Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 56

It’s clear that all children should attend nursery or half-day preschool from around four years of age, since they need the social stimulation and wider experiences it provides (and because parents need a break!). Unlike childcare, preschool has fully trained teachers who provide playful but appropriate learning experiences that are a halfway step to school. (Daycare centres may have ‘early learning’ in their names, but this is really just a marketing ploy: as one staff member told me, ‘That just means we have letters on the blocks’.)

In preschool or nursery, it will become clear which boys are ready for school – they are happy to sit and do work in books or craft, and are able to talk happily – and which boys are still needing to run about, and are not yet good with a crayon or pencil. Most boys will fall into the second group.

Based on your own observations, on discussion with the preschool teacher, and perhaps checking out what is expected of children going into primary school, you will soon get an idea – ready, or not ready yet. By taking another year in preschool, your boy has a whole year more to get ready to do really well in primary school. For most boys, this would mean that they move through school being a year older than the girl in the next desk – which means they are, intellectually speaking, on a par with the girls. By the late teens, boys catch up with girls intellectually but, in the way schools work now, the damage is already done. The boys feel themselves to be failures, they miss out on key skills because they are just not ready, and so get turned off from learning.

Holding boys back is also much less unkind. Sitting still at a desk is often hard and painful for small boys. In early primary school, boys (whose motor nerves are still growing) actually get signals from their body saying, ‘Move around. Use me’. To a stressed-out Grade 1 teacher, this looks like misbehaviour.

A boy sees that his craft work, drawing and writing are not as good as the girls’, and thinks, ‘This is not for me!’. He quickly switches off from learning – especially if there is not a male teacher anywhere in sight to give that sense that learning is a male thing, too. ‘School is for girls’, he tells himself.

There is much more that we can do to make school boy- friendly. This is explored in the chapter on schools, ‘A revolution in schooling’. But the first question – is he ready yet? – is perhaps the most important place to start.

In school, the same help is needed. One young female Maths teacher I know rarely lets a lesson pass without using some practical, hands-on example of what is being studied – often going outside to do it in a practical way in the playground. She found that the less motivated of her students could get a grasp of the concepts if they could see them in practice and do physical things with their bodies to comprehend the idea being taught. They were getting right-brain concepts to link to their left-brain understanding – using their strengths to overcome their weaknesses. This teacher’s boy students loved learning from her, she was adventurous, keen and cared about them.