The Next Adventure: March 2009

I'm a little late with the Paris pictures, I know. Better late than never. Below are a selection of pictures from my trip to Paris in February during the half term break.
Now for the ponderings. I had a year 4 class for all of this last week. They were a fairly well behaved class compared with others I've had of that same year level. Still, one thing stuck out to me, and has in general about the older primary kids. They seem to be noticeably lacking in personal problem solving skills. Now, I'm not just picking on this class in particular, I have encountered this in other classes of the same age group. However, this week this phenomenon seemed a little more exaggerated than usual. Case in point: Early on in the week, I would be asking questions about the lesson we were working on and when I'd call on someone to answer, more often than not I would get some variation of, "Miss, s/he hit/poured water on/kicked/swore at/talked to/pushed me!" Kind of made me wonder if anyone was actually listening to the questions. It got to the point where when I called on someone to answer a question I would first ask, "Is this an answer to the question or are you going to complain about something?" A real time saver was simply starting off question time by asking for anyone who had their hand up to complain to put it down; generally, about half the hands went down.
With the girls there was also an interesting addition to the complaining. Again, during a lesson a hand would go up. Thinking it was a question about what we were actually working on I would call on them and get, "Miss, she said she's not my friend!" My thought: "Well, we're right in the middle of a lesson, but obviously your having some sort of pre-teen friendship crisis, so we should probably just drop everything and focus on that for now" (sorry if your computer screen is damp, that's just the sarcasm dripping through).
Overall, it was a good week, but I did feel slightly frustrated at times that we couldn't get through a whole lesson without the kids expecting me to solve some fairly simple problem. I don't seem to recall having these same kind of issues in Canada, and I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is. It seems to vary slightly from class to class here, so I would guess that the teachers, to varying degrees, enable this behaviour. Now, don't get me wrong, I definitely don't believe that kids shouldn't come to their teacher with legitimate issues, but I think kids need to be taught how to deal with these everyday kind of problems at some point before they get to year 4 and can't get through a whole lesson.
Well, that was the pondering, and now, the pictures. Enjoy: