Skipping Rope

March 31, 2009 By 20 Comments

I love Sean’s Deja Vuesday. They are weekly reminders of moments I might have otherwise forgotten. Today I’m turning back to a post originally on Namas Daisy titled, “Writing With My Least Dominant Hand.”

children writingChildren do learn as they live, but so do adults.  Mia is in a Dual Immersion Spanish program.  She is finishing her first trimester as a first grader or “grader” as she likes to refer to herself now that she is not in kindergarten anymore.  Max starts kindergarten next fall and Mia is taking advantage of all the moments of not having to share the playground with her baby brother.

Max is gifted with as much language as she, except he cannot do it in Spanish….yet (though he nailed potty training in about an hour).  Neither can Mommy, though I am doing everything I can to keep pace.  I tell myself daily  “You can do better. Just jump into conversation with the other moms and dads at pick up time, and speak a little social Spanish.”

I am quiet at pick up time.  I listen and observe.  I am learning.  I am in the silent phase of acquiring language.

Stage 1: Listening.

If you enter Mia’s immersion classroom, the vehicle driving instruction is LANGUAGE.  No, not conjugating verbs or memorizing prepared meaningless dialogue.  Rather, one would see children using Spanish by speaking, reading, writing, adding, discussing fractions, measurement, conducting science experiments, arguing, singing, whispering – every bit in Spanish.

This of course is directed by the guidance of a teacher who follows the same curricula as the district’s English only classrooms, but she gives Mia a gift that I cannot – the mother tongue of Spanish with perfect delivery and high expectations.

We wanted this program for Mia, longed for it and cried when we did not get accepted during the first round of school of choice applications.  Mia is able to maintain English and absorb a second tongue while her brain is most receptive to learning language.  Her academic and social gains, across cultural, ethnic and linguistic boundaries are some of the most positive public education experiences I have been a part of in 20 years of teaching.

It is also the hardest and most challenging endeavor for me.

For Writer Dad and Mia, speaking Spanish is like taking a breath of fresh air.  They skip rope with Spanish like we all skip rope with English.  For me, speaking Spanish is like white knuckling the edge of the North rim of the Grand Canyon before dropping into the deep depths of the wild unknown.

This is a recent homework assignment which Mia attacked with enthusiastic speed, proficiently giving it her all, and finishing with the pride and detail that is our family’s trademark.

Estimados Padres,

Por favor ayuden a su hijo/a a escribir un parafo con 5 o mas oraciones acerca de las jirafas.  Adentro de su folder encontraran intomacion importante acercad de las jirafas que aprendimos en clase.  Nota:  Esta tarea los va preparar para el ecamen de escritura del Miercoles.

Gracias,

Senora Alaniz

Translation:

Dear Parents,
Please have your child write a paragraph with 5 or more sentences about giraffes.  Inside his/her homework folder you will find some important facts they have learned about giraffes.  Note:  This homework will prepare them for their writing test on Wednesday.

The light at the end of the tunnel was a note Mia had written to me after our last homework session.  I found it written on red paper (my favorite color) and in her best first grade penmanship rolled up like a scroll tied in white ribbon.  It said: 

Dear Mommy,  You are the best Mom.  You try so hard and you are smart.  Don’t give up, keep on trying because you are the best.  I love you so so so sooooooo much. Thank you for helping me. xoxo Mia

If wouldn’t make you weep I don’t know what would.  Her words of encouragement made me hold tighter and try harder this weekend when we had to plot out a weather pictograph and write a paragraph about it.  I want to be able to skip rope with Mia and Writer Dad in Spanish.  Max and I are ready, and guess what?

Max is also left handed.

I can add writing with my left hand to model for my son, so I can both feel and understand the difficulty of writing with my least dominant hand, then add it to my to do list under master Spanish.  It takes time, but that is the best gift I have to give my children.

Here is Mia’s exam on Giraffes.  She received a score of a “4″  which in Dual Immersion Land means advanced proficient.

Las Jirafas

Las jirafas son mamiferos.  Tienen crias cuidan a sus crias las crias toman leche de su mama y tambien tienen cuellos muy largos, manchas cafes, y colas muy largos.  Viven en la savana de Africa.  Comen hojas verdes de los arbols y palitos.  Algo de sus adapsienes son: manchas, cafes para camuflajearse, cuellos my largos para ver cuando sus en emigos van a atakar y duermen a dos horas por dia.  Jirafas son amigables.

Can you translate this without running to Google?

Cindy Platt is an educational consultant and home school expert.

