And the answer is...pencil!

I have work up past my nose and am leaving for the USA in three days, so I have no hope of completing everything before I go. Rather than fighting my way through the mountain, I find myself writing this blog instead. It’s not that I’m procrastinating; my wife can attest, unhappily, to the amount of time I’ve spent in front of my computer juggling all of the different responsibilities I’ve signed myself up for. Rather, something so compelling has come along that I feel the need to get it down into writing before it’s gone.

And it has everything to do with a pencil.

My son, now five, joins a Saturday class I have at my English school, Noah Learning Center, with three other students, all around his age, and from this morning I graduated them from the 1 to 20 Thomas the Tank Engine cards they’ve been studying with to plain, printed 1 to 50 numbered cards. One of the games we play is an up/down guessing game because it gives them a lot of practice saying the numbers and gets them in the habit of thinking about the numbers relative to one another. The idea is that they learn that if the number they’re guessing is larger than 32, then there isn’t a need to say three, because that’s already eliminated from the set.

What I haven’t learned to anticipate, however, is my son, who appears to have inherited the same infuriating tendency for sideways thinking that I’ve learned to generally not share in public. Not because it’s wrong; sideways thinking tends to be very efficient at arriving at conclusions that otherwise would have taken much longer and much more effort to come up with, but because it’s the kind of thinking that’s almost guaranteed to ensure you fail a Rorschach test, and if you fail one of those, you have the unsettling possibility of institutionalization. As much as I enjoyed watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I don’t want to live it.

And so one student had the number 33, and we got to, “32, up!” And what does my son say in response? “Pencil!”

In the true spirit of a five year-old, once he got the laugh, he wouldn’t let it go, and to him the only better thing than not playing by the rules himself was enticing other students to ignore the rules.

Thankfully the game was nearly finished, so it was quick enough to wrap up. Now I’m debating if I should find another game to help them practice their numbers before our next lesson.