November 15th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole

Yes­ter­day I had to spend a couple hours work­ing with Sierra on her home­work. Her math assign­ment was a few dozen long divi­sion prob­lems of the 35,343/19 vari­ety. She had taken a stab at them, but gotten frus­trated. I was wor­ried because I’m a lousy teacher: I just can’t seem to grasp that other people don’t know the things I know.

But after going over a couple prob­lems, Sierra jumped back into her work and started asking me to check them as she got done. And wouldn’t you know, she got the hang of it! She got better and faster as we went along, and all it took from me was a little encour­age­ment. I am so proud of her.

Today, Sierra’s turn­ing 11. We got her a snazzy new com­puter, a printer/scanner, and some soft­ware. The com­puter comes with a built-​in dic­tio­nary, an ency­clo­pe­dia, a camera, wire­less every­thing and all the toys a little girl could want. She’s been want­ing a printer of her own for a while – I get the feel­ing that she’ll be spend­ing her allowance on ink from now on.

We had told Sierra that she’d get a new com­puter if she made the honor roll this term. But report cards don’t come out until Friday, and we real­ized that giving her a com­puter on the con­di­tion that she doesn’t need it to do well in school is stupid. Plus, Sierra had a rough start to the school year and prob­a­bly won’t make honor roll, but she’s really turned things around. We decided that we’d reward the effort instead of the outcome.

So the next time any­body hears me com­plain­ing about my little girl being spoiled, remind me of two things: how bad I’ve spoiled her and how proud of her I am.

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