So this is what it feels like from the other side

[oloriel]

I've been asked to attend a parent-teacher talk.

I don't know about you, but I hated those as a student. I was not a bad student - lazy, but clever enough to make up for it; too shy to speak up in class, but good enough in written tests to get decent grades nonetheless - nor particularly troublesome (despite being a bit, hm, too physical). But you just never know, do you? You never know whether your teacher won't tell your mom that you didn't do that one stupid homework assignment, or that you never raise your finger in class, or that you claimed to have your period to escape having to play soccer, right? (They always complained that I didn't speak up in class. Because I knew all the stuff and never said it. Because everybody would roll their eyes if I had the right answer yet again, because there was a time I was actively mobbed for being "Miss Know-it-all". Later, because the right answer felt too trite to raise a finger for, and I thought I must have understood the question wrong because it couldn't be so obvious. And because I was afraid it might be wrong after all: The one thing worse than being Miss Know-it-all is to err when you're Miss Know-it-all. And -- They never ask why, do they? They just say "Christiane's oral participation needs to get a lot better." and don't understand that it was way easier for me to accept a somewhat less great grade than it was to bear the mockery and mobbing. -- To be fair, I never tried to explain it either to my teachers nor to my parents. I expected them not to understand, and I expected to know what they'd say ("But your report card matters more than some stupid remarks by your peers!"), but I never put it to the test. -- Shut up, Lyra, this is not about your school days.)

So when I knew one of the official parent-teacher days was approaching, or worse, when one of the teachers invited the parents for an individual meeting, I felt a great sense of fear and foreboding.

As I now know, I feel that sense of fear and foreboding even when I'm the parent. Oh God, does Felix refuse to do his homewo -- oh wait, this is Kindergarten. Does he torment the other kids? Does he refuse to participate in, or worse, disturb group games? What are they going to tell me? What is my precious child doing wrong?

Actually, this is supposed to be a routine meeting - 6 to 8 weeks after their kids started Kindergarten, all the parents are invited to parent-teacher-talks. So it's just as possible that it's completely harmless.

And yet.

I'll have to ask my mom whether she always dreaded those parent-teacher meetings when I was a kid, too. She attended them religiously, even the ones where you didn't have to go, where she had to take a day off work in order to cover all the talks with my brother's and my teachers, so as a student, I thought she enjoyed them. (And enjoyed tormenting us with what she learned there, afterwards. "Christiane, why don't you participate in class? T., I'll have to check your math homework every evening!") But she probably didn't. Probably she went because she felt it was her duty, because not attending made you look like a Parent Who Doesn't Care, a Parent Who Doesn't Cooperate, No Wonder The Kids Turned Out This Way.

I guess I should just find it enlightening. Parents hate parent-teacher talks too. And yet again, I find myself understanding my mother a lot better now...

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The Help Me Be Good books are written in such simple language, it's likely that Felix would start picking up English from them. I got the full set of 29 books when my daughter was about three, and we read them all the time - kids want to know what the rules are, and what behavior will be rewarded. I intend to buy all of Joy Berry's book-sets for my grandchildren when I have some.

Childrens' 'bad' behavior comes from a lot of different causes, but parents letting their children act up comes from an assumption of privilege. This article (http://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/the_racial_parenting_divide_what_adrian_peterson_reveals_about_black_and_white_child_rearing/) is about racial differences in parenting, but illustrates the point: when parents expect their little darling to be allowed to run amuck, what they're really expecting is for him or her to be treated as superior to the other children.

That did not fly in my classroom. 'How We Do' applied equally to every child, and my assumption is that letting one's children run amuck is like being rude to waiters: people who do it are rather pathetically trying to pretend to higher social status than they really have, because the genuine upper class does not act that way.

It's true that uneven development is a real thing, though, and a child with notable 'super-powers' is likely to have deficits just as notable. That doesn't mean the child gets a free pass on How We Do; it means the child might need some extra help learning to do things that way.

"whenever this is addressed as a problem, some oldtimers will pipe up how "they were taught in classes of 50, and turned out just fine!"

Aagghhh! That phrase! It's uncanny, how the people who claim to have turned out "just fine" sure don't look or sound very 'fine'. "I was taught in classes of 50, and everything I know is wrong." "I grew up watching violent television, and violence doesn't bother me at all." "My parents and teachers beat hell out of me, and it made me into the kind of person who's not afraid to beat hell out of children." I've actually heard a parent object to the Waldorf pre-school curriculum with "How will they learn about the real world if they don't watch TV?"

"But if it's raising orchids, it's raising orchids from various different places in a greenhouse that can only simulate one climate and one environment. (Does that make any sense?)"

It makes perfect sense, which is why I hold with John Holt and John Taylor Gatto that the 'greenhouse' of compulsory State education is unnatural and unhealthy - that its primary purpose is to produce a monoculture of obedient worker-consumers who will follow the carrot, fear the stick, and not give any trouble to their corporate masters. That's not its only purpose, of course, but parents who want better than that for their kids have to get it for them themselves.

I had to work, so my daughter had to go to public school, but I mostly regarded it as supplemental to her education at home. She did learn some things there that she would not have learned from me, so it wasn't entirely a waste of her time, but a lot of it was. Group education is highly inefficient, because either the whole group goes at the pace of the slowest learners, or the slowest learners get left behind. If it was up to me, I would set teacher-student ratios at 1:5 in the primary grades and 1:10 in middle school... heh, if it was up to me, I'd restructure the entire educational system, but it's not. Oh well!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

English spelling, at least! (He's currently getting to grips with German spelling, which has more pitfalls than adults tend to realise, such as Auslautverhärtung and conventions on how to spell the /ʃ/-sound under what circumstances and -- anyway, I think it might be a bit too much to try learning German and English spelling conventions at once. On the other hand, Felix has proved me wrong on so many "I think 3-year-olds can't..." ideas that I probably should no longer expect anything...

