I’ve been thinking about blog titles. I very often put ones in that have little to do with the topic of the post. Or they are utterly factual, probably great for a search engine but not very interesting when you’ve several hundred posts in your reader. But it takes too much energy trying to be clever and really I should be wrangling children into bed, so you’re stuck with yet another guess what it’s about quandary.
Actually, it’s partly about swimming. Long term readers of this blog will remember the trauma that attended Big’s first bash at swimming nine years ago. I think home educators around the country breathed a collective sigh of relief when I pulled her out of the lessons and returned Saturday mornings to their previous relaxed state. It was six years before she attempted lessons again, and even with that gap she still remembered the incident that had put her off first time around.
With that in mind, I was a bit nervous about Smallest starting swimming. But after a couple of weeks of being rather nervous about being abandoned in water with strangers, she settled in well and it’s all gone swimmingly. (Sorry.) Until 4 weeks ago, when she was brought out of her lesson part way through, having said that she needed the toilet. The week after that she came out of the lesson part way through again. Last week we were away. This week, instead of asking every day if it was her turn, she woke up saying “not my swimming, I don’t like my swimming, don’t make me go to my swimming.”
Alarm bells were ringing. I spoke to the teacher before the session today and arranged for her to make a fuss about it all. I bought extra special disney princess shampoo for afterwards and crossed my fingers that a concerted positive approach would be enough.
It wasn’t. I could hear the wailing throughout, see from the body language across the pool that I had a very unhappy little girl. She did make it through the whole lesson, but was carried out to me looking more than a bit pathetic.
I think I know what it’s about. I think they moved her up to a group she wasn’t ready for, because she seems tall and capable and verbal – forgetting that she was nowhere near three when she was moved. I think that there are children in that group who are a year older than her and actually should be in proper swimming classes and the teachers have been stretching the class up towards that and she’s been worried that she’s going to be made to do the things the older children were doing. I think that the teacher she’d built a relationship with disappeared and was replaced by a woman who seems to feel that smiling sweetly means it’s OK to say different things to different parents and that they won’t ever compare notes. (Hint. We did. We know.)
I think that I’m really quite amazingly cross about all of this. And that if they’ve put my little girl off swimming for six years that I may have to sit down and cry. And I think that I don’t really know what else to do.
What would you do?
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