Today after a walk on the beach, a good lunch, and some painting, Ella filled a page with lower case gs. Well, she didn’t exactly fill the page. She wrote 36 of them. 2 were upside down. She just couldn’t finish that last line. Repetition isn’t for everyone. Practicing a skill over and over again is not something our household is very good at. We like to take the uncharted path, constantly optimizing, always searching. Part of the challenge of these lessons is to come up with activities that are novel and interesting but still building the skills she needs to move on. Ella likes a healthy mix of the familiar alongside new information and it’s hard to know the recipe that will keep her engaged. Simply doing this practice every day (almost) is an amazing challenge for both of us. We are both hanging in there – some lessons are short but we show up every time.

Though our life in the suburbs of Boston tends to be quite steady and safe, Ella has grown to be very good at managing lots of different kinds of people. She is continuously exposed to the very young and the very old, different languages, different economic and social strata, different levels of hygiene, different political views, etc… For example, last night we had dinner at the olive yard farm house with a representatives from around the world. There was the couple from Germany and their local Italian friends (all met while both working in South Africa tweny years ago). There was my father in law’s longtime Moroccan (and devout Muslim) house-keeper and her cousin’s family visiting from Paris. The three kids didn’t speak a word of English or Italian but Ella played with them all night without a hitch. She was generous, helpful, flexible, and happy. There was also our British/German au pair alongside us – an Italian-American couple from the Boston area. All inside the walls of our Sicilian farmhouse eating arancini, cudduruni, watermelon, and beer.

Sicily has been a cross-roads for many races, cultures, and dominating classes forever, most notably African and Arab countries. In recent years, Arab and African immigrants have been pouring in on rickety wooden boats in the 1000s. It’s a humanitarian disaster as most don’t make the trip and Sicilian fishermen have been pulling up many kilos of human skeletons in their nets.

The mix of cultures is evidenced in the Sicilian dialect, the food, and the religious practice. My husband’s family name, Taibi, means ‘good’ in Arabic. There is cous cous in Trapani. The famous Sicilian cassata dessert is Arabic in origin. The patron Saint of nearby Agrigento, San Calogero, is black. Sicilians have to be tolerant to survive. Diversity is an artform here that is expressed in the food, the fabric of everyday life, and hardship of both citizens and non-citizens alike. There are many that could learn a lot about tolerance and diplomacy by spending a few weeks eating with Ella at our table.

Distractions/Tangents:

· Alex Linder wikipedia biobraphy - the owner and operator of the Vanguard News Network (VNN), an antisemitic, white supremacist website

· Cudduruni Recipe

· Photo of San Calogero

“A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don’t need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero? But they will live for ever because - living seeds - they had the luck to find a fruitful soil, an imagination which knew how to grow them and feed them, so that they will live for ever.” (Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921)

Today Ella wanted to start the lesson with her writing down all the words she knows. She wrote ‘Ella’ and ‘cat’. Then she asked how to spell my name, ‘Nita’. Then I suggested she pick another of the words we’ve been working on. She picked ‘pat’ then ‘tap’. Next she wanted to write ‘papa’ and asked how it was spelled – that was hard to explain because the ‘a’ in ‘papa’ is not like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’. She ended with ‘rat’. She drew the ‘R’ so that “the tail curls up and touches its nose”. She ended with a drawing of a cat. This process took 30 minutes in itself. 7 words. It was exciting that she was proactive in choosing an activity but it is very difficult for her to write letters, words and numbers. She must first think of the right letter. Then she slowly and painstakingly pushes the pencil in a shape that approximates the letter. She prefers capitals over lowercase. Her letters are big. She likes to add curly cues and flourishes to give the letters meaning she can hang onto, I think.

The interesting thing is that she loves to draw pictures and is amazingly inventive in designing and producing objects. Yesterday she made a “Felicity (a historical character from colonial Virginia) hat” out of paper with drawn flowers, bright color choices and ingenious chin strap – all by herself with no intervention. But write words? She’d rather eat onions.

Who needs to write anyway? I’ve never seen a word my grandfather wrote. I’m not sure he ever did. He managed to immigrate to the US from Sicily and carve out a life and a family during the depression and a few recessions. Pa in The Little House on the Prairie series doesn’t know how to write (we read the Little House books every bedtime) and he managed to survive the harshest of pioneer life rather well. I’m sure Ella would have even better examples of why she doesn’t need to learn how to write.

