...have enjoyed high academic success - the oldest as an artist, the youngest as an engineer - is because they take after me, that I did it.
This offends me, and I correct them, again and again, every time they hand out that line, which I find as being disrespectful to their sister.
I was there - sometimes, when not traveling - to answer certain technical questions, but it was their mother who is most responsible for their fine minds and their ethical views.
She is the one who spent time with them, explaining things during their most formative years when they were toddlers, the one who interacted with the schools to make sure that issues were addressed, arranging trips to museums, artistic and scientific, read to them each night, and restrained me when I was being difficult with those boys. She ruminated on what things they should have, chose gifts respecting their positive interests. When the time came, she screened the colleges, collected the necessary documents, scheduled the campus visits. She is the one who bore the responsibility for their health, their nutrition, chose the things for them to watch and see, planned the vacations, the local trips to interesting places. She engaged them with her intellect, her kindness, her generosity, to be sure that they would develop into fine human beings.
I think she set my oldest boy up to be the best big brother one could have; I attribute my youngest son's success mostly to his big brother, who even when he was an infant, sat there and lectured his baby brother on the way of the world as a five-year-old would know it. By engaging his little brother, he pushed him to advance to his level in a spirt of friendship and love. As men, they are very close.
Even without knowing you, I very much doubt either of your children only take after their father. In a good marriage, with good parents, each makes it possible for the other to be a better parent. I'm sure your children are who they are as a result of a team. Clearly you respect your children's father, and that matters more than anything, respect.
(My poor wife didn't have that; parents who respected one another and engaged their children. Not everyone is blessed with good parents. My wife is one of those people with enough moral power to avoid being the same kind of parent as her parents were, who took the negative example and morphed it into a positive example of what must not be done and replacing it with what should be done. I grew to love my in-laws, but as parents they were problematic.)
As for me, I just did the fun stuff, as far as science goes, about which my youngest son, now as a man, sometimes comments, not always in a positive way.
When he was an undergraduate, he came to me to comment on a demonstration I gave him on entropy when he was in elementary school. I had arranged a bunch of cups on the floor, and threw a bunch of pennies over them, and counted out the distribution of coins in each cup. I had no idea he remembered that demonstration, but he did: When he was in college he came up to me and said, "Dad, your demonstration of entropy sucked." I laughed like hell and was happy that he had an understanding of entropy so as to rule on mine.
As for calculus, in Junior High School they assigned a problem to find the maximum of a function using a graphing calculator. I didn't know how to solve the problem while staying at his level, but I said to him, "I know an easy way to do this, but it involves calculus." I did a little demonstration evoking the concept of approaching a tangent. He came up to me a few years later and told me he remembered that, and he could see I was right.
Today, he is fine with telling me when I'm wrong, or in need of a better understanding, which I appreciate.
Thank you for your kind words.
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