Yay! J, my perfect angel who didn’t exactly pass his evaluation with flying colors due to his mother’s inattention to correct block-stacking instruction, was a wonderful, patient and extremely well-napped child this weekend. Meaning this: During his four-hour nap on Saturday afternoon, I was able to put my course on classroom instruction strategies to bed…and thank God for that. Seriously, if I had to devise one more way to use experimental inquiry in my English classroom, I think I would have had a stroke.
Not that it was a bad class. I just don’t think in that scienc-ey kind of way, you know? I’m all about rainbows and flowers and feelings. Or not, but still.
One of my colleagues would jump on this as the perfect reason why I’m a slack ass, but I don’t care. World, I’m telling you now, I’m sick of reading about systems analysis, nonlinguistic representations and historical investigation. They may be fun to do, but they’re about as fun to read about as cleaning the brown gunk out of my child’s ears, except for there’s no satisfaction of seeing that very dirty q-tip at the end of it all. That fun.
Back to the eval: I don’t know how much I can trust it, since all the evaluator did was sit on my living room floor, ask me questions, add up some numbers and color in a few dots on a chart. According to me, J doesn’t know how to use a spoon well. Now that I think about it, are there many almost 20-month-olds that can? I mean, he picks it up. He jabs at his food with it. He moves it toward his mouth and sticks it in. Is it a bad thing that sometimes the food doesn’t stay on the spoon? I’d have liked for the evaluator to actually judge that on her own. If she had, maybe J wouldn’t be scoring borderline on his social skills.
Also, I don’t make J pile blocks with me. I stack, he demolishes, and all the world is happy. Apparently, he should be able to stack 6 blocks in a pile. Umm. Oooh-Kay. Due to my deficiencies, he’s also borderline on the gross motor skills section of the exam.
Does it count that on that same night I got his attention for a few seconds, and he piled five blocks before he flitted off to raid T’s closet for smelly shoes? Any extra points for that?
I’m truly a failure as a mom. Or not. The more I think about it, the less it matters. The kid rocks–he deserves social points for learning to headbang to my cruddy, loud, 90’s music and knowing how to hum the first few bars of “Iron Man.” Oh, and what about giving me knuckles? Doesn’t that count for anything?
starfish says:
Uh yeah, I vote “or not” on the failure as a mom…every kid is different..why do we need to score them? I could see if it were suspected that he was grossly behind others his age, but he’s not. Seamonkey can’t use a spoon very well either, and most times will forgo the fork for his hands. As for blocks, I don’t really know, he has eleventy billion Diego toys and he doesn’t really play with blocks. LIke you said, who cares…they rock anyway!
April 28th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Marsha says:
I know exactly what you mean. I had the hardest time answering those questions they are so subjective, especially if you don’t have a bunch of other kids to compare yours with to know if they are using the spoon poorly, good, great??? I did that test twice, once at two and again at four. At the end I went away feeling that I had answered all the questions wrong.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:58 am