I know you are excited about kindergarten and I wish you good luck. I wish you many years of learning and wonder, making friends and finding passions.

You will be tested by your school within the first two weeks of the start of school. Your teacher assures me that it will be administered like a game, that it will not stress you out, and that it will help her find out where each student stands in terms of readiness for school. She can then plan her projects and assignments accordingly. She says that I need not even talk to you about it. I am exercising tremendous restraint and learning to trust another adult with your care and learning.

I will not talk to you about this test and will try my best not to talk about any in the future either.

I hope that you learn to read because you love stories and not because it is a skill you have to master before entering the next grade. I hope you will not read just to find out what happens in the end, but discover that reading is a very private pleasure and the end of the story does not matter. I hope that you read to play and love and cry with your favorite characters.

I hope you learn math to understand the magic of numbers, understand how numbers can fool you, how you can make numbers work for you, and dance to your tunes. I hope you revel at the wonder that is the number zero, at the magic proportions that never cease to please the human mind, and at the beauty of the golden triangle.

I hope you learn science to understand how things work, and why some things are the way they are and behave the way they do. I hope it is not a mere recital of theories and their proofs. I hope you marvel at the great minds that asked the difficult questions and challenged the established notions. I hope that you ask a few questions of your own.

I hope that history is not reduced to a study of dates; a boring memorization of what happened when. I hope you travel in time with the empires of the ancient world and the civilizations of the new world; that you understand their struggles and their achievements, their leaders and their people, their festivals and their traditions.

I hope that when you learn geography, you appreciate the diversity of the physical world, appreciate how that diversity has fostered diverse civilizations, different cultures and traditions. I hope you understand how the physical land dictated the fate of the economy; how the rocks in a continent is its prospect and its doom. I hope for you, that it is not a mindless regurgitation of the different types of climates and landscapes of the world.

I hope that tests never bother you or affect you. I hope you never study for the sake of the tests, but always learn for the sake of knowledge. I hope you make lots of friends and live through heartbreaks. I wish you could stay home with me another year. But I know that you are ready and eager to learn to be on your own. I wish you luck, son. I wish you all the luck in the world.

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Cross-posted at:
http://myturn-nisha.blogspot.com/