Partly sunny, 32C (39C)
So, I'm thinking about putting off Arima until next weekend--to spread out my spending a bit.
In the meantime, I thought it might be worthwhile to explain my position on children.
There are many problems with children, the main one being that they lack complete brains and are therefore inscrutable. You never know what a child will find amusing and they are so completely incapable of reason that everything must be amusing to them. This may be fine for playing or when you have all day to lavish attention on the child and bask in the wonders of it's development but is not when you're supposed to be accomplishing something like teaching a set curriculum on a set schedule at a set time of day every week. Not to mention the constant fight against the environment the child is in for the other 10,030 minutes of the week. 50 minutes is not enough to achieve what is desired but it's also way too long to not achieve anything.
I say all that before getting to the very important task of defining what a child is. For me, a child is generally less than eight years old for girls and less than ten for boys. This can be further divided into infants, young children and old children but we won't worry about that.
I don't remember a whole lot of my own childhood. Well, scratch that, I do remember quite a lot, but it's mostly episodic. Also, I was a strange child. I hardly ever slept and was very independent. I was intelligent and could play well enough by myself as well as with others. My games were usually elaborate--mimicking archaeological digs, cooking five-course breakfasts for my platoon of stuffed animals, or carrying out mapping expeditions in the woods by the river of my grandparents' cabin--and involved adult objects or concepts. I could add here that I never had invisible friends [and have always thought this somehow alienates me from most other people...], although I was taught to consider the "feelings" and experiences or points-of-view of even inanimate things...
My clothes all had bells sewn onto them so that my mother could tell where I was and could guess at what I was doing. All of my clothes had many bells sewn onto them. Even my shoes and shoelaces (my mother could hear if I was lagging behind because I was tying my shoe or because I was getting into trouble). I carried a McGuyver-like collection of items in a baggie in my pocket to help amuse myself when I couldn't run amok (that is, on errands or trips to the bank or grocery store or whatnot) ; it had things like strings, magnets, paperclips, marbles, springs, erasers, a little notepad and a kit of miniature colored pencils. It was part of my training to identify these situations and find a quiet place on my own to not make a nuisance of myself ; the former was encouraged and praised (but not rewarded because it all fell under "expected behavior") and the latter was simply not acceptable because it wasn't in my character. Things were largely different for my little sister--but that is because she is a different person with a vastly different personality and needed a different kind of framework while at a similar age. This is all to express the idea that I was monitored but not doted upon ; I was purposefully trained, long and hard, from my earliest memories. Which is to prepare a contrast with most of the children I interact with in this job...
At the same time I was involved with all sorts of lessons--ballet, tap-dance, karate and such. I could ride a horse, house-train a dog, nurse sick birds and organize playmates. I cooked for people, did crafts and some art. I did things like fishing, camping, and hiking actively--that is to say, I participated in planning and preparation as well as execution, I wasn't just dragged along to where the adults were going. I was asked my opinion and my opinion had some small degree of influence (small when I was still a child, greater after I wasn't ; it was all part of my training in responsibility and in choice in action). This was an inviolable expectation and it never occurred to me not to do as I did, anyway.
When I was seven years old my ears were pierced--which in my family indicates the end of childhood, or the beginning of the end of childhood. Due to various circumstances I was basically an adult by the time I was ten and was expected to make decisions and conduct myself as one in every conceivable way except openly in law (note the use of the qualifier "openly") ; at this point there were no more shields but by virtue of my being young for the world there were plenty of shackles. I think this explains why my cut-off for children I can deal with and children that are more challenging than I want to deal with is where it is. I consider myself to have been a child before seven, something else between seven and ten and an adolescent for a long time after that... I realize this developmental trajectory is not entirely average, but it's the trajectory I know from my life as opposed to a few textbooks.
