Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Oh, and try not to cry

Lately, dragonboat practices have been pretty brutal. But that's not why I almost cried yesterday.

As we were doing a coloring thing with our first graders, little Geoffrey (who always finishes first) finished first. So I told him to turn over the paper and draw a picture of him rowing a dragonboat. He didn't want to do that. So I suggested he draw Teacher Jenny rowing a dragonboat. He shrieked, started shaking his head violently, and insisted at a yell "You are a girl! Girls can't row dragonboats! Only boys can row dragonboats."

If he would yell this at his teacher, what would he say to his female peers? It broke my heart. He's such a little guy and he's already thinking in "can't's" and "boys can do things that girls can't."

So I ran a lot at the gym yesterday for cross-training. And today our boat shaved 15 seconds off our 400 meter sprint. (From 2:41 to 2:25)

We got an unusually bad seed in the tournament: We must win two races on Saturday to move on to races on Sunday for the main festival. And our second Saturday race is against a team that annually competes, and competes well. The good news is that even if we don't win and can't be competitive, we can still do scrimmage races on Saturday afternoon so we don't feel like we trained for two-and-a-half-minutes of disappointing racing.

2 comments:

Brian said...

Maybe Geoffrey's response is a bit disconcerting, but you have already planted a seed of gender equality that he probably won't be able to forget ;)

Brian said...

And by the way, who decided "Geoffrey" is a nice simple English name for a taiwanese kid??