The other day, I found myself seated in the corner of my youngest daughter’s classroom doing what the school refers to as a “classroom observation”. My daughter attends a Montessori school that strictly adheres to Maria Montessori’s original program, meaning that independence is the touchstone of the curriculum. Loosely translated, this means that I don’t know what my child does between 9AM and 12PM everyday.
Everyday, we drop our three year old at the front gate, kiss her forehead and say good-bye. When she is not wearing her beloved clogs, she skips into the school, never looking back. Put simply: my husband and I have no idea what happens in that cinderblock townhouse in the middle of our block.
So, as I found myself in the corner observing how my child spends her days, I thought about how superfluous things such as cursive writing and penmanship have not only become but will continue to be as she continues on her path to college. I thought of this for two reasons: 1) Montessori schools teach cursive letters before block letters and 2) I was quite indignant about the fact that I was not allowed to use my iPhone to text or catch up on emails or Twitter while I was there. I know that this makes me sound like a terrible mother, but I am, after all, a mother worn thin with two children in two different schools, a book to promote and a business to run. Constant contact with the Internet is a necessity, and admittedly, I’m a little on the OCD side.
As I watched little C trace cursive, sandpaper letters, I thought of that old Verizon ad that featured a grandmother and her two teenage granddaughters texting away in their living room. When the responsible father walked in and asked what they were doing, the grandmother rolled her eyes and responded: “IDK txting w my BFF Rose”. I considered my first texting experience. Everything was all GR8 and IDK and M I going 2 C U 2nite? I prided myself on speaking a new language, on being in my 30’s and knowing “the code”. Granted, I am a dork, and no teenager would find that cool, but I did. I also considered the number of hours in the day that I spend on my iPhone or at the computer and how digitized our lives have become. If I need a dinner recipe, I cull the Epicurious app. If I want to go out for dinner, I tap into Open Table. If I need to write a blog on the go, I type it into a note on my phone and email it to myself. In the event that I dropped my phone into the toilet or it toppled from my hand on the subway track (both of which happened to my old phone), I can’t imagine what I would do. Actually, I would probably go in after it in both cases. I assume that no one ever felt this way about pens and paper. I am ensconced in a technical world, and I assume that this will only get worse for my kids.
With the advent and affordability of PDA’s, I don’t think that people are using “the code” anymore except on their Twitter accounts. We use # signs to tag things and #gf to denote gluten-free, @ to signify “Hey You”. On Urban Baby, people refer to their little girls as their DD, their boys as DS and husbands as DH, so I’m thinking that we should develop a new language for the allergy-free community. After all, I’ve always wanted to speak my very own language.
Come on, it will be fun! Send me your suggestions, it can be like a little club with our own little, allergy-free lingo.
