Through a Teacher's Eyes: Encourage their passions

I can’t get the lyrics from “Hello Goodbye,” by the Beatles, out of my head.

In part, my brief visit to Denver, Colo., to see my new grandson, Brady Michael, might explain why it keeps echoing in my brain.

Arriving at my son Robert’s new home in Littleton Thursday night and returning to Boston on Monday afternoon captured the tempo of the song and the lyrics too.

So did the repartee I engaged in from time to time with my two-year old grandson Robby whose sense of humor and love for wordplay often resembled the lyrics of this famous song. I would “say yes” and he would “say no.” I would “say stop” and he would “say go.” He made it a habit of ending his words with raised inflections.

Further, Robby’s fascination with vehicle sizes, colors, makes, models, and gas consumption, surpasses anything I could imagine. For that matter most adults and/or older children in earshot of his uncanny ability to identify every vehicle in view pause and ask, “What did I hear him say?”

Much like me, they seem amused, yet taken aback by his knowledge of what has captured his attention at this stage of his development: Ford Durangos, Astin Martins, and Toyota Tundras, just to name a few.

On Sunday evening as Robby and I took a short walk down Brittany Place, the street where he lives in Littleton, a couple nearby were coaching their two sons how to ride a tandem bike. Suddenly they overheard him naming the cars parked in their driveway. They paused and introduced themselves.

Then the mother said, “We have heard all about Robby from our teenage sons, but we don’t recognize you.” I went on and explained I was his grandmother and was visiting from Boston. She said they were all fascinated by his knowledge of cars.

Yes, Robby has come to recognize a new car from a classic and a muscle car from a “Deuce Coupe.” And when he is pushing a toy model across the floor his goal is to get it to go fast. And when he can, he likes to distinguish an accident from a collision when he sees the remnants of one or the other on the road or mimics one of his own with his matchbox cars which are, for now, amongst his favorite toys.

In some ways, Robby is self-taught. His passion for vehicles drives his knowledge base forward. The undying attention of his parents helps him learn to recognize the letters that help him read the names of the vehicles he knows. This ability can be adapted to much more than playing with toys and, in time, will lend itself to broader areas of expertise that will serve him well if, and when, his passion for vehicles wanes.

My son and his wife maintain strict rules at their home. Among them is that there is no television viewing unless both children are asleep in bed. This rule explains why I did not get to see Target’s “Hello Good Buy” commercial until Saturday night, although Colorado schools opened last week.

A spin off the Beatles’ classic song, Target’s new back-to-school ad makes clever use of wordplay, yet it haunts me still. The message, “buy, buy, buy,” exploits parents. It insinuates that there is a correlation between buying goods for school and performing well. Yet, most of us know that learning amounts to more than what parents spend.

Target’s ad, coupled with my visit, with my grandsons, reminds me of the story that Mary Louise Pratt told her audience about her son’s education when she delivered the keynote address at the Modern Language Association Literacy Conference in 1990. A literacy expert, Pratt began first to speak as a parent and described how literacy began for her son Sam. She said it began with baseball cards. From them he learned phonics, history, geography, mathematics and, eventually economics.

So, if you are a parent and might even be getting ready to send your child to school, do not overlook his passion; help him to use it as a vehicle to develop literacy and to expand his learning base.

It will pay greater dividends than the purchases made because of ads run by stores like Target, which try to get parents and kids to believe that they need a new one of everything if they are going to do well in school. Whenever you can, encourage your child to develop his passion; in the end it will enhance his ability to learn.

Westwood resident Carol Ziemian teaches writing at Northeastern University. Her column appears in the Daily News Transcript on Wednesday. She can be reached at YankeePenn@aol.com.