Write On, the Revolution!

Four is bored.

She tells me she is considering resigning her position at preschool and wants to take some personal time to explore her options. From there she will be seeking a new challenge.

I can see her point – there is a limit to how much a mature person who will be five in just a few short months wants to play with Lego, sing songs about fishies in the ocean and lie around during the mind-numbingly boring mandatory naptime unable to sleep. A lot of the activities she sees as being more geared towards the threes-turning-four and she thinks her teacher isn’t interested in changing the curriculum to suit her and the other slightly older children.
“Toddlers” she says, dismissively with a snort
“Don’t they realise I’m a big kid now?”
She’s gagging to go to Kindergarten, still eight months away. She wants to learn the three R’s.

At her age I was at ‘big school’ already.
I very clearly remember the first day; being taken by my parents in my uncomfortable and unfamiliar uniform that would soon become a second skin to a room full of other nervous children and a teacher called Mrs. Grimm.
That really was her name. Need I say more?
We little ones were sat around diminutive desks and told to sit absolutely still and not wriggle or speak until we were called upon. I remember initially having a slight academic advantage in that I could already read by the time I went to school, but I had not really been introduced to numbers much beyond counting. One awful day I came into the classroom and found myself face to face with a blackboard chalked with ten math problems that had to be completed during the morning period.
I felt my heart sink rapidly with an overwhelming sense of panicky, hopeless doom.
I tried, faithfully, to answer the first two or three sums, doing the requisite addition by counting on my fingers, albeit surreptitiously under the table as we were not really supposed to do that for reasons that were not fully outlined (explaining things to children being unfashionable at the time).
So 2+3 turned out to be 5, 4+2 ended up, after much deliberation to be 6 and so forth. Then the sums got a bit harder, not to mention more boring, and I started to fidget, grow restless and unable to concentrate. I stared out the window and watched leaves whirl around in the autumn wind on the empty playground and wished I could be outside with them.

That’s when I had my epiphany. 

It had a strange kind of logic to it, and if it had happened today I probably would have been given extra credit and a young economist’s prize or some such, (that or a free pass to Gamblers Anon).

I decided that I would not bother working out the answer to all the remaining problems; I would just pick (in my four year old’s estimation) the most important, special, and commonly thought of number (which is, of course, 100 as every fool knows) and put that down instead. Statistically, I reasoned, it would have to be right at least once, probably more, and the time and stress I would save on working out the answers to the boring questions would more than offset the pain of having a few red crosses against the ones I might get wrong.
It was pure genius.
Really, with that kind of thinking and the right set of teachers/parents/conditions I could have gone on to a stellar career on Wall Street and right now instead of wondering how it will be possible to pay for our children’s college education and also retire before age 93, I would be in the Bahamas with your children’s college education fund which I would have managed to cream off in Bernard Madoff style Ponzi Scheme and scarper before the Feds found me..

 Anyway, Mrs. Grimm, for better or worse, was not impressed with my statistical analysis and in addition to my red crosses I got a parental conference and a big COULD DO BETTER tag which has dogged every report card, both physical and psychic ever since. I even do it to myself now. She would be so proud!
Unfortunately that was the first of many similar experiences that put me completely off school and formal learning. This has had huge implications across all areas of my life, and definitely drew me on a somewhat unconventional and autodidactical path which posed its own pains as well as pleasures. I have had a most interesting journey so far – no regrets – but I question now whether it had to be quite so obstacle ridden, even if many of the obstacles were placed there myself.
Poor Husband has heard many a woeful tale of my disenchanted and disjointed education, the ten different schools I attended, not including nursery school and Art College and the miracle of how I managed to graduate from high school without doing a single piece of homework. Not one. I felt it was tantamount to a violation of human rights to make me think about school when I wasn’t even there, so I skipped that part of the curriculum, deciding it didn’t really apply to me. This, mind you, is not homage to my own brilliance. It is more illustrative of the apathy that I must have fostered in my teachers. I think they didn’t give a monkey’s fart whether I turned anything in or not – at a DC public school in the 80’s they were probably relieved that I turned up, spoke with correct grammar and didn’t shoot them.

Hmm. I meant to write about Four, and really this is ultimately about her and not about me.

At her request I have been keeping her at home more often to practice her reading and writing, and we are even doing some rudimentary math at which she is proving startlingly adept – I think she takes after Husband in this area. Her handwriting is fairly appalling – clearly my genes – but we are working on this and she is very proud and excited about our mutual improvement.
It’s odd, but can feel some kind of huge healing happening for myself as I watch this wondrous little person filling her brain with knowledge, enjoy struggling with problems, and even laugh when she makes mistakes and say to me;

“It doesn’t matter! I’ll just try again.”

If only I could have said that to myself instead of

“It doesn’t matter because I’m not going to be part of this”

I wonder how different life would have been?
This morning as I took her to preschool, she insisted on taking her exercise book in which we practice her letters with her, and she told me she is going to teach the other children to write.

“I’m bored of being bored there,” she said.
“I’m going to change things up a bit”

So rather than resigning, it looks like Four has decided instead to lead a revolution inside the classroom, armed only with her pencil and a sheet of lined paper.  I’m not sure what her teacher will say about her new career as a literary agitator, but I couldn’t be more proud. 

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