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Language is Our Landscape

March 24, 2009 By 17 Comments

The original version of this post was written last October for Write to Done.

3355654120_e64957ece2Flowers feed the fire in our souls like little else, stirring several of our senses in a single swirling second. Language is the landscape, populating the white space of an otherwise empty page. Our ideas are the seeds we plant and our words are the blossoms in spring time.

I worked in a flower shop for a dozen years, back in the first few chapters of my adult autobiography. In those years, I arranged flowers one by one into the perfect bouquet; peeling petals, laying layers, and designing displays intended to halt the heartbeat of whoever happened to see them.

Now I’m a writer and so I do this with words.

I was young when I first nudged my heels into the shoes of head designer, eighteen as a matter of fact. Circumstance had set me there when everyone ahead of me fled in the middle of the night for some rather nefarious endeavors. I had no experience, but I was hungry, and had an innate belief in myself. Without training, I could only rotate my wrists according to instinct, slowly bringing every bloom into brighter focus. I ignored the rule book, following only intuition.

Within two years, wedding seasons were thriving.

Flower design is about color and texture, married in immaculate measure, not too different from writing great copy. Each of us sees the world through a different prism, the view prepared by our own million moments. Individual interpretation dictates design. Just as we all see color a little different, so do we hear the hues of language.

The way in which we string our syllables is our art to share, with no two thoughts the same. I am thankful I never sat for a class in flower design.  I would have spent countless hours in earnest study of all the things I should never ever do. Instead, I discovered there are no limits.

Again, I would argue that writing is no different.

Each of us has what it takes to be a better writer. It is already sleeping inside us, waiting for its salutation. For some, this means discarding the rules the gatekeepers have handed down and listening to the quiet whisper of our instinct. Only we know how we view the world, and it is us who best understand how to make our thoughts sing with all our soul.

I’ve been writing now for a year and a half, each day arranging my words with a better measure of color and precision.  Now I am a ghostwriter. Whether I am penning my next post or working on a novel, it is I who ties the bow around the bouquet.  Let’s close our eyes and forget what we think we know.

We do not think of the book of love when we whisper to our lover.

When we speak through our heart, as our fingers dance across the keyboard or glide across the page, then we can make every post as pretty as a bouquet, each word placed as perfect as a posy.

Writer Dad

Sean Platt is a Ghostwriter and creativity consultant who knows a thing or two about potty training help.

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Two X’s the First Grade

March 10, 2009 By 27 Comments

This Deja Tuesday post on dual immersion was originally written late last summer, before Mia entered first grade.

Speaking to my children in Spanish, like the morning cup of coffee or hot water beating on my back, is a small pleasure that polishes each of my days.

I exaggerate my accent and send my gestures sailing straight across the top of ridiculous.  My voice swells, especially when my tongue rolls along the outside of a double R, or when I’m delighting in the oral treasure of an Ñ.

Amid the million daddy do’s of any given day, it’s brilliant fun to steal a moment and step inside the skin of a character that isn’t quite me as though I’m dressing up for a kind of verbal Halloween.

I am not fluent in Spanish, in fact I struggle for every well constructed sentence.  This is part of the reason for my inflated accent.  I treat Spanish exactly like singing: since I cannot do it well, I make sure to do it loud.

I long for the authority of a second tongue.  Spanish is my first new language, but I plan to follow it with something more eclectic, I’m considering Klingon.  I never learned Spanish as a child, despite my Honey and Papí both being born in Mexico, and raising their daughter with fluency. As an adult, I struggle to absorb new vocabulary into a mind already littered with everything from next week’s list, to every thread from the last five seasons of Lost.

I want my children to have what I did not. As some Writer Dad readers already know, Mia attends a Dual Immersion program. 90% of her school day is in Spanish. Yes, I love my daughter, and no, this isn’t cruel.

“Why don’t you just drop her off in Tijuana?” That’s what one of my best friends said when I first told him (quite excitedly) that we wanted to place Mia in this particular program.  This beautiful philosophy, not everyone understands. Music and language are highly beneficial to the development of the mathematical mind.  The internet is an awfully big place, filled with towering terabytes of text, but you’d have to comb it all day to find a half pile of research that disagrees with this elemental truth.

But Writer Dad, how will I know when my child is ready for music, or a second language?

Because you will look down and see their ears. Children are sponges, and we should not ever underestimate them, because they will absorb all that we ask. Delivery is important, of course, which is why we would never throw her into a school in Tijuana. That would be immersion, not dual immersion.