If she lived in Sicily year round she would be in good company. Education here is abysmal. 40% of Sicilians leave high school before graduation. Literacy is shockingly low and the results are felt in politics. The leaders that are voted in based on popularity and back door deals scandalize the region with the blessings of the populace. Bookstores are hard to find and the graffiti is often misspelled.

Yet writing is one of those miracles of the human mind that gives us love letters, signatures, grocery lists, and Luigi Pirandello’s novels. Pirandello was born just a few miles from where I write. Ella can do it. She needs more practice and her own laptop as soon as possible.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Pirandello’s biography on Italian Wikipedia
• PBS special  - Misunderstoodminds
• A compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today.
• Education in Sicily by Maria Luisa Romano

Today we played the sticker board game where we throw the dice, move a number of spots and read a 3-letter word. There are about 35 stickers on the board. Ella made the board during our first lesson by placing stickers of her choice following a curved line across a piece of paper that I drew. She didn’t want to work today and tried everything to get it done faster. One way to do this is to cheat. Our reading mentor and guide, the person that laid out our summer plans for us, says cheating is ok. Kids do that. Ella needs to feel accomplished, powerful and self-directed. She needs “constant, visible success.” Ok, so I let her win most of the time, and sometimes she gets to re-throw the dice to get to a spot that provides a short-cut to the end of the game (Ella’s idea). But it bothers me. It’s really hard for me to let her do this. As a person always concerned with fairness, justice and equity, it’s hard not to lecture her every time on the virtues of playing fair. But I’ve been letting it go and considering how happy it makes Ella to win I can see the results. And somehow it’s helping her handle losing better. It’s interesting in the same way that focusing on just ‘a’ words (cat, bat, sat, map, dad, etc) is helping Ella learn all her consonants really well so that she can move to other vowels more easily.

Ella is also concerned with equity and fairness – perhaps this is an obsession of all 6 year olds and siblings. She is constantly watching closely for how many gazes are directed at her sister’s blue eyes or if so and so get’s a present, why not her… However, yesterday she really did get hit with a shower of unfairness.

Two days ago, Signor Frenna brought Ella her fourth summer bunny. She loves the Frenna’s. They are farmers and wine makers, they all hold day jobs (most farmers here do), they work HARD, and they always smile. The bunny was quickly named Bella and Ella was a master in patiently waiting for the bunny to come out of its box slowly without scaring it. She prepared the food and made a little picture to go on the box. She was in love. Since last year’s too small baby bunny disappeared unexpectedly (we left her in the yard as cat food) we promised this year to keep the bunny locked in a room during the night. Alas, I couldn’t get that thing back in the box and thought one night would be fine. It’s bigger than last year’s bunny and still learning about its new vacation home.

This morning, Ella woke quickly and ran down to search for Bella, prepare her breakfast, and attempt a cuddle. No bunny. We searched behind every bush in the enclosed garden. NO bunny. Turns out Bella ended up in a dead heap next door. We have no idea what happened - maybe a cat, maybe it ate something. Ella thinks it escaped – that same fate as Zayda last year. She was crushed. She has a special ability to connect with animals and I believe she actually needs to be near them. All morning the tears came and the refrain, “it’s not fair, its not fair.”

How do I explain to her the unfairness that follows the North African beach seller who rests on the pavement outside our wall every mid-day to get out of the sun after spending hours walking up and down the beach to sell plastic trinkets for nothing. Or the unfairness that the hardworking, pretty, young housecleaner experiences when she has to go the church to pick up cheese and milk give-aways. Or the unfairness that this region’s economic desperation will lead it to being the only Italian community that has allowed a liquefied gas plant to be built along the once beautiful beach. Yet another environmental disaster to follow eventually. It’s not fair.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Bloomberg news about Porto Empedocle’s plans to build liquified gas plant at the port.
• Liquefied_natural_gas - Safety_and_accidents

It’s fascinating to watch Ella circle around the challenge before her. Rather than write the next letter, she will choose a complicated method of holding up the paper to the window with the letter card behind and attempt to trace it. Or she’ll decide the edge of the paper needs to be trimmed and then another piece of paper taped on in order to mark which activities we complete. The second piece of paper needs to be a copy of the pencil drawing of the dolphin she did earlier. Of course the copier is not plugged in so that is another several minutes of explaining why its not working and why we are not going to plug it in RIGHT NOW. And so on.

For me conversations in Sicily are like this about everything. About what to eat for dinner, when to eat, how many cherry tomatoes go in the salad, how should they be cut, when should we go to the pool, who is going, should we wait for so and so or go now. Everything is a complicated group discussion in a language I only partially understand.

