Now that my daughter is in Year One, proper homework has started. The kind where a parent has to be involved, because they don’t quite know how to do it themselves. Yesterday it took half an hour to do a page of arithmetic. The assigned reading book is now half covered in words and is 20 pages long. The days of ‘The cat sat on the mat now can I watch TV?’ are over. The bus days of getting home at 4:20 exhausted have only just begun.
One of this week’s tasks is to prepare for a morning talk. Until now our kid has talked about whatever came to mind at the time: Minecraft, new toothbrushes, dogs vomiting on carpet, chickens dying… Dog knows what other household secrets got blabbed. This week the six-year-olds have to take along a favourite piece of music and explain why it’s important to them. They can take instruments if they like. (So far no one has taken instruments and the teacher is apparently disappointed about this.)
Here is my daughter’s favourite song in the whole wide world:
I blame myself. I skipped The Wiggles and Hi-Five jingles because I can’t stand listening to them. My daughter’s music tastes — for now — tend to match my own. And I’m a fan of Larry McMurtry, so of course I’m a fan of cowboy culture.
Not the actual cowboy culture, mind. The fictionalised kind, most of which probably never happened. How much does the six-year-old really know about cowboys?
What do cowboys eat?
Meat. They kill cows and eat steaks.
What do cowboys do?
They ride around on horses and have fun.
But what’s their job?
I don’t know.
Can girls be cowboys?
Yes! Like that girl on that movie we watched, you know? (The original True Grit. She’s also seen Disney’s Little House On The Prairie, in which Laura is adamant she’s going to grow up to be a cowboy.)
My daughter has drawn a few pictures about life in the Wild West. The cowboys are sleeping in beds. They have wives and children and they sing happily around campfires. It’s just like camping!
Even with all this homework, I’m not sure my daughter’s reading is going to improve to the point where I can just hand her a copy of the Lonesome Dove series, so she can see for herself by Friday morning that no sane individual would ever actually want to be a cowboy, or a cowgirl for that matter.
