Real Conversation #13 - Young Father (Gabriel & Brian)

GABRIEL: Alright Brian, so now we already chatted about your son a little bit, so you're a relatively young father, you're 32, and tell us a little bit about your son? BRIAN: He's 9 years old, he's the most caring person I know, or at least in my life, yes he is, probably because I'm his dad. He always asks me little things that really show he cares, like when I was.... I don't know, a few years ago I remember I was really sick, and he had called me and I was sick, he realized after few days when I didn't come and pick him up and chat with him, he was like, are you okay? I was like I'm a little sick and he tells me and was like make sure you get lots of rest, drink some water, and then he reminds me that he has.... He was like, and you can have some of my cough syrup, because I bought him some cough syrup. GABRIEL: Just in case, you were covered. Just in case you're going to have your cough syrup medicine. BRIAN: Exactly.

GABRIEL: Excellent, so cool. I think that I've always seen him in pictures, so far he looks like a very handsome young fellow, and I'd love to meet him one day hopefully in the future. So how often do you normally see him?

BRIAN: I see him two week days a week, like from Monday-Thursday, I usually pick two days that's when I'm not working, and I pick him up right at 2:30, that's when he's out and then we usually go to a library nearby or we go to SFU, which is the university, the campus close to his school. GABRIEL: So that's, for the listeners Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and I already mentioned that in a different conversation, but it's basically smaller only then the University of British Colombia (UBC). They have a nice campus on top of Burnaby mountain, and some people say that it's a sad looking campus, because it's very gray, at the same time like, I personally find it beautiful, it's perhaps not as green as UBC, UBC is also larger, and UBC is right at the ocean, so you get some beautiful views there as well, but Simon Fraser University, I find it nice as well. Do you normally go to the library there, or do you guys just chill?

BRIAN: What we usually do is, we either find a classroom, an empty classroom or we go to the areas where they have chairs and tables, and then I'll take him there, sit down and then we'll study a bit. Like I'll either help him to read or do some math or we'll do some writing exercises, whatever homework he has, and then we usually take breaks. So I'll take him down stairs, I let him play in the computer lab, I'll punch in my password and username, he can watch videos and play games. And then once his break is over we'll go back up and we'll go back and forth. That's really helped him improve at school, because the whole reason why I pick him up is, because he is in grade 4 now. In grade 3 last year, like in the beginning, like he had the hardest time doing his elementary math, like anything above plus two to a number, he couldn't do it. At first it was shocking and disheartening and I was like holy cow, he is way behind, so at first I wanted to come every day, pick him up like stay with him, because I felt it was like an emergency.

GABRIEL: Remember actually we spoke back then, remember you were quite concerned, so that's good to hear that things have progressed. BRIAN: It's been at least over a year, and we've been consistently doing it right, I mean like it could be only a couple of weeks where from other reason, either I'm stressed out or exhausted, and I just don't have the time, but I always try to read with him at least a little bit, and I have flash cards doing his math. So I mean like, it's a steady work. GABRIEL: That's so important, especially doing it almost on a daily basis or at least a few times a week, and it's the same with languages, you know I think that, for instance; The more... If you are learning a language or even if you already know the language, but you want to continue improving in it, basically if we don't practice often, we just start forgetting stuffs, we get rusty, and math is just the same thing. Practice makes perfect.

BRIAN: That's what I thought, I mean like his teachers thought he would never catch up period, it was like he has two teachers, and they told me he'll never catch up, so I was like, for the first week I took that pretty hard, I had trouble sleeping, but now I just... GABRIEL: Is he getting good grades now?

BRIAN: Yes, he's getting good grades, he's catching up, he's meeting the expectations, so he's making more than a year's worth of progress in the last year that we studied together. GABRIEL: It also sounds like he cares, and that's what I think is really important as well, because I think that unfortunately, sometimes even a bright young student, he or she won't care, and of course that will make everything a lot harder for the parents and for the school, for him or herself. Given that he cares and you're working with him, I find that really awesome on your part, obviously, you know you care and you do your best to help him, and I think that of course many most parents do as well, but I think that many parents would unfortunately not be willing to take or willing or unable to take and act that act of a role, I think that essentially most parents would just try to hire a tutor and just sort of delegate that help to somebody else and urges basically point the finger at the education system and say, do something about it, it's your fault, and it's not my problem kind of thing that in the end I think that's really noble and really awesome of you to take this really active role and basically in a way tutor your own son. BRIAN: Thank you.

