How was your first day at school?

paleoperson wrote: »

I'm gonna call bs. There is no way a person 4 or 5 thinks like that at that time. At that age your biggest concerns are if other children will accept you and your parents will remember to collect you, if you can do the work you're given.

That's simply not true and very unfair on that poster.

Just this morning, my daughter (aged 19 months) looked up from her Times Literary Review, swirled her spectacles in her fingers and, with her other hand, drummed her fingers impatiently on the bureau. "Daddy!" she enquired with her most refined Mid-atlantic accent, "Daddy is it part of the human condition to glorify one's past achievements, or to live vicariously through one's own children, to compensate for a failure of responsibility in one's own life, ie resort to 'bad faith', if we must invoke Sartre?"

I gotta admit the little tyke had a point.

People don't remember things in detail from before the age of four and clear memories aren't formed until later. Usually what we think is a memory is a visualization of something we were told, and all memories of early childhood are unreliable as when we remember something, we are thinking of how we thought of it the last time we remembered. It's a sort of Chinese whisper situation.

It does seem unlikely that a four year old was assessing the future teaching ability of unknown persons based on a misdirection on their first day in a strange place, but who knows.

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

That's how it should function ideally. A more critical appraisal might view schooling as obedience training, as selecting rule-followers.

That's before we even consider the morality of separating children from their nurturers at such a tender age.

The first thing school teaches is conformity, and four or five seems tragically young to have to conform to anything.

I remember very clearly my first day at infant school, a 10-15 minute walk from our house. On the way we came across a dead curly haired black dog on the road, with a pool of blood coming out of its open mouth. I pulled my mother over to examine it and asked why an ambulance had not come for it...going on to say I would become an animal doctor to fix poor dogs. Mum said that was Dr Coffey’s dog, she being the pediatrician who looked after me when very young. Mum said “I’ll have to call into Dr Coffey on my way back and tell her the bad news”.

We continued to school and I insisted on wearing a white poodle mask into class. I told my mother to go away and sat at my little desk. The teacher started asking our names and I thought it would be fun to make up a name and confuse her, so I said “my name is Foxy”. The whole morning she was calling me Foxy, and I was laughing my face off behind the poodle mask.

Some kids around me started crying and bawling, and I turned to the boy next to me and said “Im bored, listening to all that screaming and crying. Why are they crying? I’m fed up”. The boy responded “you’d better get used to it, you are at school for the rest of your life”. I was most disappointed that teacher never started teaching that morning as I was eager to listen and learn as long as it was interesting to me. Next day they put me into a more advanced class as Mum had already taught me the basics of reading, and at age 4 I was very ready to learn everything. Pity I didn’t remain the eager pupil later in my school career!

Candie wrote: »

Sometimes things are achingly simple, and kids are just frightened of strange places.

A child of four years encounters strange places all the time. They have been almost nowhere.

There has to be something else, perhaps the exchange of parental control from the parent to a stranger -- whatever it is there is something, for some children, that makes the first day of school very distressing.

That's unnecessary, as most of us know who liked school. It seems avoidable via properly socialising a child to new experiences, with adults as well as with other children.

I just cannot get my head around the idea that a child would be reduced to tears and even panic on what should be one of the most exciting days of their lives. It is not normal.