Do you know when to give your child a push and when to leave well enough alone? I do. However, there are so many social pressures that push against my instincts, encouraging me to push my child to conform to whatever it is people feel that she is supposed to be doing. I can easily get swept along in these pressures unless I determine what my goal and my daughter’s goal is for a learning experience.
Let’s take swimming lessons as a case in point. We are taking swimming lessons for two weeks. Every day at high noon, we go down to the pool that is a five-minute walk from our house to have half an hour of group swimming lessons.
The swimming lessons are going well, for the most part. My daughter isn’t overly fond of the life jacket survival float, but she’s doing well on stroking. When we first started the lessons, she was visiting our own local pool daily and practicing her doggie paddle. She taught herself how to swim across the pool.
She was worried about the swimming lessons, and most of this was because of the diving board. At the end of the lessons, the children all jump into the water, the teacher catches them, and then they jointly swim towards the side. I had to remember that I just wanted her to learn how to move around more efficiently. To me, it doesn’t matter if she jumps off the diving board.
Of course, she’s refused to go on the diving board. I have been somewhat encouraging, but I haven’t pushed it. As a child, I was desperately afraid of heights and was dropped off a high diving board. I haven’t been interested in going off one since, and the very thought of a high diving board induces a mild feeling of panic. The one in the lesson pool is very low, but my daughter is still afraid of it. So I’m not pushing it.
She needs to jump off the board and swim towards the edge to pass the class. However, she currently has no idea what passing or repeating the class actually means. She doesn’t know that she’s being graded, and I don’t want to tell her. At the moment, she is enjoying the class and getting much better at moving through the water. If we pushed the envelope on the diving board, I doubt that she’d want to go at all.
Sometimes it’s a matter of knowing what your priorities are, even if they aren’t the priorities of the class and the teacher. That’s one of the aspects of being a learner who is self-directed.