matching tracksuits

Do much course work in education and you’ll soon find yourself covering some of the same names in various classes: Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, Binet, Skinner, Kohlberg, and the list goes on.

It’s frustrating to cover the same material in course after course, but the advantage is that it sits solidly in your head, and you find yourself thinking about it at the oddest times.

For example, L and I sit down to play chess. Our chess is usually random motions of random pieces, but instructive all the same: she learns that we take turns, and that the object of the game is to defeat your opponent by taking pieces. It’s fun, but her attention span usually only last a few minutes before it’s time to have “tea” or feed her baby or any number of other priorities.

Today, we try something new. I tell her I’m going to set up pieces on my end of the board, and she needs to try to copy them on her end. A real challenge, to be sure. It is quite taxing on her spacial intelligence, for I am asking her to create a mirror image, which requires quite a bit of mental spacial manipulation.

I think of Piaget and Erikson — does she have the mental development for the task at hand. Technically, those gentlemen would probably say, “No.”

“She’s still at the very beginning of the preoperational state,” Piaget says.

Forget ed psych — let’s have some challenging fun.

The beginning is slow, and it takes her a good ten minutes to figure out that she’s supposed to be mirroring my pieces. But she puts everything together slowly, and it’s obvious she can do it.

More importantly,  she loves it. And I figure it must be in her “zone of proximal development,” for she’s having great difficulty, but slowly she’s mastering it.

“Let’s do it again!”

And so we do it many times. Each time, I alter the order in which I put the pieces on the board. First one pawn, then the other, then a knight and bishop beside each other before moving to the other side. Sometimes a mix of major pieces and pawns.

Toward the end, I give her the real challenge: most of the major pieces and some of the pawns are on the board when I tell her, “Figure it out.”

She looks at my pieces, looks at her own, back at mine, and suddenly, in a flash, her side of the board is perfect.

Once we get the piece positioning down, we’ll start learning how the pawns move.

I go home to learn about life from my daughter. I learn what goes on in her school, what her teacher says, how her teacher teaches.

L, like any good story teller, doesn’t simply tell us, though, she shows: she begins incorporating various phrases from school into her own speech.

“You might have to” becomes the key phrase. “You might have to do this.” “You might have to move that.” I can imagine L’s teacher helping her with this or that task, explaining, “You might have to try it a different way, like turning it the other direction.” “You might have to wait. I believe someone else is using those crayons.”

“That’s okay” is another. I spill a little milk and mutter “Shoot” under my breath. L consoles me: “That’s okay.”

The Girl enjoys playing with the chess set I brought back from Poland. (If I remember correctly, a gift from Nana and Papa, when they came for our wedding.) She has invented her own little version that involves us using single pieces to push our opponent’s single piece around the board for a few moments. She loves the game, but I’ve yet to discern the sublime objective.

Occasionally she just gets all the pieces out and puts them on the board. There’s usually a pattern: black pieces on black squares; white pieces on white squares.

A perfectly impossible position, but notice: the white king is in check, forking the queen.

It’s another example of the similarities between toddlers and older children with autism: pattern, pattern, pattern. Everything has its place, and to disturb that order is to invite chaos, in more ways that one.

We’re more like that than we’d like to admit. A colleague once commented that we’re all on the autism spectrum; it’s just that some of us have very mild cases. Mine manifests itself in my obsession with seeing patterns in floor tiles and then feeling a compulsion to walk in accordance with said patterns.

That’s probably why I looked at L’s work, smiled, and said proudly, “Very symmetrical. Well done.”

I never really liked card games as a kid. I guess Uno was alright once in a while, but that doesn’t really count as a real card game. Since Windows hadn’t yet come out when I was a kid, I never learned to play Hearts. Spades was popular among some friends, as was — oddly enough — euchre, but I just didn’t get it. What was the point? (Bridge, of course, was out of the question then; now, it’s the only card game I truly enjoy.)

L learned a new game today — “learn” being used in a most generous way. She didn’t quite get the point; she couldn’t quite understand why Babcia took the upturned cards for herself sometimes and sometimes gave them to her.

I can’t remember what this particular game is called in English. In Polish, it’s “wojna” — war. Perhaps it’s the same in English. I can’t really recall. (Another one of those odd circumstances in which I know the Polish but am unsure of the English.)

Most importantly: the Girl enjoyed it (for a few minutes).

“Let’s play it again!” she chimed again and again.

Still in English, though…