‘Illiterate’ Nanny Ranting About Literacy/Spelling

A popular half hour show on TV has bugged me a great deal last week. The issue of poor spelling among young Aussies was brought up again and of course TEACHERS were to be blamed again. What infuriated me most was that the show has used the same case study of a father and son time and time again.

In the short segment about the father and son, the show highlighted the father’s frustration when he found out that the child’s teacher had not corrected his spelling mistakes in what looked like to me, an exercise book for creative writing. I really can’t stand parents who seem to think that they know it all because they have managed to produce little human beings. So instead of finding out why the mistakes were not corrected and read up on today’s literacy education, he jumped to complain to the media first.

Anyone who has seen a child develop from being a newborn to an active toddler would have realised that a baby that has just learned to sit up unaided is not going to step up in the next minute to hop to the toilet. There are other skills in between for the child to master first. There are different stages too in Language Development. In speech development, interested people are often at awe at how a toddler masters his mother tongue without signing up to a formal language course. In reading and writing however, the child must be shown keys so as to gradually apply them to unlock the mysteries of reading and writing. This can be a speedy process for some children and a slower process for others. Do not be fooled into believing that a preppy will learn all he needs to be a reader/author in the first year of school.

When a child enters the first year of school, he brings with him an extensive and well developed vocabulary. At school, his teacher will offer him the keys (like learning the alphabet and their sounds) to learn to read and write in a well-designed language rich classroom. It is in such a secure environment, (hopefully) free from unnecessary interventions and judgements, that a child experiments for himself, trying out the keys (he has learned so far) to write for the very first time and then to read simple text. This is when inventive spelling starts to appear in the child’s work. For example, the child may write ‘cum’ for the word ‘come’ or ‘egs’ for the word ‘eggs’. This is the stage when the child is trying to write phonetically. Read the misspelt words and you will find that they are pronounced the same as the original words. This shows that the child is intelligent and resourceful in trying to apply some of the sounds he has learnt into his own writing. Parents should be happy to see that their child is inquisitive enough to want to experiment in different ways. Gradually over years (shorter, in some instances), the child will master the entire set of 44 (or 45, depending on where in the world you are) sounds of English and then begin to learn alternate spellings for sounds they have learnt earlier. (English is a non-phonetic language. There is a combination of skills to learn to be able to read and write properly.) This is when the child will start to show accurate spellings. Instead of writing ‘plai’, he may now be able to write it properly – ‘play’. Continued exposure to book language through read-alouds and shared-reading enhances spelling accuracies as well.

Most teachers are discouraged from correcting the young author’s spelling mistakes. This is partly because teachers do not wish to discourage the child’s new found interest in writing. By being a picky parent, judging the child’s every mistake, he runs the risk of putting the child off writing. Visualize a child too worried of failing to even want to try. I believe that Cathy Freeman as a 6 year old didn’t run as fast as she did at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Everyone should be patient and allow each child the time to blossom naturally.

The little boy featured in the TV show was 6. His state of origin was not mentioned. He could have been a preppy or in Grade 1. From the footage no one can be sure if his teacher never records his mistakes into her own folder. Respectful teachers do not mark out a child’s beautiful piece of writing. (Which La La Land is this nanny from?) That’s like tagging a beautiful public structure. Dedicated teachers are likely to record the child’s mistakes in a separate folder. From there, the teacher may invite the child for an individual or small group (with children sharing the similar mistakes) discussion. If not, the teacher may create a mini lesson to be presented to the whole class. No shaming is necessary and the child/children who made the mistake/s are never mentioned. The teacher may include examples she created herself. No one can be sure if the boy’s teacher ever carried out what I mentioned above. (Why would the show’s producer want to give her a chance to speak up? She is only a teacher.) Facing a dad who was on a mission of picking errors from the child’s work, the boy is likely to just back down and accept what is dished out. As a nanny, I have seen children who are so tired at the end of the day, they just agree with what is ‘thrown’ at them from their parents. This is quite a funny sight because children are known to be troublemakers and not the parents.

