Well it's that time of the year again and I don't know if I'm looking forward to it. Sure I want to know how the girls are going at school but I think I have a pretty good feel for where they are at. I just don't do confrontation well and often go out of my way to avoid it all together. Don't get me wrong I don't mind their teachers as a whole and neither of them are horrible but I just guess I see the girls needs differently.
My baby who is 5 had to go into year one this year because there is no more preschool in our state and as the prep year has just been introduced into our state she missed out by 5 weeks of the birthday cut off. Most of the children in her class are already 6 and turning 7 this year. So developmentally for a start Miss E is behind is some areas. She is very social and has great integration skills but lo and behold her reading skills are that of an average 5 year old. Not brilliant but not disastrous. She loves books and is reading early readers well with confidence and knows the allocated number of sight words enough to get her to the 100 words they need to know by the end of the year. But this is not good enough for her teacher who has told me that she expects a lot of her students and pushes her students hard. That's ok when your 7 to be performing at a certain level but not when you are 5. Miss E wasn't even born when some of these children would of been walking and talking. It just seems so much to me suddenly expect children be at a developmental level that they are not ready to be at. I kind of wonder why this teacher expects so much of the children in her class, is it because she wants them to perform well for themselves or for her own ego to prove that she has a class of top performers. I think it is sad to put a child's love to learn and discover behind performance markers. I know this teacher is going to be disappointed in where Miss E is in respect to the class but I don't want to be disappointed in my little girl when she is doing the best she can for her age.
Maybe part of this stems back to some form of guilt on my behalf. Miss E was a surprise but much wanted edition to our family. There is only 15 months between Miss T and Miss E. I know on some level that I have done wrong by my baby. I put Miss T's needs and problems in front of her on a lot of occasions. I went through a period of sadness around Miss T's diagnoses and I know I should of been more focused on all of my children. Don't get me wrong I have never, ever neglected any of my girls but sometimes there were choices I had to be make and often someone missed out and that was my baby. She spent so much of her early years carted of to appointments and therapy with her sister part of me can't help but wonder that if I had scaled back on some of it and I had focused more on her needs and interests she would be coping better a school than she is.
Homeschooling has been discussed in this family a bit of late and the more and more I think about it the more and more I feel it would allow me to adapt the girls learning to their needs and not make them adapt their learning to the needs of narcissistic teachers.
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