What We Want For Our Daughter

Last night, at a Meet The Teachers event, our daughter’s language arts teacher asked what we want for her. I came home and wrote this as a response:

Mrs. S., you threw me for a loop this evening when you asked what we want for Girly Girl, what our goals are for the year. It’s been a long, long time since an educator asked that. Usually what happens is, they come into a formal meeting with many pages written about what they want to work on, and they ask us to sign off on it. We always do, mostly because we’ve been relatively content with the program they offered, though we usually tweak a few items and add some of our own.

But you asked what we want, and that’s a whole different question. I’ve been thinking about it all evening, and since I think best with all ten fingers on a keyboard, you’re getting a much fuller response than you probably wanted.

In the long run (and this year too), what we want most is for Girly Girl to feel like a contributing member of society. We do not want her to grow up thinking she gets things without working for them. Yes, it’s harder for her to learn and do certain things, but that just means she has to work harder, not that she gets away with working less. We don’t care so much about the outcome – she’ll learn it, or she won’t – but we care a great deal about the effort she puts into a task.

We want her to feel like just another 13-year-old, at least as much as possible. We want her to take responsibility for herself, and act responsibly. In part, this would mean acting her age rather than using baby talk and behaviors to get out of obligations she doesn’t like. For instance, she is capable of going through her daily routine on her own, once she learns it, and should face consequences for wasting school time, just as any student would. But if she can get away with it, she will quickly learn to talk her aide into completing difficult tasks for her while she plays.

Philosophically, we believe she is most likely to think of herself as a contributing member of society if she grows up as a part of society, rather than being segregated in a special room or place. In fact, we try to downplay the ways she is different from typical children (i.e. special) and emphasize the ways she is quite average for her age group.

Obviously we do not expect her to keep up with the regular curriculum, but in a perfect world, she would be included as much as possible, and when her peers are working far above her abilities, she would be working at her own level on something similar in the same room. And it’s often surprising how much she gets out of being included even in curriculum one would expect to be much too difficult for her. For instance, one day last year, she came home talking about a science lab the class had done. Though she had mostly just watched, she was able to tell me exactly what they did, and was even able to describe what the class had learned, albeit in very simple language.

We do not want anyone to limit her own ideas of what she is capable of doing. She’ll discover her own limitations, as we all do, on her own. We don’t want to teach her what her limits are – largely because we do not believe anyone knows.

For instance, Girly Girl wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up. We know she’ll never be a vet, but we’ll never tell her that. If she still wants it when she gets older, we’ll find an animal doctor who will give her a chance in his clinic. She would be a fantastic vet’s assistant – cleaning up after and caring for the animals – and in her mind, that is not different from being a vet.

But we believe if we try to rein in her dreams, to teach her to be “realistic” (whatever that means), she’ll grow up planning to do menial labor – maybe bag groceries, and not that well – and no one ever hits a target higher than they aimed. And who knows – if she’s stubborn enough (and believe me, she IS stubborn enough) – maybe she’ll find a way to do direct medical care for animals. As long as nobody lets her in on the secret that she can’t.

I know this probably isn’t what you really wanted to know. You probably wanted more concrete goals, something you could work toward. So, I’ll try to be more concrete.

We would like for her to get into the habit of speaking clearly and loudly enough to be understood. She used to speak much more clearly, clearly enough that everyone understood her, but we’ve watched her speech decay in the past two or three years. We believe much of her unclear speech is a learned behavior, a way to get out of displaying how much she doesn’t understand, but it’s a self-destructive pattern because it makes her appear much more cognitively disabled than she actually is. We would like to see her find the self-confidence to speak up, to speak clearly, even if what she says is utter nonsense.

We would like to see her discover the joy of chapter books. She is quite capable of reading easy readers and middle grade novels, but given her choice, she will revert to the familiar and comfortable (but not challenging) Little Critter and Berenstain Bears books of her childhood. She also clings stubbornly to her baby toys, and as someone who longed for a baby doll in middle school, I haven’t pushed her to give them up. But she has learned the joys of more age-appropriate activities as well, like listening to popular music on an iPod and playing air hockey, and we’d like to see her make the same leap in her reading.

We’d like to see her use correct punctuation. She has a natural gift for description and storytelling, but she’s careless about things like initial capitalization and ending punctuation. Her mother is a storyteller – I write fiction. I write for adults, but at about Grade 4 level, so we (her family) obviously do not care about sounding impressive. But we really value the idea that the message is delivered most successfully if the writer follows common rules of grammar and punctuation. Girly Girl has a gift for writing. We’d like to see her hone it to the next level.

We would like to see her gain some familiarity with Canadian money, at least enough to know whether to hand the clerk a quarter or a toonie. In all fairness, we’ve been working on US money for many years and seen no measurable growth, so this might be a pipe dream. But it’s worth working on.

We would be delighted if she learned enough math to complete simple equations – the kind she’s likely to run into occasionally in life – on a calculator. We don’t care if she’s able to complete them on her own, using pencil and paper. If she understands the problem enough to plug it into a calculator and get the right answer, we’d be thrilled.

We’d love to see her interest sparked in the natural world. It is such a fascinating place where we live! But she has a tendency to go through life with nearsighted eyes, seeing only the familiar and comfortable.

That’s about it. That’s all we want. It’s embarrassing to admit perhaps since we’ve included few academic goals, but we’ve come to trust our daughter. As I told you tonight, we’ve come to believe she will find her way. She might not reach her “potential” – but who among us does? She will find her way. She has such a solid grounding, such a firm understanding of her own identity, and no question about her personal value.

She will find her way, and indeed, what more do the most successful of us actually accomplish?

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Tags: full inclusion, inclusion