The following open letter was (or will be soon) sent to the Education Department of our town, and the Ministry of Education, as a result of the miserable school year experienced by my son Guy in his kindergarten. I want to add that towards the end of the school year, I have had a really blunt, straight and direct conversation with the head teacher. As a result her behavior changed significantly. It taught me that one should never keep things inside, and that other behavior is possible.
Do not let your child fight on his own. You can, and must help. Here it is.
D.S.
Before I start with the real issues of this open letter, let me emphasize a few points.
First, the 2009 school year is behind us. Our son Guy, the subject of this letter, has graduated pre-school kindergarten and will attend first grade in September. Therefore, this open letter is meant to accomplish nothing but to report, to update, and to warn. My hope is that other parents, and other five years old children will be saved the anxiety, grief and disappointment Guy and we, his parents, had experienced this year. We sincerely hope that attention will be paid, action will be taken, improvement will be made.
Second, this kindergarten, is a place guy attended less than one year. Most of the kindergarten staff, are courteous, gentle, caring and giving, loving and considerate. In order to not be guilty of generalization, let me use this opportunity to praise and commend most of the kindergarten’s staff members (with one exception), the staff who will not be discussed in this letter. My wife Dorit and I are grateful for your help throughout the school year. Thank you and God bless you.
Third, my wife and I aren’t the complaining type. We do not raise our voices, and we do not scream even when justice is clearly on our side. We never ask for special treatment, and we never suggested that we have been or are discriminated against. We believe in the authorities. All we have asked for, is for our youngest son Guy, to experience a childhood like every other child. We have only asked for Guy to go to kindergarten in the mornings happy and willing, that he shall broaden his horizons, gain knowledge and good manners, that he shall learn the codes of behavior between human beings. We wanted him to prepare, to get ready for school, and the real world. We believe this is pretty basic.
Let me add that our small family was out of the country on assignment. For two and a half years, we have lived in Beijing, China. Guy attended an international kindergarten from the age of three and until we have returned to Israel in November of 2008. Since we had arrived in Israel after the beginning of the school year, and since all other kindergartens were full, and since we had no other choices, we had agreed to send Guy to this Kindergarten, headed by a certified kindergarten teacher, the one who’s responsible for the lion’s share of grief and disappointment we had experienced this year.
Needless to say, had our expectations, wishes and hopes come true, this letter would have never been written.
Guy, a clever five year old at the time, friendly and handsome (if I may say so myself), went to school happily. Soon he realized that his world is about to shatter. His smile faded away, his cheerfulness disappeared. Guy had to start his war for survival early. Way too early.
Guy’s objective difficulties – moving between continents, countries and cultures, between languages, homes, and schools – were dwarfed by his day to day difficulties. Some children, a few, quickly understood that Guy, as are his parents, is not violent, does not scream and yell, does not hit, and doesn’t even return when hit. They started picking on him. Used to a different environment, Guy went to tell the teacher. He was hoping that the teacher will make peace, teach manners, use her authority to dismantle tension. He was hoping for a loving, friendly environment. He was mistaken. Guy had realized that there was no winning strategy. If he told he was hit, there was no reaction. If he hit back, he was punished. He was getting no protection from the authority figure. What he was getting, plenty, was anger.
The authority figure who was supposed to give and to listen, turned angry and loud. The teacher who was supposed to give, robbed Guy of his childhood.
When we came to the kindergarten to pick Guy up, we were often received with an angry face followed by a nasty tone of voice. The news of Guy’s “situation” were given upon arrival, and in front of all the children and some parents who happened to have been there at the time. All shared with us the daily “report”. Naturally, the children picked up on it, and were on occasion delivering the report on their own. Imagine that, you come to pick your child from kindergarten, and a bunch of little kids tell you “Guy behaved well today”. That happened on many occasions. I found it to be unacceptable.
One day, the children had told Dorit at the gate, that “the Teacher wants to have a word with her”. Upon entrance, in front of all the other kids and some parents, Dorit was told that we were “back to square one”, and that “all progress had been eliminated”. In answer to our questions, the teacher said that “Guy tripped every single kid in the class”. However, other parents and children provided a different version, one child tripped over Guy’s foot, it was unintentional. Guy did not get what every criminal gets in the court of law: the benefit of the doubt. He was guilty until proven innocent.
Now Guy is not an angel. He’s a child. A boy. He does on occasion get mischievous. But he certainly is not a convicted felon. Listening to the teacher’s words about Guy could give the wrong impression. Very wrong. One could have gotten the impression that we were raising the son of the devil, or worse, the devil himself.
Since we are responsible parents, and since education and behavior are extremely important in our family, we had Guy diagnosed. As we suspected, the expert child psychologist suggested that Guy was a normal six years old child, clever and smart, friendly and charming. We were not surprised to have realized that all Guy needed, like all kids his age do, like all of us do, was TLC – Tender Loving Care. Love he received very little of, if at all, from his teacher throughout the school year.
Now I don’t know what a person must go through in order to lose her compassion. What could possibly cause a middle aged woman to show an angry face to a bunch of little kids. I cannot look into one’s soul, but I know for sure, that such a person does not belong in the school system. Any school system should extract such persons. Any school system should bring instead some real education people, who carry inside a large pile of unconditional love, compassion and a strong will to educate.
As I said before, Guy will attend first grade next year. We hope that the smile will return to his face, that his trust in human beings will nest in his heart again. We hope that he will be able to trust the system again. We hope that we will be able to do so as well.
The other day Guy had returned from his first fay of camp. He was glowing. His first words to his mother were that nobody got mad at him, that nobody shouted at him. Both his mother and I shed some tears, understanding with that one sentence what he had experienced throughout the school year. We will have to spend some time explaining to him that this, and not the other, is the expected behavior. The other was the absolute exception.
Latest Comments