Ella looked through a small, paperback Italian/English dictionary today and said, “This looks like scribbles.” Looking at that density of tiny letters must dizzying for her.

But you should see her dance.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Kinesthetic Intelligence

In 1933, Albert Einstein is quoted, “Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.”

It pains me to watch Ella desperately compare herself to others. Whether its around which silly bands she owns, how high she can (or can’t) climb a tree, or staring at the every move of the older kids as the ‘hang out’ on the street here in Sicily. She needs to connect to the world through external means as she does not feel an easy connection internally. I get it. I remember worrying about this myself when I was a kid. I was never naturally comfortable around too many people and always suffered at my slow and inaccurate memory of TV show theme songs or other trendy bits of knowledge. I felt the lack of my conformity to my peers.

However I came to revel in being a bit weird. I found my strength in that. I want Ella to celebrate her differences.

This morning she chose to buy a red dress just like mommy. There were other worthy choices available but she could not be swayed away from the red one. It’s a cute dress, just a bit too big. She remembered picking out my dress for me last year and wanted to pick this one for her. Bonding with mommy is not the same as conforming but it does trigger my worry for future peer pressure. In Sicily, few act alone. No one goes to the movies or a restaurant alone. It’s communal thinking all the time.  Vestiges of Fascism come out it many ways in Southern Italy. Folks are extremely judgemental, suspicious of liberal ideas, and, in general, afraid to rock the boat. In the US, too many years emphasizing standardized testing and rote memorization isn’t helping our personal mission. We will teach Ella to listen to herself and not follow the crowd. Let’s hope the American school system gets the memo on this matter asap.

Eventually we did get to our daily lesson today. It started off very rough. She was tired, thirsty and hungry. She couldn’t concentrate and couldn’t tell the difference between the J, U and Y in July. But I used our bonding experience of the morning to smooth over her mood. We took a picture of our matching dresses and talked about the new bicycle waiting for her downstairs if only she could get through a bit of work.

She did it. We only lasted 30 minutes but she did it. And she couldn’t help but turn the S into a Teddy Bear Fairy.I think she felt accomplished afterward. I was exhausted.

Distraction/Tangent:

• The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek

Ella is incredibly detailed-oriented in her desires. This is a wonderful trait for a scientist, engineer, surgeon, or chef. For a 6 year old it can be rough. For lunch, she wanted her peach dipped in wine cut a particular way that none of us could interpret. This caused anger, mean words, jealousy, and eventually no peach was consumed. She’d rather give up that incredible taste experience than have to compromise. One thing led to another and eventually she dangerously slammed her leg into a glass door and nearly broke it. I was furious – I cancelled are impending lesson that she was actually looking forward too. She wouldn’t have been able to work anyway.

I have rarely ever done anything every day/week/month with discipline. Here in Sicily, I have noticed the woman in the home behind ours do exactly the same thing every day for years. She closes all her shades at a certain time in the morning, she sets the table on the porch for lunch and dinner at the same time, waters and moves the plants from here to there at the same time, sweeps the floor, argues with her husband, then her daughter, then her grandson at the same time every evening. They always end the night with cards – sometimes just her and her husband, sometimes with the daughter, sometimes several play, but always cards. It’s amazing. You can set your clock to it. Whenever we are here she is there. It seems she never leaves that apartment. It’s an amazing discipline that almost approaches some sort of enlightenment. Sometimes I wish I could be happy with myself, in this moment, doing what needs to be done to get through to the next day, nothing more or less, with no desires or complaints, or wishes. Is the enlightened mother one that smiles blankly into space but is always there, always patient, always giving, always cooking? Is short-term thinking actually the most sustainable in the long-term?

Wait… the heat is frying my brain. One of the problems with Sicily is that too many folks get through the day focused on the housework, the food and the fashion. Corruption, bad planning and lack of attention is allowed to overpower the society. Wanting it one’s own way is the stuff of life! Having an opinion, having desires and ideas, suggesting improvements, dissatisfaction with the status quo – YES! Go Ella! – you can have the peach the way you want it. But you just can’t slam the window to bits to get it.

Ella is learning to discipline her emotions and her attention. From Ella, I am learning how to adjust to new information. Instead of our daily practice, we went for a boat ride.

Distractions/Tangents:
Mike Robbins on Being Flexible

I watch two ultra-thin beautiful Sicilian 20 somethings exit a beach bar. Boy hands cigarette to girl, drops empty carton on the street and says, “hai ragione. hai ragione….” (you are right, you are right). He was upset - perhaps they had gotten into an argument with someone in the bar, or she had pointed out something offensive in his behavior - who knows? What i noticed was the cigarette carton on the ground as he said “hai ragione.” She didn’t pick it up either. These two are apparently concerned with what’s ‘right’ but have no sense that that littering or smoking might be a little wrong. Who is actually right?