Oh dear! I'm sort of the opposite: It's fine if other people's kids misbehave (that is, it isn't fine, but I don't feel awful about it), but my kids have to do better! Which is probably assumption of privilege as well (We Are Superior So We Act Better), just expressed differently. >_>

Felix did hit and shove kids in his kindergarten class, and we're still working on making him understand that This Is Not OK. He seems to have learned that it's not OK in kindergarten, but he tests the rules in every other social situation. I guess he hasn't yet realised that some rules are universal.

"I was taught in classes of 50, and everything I know is wrong."

My brother got into a huge argument with my grandmother because he actually translated her "... we turned out just fine!" into just what you said. My grandmother is a lovely old lady, just with a lot of very backward ideas. I think there's little point in arguing with her, because she's unlikely to change her mind (on the contrary, if at all possible, she'll work anything you say into her view of the world) and will only end up hurt and sad when you insist - like my brother - that she's wrong and you're right. (Even if that is actually the case). Sometimes, all you can do is change the subject...

"How will they learn about the real world if they don't watch TV?"

AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. As they say on Tumblr, I don't even.

that its primary purpose is to produce a monoculture of obedient worker-consumers who will follow the carrot, fear the stick, and not give any trouble to their corporate masters.

That's no longer the case here, fortunately - intentionally or accidentally, our curriculums rather tend to reward the intellectually rebellious. As long as you manage to meet the requirements, you can thwart a lot of rules.

Homeschooling is not an option here - you can either send your kids to a public school or to a (publically approved) private school, but you're not allowed to keep them at home teaching them yourself. Which is just as well; I know many people (such as our ex-tenants) who'd definitely make use of the homeschooling option if they could, and the result would be four kids with only the most basic general education (if any), an excellent knowledge of those parts of the Bible their father considers relevant, a mishmash of errors, and the firm belief that Anything We Do Is Right Because People Like Us CANNOT Do Wrong. And nothing else.

To be fair, though, even though I have a lot of misgivings about our educational system in general and most of our teachers in particular, I wouldn't dare to do homeschooling. I like to think that I'm well-educated, I'm from an academic background, I'm interested in a broad range of things and I'm sure I can read up on anything well enough to teach it on an elementary or middle school level. But I know I wouldn't have the necessary self-discipline to handle subjects I don't care about in sufficient depth. Heck, I probably wouldn't have the self-discipline to dedicating sufficient amounts of time to "school" every day!

So it's a good thing that education is firmly in public hands, here. But like you, I'd like to restructure the education system first...

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Three-year-olds are at the lifetime peak of their brains' language-acquisition capacity - if every member of their family speaks a different language, they will learn every language and not mix them up, regardless of whether the languages are related. And Felix is the son of a linguist; expect to continue to be astonished at what he can do.

English spelling is a mess, and it gave my daughter fits. She could spell better in Gaelic than she could in English, and we don't even speak Gaelic; it was absurd. She's currently teaching herself Russian, and she adores Cyrillic because every letter makes only one sound.

"my kids have to do better! Which is probably assumption of privilege as well (We Are Superior So We Act Better)"

I was brought up to the idea that We Are Superior Because We Act Better. I've never been able to find it again, but I once ran across some nobleman's letter to his son, the gist of which was "Since you have been so fortunate as to receive advantages far above the ordinary station of life, it would be disgraceful and ungrateful if your achievement was not similarly above the ordinary." That's acknowledgement of privilege, and of the duty that comes with it, noblesse oblige.

LOL, I'd be a terrible snob if I wasn't such a 'class traitor'. Maybe I am one anyway, because I do look down on people who think they can buy their way into good society, not realizing that their manners are giving the lie to their social pretensions all along. There's a whole social class of boorish and ostentatious poseurs with more money than sense: they may have lots of privilege, but they're still trash:

"I have known many heroes and some were such oafs that one would feed them at the back door if their deeds did not claim a place at the table. I have known few men who were noble, for nobility is scarcer far than heroism. But true nobility can always be recognized...noblesse oblige is an emotion felt only by those who are noble.
-Robert A. Heinlein

My parents never let us run rampant in adult spaces. First there'd be the Hairy Eyeball, that frosty look that meant "straighten up and fly right" and if that didn't work, we'd be removed from public view for a little talk about expectations of proper conduct. I used the same method on my daughter, and it worked quite well.

Kindergartners are prone to hit and shove. That's basic bio-programmed behavior for little primates, especially strong and active males. The customs of civilization require learning more subtle, cooperative methods of social interaction, but that takes time and support - mostly by fostering empathy: "Look, your friend is crying because you hurt him - what can you do to help him feel better?" "Would it be okay for a bigger boy to shove you? How would you feel if that happened?"

" kids with only the most basic general education (if any), an excellent knowledge of those parts of the Bible their father considers relevant, a mishmash of errors, and the firm belief that Anything We Do Is Right Because People Like Us CANNOT Do Wrong. And nothing else."

Oh, do we ever have a PLAGUE of precisely that here in the US! But a lot of the schools are run like prisons, complete with sleazeball 'prison culture', and a lot of our government is run by adults with only the most basic general education, etc.

*wry grin* I'd like to restructure the whole world. And maybe we can, y'know? Here's hoping!