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Drooling on the Pillow

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

And You Have 35 Words for Potato Chianti 

Lane was helping out at Grace's first grade class for a couple of hours yesterday when one kid remonstrated another for being slow in completing her clay snail. The upbraided kid, now sorely aggrieved, stood up and announced, "I am Italian and Irish and in my culture when you say I'm slow you hurt my feelings."

Well.

As you can imagine, it was difficult to formulate a response to that for my wife, much less the (now) offending child.

First let me say that this is an excellent charter school and Grace has a wonderful teacher. She's doing great

However, we've run into this a few times with Grace and observed it a number of times in her dealings with her classmates. The children learn a vocabulary of victimhood that they quickly learn to use to rationalize any behavior that is challenged. Last week I was giving Grace a talking to about some (rare) misbehavior. She later reported to Lane that the problem was that I should have calmed down and that I didn't try hard enough to understand her. I think I got her message, though. I was a stupid old poopy-head or words to that effect.

Of course, all these things they're teaching the kids are important and appropriate. Culture is important and interesting and people should calmly try to understand each other when conflict arises. But when the kids use these truisms to evade responsibility its more important to challenge them every time. Otherwise, we're raising a generation of Rosie Sharptons
Posted by: Sluggo / 10:35 AM
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