Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The Class Trip And Why We Lied

Yesterday DD had her class tiyul shnati (year trip). They have other smaller outings during the year but the tiyul shnati is the biggy. It's a day trip for the younger grades and older grades often do an overnight trip.

You have to understand that hiking is a national obsession passtime in Israel. Whereas we went to museums in London, stately homes, canal or river trips, zoos or safari parks for our end of year trip, here they go hiking in the countryside Mediterranean scrub.

You see I've crossed out the word countryside. An English friend of mine pointed this out once when she wrote how her Israeli husband would want to drive out into the countryside every weekend. So off they went with him exclaiming about the beauty of it all while she tried desperately to find something that looked remotely like countryside in all the brown dusty and rocky landscape.

So DD was taken to a valley just outside Jerusalem to spend the day hiking, climbing and appreciating the spring flowers. It was the hottest day of the year so far - I think it reached 27 degrees C by midday. Reader she hated it.

Today she brought home a page with the title: My Experience on my Class Trip. She has to write about the outing and hand it in on Thursday.

I posted this on a parenting facebook group:

My daughter had her 1st grade class trip yesterday and she has to write about it for homework. So far this is what she's said about it: "I hated it. It was too hot and all we did was walk and walk and walk and walk. Oh yes we saw some pretty flowers. No I don't remember what they are called. Then we did more walking and it was still too hot and my legs hurt. Then x was screaming in my ear on the bus all the way home so I got a headache." What do you think, will we get an A grade for that? Any suggestions?

Under the guise of not stifling her creativity, not teaching her to lie, and other noble concepts, some of the other parents urged me to let her write this. I suspect, as anglos (as us English speaking expats are called), some of them were wanting to vent their own frustrations about these sauna-hikes. 

I read her words out to DD as I'd written them on fb, to see if she did indeed want to write the absolute truth and she burst out laughing. "Mummy you can't write that! You have to say, 'it was lots of fun... I loved seeing the pretty flowers...' and all things like that."

Only half a year in school and she already knows that you have to write what they want to hear. So we did. But she keeps asking me to read the true version to her as she thinks it's hilarious that we could have sent that account into school. 

8 comments:

  1. From Margie in Toronto - too funny! I love reading about your daughter - she is very independent and obviously knows her own mind - but you could always say that she also understands how to be very "tactful". :-)

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  2. In the end we did write one sentence about how she found it hard to walk in the heat. And I heard from another mother that the trail was quite difficiults and that there were a group of girls who suffered. In the end even the teacher said she'll recommend an easier trail fro 1st Grade next year.

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  3. Why not make it a kind of "what would I do different next time to make it better" kind of thing?

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    1. She only wanted to write the normal things all the kids will write. I persauded her to put in the sentence about it being hard to walk in the heat - even though it was true. You can't send a 6yo with something too alternative as they won't be able to deal with the responses and the questions that will be asked about it.

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  4. From reading the comments above, it sounds as though you found the perfect compromise between you, not lying, but mostly focusing on the good parts of the trip x

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    1. Yeh I think we did the right thing, although the mixer in me wanted to tell it how it was I put on my responsible mummy hat and behaved myself.

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  5. I am glad that something good has come out of her honesty then! That's a massive lesson in itself :) As is learning what is and isn't acceptable sometimes :)

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    1. I read some of the other homeworks as they are displayed on the wall in the corridor. No one else said anything negative at all but I'm glad we made our point.

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