When Oscar was Bullied

“Go back to bed,” Marty said before leaving for the studio yesterday. I tried but instead broke out the Throat Coat, hoping that might help. First cold of the season and I’m pissed.

I don’t like Throat Coat, it’s so sweet. And it didn’t help.

More money more money money spent on homeschooling materials but this looks like it may be good. Signed up for Cosmeo powered by the Discovery Channel which gives access to (they say) over 30,000 educational video clips. 30 day free trial, good for seeing how H.o.p. likes it and if I’ll find it useful. $100 for 12 months if you decide to stick with it and pay in a lump sum.

Checked out several science and math videos that could supplement what we’re now doing. We were going to be reading on Sumer today so I looked up what they had on Sumer and there was a 20 minute video on life in Mesopotamia that turned out to be very effective. As H.o.p. sat and watched it with me, every couple of minutes he would ask, “What’s that?” or “Did they have such-and-such?” and within a couple of minutes, or even in the next sentence, the video would be addressing the question he’d just asked. So, a well thought out presentation. After watching we went to our book and everything in it had already been covered except for some extra information on the gods.

H.o.p. of course wanted to see the science and health section. We made some virtual volcanoes and then I selected a video on fear of failure because H.o.p. hates getting things wrong. He was fine with it until toward the middle and then started to get mad at it, knowing the psychology. “I know what they’re going to do,” he said, pissed. “They’re going to have her make a mistake but say because she tried everything’s OK.” I said probably but let’s wait a minute and see. We watched the rest and of course this is what happened and H.o.p. slapped the chair and said angriliy, “See, I told you that’s what would happen! She made a mistake but everyone says it’s OK.” I told him what I tell him every day, that it *is* OK, and he responded by bringing up an ages old event that happened on the playground, when a child had bullied him and hit Oscar, his stuffed dinosaur.

This happened three years ago but it had a powerful effect on him and out of the blue he’ll still sometimes bring it up, it being the first instance he can probably recall where he was bullied, though it had indeed happened before.

Now, the story does not overtly have anything to do with fear of failure. No, the way the story relates, I think, is that not everyone does respond kindly and considerately to people who are different and in most cases people who are different from you are instantly regarded as failures in some respect, most notably in that they are not like what you think they should be like, which is occasionally, over the yars, the problem on the playground with H.o.p. and his long hair and his being in general a different kind of kid–he’s accused of having too much hair and too much imagination. Now, I’m not going to blame a child who I figure simply doesn’t know any better, and though I tell H.o.p. no it’s not right when this happens (just as I wouldn’t want him doing ianything like this), I also remind him that these are kids like him and young and limited in experience and don’t know any better. But H.o.p.’s not dumb. He knows the difference between what I tell him (it’s ok to get things wrong, it’s all part of learning), what videos like this tell him (it’s ok to get things wrong, it’s all part of learning), and what goes on in society. Kids ostracize and make fun and H.o.p. knows this about society and you can’t blame inexperienced kids but fact is many of them will retain the same talents as aduts. And for some reason, though I’ve brought H.o.p. up to not worry about failure, taught him that everyone experiences failure, taught him that you learn through experimenting and that not getting things right comes with learning new things (which he’s fine with when it comes to art), he still has problems with this. And if a child hurts him he remembers it. Doesn’t mean he won’t get along with that child in the future, but he remembers being stung. And if he does his math or spelling wrong he hates that he didn’t get it right and doesn’t want to do it any more. He’s getting a lot better about it though, else we wouldn’t be into our third week of doing the AVKO spelling program (which he wasn’t ready for last year but is this), but to get through it daily I have to come up with elaborate story settings for each word and that takes some time as usually H.o.p. is not satisfied with my first story and thinks of numerous ways to modify and make it a better story.

Though Oscar was bullied three years ago, I felt I shouldn’t let it drop this morning but explore it again. H.o.p. said he wasn’t upset about it but Oscar still was because it had hurt his eye. I got Oscar and we had a conversation with Oscar about this and how we could fix Oscar’s eye. H.o.p. said glasses but I wasn’t willing to give up my glasses to Oscar. So I got a pair of H.o.p.’s sunglasses, at which point H.o.p. said instead maybe contacts because those were his robot sunglasses and not real eyeglasses. I started to do pretend contacts, silly me, and H.o.p. stopped me because they were pretend. No, Oscar needed real contacts. I said no, I couldn’t afford them. So he decided laser surgery would do the trick. Fortunately his robot sunglasses flash a little red beam and he fixed Oscar’s eyes with the little red laser beam (he learned about laser eye surgery at Brainpop of course) and Oscar was happy and H.o.p. was happy and we went on to do some math, which H.o.p. enjoyed today because he’s liking a very simple counting board I made up for him, a very basic one I developed for him that I thought he would like, and he does, which I thought we’d use for a couple of weeks prepping him for moving over to a real abacus.

Hum de dum dum. Anyway, that’s about all I’m doing right now. School, school and more school. If I’m not doing school with H.o.p. then I’m planning things out. And spending a lot of time watching animations with him because we break up the schooling with watching animations and talking about them.

Now I’m going to go eat some more vitamins.

Oh, I did experience something totally new today. I’ve never ever before had a dish towel catch on fire when using one to take a pan out of the oven but there’s a first for everything. After I put down the pan I realized I was holding smoke and not just smoke but flame in the palm of my hand. In two seconds the pan burned a nice two inch hole in the towel where my hand was holding it. Lucky I wasn’t burned. I guess from now on I only use the insulated gloves.


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