Drifts and mastery

October 8: Snow on the mountaintop!

We've had sunny, balmy weather since August, but when I woke up to prep for class this morning, I could hear the wind blowing wildly outside. It continued after sunrise and was whipping the tree branches as we stood with Edith waiting for the schoolbus. But it wasn't until we got in the car to head downtown that I saw Pike's Peak for the first time today, covered with a dusting of snow. It was so beautiful! As I got out of the car on campus, I overheard two students passing each other: "Have you seen the mountain?" "Yes: SNOW ON PIKE'S PEAK!" It was gone by the time I got out of class, so I have no pictures. But maybe it's a sign that fall has arrived at last.

Fall in kindergarten has brought the promised week of autumn leaf study--apparently all of the children defaulted on bringing in pretty fall leaves, as there just weren't any. Now they're on to spiders, in anticipation of Halloween. Edith combed over the British costume book that I used to love perusing when I was young and announced, after much weighing of the options, that she wants to be a palm tree. It's a good costume; the only problem is that the mother tasked with creating it is not a skilled seamstress, unlike the professional costume designer who published the book.

But if I want to be an example for Edith, it is probably important to dive in and give it a try. That's the lesson we're trying to impress on her these days...we think. After her initial enthusiasm about a spate of afterschool activities open to her as a kindergartner--prompting us to sign up for ice skating, swimming, and soccer--Edith has drawn up short and balked at each one. It turns out that the kid who worried all summer that she would be mocked in kindergarten because she didn't know how to pump her legs competently on the swings is deeply reluctant to try anything she doesn't know she already can do. So while the first day of ice skating was great, at the second lesson they asked the kids to push forward on their skates a bit, and Edith sat down on the ice and cried rather than try. The third week she put on her skates but wouldn't even venture onto the ice. At swimming she freaked out because the instructor used different terms for the skills they were practicing than any she knew, and she refused to get in the water.

At that point, not knowing whether to cajole, encourage, guilt-trip, bribe, or back off, we told her we were hesitant to enroll her in soccer. Soccer, she insisted, was different: She was loving it in gym class, and it wouldn't involve being on a surface or in a substance where it's perilously difficult to stay upright. So she went to soccer for the first time this week. And stood on the sidelines and watched.

It's really hard to know how to respond. I don't fundamentally care whether Edith becomes a soccer player or masters ice skating or not. And all these programs are relatively inexpensive, meaning that it's not a question of major investment. But when she has voluntarily expressed enthusiasm for an activity and asked to participate, we do hope she'll at least try. (And not only because we've spent 40 minutes early on a Saturday morning driving to the ice rink.) Edith has never had much patience for working things out when she's not already good at them. But I don't think this is about impatience so much as fear. The more I watch these moments unfold this fall, the more certain I am that underneath the sulky, balking exterior, she's very scared. So I don't want to berate her. As someone who was never inspired by the athletic coach's play-tough, fear-based style of motivation I can understand shrinking from heavy-handed appeals. At the same time, I don't want to see my daughter give up on things before she even tries, which seems like a pattern destined to cause trouble if it becomes her life rule. So for now we're thinking we'll go easy, backing off the lessons when they all finish up here in another few weeks. And we just hope she'll find the confidence, or the kindness to herself, to try again at some point down the road.

By way of comparison, she continues to love kindergarten, even though the first few weeks seemed to us to involve pretty easy lessons. But already having mastery--of her letters, of their sounds, of writing her name and knowing her numbers--seems to give her real confidence. Rather than boring her, class excites her. She also responds well to the multitude of classroom rules, proud because she has never had to move her clip to the yellow light on the class traffic light and because the whole group filled the marble jar with marbles this week and earned an extra recess.

