Olivia and I were doing a page in her usual weekly homework packet last week. There are often several problems or tasks that she has to work through on each page.
We got to one task that said, “Draw a three-sided shape.”
I read it to Olivia. She looked at me like I’d spoken Swahili.
I read it again, still speaking plain English.
This time, she blinked at me and narrowed her eyes. Apparently, this time her brain translated my words into French and couldn’t translate them back to English.
I finally just said, “Draw a triangle.”
She put the pencil on the page and drew…I don’t even know.
It was weird but definitely not a triangle. I asked her, “Why are you drawing a quadrangle?”
I made her erase the shape she’d drawn and told her to try again.
She announced quite stiffly, “I can’t!”
I sighed. “Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t!” she insisted.
I took a deep breath and told her, “You can totally draw a triangle. You’ve done it a million times.”
She looked startled. “A triangle? I thought you wanted me to draw a trapezoid.”
And once I looked at the original shape she'd drawn, I saw that it was indeed a crude trapezoid.
I laughed and asked, “A trapezoid?!? When did I tell you to draw a trapezoid? The instructions say to draw a three-sided shape. That’s a triangle!”
She laughed too and drew a perfectly lovely triangle.
I guess her brain translated triangle into trapezoid when it heard French and tried to translate back into English.
A mom, a dad and two daughters. We're living ordinary lives with a twist of 5p- (Cri du Chat) for spice. But we're about so much more than our younger daughter's genetic diagnosis.
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