So my son Braxton starts kindergarten next year and as part of the process I guess there is some sort of readiness assessment. Not sure what happens if you don’t pass but that’s another story.
Anyway, on the way there, he must have been nervous about the situation, thinking through all his deep knowledge gained over his lengthy 5 years of life, and said, “mom, I get confused between my sixes and nines”… Of course my answer would have been, “don’t worry son, when you get older, you’ll want them together in either direction…” but fortunately, I wasn’t there, and my wife had a more appropriate answer which was “sixes sit down”. I’ve never heard that but it seemed pretty good.
What’s more interesting is my son completely under sold his skills during the “interview”. According to the teacher/aid/part-time person that conducted this assessment (she was very nice my wife says), Braxton went in and meekly pronounced, “I can’t read”. I had to chuckle at his transparency of information given that he does know some words and although he has certain books and phrases memorized, he does pretty well.
Of course, I’ll need to work with him on his interviewing skills as you never want to start out with “I can’t…” My advice, if prompted for areas of development, would be to aptly explain that reading is a secondary skill to his ability to innovatively reengineer complex technology components his father happens to accidently leave in an open, inviting area.