Before watching Edith navigate kindergarten, I would have said that lessons on topics one had already mastered offered little in the way of pedagogical value. But in the last month we've watched Edith start from confidence in her academic skills and painlessly move into topics over which she doesn't have mastery...without any balking. Yesterday she came home with her daily journal from September, filled with pictures she had drawn each day, each labeled with words she had written. Most of the words are unintelligible without her interpretation: We figured out the big ROC that she drew, and eventually guessed the HLC behind our house. The FAMAL also was easy, with all four of us drawn in, and the BAB born in a hospital even made a certain phonetic sense. But we definitely needed assistance with I BUIT NO HS ["I bought new horses"] and CS PCIN ["scary pumpkin"], as well as most of the rest. The thing is, she doesn't seem to mind that she hasn't come up with the orthodox spellings. As a child of the phonics era, I used to the think that the whole language way of teaching writing seemed fairly silly. What good could it do a child to allow her to write in a way that communicated no meaning to an outsider? For Edith, though, it's clear that that approach has freed her up to start trying to write independently without angst. She shared her journal with enthusiasm and didn't seem frustrated that we needed her to interpret her words to us. That's a very different, relaxed attitude than we're used to seeing from her, and it seems like a positive thing. Unlike soccer and skating, writing isn't CS to her at all...

A few more quotes from our quirky, sensitive, wonderful kiddo:

Last night at dinner she told me they would be making applesauce in class today. At first she looked excited, but she quickly frowned.
"Actually, I'm sad about that."
I asked why.
"Because, since we don't have a stove in our classroom, we have to use a crockpot. And it plugs into the wall and uses up energy from the wall, which is bad for the earth."
So I pointed out that we use energy all the time in all kinds of ways--stoves use energy from the wall, too--and that it's important to be conscious of ways not to waste energy, but that making food to eat isn't necessarily a bad thing. We have to use some energy. She took that to its logical conclusion. The next words out of her mouth:
"I wish I could die, so I wouldn't do anything to harm the earth. And I wish all my family would die at the same time--my parents, my sister, my grandparents, my great-grandparents--so they wouldn't be here to be sad that I was gone."
Oh, dear. In my mind this is one of the biggest challenges in addressing climate change: How do you present the problem as grave without overwhelming people and making them fatalistic about the prospects? If a five year old concludes it would be better for her to die and stop stressing the earth, based on one or two readings of a fairly upbeat kids' science book about climate change, what chance is there of making adults feel concerned but empowered?

She does appreciate the earth in the meantime. Later in the same meal she told me that she had been getting good at giving silent kisses. I asked whether she had been developing that talent on someone in her class. She smiled and shook her head. "I've been giving the air little silent kisses recently, thanking it for letting me breathe. It's really great, air. So I've been kissing it and thanking it."

***

Unlike her sister, Alice's ever more frequent cry is, "I do it myself!" Among the things she is mastering seems to be potty use. (I don't want to tempt the fates by saying that too loudly.) About 10% of the time now, she tells us in advance that she needs to "peep" or "poop," commanding us to take off her diaper and follow her to the bathroom to watch. She's so pleased with her ability to control her urine flow that a single trip to the potty can be divided into about eight or nine rounds of her sitting, performing, cheering for herself, dumping the content into the big potty, and starting again.

We continue to think, with full parental pride and prejudice, that she's crazy smart. She knows how to count two of something and understands how to apply the word two both concretely and abstractly. She is learning her letters (on her own) and now recognizes B, C, H, and L. When offered an abstract choice, she usually understands and can make a definitive answer, then sticks with that decision. She has some sense of time and when told we can't do something right now might propose, "Tomorrow? Or later?" and then anticipate the coming event without continuing to clamor for it to happen now. (The exception: If I don't nurse her the minute I come out to the car at the end of the day, it's a fraught ride home.) She continues to learn names without our realizing it: On the Walk-to-School-Day she pointed behind us and announced, "Dylan!" on spotting the little boy who had been sitting at Edith's table at kindergarten orientation back in August (and every day since then, but orientation was the only day on which Alice was present).

One thing she hasn't mastered is weight gain: Still eating enthusiastically and developing physical skills that seem appropriate for her age, she nevertheless is off the bottom of the weight charts. We'll see what her new pediatrician says at her two-year checkup. It's hard to be worried when one spends time with her and sees how she's thriving. But then one looks at that number that has hardly edged up this year and at the 6-12 month clothing that fits her, and a little anxiety sets in. Guess we'll wait to hear from the experts come December.