My request last week for vignettes about your children was met with an overwhelmingly pleasant response. Here is one of my favorites:
On the first day of school, the teacher noticed one of her new first-graders packing up and starting for the door at noon. The teacher asked him what he was doing. The six-year-old replied that it was time to go home. The teacher explained that, unlike kindergarten, first grade lasts a full day, not a half day. The student replied, “Who the hell signed me up for this?”
Which in addition to being adorable is noteworthy because it reminds us that our perspective as adults is incomprehensible to our half-pint charges. We can read, we can tell time, we can drive, we can open the refrigerator, we can cook. Heck, we can even see over a table and perceive what might be yummy.
Our children perceive the world from an entirely different place.
Imagine spending every minute of every day listening to math and physics Ph.D. candidates defend their dissertations. What would we understand of Tom Lehrer’s flippant “analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean Metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds”?
The perspective of little ones is similar. What is actually going on in grown up world? Why is there this emphasis on bed time (I’m not tired;) eating (what other menu options are available;) and safety (you keep talking about the acceleration of objects due to the force of gravity but I don’t understand any of the concepts in that sentence.)
When little ones say “no”, when they repeat, “how do you know?” what they are actually trying to communicate is, “what does that mean?” “why are you saying that?” and “is the world a safe place?”
I watch Lauren Bacall portray Marie “Slim” Browning is Earnest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not every few years because a) “you know how to whistle don’t you, you just pucker up and blow” still knocks me out and b) there is some possibility, however slight, that I will understand who killed whom and why with a few more viewings.
Your kids are watching a reality movie every day. With no ability to rewind or make the subtitles bigger. They are learning as they go, growing as they learn. They are missing many of the connections just as I am still wondering what the deal was between Humphery Bogart and that woman in the books store in that other brilliant noir film, The Big Sleep, never mind who killed whom and why. (To be fair, even Raymond Chandler, the author, admitted to being unclear on some of the murders.)
Which might explain why you hear, “again!” after reading The Hungry Caterpillar for the third time. Junior isn’t necessarily just trying to avoid going sleepy bye all alone in his new big-boy bed (are you sure there are no monsters in that closet? How do you know?) What he may very well be doing is trying to determine whether the book will be the same and just how cool it is to put his fingers on the pages. And don’t even try to tell me you didn’t reread paragraphs in college to try to organize your understanding. It’s the same thing. Except that you felt confident that you could extract meaning because, unlike little ones, you had done it before.
Which is not to say that the six-year-old in the story above gets to determine how long the school day is. Only that we have to be sensitive and understanding as our beloved children learn to find their place in our world.
The jump from Eric Carle to “analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean Metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds” will come soon enough.
