_3890599.html), thanks to a heartfelt request from a brave little girl. These are the sort of walls we all need to tear down. There are limits we set to keep our children free from danger, or to help them focus on one specific life-lesson at a time, but there are other limits that simply say “don’t think, don’t imagine, don’t feel too strongly.” While we keep the helpful training wheels on childhood, we should never embrace the arbitrary, lazy rules that push our kids to occupy their time instead of stretching their minds.

These tips may at first seem unnecessarily drawn-out. But a major purpose of this blog is to show that any moment is teachable with your kiddo, and many can be fun as well. You can consider it time well-spent whenever you can turn difficult chores into bonding with your children.

With the last week of school and the joy that comes with graduations — from kindergarten into elementary, 5th grade into middle school, high school into “the world” — there come some disappointments as well. Sometimes the chrysalis we expect to open miraculously into a new stage does not happen so easily or perhaps not at all. For instance, a handful of my 12th grade students did not graduate to walk the stage to Diploma-land.

One of them — a quiet, polite, naturally-gifted writer — had literally a few more hours of “credit recovery” work standing between her and a high school diploma. As a senior, she had the end of the week off. She could have spent the morning, maybe into the early afternoon, and that would have spared her the work of summer school or a GED or the consequences of applying for jobs without any credentials. But the last essay she wrote for me detailed why she doesn’t care about any of that. A deep and earnest thinker, she reasoned that academic learning as she had experienced it didn’t feel challenging or when it did, it was a challenge of tedium. Echoing the great pragmatic philosophy of American history, perhaps unknowingly, she asserted that experience in “the real world” provides all the wisdom anyone ever needs. And she does have a point. Life is the ultimate teacher and test rolled into one. But I disagree with her conclusion, and I wish I had one last chance to convince her of the worth of an academic education.

First of all, I think most public schools (ours in particular) offer excellent challenges, designed and facilitated by teachers who have dedicated great intellectual effort and compassion for the students. I frequently find that young people who claim to be “bored” do not suffer from the failure of teachers to inspire, but instead from their own unwillingness to commit to cooperation with classmates or educational leaders. Excessive pride — even when based on a real talent for independent thought — has ever been the enemy of the search for wisdom.

I have a second, more crucial point, and to make it clear I have to tell a personal story.

At this moment, I am sitting at a lunch table in a grocery store, my black t-shirt covered with fur from the deeply-loved pet cat who I just had put to sleep, at the pet hospital a block away. My family and I had this cat for a little over three years. A rescue kitten with a missing tail (an amputation in infancy? a birth defect?), he moved so quickly my older daughter — age 8 at the time — said he looked like The Flash. I suggested we name him “Wally,” after my favorite one of the comic book characters to bear the name and legacy of that speed-powered superhero. My younger daughter, who was then 3, thought that sounded like the cute robot “Wall-E,” so we all agreed.

As he grew, he retained all the charm of a kitten with none of the repressed killer instinct of the typical house cat. He loved to climb, chase laser pointers, and curl into a ball around your hand, letting you tickle his belly, and in return gnawing on your hand just lightly enough not to leave a mark. Some might call his good-natured affection “dog-like.” He was a perfect family cat and all four humans in the house loved him (as did our other cat, and two dogs).

So when he suddenly lost weight and energy, and the vet’s blood test showed massive liver damage, it shocked and saddened all of us. After an ultrasound, doctors diagnosed him with “FIP,” a feline illness still somewhat mysterious — and incurable — to medicine.

Since he was not yet in great pain, but might soon suffer both pain and incapacitation, we chose to love him for one more week at home, and then to schedule his euthanasia. Already laden with end-of-the-school-year duties, both parental and teacherly, our week became even harder and each of us expressed it through bouts of crying, binge-eating, and Facebook posts of old pictures of Wally.

Last night we had a living wake. The entire family, human and otherwise, gathered in the living room. We turned off electronics, and made snacks and cookies. We told stories about times our enjoyment of Wally filled the entirety of our hearts. We toasted our glasses. My oldest held me tight for a long time, overflowing with love and tears. My wife answered questions about what happens to the dead and those they leave behind. My youngest, age 6 and wise beyond her years, predicted that someday soon we would forget our sadness but never forget our cat. (She was the last to shed tears, trying to cheer and entertain all of us until the moment, this morning, when I loaded Wally into his plastic carrier for the final trip to the doctor. Then we all three held her tight as she cried with the wholeheartedness of the rather young.)

Owning a pet is a person’s declaration to the world that he or she has more love to give. It also creates structure and tasks of responsibility in  an otherwise hectic life. But, to a family with yong children, pet ownership provides one more thing: an education into life itself, and the consequences of love.

Someday, hopefully not soon, and not until a time when all those around her can provide all the emotional support she wants, one of my daughters will live to experience the death of a human they love very much. Death: the guaranteed result of life, and one of the universe’s ways of reminding us that love does not come without cost. And today, the pain of losing Wally will help prepare my girls for the heartache that may someday challenge all they believe. Life is indeed learning from death, and failure, and experience. But we can make measured choices to rehearse, and therefore survive, the slings and arrows of commonplace fortune.

Which brings me to my point: though life truly teaches us whatever wisdom can be had, though the exuberance of youth encourages us to experience all seasons in a day, though the interruption of books and teachers may seem artificial… there is a way to grow as a person that is no less true, that also helps preserve our ability to live and love without turning away.

