I am the Mom of a Kindergarten boy. No, not the chocolatey bacon boy (who, incidentally, has given up bacon but adopted sugar coated cereal as of this weekend). I have never considered this particular K-boy among the most socially perceptive of K-kids but perhaps this new schooling environment brings out the best in him.
I learned about his newfound perceptive genius when I was fully informed, in alpha order, of all of the "red" kids names. Don't panic if you have one of them because I can't recall the names (well, I can but I won't call them out here - how rude!). A red kid is characterized, according to my guy, by "really bad all the time behaving". There is a second list of kids who are "orange". These are the kids who get yellows mostly with an occasional splash of red. The lists continue and creates an exotic color palate including turqoise, pea-green and sunshine yellow. I am actually sort of proud of my cute little budding artist for his knowledge of color mixing but I suspect I should note something other than his artistic prowess.
My kids have recently gotten into Harry Potter. We actually have a witch hat and they love to take turns pretending they are Professor McGonnagle (or sometimes I get to be Professor McMOMaggle). The good Professor places the hat on each child and sorts them into their houses based on their inner qualities. Like the evil ones go to the evil house and the good ones go to the good house and the ones that are kind of boring and neutral go to the, well, yellow house. My kids love this scene and enjoy acting it out, among other broom-flying and potion brewing portions of Harry's first year at Hogwarts. Please don't ask what the white substance sprinkled with floating flowers is when you visit the playhouse in the backyard, OK? You don't want to know, of that I'm sure.
I'm sure that I don't need to make this any more plain because only seriously brilliant people who live their lives in the "green" are reading this right now but... what? If I am to understand, the system of reward and punishment in Kindergarten is so explicit that only 4 weeks into school my newly minted 5 year old has classified each child by their spot on the color spectrum? So it would seem - as plain as a house assignment. In the 3rd grade at least my #12's shameful yellow (so procured for doodling) today was anonymous...
So let's be fair for a second here. At my pretty private school everyone knew who the bad kids were and who the good kids were, right? Like my own K-boy could, well, no - couldn't actually name kids by behavioral hue but I bet the parents could come pretty close. And that is because we all spent a lot of time in our lives resisting the perhaps Darwinian urge to categorize angels and demons as such. Somehow the urge to categorize is indeed irresistible. Whether it is sorting wizards into houses, sorting kids into paint palates, putting students into reading and math groups, selecting a performance rating for a subordinate. Somehow organizing the people around us into small groups helps us humans to get a grip on how we plan to and subsequently manage them.
Is this so wrong? I know where my K-boy stands, he is happy and learning, he is practicing his powers of observation, he is in the best of the reading groups (although apparently he is behind in handwriting... leave that for another day). Slicing and dicing the kids at this early age may be be a useful tool for teachers and administrators who are well equipped to make plans and manage classrooms. My K-boy, however, with his new friends the Crayolas, is just learning for the first time what exactly to do with that knowledge. He is working at making good choices - staying away from the Slytherins (burnt orange) and trying hard to find some fellow Gryffindors (grass green). I sure hope that the Slytherins get to redeem themselves and I hope that my K-boy doesn't miss the chance to hang with some Hufflepuffs (sunshine yellow) along the way.
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