…where jack sometimes does stuff, but mostly not

I know we like to go on about how awesome Daphne is and I know that it is smug and self-congratulatory. It’s annoying.

But.

Daphne just ranted angrily for five minutes about how her kindergarten class is too easy and how it makes her frustrated. She said her teacher spends all the time teaching kids how to read “high-frequency words” like “I, can, see, my, and, to, go”. Right this minute Daphne is pleasure reading, a 3rd or 4th grade chapter book with no pictures, while she eats her ice cream.

What the hell are we supposed to do about this? Serious question. As one of Holly’s fellow teachers pointed out, she is going to learn no matter what happens in Kindergarten; she learns more poking around by herself that she is likely to get from her classroom experiences. But that doesn’t mean her needs are being met.

One of the classic problems affecting kids who are early readers and the like is that bad habits are learned in the early grades (kids learn that they do not have to try hard to succeed, because everything is so easy for them) and those habits come back to bite them in the ass later on. At some point they get to a grade level at which they can’t skate by, where they actually have to study, and they can’t cope.

I don’t just mean that they have learned to be lazy — that’s part of it — but that getting near-perfect results with little or no effort bakes a poisonous attitude deep into kids’ psyches. A requirement to put real effort forth to accomplish something actually feels like abject failure. This turns into a sort of underachiever syndrome that can be very hard to overcome.

I think we’re ahead of the game in that we are aware of this danger at all, and in fact we are trying to do some things about it (e.g. finding things that challenge her and then making her keep doing them) but the thought of Daphne spending 6 hours being bored and annoyed in Kindergarten still freaks me out.

I think that I’ve twiddled the right bits to make the Christmas songs I’ve posted in years past show up in the embedded MP3 player that should be showing in the bottom-left corner of this page. So, try that. Unless you’re seeing this in a feed reader, in which case this has been a waste of your time.

an old playlist

I hate it. Hate hate hate. It has stolen my brain and I want it back.

I wish for Vishnu arms so I can hear no evil and see no evil at the same time.

My poor brain is tired of trying to absorb all the stories about all the crazy junk that whatsername did up in Alaska. Is someone making a list with the help of a suitable computerized digital electronic list-making device of some kind, I hope?

I’m pretty sure I heard that her husband was a member of a secessionist political party until 2002 and that she spoke at that party’s convention and that she’s under investigation for using her office to try to get her sister’s ex fired and that she tried to fire a librarian for insufficiently supporting her idea to ban library books and that she fired the sheriff for supporting her opponent in the election and then lied about it to a reporter and that she cut programs to educate teenage mothers and that she’s for abstinence-only sex education and that she invited international scrutiny of her teen daughter’s sexual behavior and that she thinks she should be able to use the power of government to make other women’s reproductive decisions for them and that she asked her church to pray for a deal to build an oil pipeline and that she lied about opposing the bridge to nowhere and that she hired a lobbyist to acquire $27 million in federal earmarks for her town of 10,000 people and that she goes on about Alaska’s ability to be “self sufficient” and that she nonetheless left that town of 10,000 with $20 million in long-term debt and that she lied about visiting Ireland and that her pastor said Kerry voters and Bush critics would be damned to hell and oh crap, who can keep track?

She’s pro-life enough to satisfy your basic Dobsons and Robertsons and so on, though, so I predict she’ll go far. Plus she’s all mavericky and stuff, just like John McCain!

I really need to stop paying attention to this crap before I give myself a migraine with all the forehead-slapping.