It was rare Saturday when all of sudden the Matsumotos found themselves with nothing on the calendar. After a last minute baseball cancellation, Jenni and I looked at each other and wondered how we were going to fill the day. Goofing around, I starting following Chase through the house with my phone taking video. After a couple of funny takes, we decided our mission for the day would be to make a movie. Soon, we began shooting our tale of good and evil in the suburbs. A couple hours later, we needed new characters and the kids from next door were drafted into the project. We compiled the necessary footage and crudely edited it in iMovie. Five hours later, with the debut of Diary of An Angry Boy, the neighborhood drama club was born. Mind you, we aren’t an official organization, but our co-stars next door took it upon themselves to circulate a sign-up sheet which read “See Mr. Matsumoto for more info.” It was very flattering.
Back in my New Jersey days, I taught elementary and middle school for twelve years. Teaching was my first “real” job after college and it also led me to my future wife, a cute English teacher across the hall. While I haven’t had my own classroom in over a decade, I seemingly can’t stop teaching. Whether it be writing scripts with the neighbors or coaching Little League, I still get a spark out of working with and helping kids. If we’re at a barbecue, and the collective mass of children are bored or getting into trouble, I just might organize some sort of game of capture the flag or ultimate frisbee. Our neighbor refers to the phenomena as “Camp Counselor Steve.” Let’s face it—kids today just can’t entertain themselves as well as we did. If I can keep kids engaged and out of trouble by challenging them to roll a soccer ball through a spinning hula hoop, so be it. It’s fun to see kids light up in a social context. I also admit sometimes rallying the kids is completely self-serving. I’d rather have the kids involved in something structured (even if I have to facilitate it), than have them jumping off the couch hitting each other with sticks. One could argue that I’m trying to bring peace to the galaxy like Anakin Skywalker in Episode III, but I personally I think my motives are more pure.
Of course, keeping law and order is just one part of being a good teacher. In addition to classroom management, there’s the curriculum to deliver. Ryan & Chase are lucky (or perhaps unlucky) to have two parents with ties to education. These poor kids are in school all the time! Whenever we go to a movie, there’s extensive class discussion on the car ride home. Dinner time can turn into a lesson on anything and everything. Chase actually sometimes raises his hand when he wants to speak at home. Earlier this school year, we took part in a Matsumoto Book Club—reading Maxi’s Secrets and discussing over pizza.
Breakfast seems to be a place to find an endless source of math lessons. For example, who knew the pockets of traditional Belgian waffle create the perfect standardized unit of measurement to teach area of circle? What a tasty way to understand πr2! (The exclamation point is for emphasis not indicating factorial, for you math nerds out there.) Math is everywhere and especially hiding under butter and syrup. Math is merely description of the real world and if geometry was always accompanied with waffles, SAT scores would probably skyrocket. At another breakfast, Chase was arranging dry Cheerios into neat little arrays. This obviously led to a discussion about geometric growth patterns. (For extra credit, how many Cheerios would it take to complete the next figure in the series?) I’m sure most people in a similar situation would do the same thing?
We have some friends who are both educators; he’s a principal, she’s a high school teacher. Our dinner conversation often turns to teaching. For years, the wife would lament the fact I was no longer teaching. “Waste of talent,” she would say. A couple years ago, after I had the privilege of representing this couple on the sale of their home and the purchase of another, she changed her tune. Her “approval” of my real estate career is still one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
When I tell people that I used to be a teacher and now I’m a real estate broker, often times the response is, “Wow, that’s different.” In some ways they’re right—public employee vs self-employed, fixed schedule vs fluid schedule, salary guide vs commission. I certainly acknowledge the boundaries of these jobs are different; but the core of both teaching and real estate is helping someone get from one place to another. That destination could be factoring a quadratic equation or a 4-bedroom in a specific neighborhood, but the guidance feels the same. I’ll probably keep teaching well into old age. Ideally, I’ll become the Socrates (minus any hemlock) of the retirement home—wandering the halls and asking open-ending questions.
