Gifted children and afterschooling

Tuesday, 30 November 2010 12:34

Over the past couple of weeks, after some dinners out with other mums, and a conversation with Sam's teacher, I've woken up to a new word - afterschooling! Crazy. Funny. A whole new English word.

Afterschooling is when children come home in primary school with a lot of homework, and parents, are expected to sit down with them, do homework and teach. For most of us, our children are enormously tired by 3:30pm and the last thing they want to do after a long day of school is... more school.

It seems teachers are very busy .... Taking the children on excursions to the zoo, teaching them things about social interaction and behaviours, and there is just not enough time to focus on all academic stuff.

One of my friends, a mum of a ‘normal' child put it this way: "Why can't the teachers teach Will his multiplication tables and leave me to take him to the botanic gardens on the weekend? Why do I have to teach him his tables while they take him on an excursion?"

She went on to explain that when she and her husband get home from work at night they would like to spend some quality family time with their sons. Instead, evenings end up being a battle to fit in all the cooking/dinner/bathing and homework.

If parents of "normal" kids are coming up against this ‘afterschooling' then I should not be surprised to face it with Sam.

Somewhere along the way, some trying-to-do-well educator probably decided that schools should be more than just a rigid teaching of the 3R's - the old fashioned Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Children should be "whole of person" individuals who learn other things too. However, then somewhere along the way, they became so obsessed with all this other stuff, that the necessary reason we send our children to formal schooling - the 3R's - started to fall lower in the priority list.

Sam's teacher recently said that she simply did not have the time to make things more challenging or interesting for him and that she thought it would be best for him to just have fun with other children his age, and that if I wanted him to learn more maths, perhaps I could teach it to him after school or on weekends.

The readers of a gifted website would be shaking their heads - so I won't waste time delving down why that suggestion is such a bad idea!

But hey, I have learnt a new word! Afterschooling. When parents teach their kids the 3R's afterschool because the school is too busy doing other things during the day.

You are never too old to learn new things.