The tragedy of this situation lies in the fact that the parents undoubtedly had the best of intentions; from the very beginning, they wanted their children to be good, responsive, well-behaved, agreeable, undemanding, considerate, unselfish, self-controlled, grateful, neither willful nor headstrong, nor defiant, and above all meek. They wanted to inculcate these values in their children by whatever means, and if there was no other way, they were even ready to use force to obtain these admirable pedogogical ends. -- Alice Miller, For Your Own GoodLast week, my daughter's school opened with two new teachers, both in fifth grade, and the Kicking Incident. I finally got the details straightened out…
What actually happened was that my daughter's teacher had gone into the classroom of another teacher, and scolded a student there, GH. Meanwhile another student, CC, had gone home and reported to his parents that the teacher from the other classroom had kicked GH for tormenting another student, CL, last year.
CL is a female, slow of mind, and thus a ripe target for abuse. Because she was my daughter's friend, the other students had ostracized my daughter, giving her the stark choice of abandoning CL or not having any friends. My daughter, who has the full complement of stubborn Polack genes that run in our family, chose the latter. So last year was hell for her, and she was looking forward to being in a class full of students who liked her and were willing to interact with her.
Meanwhile, CC's father, the Braggart, swung into action. You know the Braggart. He drives expensive, flashy vehicles that come in bright colors, the kind a real aficionado mentally labels "pussy." His voluminous waistbag is packed with the latest in photography equipment and two SLR cameras are always draped about his neck. He has a gregarious smile that could swallow Atlantis, and his personal relations are colored by a hearty bonhomie that lets you know he thinks you're the dumb one. He has an opinion on every topic, and interferes in every school activity. It's a universal rule that all Braggarts are oversize men with petite wives, and ours is no exception. Naturally he claims to be a reporter for a certain popular local tabloid, and that is how he gets leverage over the school. If he doesn't get access, he threatens to write a nasty article about the school and its administration.
CC's father ran into the school office and demanded that my daughter's teacher be punished, and sat there in the office while my daughter's teacher was brought in to account for his behavior. It wasn't his kid or his business; he had no right to be there, but the school let him sit by while the teacher explained that he had accidently bumped into the boy as he was scolding him.
At the same time, CC's mother met my wife coming into school, and remonstrated with her. "Why did you tell the new teacher about the problems with CL? That was a very bad thing to do!" My wife was flabbergasted, for she had done no such thing, and so what if she had?
Immediately a furious wave of phone calls broke over our little community. Most of the adults here haven't moved away; they all went to the local primary school together and have known each other forty years. Old alliance networks instantly revived. Who had told the teacher about the way the kids had tortured CL? Of course, it was CL's mother, who had mentioned it in the parent-teacher meeting at the beginning of the semester. As she should have….
This brought down the wrath of the community. One of the mothers said that CL's mom should "let them start at zero." She had been wrong to bring up that stuff that happened last year. Everyone was angry at her. My wife got the usual backhanded insulting apologies from those who made the false accusations: "We're sorry. We thought you had told the principal, since you always report to him." As if!
The ethics of this little affair are quite illuminating. The parents wanted their kids to start at zero with the teacher, but none of them noticed that the kids wouldn't be starting at zero with each other. The hurt in the hearts of CL and my daughter wasn't going to be washed away. Nobody offered either CL or my daughter or her mother or my wife apologies for the appalling behavior of their children, promises that the kids would be dealt with, and assurances that it would not happen again. Indeed, none of them appeared to think that their children had done anything wrong, for none of them even raised the issue of their children's behavior as such. The wrong thing had been done by CL's mother – on that score there was universal agreement, marred only by my wife's dissent. Nothing could better illustrate the paradox at the heart of Chinese child rearing: while children are often hit, they are less often punished.
Why do politicians like Hsu Hsin-liang, Shih Ming-te, Cheng Li-wen, or Sisy Chen switch from the independence side to the pro-annexation side, lacking even the slightest recognition of ethical principles? I suspect at least part of the answer lies back in their childhoods....
[Taiwan]
3 comments:
achingly familiar. my son's classmates' and schoolmates' parents are the same way. they eaither spoil the kids rotten( can do no wrong ) or they completely ingnore them until their own face is challenged. my son sprouted early, he's active and boisterous. since first grade if he even lightly bumped one of the little princes or princesses they'd shout, 'he hit me!' parents like these can't discern children's oversimplificatin of incidents or how much is normal learning experience. and of course since some of these parents donated lots of cash to the school... what got my wife and I most pissed off, besides outright lying disguised as gossiping, was that the administration seemed to have no clue how to deal with this sort of situation. a truly professional educator could educate the parents about child behavior and defuse the whole thing. they of course don't. i think too many parents are control freaks who project their personality onto the schools.
as an aside, my son went to a bilingual program within a local school. i took him out because the foreign teacher their had no idea about how to deal with grade school age children and the director would do nothing to provide the kids with mentally-safe and qualilty education.
Gosh, I hope things get better for your daughter. When I am teaching my students, I try to be fair and even-handed, even if I must seem terribly tough. Girls and boys each have their own peculiar politics. Unfortunately, it's been a bit overdramatized by pop culture with films like that Lohan vehicle, Mean Girls, which oversimplify the issues while rarely providing potential solutions.
With boys' socialization, well that's a whole other ballgame. You have hundreds of teen movies from those Patrick Dempsey movies to whatever else. And my favourite is a book I recently read, namely, Nick Hornby's About a Boy. It was made in to a movie, the latter of which I can't vouch for, because I haven't seen it. But it truly is cathartic and I think potentially good reading material for any adolescent, from one who is actually 12 or 13 to one who is 31 or the like.
Of course, this is Western pop culture I'm speaking of. What of the Taiwanese experience. It seeems they are getting so much of their material from Western TV, so the potential for change is there. But giving girls Western cultural baggage that Western girls have is not so good. I don't know. Maybe the kids will be smarter than us - or our Chinese contemporaries.
The politics of the classroom can truly be screwed up. It's as if they aren't people but a pack of wolves. Every class has their alpha and omega, and the structure leading from one to the other. As a teacher I've seen this time and time again. Some times the students will be so mean that the omega will be subject to serious emotional abuse in the classroom. When a kid freaks out, ie puts on a show as if he were going to die just because they accidentally touched a student, and it considered funny, then you know there is a huge problem. These kids may make it through school but the emotional abuse they suffer is extreme. How do you say, 'Columbine' in Chinese?
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