Many people, such as the high school teacher and reading specialist Kelly Gallagher have noted that reading conscientiously prepares us for life (especially when he quotes philosopher Kenneth Burke that books are “imaginative rehearsals for the real world”). Both fiction and nonfiction communicate all the trials-and-errors of all the philosophies lived by others, who might have been — remember the harm of pridefulness — actually smarter than you and me. Books address us with the mind and with the heart. Sometimes, but not always, the help of a teacher who has experienced the reading (if not also the life lessons), and the cooperation of other students, co-learners on a journey, can greatly enhance this value of books. And that is why reading in general and the academic world in particular have value.

To say that “I will never learn from education or books or academics” is to say the world is not worth examining, that your own world is not worth sharing. In short, turning your back on all that is academic is not an act of creative exuberance, or common sense, but a great act of cynicism.

Now don’t take me the wrong way. The life of an aesthetic monk, or a learned degree, or a liberal arts path does not benefit every person all of the time. It is not the only way. Believe me, I get the lyrics to all those XTC songs (like when Andy Partridge sings “some of your friends are too brainy to see/ that they’re paupers and that’s how they’ll stay” in “Mayor of Simpleton,” 1989). There are people, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, that come to know their world through a lifetime of hard work and concern for others. I have had the honor of knowing such people. And I have had the honor of reading about them, thanks to writers like Ernest Hemingway and the teachers along the way willing to discuss the hard work represented by all those books.

Now that I have some summer days to spend writing, my blog posts will happen more frequently. Expect something from me each week. Maybe I’ll learn how to maintain that habit throughout the year!

Here comes a long entry about why becoming “book smart” constitutes a healthy part of developing good old-fashioned common sense without becoming “world-weary”…

At the end of my freshman year of college, I was invited to apply to a renowned program for the performance of Shakespeare. A small group of students — to which I was accepted — studied three of Shakespeare’s plays and went out into sweltering rural Texas, in the middle of summer, to perform them, night after night, before paying audiences, in a small barn with no air conditioning. Our professor had purposely recruited students with no more than limited acting experience so we could work from fresh, authentic interactions with the text. We discovered that previous classes had nicknamed it “Shakespeare boot camp.” To this day, joining that band of players remains one of my proudest achievements. I barely made it through intact.

One night I dropped a major line so utterly, that I had to ad lib my way off stage. My professor was livid. I can tell you, the long path from long-haired naif to the bald-pate of advanced wisdom before you now began in that hectic, hazy central Texas countryside. (Literally, as clumps of hair began to fall out from stress.)

One of the “cadets” played Hotspur, a fiery-tempered rebel knight from the history play Henry IV, Part One. His was a demanding role that required both physicality and concentration. On one occasion, only a couple of hours before an evening performance, I found my friend alone in the guys’ dorm room (all the women stayed in a similar room on the opposite side of the building). He sat stretched out on his bunk, reading jazz-era novel The Beautiful and the Damned. “How can you focus on that,” I asked, “when we have so much to do? And so many lines to keep in our heads?” I wasn’t criticizing; I really wanted to know.

“Take it easy, man.” He smiled the sideways grin of a rebel knight. “There’s always time for Fitzgerald.”

I think about that statement often, especially on nights like this, when I have stacks of papers to grade, and a feeling that the most unappealing parts of my work are far, far from over. I have learned that I have to take time for myself, and for my family. Part of what makes me a whole person, and the parent I want to be, is knowing that I always have time to read and write. If it means two more pages of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, or a little classic Chris Claremont X-men, or just hanging out with my kindergartner and some Mo Willems… life is more play, and less script.

I considered naming this blog The Reading Dad, because one of my several goals involves promoting reading among men who influence their children — dads, stepdads, granddads, uncles, mentors, educators. Even though gender roles do not limit us as much as they did over 40 years ago, when I was born, many dads do not see reading as an essential activity to model for their growing children. I came from a reading family, filled with scholars, “creatives,” and people who practice curiosity.

My dad, Joe Readingparent, worked in construction through most of my youth, and knew many essential skills to be emulated (often with desperate gaps in success) as a young man. One of those skills is reading. I often saw Dad reading fiction, journalism, Eastern philosophy, and also magazines on his craft, such as The Journal of Light Construction. We often talked about what we had read at the dinner table. 

As parents, we can easily fall into a trap of “encouraging” reading, without actually modeling it ourselves. We convince ourselves that working adults just don’t have time for frivolous literature or erudite non-fiction. In reality, you don’t have to have a liberal arts degree, or even a lot of time on your hands, to read in front of, with, and for your children. Reading can be one of those things you just do, like watching hockey, tinkering with a car or an old clock, or purchasing useful apps for your phone. It’s pleasurable, purposeful, and reinvigorates us to do all the activities that support our families and our children on the path to who they will become.

Please, spend a summer reading a Chilton car manual with a young adult getting ready to drive for the first time, examine a book that demonstrates proper form before you shoot some hoops in the driveway, show your child a book about why YOUR job is important, or just read the same funny novel as your child, and laugh together. 

Or, for goodness sake, read that Avengers book to your little girl, or that My Little Pony book to your young son. The Reading Dad, first and foremost, loves his kids for what THEY love.

The Reading Parent has been a high school English teacher for over 20 years, a parent for over 10 years, an employee in the greatest comics store in Austin TX for over 3 years, and a constant reader for over 35 years. All of that stuff is going on at the same time, so you can’t add the numbers up to get his age. Although some days, it may feel like you could multiply them. RP also writes under his alias, Daniel J. Rucker.