It is often said that once bilingual kids go to school the language that is spoken at home is slowly pushed out by the language spoken at school. Well, not in our case. Hahna successfully finished her kindergarten year and I am happy to say she still speaks Czech the same way she spoke before she started school. Sometimes it is hard for us to translate new school terms like “supper star” or “happy/sad face” or “freeze time” or “library time” to Czech without sounding clumsy but we do it anyway or we just leave the term in English.
So what are my legal alien observations as a brand new school mom?
1. Homework – the kids have too much of it! A 5-year old should be spending a little less time on learning and more time playing outside. Also, our homework is written in English on one side and in Spanish on the other side. How are these Hispanic kids ever going to learn English I don’t know….
2. I did say they get too much homework but I have also been observing (as a one-day-a-week-in-class volunteer) that they have a LOT of play time at school, which I guess, balances out my point number one. They make artsy stuff all the time! I don’t remember doing anything like that when I went to school, only during prescribed ‘art class” time, which was once a week.
3. Now this one really chopped my you-know-what. Since I volunteer in the class I get to talk to the teacher quite a bit. One day she started talking to me about Hahna and how distracted she gets. “She has an attention problem. She daydreams and I have to tell her things multiple times.” She went on saying that I should talk to the pediatrician, hinting that I should maybe go the Ritalin way???!!!! For those who don’t know what Ritalin is, it is a drug used for ADD, given kids here in America like candy. I talked to my dad about it who is a doctor in the Czech Republic and he was appalled. He told me that in Europe it is NOT allowed to be given to the kids at all…kind of a red flag, don’t you think?
Anyhow, I think she is a good teacher but the fact that she would even suggest it is just unbelievable to me. I see Hahna what she is doing in class and yes she daydreams sometimes and yes the teacher has to repeat things to her but she is FIVE YEARS OLD for crying out loud!!!! This is what kids do!!! As the time goes by they just have to learn to pay attention and to daydream less. That is all.
One of my good friend’s husband is a high school teacher and she told me Jeremy had a student on Ritalin. Before she was on it she was quite the annoying student, hyper, talkative and he had to pay a lot of attention to her. When she was on Ritalin she would just sit there, looking tired and without any spirit in her. He didn’t have to pay that much attention to her like in the past but guess what? Jeremy said he preferred her to be the hyper herself rather than this quiet drugged up girl because at least she was participating in a discussion!
4. Lunch time – yuk! The lunches in the cafeteria are not very appealing. They seem to fulfill requirements of the food guide pyramid but still….pizzas, corn dogs, chocolate milks, fries…..That’s why I pack Hahna lunch every day.
6. The teachers are very nice, sometimes too nice. If you read my post called “Please, honey, please” you know what I am talking about. They use a little too much ‘please’ and too little of a strict discipline. I don’t mean hitting the kids with the ruler but have a little more authority!! Let your ‘no’ be ‘no’ and don’t be apologetic about it.
7. A large Hispanic community – so what? At the beginning of the year I was a little scared that Hahna would learn more Spanish than English since 2/3 of her class was Hispanic. But now I am at peace. The Hispanics are mostly well behaved and they are eager to please and eager to learn. So far. I heard from the teachers that later on the racial separation becomes a problem among kids, not exactly sure what they were talking about but I guess I will find out.
Here are my previous diary stories:
Mommy Diary 7: The school problem
Mommy Diary 6: ‘Mommy, why do we speak Czech?’
Mommy diary 5: Red, white and bilingual
Mommy diary 4: OPOL can kiss my shorts
Mommy diary 3: I got me a bilingual baby, baby!
Mommy diary 2: Bitter-sweet results so far
If you liked this post buy me a coffee! (Suggested:$3 a latte $8 for a pound) Thanks!
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Great article!I have not heard good things about Ritalin but my friend – whose teachers were suggesting the same when he was little – still felt like he couldn’t concentrate even when he become an adult. So he stared taking ritalin and it helped him. So could see the point in that but giving it to a 5 year old is just wrong.
Tady mas castecnou odpoved na to, proc tu ma tolik deti nejakou diagnozu :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_L5KRPoTJ0 (video je anglicky s ceskymi titulky) a tady mas video s nekolika pribehy deti na prascich : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfEiJa43sTs ( anglicky se slovenskymi titulky).
1. Homework — When I was in kindergarten, we had NO homework. We played, built things with wood, hammer and nails (believe it or not!), sang, had social studies, etc. There was little attempt at “literacy education”, even though most of us could already read a little. It must work, because when we got to college and were given a reading test at 18, we all scored at graduate school level.
