He's done it again.

Scott Adams is just brilliant. Today's Dilbert is again, so timely for me.

How apropos

Some of you may know that I'm knee deep in this global warming project at the paper.

So, today's Dilbert seemed incredibly timely to me.

More lessons learned

Playtime today offered a few new glimpses of what Kindergarten life is like.

Or least an earful of what the teacher says during the day. It's funny how he likes to regurgitate what he's heard.

First, there was the description of the "Don't Bug Me" hat that the teacher wears. The kids are assigned to their various centers and can only disturb the teacher for one of three reasons: "Blood, broken bones or vomit." Yes, that's an exact quote.

Then, there was my son's latest jumping game, where he likes to jump and see how far he can jump and if I can catch him. He usually does this from a slightly elevated position, such as from the couch or from the lower ledge of the fireplace.
After the first jump, he told me: "Now, we'll do something different so that you don't get bored."

Finally, at storytime, my boy brought out his little crew of stuffed animals and had them neatly arranged on the bed in front of the book of the night.
"Now, everyone, please sit down nicely and pay attention."

Observations

My boy has begun to discover how illogical this world can be.

Here's one comment my Kindergartener made during a recent drive:

"Mommy, why is everybody confused about Christmas? It's not Christmas yet. It's just Halloween!"

The guessing game

I loved my son's preschool for many reasons, but one of the main reasons was that they emphasized phonics for early reading. It's a system that works well, I believe, giving a child a solid basis for deciphering words that he or she doesn't know.

It was tricky as a parent. We didn't learn the ABC song right away. A was "ah" as in apple (short vowel sounds first). B was "buh". And so on. I flubbed the system a few times before I got all the basic letter sounds down. By the time my son was 4, I had a solid knowledge of the letter sounds and so did he. At his pre-K graduation, my son was already able to read sentences constructed primarily on these basic sounds with a few "memorized" words. He could read a worksheet that asked: "Is the cat on the bed?" and he could look at the illustration and answer the question.

In Kindergarten, this put him clearly ahead of the reading curve and we've been working hard to make sure that he progresses from his level, even as his classmates catch up.

However, I feel uneasy about the reading skills that public school is training in him. They want him to progress by simply guessing words.

His homework sheets and homework books feature many words that don't follow the basic letter sounds. Of course, in English, he will have to learn these other sounds eventually, given the vast variety of sounds and odd spelling combinations created from those 26 letters. But seeing how well he advanced with the early phonics, I'm not sure if I want him trained to guess.

For example, a drawing will show a girl climbing a tree. The sentence will read: "The girl is climbing." 'The' is one of those basic words that even phonics teachers have the kids memorize. 'Girl' uses all the basic letter sounds, so he could decipher it, regardless of whether he saw a picture of a girl or not. 'Is' also uses basic sounds, which helped him to read it the first time he saw it, though at this point, I think it's also a memorized word.

But 'climbing'? My boy is not ready for the concept of silent letters. But he can use his phonics skills and then guess the rest. The word begins with "cuh" like cat and L. The girl is obviously climbing. So he guesses that must be the word.

After 5 homework books of this, he has well mastered the skill of guessing. He doesn't flub these more complex words. He can just infer what the word is by the picture.

But say there isn't a picture and he sees the word "climbing"? Has he really learned to read the word? I think not.

We had an issue with one of the pages when his guess, though logical, was wrong. The picture featured a slew of crayons drawing colored lines on a page. The sentence read: "I can see crayons." But he thought it read: "I can see colors." Reverting back to the phonics training, I made him sound out the letters to decipher the unknown word, but then I tried to figure a way to explain the "ay" combination and its sound. Which of course is a more advanced dipthong and he's not really ready for it. But eventually I got him to realize what the word was and to stop him from guessing.

I suspect I'll have to be vigilant if I can steer my son away from these potential potholes in his path to a good education.

Out of left field

Baseball has been a regular part of my son's life for the past couple of years. T-ball games. Visits to the local AA ballpark. My own professed love for the NY Yankees.

Still, I was surprised by the answer he gave when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.

"I'm going to be a baseball player."

I know he likes the game, but he also loves NASCAR driver Carl Edwards and he loves watching Roger Federer and most Sunday afternoons, he'll eventually wander into his father's lap as they watch the football game while I prepare dinner. So he never showed a more intense interest in baseball than other sports.

Knowing that he can regularly change his mind, I asked him the question again a couple of other times. Yet he gave the same answer.

I tried to drop him the hint that even if he played baseball he would still need to go to college. He just shrugged.

At school, they asked the kids to wear baseball hats today (No, it's not some particular World Series commemorative moment). Leaving the house with his NY Yankees cap, he gave me his goodbye kiss.