GABRIEL: Obviously you guys must have like an awesome relationship, because like he's open to working with you and so on, and something I came across as well, because I have a lot of tutoring myself mostly for math. A lot of parents really take that as a step back when it comes to the tutoring, they will just really hire the tutor and just know they don't have to worry about it. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly.

GABRIEL: They will just hire the tutor, they will pay the tutor and be like, okay do the work and basically they will keep their fingers crossed. There is something about trust as well, I have to say they trust that with my professional's help the child will be able to do it. But that's really cool. BRIAN: Thank you.

I noticed his future is proven just in the first few months, like he was able to focus a lot longer, at first when we were starting going beyond 10 minutes was like! I'll just pull out my hair and I just could not focus on the effort. He can focus a lot longer, and then it wasn't until few months ago, like one of his school mates, he had seen us at the library studying, and he saw huge stack of flash cards and he said, oh! Can you help me too, so I thought okay if I am already here helping him, I can help his friend out, and then when we were doing that altogether, it was my son and two other kids, trying to be with him, and I noticed just from seeing them and my son like what a huge... How much progress my son has made, because he was able to focus on all the reading I was doing, because it was at least 30-40 minutes and reading his book, the other two kids take every 2-5 minutes, they have to say something, they have to move around, they want to stop, and my son is there, he's like attentively learning that. GABRIEL: That's awesome, I think that's a big problem for today's generation as well, like when you and I were growing up, we didn't have this much disrupt of information essentially I think, you know, you and I didn't grow up with iPhones, and the internet, and like I only started using the internet probably when I was, I think around 12 or something, back then the internet was so slow, and useless too. Technology has made gigantic progress since then, and something that I noticed as well, I think I read this somewhere that; people's attention span has been reduced significant to about 30 minutes because of sitcoms. It's like psychologically we built expectations that most problems should be solved within 30 minutes, because the sitcom, the whole episode is basically finished in 30 minutes, by then they had a problem, they worked up a resolution and that's that. BRIAN: It's funny you said that, I feel I'm turning into that too, like even if I'm watching videos or I'm trying to learn something. GABRIEL: It's almost inevitable, because sometimes on YouTube, I look at a video and its 6 minutes long and I'll be like, that's over 5 minutes, I can't watch this. It's just so long which is so funny. And yesterday for instance; I managed to sit through Donald Trump's speech after super Tuesday, and basically I wasn't even attentively listening, it was just like, I was just kind of interested in seeing what he had to say, especially because he's such a controversial figure, I just wanted to see what he wanted to say, but I was surprised myself that I was able to essentially watch the whole thing, which was 33 minutes perhaps. Meanwhile, I was actually having a chat with a mum and so on, but presently everyone's attention span has severely been constantly bombarded by information, and the kids, their brains are developing, so I think that whoever is 9-10 years old today, their attention span is going to be a lot shorter, like in the long run too probably. Then our generation or even 20 year olds; although 20 year olds have been exposed to sort of the same thing, so it's essential to see like how each generation is probably going to be affected by media in general, and so, that's interesting. What else do you guys do? Do you find Vancouver a nice city to raise a child?

BRIAN: Yeah, I mean what I hear from a lot of people who come here is, they say it's so safe here. GABRIEL: It's quite safe, that's true. And being from Brazil unfortunately, there's... You know growing up in Brazil, unfortunately there has always been a lot of crime, so the first time I came here, I was actually 15 years old, and I was just basically so impressed at how safe the city was and how my home state family said that mum should just basically leave the car with the door open, and I thought wow! Are you seriously going to do that? Yeah of course! What's the problem? Nobody is going to come and take anything.