What makes dual immersion successful is the consistent practice of full body response.  This means that the teacher employs language, in addition to gestures, when teaching their class. This was wonderfully illustrated one day at the dinner table, sometime toward the end of Mia’s first month of Kindergarten. “Is it hard sometimes,” I asked. “Not knowing what Sra. is saying,”

“Only if I’m not paying attention,” she said, barely lifting her head.

Exactly.

How is this different from life?  How much do we miss, simply because we’re not paying attention? Being in the Dual Immersion program has not only taught our daughter the basics of another language, it’s taught her some of the fundamentals of a fulfilling life. If you really want to learn, you have to pay attention.

Our last summer was wonderful.  I helped Mia with her Spanish and she helped me with mine. I had a bit more vocabulary than she, but Mia strings what she has together as beautifully as if she were born in Barcelona (Gracias Señora Mochila).

The two of us exchanged words all day long in a room full of toddlers without anyone wise to what we were saying. It was like we had our own secret code. Of course, we were also using our bodies as we spoke, so if the toddlers were paying attention, eventually they’ll get it too.

Writer Dad

Sean Platt is a ghostwriter, creative blogger, and occasional potty training expert.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bahma!

March 4, 2009 By 34 Comments

“Language is the dress of thought.”

~Samuel Johnson

mail-1Max has never been willing to miss out on the swirling world that fills his eyes. This was never more evident than when he was a two year old toddler, teetering at the lip of fully developed speech. His sister, two years his senior and never without a mouthful of verbiage, would spit sentences with supersonic speed as Max just sat for seconds at at time, eyes wide and mouth open, like a sixteen year old gathering the courage to merge onto the freeway.

And thus, “bahma” was born. The language of children is fascinating.

Anyone my age, give or take a calendar or two, surely remembers the Smurfs. Probably with affection. Though it was fun to watch those little azure mushroom dwellers constantly dodging the danger of Gargamel, it was far more interesting (for me at least) to see the games they played with language.

The word “smurf” –  never before had I seen a single syllable twisted in so many directions. Noun, verb, adjective; homophone, synonym, onomatopoeia. The Smurfs was a show that had a horde of tiny blue men in white pants (alongside one lonely blond created by their arch nemesis) who lived inside magic mushrooms and spent their days gathering smurf berries. Oh, and if you caught seven of them (if memory serves) you could boil them into a bubbling pot of gold.

Weird, sure, but not nearly as cool as the fact that on the Smurfs, this was perfectly acceptable: “Hey Smurfette, would you be a smurf, and fetch me a smurf so I can smurf. I’m feeling smurfed and If I get a smurf, I might be able to smurf a little smurf.” To add a multiple on top of the crazy, the second smurf would casually answer with, “smurf thing, I’ll smurf the smurf in a smurf.”

WHAT?!?

Two and a half decades later, I’m still trying to decide if those writers were the laziest batch of thinkers to ever fritter 22 minutes or whether they held genius unparalleled. My sister and I used to whittle minutes trying to convince one another we had the language totally figured out.

Max would have loved the Smurfs. He used bahma in exactly the same way. This was in the days just before our preschool got started. Daisy and I were tutoring a large passel of fifth graders in our house after school each day, plus he lived in a house with both Mia and myself (both of us who know quiet only as concept), but there was nothing that was going to slow this kid down.

Max was determined, and viewed the constant rattle of language as an open invitation. We had thousands of cards in our deck and Max but a scant few hundred, yet amazingly, our boy treated this handicap as only a hiccup.

“Daddy,” he would ask as a smile made an oval of  his round face, “Why is that bahma always sitting next to the bahma?” Max was able to measure tone against environment to eliminate any question of intention, allowing me to answer without so much as a skipped beat.

“Because Daddy forgot to throw it away,” I would have to admit.

Bahma became a catch-all word, even capable of modifying others. I’ll never forget the day we sat outside as Max gazed into the sky at the whirring blades of a news chopper. “HELLA-DA-BOMBA” he breathed, pointing in wonder.

Leaves fell, bahmas receded, and by Christmas dinner they had been all but abandoned to memory. Still, rarely does a week pass without my mind wandering back to bahma, causing a smile to lengthen my own face.

Bahma!, I think with a mind suddenly thick with melancholic laughter.

Writer Dad

Special thanks to David Wright whose post yesterday about the language of his toddler was all the prompt I needed today.