Throughout this time, it was not enough to be passively taught and it was far from acceptable behavior to not listen and not pay attention.** This is not usual, it seems, for children which makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for me to identify with them--something I have to do to teach effectively. I don't understand the "games" they like or what drives them from one thing to the next. I've tried to study rules for children's games and they're all so nonsensical and meaningless that I can never remember them. I don't understand how one thing can keep a child in it's thrall for ages but something actually amusing on several levels fails to even distract them.
I attribute my confusion in these matters to their lack of sufficiently complete brains. Of course, children aren't completely brainless, but enough is missing that many things are more difficult for them than they need to be when presented the way they are in these classes in order to keep the schedule, to give the parents something tangible to see us doing, etc. And parents almost universally fail to understand this. They have totally unreasonable expectations and totally unrealistic views of how to accomplish them. They don't understand that children's hours of activity vary throughout development, nor that some hours are better suited to some behaviors than others--a child's development, in this sense, is utterly incompatible with modern adult, commercial society. Parents are in the forest--or bricks in the wall, if you prefer. The parents, more often than not, don't really get what's going on with their children or how things are happening and I can't communicate with them effectively/properly, not to mention I have no outstanding qualifications so even if I could the parents would have no cause to heed me. Which brings me to the next point : my company [and most, if not all, like it] suffers major retardation on this matter. They fill the parents with unrealistic visions of their bilingual children and set a schedule and a pace as if this is the way that sort of thing reliably works when what brain the children do have simply doesn't work that way.
Not that I'm an expert on how they do work.... But I do know that children are like rubbery goo with sponge-like elements. They're in constant and elastic transition--considering the proportion of their lives spent in this period versus out of it, the transition is also rather violent. They retain the craziest things and forget the most important--with no rhyme or reason. As the child ages and becomes somewhat more enculturated some issues lose some of their high-relief and the child develops tools to then overcome them as it reaches the ages that I can handle with a level of discomfort that doesn't totally frustrate and exhaust me : over eight for girls and over ten for boys, generally speaking. In other words, at about that age we both become capable of reaching [for] the other, and it becomes worthwhile to do so. Below that age, they don't understand to reach and I am incapable of bridging the distance. As a human being, I don't like children who don't know to reach for me when I can't reach them on my own ; as a teacher, I am not properly trained to overcome this challenge.
At about thirteen for girls and fifteen for boys, I can begin holding them responsible for themselves, for their behavior (though they can't fully be held responsible for their choices until they're eighteen or twenty), and I can begin teaching them how to nurse their own motivation for learning. (This is very late by my own life's timeline for being held independently responsible for such things, but I consider myself to be a relatively flexible person and this is one of the reasons why.) After about twenty for girls and twenty-two for boys (around the same time that their brains become completely whole and totally functioning organs, ironically enough), I can usually no longer teach them about motivation or even very much about discipline. In fact, I can't teach them much of anything, strictly speaking, I can only help them learn and the value of my help is nearly totally dependent on what they make of it. At about this time they are completely adult in every physical and psychological respect, the only question is how much they accept that--and how much they express that acceptance through their actions and attitudes.
Obviously there are exceptions, there are varying personalities and varying levels of awareness, but if I had to generalize this is how I'd do it.
**I should note that "good behavior" was on a scale adjusted to my needs. For example, when I was a young child, if I was told to sit that meant that some portion of my body had to remain in contact with some part of the chair I had been told to sit in--however that obligation was met was perfectly within reason. At night I had to sleep, which meant that I did not leave my bed from the time that I was put there until the sun came up (I could go to the bathroom, of course) because of course I didn't sleep the whole night but other people in the house did (as an aside, maybe this is the only time in my life that I have ever awaited the sunrise...). When I was an older child, the part of the chair was narrowed to the seat and arms. When I was no longer a child, it was narrowed again to just the seat and it had to be the back and lower part of my body that was in contact with it. When I was what I call an adolescent I was no longer told to sit as I could make that decision for myself and was fully expected to.
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