I love this blog. I get to speak my mind even though I am just a nanny. Readers may not agree with what I have to say but I get to say it anyway. If you totally disagree with this nanny, please drop me a comment.

Travel Dreams

As expected, Ettie took Bree and I out for most of the day on Tuesday. She bought us brunch and afternoon tea. Ettie actually wanted to drive but Bree's dad was using the spare car because his was taken to the workshop for servicing. So, we ended up using the taxi to go shopping. Also as expected, Ettie bought heaps of things for Bree. She bought three outfits, a couple of picture books and toys (including a T-Rex).

While I was sipping an ice cold lemon tea, Ettie asked me of my plans for my annual holidays at the end of the year. I told her that I really wish to travel. I told her about my plans to go to Japan but it won't be happening during this coming holidays. I am intending to have a good time in Japan and will have to budget carefully when travelling around this beautiful country. Ettie remembered me telling her that I went to Euro Disney years ago and she asked if Tokyo Disney will be on my list of places to visit. Of course Tokyo Disney will be on my list. I have heard so many great comments about this theme park. Some said that the Japanese one is the best of all of them. Despite believing in a need to avoid licensed characters, I also believe in the practice of moderation. LOL.

I have been returning to the Hotel Reservations.com website regularly to see the kind of accomodation and packages on offer for Tokyo. I am planning to have a short stay near the city so I can explore Tokyo on my own. I would like to stroll in the Imperial Gardens, take photos of the Imperial Palace, to window shop at Shibuya, to experience the serenity of the Meiji Shrine and to travel on a bullet train (Shinkansen?). In my desperation to travel to Japan, I have also started to take up Japanese casually. My friends in Japan can't wait to show me some aspects of Japanese life. They like it there so much that none of them are planning to come back to Australia anytime soon.

Hotel Reservations.com is a handy website to shop around for hotels, motels, holiday packages, bed & breakfast options, car rentals and airline tickets. They also offer vacation rentals to people (especially families) with a bigger budget. A vacation rental is not just a basic hotel room. It is usually a larger self-contained suite that includes handy cooking facilities like a kitchenette, fridge and microwave. This website is very easy to use. Visitors can search for examples according to their individual needs. They do not list only the high end options but affordable options to cater to those of us who are planning to travel on a tighter budget as well. While they also offer more destinations within the USA, their coverage for the rest of the world is pretty extensive. Everytime I check out the super affordable accomodation options on offer in other parts of East and South East Asia, I become so tempted to ditch my plans to visit Japan. Some of the 3 Star hotels in Thailand have rooms starting at less than US$50 per night! Some friends who visited Thailand also had heaps of great things to say about Thailand, including one who went when the Tsunami hit at the end of 2004.

Travellers should really visit HotelReservations.com to see what is available out there. Travellers booking their reservations online are given Special Internet Rates. For greater reassurance, phone bookings are also available. People from the US, Canada and Europe can book by calling toll free numbers outlined on the website.

As it turn out, Ettie told me something I didn't know about the family. Ettie and her husband (Bree's grand dad) lived in Japan for a couple of years in the 70's. The couple moved there to work. Bree's dad was sent to a boarding school because he didn't want to leave his mates. He used to visit his parents during school holidays. No wonder there are bits and pieces of Japan around the house. There is a wooden bucket in the home office where Bree's dad 'hides' his pens. These are souvenir pens he receives as giveaways from functions and events. I just learned that the bucket is actually a traditional Japanese rice storage container. People in Japan probably do not use such buckets anymore. In the land of gadgets, they might have already created a digital rice storage container with smart technology.





Hotel Reservations



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Begging For A Pixar Show Bag at ACMI

I had Thursday off thus creating an extra long weekend for myself because I am getting Monday off as well, because grandma Ettie is here to visit Bree. Stella had an appointment at the dentist and was also invited to celebrate her friend’s birthday party. It was kind of weird to have the party on a weekday afternoon and Stella’s mum wasn’t looking forward to it because it was based on the Disney Princess theme.

After reading for 6 hours, I decided to take a break by going out for a walk. I was meant to just go down to the Ferris wheel by the Yarra to take a few pictures and ended up paying $15.00 to check out this popular exhibition at ACMI called “Pixar: 20 Years of Animation”.

