With bittersweet intentions
I invited a few folks over
to celebrate Girlie’s
second birthday.
She played like a bruiser
with her cousin another
female bruiser until they
had to go home. We had
cake. Now, I’m not an anti-
cake mom, but I don’t
believe in giving frosting
to a two year old.
Call me crazy, but do you
have any idea what kind of
sugar high a two year old
can have in your own home.
I can remember peeling my
boys off the ceiling after
a birthday party and I swore
never to do that to my own
children or anyone else’s kids.
I was raised in a sugar
free for all childhood.
Pitchers of Kool Aid
and a cup of sugar added.
We could run for hours.
She still doesn’t
know why we did it,
but she spent
a fair amount of time
blowing out the candles
She has the lungs of a bird
(unless, she is shrieking or
yelling, new sounds, don’t ask)
I think she was just playing
with fire like her mom does.
PHfffff-phffffff-phffffff
phfffff-phffffff-phffffff
“Girlie, blow the candles out.
Like this, Ffffffffffffffff.”
Blow out the candles
out the candles blow
the candles blow out
Candles, blow out!
The
End
3:56pm
Everyone at the table
was huffing and blowing
showing Girlie how to blow
out the flames she was blowing
and laughing at us, the flames,
the faces we were making,
its a wonder people don’t
leave birthday parties with viruses.
Everyone had to help her
breathe on her cake
My bear made the cake then
shut down. I didn’t have to
but I forced him to come
upstairs to watch his daughter
blow out two “number one”
candles. In my land one
plus one equals two.
I’m not sure if the new
common core approves of
my style of teaching,
since I want my daughter
to be able to actually
count and quantify real
items not theoretical items.
If she shows signs of being a
programmer or genius, I will
surely send her to a public
school so she can unlearn how to
use a damn yard stick.
A yard stick should be a yard
long, meaning;
one, two, three feet long,
one foot equals 12 inches
3×12 equals thirty six inches
(and I will give her a real
wooden ruler to learn from
not a plastic rubbery slingshot
style (Whose idea was that???),
before I give a toddler a
yardstick to hit me with)
The Common Core had a commercial
about how five multiplied by three
is not fifteen. 5X3 does not equal 5+5+5
Crickets, right?
Well, 5+5+5 does not equal 15
in the common core, because
the new way of thinking is to
teach children to do math one
way. An ass backwards way if you
ask me, but I went to a tech school
with a bunch of geeks who thought
too damn much about numbers
forward and backward.
Five sets of three equals 15.
3+3+3+3+3 equals 15. Dammit to hell.
I’m sorry. No, I’m not really.
It’s bad enough that the text books
are written by microsoft and they
are prepping our children to have a
theoretical knowledge of life
without a shop class or art class to save them.
Will a robot fly in on a jet pack
to help them change a tire or jump
start their vehicle if they have a
dead battery?
Okay, here comes the soapbox:
the statistics section of one of my son’s
textbook asked him to count a four sided cube.
First of all, why did I have a child in
seventh grade learning statistics?
Crickets again.
We know that a cube has six sides.
Have you opened a box before?
count the sides with me:
One
Two
Three
Four (Squish that toilet paper roll after you have cut the sides to equal lengths and then we’ll call it an open cube.
Five
Six.
Let’s try this again
One side
Two side
Three side
Four side -square object in two dimensions, right. Stay with me, here.
Five top of the box
Six bottom of the box,
cigar box (ask me, “what’s in the box?”),
shipping container (unless its an open top international shipping container which has five sides.
Amanuensis Sobriquet-Reverie 
Not much of a common core “dumb ’em down” approach, are ya! Good for you! I taught kindergarten at a private school, and by the time the kids came out of that year they could read at a second grade level and add a line of 50+ numbers in their head. (The parents were amazed, but it was really just touch math.) I did set up a play store, however. They got “money” for being well-behaved and once a month got to go spend it. They were great with money!
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You’re amazing, Calen, we could learn a lot from your positive, affirming approach. Why we would want to coach students to be less than excellent is beyond me.
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Unfortunately, this is not dumbing down but steering and weeding out. If you can be a programmer, because your brain digs this crap, then you win. If you are and artist, musician, inventor, actor, you lose. They want very linear thought in our little children that just don’t stand a chance in hell of surviving.
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Ah thanks, hon. I loved teaching kindergarten. They’re just all like open books waiting to be written at that age.
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The younger kids are best to teach. I like Pre-K because they like to wander to their interests and that’s half the fun making art with them. Beauty surrounds them. Most K teachers now are hung up on creating the perfect student, who sits still, is well adjusted and sits still. 5 year olds should not sit still. Sometimes in a class, they get the wiggles and I wonder how their parents got them to my class with a bribe of ice cream? a sugar snack? then we do yoga in the room instead. At that age, they don’t mind bumping into each other so much and they are gracious caring sweeties still.
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You know I think you’re right MFM. Unfortunately. Plato posted an interesting video on the subject of education a while back. http://www.platosgroove.com/?p=2052
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That was Sabiscuit, but I will go to his post.
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Little people when motivated and challenged can do amazing things. If you ask kids to suspend disbelief in things they know exist like gravity then our education system is just pathetic, wasting their little brain cells, frustrating their parents, who are expected, by the way, to force them to do this crazy homework without any training in the ass backward stuff.
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Mine is three and I’ve Heard and Read Things (but not yet experienced) on common core that make me want to gnash my teeth. Looks like a fun birthday celebration an I agree that 1 & 1 = 2!
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Gnash, gnash, gnashing away is in your future. My boys are doing the same homework year after year. I just found an Animal Farm Project from boy #1, that none of the boys could comprehend the point of. Boy #3 brought it with him this weekend. What happened to book reports and visual aids with a presentation?
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