When last I wrote, both of my kids were being constantly pathologised by Austrian educators, and in both cases (Gott sei Dank) they were coming to the end of their tenure at the respective institutions.
Sophie duly started in the bilingual class of the local public Gymnasium in September, and it is definitely a challenge. One of the big justifications we constantly heard for "it would overly tax Sophie to send her to Gymnasium and you have to consider that she may do better elsewhere" was that organisational skills are in high demand, and of course organisational skills are not exactly the forté of ADHD kids. But, since Gymnasium is essentially the only viable way to eventually get to university if you are educated in Vienna, this has to be challenged since it suggests a view that (at least in reasonable quarters) is unacceptable today, to wit, ADHD kids don't belong in higher education. (There is also a dark underbelly to all of this, which unfortunately we find ourselves implicitly participating in: middle class kids do, and working class kids don't, get regarded as belonging in Gymnasium and therefore higher education. I can be damn certain that if I were a less-educated Turkish immigrant, for example, I would not have been listened to as much as I was, would have lost these battles with the school, and Sophie would be going to a Mittelschule today and expected to start an apprenticeship at age 15.)
But one of the advantages of this being the bilingual class is that we actually have a (small) network of families either with a kid in Sophie's class or with kids already at the school, and so we were able to find out reassuring things in advance, such as who Sophie's Klassenvorstand (~homeroom teacher) would be and how good he was reputed to be. So far it seems all the rumours are true;![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mpk and I had a meeting with this teacher a couple of weeks ago, and – although he is certainly concerned about her – he doesn't treat it as a foregone conclusion that she is out of her depth. Quite the opposite actually; we were reassured that many kids need time to adjust, that since the bilingual class always has two teachers, there is an extra pair of hands to provide a bit of support for her (!! a school actually ACKNOWLEDGING that they might have resources to deal!!), and that "together we will manage." This basic decency and optimism is so utterly foreign to my experience of "teachers in Austria" that I am still sort of reeling, to be honest. To add to the astonishment, he is perfectly approachable by email, willing to give me the information I need to help her get organised, and even...thanked me...for my...support?! Crazy.
On the downside, we are still living in the age of the pandemic, and Sophie got sent into quarantine yesterday along with over half her class after a kid who attended on Wednesday had a positive test result. It meant that she had assignments to do remotely over Teams, and all the bad behaviour came out at home as we had to push her through doing this work. All we can do is hope that this will all pay off, she will get the hang of "big kids' school", the teacher(s) will remain supportive, and we might finally achieve some sense of lasting "normal".
Sophie duly started in the bilingual class of the local public Gymnasium in September, and it is definitely a challenge. One of the big justifications we constantly heard for "it would overly tax Sophie to send her to Gymnasium and you have to consider that she may do better elsewhere" was that organisational skills are in high demand, and of course organisational skills are not exactly the forté of ADHD kids. But, since Gymnasium is essentially the only viable way to eventually get to university if you are educated in Vienna, this has to be challenged since it suggests a view that (at least in reasonable quarters) is unacceptable today, to wit, ADHD kids don't belong in higher education. (There is also a dark underbelly to all of this, which unfortunately we find ourselves implicitly participating in: middle class kids do, and working class kids don't, get regarded as belonging in Gymnasium and therefore higher education. I can be damn certain that if I were a less-educated Turkish immigrant, for example, I would not have been listened to as much as I was, would have lost these battles with the school, and Sophie would be going to a Mittelschule today and expected to start an apprenticeship at age 15.)
But one of the advantages of this being the bilingual class is that we actually have a (small) network of families either with a kid in Sophie's class or with kids already at the school, and so we were able to find out reassuring things in advance, such as who Sophie's Klassenvorstand (~homeroom teacher) would be and how good he was reputed to be. So far it seems all the rumours are true;
mpk and I had a meeting with this teacher a couple of weeks ago, and – although he is certainly concerned about her – he doesn't treat it as a foregone conclusion that she is out of her depth. Quite the opposite actually; we were reassured that many kids need time to adjust, that since the bilingual class always has two teachers, there is an extra pair of hands to provide a bit of support for her (!! a school actually ACKNOWLEDGING that they might have resources to deal!!), and that "together we will manage." This basic decency and optimism is so utterly foreign to my experience of "teachers in Austria" that I am still sort of reeling, to be honest. To add to the astonishment, he is perfectly approachable by email, willing to give me the information I need to help her get organised, and even...thanked me...for my...support?! Crazy.On the downside, we are still living in the age of the pandemic, and Sophie got sent into quarantine yesterday along with over half her class after a kid who attended on Wednesday had a positive test result. It meant that she had assignments to do remotely over Teams, and all the bad behaviour came out at home as we had to push her through doing this work. All we can do is hope that this will all pay off, she will get the hang of "big kids' school", the teacher(s) will remain supportive, and we might finally achieve some sense of lasting "normal".
