Wacky Wednesday

About a mile west of me, a little girl is enjoying the heck out of Wacky Wednesday. It's the last Wednesday of the nursery school year, and all of the four- and five-year-olds were encouraged to dress as wildly as they wanted. So Cleo appeared, this morning, at the top of the stairs in a pajama suit worn backwards, with a pair of pants draped across her head (the legs falling like a rabbit's ears) and held in place by a pair of princess panties. For most of a day, at least, Cleo and her classmates can thus delight in flaunting the basic rules of fashion: they can invert, as the Bakhtinian academics would have it, the natural order.

Meanwhile, about two miles northwest of me, there's an entirely dry flannel sheet, stretched across an entirely dry mattress. Which is no small deal: rather, it's another proof that Cleo is gradually putting the need for night-time diapers (or pull-ups, she would insist, with indignity) behind her. She doesn't do it every night, but when she's feeling hopeful, and has managed an evening visit to the bathroom, it's full speed ahead - and, more and more frequently, the results are wonderfully dry.

In Music 7-11: Developing Primary Teaching Skills, Sarah Hennessy thinks a bit about how children learn music - and about how adult teachers of music sometimes go through similar processes. Neither group, she argues, can learn entirely through texts, or verbal instruction. Rather, direct experience is of central value. "Making the sounds," she writes, "responding through listening and moving, and sharing ideas and feelings about the music are the ways in which we come to learn the necessary skills." And, in turn, this suggests a certain teaching style - even when the students are adults, training to become teachers in their own right. "Because of sometimes deep anxieties felt by colleagues about teaching music," Hennessy suggests, "the leader needs to be sympathetic, patient, encouraging, and not-over-critical. An atmosphere of trust is essential."

That sounds about right. A couple of years ago, when Cleo first became interested in sleeping without nighttime diapers (kids shed them at a remarkable range of ages, from 2 to... well, 7 or 8), we often told her that accidents were no big deal. Quickly, though, she embraced that philosophy a bit too actively, sometimes announcing, as we wiped her dry in the morning, that "It's not a big deal." In time, then, we shifted to a more aspirational message: wouldn't it be awesome to wake up in the morning all dry? And we waited for it to sink in: to make its way into those distant regions of the brain that control our basic, nighttime actions. And, throughout, we tried to be patient and encouraging, as Hennessy recommends - at least when within earshot of Cleo. And, finally, the student seems to be learning: to be mastering, that is, another central social norm.

Which means, happily, that on this Wednesday she could wake up wearing one dry pair of panties and then jam another, with no hesitation, onto her head, in preparation for an especially wacky day.