People who are good with little kids

Damn, can they be clever and deceitful little turds!!! I like 'em. Their poor hygiene just got me deathly ill, so there are some cons… :blush:

Yeah, the kids were running around in class one day, so I read the rules to them, the rules that someone posted on the wall. Lo and behold, there was no rule against running! I softly mumbled, “Well, I can’t find anything specifically against running.” Immediately, one little girl asked with a gleam in her eye, “So can run?”

I had a NT$1 coin that must have fallen out of my pocket. One of the kids in a kindergarten group asked me what it was and I told him it was money. He asked for an explanation of what money was. One of the other children told him (to paraphrase his English) that you give money to people to get candy and if you don’t give the people money and take the candy, then you were a “bad guy” and the police would come and catch you. This from a five-year-old.

Even my 4th graders can be very precocious. I was reading Charlotte’s Web aloud to them while they worked on a play based on one of the scenes of the story, and we were up to the part of the story where Charlotte tells Wilbur that she’s building a nest for her eggs. One of the children asked how she could have babies. I stepped back to see just what they knew instead of giving the Talk to 9-year-olds whose parents would probably not appreciate me telling their children about the mating rituals of even spiders if they themselves didn’t think the kids were ready. One of the children suggested that she had a husband and when they loved each other very much, they made the eggs. Then the kids began to hypothesize why Charlotte’s husband wasn’t around anymore. It was a great moment…seeing my kids thinking about characters that deeply and then using their imaginations to think about what might have happened to a character that they themselves made up without any help from me.

Oh, xp+10k, you mentioned overgeneralizations with grammatical rules. that’s common in native English-speaking children as well. You might hear a young child say, “He hitted me” or as one of my younger cousins used to say, “My want to go too”, confusing I and my (easy since they mean practically the same thing and sound very similar). My 16-month-old niece is saying “dog” to represent all animals. Soon she will learn that different animals have different names, but for now, all animals are “dogs”. I had a conversation with her a month ago when she picked up the phone while my brother went to get a pen and paper. I would ask her questions and she would babble with the correct intonations for demonstrative sentences and yes-no questions. Pre-language and early language in children is what got me interested in linguistics in the first place. It’s also a big reason why I love teaching preschool-aged children. They are so much fun to talk to.

I love working with kids!

To work with little kids requires one key skill: patience.

  1. When they dont listen
  2. When their mothers come to see you, or telephone
  3. When they have sore teeth
  4. When they puke on you
  5. If they want to show you every little thing they have made, twice
  6. When you are santa claus
  7. When they still can’t do their phonics work
  8. When you have to phone their parents, who dont speak English, and you dont speak Chinese

I love teaching kindy, but I do use up buckets of patience.

Another cute kindy moment:
On Friday, one of my preschool groups were coloring a shapes book and two of them decided to do it under the table while talking to me. At first they were trying to say they were under the table in Chinglish “We are in the table”. Then it changed to “We are the table” so I talked to the “table”, with an impromptu conversation about what a table can and cannot do compared with preschoolers. Then it was time for them to clean up and go back to their regular classroom. When I told one of the children under the table that she needed to help clean up she said, “I can’t.” I ask that all children help clean up so I asked her, “Why can’t you help?” She replied, “Because tables don’t have hands.” It took me a while to stop laughing.

wanderingdave wrote:
I was never a little kid. Even when I was physically one, I was always the precocious and nerdy type of preferred intellectual conversations with adults. So for this reason, I have a lot of trouble getting inside the heads of normal little kids, and am probably not cut out to deal with them realistical
<sorry i don’t know how to do the quoting properly right now.>

Same here. I am an only child who has grown up in the most dysfunctional family you could imagine, and most of my friends are 10 years older than me. But I love the young’uns. They’re just little people as far as i’m concerned, and I find them a lot more straightforward than most of the adults that I meet.
My first day of dealing with them was over a week ago. I had failed a couple of my first demos with the older ones (why don’t they let you prepare a lesson plan?!!!) and then I did a demo with a kindy. I stayed for two hours after the required 30 minutes, because I was enjoying myself; and I found that they were beautifully innocent and completely intelligent. And i was actually afraid to do the demo!

Well, every class has it’s hooligan, and my days in taiwan will be my comuppance (sp?) for my years in elementary school, but the fact remains that the youngsters will learn everything that you teach them, if you try a little bit.

They are smarter than I am, that’s for sure… :laughing:
smashy

Yeah, I love observing what I think is evidence of the Language Acquisition Device at work. I may be fooling myself, but sometimes I think I can sort of “see” it operating.