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Old 10-12-2005, 01:02 PM   #26
FrogMan
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Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Pintendre, Qc, Canada
Forgot to mention the latest thing that happened with Andrew: a lie, not a tiny one, a pretty good one, at least to my eyes.

Let's put it in perspective. In his class, there's this thing where every kid has a spider with his/her number on it. Every Monday, every kid's spider starts the week in the grass, you want your spider to keep playing in the grass. A kid's spider goes up one step if in the day the kid has been warned more than once on any of 5 simple class rules. The one rule with which Andrew has the most problem, and you might be able to guess it if you read my long post, is speaking without being allowd to (i.e. not having raised his hand to ask for permission to speak). If your spider doesn't move up at all, you get some reward (that the kid has previously picked out of possible rewards, Andrew has picked a 10 minute period on their class computer as a reward I think). If your spider moves up one rank, you don't automatically get your reward but your name is put in a drawing to maybe get picked for a reward. Up two and three ranks you're in the grey zone, nothing really happens. Four ranks, the kid has to write his challenge in his notebook and get it signed by his parents and 5 ranks, the teacher writes something to the parents, mostly so the kids sees it's important to behave.

Three weeks ago, Andrew had a rough week relatively speaking, getting 2 or more warnings on all but one day, so his spider went up to the 4th rank, not good. He wrote his little message and we had a good talk. The following week, so the week before last week, he went all but one day with less than two warnings, so all in all a very good week. No need to tell you we praised him and told him not to give in to the temptation of talking without raising his hand. He seemed in high spirit and when he kept telling me all last week that it was going great and he was getting warned only once a day, I saw nothing wrong with it. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Turns out is week last week was not that good. he was warned two or three times even in some days for 4 out of the 5 days. When he was telling us that everything was fine. Now, remember that a kid with 4 bad days in a week has to write a note to his parents. When Friday morning came, he got absolutely desperate and admitted to his teacher that he'd been lying to us. I think she handled it very well, as she had him write a fairly long letter, at least for a 3rd grader, in which he explained that he was sorry he'd lied to us, that he didn't want to disappoint us by telling us it wasn't going well. He was in tears when he presented me the letter after I'd picked him up from school. I'm usually fairly prompt to reprimand him, but I just couldn't go hard on him. I simply told him that he had to see this as a lesson, that everything you say and do can, and often will be held against you at some point in the future. Same, as I reminded him, that if I asked his karate teacher if it had gone well and he lied to me, I'd have a chance to talk to his teacher at one point someday. I also asked him if he thought he'd get away with it, knowing he had to write something if it didn't go right in the week. He acknowledged that he had not thought about that.

I then told him that trust is something you build over time, but that you can destroy quite rapidly. I also told him that he had to see this as a lesson. I'm like that in life, and with my kids. It's not always a big deal if you screw up, as long as you learn from it and don't do it again. Nothing irks me more than a person (say a coworker) who keeps making the same mistake (or a similar mistake) over and over.

Thing is, a bit like sachmo and the weight of being the worst parents in the world, I felt a bit guilty for what he'd done. Had we put too much pressure on him? Had we put too much emphasis on the good, so much so that it made the lie look like nothing much? Sigh, kids can bring so much to ya, but they also force you to be a better person...

The lie in itself isn't that big deal, it's the realization that he can lie to us, knowingly, and with it, the fact that we could lose control over him like that. He's only 8, yet he's already 8. We know what he's doing most of the time, but someday he'll be with kids we don't know about, even though we'll try to know what he does in his time, but it doesn't take much to lose him, or any kid. That's my fear, not a big fear, but one I've got in the back of my mind...

Thanks for reading.


FM
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