As I was walking Penny up to her school this morning, one of the teachers' aides who helps at the dropoff point each morning greeted us and said, "Penny, did you tell your mom that if we were on a rocketship, you'd be the one who gets to drive?"
"No," Penny said.
"You should tell her about it while you walk up to the school!" the aide enthused.
"In math facts," Penny told me, "I got up to thirteen!"
"Wow, that's great, sweetie!" Penny's class is starting to lean heavily on basic addition right now. We had, in fact, spent most of the drive to drop Alex off at daycare playing an adding game -- entirely at Penny's prompting.
On my way out, the aide asked if Penny had told me about it, and explained a little more: the station she'd been helping with was called "Fast Facts," and the object was to answer the math problem very quickly, without recourse to counting. (When I was in elementary school, we just called it memorization, or knowing your tables, but whatever.) Anyway, a "satisfactory" score required the student to get at least five of them at the chosen speed; Penny got thirteen. And additionally, she was the only one in the class to get so many so fast -- there were a couple of kids who got as high as nine, but no one else broke ten. Thus, Penny being at the very top of the rocketship.
That's my girl.
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