Kenders' Musings

My son is five years old, and a bit ahead of the pack for his age. This is not by accident. Mostly I have been a stay at home dad since he was born. Since we live in a somewhat rural area and he has no siblings his interaction with other children was sparse when he was younger. I worked with him alot between birth and two and a half years of age. But still he was deprived in the sense that he rarely had other kids his age to play with, and that bothered me and I knew something had to be done.

At the age of two and a half we enrolled him in a Montesorri school. I won't explain it here, you can look it up. My wife and I did our research and found the Montesorri system to be to our liking. He got to work at his own pace and interact with other kids and they also stressed such mundane skills as cleaning up after yourself and helping to keep the classroom clean as well. (those little brooms and dustpans are so cute)

His school has decided to test the kids using a test equivalent to the state test. His school, being quasi-private, (they have a government sponsored program for poor kids) isn't allowed, for some reason, to use the state test and have the results tallied against the state scores.

One problem that kids from montesorri schools have when they enter public school is a complete lack of test taking abilities. So to say that this week preparing for the tests ahs been interesting is a major understatement. These are kids that are used to raising their hand and saying what the answer is when they know it, rarely waiting to be called on to answer.

See? The teacher, in preparing the kids for this test, is reading the problem out loud, so the last three days has been a task to get the children to keep the answer to themselves. The first day of this showed little progress, after all, it is habit to these kids to call out the answer. There are 12 kids in my sons kindergarten class and he is one of those that is being tested across the board, no holds barred, on the first grade level. (they have no state kindergarten test)

It seems that my son, along with a couple of the other advanced kids figured out early tuesday that the kids that weren't getting the answers were waiting on those that did to call it out and then writing down the correct answer. In short, these other kids were, technically, cheating.

The advanced kids in the class, one of which is my son, apparently have come up with a plan to stop the other kids from cheating. I was informed this evening at the PTO meeting, (I am president by force of this group), by the administrator of the school no less, a shorter version of the story you have just read, along with this astounding bit.

My son and his advance cohorts have taken to writing the correct answer and calling out an incorrect answer, all the while smiling at each other while the other kids quickly scribble in the correct bubble on the practice sheet.

The administrators eyewitness account of this tale from today almost brought a tear to my eye because I was that proud of my son for peacefully stopping other kids from cheating off of him.

The following is her tale of what happened while she was watching the test prep go on today:

TEACHER: Ok kids, fill in the blank in this sentence: "The 'blank' flew".
kids filling in bubbles on practice sheets
MY SON: (after filling in the bubble for "bird").....PURPLE!!!

The Purple Flew!!!!