Now that Lucas is in the first grade his education has taken an upward turn. I have always been impressed with the way his teachers worked with him over the past few years and they helped him grow quite a bit. But now he has certain tasks he has to complete each day at school, or else he has homework. I was adamantly opposed to this. Livid, more like it. "Work at your own pace!" I snorted. I couldn't accept the notion that a six-year old should be doing homework, and I still don't. The idea was to try to keep him on task while at school. Otherwise he might stare into space for an hour if his pencil isn't where he expected to find it, rather than just grabbing another pencil. That fine's, I'll concede the point.

He has also been writing "reports." He looks up some facts and writes them down. Draws a picture. Then he puts the pieces of paper (two or three, depending on how big his letters were) between two colored pieces of paper, ties them with yarn and voila - report. The first one was on volcanoes. A bit of a surprise there, I would have expected dinosaurs. But he had been studying volcanism and even built a clay model, so the timing was right. Dinosaurs came second, natch. He came home with one fact that didn't make it between the green covers - one of the books in the school was dated. He said the book had an apatosaurus body with a camarasaurus head. He he. In other words in mentioned a brontosaurus. Fred Flintstones burgers not withstanding, brontosaurus never existed, they were mistakenly "discovered" when someone put parts o

f two other dinos together. But you probably already knew that.

Once we fawned over the dino research Kim asked him what his next report would be about. Light bulbs. That is height of Lucas comedy. Ask him what he wants for dinner and if he feels like being silly he will say light bulbs. Kim deftly steered him toward electricity, so that is next on the agenda. He'll be light years ahead of his father in no time. His teacher, Ellen, then offered to take him to Hardware Sales in Bellingham to get supplies for electrical experiments.

How great is that? The round trip from Ferndale plus shopping had to be at least an hour and a half - that's a lot of one-on-one time with a teacher. My teachers would have never made such an offer, let a lone followed through. Whether we would have trusted them is another matter. Actually it's not. We've been to Ellen's house and she's been to ours. I couldn't say that about any of my teachers not could most kids.

I can't express how impressed I am with the teachers at the boys' school. Next time someone around here grouses about a little extra penmanship practice at home I'll just have to remind Kim about that.