BUCKING THE SYSTEM: SWITCHING ROLES WITH PARENTS MAKES FOR LOTS OF FAMILY LAUGHTER

A person can really get a new understanding of her parents when she becomes teacher and they are the students. The older I get, the more Portia and Sam make me laugh.

My parents are two of the hardest working, smartest, down-to-earth people I know. They are also probably the funniest couple I've ever met.

Mom and Dad have very different approaches to parenting and to life in general. They are very caring people who will go the extra mile for just about anybody. Both of them enjoy the limelight, although Mom's the showboat in the family. Dad's the extravagant, fun-loving, larger-than-life male role model who is always buying "family Christmas gifts" that nobody ever heard of, like Nintendo, or remote-control cars.

It's funny how age gives you a little perspective about your parents and makes them much more real. I learned to really appreciate my parents as human beings the summer after my freshman year in college. Either they did a lot of funny stuff that summer, or else being away allowed me to see what I'd been missing for 19 years.

My dad recently invested in his first computer. Remember, I said he was larger-than-life, so just imagine the SUPER-MONDO computer that this man came home with. The funny thing is, he's barely computer-literate and has been relying on someone with an animal name he met on-line to help him set everything up.

As usual, Dad's going all out on his computer adventure. Mom, tough cookie that she is, refuses to let him get the ups on her so she's tagging along willy-nilly.

Because we have grown up in the Computer Age, Clarissa and I have been forced to join this strange safari. No matter that she's in Phoenix, I'm in Cape and they're in Charleston: They want to become computer-literate and by God we're going to get them there.

Remember those different approaches I talked about? Well, nowhere are they more telling than in this learning experience. A person can really get to know her parents when she becomes teacher and they are the parents.

My mom, who actually is an educator, has always used the by-any-means-necessary approach in helping us understand a concept. She generally has lots of patience and doesn't mind using any number of different explanations to help make something clear.

She's used the same approach to this learning experience. She attends Internet classes and actually uses the "Help" option on the computer. She also calls Clarissa or me for more information when she has a question she hasn't been able to answer on her own.

Dad's the exact opposite. His teaching style has always been the "demonstrate and do" approach. That usually meant he'd show me how to do something, like change a flat tire, and then I should be able to do it, whether or not I actually can.

He's got the same approach to learning. Clarissa and I tell him how to do something and he says "OK, I've got it." He actually doesn't have it at all, but figures he can bowl his way through it.

Sometimes it works out, sometimes it makes a mess.

I don't know where this adventure is going to lead us in the next few weeks. Being physically closer to them, I'm getting more phone calls with technical questions. Unfortunately for them, I'm very much like Dad and like to experiment my way out of things.

Clarissa, the technology expert in the family who is much more like Mom, will probably have to spend her entire Christmas break cleaning up all of our mistakes.

That's OK, though, because we're family, and our weirdness is what bonds us together. It'll also make for some great laughs in the future.

~Tamara Zellars Buck is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.