As a parent of two children, I have to be careful that I don’t give more attention to one child than the other, so this posting is concerning my son, who is currently in another school, but will be joining Tenby International School in September 2009, which he of course looks forward to considering the bumps on the road that he has had to deal with in his current school.
There is no question that I am very much involved in my children’s lives and watch over them like a hawk and if I feel that my children’s well-being and happiness at school are being compromised by teachers, I won’t hesitate to bring it up with the school. However having said that I have actually had to compromise my own principles, when I was told by my son not to talk to the teachers after several incidences at his school, because he didn’t want me to make it worse for him, as he feared that the teachers would take it out on him for telling about it at home.
Already here you may be shocked that he really said that, because it is as sad as it can possibly get, that a private international school instils so much fear in the children that they choose to live with the kind of treatment that I am about to write about in my next couple of postings instead of allowing their parents to speak to the school to make them stop this malpractice. And is, of course, one of the many reasons for moving him and his sister to Tenby International School, where we are hoping for greener paths.
My son is not the academic type of person, he is an average student, who doesn’t see the necessity to put in the extra efforts that would pull his grades up, but he has so many other interesting and good things going for him that at this point in his life, it may not be the most important thing for him to perform well academically, as he is developing other skills, which equally contribute to his overall feelings of self-worth, confidence and well-being. He likes sports, music, the performing arts and has taken initiatives to music and dance performances and artwork in his school, as well as participated in various sports events. He may not be the best at all these things, although he is doing well, but he is exploring various fields, which gives him experiences and exposure to new things. The problem is that this kind of attitude doesn’t go so well with his school, because the students’ academic performance is very important to the school, so simply said, my son gets in trouble for being, who he is. Quite often he doesn’t even know why he is being scolded or punished, because in his world he is being himself, someone who likes to have fun and enjoy himself, but in the eyes of his school, he is being disruptive, annoying and someone who wants to play up, which he can’t relate to or recognise in himself.
There have been several incidences of unfair treatment that my son has had to cope with in his school, and I will write about a few of them which are directly linked to the title of this posting and which is completely demoralizing children at every level.
The first incidence too place when the school was having an International Understanding Day, which they have every year, where the students can get involved in various activities. A group of students including my son had taken the initiative to do a hip hop dance act to be performed at the center stage during the opening of the IU day. They had been practicing after school weeks before the event, requesting their parents to pick them up later than usual, and in the case of my son, who normally goes by school van, I had to pick him up myself on those days, they were rehearsing. All was set to go, the teachers involved had given their thumbs up, but the day before the performance, the school management rejected their performance, as they didn’t think it was suitable, and cancelled it. How anyone can do that to children is beyond my comprehension, as not only is it disappointing for the children, who had practiced for many hours and looked forward to performing in front of their parents and friends, it is also a blow to their confidence and sense of fairness and righteousness and is a step towards killing their initiatives, because why should they bother doing all this next time, if in the end they won’t be allowed to perform anyway.
There are other incidences too, and in my next posting I will tell how the teacher on duty at a party held at the school stopped the student’s music rock band performance, because of one word.
I would like to call you my friend, because I completely sympathize with you on this matter, and can relate to what you are saying, emphatically. I am always disheartened by the arrogance in which some teachers abuse their power over children. Instead of empowering them they choose to fracture their enthusiasm, and instead of promoting their creativity they choose to tear it down. Why? Perhaps its a freakish way for them to control. I am saddened that these events have taken place, in your sons school. I have chosen to become a teacher to help kids succeed, to teach them to feel empowered, and advocate against the mistreatment of children in school. I will read and look forward to your future posts. Best of luck to you and your son.
From Ghita: I am so sorry for my late response and publishing of your comment, and for not writing actively on my blog in 2010. I intend to write more often in 2011 and hope to receive more comments from you in future, as I would like to hear your and other people’s thoughts on education, parenting, children etc. Please note that my son is now at a new school, been at Tenby International School, Setia Ecopark for 1+ year, and they treat him better. I completely agree with your comments and I wish you the best of luck in your teaching career, as I believe you can make a difference in a student’s life, if you have a different approach, one based on respect, empowerment, positivity and belief that children want to do well, it’s only a question on finding out how to motivate them to do better and to correct or modify any behaviour that doesn’t serve them well by using behaviour change techniques. All the best!
By: got2bhelene on July 27, 2010
at 8:04 am
Hi Ghita – Stumbled on your blog while reading up on private/international schools in Malaysia. I’m sorry to hear about this unhappy incident, which I hope your son has gotten over with now that he’s at Tenby.
I teach young adults at a private college / university and I can imagine how devastated he and his friends must have felt to have their hip-hop performance cancelled without a consultation with them. In this case, I feel that the administration could have set some ground rules for the performance – that way, the students know beforehand what is acceptable and what is not.
