A few weeks ago my daughter came home from school with a worksheet that contained basic shapes such as a circle, rectangle, square and other shapes that were age appropriate for Year 1's. I noticed that according to the worksheet, my daughter's answers, and her teacher's marking, that she'd been unable to recognise a triangle as well as some of the other shapes that I would've thought 'easy'.
I know that my daughter knows what a triangle is - I've seen her, firsthand, identify one on more than one occasion. Which is what made me, over the next few days, conduct my own mini test of her knowledge of shapes that I thought a six year old should know. During the course of our everyday, I asked her to identify triangles, circles, squares, rectangles, hexagons, pentagons, octagons (these only at stop signs) and she was able to tell me, correctly, what most of these were - I don't think she'd been introduced to hexagons or pentagons, and if she had, she was often confused between the number of sides, and which was which. (I'm not even sure which primitive shapes a student in Year 1 should be benchmarked by.)
My wife and I got to talking about this - that she had been unable, or chosen not to, identify the shapes at school, but had no problem identifying them at home in casual conversation. We batted around our theories and hypotheses about why this might be the case and how we could help her to do better at school. We worried that maybe she actually couldn't recognise the shapes and that she was falling behind (completely unfounded parental worry), which was the cause of the casual testing I mentioned in the previous paragraph. This topic continued to crop up in conversation over the next few days, and after contemplating it, I had an epiphany.
Before I get to that, however, let me stipulate that I believe in education. I think it's important and that all children should have the ability to attend a safe nurturing school where they can learn to read and write, and develop social skills that are important for adult life. I do also recognise that the school system can be very pedantic, expecting that students learn information that is sometimes useless and irrelevant - that in a lot of cases an academic education does not necessarily prepare people for life. That life is something like a crucible and it's not until a fire is lit under it and the heat starts to permeate the foundations of what you thought was solid that you really begin to learn.
So, with that in mind, my epiphany:
Life will be marking my daughter way more harshly than her teachers ever will.
If you've been following my other posts, you'll know that my son has a rare genetic condition called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), that this condition causes his muscles to weaken over time. That it will put him in a wheelchair within the next two years, that there is currently no cure and the condition has an 100% mortality rate.
So while her teachers will be marking her on whether or not she can tell the difference between a circle or a square, life will be marking her on how she copes when her older brother stops walking and when he needs a ventilator to help him breathe at night.
To be honest, I don't care if she can't tell the difference between two shapes, or can't spell certain words, yet. She been dealt a pretty raw hand and she's coping with a lot more than most people her age. Life isn't going to grade her against benchmarks or take into account what happened to her before she arrived. It's going to be harsh and the reality is she's learning lessons that can't be taught in school. She's learning heartache and sadness, but she's also learning empathy and how to genuinely care.
She's strong-willed and determined, and she's a battler. Despite what that shapes worksheet indicated, I'm proud of her. She's resilient and tenacious. When life pushes, she pushes back. I can't understand the sorrow that she's going to experience over the coming years but I know that when we look back, that worksheet is going to be insignificant. I think school will always take second place for her because she has something so much bigger going on. And that's okay as long as she always tries her best.
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