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At the school of my disabled son Willi I love that the performances of the children are not compared. Every child is so individual there, that would not be possible. So there is no competition among the mothers. That seems to be good for the kids. I hear from our teachers that Willi is very motivated - without any pressure and class work. He always enjoys going to school. Quite different than our non-disabled daughter.
Unfortunately for Olivia: Life is not a Waldorf special school. From the beginning, even in the first grade, she let herself be demotivated by the constant comparison with her classmates and decided that she could not "do it all" and therefore did not need to make any further effort or even go there. Maybe she was too used to being ALWAYS the one who did her best at home with her disabled brother?
So that Olivia does not lose the fun of the school, I tried to build up no additional pressure at home. Dear, I made sure that she had plenty of time to play. After all, the child was in first grade!
At the same time, I felt bad when I heard the little group of ambitious mothers from Olivia's class talking. They were eternally concerned about their children's accomplishments, even though their children seemed like a self-runner compared to Olivia.
These mothers kept asking how far the other children were in the "Lies-Mal" issue. To belong to the parents whose children were still in the second volume, while others were already working on the third, was out of the question for them. Some mothers even bought the books privately so that their children could work their way into the home and progressed like others.
"A camel has two proboscis"
Incidentally, Olivia never got beyond the first band. The booklets were nicely done, and there was always something to paint and funny quat questions. But whenever I sat down with her, we did not get on with reading. Instead, Olivia preferred to decorate the pictures. And if you should tick "A camel has two humps" or "A camel has two proboscis" she had to tick "two proboscis" and draw a suitable picture.
Birte Müller
Question: Does the camel have two proboscis, cusps or pouches? Olivia's imaginative answer in the picture
When Olivia presented the first issue FINALLY finished at school, she received no praise from the teacher, as my child told me. Rather, the teacher had been horrified because the other children were already much further with their notebooks. The result: My daughter refused to open the second "Lies-Mal" issue ever, and then we just tortured ourselves through ordinary books.
Practice for the test - but secretly
Once we had a boy from Olivia's class to visit. Type "Lies-Mal" -Heft, Volume 6. The child said that it could not stay so long to play, because it still had to practice for the test. I did not know anything about a test. Not Olivia either. The boy guiltily put his hand over his mouth and whispered that he should not have said that with the test, it was a secret. Of course I became curious and told myself exactly what his mother practiced with him.
The next day, Olivia told me they had actually written the test at school. And the sentences that the child had told us by heart the previous afternoon were also dictated. Interesting.
However, the test was never returned. I found out the reason a few weeks later, when I helped to clean up at school just before the summer break and asked the teacher about it. It turned out that she had done a reading and writing test - a test that is available every year at all elementary schools in Hamburg.
The special thing about it: the teachers are expressly forbidden to prepare the children for it. On the one hand, the purpose of the exam is to find out which child has special needs, and on the other hand, to compare the different learning levels of individual classes or schools. Grades are not given to the students for the tests, parents are informed only about the result, if the children show conspicuously bad. And that was exactly what happened to Olivia - as I learned incidentally while I was carrying a table with the teacher.
I was confused. How could that be?
If the performance comparison between children should make any sense and a child has proven weaknesses, why do you chatter the parents only on demand and in between the catastrophic result? Or would the teacher later still with me the conversation and want to inform me in peace? Or is the test completely unimportant and not meaningful at all? Why do mothers, who somehow get to work, drill their children well?
It depends on the drawer
I told the story of my girlfriend, who has four children and of such things much more idea than me. She said: "It's clear that the mother gives her child a huge advantage with secret practice, even if it does not get any grades, because: Your child ends up in the drawer 'good, high-performance students', and that's what matters on".
When this conversation took place, the first year of school for Olivia was over - and I was almost as disillusioned as my daughter herself. I was disappointed with the actually nice teacher, the unfair practices of other mothers and our entire school system. And somehow I was disappointed, too, because my "normal" child was not in the drawer of the "good guys", as I had imagined.
But my daughter could not and did not want to participate in this whole competition for performance. During the race around the school she strolled through flowers picking flowers and singing to the finish. Great! But although I thought it was a strength that she seemed to be free of competition, I realized that it would not get away with it at school. And maybe refusing to compete was just resignation?
