[Note: Dear Reader, in order to understand today's post, you will need to read yesterday's post first.]
On the third day of my "crayon simile" lesson, I needed to set the bar a little higher for the class. I erased both chalkboards, and asked them to write a description of our classroom, using at least three color similes. They could use their crayons if they wanted to.
But I knew that Jewel needed some kind of special magic.
Jewel's birthday was in the summer, and there had hardly been one day since school started that she had not asked me when, exactly, were we going to celebrate her birthday, with that look of glorious expectation that very young children get about their birthdays. She was that kind of little girl. To have her suddenly so upset over this new activity was heart-breaking.
It was not that Jewel was the only one in the class who could not do yesterday's assignment or today's assignment. I needed to be right beside four or five other kids, too, right that minute. But those kids were busy, for the moment, writing descriptions without similes, or drawing pictures without words, or cleaning out their desks. They were not in tears.
Jewel was in tears. Again. The bad day from yesterday had come to school with her today.
Jewel had fallen through the hole in her paper into a very dark place.
I was in the portables so I had the luxury of having a teacher in the adjoining portable who could keep an eye on my class while Jewel and the little brown dog and I went outside.
We sat down on the bottom step of the stairway to the portable and looked at the world. If you haven't thought it about recently, I can assure you there is a great quantity of brown in the world at large. We looked at the paper dog and then we looked at the world so see if we could find a brown out there that would fit into a sentence about her dog:
The dog is as brown as ________ .
We looked at telephone poles, tree trunks, autumn leaves, the wooden steps we were sitting on. But Jewel was having none of it. She picked up a stick (a brown stick, mind you) and began continuing the hole in the paper phenomenon by digging a little hole to China right there in the ground at her feet.
Ever helpful and hopeful, I kept on enumerating brown things: sparrows, pecans, a piece of twine that was hanging from the railing, not realizing that every time I thought of another brown thing I was simply further reducing Jewel's chances of finding one all by herself.
(Honestly, sometimes I need to take myself out into the hall and give myself a good talking to.)
Jewel's hole got deeper and deeper.
I started digging a hole, too. Jewel and I dug in silence for a little tick of time.
And then I got to have that huge once in a lifetime Helen Keller-Anne Sullivan "the word for water is . . ." experience. Suddenly, Jewel lifted up her face to me with a smile brighter than the sun, and slowly unclenched her little fist so that I could see the treasure in the palm of her hand: a handful of dirt from her hole to China.
I really have no earthly idea of what happened that day, but something bigger than one little simile clicked for Jewel.
A little girl who had no idea of what a simile is came up with one all on her own anyway. And then it was as if doors in her mind that were keeping phonics in one room and reading in another room and writing in another room suddenly began to open up into each other, letting an intermingling take place that hadn't been happening before. Or maybe it was just that a little girl who wasn't ready for third grade summoned up the courage to begin to read and write at her very own pre-primer level anyway.
We went back inside and together we wrote her "dog is as brown as dirt" sentence on the new piece of paper.
But then Jewel started writing instead of drawing in her journal in the mornings, and it was obvious that all those perfectly-copied phonics lessons in her perfect penmanship had been sinking in. Her journal pages almost always started out about a brown dog and then proceeded immediately to her birthday and all her birthday wishes. She never stopped for periods. Like Faulkner, her thoughts went on and on for pages, one long sentence composed of many independent clauses all connected by "and."
Below is a sample from my memory ~ I've probably misquoted her a little:
"The big bron dog jumt on me and it is my brday and I mad a wis for a red dres and a puzl and I had a cak and thr wil be 9 candls on my cak and it is my brday sum day soon."
No child wrote as many pages in her journal as Jewel did from that time forward. No child continued to come to school every day with such a beatific smile. No child ever raised her hand so eagerly to answer questions she did not know the answer to. No child ever asked me so many times when were we going to celebrate her birthday as my sweet little Jewel.
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