Thursday, October 04, 2012

Plot hole in my childhood

I've blogged before about my most vivid memory from the single year I did at Montessori school.  I wanted to play with these beads, but the teacher told me I couldn't because I couldn't count to ten.  This confused and frightened me.  I genuinely thought I knew how to count to 100, so I didn't understand why this teacher was telling me I didn't know how to count to 10.  How could I be so wrong about my own ability to count? 

Looking at it with adult hindsight, I see that she expected me to respond by showing her I could count to 10 by counting to 10 then and there.  However, as a 3 or 4 year old child, I wasn't able to draw that conclusion.  I thought she was telling me that my counting wasn't good enough.  Which baffled me - I got to 10 every time, I used the same numbers every time, I could carry on past 10 all the way to a hundred, the numbers followed the same pattern all the way through, how could I be wrong?

In my previous tellings of this story, I criticized the teacher for not being able to make it clear to me what she expected.  If you're an adult in a conversation with a 3 year old, it's primarily incumbent on you to communicate in a way that the kid can understand.  Especially if you're an early childhood educator!

However, there's another, even more egregious problem here: why didn't she take this opportunity to teach me how to count to 10?

You're an adult and a teacher.  You're faced with a small child who needs to be able to count to 10 to play with the toy she really really wants to play with.  You believe this child does not know how to count to 10.  So why not take 30 seconds of your life and teach the child how to count to 10?

What kind of teacher says "Oh, you don't know that" in a blamey tone of voice and walks away rather than teaching???

1 comment:

laura k said...

It is indeed bizarre.

I wish we could summon that teacher, and she'd have perfect recall, and she could tell us her version, what she was thinking.