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Surrender

Tuesday 21 February 2012

“Lent is when you give up something that you like,” L explains, sharing what she learned during the Children’s Liturgy at Mass this Sunday. “Pretend you didn’t like dark chocolate,” she elucidates, smiling, as if it were possible for the Girl to claim with a straight face that she doesn’t like dark chocolate. “You couldn’t give that up because that would be nonsense.”

Indeed.

I tell L that it’s not enough just to give up something you like. “If it’s something like but don’t use often, then what are you really giving up?” I ask. Which is why dark chocolate is not an option for a meaningful Lenten sacrifice for me. At one point, it would have been cigars and libation: indeed, that’s what I did last year. But I’ve all but sworn off cigars, limiting myself to one a month, and libation quickly followed suit.

As I finish explaining this, L quickly replies that she’s going to give up making messes for Lent. K calls out from the kitchen, “I’m giving up cooking!”

Our actual decisions are somewhat less silly:

  • The Girl has given up two of her four Barbies and a favorite book.
  • I’ve sworn off online chess playing, deciding to replace it with a Lenten reading schedule and a bit more thinking out loud here about what I’m reading.
  • K, having given up so much for the baby, is giving up nothing in addition. Very wise.

Teachable Moments

Tuesday 7 February 2012

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It often astonishes me how few social skills some students have. Among other tendencies, they exhibit an inability to accept criticism, to delay gratification, to express frustrations in a positive manner, or to know when it’s best to keep a particular thought to themselves. “How is this possible?” I sometimes wondered in the past; having a child whose verbal abilities and cognitive skills increase daily has taught me: these students simply haven’t had sufficient direct instruction.

There are so many things that kids pick up on without being taught directly — chief among them, the most unique characteristic of humans: language — that it’s easy to forget that some things we take for granted actually have to be taught. We think that correction is teaching.

Tonight, I came home with a bit of spare change in my pocket, and as the Girl is saving for a Barbie camper, I give her a bit of my loose change when I have it. I gave her a quarter; she smiled and asked, “Can I have more?”

The easy response — the response I suspect a few of my students got as children — would be, “Can you what?! Don’t you go asking me for more when I’ve already given you something!” And that would be the end.

Tonight, I took the quarter back and explained calmly that, when someone gives you something, it’s really not very polite at all to ask for more. “Let’s try it again,” I said, directing the Girl to return to the spot where she was standing.

“I have something for you,” I smiled again.

“What!?” she asked in almost genuine excitement — she’s a good play-actor.

I gave her the quarter, raised my eyebrows ever so slightly, and she replied, “Thank you!” and put it in the piggy bank.

Explicit teaching followed by directed practice. Sounds like I what I do eight hours a day…

Circus

Sunday 5 February 2012

Remember your first circus?

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The excitement as the animals and performers all came in, music blaring, ring master chanting?

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Remember your gasps as you watched acrobats perform what seemed to your young eyes to be impossible feats?

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Remember seeing the elephants and thinking, “It’s not just Dumbo. They really do line up like that”?

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Remember the ball in the pit of your stomach as you watched riders in this or that steel cage of doom?

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My folks took me to my first circus when I was about L’s age, and I still remember those sights. Hopefully the Girl will remember today’s first as well.

More photos at Flickr.

Map Work

Saturday 4 February 2012

The Girl has been working on puzzle maps at school, learning, continent by content, states and countries — Europe, North America, and South America down, currently working on Africa.

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Almost every day since then, we’ve gone over countries and states, an effort to remember what’s learned and add new states so she can finish a continent and bring home her hand-colored map.

In Poland this autumn, she drove everyone crazy showing all the maps she knew. Only Dziadek, a former geography teacher, could sit down and listen to her, time after time, catalogue the shifting geography of an ever-changing world. “Many of those countries didn’t exist when I was born,” I think as she names them for me; as for Dzaidek, even Poland was a different country when he was born. Those nuances are lost on L as she points and names, proud of her memory.

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As a reward, though, we agreed to buy the Leap Frog interactive maps for her when she completed Europe, and they arrived today.

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Endless fun on the horizon.

The Games We Play

Wednesday 1 February 2012

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The Girl simply loves playing games: Candy Land, checkers, Go Fish, “the memory game” (Never just “memory” for her), Curious George — you name it, she’ll play it.

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The long-standing challenge for us as parents has always been teaching her to win with humility and lose with dignity. It’s tough to teach a child something you yourself are not good at, for it must be said that I don’t always lose with dignity myself. Chess is about the only game I play, and while I don’t pitch a fit, my pulse quickens at a loss, and I’m soon berating myself for my obvious mistakes.

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Yet by their very nature, these games make excellent benchmarks for social skills development. There are countless metrics:

  • How far into the game does the first fuss appear?
  • How long does the first fuss last?
  • Once it subsides, does the first frustration return immediately?
  • Is the Girl capable of finishing the game or has she worked herself into an irreversible tizzy?
  • When it begins to look like a loss is inevitable, does she give up or continue playing?

Recent gaming adventures have shown that L is developing a tolerance for the inevitable eventual loss, an ability to recover quickly from initial frustrations, and the poise to win and lose well. It was, in short, truly a phase.