I teach swimming lessons at a pool on the navy base and have found recently that where there is a problem child there often are enabling parents. The first example occurred when I was teaching lessons to an 11 year old french-canadian boy. When the boy liked the activity he understood my instructions perfectly. However, when he was not jazzed about what we were doing he conveniently no longer spoke or understood english and would communicate only in French. Once I discovered this pattern I tried to speak with his parents about it only to find that they could speak english when I was offering praise about their child but were 100% francophone when any criticism was offered. I found the root of the problem but had no solution. Any ideas for that one?
The second incident occurred when I was teaching a private lesson to a 4 year old boy. The boy is very enthusiastic and comfortable in the water EXCEPT when his face wet, which as you can imagine happens a lot in a swimming lesson. His parents sit on the pool deck 1 m away with a towel so that anytime the boy gets water on his face he may hop out and dry it off. I have explained to them that if they don't bring a towel on deck he will learn to wipe his eyes with his hands and will get over his phobia, yet they continue to bring the towel. This boy also has a tendency to get distracted and I have to change the activity a ton to keep his interest, which is fine, I'm used to this with small children and am capable of getting them to accomplish what needs to get done. With this boy however, if he so much as turns away from me his parents scold him from the side of the pool "listen to your teacher! look at your teacher!" As you can imagine this distracts him even more and it is way harder to regain his attention. I have suggested that the parents leave the pool deck during the lesson but they are resistant.
In both cases, the lessons are over or soon will be over so there is not much I can do about the situations now. I'm wondering though if anyone has any suggestions of what to do for next time or has had a similar experience dealing with parents in the past?
How are we going to deal with these parents when we are teachers?
That is very funny you touch on this topic because I was going to post about parental involvement as well!
ReplyDeleteI Know exactly how you feel. I am also a swimming instructor and I have dealt with very similar cases. I used to teach a boy who always brought snorkeling goggles to class, and he was in Level 1. Kids in Level need to start blowing bubbles through their mouth and nose. It is hard when someone is wearing goggles to class and is not able to use the proper blowing techniques. Well, anyways, everytime his goggles slipped off, which was every 2 minutes, his mother would rush over and help him put the goggles back on. This was very disruptive for the class because I was always interrupted by the mother because the child would be whining about the goggles falling off. The child would never really participate in activities either because he would have his head under water for the full 30 minutes. I thought he had a 'mental' problem but I didn't judge. But getting back to the parent involvement, how was the child going to learn to do things on his own if his mother is always there codling him.
I did have a chat with the mother. I said that the child wasn't paying attention in class because she was always there to help him with his goggle situation. I said that the child would probably get a lot more out of the class if he was focused on me and maybe forgot about using the goggles and tried that activity I was teaching. It was hard for the mother to understand because she put him up on a pedestal and thought nothing was wrong with him. But after him being in other classes, she realized he wasn't improving so she put him in private lessons which has been helping a lot more. He is still slow at improving but at least his mother soon realized that sitting right next to his son on the pool deck was very distracting.
I suggest you watch this video. For those of you who are in 401 have seen it already but this I think is a great documentary that should be watched.
It is called Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids and is a CBC documentary.
http://ed-p4982010.blogspot.com/2010/03/parental-interference.html#comments
To watch the video is just right of the article.