Thinking sideways
It’s parent-teacher conference time, which I love. There always seems to be a moment in these conferences when I’m reminded that my kids think sideways.
Present any one of them with a question or problem and they tend to choose the least conventional solution that’s still a solution.
Mr. H, Delaney’s first grade teacher, showed us an assignment in which the kids were asked what superpower they would want to have. Informal web polls tend toward mind-reading, flight, super-strength, super-speed, invisibility, and the rest of the Marvel Comics arsenal. Mr. H said the other kids had generally chosen from that traditional list.
Not Delaney. “If I could have any supper power,” she wrote, “I would want the power to help other peple. Like if some one was blinde, I would make them see again. Wenever I would here HELP!, I would come.”
I wonder where “reversing disabilities” would be on a frequency graph of power preferences. Then there’s the fun fact that the children of Christian parents were busily emulating Superman while the child of humanists chose to essentially emulate Christ.
Last Thankgiving, Erin’s fourth grade class did the usual “what are you grateful for” assignment, and again we heard our child’s sideways answer in the teacher conference. Most of her classmates were grateful for health, family, sunshine, food, a home, our country, our soldiers, our freedom. All marvelous answers.
And my daughter?
“Pain,” said Mr. J. “She said she is most grateful for pain.”
I smiled. “Really.”
“Yes, pain. At first I was a little, uh…concerned,” he said, “but then she explained it. She said that pain warns us when something is wrong, and without it, a little injury or sickness could get worse and we’d never know. We could die from something small. So she’s grateful for pain.” He smiled and shook his head. “I never thought of it that way.”
We’d talked about this once when she had a bad splinter in her foot. If it weren’t for pain, I said as I worked the tweezers clumsily, she might not have known the splinter was there. It could have become infected, even dangerous.
But here’s the thing: that splinter came out four years ago, when she was six. I had no idea at the time that the idea of pain as our friend had made any impression, much less a deep one. Unlike the splinter, that sideways idea worked its way in and stayed.