Cole, my darling adventure boy of irrepressible spirit, has struggled with all the new rules the first month of public school kindergarten brings: sit quietly. Some more. No, keep sitting. Also keep being quiet. Good. Keep it up! Only five more hours to go...
Coley is a high energy guy, and before his debut as a K at the district school he was in Montessori, where children are trusted to get up and choose their own work and move around so long as it does not disturb fellow students. This educational approach works well for Cole, though alas other parts of Montessori did not -- for example, there is a learning activity essential to mastering the first three years of Montessori called The Pink Tower. It's graduated wood blocks meant to be put together a certain way to teach pre-math foundational understanding of proportional spatial relations. Cole, on the other hand, really really liked to use The Pink Tower to build robots, not the appropriate educational edifice. Montessori, it turns out, offers freedom of a sort, but it's a highly specific and, to me anyway, surprisingly rigid sort of freedom. Once the other children saw him building robots, then they wanted to build robots too. This was viewed as disruptive: The Pink Tower Must Be Built As Intended. It was asked that Cole not return to Montessori for kindergarten.
So no surprise that within a week of school starting Cole's new teacher was asking for help with behavior modification, and so now we have a plan in place where he begins each day with 10 pennies and he loses one every time the teacher has to correct his behavior. At the end of the day I get an accounting of how many pennies, the number of which remaining relate to colors as on a traffic light, and if it's a "green" day (six or more pennies remaining) then Cole gets a small reward: ice cream, say, or he gets to be the one to pick out the family movie we watch on Friday nights. After his first week, a week of all green days, he earned the cumulative reward of going to the pet store and picking out a betta fish.
My little guy. He's really with the program right now, he loves accumulating the pennies and he's proud of his green days. And I recognize that he's learning important behaviors: how to co-operate in a group setting. Good citizenship, respect, consideration. And I recognize that his teacher is young and has 23 energetic children to shepherd through the day all on her own, and that once chaos breaks out in a classroom things just fall apart. Still I wish the message was a little more nuanced than, sit down and be quiet, good little boy. Here's your ice cream. I have always raised my boys to ask questions, to not just accept authority. That what they think is important too. I plan to raise the future leaders of the rebel forces, something that looks more and more each of these recent kinda scary days like a realistic job opening we might need filled quite urgently some time in the nearish future. I'm not at peace with this, but for the moment Cole is and that's what matters most. My money's on the charm wearing off, however, and a little rebellious behavior resurfacing.
But he sure loves his fish. The betta's name changes each day; he started out as Spike. Today he was Bluey.
