I am fairly certain that if you looked up the dictionary definition of "stubborn," you would see a picture of my first grader. The girl was born as obstinate as a mule. I sometimes wonder why a girl as stubborn as my Rooster is was given to someone as easily frustrated as I am.
From the moment she was born, Rooster was dedicated to wearing me down to a quivering mass of sobbing bewilderment. She always marched to her own drummer, and it appeared that her favorite percussion instrument was my head. She was the child who tried to set the house on fire at age two, threw temper tantrums that would last for hours, thought towel bar rods and monkey bars were interchangeable, had health issues that I had never even heard of until she was diagnosed with them, and was extremely good at requiring immediate adult intervention for whatever stunt she tried to pull at any given time. I have never, ever understood what makes her tick, although I'm fairly certain a bomb of some kind is involved. That would at least explain why her half of her bedroom looks the way it does.
Anyway, I'm the lucky soul who gets to help her with her homework every day. Do you see me twitching? If you sat with us at the kitchen table, you would understand why.
Today's spelling homework required Rooster to write tongue twisters. Specifically, she had to write ten sentences, one for each of her spelling words, and attempt to use alliteration. The homework sheet even gave two examples of sentences that had most of their words start with the same letter. Rooster either could not or would not grasp this concept.
Rooster: "Okay, so number three is 'night.'"
Me: "So you need to come up with a sentence that has a lot of words that start with the same letter as 'night.'"
Rooster: "There is a noise, noise, noise, noise, and a noise."
Me: "That sentence does not even have the word 'night' in it!"
Rooster: "It is night."
Me: "That sentence needs more words that start with 'n' like 'night' does."
Rooster: "There was once a night, night, night, and night."
Me: "Pick different words that start with 'n.' Don't just use the same word over and over."
Rooster: "Someone had a knight kill a dragon."
Me: "That knight is different than the night that comes after day. And you still need more words that start with 'n.' Here's an example: No one needs noise at night."
Rooster: *writing* "No one wants any noise ever."
Me: "No, no. No one needs noise at night."
Rooster: *writing* "No one ever wants noise."
Me: *stares up at the ceiling and wonders how many cookies it will take for me to recover from this homework assignment*
I swear that I cannot honestly tell whether she truly does not get it, or if she is playing me like a piano. I feel frustrated because she insists she does not know how to read her homework directions, cannot spell to save her life, adds when she should subtract and vice versa, and declares she does not know how to draw a square, yet she has the advanced spelling lists because she easily passes her pretests for the easier words, and her teacher was recently raving at how she helps out the other students because she is on top of everything she is supposed to be doing. However, if I tell her she is doing something incorrectly, she informs me that I am the one who is wrong. "But Mom, three plus four DOES equal nine!"
I let her write the rest of her spelling sentences all by herself. Rooster's teacher can address her lack of alliteration in whatever way she sees fit. Mommy must make her massively monstrous migraine go away now at night, night, night, night, and night. (Alliteration, it ain't, but it would at least make sense to my first grader! Oy...)
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