I enjoyed the exhibition more than expected. It was interesting to see how much effort the artists put in to create the movies or short features that we enjoy at the cinemas. They actually made 3D models, to show everyone involved in the production the size of each character in relation to the rest of the characters. The whole process seemed pretty time consuming. I used to think that they used only computers to create this form of animation but it turned out that they still use traditional techniques in the process. I was of course delighted to see the magical Toy Story Zoetrope. Although I knew what it was, I refused to believe that I was still looking at the same figurines for a little while. I kept telling myself that when they started to spin real fast, someone must have removed the figurines discretely and replaced them with a screen to show the same characters doing their stuff. LOL. The Zoetrope is not suitable for people with certain medical conditions because they use Strobe lights, but I actually found the Artscape experience dizzying for some reason.

To me, the service was pretty good at first. The lady who sold me my ticket was friendly. The guy who checked in my backpack was friendly. The lady who checked my ticket was also friendly. At the entrance of the exhibition, I was welcomed by another lady, who gave me the leaflet as pictured here. She too was friendly. The attendants at the Zoetrope and the Artscape were friendly and cheerful. I almost gave the whole experience a thumbs-up until I witnessed what I would consider as pretty ugly on the way out. What I think is ugly may not have been necessarily ugly to other people, especially among those who are totally desensitized in the rat race of life.

I was on my way out. Immediately in front of me was a casually dressed young couple in their late 20’s. In front of them were 4 tall men (3 in power suits), chatting to the two attendants there while blocking the rest of us from exiting. After they stepped onto the escalators, the couple in front of me moved forward. They asked for a show bag. The attendant asked them bluntly if they had any children. Her body language was clear that they were not entitled to the show bag. The couple did answer yes to the question but the attendant only reluctantly gave them one after a long pause. There was another attendant but he didn’t speak the whole time. I didn’t bother to ask for one. As much as I enjoy the movies made by Pixar, I can live without too many products linked to licensed characters. Super sensitive me didn’t like the way the couple was treated, especially because the attendants were super friendly to the 4 men in black before the couple. When I did finally get up to the next level, I did see the men again. They were just men (probably from offices nearby) without their wives and kids. This is what I noted. One man had five show bags, the second man had 3, the third man had one and the youngest of the 4 didn’t have any. So, is it that expensive to give the young couple one show bag? Is giving away one show bag to a paying couple who didn’t take with them their kid/s going to cause serious constraints to the budget of the people who brought this exhibition to Melbourne?

The men left the building looking very happy, stepping out to Flinders Street. Where did the couple go? I went to the Gift Shop and they were there too. Poor me bought 4 postcards to give to the Good Samaritan. As I stepped out of the shop, the couple was getting served. Judging from what I could see, they were paying for a number of items. Now, suited up men do look like they have the power to spend big but that is not always the case. This young couple spent more at this exhibition to deserve that one show bag than those men. Jokingly, I am suggesting that parents who visit this exhibition without their children should take with them their children’s birth certificates and family portraits to show when requesting for the show bag/s. Maybe the show bags should be made available for a small fee of a few dollars for those who do not qualify for some reason. Nothing is Free in life these days. Gee, I really wonder what is in it anyway to make it so precious!

About The Previous Post.

This is just a brief reminder that names of people on this blog are altered. In the previous post, parts of the names of my neighbours were also altered. Winnie helped me to select the initials to create the Chinese names. Seeing that I am having so much fun writing this blog, she too is thinking of creating her own blog, describing her new life in Victoria.

I Agree With You, Inga Gilchrist! (Re: ‘Pumpkin’)

My Singaporean neighbour, Winnie, and I have been following the news closely since learning about the little New Zealand Chinese girl who was abandoned at the Southern Cross train station. Before we found out what had happened to her mum, we wondered why she was abandoned. We almost naturally wondered if the little girl was abandoned simply because she is a girl. One of Winnie’s cousins was born in the year of the tiger in the 60’s and was given away because she was a girl. Winnie explained that people used to believe that girls born in the year of the tiger may never find suitable husbands. She said it had something to do with the Chinese Horoscope cycles. I know that there are 12 animals in the horoscope, rotating in a 12 year cycle but I only just learned that there are other cycles involved. It really is quite intriguing.