Filed Under: Fatherhood Tagged With: , , ,

Conversation That Pays Dividends

November 5, 2008 By 87 Comments

“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

What makes my six year old daughter Mia so amazing to speak with is that she is, and always has been completely unafraid to ask questions.  I get the gift of gab from my mother, and passed it to my children.  Daisy and I have added plenty of food and water to this quickly flowering seed.

We both believe that it is important to speak with our children as though they understand, with unforgiving vocabulary, well ahead of any expectation of a reasonable response.  Eventually they will reciprocate, and those defining moments leading to that inevitable verbal eruption are each and every one majestic.

The fact that Mia is so undaunted when it comes to asking questions, means I’m able to lower my filter when I open my mouth.  I’m confident that if something flies over her head, there’s a near certainty that she’ll throw her arms to the sky and try to catch it.  Of course I keep the grown-up talk in the cupboard with a white, plastic child safety lock latched across the top, but I’ve never hedged on the vocabulary.  This strategy has paid in dividends far more handsome than any mutual fund I’ve ever contributed to.

Mia’s language was good when she was two, great when she was three, and amazing now at six.  I understand that comparing my daughter’s articulation to compound interest might seem a little off, but really it’s quite apt.  At first, contributions are high while the returns remain low.  Sooner or later, the interest earned starts to exceed the initial investment.

As is true with most successful ventures, we must start early to finish strong.

I am in awe of the connections that Mia is constantly making, and the verbal balls we are now bouncing back and forth.  Even more amazing is that she’s able to weave new experience into the countless little details that she has absorbed over the long years of her short life.  Mia will often reference things from her distant past, tying tidbits from long gone lessons to newly discovered details.

Knowing that Mia is storing everything inside that amazing little brain makes me far more mindful when it comes to our four year old Max.  Our first born is the child who teaches us to parent, the second is equalized by all the lessons we learned by paying attention.

With Max, I have learned that everything matters.

We only get one life, and in that life a single childhood made from a million moments, most of which fall neatly under our jurisdiction.  If there was one thing I could say to each and every parent, it is this:

Our children get it, and we should never do them, or ourselves, the disservice of underestimation.  There are no do overs.

Writer Dad

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Scads of Ads? Not Here.

October 7, 2008 By 83 Comments

This is part II of a four part series. Click here for part one.

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.

~Will Rogers

We canceled cable two years back; in our house, it’s DVD’s or downloads.  We rarely listen to radio; too much trash cluttering the silence between notes.  In our car, it’s CD’s or conversation.

Our children are exposed to advertising, of course.  They are not deaf or blind, and we do occasionally leave the house.  But their exposure is remarkably thin, especially considering the times we live.

I can’t weave the worldwide web without constant commercial assault; my eyes spammed at every other click.

I’d like for Writer Dad to offer asylum.

Allow me to state clearly before I proceed:

I’ve no issue with advertisers or advertising on blogs.  Bloggers have every right to mine as many dollars as they can from the countless hours they pour into their online enterprise.  If I had no product of my own, I would sell ad space, and I’m positive that I’ll have sites in the future which will harbor ads.

For now, here, I would prefer to design something different.

Our world is littered with advertising.  Online, it’s worse.  It’s embarrassing, we all know it.  I shudder to think what our more civilized progeny, several hundred years from tomorrow, might think as they comb through these, our present histories.

On Writer Dad, I’ll have my own words to shill.  I needn’t subject a loyal audience to supplemental promotion.

However, I am moving toward writing full time, and must leverage Writer Dad in a way that will generate income.

A few methods:

  • I’ll use Writer Dad to further spread my voice, and promote my services.  This is paramount to my future as a writer, whether I freelance or publish.  At Writer Dad I can meet new people and potential partners.  Fellow writers, artists, editors, agents, publishers, etc..  I adore the knights already around the table, and there’s plenty room for more.
  • I plan to peddle a lot of my language; WeeBooks and otherwise.  We’ll discuss this one in more depth mañana, but I don’t see why writers must always maintain middle men between themselves and their patrons.  Why sell a short story to a magazine, who will fill their magazines with ads, if I have the means to deliver directly to an audience, should they be inclined to download.  Sometimes, dissemination should be as simple as a handshake.
  • I’d love to keep our white space free from ads.  If this objective grows unreasonable, and I do add paid color to the sidebar, it will fly in only two varieties: affiliate products from people I believe in, or ads for services which relate directly to the plurality of the Writer Dad audience.  These will have long term placement, so our space doesn’t mutate with every refresh.

