Choose Your Heroes Wisely

Yep, this is Magic Johnson made of pipe cleaners. He is one of the final pieces of Brock's second grade report on a "Hero". (Do teachers stay up late thinking of projects like this to punish parents? Hmmmm.. I know... Let's make them create models of people out of pipe cleaners! Ha!)

If you are already cringing about Brock's hero choice, then you are a better sports fan than I am! He started out with Michael Jordan as his first choice. Sadly, another child in his class got Jordan first. Shaq was also taken. Brock went thru a myriad of other possibilities... football players and basketball players I had never heard of. The kid has a lot of sports trivia and names stored up there in that brain of his. Finally, he came home and said Magic Johnson was his choice. At this point, I was fine. I knew Magic played basketball and vaguely I recalled that he was a Laker.

Later in the week, Brock starting brining home books about Magic. He started his research and asked for a little help. He was trying to find the date of Magic's college graduation. (Ends up Magic left college early for the NBA draft). I started flipping thru the books to help him. That is when I discovered the 1990s.

I can now remember 1991 when Magic Johnson was diagnosed with AIDS. He retired early because of his HIV status. There was a fair amount of press about it and even some controversy when he went back to play with the Dream Team at the Olympics. Players were scared that he could transmit the virus during the course of the game and so on... Brock's elementary school books even hinted at the fact that Magic acquired AIDS because he had so many woman partners when he traveled for road games. Pretty mature stuff for second grade!

Of course, I started to flip. Although Magic went on to form a foundation to support AIDS research and education, Mike and I were not ready to cover topics such as HIV, promiscuity and AIDS with Brock. I was sure that Mrs. Schwartz did not want to review them in class! After talking with Mike and his teacher, we decided to let Brock keep Magic for the project but we focused him on his basketball career and left out everything from 1991 on.

For the next week I learned all about Magic's various basketball awards, his great passing and his rivalry with Larry Byrd. I also had a heart to heart talk with Brock about the fact that Magic was a hero on the court, but made some bad choices in his personal life. We would talk about those choices later, but he should be careful about thinking that Magic was an all around hero for him. Tough parenting this week for Mike and I!

Brock took pipe cleaner Magic to school yesterday. So our project is wrapping up. Next time I will pay more attention as Brock is scrolling thru all those names of potential heroes. My lesson is for him to Choose his heroes wisely!

Mike is in Hawaii this week and the 3Vs are watching a little snow fall in Misawa. Nothing else exciting to report!

Take care!

Love,

4Vs