Out of the pens of babes
Published July 31st, 2008 in Mostly a picture, Re: the lil' monkey, Visual aids.
My first thought was: Should I be worried? A friend who’s a mental health professional says, No. Says I should be more worried if she’s drawing faces with no mouth, or no eyes, etc. Weelllllll, okay, I says, marginally convinced.
I put it to the lil’ monkey.
Baba: Wow, sweetie, that’s quite a drawing. Can you tell me what you see here?
Punky monkey: You tell me. [Where the hell does she get that, little smartass. Ooop! Moi.]
B: They look sad to me. Or angry. How did you feel when you were drawing this? Were you upset?
M: No. This one is silly [points to upper left one, sans eyebrows]. The rest of them are angry.
B: So these are angry people.
M: Yep. Silly, angry people.
Lesbian Dad is written by a parent who answers to the name "Baba" and works toward a world in which amor does indeed vincit omnia. 
Um, *cough* time for me to fess up. I think I’m the one to blame for the frowny eyebrows. Last week we were drawing all kinds of characters from her storybooks (or trying to!) and I drew Pierre (of “I don’t care” fame) with frowny eyebrows and a downturned mouth. Then, just to ram the lesson home, I drew lots of different faces with different expressions, and we named them all…
I suppose (in hindsight) I should have realized she was recording every second of it to play back later in order to totally freak you out! (I usually just try to get her to freak you out by teaching her large and conceptually complex vocabulary words!)
All I can say in my own defense is that’s what you get when you leave your kids in the hands of sketchy characters.
“Silly, angry people”…the little known alternative refrain to Holly Near’s “Singing for Our Lives”.
Annz, d’oh! Sketchy indeed! How very nice, though, to be able to re-route my immediate assumption that All Was Lost and her genius was indeed of the Disturbed variety. Now back to trying to conjure up some pun to whack you back with.
Vikki, “…and we are frowning, grumping all our liiiiiives.” Mmmm, still needs some work.
what hits me here is the symmetry of the lines of the eyebrows and mouth.
oh, and of course the thing that’s really gonna come to haunt you, i imagine:
the response “you tell me”. !!!!
i just discovered that one myself. a great tool.
Every teacher’s friend. “What do you think is the answer to that question?” Works for everything: stuff you know the answer to, and stuff you don’t. Either way the learning process continues to churn forward. And you’re off the hook and they’re on it. Which is how things should be in a classroom, at least in my (frequently not so) humble opinion.
Ok, first your friend annz is very amusing and reminds me of my friends. When they are around my son, they are such instigators and then wonder why he gets cranky at the end of the day. They also forget how much kids absorb. I think it is a cute picture. I think kids just do things out of spite to get a reaction. My son had drawn a picture of me and my parents and when he got mad at grandpa, he walked over and scribbled him out of the picture. Just another way to see what you will do.
Instead of Holly Near, I now have R.E.M. playing in my head…”Silly, angry people holding hands….”