Assessments

A month shy of Maia's fourth birday, we've had our first setback--she wasn't accepted into the pre-k, kindergarten and elementary school we had wanted her to attend. They cited language--she's behind, noticeably, I guess.

And yet I can't help but think they missed the boat in rejecting her. When I got home today, she wanted to play "learn words" with me. We started with truck, and she correctly inferred from the sound of the word that its first letter is "t" and last letter is "k."




Assessments are such odd things.

It's been hot, the house we're staying in (while our own is being remodeled) is hot, and tonight at dinner, Maia said, "Everything is hot. The sun is hot, the house is hot, the food is hot. Only the salad isn't hot. The salad is cool."

That seemed a reasonably well articulated account to me.



Later in the dinner, I talked about bringing the lawn mower from our house to this one to work on the yard. "We need an elephant," Maia said. "An elephant can pull trees." There are a lot of haole koa shrubs here, and I think that's what she was thinking of. "An elephant!" I said, "What would we name it?"

She thought a little, and then she said, "9-1-1!"



I don't know. I think part of it is that she has a hard time performing for anyone but us. She wouldn't respond at all to the person who interviewed her for that school. Whenever she's had to perform at school or in her hula group, she freezes up. Can't do it. And yet as I write this, she's doing an entire hula performance for us, complete with the chanting and all the foot and hand movements. I know she's not making it up because, back in the day, I used to dance myself. A whole performance for us, but not one movement while on stage--not including the one hand movement that I think she purposefully did backwards. A little passive resistance. Can't deal with attention focussed on her. It's like who she really is is a secret.

It's the orphanage thing, I think. I believe that it's hard for her to show her talents to anyone but us.

And now you.

John, June 12, 2006.