I'm trying to push the idea that those smiley face/color systems (ours is blue-green-yellow-red) are counterproductive to learning and personal growth, but I haven't gotten much traction at the school with that yet. When I rule the world/end up on school board, I may push harder. Both school and aftercare have "prize boxes" full of dumb junk and I just have to believe that that's where the girls get their stupid things and they're not being kleptomaniacs or something.
Obviously I'm more comfortable meddling than you are because I talk to my girls' teachers a lot, or at least text or email, but this I'd probably bring up at a larger level. When there was going to be a festival last year for kids who met their goals on the state achievement test that doesn't even count toward anything at their grade level, I wrote to the principal and superintendent saying I didn't think it was sending the kids who didn't meet their goals (mine, but not exclusively mine) the right message about whether the effort they did make was appreciated, etc. And maybe this makes me one of those everyone-wins people everyone complains about, now that I think about it, but we have a new principal now and how this gets dealt with has changed drastically.
Anyway, if you do want to address it, I'd go to the principal with "Hawaii was concerned that so many of her classmates are sad they didn't get to participate and I told her I'd talk to a grownup in charge about it. Is that normal?"
I don't know what to tell you about the question of whether to talk to teachers, principals, whatever. I do know our principal would absolutely want to know if one of the teacher is losing control of class discipline if that's what's going on, though a good principal should probably have a clue already. And the response would be to get a successful teacher to mentor not to just fire the teacher, at least here, so it's the lesson I'm trying to impart to my annoying children about how it's wrong to tattle so someone else will get in trouble but all right to tell someone if someone else needs help.
Is she a first-year teacher? If she is, I'd leave it alone. Every teacher needs a year or two (as you probably remember) to figure out what the hell they're doing.
If she's been in the game for awhile, yeah, maybe go talk to her first, and then if that doesn't sort it out, go over her head.
Not a first year teacher. From what I understand, she taught 3rd and 4th grade for awhile, was a designated science teacher for awhile, and this is maybe her second year (in recent history) teaching kindergarten.
We're clearly in the post-scarcity age as far as cheap plastic shit goes.
I hear from teacher friends that going from older grades to K is a huge and scary shift, though one friend who just did it is loving it and doesn't want to have to go back to older kids now. Is there a teacher's aide in the classroom? You don't have parent-teacher conferences, right?
I don't think there's a teacher's aide, but it sounds like the teacher's daughter comes in to lend a hand sometimes.
We do have parent-teacher conferences, one per semester. Next one will be in February.
4. Big difference between 9 year olds and 4 year olds. She may be a good primary teacher who hasn't yet got to grips with how kindergarten works.
5-6 year olds, but your point stands.
I'd probably ask about it at the conference. If I were you, I'd worry most about how Hawaii's perfectionism is being affected by the frowns. It could be a good thing for her. Mara has certainly taken on a certain "Who gives a shit?" attitude about being on a color that signals bad behavior.
My mom's story is that she remembers the day I came home sobbing like I'd sobbed all afternoon because the entire second grade class had to sit on the wall for a few minutes at recess because people had been talking in the changing rooms and it was so embarrassing and unfair since I'd never had to sit on the wall and I hadn't done anything wrong. And then when my brother was in second grade, one of the other mothers told my mom that her daughter was sad that my brother had to sit on the wall every single day and never had recess, which he hadn't bothered to mention. And then both of us grew up messed up, so I'm not advocating either version.
After a few weeks of kindergarten, Kai drew 3 faces and taped them to our living room wall, with miniature colored clothespins to indicate where AB & I stood.
I personally never saw much problem with it*, but I imagine it has a lot to do with how it's implemented (including paying attention to how the kids are reacting to it).
Tchotchkes on any kind of regular basis is anathema to me. Maybe for standout behavior (4-5 smileys in a week? Zero frownies in 2 weeks?), but H-G is right to think the toy for every smiley thing is nuts.
*it gives the kid a fairly concrete, realtime sense of how s/he's doing with citizenship, which is on the report card after all
I don't have anything useful to say, but it seems like there are two possibilities: either the teacher has lost control of the class, and is handing out frowny faces in an ineffectual attempt to maintain control over a seething mob of rioting children; or the class behavior is pretty normal and the only weird thing is her grading. It's hard with a kindergartener to get a real picture of what's going on, but I'd be either pumping Hawaii or wanting to visit the class to get a sense of which one.
11.1 is great. Mine have done similar things.
Also we've had unusually few opportunities to gossip with other parents in the class. There's been one birthday party, which we missed, and I'm FB friends with one parent. (That parent has concerns along these lines, but she may be more prone to worry. She's said the class has a lot of rambunctious kids. It's true that the class is 3/4 boys, FWTW.)
My friends mostly have older kids, and they've said, "My kid has never gotten a frowny face," so it sounds like most teachers reserve them for serious infractions.
This sentence made me laugh in the out-loud manner. I'm picturing a cop in aviator glasses pulling up beside a five-year-old. "Are you aware you cut in line back there? 'Fraid I'm gonna have to issue a frowny face." Oh, but sure, she cries and bats her eyes and gets off with a straight face. "Just this once. Walk careful out there, you hear?"
11- This was the first year (out of 11 child-years of K and later classrooms) that we had a teacher that used color charts/stickers, and the kid came home and did the same thing to us. My wife, as a professional elementary educator, has strong disagreements with the technique but we've mostly let it go. Which maybe was a mistake- what happened to our kid in that class is he was by far the top performer, reaching the top level every day for the first month or two of the year, and then he realized the rewards were BS (including some plastic crap) and now he doesn't give a shit- he'll still always do his homework but doesn't bother handing it in. Philosophically that's fine but it's been difficult to explain to a second grader that yes we're doing the homework to learn and you shouldn't worry about extrinsic rewards or pleasing your superiors if you're still doing what needs to be done but JUST HAND IN THE DAMN PAPER PLEASE.
The problem is the binary smiley face/frowny face system. You need a clip chart with gradated colors, where people can aspire to (but almost never get) their clips on "blue" or "off the chart" but most bad behavior only moves you down one notch, say from green to yellow, and you can get back up to green by the end of the day. Keep red reserved for serious infractions.
Pinterest abounds with such charts, and complex rules for navigating them.
I'm picturing a cop in aviator glasses pulling up beside a five-year-old and tasing her.
My only relevant memory was being issued warm fuzzies and cold pricklies in first grade. T.A. for Tots was a popular book in our house. I just went looking for a link and then realized that transactional analysis was a huge rabbit hole that I don't have the time to rabbit down.
FWIW My kid was driven into emotion wreckitude by the clip-chart thing. She's the perfectionist sort who can't handle criticism, and if she got moved off of green for anything, her LIFE WAS RUINED. (Yes, this was kindergarten.)
Not saying it was a bad thing, exactly. Now, in high school, she's still terrorized by the fear of being moved off (the metaphorical) green notch. She does her homework every night, assiduously, without the slightest reminder from me.
OTOH, panic attacks at the VERY THOUGHT of getting something wrong on a test or writing an essay "wrong" are also very common. So, downside.
My constant assurances that it's okay to get things wrong occasionally, and that no one will take her out back and shoot her if she gets a B cut no fucking ice, I will add.
My kids have somehow settled on being really very hardworking and conscientious, with a 'who gives a fuck' attitude about minor failures. This is great, and very low stress, but I have no idea at all how we got here. (The 'who gives a fuck' attitude is very familiar, but the hardworking conscientiousness is weird to me.)
6. Reassigning teachers to lower grades is a common punishment for infractions such as being the local union rep.
I recall collective evaluation from those years, i.e. the whole class went up or down in assessment for behavior, but that may have been because there were a couple of really challenged and challenging kids among them who probably would have gotten neon red/tibetan kali grimace face every single day. Generally the teachers worked hard, and were pretty darn successful, at inculcating solidarity and helping each other get your shit together. And most of the "difficult" kids have or are clearly growing out of their problematic behaviors and they are all transitioning into variously normally annoying/pleasant teenagers. The exception was one child who had mega serious issues regularly resulting in violent outbursts with phones being ripped off walls, computer monitors thrown and teachers being tussled with. That poor soul moved on to another school and is hopefully getting an appropriate education and support. I was surprised the kid's school hung in with this student as long as it did, and i felt everyone was generally doing their best but that they weren't well equipped. But on the other hand it depressingly doesn't seem like there are many schools that are great at addressing these types of issues.
my brother had to sit on the wall every single day and never had recess
That's brilliant. The kids who need recess the most end up sitting on the wall.
26: Yay Catholic schools! (I'm pretty sure the local public school would have been worse for him, really.)
How can one tell if one's spouse gets TOO angry at one's kids, as opposed to just having been brought up in households with different tolerances for yelling and anger?
