Coloring inside the lines

Transferred from myspace. Originally posted April 17, 2007

My son's preschool has started sending home homework recently. Yes, preschool. Yes, homework. It's pretty simple stuff (mostly coloring certain letters different colors and writing one capital and one lower case letter) and he loves to do it, so I don't mind, other than, well, he's 4 and it seems awfully young for homework. He's so proud of himself every night after he's finished and has written his "F" and "f" and colored the picture of a fish or whatever that days letter happens to be, that I go along with it and tell him he's a genius (which secretly, I think he might be, but then again, I am his mom, so I could be the tiniest bit biased). He gets his homework back at the end of every day with a "Good Job" and a sticker on it, which is really the big payoff, but one day about 2 weeks ago, I got a small note attached to his homework that read: Mom, he really needs to work on staying inside the lines. At first I thought, yeah, he does, and we worked very hard on coloring inside the lines, despite the fact that this made homework far less fun and much more like, well, homework. I watched him every night, small pink tongue poking out slightly between pursed lips, firece concentration on his face, and a fat crayon clutched ever so tightly in his little hand, and thought, Why? He's only 4, why does he have to color inside the lines? Coloring inside the lines was frustrating for him and heartbreaking for me to watch as I could see the look of disappointment cross his face every time he went over one of those sacred lines. I finally decided I'd had enough; he'd had enough. Damn the lines, damn the teachers, grab those crayons and go wild! He has the rest of his life to worry about staying inside the lines, so why shouldn't I let him be a kid now and color wherever he wants (within reason of course, I am NOT about scrubbing crayon from walls, though he's never even attempted it)? The first day we took his homework in with colors here and there, and bleeding into each other, I attached a note to it for the teacher that read: I know he's colored outside the lines and I'm cool with it. He's very proud of his work. Think of it as impressionism ~Mom