My favourite character

My favourite character in the Bible is Jonah. Not very seasonal. You thought I was going to say Mary or Joseph, or possibly a shepherd, didn't you? Well, ha ha. Wrong! My favourite character, by a long chalk, is Jonah.

Jonah is best remembered for that stint in the whale, but the rest of his story is the best bit. He gets to Ninevah, where God sent him in the first place, and he preaches to them, and they all go "Hey, yes, Jonah has a point". They repent, and live happily ever after, and Jonah says "See, God? I told you there was no point me coming here. You make me so angry. And now you're probably expecting me to be all glad and joyous that the Ninevites have repented, but I'm not. I'm angry and I'm grumpy. Aaaaargh, I'm so angry I can't even speak. I'm going to sit under this tree in the shade and be really really angry". And the story ends with God trying to get Jonah's attention, and Jonah sitting in a great big wallowing grump, probably the emotional equivalent of the belly of the whale, and not talking to him. It's marvellous.

When I get to Heaven, the first thing I'm going to do is find Jonah. I'm going to sit right down next to him, under that tree, and I'm going to join in his great big long eternal grump. And I'm going to enjoy every eternal minute of it. I think he and I will get on really well.

We'll start with schools. I don't know if he had much experience of schools, or even had children, but I expect he did. I mean, that whole whale episode was so designed to be a Favourite Kids' Bible Story down the ages, it smacks of someone who knows about children. So we'll get started on schools, and how teachers can ruin your week by expecting you to help your child produce a project, on a huge piece of poster board, about Christmas traditions in some selected nation of the world, by Friday. Don't they KNOW how much some children hate doing projects on poster boards? Don't they REALISE that Friday is very soon after Monday? (and ok, ok, I could have read the homework page on the website, or maybe my child could have communicated to me, but GET REAL, this is life). Does anyone CARE about Christmas traditions in France? I will ask Jonah if they had the tradition of teachers' seasonal gifts back in his time. You know the one. Where you feel obliged to contribute to a pot of money for someone who is doing their job, just like all the rest of us are doing our jobs. But most of us don't have jobs that involve innocent adults having to help with projects on poster board. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

You see, Heaven will be Heaven, because it will be full of people who have noticed the poster board thing. I am sure of it. I'm guessing quite a few thousand of them will have drifted towards Jonah and his tree, and it will be FABULOUS, because we can complain about poster board projects endlessly (literally endlessly). And if we get bored with that, we can move on to children and their incapacity not to strew chaos everywhere (Heaven is going to be self-tidying, did you know that?), the Post Office, churches and all their members, the media, adolescents who answer every question with "I dunno" but manage to leave out all the consonants so that it sounds like a nasalised "I uuuhhh", tax forms, sleepovers, McDonalds, customers who want to tell you about their trip to England which happened so long ago they can't remember the names of any of the places they went to, the quirks of Blogger, apostrophes in the wrong place's, library fines, and families who have the nerve to get together at Christmas - together, I tell you! - without those of their number who live on a different side of an ocean.

So Jonah, hang on in there, up there, or wherever the Nth dimension is. I am coming. I'm going to join your club. I bet it's the coolest one in town (does Heaven have towns?), with all the anarchists, the Occupy Cities people, the trailing spouses, the disgruntled mums, and all those people who just can't face the shiny smiley ones over the other side of the cloud. We will eat far too much chocolate and drink far too much wine, and be really really grumpy all the time, without it mattering one single jot. We will whitter and whinge to our hearts' content, and dance to the very loud music of rejuvenated punk rockers dressed in bin liners with safety pins through their noses and lips, who will be tediously smug about how they started the whole body-piercing craze.

And ha! I've just had a brilliant idea! We will do poster board projects... about teachers. We'll do them badly, without reading the instructions, and hand them in late (we'll need a philosopher or two to help us out with the concept of "late" in an eternal setting). Ooooh. I'm looking forward to it already.



Picture credit: phillipmartin.info

More second grade homework

I wrote recently about 7-yo’s homework, and how I hate the way she is being taught ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways to interpret passages of English. It’s getting worse. Could you bear it if I whinged on about it again? Given that you, my readers, are among some of the finest writers I've ever come across (and I sincerely mean that), let's see how you'd fare in second grade English homework.

Sam swims quickly.
Sam swims well.

Question : What is the best way to combine these two sentences?
Answer (choice of 4):

1. Sam swims quickly and Sam swims well.
2. Sam swims quickly, well.
3. Sam swims quickly, well too.
4. Sam swims quickly and well.

The right answer is number 4. But 7-yo had chosen number 1. I have to say I agree with her. That sentence has a lovely rhythm. It’s almost like a nursery rhyme or chant. It echoes the movement of someone swimming front crawl. It has a symmetry. It swings along. I actually quite like numbers 2 and 3 as well.

Of course it depends on your definition of “what is the best way…”. I note that it doesn’t say “what is the correct way…” (thank goodness). I would prefer to see it rephrased “what do you think you’re meant to think is the best way…”. At least that would be good early training in exam technique.

