Friday 29 March 2013

Tact

I was hauled before the class teacher again yesterday. I hadn't a clue what my son had done this time and he was keeping tight-lipped.

Turns out he had upset a girl in the class by telling her that her dad, a smoker, was going to die of cancer.

The dad was really angry apparently, and it took a lot for the teacher to calm him down.

Looks like I'd better keep my eye open for lynch mobs in the playground.

My son sees the world in black and white. To him, something is good or bad. There is no in-between.

He knows that my grandad died of lung cancer from smoking and that his own grandad died of smoking related complications. He also know a close friend of ours who survived lung cancer, but has a husband who smokes. This is why he is so anti-smoking. Couple this up with the ads on the TV and radio and it is easy to see why he said what he did.

We had a word with him about being considerate of others feelings. He needs to learn about how words can hurt and to have empathy for others.

I dread these "chats" with the teacher, which seem to be incresing in frequency lately.

Tuesday 26 March 2013

Science Day

Today was science day at school and the parents got to go into school to see what the kids had been doing in science.

Talk about organized chaos.

There were tables around the edge of the room with "experiments" on them, but as I arrived mid-morning, most of the "experiments" had turned to mush and slop.

For example, some genius thought it was a good idea to place a vat of cornflakes and milk in the school hall to show what happens to cornflakes when they get soggy. There were lots of big plastic syringes that the kids could use to baste the flakes in milk.

Guess what happened?

My son ended up squirting some poor girl with milk all over her nice jumper. I bet she will stink for the rest of the day. I told my son to be more careful and he descended into a screaming fit. The teacher came over to see if he was OK.

"It's a bit unstructured for him isn't it?" she remarked.

"And noisy."

Anyway., I managed to calm him down and we went to look at another experiment. This time it was about teabags. My son enjoyed poring out the tea...all over the floor of the hall...We quickly moved to the next experiment, a pile of mouldy food in bags. My son went to grab one....we moved on again.....

In the end, we settled for an experiement where he ran round the hall and I took his pulse. It seemed to keep him amused.

Science day was a bit rubbish really.