Without ads, audience participation is crucial.  Even without purchase, readers are patrons.  Links and comments are two ways to help without a wallet.  Reader creativity, I’m sure will help breed others.

This is our blog, and it will be exactly as excellent as we make it.

Writer Dad

If you enjoyed my words, please subscribe (for free) by RSS or Email.  If you’re a Stumbler, please consider Stumbling.  Thanks.

The uber observant of you may have noticed my new header and RSS splash, along with my groovy Stumble and Twitter buttons in the Sidebar.  These were the splendid work of Eric Hamm at “Motivate Thyself.”  How awesome is Eric?  He did it for me just to be a nice guy.  He was probably still glowing from the guest post he got from Leo at Zen Habits.  Congratulations, Eric.

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I Heart Movies

September 3, 2008 By 86 Comments

“Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.”

~Walt Disney

 

I love the movies.

Great films are best, but I’ll settle for good.  I’m even willing to watch bad, once… or twice.

My childhood was full of great cinema from a range of sources.  Saturdays were spent at my Grandparent’s, where my sister and I would camp on the carpet in front of an old wooden TV. It was the same size as a 42″ High Def set I would drool over now, except square instead of rectangle, and thick instead of thin.  

And no High Definition, but rather, limbo stick low resolution.  

But it was TV, and I was a kid.

Every weekend, an old film played on channel five.  The same one, four times.  This is where I learned to first tolerate, and then love, black and white.

In between the awesomeness of the Love Boat and the hysterical cool of Fantasy Island, I’d watch something like, “King Kong,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or “Some Like it Hot.”

Weekends were made for movies, and a festival started on Saturday, often resumed the next day.  

A family tradition, second only to Sunday breakfast, was a trip to the theater to fill the final afternoon of our weekend.  

The experience ripened alongside our years.  As our literature aged, so did our cinema.

I remember the first R rated movie we saw:

Rain Man.  

I loved it because it told me a story in a way I’d never seen.

At least not on the big screen.

At home, we had a library, stocked with a wealth of R rated features.  These red stamped flix were supposed to be off limits.  Fortunately, my mom and dad were different, each with their own opinion about what best to withhold from a budding mind.

My father believed it important to shield us from coarse language and violence (though this did not slow words that rhyme with truck and sit from frequently fleeing his lips).  

But my mom’s objections could be summed up in a single word.

Nipples.

Not nudity mind you.  Just nipples… and the short and curlies, at least if they sprung from a lady.

The swollen underside of a breast, fine.  The lazy S of a damsel’s backside, sure.  Full frontal nudity from someone with a hairy chest and dangling participles, not a problem.

Nipples?

No way.

Now here’s a test:

At age thirteen, would my mom have preferred her son to see…

A movie where a guy gets a grenade shoved in his mouth, as he’s kicked off a cliff.  He rolls down said cliff, releasing a chain of curse words which link every oath with four letters to the few that involve immediate family.  As he exhales his final syllable, he is blown to a billion bits scattered in the bed of the basin.

OR

Franco Zeffirelli’s, “Romeo and Juliet,” which displays precisely two nipples for exactly two seconds.

High five if you picked the one that might warp me.

Like any kid worth their childhood, my sister and I were able to wade the waters of our parent’s particulars.  

We saw pretty much everything.  

By the time I could drive, I was ready for flix from art house to multiplex, which probably explains my love for Tarantino.  

Who are we but the product of an infinity of finely sliced seconds, where each one matters, at least to some degree. 

What we feed our brain is important. 

Was I feeding mine well?  How do you feed yours?

Writer Dad

If you enjoyed my words, please subscribe.  I’ll be back again tomorrow.

If you liked that post, you’ll love, “A Billion Pixels and None of Them Wasted,” “Batman Left My Wife Lying Crumpled on the Floor,” or “An Old Dream Come True.”

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Just Pay Attention

August 20, 2008 By 92 Comments

If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual.  If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual.  If you can speak only one language you’re an American.

~Author Unknown

Speaking to my children in Spanish, like the morning cup of coffee or hot water beating on my back, is a small pleasure that polishes each one of my days.  

I exaggerate my accent and send my gestures sailing over the top of ridiculous.  My voice swells, especially when my tongue rolls along the outside of a double R, or when I’m delighting in the oral treasure of an Ñ.  

Amid the million must do’s of any given day, it’s brilliant fun to steal a moment and step inside the skin of a character that isn’t quite me.  

Like I’m dressing up for a kind of verbal Halloween.  

