Friday, 30th October 2009
Children's corners
It was about 9.30am, and I was walking along a street, desperately trying not to breathe in the traffic fumes.
At the zebra crossing, a bus taking school children for an outing stopped to let a stream of people cross the road. I was not one of them, so I could look at the faces of the children, some of whom waved at me - and of course I waved back.
I noticed that both teachers in charge of the children were sitting at the front, talking animatedly together; this means that the children at the back were unsupervised - at least for that part of the trip.
And then I saw her. Unlike her peers, who were sitting two or three to a seat - she was alone. Her chubby face was wet with tears, and pressed against the window. She was sobbing silently - and no one appeared to have noticed, or cared. Perhaps because, as I have sometimes been told about other children in similar circumstances, "she is always like that and no one wants to stay near her".
My heart went out to the chid- but by the time I retraced my steps and made to cross the road, the lights had changed to amber and the man driving a souped-up red Ford Escort was too mean to give me a couple of seconds' grace - and I missed the opportunity to draw the teachers' attention to what was happing right behind their backs.
It is illogical to expect a teacher to give personal attention to each of her charges, all the time. In fact, that is why some teachers address the pupils as "Class!" in a tone appropriate for the occasion. Yet I do expect teachers, in whose hands we leave our children, to cast a practiced eye over their charges, and take action where necessary.
In Malta, we have to send children to school whether we like it or not, since home-schooling is not an option except in dire cases. Alas, all too often, when a child is singled out for attention by a teacher, it is for a negative reason. Such as time a boy was described as "the one who eats rabbit food" because knowing he would not eat sandwiches, his mother always gave him a salad instead. Some teachers still go for the "star" system, where children are given tokens for exceptionally good behaviour, or improvements in the quality or work (or even doing it, in some cases). That this serves as an encouragement is without a doubt.
However, children who are naturally intelligent and yet antsy (perhaps because they are bored) will never get any kind of "encouragement" from the teacher, and comments would tend to focus on their (mis)behaviour. These kids have been known to become frustrated because they never receive praise for their work, because it is taken for granted that they will deliver.
But the moment they step out of line- whether in the grades or in the behaviour departments - they are threatened with notes to parents, spending breaks without being allowed to play with their peers (or worse, writing an essay - which will make them abhor writing), or even missing the next outing. Before someone takes pen to paper to accuse me (again!) that I have a grudge against teachers - let me admit that as a parent, and as an educator, I, too, have failed at times to be sensitive enough to a child's needs. I also know full well that some children (and their parents) can be especially demanding of a teacher's time... and mental equilibrium.
That having been said, I also know that certain teachers expect children to toe the line and fit into a mould, preferably simultaneously. Anyone who does not conform thwarts this pattern - and tends to be branded as "difficult" or "defiant" or "dreadful" as the case may be. It is a sad truth that there are teachers who shunt to one side children who are careless, smelly, and (insert several other adjectives here, including "left-handed"!). Take the case of the child who had saved up his ‘tokens'.
In this particular group, on a Friday, children could select a tiny gift to take home for themselves or for their siblings, from a collection of stationery and knick-knacks the teacher kept for this purpose. They could choose to "pass"; the week following they could choose something that was worth "2" (each item had a value in points). I am making it clear that here, the gifts were not connected to behaviour, quality of work turned in, or any other matter; it was just a routine the teacher had.
This child had resisted the temptation, throughout the year, to take anything from the kitty - even when there were tiny bags of marbles, or football stickers, or pencils in the colours of his favourite football team. He was saving them up for the last Friday of the scholastic year, so that he would have a stash of things to give away to the children at the place where he did some voluntary work.
Everyone knew this - even the teacher. Sure enough, when the Friday came around, he made sure that his bagful of tokens was in his bag before he left home. But when the time came for him to make the selection - the bag was not in his satchel.
The teacher was wary of searching inside the bags of the other children. Later, she justified herself that it would have been tantamount to accusing each pupil of being guilty of theft. She added, somewhat patronizingly, that she did not want to set a precedent and have kids claiming that they had ‘lost' any number of tokens. Paradoxically, she knew that no one else could present more than a maximum of four tokens without giving himself away. So she took the path of least resistance - she told the child that since he had no token to redeem, she could not give him his gifts.
The child was shocked. He knew that the teacher knew that he had never picked anything form the Big Box. He knew that she knew someone had stolen the tokens. He knew that all that he had hoped for, and had worked for unselfishly, was being reduced to nothing, in that moment.
So he cried. And the teacher told him not to be a Big Baby, - a phrase which, inevitably, was picked up by a couple of children and repeated over and over again... until the teacher intervened. I know this from a parent of one of the children who told the story at home. Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending - the parents passed the hat around and someone left a box of things with the boy's name, at the door of his house.
This story is, probably, unique - but its parallels exist in many classes. There's more - but let's just mention the seven-year-old who started wetting the bed again when her father died, and every day, the teacher used to ask her whether she had washed herself that morning, in front of the whole class.
Let's not talk about the teachers who speak in English to children who do not understand it, "because this is an English-speaking school and they have to learn it" - without bothering to translate the gist of what they are saying into Maltese. Let's leave out of this, the teachers who play favourites, for reasons best known to themselves.
RSS
Comments