déjà vu

Four-year-old Junior Trigirl 2 came home from school with eight 'high frequency' words such as 'mum, cat, and, dog' to learn to recognise. Her teacher would be happy for her to spent a couple of weeks absorbing them, but Junior Trigirl 2 wanted to commit all of them to memory today, such is her determination to learn to read.

She forced Trigirl to go over them with her about two dozen times this evening. She did amazingly well - at the start she knew none of them and by the end, the only one of the eight that eluded her was 'my'. This inability to remember this one word was unbelievably frustrating for her and she had a tantrum.

Trigirl has this same personality trait and she can now understand the mixture of pride, irritation and exhaustion that she must produce in anyone trying to teach her anything. The only difference is that Trigirl doesn't often have tantrums these days.