Sleep
Sometimes an hour more sleep is more important than one more post…
Zugzwang
I’ve begun a chess club at school. Today was our informational meeting, and around twenty students showed up, including three girls. We set up a meeting schedule — first and third Mondays of the month — and I had them take a little “quiz” to see if they knew how to use algebraic notation, had the instinct to do more than take the “free” pawn in the King’s Gambit, could recognize the next move of the Sicilian Defense, and knew what stalemate means.
One small problem: we don’t have any chess sets. PTSA to the rescue. And as I was talking to someone about how to fill out the paperwork to request the funds, I had an epiphany: why not use chess in the classroom on a regular basis? The benefits are manifold, especially the thought of encouraging such dedicated, focused attention for some period of time, weighting options and making a decision, and overall critical thinking. So with some careful planning, I might actually be able to pull it off.
Coming home, I discovered that the Boy wants to play soccer. A good sign. And out of the blue, he wants to play chess.
Sometimes life gives you zugzwang — a situation in chess in which one player would rather not move but has to move. And occasionally, it gives you the opposite.
Confirmation
We parents wait for it all our lives, I imagine: confirmation that all the teaching we've done has somehow taken root and flowered. It comes sometimes in those little notes scribbled on our children's school papers or comments on report cards. We hear about it from grandparents or neighbors. And then sometimes we see it.
K arrived home with the Boy from a short trip to the grocery store and the pizza place only to find it had started raining. It wasn't raining hard enough for me to hear it, so I hadn't brought in the laundry drying on the back deck. (Truth be told, I wasn't even aware of it being out there, but that's an entirely different issue.) K rushed in, pizza in hand, tossed the box on the table and darted out through the back door. "My laundry!" Following a few moments behind, E appeared at the door, shopping in hand, car door closed, struggling mightily with the two bags of groceries.
He'd taken the initiative all by himself.
Coincidentally, one of the words in L's Polish lesson for the evening was "dżentelmen," the Polishized spelling of "gentleman," which has the same denotations and connotation.
In the end, I couldn't care less about how well he plays soccer. I'm more concerned with how he plays life. And while at the moment he seems destined to be darting around all the action in a soccer game, he seems to be diving right in to life.
Games
The Boy was determined not to play soccer today. "I'm scared!" was the refrain. He didn't want to get dressed. He didn't want to leave the house. He didn't want to get in the car. He didn't want to get out of the car. But once he was on the field, it was all fine.
His play was better than last week. He ran toward the ball in general, but he often just sort of ran around the edge of the hive of boys and girls kicking madly at the ball, known as four-year-olds' soccer.
And at home, a bit of badminton.
Breakfast
Dodge
The Boy comes out of the living room just as I’m headed that way. I jump in front of him playfully and block his way. As he shifts to the other side, I shift along with him, blocking his path. A fuss begins to arise. I lean down and whisper as if I’m keeping it a secret: “Push to this side like you’re going this way, then suddenly jump to the other side and run by.” He does so, then turns back smiling.
Why can’t I remember to turn every potential fuss into a teaching opportunity?
Creators
Before school, the Girl decided she wanted to make pan pipes out of straws and cardboard as she discovered in one of her many craft books.
The Boy has fallen in love with experimenting with adding random things from the refrigerator.
Family Match
If the Boy plays Saturday like he was playing today, he'll be something else. He was going after the ball no matter who had it, attacking toward the net, shooting -- everything. We even worked on passing the ball to him for him to shoot even though that's a guaranteed impossibility for his game Saturday.
But if I think back to the Girl playing soccer, I remember doing things like this and then discovering that none of it would really stick. "Perhaps more practice," I'd say, and yet it wouldn't stick. And so what if it doesn't? He's only four -- that's the cause of the "problem" and the reason it's not important.
Note from School
