Tag Archives: Education

Portraits of the artist as a 1st grader

As of noon yesterday, the school year is officially over. Truth be told, we’ve been phoning it in for a couple weeks now. Even though this June has been cool and wet, the sun still stays up late, and that’s enough to make it feel like summer vacation.

Besides, with all the field trips and special events that end the year, it’s hard for anybody to concentrate on homework or any straggling, late-year tests. The birds in the trees say it’s summer, and who should know these things better than them?

The boys have spent the last week cleaning out their lockers and desks. Our house looks like a paper recycling plant with a year’s worth of schoolwork dumped from their backpacks in daily doses. Most of this rubble of their educations is going straight to the real recycling plant, but there are a few gems that merit saving.

Big Brother is old enough to realize that if he throws it out at school, he doesn’t have to carry it home, so most of the reams of school-year detritus are supplied by Buster. In 1st grade, you dutifully bring it all home, hand it to your parents, and it becomes their problem what to do with it. Your problems are over until fall.

Of all the things Buster brought home in the final cleanout frenzy, this is my favorite.

Nothing quite captures the melancholy passage of time and turns it into a model prisoner like regular self-portraits from elementary school. Here are a few highlights:

He came into 1st grade with the maniacal smile of a comic book villain. He was also suffering from a lack of sleep, or maybe pink eye. The colored pencils had not been distributed yet, so it’s hard to tell.

By December he’d gotten his color back. A few months of solid rest made him bright-eyed, and even perhaps a little dilated. In preparation for a cold winter, he’d grown a nice pair of warm eyebrows.

Now, at year’s end, he looks like such a nice boy. He might be a little dizzy, but the end of a long year will do that to you. He’s been crowned and earned a star, which are both great confidence builders for a six-year-old. I struggled to figure out what “6 set” meant for a while before I realized it was his disordered spelling of “best”.  He is the best 1st grade graduate. I wasn’t expecting this, but I’m extremely proud to learn he earned that honor. I’m sorry to all the other 1st grade graduates that they did not win this award, but 2nd grade, and another chance, is right around the corner.

But for now, enjoy the summer, and maybe help Mom and Dad bundle up papers for a trip to the recycling center.

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Vastness of father’s ignorance inspires child to stay in school

Big Man graduates from preschool tonight. It will be a proud and happy moment for his parents. Proud because it’s another step completed on his journey to becoming a man of substance. Happy because it means the end of tuition payments. Big Man is learning on your dime for the next 13 years, Dear American Taxpayer. He’s a public school boy now.

That’s not to say we’re turning him completely over to you. We will continue to work with him to master riding a bike and tying shoe laces. And we’ve already done all the nasty potty training stuff. All we really need you to do is teach him Calculus and whatever other sundries he needs to get a full college scholarship. We’d like to make a habit of this not paying tuition thing.

Buster’s preschool graduation day, two years ago. He is currently pursuing a post-Kindergartenal degree in Homework Evasion.

Big Man is mentally prepared for Kindergarten. He’s a boy full of curiosities, who is slowly being disappointed to find his father does not know everything. He is coming to understand that his pathway to knowledge runs through Kindergarten, and then high school. Any information gleaned from Daddy is supplemental at best.

The other day, for instance, Big Man and Daddy were observing a Roly-Poly (a.k.a. Pill Bug) in its travels along the length of a twig. “What do Roly-Polies eat?” Big Man asked Daddy.

I could probably see what it’s eating if I knew which end the mouth was on.

“I don’t know,” Daddy naturally replied. Daddy knew the fascinating fact that Roly-Polies are crustaceans, but he didn’t know the mundane facts of what they eat. Children never ask the right questions.

“How do you not know what Roly-Polies eat?” Big Man asked. (“How do you not know?” is becoming one of his standard questions as he discovers how many basic curiosities Daddy is unequal to.)

“How do you not know?” Daddy asked in rebuttal.

“I never went to the high school,” Big Man asserted. “You went to the high school, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Daddy confirmed. “I went to high school, but not to the one where they tell you what Roly-Polies eat.”

Big Man shook his head at yet another of Daddy’s maddening ignorances.  “I’ll ask Mommy.”

Now, Mommy is pretty smart, but her knowledge of bugs revolves around how to neutralize them before they bite, sting, or burrow into an ear canal. “Mommy may not know,” I told him.

“What?” Big Man asked in exasperation. “She didn’t go to the high school either?”

If we have many more of these conversations, Big Man may become convinced he is the first generation in his family to graduate preschool.

