Wednesday, December 12, 2007

[child mentors] oh dear, here we go again

The logo itself sounds the warning bells.

I really don't wish to make too much of this and have to confess I didn't actually know it was going on but do you see something mildly worrying about a semi-governmental body calling itself Friends of the Children or Western Wellness [with the tagline Best Friends] compulsorily taking your child once a week for "mentoring"?

Wouldn't you feel it was the teensiest, weensiest bit presumptuous of them attempting to make your child "well" again?

Of course, some will say they only target children form dysfunctional families or families where the parents see this as a way for their child to escape poverty. In other words, children where the parents are neither going to say no nor put up any resistance to the move.

Now, if you google "child mentors", you'll see, page after page, how rampant this thing is across the United States. In other words, thousands and thousands of children are getting government "mentoring" to make them "well" again.

Is it the merest coincidence, just a quirk of fate, that in April 1972, in his keynote address to the Association for Childhood Education International, Chester M. Pierce, Professor of Education and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University, said:
"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being. It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future."
In one school where I once taught, there was a 30ish woman who was the Special Needs mentor. Uh-huh, so the idea was that we selected the children from our class who needed extra help - let's call a shovel a shovel - remedial help and they went to her twice a week.

Now she and I did not see eye to eye. She thought I was altogether to harsh and I thought she was full of s--t. My reason for this latter were the reports she'd compile, using statistical "percentiles" and quoting authorities in remedial education and the whole thing was unreadable to the average teacher.

I showed one of her reports to a colleague and asked him if it was me that was the moron but I, for the life of me, could make neither head not tail of it. He laughed and said no one understood what she wrote and that was the general idea - she was justifying her position in the school.

Trouble was - she had a twice weekly meeting with the boss and was one of those who didn't let her professionalism stand in the way of getting her dig in about those she didn't like [the boss told me this later]. She was one of those who smiles a lot and says little to the person she's commenting on later.

So, one boy we'll call Matt went to her and in the first week or so, all was well. Then, slowly, I noticed a change in him. He'd been dying to get to my class for a year and so there was an initial connection between the two of us.

Now I'll play fair here, for the purposes of the post and say that I was and am strict. The work has to be done and I've no time for stirrers, who are a waste of space. So I'm always going to have trouble from that quarter. On the other hand, the remainder reported, through their parents, that they enjoyed my class. That's about all that can be said on that.

To cut a long story short, Matt slowly changed and eventually became disruptive, sullen and withdrawn but adored going to Special Ed. I visited her a couple of times and there was a most definite conspiratorial silence when I did, as if I was spying on them.

I raised it with the boss and he told me, with a big grin on his face, thank goodness, that it was being reported to him that I was a tyrant, that everyone hated my lessons and that I was unfair to Matt in particular. I suggested that Matt be shifted to the parallel class if that was the case but it seems that neither the boy nor his parents wanted that.

Now the woman's not here to defend herself but a couple of colleagues warned me not to antagonize her as she could make considerable trouble for anyone who got on the wrong side of her. Well, that cuts both ways - I can do that too. So I went to her and invited her to come into a couple of lessons and see for herself how tyrannical my lessons were.

She never did but she was mightily surprised that I'd utilized that term "tyrannical".

I'm not going to tar all "mentors" with the same brush as this woman but I am going to say that these people do have a certain mentality which I didn't understand way back then but now, in the light of last year's blogging, I understand it perfectly well.

All I can say is that, unless it was legally compulsory, I wouldn't let one of these people within speaking distance of my child. Whether that is right or wrong, surely it's a parent's prerogative.

6 comments:

  1. This is something I particularly took issue with when I was at school. At my school they had a system (can't for the life of me remember what it was called though)where the most disruptive, rowdy kids got taken away on outings some days of the week instead of attending lessons. They would go to the cinema, ice skating, abseiling whilst the good kids would get left behind.

    The people behind the initiative justified by saying that taking the rowdy kids away made them feel morevalued as a person and would therefore learn that they could be 'good' like everyone else.

    I call bullshit. What it taught them was the longer and worse they behaved,the more rewarding it would be. It certainly didn't make them behave any better, if anything it actually did make them worse.

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  2. Oestraybunny i agree completely with you. My eldest son said he sometimes wished he had a special need or needed help at school as these kids get all the help and incentives. I also have a son at special school he is autistic and because of that gets treats and outings.
    I think we need to look into supporting all of our children on merit. If a child cannot or will not behave they do not deserve "special treatments" but if they have underlying problems then they should be addressed.
    I worry about the whole mentoring thing as it seems like "they" are just trying to find out stuff about the child and family that they do not need to know. Just being nosey.

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  3. Oh do come on James, what do you REALLY think?

    A good rant, I have no data or experience with the issue so I am listening.

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  4. Ladies, I agree and in the decades I taught, it was as you say. Lady M - I think the parent and class teacher are the ones to judge together about the child.

    Many teachers are parents and yet they seem to lose their sense of parenthood once they step into the classroom. There really are some strange thought processes going on in those teacher heads.

    I have to come clean here. I was always slightly distrusted by my colleagues because I seemed to get on better with the parents and children.

    While this might have helped me become a head, it possibly meant there might have been troubles on the horizon with the teachers.

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  5. Friends of the children, Friends of the earth, friends of the Western General Hospital. There'll soon by a Friends of the Friends of....

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  6. You'll have the educational police onto you for using the word "remedial"! Personally I hate the term "special needs" because I think EVERY child has special needs. I do identify a lot with what you are saying in this post. The mentoring business is also big in the UK now and I would have to admit it can fulfill some useful functions. BUT - we can all get on with disruptive children if we don't have to TEACH them anything so they don't resent us in the first place, can't we? So all in all I tend to agree with you.

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