I’m sure you’re going to say that it’s important for second graders to learn grammar, and that these are just grammar exercises, and won’t quash her literary creativity. And you’re probably right. But the words “dumbing down” spring inexorably to mind. (Perhaps I wouldn’t mind so much if the letters that have come home from the three primary schools my children have attended weren’t sprinkled with typos and grammatical mistakes.)

Then I stopped to think. Do I care so much about how her brain is being trained in maths? Or any other subject? Do I have a strong opinion on what she should or shouldn’t be doing in PE? Do I react so strongly, either positively or negatively, when she talks about what she’s done in Art or Music? The answer to all these is no, not really. Opinions here and there, varying from mild to strong, but nothing gets under my skin to the same degree as her English homework. This says more about me, than about the education system (though I think my opinions stand, none the less).

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about being a parent, it’s that you learn such a lot about yourself in the process. I knew all along that I love words, and that how we put them together is important to me. I didn’t need the reminder of 7-yo’s homework really. But it’s interesting to see what things push our own personal buttons.

Things that aren't right with education

Oh, don't get me started. Truly. This is the stuff of many a conversation in our household. Kind of goes with the territory if you're married to a Philosophy Professor. I tell you, "evaluation" is a more-than-four-letter word in this house. (Come to think of it, it probably is in your house too.)

So I'm not going to get all ranty about the education system. The school year has been underway a couple of weeks here, so we are almost in full swing, ahead of you, my fellow compatriots-by-birth-not-current-location.

However, I do just want to share with you something that happened with 7-yo, which was one of those moments where she discovered that sometimes you do your best, and it's not right, or not good enough. I hate that. What mother doesn't hate that for her small child?

She was showing me a couple of passages that she'd had to read and answer questions on. I think we used to call them 'comprehension exercises' - I don't know if they still do. The first one was about a girl named Frida, going off to camp to learn to play tennis. On the bus, Frida looks for her best friend, named Gina (not Saturda or Sunda, which would have been more logical), who wasn't there. So she sat next to another girl, Elaine. When she got to camp, she found out that Gina wasn't coming as she was ill. "Frida was sad" the passage tells us. "She wanted to play tennis with Gina". But she played with Elaine instead. The passage goes on "The girls learned how to hit the ball." Oh yes. That would be useful for playing tennis. It concludes by saying that Frida missed Gina, but still enjoyed herself. The next day, she told Gina about camp and about Elaine, and couldn't wait to share her new friend with her best friend.

Most of the questions on the passage were multiple choice, but one of them asked

Why is Gina's illness important to the story? Include details from the story in your answer.

7-yo wrote:

Frida and Gina are Best friends. Frida missed Gina very much.

an answer which was deemed inadequate. Wah. Honestly, I think 7-yo had just missed the ending of the story, which was on the back of the page, and maybe there's a lesson there about remembering to turn the page over. But I also think that even if she'd read to the end, her answer stands. I'm guessing the correct answer would be something like "Because Gina was ill, Frida made a new friend, Elaine. Frida would not have played with Elaine if Gina had not been ill." But I like 7-yo's response. She's bringing of herself to the story. To her, the most important thing was that Frida missed Gina very much. (And, between you and me, I think she did well to skip that bit about introducing a new friend to a best friend, because we all know what a recipe for upset that can be.)

I comprehend that the exercise was all about comprehension of the passage, and not designed to encourage personal response to literature, but I think that's sad. The idea that there's a right and wrong answer when you're talking about plot and character seems very limiting. I know I'm over-thinking this, but you would too, if you'd seen 7-yo's big blue sad eyes, as she asked "why did I only get 11 out of 13?", and I had to tell her that she's not always going to get full marks for everything and that that's ok. And adding that sometimes the questions are a bit silly, or open to misinterpretation, and then you just have to know that it's the question that's wrong and not you. Was that the right answer? I don't know.

Then there was the second passage, all about Mr Garcia, who brought a guinea pig into his classroom, and how excited the children all were. One of the children, Paula, held the guinea pig, and whispered to it "Welcome to our class". Aw. Anyway, 7-yo had to say what "whisper" meant from the following four options: shout, soft voice, loud voice, friendly tone. She picked "friendly tone", which wasn't the correct answer. But she explained to me that in the story, Paula knew the guinea pig would be frightened by all the people, so she whispered to it because she wanted to help it not to be frightened, and so that was being friendly to it, wasn't it? So "whisper" DID mean "friendly tone" in this story, didn't it?

All this over-thinking. Can't imagine where she gets it from.

One more thing. Can schools puh-lease stop giving our children stories to read about cute dogs and sweet little guinea pigs? At least until after Christmas. If they insist on stories about dogs, the narrative should be full of details about vet bills, boarding kennel bills, unpleasant poop-scooping, and walking out in the wind and rain when you'd rather be inside watching television.

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