Reading, writing, arithmetic — and grim reality

[Sharifa]

Reading, writing, arithmetic — and grim reality

By Lois M. Collins
Deseret Morning News
My daughters, Jenifer and Alyson Kyle, fourth- and third-graders respectively, can tell you a lot about Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their adventures exploring the Northwest.
They think Sacagawea "rocks."
They can tell you how many miles the Iditarod route covers across Alaska and how fast a cheetah runs.
They learned those things in school.
They can also tell you that terrible things will probably happen if you forget to lock the door to the school library where you're hiding when an intruder is rampaging through the hallways. They learned that in an intruder drill at school when one of the staffers, Antontwon, broke in. Lucky, they said, he's really their friend.
They can explain why bedroom is a compound word and how to count by sevens.
They can figure out the square area of a rectangle with a perimeter of six feet.
They know that if Johnny has 11 oranges and gives three to Tom, he'll still have enough left to give one each to his folks and five sisters. He'll get one, too.
Aly can spell "believe" and Jeni can spell "responsibility. "
They can both spell "sexual harassment" — and give you at least a half-dozen very specific examples. They're not quite sure, though, what sex itself is.
They know most of the words to the preamble to the Constitution of the United States.
They know all the words to "Complicated," by Avril Lavigne.
Stranger danger? They're experts — at least in theory. They have secret code words they won't share with anyone but their dad and me. They've practiced screaming and running away. A zigzag pattern, Aly informs me, is the best choice if the person who's after you has a gun.
They say you can talk about your religious beliefs in school, if you call them your culture and you don't mention Jesus Christ. Santa's OK, though. And so's the tooth fairy.
Jeni shares helpful tidbits about what to do in a fire: Stay low, touch the door to see if it's hot before you open it, don't panic.
If there's an earthquake, they say they'll stay away from windows and hide under a table.
If someone asks them to try drugs, they're pretty sure they know how to turn it down.
With all this knowledge, there's still an awful lot they don't know.
Jeni puzzles over how to make the color brown out of red, blue and yellow. Making black's challenging, too.
She struggles to subtract three-digit numbers from each other (she doesn't like borrowing, she says with a sigh).
Aly's still trying to conquer the concept of waiting her turn, made harder by the fact that it's never her turn, for some reason, when the little girls are jumping rope on the playground. On the bright side, though, she's getting really good at turning the rope.
They learned to read for comprehension and have yet to ace the state's DIBLE exam, which only emphasizes speed. They can't figure out how to do that.
They don't, they admit, know what drugs actually are. Just that they don't want any.
Aly doesn't know why dogs aren't allowed on the school grounds. They should be "mandatory," she tells me.
They don't understand why t-o-u-g-h is pronounced tuff and t-h-r-o-u-g-h is like threw.
But the big one, which we return to over and over again, is why an "intruder" would ever come to their school in the first place. And why anyone would want to hurt them.
That's one I can't answer.

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