And since he’s in the first generation of his family that didn’t jump straight into Kindergarten, that little son of gun would be right again.

Modern Art make caveman feel old

When you’re very young, many things confuse you. Over time you change and you begin to understand more and more until you hit the prime of life, that fleeting moment when you understand as much about the world as you are ever going to. For that split second, you are in the grove, a knower of things, wise and worldly.

Then the world changes, and you understand less and less. Green reality turns to brown, dries to a brittle sheen, and floats away on a chilly breeze. All at once you are old.

I am old.

There are many things I no longer understand, but that which most recently warned me of my slipping mental grasp is stripes.

I didn’t understand stripes in my youth either. Circa 1971, my parents dressed me in a polyester shirt of many discordant, horizontal stripes, sporting a zipper V-neck with a metal hoop pull tab. I never figured out why. As I grew up, I discovered horizontal stripes look best on flags, while slim, sparse, vertical ones are better for fashion.

I thought I’d made my peace with stripes until our visit to the local art museum this past weekend.  The horizontal stripes were back, bigger and bolder than ever.

Even on my peak day in this world, I would not have presumed to understand art. My peak day is farther behind me than I realized. There are two huge rooms of stripes, and nothing else.

Hover over photos to see captions.
Please let there be an entire other room of this!
I probably ruined the soup by adding children.

My wife asked the docent about the fabulous stripes. What I got is second-hand, but the upshot is the courageous artist freed us from the bondage of needing anything more than big stripes on big canvas to be aesthetically fulfilled. Perhaps this explains the tingle of aesthetic liberty I’ve been experiencing all week.

If only it were just the stripes conspiring to age me. There was also this.

or not so falling

Walls just don’t collapse the way they used to.

I roused the courage to ask the docent about this one. “It’s a falling wall,” she told me. I didn’t want to upset her, so I didn’t point out it wasn’t actually falling. There was more timber holding up that wall than the non-falling walls all around us. Maybe they were just supporting it until the crowd got there. I suppose you don’t want to advertise a ground-breaking Falling Wall exhibit and have all the latecomers be disappointed by a run-of-the-mill Fallen Wall exhibit.

Also in this gallery were two projector lamps projecting nothing but light onto the walls. The docent confessed the projector exhibits were open to interpretation. The boys interpreted them to mean they were to make shadow puppets on the wall. Some of the hand gestures were very artful.

We didn’t have time to view the rest of the museum because my family had to rush me to the Home Goods section of Target so I could flip through framed prints before I started shaking my cane and shouting demented gibberish at our brave new world.

Kindergarten spring exhibit

It’s that season again. Spring parent-teacher conferences mean it’s time to get the official assessment of your Kindergartner’s progress since November, and more importantly, admire his artwork.

Kindergarten artwork is always instructive for gaining insight into the minds of five-year-olds. This piece tells of Buster’s limitless imagination, and rudimentary spelling.

rich man

Get ready to sell all your stuff. He’s in the market for everything.

It’s the Kindergarten equivalent of “If I won the lottery,” and just like everyone who’s ever won the lottery, our kindergartner would attempt to buy everything.  Lottery winnings have never succeeded in buying everything, and I doubt a pot of gold would either, but then I don’t have any better idea of the price of everything than he does, so maybe a pot of gold would just do it. I guess it would depend upon the size of the pot.

On the other hand, I’m glad he’s got an open-ended shopping list, because I’ve got lots of stuff lying around the house I’d like to sell him, starting with a playroom full of broken toys.

a sweet penalty

Two minutes in the penalty box never looked so sweet.

This holdover from Valentine’s Day seemed odd at first. It’s the only image of a hooking penalty I’ve ever seen captured in a heart cutout. Art critics could spend weeks speculating on the deeper meaning of this piece. The kid has never played hockey or even paid attention to a hockey game on TV. He doesn’t skate and he’s never touched a hockey stick that was taller than him and not made of plastic.

Looking at it from a hockey perspective is probably the incorrect view. At a basic level this is an image of one guy jabbing another guy with a stick. That’s something every five-year-old boy can relate to. I wouldn’t be surprised if the artist imagined the jabbee to be the jabber’s older brother. Therefore, he had it coming. What kindergartner wouldn’t admire a photo snapped at that moment of triumph when he whacked his brother with a stick? The only shame is that he couldn’t find a photo of a good, solid slashing penalty.

Oh well. There’s another whole year, and half of 1st grade, to find a more romantic, major penalty picture to put inside the next heart.