Mother’s Day in May always brings up wonderful memories of my mom, but actually there is hardly a week goes by that I don’t have some mental conversation with her. Gone now for more than twenty years, she was always an advocate for progress and especially for any gadget that she believed made her life easier. One of her constant statements was to say: “Don’t be afraid of the new tools; use them and see if they make your life easier.” So yesterday, when I was attempting to tutor a child, Libby, a fourth grader, who was trying to decipher the metric system, my mom’s words ran through my brain.
My ability with the metric system is as simple for me as it would be for a turtle. That is, I cannot figure it out at all. My excuse is that I was never taught it, and that is correct, but the fact is I have never been called upon to use it, nor have I ever wanted to. Consequently, there I was trying to help a child figure how many milliliters in a liter, or how many centimeters in a meter, etc., and I was obviously clueless. Libby was pretty confident that her answers were correct, but I was unable to tell her that she was absolutely right, since I do not know a gram from a meter or anything else having to do with metric.
Then, when I was almost ready to give up and tell her teacher that I was useless in aiding this little girl, I thought about what my mother would have said to me, “Use the tools that you have at hand to make this easier.” And that was when I remembered that I had SIRI in my phone.
Now I have to say that my I Phone is not something that I love. In fact, when I gave up and purchased one, the workers at Verizon came to know me by my name, as I was there nearly every day for the first year asking very dumb questions, and writing down the answers to help me get them in my head. Thus, I was hesitant in trying to work out the metric problems, but when I asked SIRI how many milliliters in a liter and she promptly gave me the answer, I was sold.
Libby had twenty metric problems, and she definitely knew how to work them multiplying by 100 or 1000, or whatever was required. When she finished and I checked the answers with SIRI’s help, Libby missed only one problem. I could help her at that point in correcting the answer, but that was because I had SIRI in my hand ready to give me the information that I needed. When I was about to leave the classroom that afternoon, I had to confess to the teacher that I had cheated by using SIRI. She laughed and said, “I thought I heard SIRI talking, but since the students aren’t allowed to use cell phones, I knew it must be you. Never mind, Ms. Nunnally, it’s okay to get some help when you need it.”
My mother would be proud of me if she were still here, and I could tell her how I got the confidence to use a new tool. I know she would have had no patience with older people who refuse to try to learn how to use a computer or the internet, or even an I Phone. She would say in confidence to me, “Those old people are going to finish their lives never knowing how much easier life could be if they would just try to learn something new.”
When I consider how many new things my mom had to learn in her lifetime of one hundred years, I feel fortunate that she never gave up learning how to use the latest tools. She set a wonderful example for me, and yesterday in a classroom where I didn’t have a clue about what a child was learning and practicing, I found out that I ended up learning something new, myself. I have to admit that the metric system is much easier than I thought, but then I have SIRI to help me if I cannot interpret the system when I need it.
Happy Mother’s Day, mom, wherever you are. You gave me the perfect gift when you convinced me to use the new tools.
