(Submitted on February 28, 2017)
Before I sat down to write this story I gave myself a test. I took a piece of paper and a pair of scissors and tried to cut a circle. The end result was the roughest-looking wonky eye shape that you could imagine. My scissor skills have not improved with age, and I will always be an adult who can’t cut. Nor can I tie shoelaces properly, or fix stuck zippers, or negotiate combination locks, or perform any number of other “non-verbal” tasks requiring hand-eye coordination. But let’s stick with scissors for now because this isn’t about coming up with a laundry list of my flaws and it was a lack of cutting skills that caused me one of the most frustrating years of my life – the year my parents remember as the one I almost failed kindergarten.
It was 1996 and I launched into kindergarten in a happy, even great, mood. I had had a fantastic year of pre-kindergarten, being coddled and nurtured by Mrs. Cecile Legaspi, a woman who was genuinely kind and unquestionably understood me. She indulged my desire to read incessantly, did not get mad when I corrected other students’ spelling, and sympathized with all of my foibles (of which there were many, even at the age of four). She gave me confidence that I had something to offer. I was full of hope, until I ran into Mrs. Karen Elliott.
By all accounts, Mrs. Elliott was a first-rate kindergarten teacher and she was well loved by both children and their parents. I recall her as having a soft voice and a calm demeanor but, to me, underneath that gentle Midwestern façade was a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a woman of steel; a woman who was determined that I would meet her expectations for a kindergartner. And it turns out that there are many items on the checklist for what makes an acceptable kindergartner and most of these items required skills that I did not possess. First and foremost on this list was, apparently, cutting with scissors.
I had pictured kindergarten as consisting of hours playing happily, if clumsily, at the incredible Lego building station which was shared by our “cluster” of classes. Oh, how my eyes had lit up when I’d first seen that Lego collection! I’d figured on spending the rest of my time in the “reading nook” choosing chapter books from a large, rotating stand that most of the other kids ignored. It appeared that those books were all for me.
What I hadn’t pictured was hours upon hours spent doing tedious craft projects, cutting, gluing, shaping pipe cleaners into people or animals, fixing googly eyes to Halloween decorations or painting Christmas ornaments. Every project seemed to be a bigger, more daunting challenge than the one before. And all of them, at some point, required the use of scissors. And I simply could not cut.
My reaction to these projects – one that from my point of view was totally reasonable – was to get up and remove myself from the stress of it all by heading to the Lego table or the reading nook. And then I’d hear the gentle, but insistent, voice of Mrs. Elliott “suggesting” that I return to my work desk immediately and continue with whatever project was being worked on. As much as Mrs. Legaspi “got me”, Mrs. Elliott did not, or did not want to, or maybe felt that she had a higher calling – that being to complete her instruction in the use of scissors.
My parents were unaware of my frequent run-ins with Mrs. Elliott. No notes were sent home. There were no phone calls. Their help was never enlisted. It appears that my teacher felt that it was her job alone to drill into me the finer skills of craft-making. Thus, my mother was quite unprepared for the mid-year parent-teacher conference. She trotted off happily, hoping to hear that her son was doing just fine. After all, this was kindergarten. And he could read and spell and do arithmetic.
Yet somehow Mrs. Elliott almost reduced the poor woman to tears with her criticism of my scissor skills.
My mother has always said that not a single mention was made of the fact that I was reading at what was probably a third or fourth-grade level. To digress a little, I must admit that I was a precocious reader. Quick story – when I was barely two years old and living in New York, I would read out the names on the manufacturer labels of apartment building air conditioning units from my stroller as my parents and I passed by. It was a slightly strange thing to do, but I’ve mentioned that I have foibles. My precociousness did not really extend beyond reading. And it certainly did not extend to any non-verbal skills such as scissor cutting, an ability that I never developed, even with the constant prodding of Mrs. Elliott.
At any rate, back to the parent-teacher conference, where zero mention was made of my reading skills, and the entire time was allocated to discussing the inadequacy of my craft-making and cutting expertise. At one point my mother, searching for a little affirmation, interjected “But he can read well, can’t he?” A stony-faced Mrs. Elliott, however, immediately circled back to further condemnation of my capacity to cut, glue, and paint.
My parents purchased home arts and crafts kits (we probably still have reams of construction paper and thousands of unused Popsicle sticks stored someplace), but to no avail. Any attempts at piquing my interest or developing my skills proved futile. Thankfully, I was allowed to move on in school, and as years progressed there was less need to produce and use scissors in class.
As it turns out, Mrs. Elliott had tapped into a real, and important issue in my life. My inability to cut with scissors was found to be symptomatic of a person with a non-verbal learning disorder. What she did not realize was that neither encouragement nor threat of punishment was ever going to make much difference in my mastery of non-verbal skills. My non-verbal inadequacies have caused me a lot of anxiety and heartache over the years. That I still can’t cut with scissors doesn’t matter in the scheme of life, but the wider problem that it represents will be with me forever.
Manhattan Dreaming 