I'm trying to figure out why tests get all the blame for childhood anxieties when we have parents like this:
Haley Califano is a pretty normal 5-year-old. She likes coloring books and the Hula Hoop. But her mother, Christine, was concerned that with kindergarten fast approaching, learning her ABCs was throwing Haley for a loop."It wasn't that she had any kind of limitations," Christine Califano says, "It was that she really wasn't interested, and she needed to be motivated a little more."
So she took Haley for private tutoring at the Sylvan Learning Center in Huntington, L.I. "It is unfortunate that you have to do all this preparation for kindergarten, but you really do," Califano says...
Lesson learned: Mom will not try to motivate you herself, but she'll be glad to pay someone else hundreds of dollars to do so.
If you wonder why Christine Califano doesn't teach what Haley needs to know, believe it or not, Haley said it was easier for her learning from her teachers. Experts also say that's sometimes the case because teachers are trained to teach and parents just aren't.
Wow. I guess all those homeschooling parents are just completely missing the boat. What would we do without those experts to tell us that we're incapable of teaching our children?
Kudos to Joanne Jacobs for the link and the phrase, "star anecdote" to describe poor Haley.
Posted by kswygert at August 15, 2005 07:03 PM