[quote=flu][quote=nla][quote=TemekuT]Let’s be careful assigning racial prejudice to a 5 year old demographic group. “People might classify her as timid due to her Asian culture”. Certainly not kindergarteners! Children at age 5 are still too young to pull the race card…unless they are being raised in a white supremecist environment.
P.S. my grandkids will be half Asian[/quote]
Don’t be too naive. My kid when she was in kindergarten was told by a white girl not to play with her because my daughter is not white.[/quote]
Well, the interesting part is that there is a Chinese kid in my kid’s class who doesn’t speak English. Being that my daughter is bilingual and can read/write roughly at 1st grade in both, teacher has her sort of being her buddy. Any concerns? I mean, I understand why but at the same time, the entire purpose of me sending my kid to public school was so she wouldn’t have only friends that are chinese… She already has enough chinese friends at her afterschool program…. This isn’t exactly helping out in the diversity department imho….[/quote]
This is one of the difficult things teachers have to deal with. Teachers often have to pair up good behavior/bad behavior, slow learner/exceptional learner, English Language Learner (ELL)/bilingual, etc. They do this because it is physically impossible for one teacher to teach 30 kids individually, so they have to rely on some of the “better” kids to help them. They will say that both kids are benefitting from these relationships because the less prepared/disciplined kids learn from the higher achievers/better disciplined kids, while the “better” kids are supposed to learn about tolerance and helpfulness. I agree, to a point, but there is no doubt in my mind that the exceptional learners and better-behaved kids tend to feel burdened by it, and they feel like they are being punished for behaving well or performing well academically.
It’s a tough call for teachers, but when you have to teach in an institutionalized environment, that’s really your only option, especially if you aren’t allowed to screen for behavior/learning problems as part of the admissions process, like many private schools do.
