One calculation in measuring the success of a surprise birthday party is fairly simple: the level of apparent surprise at the exact moment of the intended surprise. For those lined around the room uniformly hollering the surprise, it is the look on the face of the birthday person that reveals all.
When this occasion visited me on Saturday evening I utilized the limited skills one accumulates for such rare events in an attempt to look surprised. I picked up the mail in one hand, appearing to look down at it, as I walked into the ambush stridently. However I was somewhat genuinely surprised to be physically attacked by a dozen kids armed with large balloons. That detail I could not have envisaged.
I knew this whole thing was coming. It was my birthday weekend. I was not sure of the time and place, but the whole affair had been confessed to me, in whisper, some days earlier.
It was probably the power of intimating with parent that drove Havana to lean into her daddy and confide that “they are doing something for your birthday, it’s a Secret.” By bringing me into the conspiracy of the surprise I was concurrently excluded from the actual surprise.
It would have been justified to be mad at Havana. But there are many occasions when a child of diminutive vocabulary makes a parent with more vocabulary, feel short of words. This was one such moment.
I didn’t have much time to figure out how to respond. Without much thought I stopped on the sidewalk, leaned down to my daughter, and eye to eye whispered back to her. “In a couple of years your Mom will be forty. I will be organizing a surprise party for her. Won’t that be nice? However, I will not be telling you about it because it will be a bloody secret.”
She grinned back at me, “too late Daddy, ‘cause now I already know!”
Thus the parent-to-kid life lesson of this story, tossed clumsily at my daughter, made no impact before it was summarily returned so fast as to leave me once again speechless. Unsurprisingly.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Kindergarten, Dickens and the Proven Fact
Last week our almost 5-year old daughter began Kindergarten at the public elementary school two blocks from our house. Such transitions are generally anxious times for both the child and therefore for the parents too.
Wednesday evening I attended the Back to School night and along with a dozen or more parents, overwhelmingly moms, I listened as the teacher explained her hopes for the children’s year within the school district’s mandated curriculum.
“Basically, Kindergarten is the new 1st Grade” explained the teacher, a 30-year veteran of the Oakland School District. She went on to explain how the school is required to have every 5-year old be able to read by the end of the year. “We teach reading 90 minutes each day. We have 2 science classes a week and math for a minimum of one hour a day” she explained. The school day for the four and five-year olds is 7 hours long. There are 3 recesses, including lunch and no music or art to speak of.
As I left, I thought: OMG, our daughter’s childhood is over. The rat race begins here. Get up, go to school, suffer, come home tired, go to bed, get up, go to school. While children don’t have to work in factories in this country, nor are parents forced to sell their children, the earlier and earlier start of the drudgery of work is no sign of social progress.
Additionally, on the day the country of Georgia was rewarded with $1 billion from the US government for doing the oil business’ dirty work in the Caucuses, we were asked to donate toilet paper, hand sanitizer, paper, children’s snacks and other necessities on a long list the teacher gave out.
When picking up Havana the next day I chatted with the teacher. She had implied in her talk the night before that the curriculum was too much for the kids and not necessarily the best for their general development, adding, “the children start raising their hands right after lunch to ask if it’s time to go home yet. They are tired.” She explained that her hands were tied with the high-performance pressure of the curriculum. I responded that the politicians play football with our kids to try to prove, through testing, that they’re strong on Education. She smiled and nodded.
The testing-driven style of education is a retreat to pre-civil rights era education. In Charles Dicken’s critique of Victorian Schools, Hard Times, the main character is a Member of Parliament and the owner of a local school. His railroad-method of education has no room for exploration, imagination or dissent. The children are seen as ‘little vessels’ to be filled to the brim with facts. The two strains of education were taught as one: for the children expected to become managers, they learned how the teacher taught; for the children of the workers, their education was essentially about obedience and tipping your cap to the bosses’ “fact.”
Meanwhile there is the additional factor at our local school. It is considered an under-performing school. All schools with lower income children are this way. So, the school is under even more pressure than many schools to raise test results,
Our Kindergarten teacher does a great job. The mandated pressures on her to teach strictly by the book and timetable makes her job more difficult.
She alsohe mentioned that our daughter is running around, chasing the boys in the playground and generally happy.Havana confided to me that she already has two boyfriends.
On picking her up one afternoon, I noticed from a distance that while in line a boy pushed by her, she turned and jabbed the kid to get his attention. These apparently small skills, of learning how and when to stand up for yourself and how to enjoy the people around you are among the most important skills we learn as kids.
With both McCain and Obama committed to variations of No Child Left Behind, our kids will be forced to continue the monotony of fact-driven education. Working class kids are more likely to survive because they are more likely to see through the system’s veneer.
Wednesday evening I attended the Back to School night and along with a dozen or more parents, overwhelmingly moms, I listened as the teacher explained her hopes for the children’s year within the school district’s mandated curriculum.
“Basically, Kindergarten is the new 1st Grade” explained the teacher, a 30-year veteran of the Oakland School District. She went on to explain how the school is required to have every 5-year old be able to read by the end of the year. “We teach reading 90 minutes each day. We have 2 science classes a week and math for a minimum of one hour a day” she explained. The school day for the four and five-year olds is 7 hours long. There are 3 recesses, including lunch and no music or art to speak of.
As I left, I thought: OMG, our daughter’s childhood is over. The rat race begins here. Get up, go to school, suffer, come home tired, go to bed, get up, go to school. While children don’t have to work in factories in this country, nor are parents forced to sell their children, the earlier and earlier start of the drudgery of work is no sign of social progress.
Additionally, on the day the country of Georgia was rewarded with $1 billion from the US government for doing the oil business’ dirty work in the Caucuses, we were asked to donate toilet paper, hand sanitizer, paper, children’s snacks and other necessities on a long list the teacher gave out.
When picking up Havana the next day I chatted with the teacher. She had implied in her talk the night before that the curriculum was too much for the kids and not necessarily the best for their general development, adding, “the children start raising their hands right after lunch to ask if it’s time to go home yet. They are tired.” She explained that her hands were tied with the high-performance pressure of the curriculum. I responded that the politicians play football with our kids to try to prove, through testing, that they’re strong on Education. She smiled and nodded.
The testing-driven style of education is a retreat to pre-civil rights era education. In Charles Dicken’s critique of Victorian Schools, Hard Times, the main character is a Member of Parliament and the owner of a local school. His railroad-method of education has no room for exploration, imagination or dissent. The children are seen as ‘little vessels’ to be filled to the brim with facts. The two strains of education were taught as one: for the children expected to become managers, they learned how the teacher taught; for the children of the workers, their education was essentially about obedience and tipping your cap to the bosses’ “fact.”
Meanwhile there is the additional factor at our local school. It is considered an under-performing school. All schools with lower income children are this way. So, the school is under even more pressure than many schools to raise test results,
Our Kindergarten teacher does a great job. The mandated pressures on her to teach strictly by the book and timetable makes her job more difficult.
She alsohe mentioned that our daughter is running around, chasing the boys in the playground and generally happy.Havana confided to me that she already has two boyfriends.
On picking her up one afternoon, I noticed from a distance that while in line a boy pushed by her, she turned and jabbed the kid to get his attention. These apparently small skills, of learning how and when to stand up for yourself and how to enjoy the people around you are among the most important skills we learn as kids.
With both McCain and Obama committed to variations of No Child Left Behind, our kids will be forced to continue the monotony of fact-driven education. Working class kids are more likely to survive because they are more likely to see through the system’s veneer.
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