There is this really mischievous Chinese boy in Lil Shauna's music class. He takes a lot of coaxing to get him to pay attention and behave. He disrupts the class alot and the teacher thus spends alot of time trying to get him to behave so that class can continue. To do so, the teacher praises him a lot and uses praises to entice him to behave. As a result, he gets a lot more attention and praises than the rest of the kids.
His mother attends the class with him but very much left it to the teacher to control his behavior. In one of the particular classes, the teacher finally couldn't take it and punished him by making him stand at the naughty corner. He cried shortly and his mother went to his rescue by pulling him back to his seat. It was a pretty awkward situation.
About 3 weeks ago, a new boy joined the class and he is very vocal. He makes comments and wants to talk to the teacher very much while she tries to instruct the kids the next task to do. Many times, the teacher had to cut him off so that she could carry on with her lesson. There is afterall only 1 hour.
The next week, there is a Parent-Teacher meeting and the parents were asked to fill up the feedback form before the meeting. I took the opportunity to gently remind the teacher to not give so many praises to that misbehaved kid. I thought that her behavior indirectly suggest to the other kids that it is ok to misbehave bcos you will get all the praises when you finally behaved. I also suggested that maybe she can work with the child's mum to better control his behavior.
However, I started to struggle during class on whether I should hand in the form with the comments. I felt bad for pinpointing her teaching methodology and not at the course content itself. And it is seriously not easy to try to conduct the class, try to control the kids, yet not be overly fierce to the kids since their parent sit right in that same class. But I still handed in eventually. And I realised that it is seriously tough to be a teacher, especially when they meet parents like me. It is even more so for teachers who conduct parent-child classes bcos the parents are in the class to witness how the class is being carried out, how their kids are being treated. Poor teachers.
I have to admit that I am probably going to be one of those difficult parents that teachers have to handle in the future. This is deduced from how difficult a customer I can be when my tail is being stepped on. Well, I probably wouldn't make a police report when my kids' hair is being cut by the teachers but I am quite sure that I would complain.
I wonder how the music teacher will react to my comments. I wonder if she will target Lil Shauna in the future or treat her extra nice knowing that she has a difficult mum to back her up. I will find out bcos we are going back for another term of music lessons. I do hope that the mischievous kid and the talkative kid will drop the lessons. Oh, I will remind my kids to not be teachers in the future, bcos by their era, they would not only have to deal with difficult parents but also difficult grandparents.
Mummy Lim
No comments:
Post a Comment