Last night my 9-year-old son asked me to teach him how to play basketball. His friends at school are started to play "Elimination" at recess and he would like to be able to join them. We have a basketball hoop in our driveway that rarely gets used (I won it at a company party about twelve years ago). I pulled a vehicle out of the driveway so we would have room to play, and we found two basketballs and a volleyball in our garage.
I immediately realized that basketball is one of those things I can do, but I don't really know how I do it (which makes it hard to teach). My son is also left-handed, but he seemed to prefer shooting right-handed. We tried several different techniques and he struggled just to get the basketball as high as the rim. I tried lowering the hoop, but it seems that 10 feet is as low as it can go. We played for about an hour, and in that entire time he made exactly one basket ... with the volleyball. He was cheerful and happy the whole time, though, and it was actually pretty fun. It felt a little like a "rite of passage."
Recently my son and I have had several "memorable moments" like that. He won the 3rd grade spelling bee a couple of months ago, which also seemed like a "right of passage" because I used to compete in spelling bees when I was younger. For weeks afterward he carried his trophy around the house with him. He also asked me to teach him how to play chess recently, and at first I either beat him or let him win, but in a very short time he got pretty good and beat me in a legitimate game. As he gets older we'll have many more opportunities to spend quality time together, and I'm looking forward to them all.
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