Changes! Eek!

[rivka]

I just scheduled a visit to a nursery school for next Thursday.

Well, nursery school/daycare. They have both. All the kids do nursery school in the morning, and you can either bring them home at noon or have them stay for lunch, nap, and afternoon daycare. They have a two-year-old classroom. If we like the school, we'll be signing Alex up to start in May.

I had despaired of finding a good play-based nursery school, because all of the ones that advertise in Baltimore's Child magazine talk about "computer literacy" and "pre-reading skills" and "kindergarten readiness." It's part of a trend that, unbelievably, includes academic tutoring for 3-5 year olds. From the way things are going I do predict that Alex will master preschool concepts early and be reading by three or four - but I am utterly opposed, philosophically, to sending her to an "academic" nursery school where those concepts are formally presented.

My friend Suzanne passed on some materials about the Bolton Hill nursery school. "Play is a child's work," the flyer began, and went on to explain that young children learn best from exploring their world, not from formal instruction. The teachers provide a rich environment - music, art supplies, pretend play equipment, a courtyard and a nearby playground for outdoor play, books, building materials - and help the children negotiate social interactions. They do all the traditional nursery school projects, like sprouting seeds in Dixie cups and visiting a fire station, but "rarely will you enter a classroom and see all the children seated at a table doing the same art project." It seems very free.

Best of all: they offer a flexible schedule - anywhere from 1-5 half and/or whole days a week - and they are much cheaper than a nanny. They're located just six blocks from our house, so we can walk there. And Suzanne's son Leo, who is in playgroup with Alex, will be going 1.5 days a week - so she would be starting out with a familiar playmate.

Still: nursery school? Already? What a scary thought. And yet, Alex really enjoys being with other kids. We've been thinking that when our current nanny graduates from school and takes a full-time job, we'll probably want to put Alex in group daycare. It's just the word "school" that's making me think "Whoa!"

Comments

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Cool! I Did Not Know this about you. Who was your grandfather?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

George Wald (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1997/04.17/GeorgeWaldNobel.html), Physiology or Medicine 1967.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Coolness! Sounds like he was a good person as well as a smart person, which to my mind is more important. Living in Germany between 1932 and 1934 must've been interesting (not necessarily in a good way), what with the Nazis taking power in 1933. Bird's eye view and so forth.

As for Alex, good for you guys putting her in a preschool/daycare where she gets to be a kid instead of a homework receptacle. Particularly since if she can already count to six at the age of 17 months without having been formally "taught" to do so, I highly doubt she'll NEED formal teaching in order to acquire the rest of the preschool skills.

It's weird, though. On the one hand you've got yuppie parents stuffing their 3-year-olds full of knowledge and not giving them a chance to be a child, and what's more, to acquire skills naturally, and on the other hand you've got parents who don't do enough enrichment activities with their kids. My mom teaches Grade 1 in a school that's classified as inner city for funding purposes (it's actually in a blue-collar suburb, but it has all the poverty and social problems associated in the popular mindset with the inner city). So yeah, she gets 6-year-olds starting Grade 1 and not having basic skills, while simultaneously yuppies in the highly gentrified former inner city are drowning their kids in demands for skills and achievement.

She has to really nag to get some of the parents to practice reading with their kids in the evenings, because they see the kid learning to read (a fairly essential skill one is supposed to acquire in Grade 1) as being exclusively the teacher's problem. Mind you, that's often just a question of personality. I mean, there are some dirt-poor immigrants who only have a Grade 4 education in their own language, let alone English, but when she says practice reading with your kids, take them to the library during vacation time, etc, they're happy to do it. It's just a question of communicating (some teachers don't bother trying to get parents with poor English focused on their kids' education, unfortunately). Just because someone comes from a disadvantaged background doesn't mean they're stupid or that they aren't willing and able to give their kids the tools to succeed.

And then you get another set of parents, possibly from an identical background, but they really don't give a shit. The key variable is parental attitude rather than parental socio-economic background. And their kids might have arrived in Grade 1 better prepared if they'd been in a Head Start-type program of some kind. And then we get the Head-Start-on-Steroids parents who bombard their kid with Baby Einstein from birth, leading to stressed-out preschoolers.* There doesn't seem to be a happy medium between the two extremes.

* Granted, I was the first physically healthy three-year-old my pediatrician had ever seen who was suffering from stress (I had a muscle tic in my face that my mom thought could be nerve damage, but it was stress). HOWEVER, my mother wasn't doing anything to make me stressed out, like, say, giving academic tutoring to a 3-year-old. I came out that way, according to her. And I already knew how to read.

As for a pediatrician in practice today, I wonder how often they see stressed-out preschoolers suffering from parents trying to mold their kids into baby geniuses. Particularly since my understanding is that when the occasional child is so profoundly gifted as to be at the Doogie Howser/River Tam/Good Will Hunting level, they usually are that way no matter what the parents do in infancy and early childhood, and aren't the beneficiaries/victims of intensive tutoring. It's perfectly possible to give a small child intellectual stimulation through play rather than work, as Alex's example shows.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

I second that. My grandmothers worked as cleaners, granddad 1 was an electrician, and granddad 2 left school early, but BOY did they value education. Granddad 2 taught me to read at age 3 (in a playful way, may I add), and I'm sure he was key to my mother's and my performance at school.