Through the eyes of a child
As a first grader in a new school with half the year over, I tried to fit
into an established classroom routine. It wasn’t always easy. Especially
the day the teacher said, “write your alphabet, as you remember it.”
I knew the alphabet, but that phrase “as you remember it” was quite another
thing. It would have been easy to have simply begun with A and gone through
to Z, but I thought that was against the rules of the assignment.
I began thinking about letters. OK, I remembered the letter “I.” I wrote
that down. I thought a bit more … and I remembered the letter “T” and “M”
and “R.” I did not have enough time “remember” all of the letters.
The teacher gathered up our papers and looked them over. She announced we
needed work on the alphabet because only a couple students had written the
entire alphabet in order. I still remember my internal protest, “but you
said …”
Other people remember not quite understanding adults when they were
children. A friend said her mom always told her to look at the scenery when
they were in the car. She says, “I looked and looked, for years. I saw
trees and hills, but I never saw any scenery.”
When my son was in elementary the recess teacher did not like the way he
looked as she talked with him. “Wipe that smirk off your face,” she
demanded. He knew he was in trouble and he had to get something off his
face. He began scrubbing his face. I knew that smile. He had been born with
it. I wanted to protest, “but every time my neighbor saw him as a baby, she
always chuckled and said ‘he has the most mischievous smile.’ ”
My daughter-in-love’s family was not smiling when her childish confusion
with language was compounded when she translated for her Vietnamese mother.
Take the time they went to a kitchen and bath shop to price fixtures. As
the sales lady talked, the 10-year-old faithfully interpreted, including
the statement, “you can even finance it.”
“What does finance mean?” her mother asked. The 10-year-old did not know
the Vietnamese word or the English meaning, so she asked the sales lady.
She still remembers the startled look the sales person gave her and her
inability to define “finance.”
My daughter-in-love says it was years before she realized her worst mistake
in translating. During tax time she was asked, “What does ‘spouse’ mean?”
“I told’em ‘I think it means children.’” That year the family tax form
listed three spouses: a new born, a 7-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl.
“I was never again asked to help with the taxes,” she says. Years later she
realized ‘why’ when she read a dictionary definition of “spouse.”
Even the dictionary was not adequate the day she told the family that in
tennis “love” meant zero. She even pointed it out in the dictionary. Still
unconvinced because they were unable to read an English dictionary, they
sent her to ask the nuns who lived across the street. Only the nun’s
affirmation that in tennis “love” means zero satisfied the family.
I just wish I had had that kind of help the day I wrote the alphabet, as I
remembered it.