If you married an Italian, it's almost impossible to tell.
28: How do the kids react to it? I mean, no one likes anger in the moment, but how's their relationship with Mr/Ms. Furious inbetween blowups? If everything's okay inbetween events, I'd tend to think everything's okay. (What, exactly, does 'okay' mean in context? Hard to say.)
That's an excellent point; they do not seem to walk on eggshells around my spouse.
Reflecting on what bothers me: slamming doors with adult strength, very loud volume and yelling, and getting mad at the kids for things that aren't bad behavior, when the spouse is already angry.
A separate point is that I think it makes my spouse unhappy to regularly turn into Scary Parent.
SoAP, I am not one to give advice in that context because parts of it are too familiar, but I think the part where it maybe bothers AP sounds like it could be a productive way in.
Some of the inside jokes my brother and I share are of times our dad yelled at us about something trivial. So, I think your kids are probably fine.
I'm not a yeller, nor an angry temprament, and being around folks like that puts me on edge. The things that I'd probably look at are whether your spouse apologizes afterwards for overreacting and whether the kids see him being short-tempered with other people or just them. If he's got a general short fuse with everybody, that seems like less of a problem.
Also? Cannot say enough that irritability sometimes means depression, especially if it's a change from normal. If that's it, I wish you the best.
The kids are three and five.
whether the kids see him being short-tempered with other people or just them. If he's got a general short fuse with everybody, that seems like less of a problem.
Definitely just with them. I was surprised when this temper started to emerge.
I hadn't thought specifically about depression, but I don't think there are any other warning signs - I think it's the general stress of work-family balance that removes any buffer the spouse would normally have. The kids are the immediate trigger and receive the brunt of it.
Toddlers are assholes. It will probably pass once they get a year or so older.
As the daughter of a yeller, I really try not to yell. I remember cringing and I don't like that.
It sounds like AP needs a bit of help to manage the stress (maybe that's someone to talk to, maybe that's you doing the laundry -- you're in a position to know), but it doesn't sound like "AP's parenting style is yelling" but "AP's parenting style isn't yelling but AP is at the end of AP's rope because AP needed a toddler to be an asshole like AP needed another hole in the head."
If she's a veteran teacher but new kindergarten teacher, that could be the problem. She may have thought she'd have a handle on classroom control, and not realize exactly how much harder little kids are. She also probably has unreasonable behavior expectations if she's assuming a linear rather than exponential increase in unruliness as you go down each grade. I've been volunteer teaching 3-5th grade recently, and even 3rd vs. 4th grade is orders of magnitudes different in terms of attention spans and general student self control.
Since I grew up in a socialist parody of the US, we only had collective rewards and punishments in kindergarten. We had a large jar, and every day our behavior met some standard of reasonableness, the teacher put a penny in the jar. If we got 100 pennies by the end of the year, we got to have an ice cream party. I don't actually remember the outcome, I mainly remember the teacher threatening that such-and-such behavior was threatening our chances of getting a penny.
And you all had to share a single ice cream sandwich because that's all you could get with $1.
slamming doors with adult strength, very loud volume and yelling, and getting mad at the kids for things that aren't bad behavior, when the spouse is already angry.
One of these things is not like the others. The first two are basically annoying behavioural tics writ large; the third one you probably need to address. No useful suggestions about how.
My brats are similar ages, they have discovered a ganging-up-going-stupid skill that is a whole new trigger. After a weekend of that and some lost sleep pretty small things can set me off in a just get out of my face way. It's not completely fair or a good example. Splitting them up, preferably pre-emptively when things are going downhill, changes the situation massively. One-on-one they're fine. Also they are much more prone to it if they haven't run around enough in the last day or two.
The other thing that always comes up for "things that aren't bad behaviour" is when one parent has grey area rules the other doesn't, the old "he makes up all these new rules on the weekend" argument / cliche, "what do you mean they're allowed to jump on our bed while spitting watermelon", which I guess is talking it out.
Maybe I should bring back the DHS color coded alert system for my household. I'm about as calm and rational about discipline as they were about counterterrorism; I could embrace that.
My household is now on alert level "Lifted," which is light green in color and musically represented by the oboe.
42: Isn't that literally the experience of every parent with two or more kids?
23: "(The 'who gives a fuck' attitude is very familiar, but the hardworking conscientiousness is weird to me.)"
Hybrid vigor?