Why be a Perfectionist?

At school, my 5 year old gets tested on the spellings of 10 new words each week. The list of those 10 words is published upfront; and so parents have to make the kid practice and learn them during the course of the week.

The first week, she got all of them right; an “Excellent!” and 2 stars from the teacher; and applause from the class (the applause was for all the kids who got all 10 words right). Boy, was she proud and happy!

As we worked on the words for Week #2, by Day 5, I was irritated that she was always confused about the spelling of “parents” (is it “pa” or “pae”?). Upon which she snapped and we had this very amusing conversation:
She: “So you want me to get all 1o right all the time, is it?”
Me: “Yes, that is exactly what I want.”
She: “Why? Even if I get 9 of them right, my teacher will still give me a star.”
As Hobbes once told Calvin, she had me “wriggling in the crushing grip of reason”.

Anyways, I stuck to my guns, and by the day of the test, it looked she just might get “parents” right after all, the key word being “might”. Guess what happened in the test?

She got all 10 spellings right, but forgot to cross the “t” in the dreaded word, “parents”. That’s a mistake, even if not one in spelling. And so the teacher gave her a “V.good!” and a single star, just like my daughter had said:

This incident led me to understand the origin of that phrase “to cross the t’s and dot the i’s”: it’s because of cursive writing! With cursive writing, a kid needs to finishes writing the entire word and then look back to decide which letters to cross and which ones to dot. Yet another thing to train the kid on (sigh)…

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