Today Ella and I continued with our second lesson.  She did everything i asked of her. We played a sticker board game (she made the board according to her design, fairy garden theme, called Sunny Day) in which she had to read 3 letter words. She won again. She matched 3 sounds to the right letter and then traced the letters in rainbow colors. Then spelled 4 words and wrote them down correctly in boxes. We ended with some numbers - we threw the dotted dice and she had to identify the number then right them down.  She reversed a few numbers, and got stuck on 8 but other than that she did it all ‘right’.  We worked for 40 minutes, not a complaint.

Ella loves being in Sicily. When we ask her why she says its because she gets to do whatever she wants. I think that is what Sicilians like about Sicily. There is a certain amount of carelessness that goes with the culture. The biggest symbol of this is the littering. it’s everywhere. It drives me crazy. It stresses me out.  There is a lack of accountability.  Accountability is one of the many things that we try to instill in our children constantly. And I’m sure this drives them crazy.

As I work with Ella and we try to reshape her brain to make sense of words, I wonder how this re-shaping will subdue that part of her that wants to do whatever she wants. is that the right thing to do?

What she really wants to do is turn that pencil into an arrow and shoot it across the room, or figure out how to get a movie into the paper of the gameboard, or figure out how to use up all her lesson time to make a beautiful picture of a fairy forest without actually doing the hard work of reading and writing.  I love that her brain thinks like that.

Distractions/Tangents:

Models in Sicilian Garbage -  Aziza Munnizza - TGR Nazionale

Today we started our reading/writing lessons in Sicily. It wasn’t as frustrating as I expected but it wasn’t easy either. I’m working really hard not to lose my patience, have too high expectations, or rush through it. I have to actively stop my knee from shaking i’m strung so tight. You have to have the patience of a turtle to do this. She did a great job.

1.  first, we played the sticker game: she choose 25 or 30 stickers and lays them down on paper, then we roll the dice, read a word, and move through the board. whoever gets to the end first wins. Ella won.

2. then she practiced writing – this is the hardest thing for her. I said a 3 letter word, she found the letters from a bunch of choices on the table and then had to write them (lower case) in boxes on paper. she wants to use all capital letters. but she was a trooper and re-wrote ’sad’ again in lower case at my request.

3. then i flashed several letter cards and she had to say what the letter was, how it sounds, and what word goes with it. she wasn’t too into this so we stopped quickly.

4. next I asked her what makes the sound of r, s and a and she then traced the letter and then made rainbow colored traces of each one.

5. for a bonus activity I asked her to identify the numbers on a dice 1 – 6.  she did this pretty fast. i need one that goes to 10.

For the first real session it was a good one I think. We didn’t get upset with each other and she moved through everything successfully. We were alone, Gaia was with Papa at the pool and we had the AC running.  The bait was that she could choose an activity or project afterward. She wants to color beach sand with food coloring. I can do that. If we can keep this up I think we’ll make real progress.  I love her so much.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Teaching patience in an impatient world

Seems we’ve given our daughter many elusive gifts - visual thinking, extreme sensitivity, impatience, empathy, the ability to day-dream, and perceptiveness. She’s amazingly smart, superbly verbal, independently creative, and is currently learning how to read in her own special way. She shares all the above with Leanardo Da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Agatha Christie.

I have entered another stage in the labor of parenting that was invisible to me before now. How can I help my daughter see the hidden words on the page so that she can grab onto the knowledge, poetry and ideas held inside the written word?

My summer project is to tutor my own child towards reading. We are doing this daily while in Sicily - surrounded by 100 degree days, beach-goers, the best peaches in the world, sweet cherries, fresh fish, and a culture bursting with distraction and fascinating tangents.

I’ve decided to include my musings here on VisibleLabor.com because I see that my own hormonal swings, artistic yearnings, and mothering duties braid together a demonstration of the concepts we seek to explore.

Thank you for reading.

Nita
Porto Empedocle, Italy
July 2010

Distractions/Tangents:

• Born to Explore
• TIME Magazine: Overcoming Dyslexia

even if it IT a bad movie - folks spend MILLIONS on crappy horror films. But present the topic of motherhood. nobody wants to talk about it.

It points to the complete lack of appreciation of the essence of humanity.