3. Ritalin — The teacher should just learn how to handle the kid. SHEESH! I read a great story, where a couple was told to get their kid put on Ritalin. They tried it for a couple days, but they missed their son, so they took him right off it but didn’t tell the teacher. After several weeks of his NOT being on Ritalin, the teacher sent a note home telling the parents how much the Ritalin had improved his behavior.
I have a friend who taught first grade and had got a Puerto Rican kid who’d been put on Ritalin. My friend didn’t know why, so he looked into it, and it appeared that in kindergarten he couldn’t respond verbally to other kids picking on him, because he didn’t speak English yet, and hardly anybody here speaks Spanish, so he’d hit and kick. They just medicated him without having a Spanish-speaking person discern the reason for his behavior. In first grade, in my friend’s class, someone forgot to refill the kid’s Ritalin prescription for several weeks, so the kid wasn’t on it. My friend said he saw no negative change in the kid’s behavior.
Also be careful of teachers’ love of diagnosis. They enthusiastically diagnose kids with imaginative new disorders, and often the diagnoses are bogus. For example, my step-niece was diagnosed with “minimal brain dysfunction”. I was curious, so I asked my psychology professor what the term meant. She said, “Minimal brain dysfunction is a diagnostic term that means, ‘I don’t like this kid, and I don’t know why.'”
4. Those lunches sound awful. Beware of federal authorities, though. Recently there was a story in the news about a girl who got her grandmother’s packed lunch confiscated because it didn’t have the federally mandated nutritional content in the right proportions. So the girl had to eat the school lunch, most of which she left untouched and got almost no nutrition.
6. Your story about Ava at story time made me think of a man I saw in the hardware store. His little boys were distracted by some Halloween decorations, and the long line at the register was being held up because the man would not raise his voice — even in a nice way — to get his kids’ attention, and he wouldn’t touch them. This struck me as sick. The story also reminded me of a radio spot by Dr. Ray Guarendi (who I think has a show on EWTN now), where he explains to parents that a 2-year-old has the reasoning ability of a German shepherd, and if parents don’t try to reason with their German shepherd, then they should try to be reasoning with their 2-year-old. Just discipline, and when they’re older you can reason, according to him.
7. When I was a kid in Michigan, there was no such thing as a Hispanic. There were people from Latin American countries, but we didn’t think of them as a different race. They were more like a different kind of Italian or Lebanese. Hell, we even thought people from India were “white”. (Everybody was Caucasian — the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Syrians, the East Indians, everybody. So, despite the ethnic diversity of my school, it wasn’t considered “integrated”.)
Keep following your own healthy parenting sense!
Jamie
About Ritalin: My friend has exactly the same story: she has a 13 year old boy and the teachers have been bugging her and bugging her about getting him on Ritalin, the boy tried it, made him feel weird, they stopped but did not tell the teachers at school. And guess what? All of a sudden – they have peace! No teacher has said a word. So lame.
Except my other friend said (a mom with older kids) that it is going to go on her record hence she is marked as the potential ADD kid? Not sure….
Wow!If “having to repeat things multiple times” is the deciding factor in whether to put a kid on Ritalin or not, I guess all children would be on Ritalin by now. Either way, she should have suggested an evaluation by a psychologist before coming to any conclusions if she had concerns. Unbelievable.
Some good points in your article. But why would you point out that the Hispanic kids are “well behaved and eager to learn and eager to please”. Hispanic kids are the same as every other kid. Right?
In fact, I find the Latin parents that I know are more strict with their children than their American counterparts.
Anyways, just an observation.
Well, racial separation is a fact of life since Hispanics come from a different country, a different culture and speak a different language. And if on top of it, there is 2/3 of them in the class, I as a parent worry. And I know that I am not the only one in the school since more than a couple of the Caucasian parents actually pulled out their kids from the class/school when they saw the situation. I stuck with it, observed the situation and persevered and I am glad I did because it turned out to be OK.
I would like them to be as any other kids, like my kids are, but we all know that when they start getting aware of their racial identity (which is during middle school) and begin singling themselves out as the ‘others’ then that’s when gangs are created and situation is not that pretty anymore. This, of course, is not the case every time, but it is a reality at some schools.
I just wanted to point out that it IS allowed to give Ritalin to kids in Europe (I live in Germany). But of course, you need a prescription. And it is not so well liked among the parents etc, because of all the effects it has on the kids.