And now a William update

Don't worry, even with the impending birth, the first child has not been forgotten. He still gets as much attention as ever, even if I do have to say "no" when he wants me to chase him or constantly get up and down (luckily, Greg still obliges). He is chatting up a storm, in full sentences none the less. Hopefully, Floyd will take note and learn to speak quickly!

We are in the process of changing William's pre-school. His first one wasn't bad, we just weren't entirely satisfied. The sort of thing where a lot of little issues eventually add up to the point that we decided to look for a new place. This is William's trial week for his new school. Today, he went with Greg for an hour; tomorrow, he'll stay with Sarwary for the full three hours, and then on Friday he'll go by himself for three hours.

The new school also has its pluses and minuses. What we really like is its humanistic philosophy. This isn't something we would worry about so much if we were in the States, where we generally share a similar set of values with the populace at large. In India, though, class is still such a major issue; we weren't so wild about William learning to distinguish between the "upper" and "lower" people, which we could tell was starting to happen. Kids definitely learn by imitation, and even at age two William was picking up from those around him that one uses different respect levels to the classroom teacher vs. the ayama (i.e., classroom helper). At the new school, the distinction between teacher and aide is much less apparent. The aide is more of a trained teacher aide.

Plus, kids are expected to help out around the classroom - put away toys, help set the table for snack, etc. Again, something that would probably be pretty normal in a US preschool, but here, the ayamas do all that for the kids ... so as a result, a common phrase of late from William was: "no, *you* do that, Mama" even though he was perfectly capable of doing the task at hand himself. He was developing a borderline sense of entitlement.

On the flip side, the new school believes that since they're teaching the little kids how to be good people, how to be inquisitive, and how to fit in with the environment, they don't have space to introduce letters or numbers until after age four. He'll still color, sing songs, play in a sandbox, learn about fruit and trees and insects, etc ... but the "traditional" 3Rs won't be taught.

He's also in a mixed age class: 15 kids from 2.5 to 4 yrs old. I'm hoping this will be a positive experience for him and not frustrating (since he is the youngest). That's part of the reason why this is a trial week.

All things weighed out, if the trial week goes OK, we've decided that - for a two year old - being an environment where he can learn respect and responsibility by example is more important than learning his alphabet or numbers. After all, we can always teach him letters and numbers at home (and do already!), but it's much harder to control the personality influences when we're not home. So, having him in an environment more in tune with our values (even if this place is a little more "natural" than we are) wins out at this point.

Neither of us ever thought we'd be making these kind of educational decisions so early - William's only two! Being overseas definitely causes one to think more about which ideas or values are important to retain from the "home" culture. Figuring out how to model and instill those same values in William (when sometimes we feel like we're the only ones who hold those ideas!) can be quite a challenge.