Making the Impossible Possible

The sound was a very familiar one to me. I’ve heard it many a time over the past few years. Borrowing from Dr. Seuss, it could appropriately be described by It started in low. Then it started to grow…

Only this sound wasn’t merry. In fact it was very un-merry.

It was the beginning of sobbing from the boy.

What could possibly have reduced him to such a state? If you’re suspecting me, well, that would be a fair guess I suppose, but in this case I can’t claim credit. It was his homework that had done him in.

That and having low blood-sugar levels.

His homework involved using his spelling words for the week. He’s been very good all year with spelling, even knowing all of the bonus words the teacher has tossed out. The exercise that did him in was the final one on the worksheet, which wanted him to write a paragraph describing how to do some gardening using 5 of the spelling words.

The problem he had was it wasn’t obvious how to use any of the words to describe ow to garden. The phrase he kept using was “It’s IMPOSSIBLE!” Hmm, actually it was more like “It’s IMPOSSIBLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!”

At this point in my parenting career, I don’t have much patience for crying. Especially because something is hard- cry me a river. It’s just a phrase but the boy was taking it literally. So I sat silently, waiting for him to stop. I didn’t even bother with the usual “Does crying solve anything?” type of attack. It’s not worth it as it only would have given voice to my frustration.

Since he wasn’t in a hurry to calm down, I took his worksheet to see what all the fuss was about. As it turns out, not only was his assignment possible- there existed a shining example of it in the previous problem. It was a paragraph about gardening using all of the spelling words, only some of them were misspelled. For that one, he was supposed to identify the misspelled words. He managed that just fine.

Back to the problem at hand, I informed him about the example on the worksheet. But this only agitated him further because he couldn’t use it. Oddly, I felt a little better after his statement since he’d voluntarily rejected plagiarism as a solution.

Since he still wasn’t calming down, I decided that the best course was to make him eat something. He continued to whimper all the way through his meal. To the point that I decided to eat somewhere else. Finally, after he’d finished his meal he calmed down. I’m guessing those two things are not unrelated.

Then wouldn’t you know, he went and wrote a paragraph about gardening using his spelling words. I even checked it over, correcting his spelling mistakes and helping him with his writing in general. He was a habit of creating runon sentences and using the same phrases over and over and over again without breaking things up into different sentences so that he has a whole bunch of words that are tied together and by the time you are done reading his sentence you are out of breath because you weren’t sure it would ever end and did I mention about the runons?

So it turned out to not be so impossible.