Yesterday Max brought home some stories he's been working on in school. There are four. One is about tennis. One is about golf. One is about bowling. One is about baseball. (These are all games he's been playing on Wii.) The thing is... they are all the same story... he has just changed the sport... and within each sport story is the same scene repeated over and over with just one name changed.
They go something like this: The other day (insert classmate name) came over to my house. He/ she wanted to play (insert sport) with me. I said okay and set the game up. Then we played (insert sport) for a long time. It was really fun.
He wrote pages and pages and pages...
I was kind of dumbfounded. I wasn't sure whether to praise him or be slightly critical. So I did both. Then I laughed a little. What he had done was so indicative of how he operates.
I'm sure that, when the teacher was giving directions for the story writing, it was probably quite lengthy. Anything lengthy tends to bore him. So Max just listened for what he needed to do to get a good grade... he heard he needed to fill lots of pages up with words. Mission accomplished.
Not surprisingly, Dan has a similar 1st grade story. One day they were practicing how to make a little h. Tired and bored, but knowing he had to fill the entire page, he developed a strategy: long lines from the top of the page to the bottom... and then wavy curves going across. TADA. Mission accomplished. Lovely little h's in a matter of seconds.
I still wonder though... since we're just at the beginning of the long academic road... do I celebrate the clever approach... or condemn it?! Or both?!
No comments:
Post a Comment