School

chase  ·  Sun, Nov 8, 2015

We have a niece named Olivia. She’s four years old, and when we were in Texas this spring, I sat with her in a back room of my mother-in-law’s home and played a game of memory on the floor. We’d bought the tiles from IKEA; they had pictures of fanciful crowned Swedish elephants and other animals. Olivia liked them well enough, but before long we digressed into a game of School that I will never forget.

What’s School, you ask? It’s not really a game. More like a chaotic alternate universe that lives inside Olivia’s head — a universe in which:

1. teacher is boss
2. teacher constantly needs to prove teacher is boss
3. everyone else is student
4. teacher has the attention span of a four-year-old

I was not teacher, so I was student, and Olivia commanded that I do task after task: matching the cards, un-matching them, putting them away, getting out the other deck, standing up, lining up, sitting down, being quiet, speaking up. Nothing I did was right, especially since I kept ignoring the one other (imaginary) student in the class. I really wish I remembered his name. What I do remember is that I was so disrespectful to the teacher that I ended up in timeout in the other room.

After that, my mother-in-law stepped in and told Olivia she couldn’t put her uncle in timeout.

Despite seeming angry at me and at her grandma, Olivia must have had fun, because playing School was one of the first things she asked me to do when Misty and I visited Texas again last weekend. I obliged. This time, my other young niece — seven-year-old Maddie — and nephew were present, so we really had quorum for a proper class. We also had materials: a series of educational booklets about each of the 50 United States. We also had a power struggle: Olivia and Maddie are both alphas, so while Maddie kept trying to read to us about Wyoming, Olivia kept plastering the wall with black play-doh so we’d have a screen on which to watch an educational film. We had two teachers. And later, when I took my turn as teacher, we had two principals.

I stopped playing, but they begged me to come back. I refused and refused and finally caved in and tried to take charge and be teacher and have them all be students, and it worked, but almost immediately I had to throw my lesson plans out the window. I was wearing a T-shirt with a rather anatomically incorrect depiction of a pig, and they had an endless stream of questions about it. One of my answers grossed out Olivia, who said eeewwwwwwwwwwww. Maddie quickly figured out how to ask very similar questions, and I obliged with similarly gross answers, to which the entire class erupted every time in gleeful response: eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww!

I mention all this because I can’t wait for Milo to play School. I can’t wait for her to be old enough to meet these girls as a talking, thinking human being, and to look up to them, and to miss them when they’re gone — to want to play with them again. I can’t wait for Milo herself to be old enough to ask questions about things that I take for granted, like my shirt. I can’t wait for her preposterous assumptions, her naiveté, her imagination. And it’s especially hard to wait to be that silly with Milo, and to sneak in actual morsels of knowledge here and there, and to see Milo volley back both the knowledge and the silliness a thousandfold.