I am not fluent.  In fact, I struggle for every well constructed sentence.  This is part of the reason for my inflated accent.  I treat Spanish exactly like singing.

I cannot do it well, so I make sure I do it loud.

I long for the authority of a second tongue.  Spanish is my first new language, but I plan to follow it with something more eclectic… Klingon perhaps.  

I never learned Spanish as a child, despite my Honey and Papí both being born in Mexico, and raising their daughter with fluency.  As an adult, I struggle to absorb new vocabulary into a mind already littered with everything from next week’s list, to every thread from the last four seasons of Lost.  

I want my children to have what I did not.

As some Writer Dad readers already know, Mia attends a Dual Immersion program. 90% of her school day is in Spanish.  

Yes, I love my daughter, and no, this isn’t cruel.  

“Why don’t you just drop her off in Tijuana?”

That’s what one of my best friends said when I first told him (quite excitedly) that we wanted to place Mia in this particular program.  This beautiful philosophy, not everyone understands.

Music and language are highly beneficial to the development of the mathematical mind.  The internet is an awfully big place, filled with towering terabytes of text, but you’d have to comb it all day to find a half pile of research that disagrees with this elemental truth.

But Writer Dad, how will I know when my child is ready for music, or a second language?

Because you will look down and see their ears.

Children are sponges, and we should not ever underestimate them, because they will absorb what we ask.  Delivery is important, of course, which is why we would never throw her into a school in Tijuana.  

That would be immersion, not dual immersion.  

What makes dual immersion successful is the consistent practice of full body response.  This means that the teacher employs language, in addition to gestures, when teaching their class.  

This was wonderfully illustrated one day at the dinner table, sometime toward the end of Mia’s first month of Kindergarten.  

“Is it hard sometimes,” I asked. “Not knowing what Sra. is saying,”  

“Only if I’m not paying attention,” she said, barely looking up.  

Exactly.  

How is this different from life?  How much do we miss, simply because we’re not paying attention?  

Being in the Dual Immersion program has not only taught our daughter the basics of another language, it’s taught her some of the fundamentals of a fulfilling life.  

If you really want to learn, you have to pay attention.  

This summer has been wonderful.  I help Mia with her Spanish, she helps me with mine.  I have more vocabulary than she, but Mia strings what she has together as beautifully as if she were born in Barcelona (Gracias Señora Mochila).  

The two of us exchange words in a room full of toddlers, without anyone wise to what we’re saying.  

It’s like we have our own secret code.  Of course, we’re using our bodies as we speak, so if the toddlers are paying attention, eventually they’ll get it too.

Writer Dad

If you enjoyed my words, please subscribe.  I promise I’ll be back tomorrow.

If you click here, you can read Writer Dad’s thank you to Señora.

Filed Under: Fatherhood Tagged With: , , , ,

Her Face at Odds

July 9, 2008 By 3 Comments

In six and a half years, I don’t think our Mia’s ever lived through a week with such an obvious paradox etched across her face.  Those last few days of school were hard on her. 

And the two sides of her heart were having quite the skirmish.  

With the end of the school year just a few hot lunches away, Mia didn’t know whether she should be feeling sad, happy, or a healthy percentage of each. 

The resulting confusion bled across her face like one of her watercolors left too long on the porch.

Haven’t we all been there before; probably more times than we care to count (or admit)?

Mia’s excited about spending Summer at home (no schlepping in the car and racing across town before her breakfast is even digested), and she’s looking forward to a quality of downtime that she hasn’t really had in any significant measure for the past nine months, but Mia also knows that it’s going to be ten weeks before she sees any of her friends again, and that next September, when we pull up to the school with a fresh backpack and fresh expectations, her Señora will be Maestra to another class.

Mia’s first teacher was tremendous; everything Daisy and I had hoped for.  She loved our daughter, and, even better, she checked her in all the ways that our little girl needs to be checked.  Like any great mother, Señora gave Mia a generous amount of rope, but also knew when it was time to pull it tight.  

She encouraged Mia’s assets, discouraged her deficiencies, and stretched her mental rubber band (sometimes to the snapping point).  She spoke to her with a strong voice and direct language, inspiring her to try countless new things and admirably succeed at many of them.  

Mia will miss her terribly, and so will we.  

But it was good to see her work through such conflicting emotions and arrive on solid ground.  The summer’s going swimmingly so far.  She misses her teacher, but she’s using her feelings to make herself a better writer.  

What more could a writer dad, or a writer mom for that matter, ever ask?

Writer Dad

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