or BigFoot
Quotes! Shut your mouth! Now my dreams are entirely shattered...
Sincerely,
District Overbeer of the "Sassquatch" class
Teacher "ruins" lives of first graders by saying Santa is illogical
by Gopher 63 Replies latest social current
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Valis
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Eyebrow2
Yerusalyim has it right I think...tell them that is something they should talk to their mom and dad about.
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Valis
Oh and BTW does this mean we shouldn't take them on snipe hunts anymore? If so I'm gonna be pissed! *LOL*
Sincerely,
District Overbeer
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Stacy Smith
Valis you'll be very proud of me. I came *this* close to catching my first snipe last summer. I would hunt them now but they're out of season. Wait til next year, I"ll get my limit.
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bebu
I would be upset, as a parent. Valis has put the argument well: children have a great capacity for imagination, and at this age it should be allowed to expand. I have wonderful memories of Christmas, and looking forward to Santa. And I have good memories of telling my children looking forward to Santa's coming (though it really isn't played up a whole lot in my house, actually).
I had great conversation with my son when he was about 7 or 8, concerning Santa. He was wondering about the Santa issue... I asked a few questions, like the teacher did, to help him think more, but never answered clearly. Over the next year, he tried to make me confess that there was no Santa, but you could see that he was still torn. Finally I laughed and said, "Well, Santa exists, but he might look a lot different than you think!" I smiled and batted my eyelashes, looking as angelic as possible... He looked at me and said, "......YOU????"
He began to exult in having figured it out. I congratulated him, and then said, well, now that you are old enough to know this, you can be part of the secret, too! Don't tell your brother, alright? He kept that promise. And we both had a good time explaining to his brother about Santa a couple years ago. It was fun--and no trouble at all. We let him know that it is fun to do nice things secretly for others. And now he enjoys getting excited for his little sister at Christmas. Is this so terrible?
There's enough bad news around in real life for 11 months of the year. The magic of childhood isn't so useless that it must be destroyed at age 6--and parents and children shouldn't be cheated of that shared magic by a jaded teacher. I know I would have been cheated of some great memories; the mom has my sympathies.
bebu
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Valis
bebu...you say that well and thanks! We need to let them have their Harry Potters, Santa Claus and whatever else it is that make them happy as kids. I doesn't last but a few moments in time really.
Sincerely,
District Overbeer
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SanFranciscoJim
When I was a child of no more than 5 or 6, my grandfather took me for a walk in the park. He told me that bears lived in the park. This park happened to be located in suburban southern New Jersey near Philadelphia, and there hasn't been a bear seen for 100 miles of there for more than a century.
While in the park, a tree branch broke off and fell to the ground with a crack and a thud. I thought it was a bear. Terrified, I ran to my grandparents' home in tears and in terror. I ran to the arms of my loving grandmother, and told her I was being chased by a bear.
Eventually, after I had calmed down, my grandmother told me that no bears lived anywhere in Camden County, and that it was probably a squirrel that caused the tree branch to fall.
Although my grandfather had meant his story to be just that -- a fable -- I believed it until I learned the truth. During my youth, I looked upon my grandfather as a liar, and didn't trust anything he told me for several years.
Other stories I was told as a child by family members and believed:
* If you curse, your lips will be sewn shut by a dragonfly.
* If you swallow a watermelon seed, watermelons will grow inside of you.
If I were a parent, I would never teach such foolishness to my children. I would be certain that they understood that Santa was a mythological figure, not a real person.
There are enough interesting real things in this world that would interest a child than to have to resort to filling their heads with things they will eventually have to unlearn as untrue.
Did the teacher overstep their bounds? Perhaps, but by the same token the teacher may have saved an uncomfortable situation by setting the record straight on Santa. There were probably already at least a couple of children in that class who knew that Santa is not real. Children face enough confrontations with their peers already than to have to get involved in an argument over the existence of a myth.
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xenawarrior
you mean there is no such thing as a snipe?
ARGGGGGGG, I'm going to look for my uncles right now !!!
how could they do this to me?
And I'll bet you are going to tell me that you really can't put salt on the end of a pheasant's tail either right?
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Eyebrow2
Meaning no disrespect to any educators on reading this...but I feel that teachers have no right to tell a kid who believes in santa that he does not exist.
Teachers have a tough job, I understand that, but sometimes in an effort to reach out to kids, I think some teachers cross lines where they should not. Sure, this is not that major of a thing...but it just really bothers me that the teacher had no respect for the culture of the students' families in this case...or a lack of maturity.