"Mommy, this is a baseball kiss. It's very important that you take this kiss and put it in your brain so that nobody takes it away. OK?"

Ok, I said, wondering if I had heard him right. Where does he come up with that?

A must read

Though I have already professed to be a fan of the Huffington Post, there are some blog items that are just outstanding -- such as this one, discussing a new study looking at legalized abortion and how the anti-abortion movement needs to consider the law of unintended consequences in their efforts to be "pro-life."

Out of place

My survival philosophy here has been to simply go with the flow whenever I am someplace where I don't quite fit. I have enough of a comfort zone here that the slap back of the odd reality of this semi-Southern, conservative, proud-to-be-Red-Neck culture doesn't strike me too badly.

And then there are days like today.

My son had been invited to a birthday party of one of the newer boys on the block. There is another family, with two children, that moved down about 6 or 7 houses away. I thought attending the party would be a good way to get acquainted, since they made the effort to reach out to us.

The father seemed nice, a waiter at the most expensive restaurant in town and his mother seemed pleasant. The boy was 10, as were his friends, so my son didn't have anyone to play with. It surprised me at first that none of the other families had brought their kids over.

Then I met the mom, and her family and friends.

The elitist snob in me found them utterly appalling.

Smokers, obese with terrible eating habits, brash gutter mouths with terrible dye jobs and tight cheap skin-revealing clothing whose conversations revolved around complaints about their low-paying jobs, their children's schools and their favorite shopping places. I spied tons of junk - huge bins of toys and lots of tchotchkes - but few books or magazines. And forget about newspapers.

I tried to be nice and tried to chat with them, though I found it was safer to simply stick close to my kid and play with him (since all these older kids weren't playing with him).

The low-point of the party occurred after the cake had been cut and all the children were digging into the chocolate cake and ice cream.

One of the loudest, brashest moms in the room decided to address the birthday boy. She seemed to be grandmother to the youngest boy in the room (17 months) and I would estimate her age to be 48 or 50.

To the 10-year-old celebrant, she announced: "Wow, can you believe you're a century?"

I was so shocked I almost didn't believe what she had said.

She got a smart-aleck response from the boy. "No because I'm not."
"Oh?" she wondered.
"No, I'm a decade."
"Oh," she said, looking to one of her allies. "Smart kid."
She turned to him again. "Well, I was just teasing you that you were 25."

I was so appalled.

The boy shot back, "Um, no, a century is 100 years."
"Oh, so what is 25?"
"Quarter century."

Someone please explain to me how she made it to 50 without knowing a vocabulary word as basic as century. That she has apparently raised children and can claim grandchildren is what is even more disturbing to me.

Indoctrination

I cringed when my son spotted the logo on the empty box of tissues that I was about to crush for recycling.

"Look, Mommy, BoxTops!"

BoxTops, if you're not already familiar, are one of these corporate programs that encourage consumers to buy their own products, save the labels or packaging so that your school can cash in on prizes or computers or whatever. Campbell's made a huge hit with their soup labels for computers program.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm all for supporting his school. I have a collection of not only boxtops, but the soup labels and, believe it or not, the little tabs off soda cans, which apparently can be collected for some other program.

But it's just a sad reality that the public schools can't get or pay for what they need that they have to resort to these special programs that only encourage consumerism.

And it troubles me that my Kindergarten boy has been so indoctrinated into the necessity of all of this that he gets excited any time we see something in the pantry that has the BoxTops logo. (Mind you, I never EVER discussed this with him, so I'm sure he learned it from school).

Then to make it worse, he sees BoxTops at the supermarket and asks to buy the product, even if it's something I would never eat or something I would never want him to eat.

Why aren't they excited about educational achievements in the same way?

My first ever PTA meeting was one of those indoctrination sessions.
Please save your labels, boxtops, soda can tabs.
Please go to this particular fast food restaurant on this night because the school gets 10 percent of the proceeds.
Please buy this. Please buy that.

All of this on top of the normal school fundraisers, as well as having to buy school supplies and other things.

The PTA was totally money focused, with very little discussion about the fact that the school is not rated in the Florida system as an A school and what is being done to improve that. And what new academic projects we were undertaking (other than the read-a-thon.). The only good thing I got out of it was a few volunteer projects, like a day when we can spruce up the school.

What I am bracing for is a long 12 years of forced consumerism, all because the government budget is so screwed up that schools don't have what they need (or school districts don't spend their money wisely.)

My life in a nutshell

If you don't think one person can make a difference in this world ...

Then you haven't read this New York Times story.

We should all be reading the labels of our products more carefully. Thank God he did.