To teach or not to teach

(actually not about my teaching….yet…)

How can I get my child to focus and pay more attention to what he is doing????

Since Ewan was about 2 we have been going to speech and language therapists… getting hearing tests done… practicing our questions and answers at home and basically….. worrying…. About what?? About him not being at the same level as other 4year olds. Same level of socialization. Same level of speech. Same level of literacy. Same level of communication and behavior.

Milestones and the internet…  Is the internet a useful tool??? OF COURSE!!! There is sooo much information out there that you will always find an answer to what you are looking for…. BUT, you will also find sooo information that it may actually hinder, not help, your quest for knowledge….

While Ewan was going through his “months”  ages (by this I mean that when I child is still quite young we refer to their age in months not years yet. For example 1 year and 5 months would be 17 months)  I was always trying to compare his progression to what others reported on the internet or in magazines, or what doctors stated was the expected ‘norm’.  And this really drove me a bit neurotic I think, well just ask my husband.  From thinking that my son will never talk to thinking that he may have tourettes syndrome, I was constantly trying to figure out why he just wasn’t doing the things that other kids were doing at his age…..

At age 4 ½ he is now in JK and doing well.  With a lot of ‘noise’ from me, letting all of his teachers and care givers know the troubles that he has been having, we all know what he needs to work on, how to approach certain issues and how to teach things that he doesn’t yet know, and needs to learn.  ( I am not going to get into specifics because this is not really about how we have been getting through life’s hurdles, but rather what hurdles are out there…)

I was recently researching symptoms of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, to see if my son actually did have some reasons as to why his progression was a bit slower than other boys his age. (now I do want to specify boys because it is known that girls’ and boys’ progressions vary quite a lot…) But after speaking with doctors and teachers and therapists this is what I was told and it is something that I just have to track and have patience for…. My son is a late 4 yr old, or in other terms he is a young 4. What this means is this… age is calculated in regards to the school year.  School/JK (junior kindergarten, our first year in regular school) starts in September and if a child will be turning 4 in that same year he can start…. Meaning until December of that year…. If he will be turning 4 in the following year, but still the same school year, the child must wait until the following September to start school.  So, E (my son) started school what he was really only 3, and did not turn four until the beginning of November…..

To make a long story short, I am not the only parent that has this concern …  After my obsession into finding answers to what I thought to be a medical problem, I saw this on the news…

Youngest kids in class more likely to be labelled with ADHD
Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/20120305/adhd-kids-diagnosis-relative-age-120305/#ixzz1qHR7xdQ8

… and MAN! My world just became sunny once again….. PHEW! I tell you! The pressure that parents put on themselves to make sure their kids are ‘okay’ could really give us a heart attack! 

So, do we believe everything we see/read/hear or not…..

This is the conclusion that I have reached, with no less than a four year migraine about these so called MILESTONES….

Obsess about your child in every way … but inform and educate yourself and your family…. Don’t sit on the fence and hope that school will take the place of your responsibility to your baby…  be proactive and be involved….

Goal #3 – accept and learn…. (I have to accept the ‘place’ where my baby boy is in and I have to learn with him to be able to teach him…)

So as a TESL teacher for the last few years I have kind of evolved to be more educated about education and this is going to pose another huge dilemma in my life, and I hope in your life as you take the time to think about what is good for your child(ren)…

While teaching ESL I was exposed to many cultures and their stories about their education/study expectations….

Here is North America we start school at, usually, 4 years of age. We continue to finish high school at the age of 18 and then it is up to us, as adults now, whether we want to continue our education or not… Our school days start at 9 and we finish at 3, we have homework and we study for tests.. In university we attend classes, go to study groups but we kinda make our own schedules as to how we study and get work done due to a vast number of reasons…. Work, family, travel distance… PARTYING!!!  My point is, we schedule studying and living around each other because both are important…

In Asia, I have been told, their study practices border on the ridicules….. (please know that I mean NO offense to any Asians, especially former students, that may be reading this blog)

I am not sure in which grade this “studying” starts but it may be the beginning of high school… going to study groups or early classes at early as 7am, then going to regular classes and then after school study groups again until 10pm or so….

And then there is quite the opposite in Finland… please read article, here is a small excerpt…

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

“Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle”.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

So…. Where is our happy medium?? How do we know how we are supposed to teach our kids…???

I can see by watching my son, he is very “hands on”, as his teachers have also noticed… He learns by doing and not by listening… he has to be exposed physically to the idea that is being taught…. I see him with his cars and trains and books at home and know that with his “play” he is learning a lot more than if he were to be forced to sit at a desk and look at letters and number and try to figure out what is what… don’t get me wrong… we have flash cards and posters on the walls and I will randomly ask him questions about what he sees/hears/and reads, but what I am trying to say is that he needs to be active in what he is learning, it has to be a part of his daily routine because if it is just put in front of him without any correlation to what he is doing it will not make sense to him….

Well, as I stated previously …. I think that it all depends on the student, the situation and the material… all I know, because there is no way that I am in any position to make any decision for the world’s children (and really I am here to write about my life and maybe make you think about things in your life).. so all I know is that I am going to do my best to start with the basics, like the alphabet and numbers and sounds and go from there.  It is very clear and obvious when a student, my son especially, has had too much information and that will be my clue to stop…. I also think that the way you teach, with patience and respect, which is my 3^rd goal that I am working on, has a lot to do with how the student will learn and how much the student will retain….

In conclusion I think my title to this blog should be … ‘to teach stressfully or to teach calmly”…