blah blah school blah blah weeping blah wailing and gnashing of teeth. you know, the usual.

Because I like to show my face at the kids' school on a regular basis to keep the staff on their toes, I volunteer in the boys' class once a week. They have the same teacher Miss A had for first grade, and I love him. He is funny and gentle with the kids' feelings, and doesn't make a big deal out of things that aren't a big deal. Like sloppy handwriting, for example. Sloppy handwriting is an epidemic in our household.

Today the kids were learning about place value, using little cubes and sticks to represent ones and tens. "How many cubes can I have in the ones column," asked Mr. K.

"TEN!" shouted one little girl. I agreed with her but that was the wrong answer. The answer is nine, because if you get to 10 you have to trade out your cubes for a stick. Whoops.

"The answer is nine," said Mr. K. "But that's all right, I love that you took a risk and gave an answer!" This kid with the wrong answer was beaming.

Later they worked on telling time. They played Around the World, which is a game I didn't know except to vaguely associate it with some kickball-related trauma from my youth. Two kids face off, and Mr. K holds up a clock and the first kid to say what time it is wins. Mr. K wanted me to lead the Around the World game but when I went into a gym-related flashback triggered stupor, he gave up trying to explain it to me. One thing I did catch, because it was antithetical to my kickball memories, was this gem:

"No one has to race. If they don't want to I just make them tell me the time, then go onto the next set of kids who want to race each other."

***

Miss A had a math worksheet for homework today. It was four division word problems, and they had to write number models. Miss A started wigging out because she says she doesn't "get" division and multiplication. She said she is even slower at it than the kids who aren't in the "gifted" pull-out group. The horror! Oh, how my flashbacks intensified!

As a 3rd grader, I was in the "gifted" pull-out group. Our group was placed in a 4th grade class for the year. Somehow everyone understood multiplication well enough that they didn't have to memorize times tables, except for me! And sometimes my friend Alicia, but I think she was playing dumb to make me feel better.

Every day at math time I got pulled out into the hall to work with an aide or spare teacher or someone on math. And every day I felt like the dumbest dumbass in the whole world, when really I was just struggling most out of the top 10-12 kids in the entire 3rd grade. My dad made me an elaborate set of flash cards, and we worked on them all the freaking time, and now I'm faster at simple multiplication and division than math-wizard Jason, because I've got them all memorized. And math almost had a happy ending for me, except for fractions in 4th grade and algebra in 8th grade and some sort of enriched college-credit calculus I took for a few weeks in high school, until I wised up.

Anyway, I told Miss A the abridged version of this story and assured her that it is okay to struggle the most, because school is about learning how to solve problems, and not about already knowing the answers.

I'll let you all drink that in a moment because I was so proud of myself for thinking of that at the right moment. Unfortunately it went unappreciated because Miss A has other problems, namely that in her class they also have to do oral math "races" and she sucks at them. Between not using paper, and everyone staring at her, and being under a time constraint, and competing against someone else, Miss A can never come up with an answer. Before I could assure her that I've never had to complete a math problem under such circumstances in my life, she said:

"I was praying so hard asking God if it could be an easy one..."

Ohhhh, I hate school. I hate that my kid, who is incredibly intelligent, is sweating her math class because she has to figure out the problem rather than having the answer memorized. I get that the games are supposed to make it fun -- and probably do for many kids -- but having the answers memorized isn't really what it's about, is it? It's handy and fast but it doesn't teach you to think.

By this time she was crying, and said that at another time the teacher asked the class a math question and everyone called out their answers. "I said my answer really loud but it was wrong and then everyone looked at me and people said, 'Why did you say that?'"

So I have my 99th percentile 3rd grader weeping because she keeps getting embarrassed in math class. But a few hours earlier I watched this little 1st grader give a wrong answer, and get praised for taking a risk. And she volunteered again, and she seemed happy and not at all embarrassed.

I pondered these things and realized I was looking at a comparison of two different education models: one of competition, and one of collaboration. Being in a creative field, collaboration, risk-taking, and problem-solving are much better skills to develop. Maybe in other fields being super-fast and competitive as an individual is more useful.

I like Miss A's teacher, based on the exactly three very brief interactions I've had with her. But Miss A's school experience is sucking and she's not the most stable person to begin with. I'm wishing she was spending more time working out math problems in whatever way works for her, and less time praying to God that she'll get easy questions.