EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Early Years
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My cousin's eldest son is heading off to UC Berkeley. The first Alvarez, by my calculation, to do so. His proud parents threw a party and the relatives and friends obliged, consuming mass quantities of chips and salsa, beans and rice, and bearing gifts meant to prepare the undergrad for life in a dorm and beyond. My husband and I, veteran educators both, wrote a check and inscribed the card with our singular piece of teacherly advice: Always sit in the front row. Our own 2 1/2-year-old son is the youngest in that generation of second cousins, and we watched him that evening as he happily catapulted himself about the suburban back yard, leaping from laps to arms, rolling about the lawn, charming the teenage girls and perhaps alarming their male counterparts. The adults saw in him, of course, those babies that the fresh young adults once were. And the young adults, well, perhaps they nervously saw their own potential children. I squinted but I couldn't seem to conjure in any sustained way, that evening, some 15 years in the future, when we might be doing the same for our son, his bags already packed in the trunk, ready to run away the next day. Perhaps, despite nights of broken sleep, I simply didn't want to imagine the evenings when he wouldn't be down the hall or cuddled even closer, but instead would be tucking himself in. Better to imagine kindergarten, as he's already halfway there. Better to imagine what a teacher might see in him a couple years from now and what he might see in his first formal classroom. Save the vision of tuition and GPAs for later. Imagine the front row of a kindergarten. So, what does it take to sit in the front row, whether it's at UC Berkeley or kindergarten? That front row is a symbol, of course, and most kindergartens these days simply don't have one. They have circles, activity centers, overstuffed pillows in the shapes of sea creatures. But the front row, however metaphorical, is a useful measure of a student's attitude and preparedness. A student in the front row understands that the classroom is a place where something of importance happens - and he or she wants to be there. Our little guy is beginning to recognize this learning dynamic. School is a part of his vocabulary and neighborhood geography. His oft-read books feature children and indeed animals of all sorts happily going to school. What will we tell him when he arrives that first day and discovers that badgers and bears aren't among his classmates? When we drive past his future school, we greet the building and its inhabitants warmly and talk about the day he'll join them. It is, indeed, already "his" school. Storytimes at the local library and children's bookstores have introduced him to not only the concept that adults other than Mama and Papa can read books to him but also acquainted him with the important notion of learning and listening in a group setting - vital to an only child like ours, less so for one of many siblings. The little girl down the street graduates this week, along with 16 others, from our neighborhood children's center and into kindergarten. She reads. Her mother says she read somewhere (yes, read!), that it takes reading a child 1,000 books to teach the skill. We estimate we're at least two-thirds of the way there, assuming it's OK to read the same book, in our case Maurice Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen," 100 times alone. Our payoff might mean a scholar, or only a confident, self-directed, curious citizen. A bookworm, a Renaissance Boy, an athlete who knows history, an artist who reads the daily newspaper, or another Alvarez enrolled at Cal. Whoever he'll be, we hope we have helped him take his rightful place in the front row. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 2-year-old son, Louis. |
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