Guess how I spent my Friday, oh blogosphere? No ideas? Well, I'll tell you. After acheiving my goal of being hired in a real grown up job and securing an audition for a real, authentic, talent agency, I celebrated my success by spending three hours peeling out big cardboard letters in the middle of a first grade class room.
'Why were you spending Friday in a first grade class room?' the blogosphere, no doubt, enquires. Well, that's an easy question to answer. See, my Mom has recently procurred a position teaching first grade in an elementary school on the other side of San Antonio. This is very exciting for her as she has been in the market for a teaching job for the past two years. She was just recently hired to teach in an inner city district which is a bit notorious for being particularly difficult. Oddly enough, this is, perhaps what excites my Mother the most. She's always liked a challange (and...honestly...it's first grade. How menacing can a group of adorable six year olds really be?). The only thing about this job that really stresses Mom out, it seems, is finding all the right colourful borders, cute frogs, and overlarge letters to hang in the class room.
That's where my peeling off large letters in a firstgrade class room comes into play.
'Why does it take you so long to peel letters? Shouldn't that be pretty easy?' members of my reading audience are no doubt asking themselves.
Well, oh dear blog readers, the answer to that question is much longer and a bit more complicated. Not only were these particular letters very poorly made (especially considering how expensive they were. On what planet is it acceptable to charge five dollars a sheet for peel a part block letters?). Thus, they were difficult to peel appart from eachother without tearing and I had to revert to using the sicssors.
The problem with this is, I'm not known for my arts and crafts skills. There is a reason for this. See, when I was a wee little kindergardener, there was a playhouse set, complete with kitchen in my class room, which only four children were allowed in at a time. Now, I was an imaginative child and could never master the self control to resist anything involving makebelive thus, the playhouse with its imaginary kitchen always beckoned to me.
The problem...well, we had arts and crafts at the end of the day, just before we got to choose our centers to play in. The deal was, we had to finish our craft products before we were allowed to play, and the playhouse four were decided on a first come first served basis. So, if I was to beat all the other children to the kitchen, I had to work increadibly fast. This was a feat that even at the tender age of five, I was unable to accomplish. So, instead of learning the importance of hard work and perseverance, I would simply stuff my unfinished craft projects into my cubby and race the brighter and more honest children to the playhouse.
I'll admit, I'm a bit ashamed to reveal the beginings of my now infamous lazy streak to a horde (do four followers count as horde?) of blog readers. However, this incident means that, unfortunately, I never truly learned the proper form, ettiquette or style for cutting, gluing, pasting or colouring. This is why it still takes three hours for me to cut paper block letters from sheets without accidentally tearing them in half or poking my own eye out with the scissor blades.
Still, the more I thought about this today, the more I realized, the bulk of my personality was not truly formed by the arts and crafts projects that I did not finsh, but rather, by the imaginary kitchen which I (however illigitimately) spent the bulk of my time playing in.
I know it's a bit cliche but I've come to realize that playing imaginary games, interacting with others and (in essence) practicing for adult hood is a more useful and important to a childs well being than learning to cut a peice of paper cleanly or learning how to colour inside the lines. Now, I'm not suggesting a revolution against scicssors, glue and markers (though we do have some animosity in our history), I'm mearly suggesting that, if a child doesn't do these things well and doesn't want to do those things, maybe it's better, in the end, to simply let her play in the imaginary kitchen.
Oh, and Mom, I know you'll be the kind of teacher to value playhouses over scissors. So, really, it doesn't matter if the block letters are exactly centered in the end. No one child will remember if they were or not. What they'll remember is what an amazing, creative and fun teacher they had for first grade.
Ok. My sentimental speil is (hopefully) over for the month. I have an audition comming up tomorrow so, I'll need lots of prayers and posotive vibes for that! I'll let you know how it goes
See you tomorrow blog reading quartet!
No comments:
Post a Comment