Like A Sponge

At age four, like a sponge, Mickey soaks in all the letters of the alphabet, the numbers to one hundred, colors, shapes and even beginning social skills. It is her first experience with preschool and I am amazed at how much she can learn. At age six, she can read a book. No longer is my Christmas list safe in my desk drawer. Like a sponge, at age eleven she learns the names of all the states and their capitals. At age twelve, about the world – the history of Egypt, Greece and Rome. This year at age thirteen, like a sponge, her brain sorts and stores information about the branches of the government, the election process; along with cells, vertebrates, and animal kingdoms, circle graphs and percents.

In my second trip around parenting, this time I am much more in awe of the learning process and how much my daughter really wants to learn (even if she doesn’t admit it). I realize now that the people she spends more time with than her parents indeed shape and mold her mind with every little speck of information they throw at her. They are a very important part of her life, because they are teaching her things that I can’t, things that she will someday pull from the catacombs of her mind for retrieval when her daughter asks her, “Mom, what does biological diversity mean?”

Like her mother, she probably won’t remember exactly, but she will know how to figure out the answer, and like a sponge, her daughter will soak it all in.

Kudos to all the teachers of our children.