You're welcome! *hugs* You're going to leave a lovely impression, dearheart; you're young, beautiful, respectable, educated, married parents who love each other and adore your truly-adorable children. Do you have any idea how many parents do not match that description? You'll be a relief and a delight.
See my comment down below: it's not you who's up for judgement in these conferences. It's your child's teacher; every one of these conferences is a job interview and/or performance review for her. She has to satisfy you that she's creating a safe, friendly, respectful environment for your son, is capable of understanding his unique learning styles, challenging his strengths and building up his weaknesses, and can keep order in a group of young children with patience, kindness, fairness and humor.
It'll help if you think of some interview-type questions along those lines to ask her. I hate to have to say it, because it's totally sexist, but the truth is, your best strategy for these conferences is for you and your husband to both dress like you were going to court, and for him to conduct the interview pretty-much like he would a performance-review for an important employee. A Dad who comes to every conference in a business suit and treats it like a business meeting where he is the Manager is an incalculable advantage - and the fact that this is so is a shame and a disgrace to a system that pretends to be Democratic in any sense of the word, but there it is.
Your husband's primary task is to make it clear that, a) he is the Alpha Male whom it would be unwise to displease, and b) that he will be displeased if the Mama is displeased. You want to establish yourselves from the start as parents with Power, so dress that way, act that way, and take that attitude; it will make a big difference. That doesn't mean to be unfriendly or difficult, of course - far from it, but make it clear that you are the ones judging competence, not the other way around. Because that is the truth: teachers work for you now. Enjoy!
Actually, we have way too many parents who display the exact attitude that you recommend (Jörg worked as a chemistry teacher for just half a year, and part of why he didn't continue doing it was the attitude of the parents). Unfortunately, it doesn't come with accepting that sometimes, a child may behave differently in school than it does at home; that sometimes, a nice child may nonetheless be a bad student; and that sometimes, bad behaviour is NOT the sign of genius or "giftedness". I don't want to be like that.
I do hope that I'll be able to behave as someone at least equal, not inferior, but I don't want to come across as the sort of boss I wouldn't like if I were the employee. As for learning, at this point they don't have to acquire intellectual skills as much as social skills. (I'm far more confident about Felix' intellectual capacities than I am about his social skills, I'm afraid!)
(This is also a little beside the point. Whatever the actual conference is like, what they say might hurt my fragile sense of "I'm doing a good job as a mother". I am insecure about my parenting, since I'm still relatively new at it, and while I'm convinced that I'm doing OK and could be a lot worse, I'm also aware that I may be making avoidable mistakes. These Kindergarten teachers are not necessarily more competent just because they're "professionals", but they might as well be...)
At any rate, Jörg's away on a business trip (and if he weren't, he'd have to work anyway to afford the Kindergarten fees...), so I'll have to go alone.
Awell, of course one always wants to be the good boss who's trying to make the important employee's challenging job as easy and pleasant as possible. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know how to be in charge without being jerks.
Children always behave differently at home than they do at school. Some of them do a drastic Jekyll-and-Hyde switch when their parent walks into the room - often for the worse, and then how does one tactfully say "Your kid is just fine as long as you aren't around"...? So awkward! But that's perfectly normal behavior. Sometimes it's even more awkward when one has to try to explain that "Your kid goes into a frenzy of rule-breaking and fit-throwing when you walk in because he's testing the 'edges' of the difference between your rules and mine, so it would be helpful if you would enforce my rules while you're in my classroom, regardless of what you let him do at home."
Children learn what they live. If they're brought up with kindness, patience, and respect, but also with reasonable limits and expectations, they generally grow into pretty decent people. The main social skill a Kindergartner has to learn is confidence in his ability to relate positively to other people - that he can talk to them, share with them, resolve conflicts with them, have fun with them; that socializing is safe and rewarding. Children who learn this will basically learn everything else on their own.
