Learning the wrong lesson

Namine was sick last week, so she has a boatload of schoolwork to catch up on. This is really the first time we’ve sat down with her to do schoolwork since she started school, although Jessica had been doing school time with her for a while prior.

There are something like 15 pages of work to get through, so in no way do I think it’s all going to get done in a day or two. I think that if we can get through it all by the end of the week, though, I’ll be happy with that. The problem is that Namine seems to be easily distracted, and too many directions on one worksheet seem to confuse her. We thought she might be having something akin to test anxiety.

Jessica called me at lunch to have me talk to Namine, because she wouldn’t work any more on a worksheet that was only partially done. (Namine wouldn’t, I mean, not Jessica.) But Namine wanted Jessica to finish it, which I thought was suspicious. So I asked her why; she said because her teacher finished her work for her in school.

It actually sort of makes sense; the worksheets that Namine’s brought home from school have been done, but not one has had a star sticker on it. She’s probably not moving fast enough for them. Of course they wouldn’t give her a star if she didn’t finish her work, but they also shouldn’t be finishing it for her and telling us that she did it.

This angers me for so many reasons, the foremost of which is that they are still treating her like a second-class citizen. We already have our doubts that they’re including her in the normal classroom; this just further fuels my rage. And this is teaching her the absolute, completely wrong thing. They’re teaching her that she doesn’t have to finish her work, that it doesn’t even matter. Someone else will just do it for her, so who cares?

When Jessica was schooling Namine herself, Namine was not acting like this. Jessica gave her work to do, and she did it. The only thing she ever got truly frustrated with was when she had to use scissors, but that was all. Now, she won’t even color in pictures of apples.

Yet another school-taught behavior on which we have to perform damage control.

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