Not yet, but it got real close yesterday! 
We’re having major issues accessing the online teaching platform (along with most other parents in this state…the rollout has been an absolute debacle here in Qld). So the kids are getting antsy, mum is cranky, and being cooped up in an apartment has everyone on edge.
But we’ll survive, and today is a new day:crazy_face:
Thanks for all the advice folks, appreciated.
I’m not sure I’m the best example of “modesty”.
But I suppose I didn’t consider living in a suburban community “vast privilege”. It just seemed to me how basically most people in America lived, unless you lived in a city. I knew there were people with a lot more money, but also people who had a lot less.
I also grew up in a family that had a strong work ethic. So I at least understood that these things were important for achieving your goals (even though I didn’t always do it in practice).
“Summer camp” (assuming this is a serious question), is a thing in the United States (and presumably other countries) where you basically pay to send your kids off to live in the outdoors for part of the summer. It’s been over 30 years, so I’m sure a lot has changed, and there are lots of variations. But the camp I went to was run by the YMCA. The camp was divided into 4 “villages” by age group, with each village having a cluster of 8 to 10 cabins and a communal bathroom/shower. Each cabin held 8 campers, plus their counsellor (camp employee) in his separate bedroom/office and sometimes an assistant counsellor. Meals were served in a dining hall 3 times a day and there were various organized and unstructured activities such as tennis, swimming, boating, basketball, riflery, archery, basically outdoors shit. Each “session” lasted 4 weeks and there were 2 sessions during the summer.
Obviously this would have skewed towards families with more disposable income.
I suppose one thing that “taught humility” was that part of summer camp included various “chores”. You rotated through “cabin duties” such as sweeping the cabin, doing waits and cleanup for meals, and “village duties” such as cleaning the bathroom, sweeping the basketball court, and so on.
So I guess maybe one way to avoid the sense of “privilege” is having kids actually do chores. That way they don’t end up like my college roommate who kept getting hog-tied with bike rack bungie cords by his roommates because he grew up with people always picking up his shit for him…
Not a thing here in Australia.
My wife, who has been a Jewish educator at all levels for 38 years, would beg to differ with you. She’s shown it to many eighth grade classes of 13- and 14-year-olds.
Has the OP said how old the grandkids are?
Volunteering is a good idea. You can’t forcibly expand a child’s empathy bubble but you can bring them into direct contact with the less fortunate.
It can be very difficult for people (and kids especially) to develop empathy for abstract suffering. Stuff happening far away, stuff that happened a long time ago, stuff happening a long long time ago in a galaxy far away.
Teaching self-reliance by going camping is not the same thing as teaching empathy. Likewise for teaching work ethic through chores. Not to say that these things aren’t important. Just different.
It’s impossible to really **grok **privilege without spending a good bit of time interacting with people who have less of it than you. IMHO there’s essentially zero value in having a purely intellectual understanding of the concept. You’ve got to wade in, and the nice thing is that you can make your community better in the process.
They’re 10 and nearly 8. Not wanting to expose them to stuff like the Holocaust yet of course.
My first encounter was reading ‘Five Chimneys’ by Olga Lengyl, around age 14 back in the 70’s. My grandies are still reading Harry Potter and playing Minecraft.
Honestly, I was thinking more of showing them how kids around the world are coping with the lockdown. Kids who have to go out to work themselves anyway, or kids stuck at home with no tablets,
internet and maybe having to look after younger siblings etc…
Found some YouTube clips as it turned out, and today’s homeschooling ended up much more of a success than previous attempts. They’re still alive!!
Self reliance is good too. But I’m thinking more along the lines of not being too good to get your hands dirty.
Can’t get kids to stop complaining though. Especially if they are bored.
I came in to say almost the same thing, only you said it better :).
When kids are pissed off or irritated or otherwise not feeling their best, your lecture serves only as a punishment: you’re gonna make them pretend to be respectful while you wag your finger and drone at them. They’ll hate it, they might try to avoid invoking the lecture in the future. But they’re not gonna learn from the lecture’s content. They’re not in a headspace to be open to you.
Lecture if you want to punish them, or lecture them if you’re spoiling for a fight with your children. But don’t try to teach them in that moment.
(Full disclosure, I sure as shit have lectured my kids under similar circumstances. Not my finest parenting moments.)
True; but I think it needs to be done carefully, so as not to reinforce any sense of ‘we’re different from these poor people who need help’, even if it’s in the sense of ‘and therefore we’re responsible for helping them’. People need to realize that, while being lucky enough to get a good start and being willing to work both reduce the chances, anyone can nevertheless wind up on the other side of that food line.
In Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books, which are for elementary school students, two contemporary kids travel through time. Day of the Dragon King has them going to ancient China where they meet someone trying to keep manuscripts from being destroyed. The kids tell him about their public and school libraries. He says, “You come from paradise.”
Yep. There have been anecdotal incidents where people were assigned to help out “those less fortunate,” and instead of developing empathy, became all the more superior and looked down on others all the more in the process.
I’ve talked to my students about this before, how a lot of children alive today would be super jealous of getting to go to school every day.
They were, to put it mildly, unconvinced.
I think one silver lining of the pandemic will be that my students will have a newfound appreciation for in-person school.
Yup. The teaching and lecturing need to be separate, something that I really wish weren’t the case. Letting off steam under the guise of providing advice isn’t useful. Of course, you can give the best advice ever, at the perfect time and only a tiny fraction of it is absorbed. I think modeling the right behavior is least unsuccessful way.