Don't Let Me Get Me

I bought some of those Brain Quest work books, on sale,  at the grocery store the other day. I made some copies of pages from the Language Arts section of the second grade book. Wednesday, we sat down with them and had a review session. We talked about parts of speech I know we had talked about before, but probably forgotten. We practiced writing and how to form a statement vs a question. We reviewed punctuation and capitalization (which, I'm not gonna lie, I've told them all about a dozen times before, but still watch them flagrantly disregard).

The biggest obstacle we are having in our late summer refresher so far is this: ourselves.

C blasted right through the worksheets without much trouble, and only a few reminders. (ex: Tiny A is not a lower case a.) But S, who was doing just as well as C, was crying like writing sentences was painful. She could identify the common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. She could tell me how to order the words in the word bank to form a statement or a question. She could tell me which pronoun works best in each scenario. She was just writing like her pencil was the blood quill Umbridge uses on Harry Potter (okay. It wasn't that bad.)

It is my job to be patient and non-judgmental. I have not always been good at this, but I know I've gotten better. I repeatedly encouraged her with observations like, "Look, that's a really good spacing between your words. You've already improved." and, "Yes! That is how you make a lower case A, and you figured it out on your own!" I deliberately didn't correct every mistake, thinking I would choose our battles sparingly and we would have plenty of opportunities to cover everything else some other time. Spare her some stress. Still, the process seemed to be killing her.

So, we went through the worksheets, skipping the writing, to see if she got the concepts. Then, I gave her a sheet of paper with the standard, capital and lower-case, alphabet on it and this sentence: "The five boxing wizards jump quickly."

That sentence lightened the mood. How silly. Wizards?! It's just a random pangram I picked in order to give her practice writing sentences while she also writes all of her letters (especially the lower-case ones, because she's pretty much got the capitals down). After I got an accidental laugh out of her, and stopped asking her to do what she perceived as real work, as opposed to just informal practicing, things calmed down a lot. The worksheets were too serious. No matter how I tried to remind her that this was just between me and her and it was just good practice, she was kicking herself for making mistakes.

I told her it reminded me of that P!nk song from 2001, Don't Let Me Get Me. "Don't let me get me. I'm my own worst enemy. It's bad when you annoy yourself. So irritating. Don't wanna be my friend no more. I wanna be somebody else."

Copying a sentence about wizards cheered her up and she was still able to show me that she has all the skills we were trying to review today. Unfortunately, this exercise reminded me of why public school scares me a bit. Would her teacher have had the time or understanding to defuse this situation and find a way for S to get around it? Maybe. Maybe not.