Opinion: in the USA, no one owes anything to your children

Фото: Depositphotos

I took my daughters to school, I return home and pass by two mothers who also took theirs and stopped to talk: “…. I tell her - he’s in second grade and can barely read! What is it?". “Weak school, weak, teachers don’t need anything... Mine, too, doesn’t boom-boom in the multiplication table, they don’t force you to teach at school, so yesterday he sat with a calculator - dividing!”

No, I love this kind of logic, or rather the lack of it - let the school teach, and I wash my hands of it.

Or something else - let the doctor treat, and I wash my hands of it and forget about the child’s diet, hardening, or his sports activities. But let the doctor definitely give you an anti-obesity pill!

And so on. Someone all the time owes our children more than we do. Someone all the time has to strain for their sake more than we do.

Here are two of these clunkers standing near a school, albeit an ordinary city school, but a very good school - on average, last year the children passed the tests at 8 out of 10 possible, and they wash the bones of the teachers: this is not how they teach! The child is seven years old, and he can barely read! They stand and discuss how poorly their children are taught, believing that they themselves do not need to interfere in the learning process at all - well, school! let the teachers teach!

Yesterday I was just talking about this topic with one of my daughter’s fencing coaches, Yulia. She said that her youngest daughter was not interested in school. Eva goes to first grade and they again teach A, B, C there... Then Yulia went to the meeting and asked: “Why is the program so weak? Well, why use the alphabet again, after all, everyone has known it for a long time!” No, they told her at school, not all children at six years old know the alphabet...

Those who do not live in the USA cannot understand, but Americans will now understand me 100% - so that a child does not learn the alphabet by the age of three or four, or even by the age of five, he must be kept locked in an empty and dark room.

The fact is that the song that helps us learn letters is not even at every step, it’s just an integral part of life. I'm serious. It is in children's toys, and for children almost from birth, it is in animations, videos on YouTube, it is in videos for children, advertising ... It’s all around. It is possible to learn the alphabet with it even to a person with a girl's memory in a couple of hours. And the child with his tenacious memory will remember almost instantly.

Фото: Depositphotos

Well, yes, Yulia says, whatever you want, many people there don’t do their homework, and their parents don’t bother. Here was one thing: cut out a child’s face from a photo, paste it on, draw on a dress or pants, and write what the child likes most. Well, you have to strain yourself, you have to print out the photo! And here is the alphabet - but who will teach it, let the teachers teach, and the children who know pick their noses and look at the cracks on the walls.

Yes, the problem is that many parents not only do not consider it necessary to teach, but on the contrary, they are sure that he will go to school and learn there!

You don’t have any knowledge about geometric shapes, you don’t even have to count to ten—nothing! It would be nice if they brought him to school at the age of 4-5. No, they take a child without knowledge to the first grade - and with a “light movement of the hand” he slows down the entire main class.

The multiplication table can be hung on the wall and chase the child on it every day. Alas, the teacher cannot put this knowledge into his head. Buy cards and play.

Can't read? And you, mamma, how many books did you read aloud to him?

Sometimes they also say this: they didn’t force it because they were afraid that the child would overexert himself. So you don’t need to sit him down at a desk for 40 minutes, you need to do it in a playful way. The memory of a child under eight years old can be compared to a good sponge for washing dishes - the child does not teach, he absorbs knowledge like that sponge absorbs water. Without straining or going crazy, but without even noticing.

If our children were shown cartoons in Spanish throughout the year in first grade, then by the end of the year the children would speak it - I tested this on my own. My Masha and Nika learned English this way. A year before school they watched the channel PBS.

We then just came from Russia, and they did not know a word of English. And a year later at school, Masha passed the test in English and never attended additional lessons as she should have been. Nick did not pass, but simply because then did not speak plainly. And so, too, would have passed.

You can’t overexert a child with knowledge of the alphabet, no way. You cannot overstrain him with the simplest arithmetic operations. You cannot overexert yourself with knowledge of geometric figures. And so on. Just say so - we ourselves don’t want to strain ourselves, because children learn new things with great pleasure, however, when all this happens in an interesting playful way. True, when parents also teach something with them every day, and do not stand in their dressing gowns near the school, discussing teachers, although they themselves did not lift a finger for this.

It is because of people like you, dear parents, that our children are not interested in studying in schools, the program there is boring and monotonous.

I just listen to other people's conversations and never get involved. But if I could, I’d say to moms: according to statistics, Chinese children in our school last year passed tests for 10 from 10, white for 9 from 10, and Mexican (Spanish) on 6 of 10. According to the same statistics, children from low-income families passed the tests much worse than children from middle and higher families.

School - yes, it teaches. But he just teaches differently... What is this - a biased attitude of teachers? Are the Chinese getting more attention? Are whites taught better than Mexicans? Your child was deliberately not taught to read, and the existence of the multiplication table was hidden from another? Of course not. It’s just that different parents are waiting for those children at home. And it also depends on how stressed the parents are whether the school is strong or not, whether the program there is weak or not.

That's the whole "secret".

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