Starting kindergarten is hard for a lot of children, but for Master J it was an experience that started out very rough and quickly descended into a perfect example of pretty poor (and, dare I say it, ignorant) teaching.
We had been in Australia for about 10 months and J was four at the time he started kindergarten. Living in a small coastal town, most of the other children already knew each other and had formed little cliques based on the socialising preferences and patterns of their parents.
The first full day started badly, to put it mildly. Parents had escorted their kids into the playground as a sort of warm up, and the kids were let loose. J was keen on the idea of kindergarten and looking forward to playing with other children.
He approached some of the kids and told them about something he'd seen in a Diego cartoon (a baby jaguar, I think it was) and how he thought there might be a baby jaguar trapped on the kindergarten roof! That's our J, full of imagination...
A not-so-little boy walked up to him, told him he was "stupid", said "what are you talking about?", slapped one of his hands and shoved past him, bumping him with his shoulder. A girl followed up with a pouting sneer, hands on hips with eyes rolling, then shoved J with both hands, landing him on his backside.
Standing about four metres away, I gaped. The parents and teacher, standing right next to the tussle (if you could call it that) watched it happen and just went right on with their chinwag (everyone being "locals" here, they all knew each other socially outside the kindergarten).
I was beside myself, but had to clamp my jaws shut. I figured at the time that if there was anything worse than a bit of introductory bullying and teacher neglect, it was having a parent making a big scene about it in front of all and sundry right there on the first day of kindergarten. I'm still not sure I made the right decision there.
I helped J up, let him know everything was okay, and said that not all kids were going to be kind and friendly (which was rather heart-breaking news to him). We talked about it later that night and on subsequent days, when it appeared this sort of rough treatment and later even psychological games of exclusion were taking place -- and teachers didn't appear to give a fig about it.
Bullying is a fact of life in schools. I hadn't expected to see it so blatantly on the first day and months of kindergarten, but I did want J to face the reality and start developing some strategies in terms of how to respond to it appropriately.
The 'strategies' (and they were rushed ones, mind -- because I truly hadn't expected to have to deal with the bullying issue so early in J's education) were:
- If somebody pushes you, tell them very loudly not to (hopefully so the teacher will hear as well);
- If they push you again, bloody well push them back (but never do it first, and remember to tell the teacher who pushed who first);
- Tell the teacher about it when it happens, calmly, without wailing and crying (if possible);
- Tell your mum and dad about it, so we can help you find ways to fix the problem;
- Avoid the children who want to push or say bad things to you -- don't give them any of your time or attention because that's why they bully others (attention). Look around for other friends and/or don't be afraid to play a little by yourself for a while.
I'm not sure what you think of those strategies, but they seemed to work pretty well for J.
For a while at least.
Until the next problem cropped up. A conservative and somewhat aggressive kindergarten teacher who thought it was okay to physically coerce children.
A teacher who also came to the conclusion that a bilingual child had the sort of development problems that warranted excluding him from the broader group and isolating him to play with another child with genuine (and diagnosed) special needs issues.
I'll save that for a future blog post...
For now, however, I want to stress that J's kindergarten journey quickly took a turn for the vastly better. When his hands and legs started shaking while waiting outside the kindergarten door, following a mind-baffling telephone conversation with a teacher who thought he had development issues, and following the day he came home with bruises and scratches on his face from his "special friend", I packed him up and took him to a new kindergarten.
Where a very special kindergarten teacher named Jo not only revealed his previous kindergarten experiences to be a sham and a shame, but took him on an amazing journey that resulted in a very creative, very social, very confident and very caring little boy heading off to his first day of school with stars in his eyes.
=D
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