Bad behavior is never a sign of genius or giftedness, regardless how bright the child displaying it may be. It's a sign of bad communication, which could have a hundred different reasons. The teacher, being the rational adult, is the one who has to adjust her communication strategies to accommodate the child's capabilities, and learning what the child's home-life is like can be very useful. However, one usually can't do much about it - one can't just come right out and say "This kid needs to eat something besides sugar for breakfast", "Doesn't he have any actual bedtime?" or "Whatever are you thinking, to let her watch stuff like that?" (three phrases I often wanted to say!)
Some teachers are amazing at their jobs; some are awful - just as in any line of work. To my mind, the MOST important quality in a teacher is genuine liking and empathy for children as real people - not as 'potential people' to be trained-up and molded into someone else's idea of how they "should" be, but as owners of their own persons and destinies, which they need loving guidance to learn to develop along their own unique lines. As teachers, we're raising orchids, not building robots.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know how to be in charge without being jerks.
Hah! Too true. That's something they should be teaching in schools... ;)
Children always behave differently at home than they do at school. Some of them do a drastic Jekyll-and-Hyde switch when their parent walks into the room - often for the worse, and then how does one tactfully say "Your kid is just fine as long as you aren't around"...?
Heh! In my experience, this tended to come out by accident. As in, my aunt saying "I love having T. visit, he's such a helpful, attentive and responsible fellow!" At the same time, he would be an absolute pest towards our mom, so she thought Aunt K. was winding her up. But no: He really was responsible, attentive and helpful. Just not when mom was around. Poor her. (I fully expect the same to happen in my future. >_>) T. is now training to be a teacher, btw...
Bad behavior is never a sign of genius or giftedness, regardless how bright the child displaying it may be.
Oh, thank you! I don't know about the States, but here it's a common misconception that bad behaviour is a typical sign of giftedness, and that there's no way to help it - on the contrary, one should let the child misbehave so as not to quench his or her genius. Auuuugh.
Some teachers are amazing at their jobs; some are awful - just as in any line of work.
Yep. The problem is, of course, that education tends to be an underappreciated field: Many people still think that being teacher is the easiest job in the world, "you're right before noon, and off work after noon". So there isn't enough investment in education. As a result, classes are too big (and 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!", and you can't well tell them that both the style in which they were taught and much of the knowledge they learned by heart after that style a) don't work today and b) weren't all that great back then, either!), teachers are frustrated, and half the class does whatever it feels like. Of course, it isn't like that all the time. Some teachers really are awesome at their jobs, and they manage to make the best of the system and its often silly guidelines. And some students are great, too - they might even have great parents. 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?)
a lot of the time (maybe even most of the time) young children don't really understand why they're in trouble. Even if they know they weren't supposed to do X, they have no idea what they were supposed to do to prevent X, or how their good intentions went so wrong.
That is the impression I have with Felix a lot of the time. He knows the rules, and generally wants to follow them, but something goes wrong and he does something else, and is desperate when he's being reprimanded. So I'll look into those books. (There seems to be no German translation, but I figure I could translate the relevant bits for Felix.) Actually, just looking at that page has been helpful, because it addresses to many issues that aren't (yet?) issues here. So it could be worse! ;)
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 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!
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...
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!
*hugs hugs* You know your son is a happy, healthy child; curious, loving, exuberant, engaged with the world, quick to learn. He will be a good student if he has good teaching, because he already has good parenting. He would be a good student even if he had no teaching - if he was Unschooled - because his natural drive and intelligence will impel him to learn. The main thing he has to learn right now is that school is a Good Place, so the teacher's main job is to see that it IS a Good Place for every child.
Every parent makes both avoidable and unavoidable mistakes. In my experience, the important thing is admitting when one has made them, and being willing to back-track, reconsider and re-adjust, rather than clinging rigidly to rules and decisions that aren't working. Nothing's set in stone; both parenting and teaching are Art, not Science - and the 'material' we work with has a mind of its own; in fact that's the whole point.