I had an elementary teacher that really forced her opinions on the class. She would say..it does not matter what religion you belong too...no matter what your parents say. It was a threatening way in which she said it, and if she found any kids in her class not saying oh you are right she would give them a really mean stare. I got that stare a few times. I knew what she thought she was teaching was tolerance...but really it was the opposite the WAY she did it. And it really pissed off the parents...she also had a tendency to think that if a kid was occaisionally late to class or sick a lot he or she must be in an abusive household. Forget the fact that maybe the parents had a large family and no medical insurance, or if the kid missed the bus they had to walk...or just were having some bad financial times, but were still a loving family. I thought it was great she checked up on kids...but the execution of her plan was horrible.
School is such an important part of a childs life, but sometimes the school acts as if school is more important than the family. For some kids in abusive families that may be necessary, but a lot of parents, including me, get a little irritated when lines are crossed. One of the reasons we chose the area we moved to in Texas is because we did a lot of research on the schools, and found it to be pretty progressive WITHOUT being oppressive. Thank god...
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Oroborus21
Greetings!
This is an interesting topic and there is certainly a multiplicity of viewpoints here. As a fairly new father myself, married to someone not from a Witness background, I fear that I will be facing a whole host of similar issues revolving around Hoidays sooner than I would like.
For what it is worth, here is my take on this...
I applaud the Teacher for boldly respecting the children's right to be dealt with truthfully and honestly. I think given her choice of deliberately lying to her students or answering honestly, her only option was to answer truthfully. In this way her credibility is maintained and this is expecially important for those children who did not believe in Santa--just think if she had said Santa was real, what effect this would have upon them. Certainly it might be detrimental to them, especially if on the one hand their parents had told them the truth and now this other authority figure is basically saying their parents lied and Santa is real. Of course the converse is a sticky wicket too because now it is a situation where the child is wondering why Daddy and Mommy lied (or whoever).
Which springs me to my next point. Some, like Yerusalym say that this topic is the province of the parents and that the teacher should just respond: "Talk to your parents about it."
I do agree that this topic, like sex, like religion, like so many others is the first province of the parents, but I don't think that refusing to answer or deferring to answer is the appropriate response.
I thnk that a parent should have a reasonable expectation about when in life there child can be expected to encounter challenges to whatever beliefs or belief system they have instilled within them and act responsibly to prepare them for this situation.
Put another way using this scenario as an illustration, let's say a parent desires that their child NEVER learn that Santa is not real until the age of 21. Well they can certainly bar the doors and keep the child isolated from the world but short of that, AT SOME POINT the reasonable parent is going to have to consider the possibility that the child is going to be challenged in this belief simply by living in the external world.
Perhaps it IS reasonable to expect that a pre-school child, with whom you fairly strictly control their social interactions, will not have the lid blown off the Santa Myth by some blabber mouth. And if someone did expose your two or three year old to the truth, I think the majority here would agree that it would not be appropriate.
But the question is IS IT REASONABLE TO EXPECT THIS OF A 6 YEAR OLD IN A SCHOOL as what the case in this case.
No is the answer. It is not reasonable.
Any reasonable parent would expect that their 6 year old child in school is going to talk to other kids on the playground, maybe here the truth from an adult or even start figuring out that the fat guy outside of Wal Mart is not the REAL Santa.
THEREFORE, if such a parent is truly concerned that the exposure to the truth might cause some emotional harm to their child then the natural thing to do would be to talk to the kid YOURSELF, PREEMPTIVELY.
The mother in this situation has no one to blame except herself if her child is upset about learning the truth. She should have told him herself by now. The same could be said about naive parents who think they don't have to talk to their kids about SEX and that they will in a time and place of their choosing finally have a nice little chat about the "birds and the bees."
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE PEOPLE!
The sad part is that it sounds like both teacher and parent missed the opportunity to really get into the value of myth and story and how whether true or not these things can be valuable and wonderful, yes even magical, not because they are dependant upon being factual or not, but because of their intrinsic nature as STORY.
For a bible example, the parable of the Good Samaritan is not a true story. Even if a young person believes it to be true at first, yet the moral value of the Good Samaritan story is not eviscerated when the child realizes that it is not true. Why? Because generally in telling the story, it is the intrinsic message that is emphasized as being important and not the extraneous detail which only serves to encapsulate this.
Likewise the myth of Santa Clause doesn't have to be a horrible right of passage if it is presented from the onset as a STORY, the intrinsic value of which being the primary focus of the telling!
-Eduardo