Memories of Castro school. Teaching games to children. Learning the games children play.
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Five of you subscribers will recognize the characters from Castro school in the early 1950s. They were effective educators, but I doubt that any of them would be acceptable to today's pedagogues.
The guy in charge was Principal Buford H. Shreeve, a stunted Texan of about 5'5". He loved to play Bing Crosby's rendition of The Yellow Rose of Texas over the school intercom. He maintained discipline with a paddle labeled The Board of Education that hung on his wall. The bad boys – on our block they were Kim, Nicky and Norris – were familiar with The Board.
Pete the janitor handled sex education. He told somewhat off-color jokes to us little boys out behind the portable classrooms that had showed up as the first waves of the baby boom entered kindergarten. The color of off-color has changed a lot in the seven intervening decades. Here's a sample of his humor: "Confucius say woman who cooks corn and peas and same pot unsanitary."
The one who brought Castro school to mind today is Bug-Eyes Barrett. She supervised our leisure activity – I don't know if she had any classroom responsibilities. Under her tutelage we learn to play chess and checkers. I became the chess champion of the school while learning nothing systematic about the game.
Eddie's chess education has reminded me of my own. His teacher at Sunflower School, Roman Abramovich, likewise taught nothing systematic. He got the children obsessed about chess clocks, the device limiting the total amount of time a player can spend planning his moves, but never taught fundamentals.
Even though I never got to be any good at chess, it fell to me to show Eddie how to make a checkmate with two rooks, just a queen, or just a rook. That's easy. We went to the Internet to see how to do it with two bishops. I'm sure neither of us could do it from memory.
I also needed to show him how to look for opportunities such as a fork, a discovered check and so forth. I'm sure he would have benefited by systematic instruction.
The most significant oversight was chess openings. A player with any skill should have memorized the first half dozen moves in standard openings, and learned enough to take advantage of an opponent's blunder when they do something different. I bought a book on chess openings for Eddie five years ago. However, memorizing the openings requires a level of dedication. That is to say, hard work. Neither he nor any of the other boys in school have been interested.
That was fine with me. I'm not enamored of the game. But the upshot is that after having studied it for five years he still can't beat me, and I'm not any good. It's the same story with checkers. I bought a book and read it a few years ago. Nobody else has looked at it.
We do like to play dominoes. There are certain conventions of courtesy one must observe in playing any game. You should play when it's your turn, and not take too long doing so. You should not complain if luck goes against you. You should not accuse the other players of cheating. If you're keeping score, you should do it conscientiously and openly.
Eddie and I pretty much observe these conventions. Oksana lets herself be distracted by other things, so she is not reliably at the table to take her turn. Zoriana not only gets distracted but gets grumpy when she can't score. Moreover, she is not up to doing the quick arithmetic required to figure out the best play. The objective of the game, when Zoriana is included, is to entertain Zoriana instead of to win the game.
This past week Zoriana has asked me to play "Go Fish" with her. I at first resisted, reasoning that when there are only two people in the game there is no challenge to remember who asked for which cards. But I was missing the point.
Playing with a five-year-old the objective is not to win, and not to scrupulously observe the rules or teach her to do so, but to entertain her and to teach her how to interact with the other players. It's also a question of teaching coordination. Let me describe how these insights apply.
Zoriana has a hard time holding more than about seven cards in her hand. I can hold 15 or 20 pretty easily, fanning them out to see if I have what she's asking for. I also have a pretty good memory for what's in my hand, so I don't have to look much. She has problems with both. She lays her cards on a tilted book because she cannot hold them. Since at the end of a game of Go Fish there are 13 books of four like cards, shuffling to mix them up is important. A five-year-old cannot do a riffle shuffle. I have to be patient, simply cautioning her not to bend the cards as she repeatedly separates the deck and jams the two halves together.
In all things Zoriana alternates between being selfish and generous. This strawberry season, for instance, she will greedily take more than her share of the berries, then generously offer them to her father and sister. We thank her for sharing when she does. It's the same with cards. If I accumulate more books of four like cards than she does as we are playing Go Fish, she will take a book from me and put it on her side of the table. On the other hand, when she catches up, she will generously give mine back.
She will sometimes smirk curiously when I ask, say, "Give me your kings" and give me fewer than I know she has. But when I look at her hard she will cough up the other ones.
At least half the time she gets bored and quits halfway through the game.
Her approach to a game is maddening when it includes serious players such as her brother, but it is perfectly okay when it is just Zoriana and me. That is my big insight of the week. She is learning a lot by playing with me, and the game itself is not the primary objective of playing.
Marianna is learning to play the games the little girls play. This morning she complained to her mother and her grandmother that her stomach hurts. Whoops, it's her throat. Whoops, something itches. Whatever it is, it gets attention. It is keeping her home from kindergarten today. Zoriana's game was to resist getting out of bed for 10 minutes, then dawdling over her breakfast, ensuring that we would miss the early bus to kindergarten.
That's the way kids are. They will outgrow these phases simply to move on to other ones. It is a constant challenge to figure out when their demands for attention are legitimate and when you are simply being played and should resist. A second challenge is to work with your better half when there are different opinions about such things. Zoriana is constantly complaining these days that her underpants get caught in her bottom. She needs better underpants. Oksana will soon be off again on yet another quest to buy new underwear. I maintain that underwear is underwear – get used to it.
That's the everyday, quotidian news from Lake WeBeGone, where dealing with little things that have no meaning in themselves is what gives larger meaning to our lives.
Lovely. I miss the young days of my children and now my grandchildren are rapidly moving off into their own lives as well. Thank you for sharing a little of your own golden circle. When they get older you might look into the greatest card game of them all, contract bridge.
Lovely. I miss the young days of my children and now my grandchildren are rapidly moving off into their own lives as well. Thank you for sharing a little of your own golden circle. When they get older you might look into the greatest card game of them all, contract bridge.