I don't know whether they're available in German, but THE best books I've ever found for teaching social skills to Kindergartners are Joy Berry's Help Me Be Good series. The great thing about them is that they're so clear - because, y'know, a lot of the time (maybe even most of the time) young children don't really understand why they're in trouble. Even if they know they weren't supposed to do X, they have no idea what they were supposed to do to prevent X, or how their good intentions went so wrong. The books make it easy to explain, and provide a way to treat wrong-doing as understandable and fixable mistakes, rather than as acts of defiance.
Sheesh, sorry to ramble on so long! LOL, "teachers gotta teach" - I'll sure be glad when I get some grand-babies! (^^)
See my comment down below: it's not you who's up for judgement in these conferences. It's your child's teacher; every one of these conferences is a job interview and/or performance review for her. She has to satisfy you that she's creating a safe, friendly, respectful environment for your son, is capable of understanding his unique learning styles, challenging his strengths and building up his weaknesses, and can keep order in a group of young children with patience, kindness, fairness and humor.
It'll help if you think of some interview-type questions along those lines to ask her. I hate to have to say it, because it's totally sexist, but the truth is, your best strategy for these conferences is for you and your husband to both dress like you were going to court, and for him to conduct the interview pretty-much like he would a performance-review for an important employee. A Dad who comes to every conference in a business suit and treats it like a business meeting where he is the Manager is an incalculable advantage - and the fact that this is so is a shame and a disgrace to a system that pretends to be Democratic in any sense of the word, but there it is.
Your husband's primary task is to make it clear that, a) he is the Alpha Male whom it would be unwise to displease, and b) that he will be displeased if the Mama is displeased. You want to establish yourselves from the start as parents with Power, so dress that way, act that way, and take that attitude; it will make a big difference. That doesn't mean to be unfriendly or difficult, of course - far from it, but make it clear that you are the ones judging competence, not the other way around. Because that is the truth: teachers work for you now. Enjoy!
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I do hope that I'll be able to behave as someone at least equal, not inferior, but I don't want to come across as the sort of boss I wouldn't like if I were the employee. As for learning, at this point they don't have to acquire intellectual skills as much as social skills. (I'm far more confident about Felix' intellectual capacities than I am about his social skills, I'm afraid!)
(This is also a little beside the point. Whatever the actual conference is like, what they say might hurt my fragile sense of "I'm doing a good job as a mother". I am insecure about my parenting, since I'm still relatively new at it, and while I'm convinced that I'm doing OK and could be a lot worse, I'm also aware that I may be making avoidable mistakes. These Kindergarten teachers are not necessarily more competent just because they're "professionals", but they might as well be...)
At any rate, Jörg's away on a business trip (and if he weren't, he'd have to work anyway to afford the Kindergarten fees...), so I'll have to go alone.
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Children always behave differently at home than they do at school. Some of them do a drastic Jekyll-and-Hyde switch when their parent walks into the room - often for the worse, and then how does one tactfully say "Your kid is just fine as long as you aren't around"...? So awkward! But that's perfectly normal behavior. Sometimes it's even more awkward when one has to try to explain that "Your kid goes into a frenzy of rule-breaking and fit-throwing when you walk in because he's testing the 'edges' of the difference between your rules and mine, so it would be helpful if you would enforce my rules while you're in my classroom, regardless of what you let him do at home."
Children learn what they live. If they're brought up with kindness, patience, and respect, but also with reasonable limits and expectations, they generally grow into pretty decent people. The main social skill a Kindergartner has to learn is confidence in his ability to relate positively to other people - that he can talk to them, share with them, resolve conflicts with them, have fun with them; that socializing is safe and rewarding. Children who learn this will basically learn everything else on their own.
Bad behavior is never a sign of genius or giftedness, regardless how bright the child displaying it may be. It's a sign of bad communication, which could have a hundred different reasons. The teacher, being the rational adult, is the one who has to adjust her communication strategies to accommodate the child's capabilities, and learning what the child's home-life is like can be very useful. However, one usually can't do much about it - one can't just come right out and say "This kid needs to eat something besides sugar for breakfast", "Doesn't he have any actual bedtime?" or "Whatever are you thinking, to let her watch stuff like that?" (three phrases I often wanted to say!)
