Doing school

At dinner on Friday night, we had Theo and family with us, and we were all talking about kindergarten since Theo also just started (but at a different school). Dale said Jordan had been telling him a lot of things about water earlier that day and asked Jordan to remind him what he had been saying. Jordan sat up straight with his eyebrows raised, looked around the table attentively, and said, “Does anyone have a suggestion about where there is water? If you have an idea about the different places that we find water, please raise your hand.” Dale raised his hand. Jordan said, “I am waiting for someone else to raise their hand, and then I will choose who should talk.” Others raised their hands.

Jordan: “Mommy?”

Rachel: “In a lake!”

Jordan: “Very good. Daddy?”

Dale: “In a cloud!”

Jordan: “Yes! Nicole?”

Nicole: “In your body!”

Jordan: “Hmm, that’s not what I was thinking of. Does anyone have another idea?”

That last was said in such a teacherly voice that Andy (Theo’s dad) and I gaped at each other in amazement. The whole thing really knocked me out. Never mind what he does or does not know about water: this was the third day of kindergarten, and he had the teacher-student routine completely down. It made me think about how much of mastering school is really about mastering these forms of discourse. We judge children so strongly by whether they know how to “do school” – what kinds of answers are being prompted, what the possible evaluations of those answers are, what it means when the teacher says, “That’s not what I was thinking of.” (!!) Dale and I were both very good at that game as children, and it looks like Jordan will be too, and there are definitely many advantages to that. But it’s also kind of spooky. Part of my unease is that I think in many cases we mistake the discourse mastery for subject-matter knowledge – Jordan showed so much expertise in this dinner-table conversation, but you’d be mistaken if you thought it was all about water. Another part of my feeling troubled is that it’s such a constrained form of interaction... once they learn those rules for talking, do you ever again get to hear what they really think?