Nature of Children and Preconceptions (Jan 18)

Children are curious. If I had to describe them with one word I would say they are curious because they are at an age of their life where they are trying to make sense of the world around them. They want to know how everything works. They want to be treated with the same respect and dignity as an adult. With that said, children copy people who they respect. Sometimes their curiosity get them into a lot of trouble because it leads things to getting broken, lost or coloured on. Children also do not have a developed sense of what is wrong or right in the norms of society. They learn these things from their parents, teachers, and other adults.

I think children’s curiosity and excitement can be misinterpreted for being obnoxious. Also sometimes children acting obnoxious is a way of them testing and learning modes of behaviour. Sometimes people don’t have the patience for the learning process of children so they just label children as a problem to be dealt with by someone else. Children’s curiosity makes them sometimes seem needy because they want to be included with adult activities. Sometimes children want to be independent and do things by themselves. Other times they are curious but at the same time afraid to make act because they’ve been taught that they are incapable and need help. Either way they are curious because they want to learn whether its from school, adult figure, sibling, or television.

The role of teachers is to understand their students and be able to teach the children in such a way that is more for the level of their students. This requires a lot of patience and understanding. As adults it’s easy to think that the students are of either lower or higher set of skills than expected. This is because students have individual needs that make them different from other students. The teacher has to understand they are a role model for their students and as a good role model, they need to treat all their students with the same amount of respect, but at the same time be able to accommodate for the students individual needs. Another challenge a teacher has to face is finding the even medium between the individual and the student as a whole.

After seeing James and the Giant Peach, I guess it was more of the discussion after we saw it that I learned a lot more from. First off, the movie is too black and white and the characters were too flat. The audience chosen for the film are targeted more for children. I remember seeing the movie when I was grade 3 and I still thought it was okay. What I didn’t take into consideration was how James had demonized his aunts. I guess with movies like this, you just take everything you’re given, but I never realized how children tend to demonize adults on the basis that they think that the particular adult is treating them unfairly. I guess parents give their children attention and when they have to share the attention with a bunch of kids, there will be times that the child would think the teacher is being unfair when they actually are being fair. Children’s understanding are accurate to an extent but they make sense of things in a different way than adults.