First Day of September

Elena is one of my favorite teachers.  I watch her intently and listen to the absolute, unvarnished truth of her words.

Were we all that honest when we were three? Or did something in scary school (or school of life) teach us how to pad and finesse the truth?  School socializes us, teaches the norms of what to say and what not to say-. Maybe Elena senses that things are about to change in a big way as she looks back nostalgically to babyhood.

I noticed in the text I shared earlier that Elena said, "I wish I were..."  She's spot on with her English grammar. and presumably also her Spanish.

But when she said, "I'm brave to snakes, not school," she used a surprising preposition--as we don't follow "brave" with "to."

I loved it!  It made me think of all the things we have to be brave TO, to stand up to, to blunder through with  courage.

If an adult says something Elena doesn't like, she looks at that adult in the eyes and says so, no holding back.

For example: last week, Mike told her cousin Preston he was a good boy.  She looked directly at Mike and said, "Mike, don't make fun of Preston!" (He wasn't making fun of him at all, but she obviously objected to his words for some reason and told him so.)  I admired her spunk.

My "school" this week is watching camera tutorials, compliments of the nice people at YouTube.  As my read-along text, I'm reading the Book for Dummies.  Technology has advanced so much since my earlier version of this camera that I feel like I'm in preschool.  School is scary--just as Elena said.

My teacher on You Tube is a frenetic, bushy-haired photographer.  He hops about the room, squatting, changing his aperture, doing stuff with the touch screen, raising and lowering his ISO, and switching settings for different effects.  I admire his confidence with the camera, but I have to keep stopping and writing down what he says before he's on to the next thing.   I'm as intimidated by this new school as Elena is intimidated by the prospects of meeting a bunch of scary three year olds on Monday.