Me: Ask your mother. And why can’t you say ‘door’ like any other kid?

Stephen: Because I’m your kid.

Me (shrugging): Can’t argue with you there.

My father, somewhere in another plane of reality or reincarnated as a small child, is laughing. He might not know why he is laughing, but he is laughing.

This is a continuation of the goofy dance Stephen started when he found out I was home early.

I work evenings and don’t get to see Stephen a lot. Here is his reaction to me coming home early enough to see him one night.

Image by Image Editor via Flickr

When we were kids, my mother would buy me and my brother educational toys. Not just games that helped us with reading and writing, but things like erector sets, rock tumblers, chemistry sets, this thing that taught us about electricity and circuitry, magnets, etc. Plus, we always seemed to have a microscope or telescope around the house.

Even though neither of us went into careers that had anything to do with engineering, geology, chemistry, physics, biology or anything like that, I’m glad we were at least exposed to things like that as kids. Stephen knows how to use computers, but I wonder if I am not limiting his potential by not getting him the type of things my mom got for us. This is something that I have to think about.

thousand
difficult
I’ve
describe
you’ll
separate
according
throughout
variety
particular
column
experiment
knowledge
original
indeed
chief
represent
develop
twenty
familiar
community
electricity
experience
purpose

When I asked him about the words, he didn’t remember where they came from, but he knew them all with no hesitation. I wanted him to take them to his teacher and let her know that I approve of these words for him, but for some reason he didn’t want to do that. I’m pretty sure it is because he didn’t want to be insulting. Like my brothers and father, my son has the ability to not say stupid and insulting things to people. Unfortunately, I don’t have that ability.

Personally I don’t think this list of words should be given to every first grader, but Stephen isn’t like most first graders. I used to work in a learning lab for adults returning to school after a long time (sometimes decades) and there were a bunch of computerized tests the students would take to determine their reading and learning levels. I always thought there should be something like for school age children.

While I don’t think it would be a good idea to take Stephen and put him in a higher grade the way the system is current configured, I would love to see the first month or so of the school year devoted to this sort of placement testing. After that the students could be grouped according to learning ability. Age would also be factored in because we don’t want slow teenagers in the same class with quick preteens. Despite the same learning ability, the maturity level might be drastically different.

I just wish I had the time and the knowledge to go the homeschooling route, but the main drawback with that would be Stephen developing stronger social skills. I know where my weaknesses are.

day

red

by

eat

here

say

car

play

He was bored with these words before I was finished with cutting out the flash cards. To spice things up, I turned them upside down and held them up to the light so that he could read them backwards. And he still got all of them without hesitation.

So I decided to experiment with more advanced words to see where my six year was in the grand scheme of things. I had him read a back blurb from the back of Dynamite Entertainment’s Sherlock Holmes #5. I told him this is just an experiment, “skip any words you don’t know and there is no way to get this wrong”.

The original paragraph I had him read was: “Dynamite’s Sherlock Holmes launch and story is reminiscent of the their publishing of The Lone Ranger. Taking a classic character, making him accessible for today’s fans and giving him new life. I am also always impressed by John Cassaday’s cover designs, and his exe-cution, and Holmes is no let down, in fact, it’s taking it up a notch. Leah (Moore) and John Reppion are writing a story that will help cement their careers. Creating a new original story instead of an adaptation of previous works is a plus for comics and Holmes fans!”

The bolded words in the above paragraph are the ones he missed:

reminiscent (which a lot of adults get wrong),

Ranger (which surprised me a little, but not much),

accessible (again a word a lot of adults get wrong),

Cassaday (a name),

exe-cution (this was hyphenated because of a line break, I explained that the hyphen means that it is all one word),

Reppion (a name),

adaptation (not surprising) and

previous (which he thought was the word ‘precious’, which tells me that he didn’t read it all the way through and not that he didn’t know what it was).

Then I followed up with a back blurb from BOOM! Studios’ excellent graphicization* of Do Android’s Dream Of Electric Sheep. Same rules, but instead of a paragraph, he only had to read a single sentence.

The original sentence was “The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.”

OK, it is actually a sentence fragment, but the only word he missed was consistently and not by much because he pronounced it ‘constantly’ (which would also work in the context of the sentence).

I guess I am a little worried that while he knows words like publishing, character, impressed, original, brilliant and science he is given words like eat, say, car and play to study. That may fly now, but in a few years he will be bored in class and will just started to get lazy. When that points comes, it will be hard to keep him on a good track. Even if he doesn’t get lazy, he might get to the point where he starts wondering “Why should I try so hard when everybody else is getting by with doing much less?”

OK, maybe I’m more than a little worried.

* I know graphicization is not a real word, but it is as good a description of what BOOM! Studios is doing as anything else. Instead of adapting the book into comic book form, they are taking the entire text and adding pictures to it, so while it looks like a regular comic book and reads like a regular comic book, it really isn’t. Most non comic book readers won’t notice much of a difference (and a lot of regular comic book readers don’t notice one), but there is a slight change in presentation. I HIGHLY recommend the title to any science fiction, comic book, graphic arts or literature fans.

When we first go there, Stephen didn’t want to do anything except sit next to me. That was until the pizza came. He ate, the kids opened presents and he ended up having a pretty good day.

There was really only one present he wanted and as you can see he got it. Not to say that he didn’t appreciate getting the other gifts, but it was very obvious which one was his favorite.

I think it is a little weird that he is so into Mario because I remember playing Donkey Kong on the Atari 2600 with my cousins. For some reason, he doesn’t think that Mario has been around for so long.

Gabryale also attended the party and spent some time with her granddad. Every time I put my phone down, she would pick it up and hand it to me. So I took a picture.

I tried a couple of times to get her to smile, but she wasn’t having any of that.

Chances are really good that he will never see this post or even this blog, but a lot of the things that I do and say about him aren’t for his ears, they are to proclaim my love for him to the rest of the world. He is my youngest, but I have never felt a responsibility for the girls the way that I feel for him. Their mothers have to teach them how to be a woman in this world, I cannot help them with that no matter how much I research or read up on the subject.

I have a duty to teach Stephen how to be the best man I can teach him to be. I don’t know how he’ll turn out or if the job I’m doing is being done right, but I know it is my responsibility, duty and honor to do it. He will never know how much I love him, but I hope that the rest of the world never doubts it for an instant.

Me: No, why would you want to?

Stephen: Because I don’t want to feel uncomfortable with my body.

Me: (very long pause punctuated by me trying not to laugh) Sure, son.