The world of our kids...

Our schools provide us with full spectrum of problems one can encounter with kids in terms of learning. One of the problems that I have hard time dealing with are the few kids that somehow cannot learn. We have a couple hyperactive with clear attention deficit disorder - those are ok because if you are patient with them sooner or later you will see some progress. We have also a couple of under aged kids (like 4 or 5 years old ones) due to the fact that often the parents do not want to let their sons and daughters go to school if we do not take the smaller ones. Those obviously are sort of a pain for us because we do not really cater to that age group. Nevertheless, usually they are harmless.

The ones that really scare me are the few that seem not to understand anything they right. They learn to count (and mostly they can) but they are not able to recognize numbers or letters that they have been writing for months. The maximum time they will remember what they have written is five minutes - after that no way. Just like in the movie Memento they somehow do not have short memory. Our teachers try all sort of tricks and are incredibly patient - but it does not help too much. Since we are not a special school and we do not have that kind of background to deal with those kids the best we can do is find them a psychologist.

We have also a couple that seem a little bit retarded and need some more time to learn - but there is hope there. I might be wrong that some of them are a little retarded because of the way they have been brought up or because of the diet their parents "devised" for them...but this is as much wrong as I can be. All the rest of the problems we have with the kids is thanks to the parents. The fact that they have up to ten kids and cannot afford one (afford means that they have trouble with feeding them), the fact that they do not know anything about hygiene, that they make them work instead of going to school, that they make them take care of their smaller siblings...It is not uncommon that they do not allow us to take the kids for vaccinations (because it is going to be bad for them?!) or are not able to administer pills everyday to their kids (we take the kid to the doctor, pay for the medicine and just ask them to give the pills to the kid). With no effect. Last time when I went for the third time with the same kid to the doctor he advised us to take the kid for a week to our centre so that it can finally get better ?! Our kids though are quite good in taking care of their drunk parents after any local holiday (then mysteriously the attendance in the schools goes mysteriously down). In return they usually get back to school badly beaten.

Apart from the parents there are a couple of other institutions that can and should assume the responsibility for this state of affairs - special thanks for the problems of the kids go obviously to the Peruvian government which does not seem to care about kids out of school, does not have any family planning programs running and runs primary schools that are a shame to the word "school". Catholic Church does not help in family planning on its end. It is a vicious circle and most of our kids unfortunately face relatively grim future. It is really scary...

Anyway where I was heading is the way we teach in schools. Both of us have a certain feeling of failure when we see that some of our kids do not make any progress. Actually I think that this is one of the last things which unfortunately we will not be able to change here. We would need another 6 months and somebody really proficient in teaching methods - most likely we would end up implementing one of the concepts (Waldorf, Montessori or HighScope) but it won't happen. I regret that very much because I think we could move our schools to another level and really help the kids. The good thing however is that together with Rita we started studying those concepts and we will continue for the benefit of other children later on in the future :))