Some teachers are amazing at their jobs; some are awful - just as in any line of work. To my mind, the MOST important quality in a teacher is genuine liking and empathy for children as real people - not as 'potential people' to be trained-up and molded into someone else's idea of how they "should" be, but as owners of their own persons and destinies, which they need loving guidance to learn to develop along their own unique lines. As teachers, we're raising orchids, not building robots.
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Hah! Too true. That's something they should be teaching in schools... ;)
Children always behave differently at home than they do at school. Some of them do a drastic Jekyll-and-Hyde switch when their parent walks into the room - often for the worse, and then how does one tactfully say "Your kid is just fine as long as you aren't around"...?
Heh! In my experience, this tended to come out by accident. As in, my aunt saying "I love having T. visit, he's such a helpful, attentive and responsible fellow!" At the same time, he would be an absolute pest towards our mom, so she thought Aunt K. was winding her up. But no: He really was responsible, attentive and helpful. Just not when mom was around. Poor her. (I fully expect the same to happen in my future. >_>)
T. is now training to be a teacher, btw...
Bad behavior is never a sign of genius or giftedness, regardless how bright the child displaying it may be.
Oh, thank you! I don't know about the States, but here it's a common misconception that bad behaviour is a typical sign of giftedness, and that there's no way to help it - on the contrary, one should let the child misbehave so as not to quench his or her genius. Auuuugh.
Some teachers are amazing at their jobs; some are awful - just as in any line of work.
Yep. The problem is, of course, that education tends to be an underappreciated field: Many people still think that being teacher is the easiest job in the world, "you're right before noon, and off work after noon". So there isn't enough investment in education. As a result, classes are too big (and 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!", and you can't well tell them that both the style in which they were taught and much of the knowledge they learned by heart after that style a) don't work today and b) weren't all that great back then, either!), teachers are frustrated, and half the class does whatever it feels like.
Of course, it isn't like that all the time. Some teachers really are awesome at their jobs, and they manage to make the best of the system and its often silly guidelines. And some students are great, too - they might even have great parents. 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?)
a lot of the time (maybe even most of the time) young children don't really understand why they're in trouble. Even if they know they weren't supposed to do X, they have no idea what they were supposed to do to prevent X, or how their good intentions went so wrong.
That is the impression I have with Felix a lot of the time. He knows the rules, and generally wants to follow them, but something goes wrong and he does something else, and is desperate when he's being reprimanded. So I'll look into those books. (There seems to be no German translation, but I figure I could translate the relevant bits for Felix.) Actually, just looking at that page has been helpful, because it addresses to many issues that aren't (yet?) issues here. So it could be worse! ;)
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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 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!
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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...
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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!
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Every parent makes both avoidable and unavoidable mistakes. In my experience, the important thing is admitting when one has made them, and being willing to back-track, reconsider and re-adjust, rather than clinging rigidly to rules and decisions that aren't working. Nothing's set in stone; both parenting and teaching are Art, not Science - and the 'material' we work with has a mind of its own; in fact that's the whole point.
I don't know whether they're available in German, but THE best books I've ever found for teaching social skills to Kindergartners are Joy Berry's Help Me Be Good series. The great thing about them is that they're so clear - because, y'know, a lot of the time (maybe even most of the time) young children don't really understand why they're in trouble. Even if they know they weren't supposed to do X, they have no idea what they were supposed to do to prevent X, or how their good intentions went so wrong. The books make it easy to explain, and provide a way to treat wrong-doing as understandable and fixable mistakes, rather than as acts of defiance.
Sheesh, sorry to ramble on so long! LOL, "teachers gotta teach" - I'll sure be glad when I get some grand-babies! (^^)
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