My son has just started K2 and I am also actively involved in his education like a mother hen
He’d actually switched kindergartens due to relocation and I am happy that he likes his kindergarten now.
I like your posts about school especially where you emphasized that a school may be good but no school is perfect because we are all special individuals who may respond to each other in completely different ways even if we are in the same environment.
Last year, my son, who loves to be read to mentioned that he didn’t like his reading class. An English teacher myself, I was shocked and soon discovered that his reading teacher (the one who focuses on phonics) was not as patient as his English teacher (the one who helps him with the ABCs and handwriting).
According to him, she would get angry with him for being slow in reading and writing.
When I examined his reading book, I found that she had drawn circles over any unfinished work, which made his preschool book look like a middle school student’s badly marked essay, if you know what I mean.
Later, I found out that she was actually a teacher from the middle school who asked to transfer to the preschool because she found the preschoolers more manageable!
As a writing teacher, I tend to focus on a student’s ideas rather than point out his grammatical mistakes, which usually result in a “red sea” of pen markings. Thus, I was quite shocked to see a preschool teacher marking a 5 year old’s book that way.
Thankfully, his English teacher was very patient with him and helped him with his handwriting, which resulted in him winning the “Best Penmanship” award.
At home, I helped him with his Reading, which included a bit of explanation of phonics. Now that he’s started a new term, I have to admit that I am slightly worried for him because he will have the same reading teacher again.
I hope that he will have confidence to read aloud as he has been doing at home.
I feel quite strongly about teachers who poke fun at students in school, who are impatient or who scold students for being active. I used to suffer from the same scoldings your son experienced but thanks to my parents’ support and reading about other kids with similar teachers, I managed to wave them aside and focus on the positive. Here’s to the same for our kids!!!
By: Christine@We'reOnaBookathon! on August 12, 2011
at 5:52 pm
Dear Christine,
I am very sorry that I only respond to and post your comment now, but I have not been checking my blog for a while, until today. Thank you so much for sharing your story and I sincerely hope that your son will be fine with reading in school. As you know I completely agree that the style of teaching and the way the teacher approaches the child are very important ingredients for a successful learning situation and outcomd. My son is now in year 10 and it’s very clear that his results in any subject corresponds directly with the way his teacher is. When his teacher is positive, accommodating, friendly, encouraging and emphasize on his positive attributes, he will perform well and achieve good results, but the moment his teacher has a style which is based on scolding to try and motivate him, his performance and grades are immediately affected negatively. Of course a student all of a sudden cannot get worse at a subject, they have been good at earlier, so there is no doubt in my mind that it’s the teacher’s approach that is vital to a student’s success. In my opinion it’s the responsibility of a teacher to ask themselves whether the student would respond better and learn faster, if they changed their approach to teaching and allowed the children to learn in a safe and comfortable environment where the teachers are supportive, friendly, gentle and encouraging. It makes a huge difference, and I would encourage all parents to talk with the child’s teachers and explain to them how best your child learn, because you know best how your child learns and responds to instructions.
By the way if your child finds it difficult to learn through phonics, because some children cannot learn that way, you may want to look for alternative ways such as mental imagery and visual learning methods, which works very well for children who are learning to spell. I only came across such techniques recently, which I tested on my son and found out it worked. The problem is that my son has learnt spelling his own way, as phonics never really worked for him, and it would take time for him to learn how to spell in a different way, but a younger child would quickly catch on and become an excellent speller. The technique is quite simple. When you teach your child a new word, you need to break the word in to smaller parts, let the child see the word and say the letters out loud and then ask the child to close his eyes and to look up to the left still with his eyes closed and ask him to create a mental picture of the word broken in to the parts you agreed on and ask him to tell you the letters he sees in his mind’s eye backwards and forward by focusing on the parts e.g. the word Malaysia, he should see and say; ais – yal – am and ma – lay – sia. The moment the child has a mental picture of the word, and is able to spell the word in this way, he will remember it permanently and can recall the mental image of the word anytime he needs to and the more he uses the word, soon he won’t even need to see the mental image of the word anymore, but it will be second nature to him to know how to spell the word.
The problem with phonics is that sometimes we just can’t hear how a word is spelt, but we need to know it and memorize it, but some children find it difficult to remember how a word is spelt purely on auditory memory, because they don’t have a mental image to connect it to and the ability to create mental pictures of the words makes the difference between good spellers and bad spellers, so why not improve children’s ability to spell by implementing techniques which have been proven to work better, that’s what I would have done if my children were just beginning to learn how to spell.
I wish you and your son the best of luck and hope your son’s teacher will improve her approach and teaching style.
Kind regards,
Ghita
By: gaothman on September 28, 2011
at 1:40 pm