On Thursday, I picked up a copy of MX (free mini newspaper) to read on the tram. On page 4 was a piece written by a journalist named Inga Gilchrist. It was about the nickname ‘Pumpkin’, given to the lost little girl. Coincidentally, I too was wondering what a little Caucasian child would be called if he/she was abandoned in India. Sauerkraut or Brussels Sprout in Hindi? That evening, when Winnie popped over, I asked her for her opinion on this nickname. Her first response was that ‘Pumpkin’ sounded cute. She also said that everyone concerned should keep calling her ‘Pumpkin’ to keep things simple. Apparently, no one had managed to pronounce the names of the people involved in this case accurately in the daily news on TV. I secretly thought at the time of our conversation, that the newsreaders do not really want to learn to read the names properly. This could be partly because the parents and the child are not VIPs. It was only a couple of weeks ago, when most of them were pronouncing Hu Jin Tao’s name properly at APEC. A few did say ‘Hugh’ instead of ‘hoo’. Winnie also pointed out to me that even the Chinese language media (as shown in one of the short footages on Sky News) was referring the child as ‘Little Pumpkin’, in Chinese characters.

When I first met my Singaporean neighbour, he introduced himself as CK Leong and his wife as KH Wong. Yes, I was meant to call him CK and her KH. I did wish that they had given me a chance to call them by their given names. I would have tried my best to pronounce them properly. As I got to know them better, I did learn of their given names and do call them by those names occasionally. Their young son joined them later and he already had an anglicised name, Michael, even though the family is not Christian. Like the person the journalist mentioned in her article, who called a famous Chinese actress ‘the Z girl’, CK had a similar experience at work. His wife told me that people initially had trouble remembering the alphabetical combination. Some started to call him KC. His wife KH too, experienced the same at their son’s school. In Singapore, work colleagues had always called him CK and his wife by her given names. The couple decided to use the alphabetical initials of their given names for the both of them when they moved here, because people found it hard to pronounce their names. When people still find the initials tricky, they set out to find themselves anglicised names in frustration. So, CK was reintroduced to me as Leon (inspired by his surname) and his wife became Winnie. On learning that his wife is now Winnie, one young bloke at his workplace asked why he didn’t choose the name Vinnie for himself. He was not amused.

I agree with the MX journalist, Inga Gilchrist that we should make more of an effort. These are people’s names, given to them by their parents. Winnie said that Chinese names are usually carefully selected or created with pride. I think we ought to show newcomers respect and give them a warm welcome to our country. We shouldn’t be expecting them to learn all about us and live like us without learning a thing or two about them. They have heaps to enlighten us on.

Note: In my posts, I have referred to this family as my Singaporean neighbours. Some people may find it offensive that I keep describing them as Singaporean but I am only doing this on the blog. It is easier to give the readers of this blog a bit of background information on the people I am talking about. I can’t refer to them as just plain old ‘neighbours’ because I know quite a few in this building of 144 households. I have English neighbours, New Zealand neighbours, Korean neighbours, and since a month ago, Indian neighbours. It is not done intentionally to offend negatively.

Can’t Live Without My Digital Camera

The camera that I was given when I was 11 died in 2004. I had always wanted a camera with zoom function but hated to just throw my beloved camera away. It was after it stopped working (beyond repair apparently) that I finally bought myself a digital camera. Not only am I blessed with 10x Optical Zoom, the best thing I like about digital cameras is the LCD screen that allows me to check the shots that I have taken. Pictures that didn’t turn out ok can be deleted instantly. At the photo developing kiosks, pictures can be further enhanced so that the end result is almost always brilliant. How wonderful, huh? Digital cameras are so easy to use that even one of my friends was producing great shots of her son playing footy recently. She is the last in our circle to purchase a digital camera and she bought one for less than aud$200!

On my way out to the city today, I walked past a few trees behind the National Gallery of Victoria that were starting to bloom. Being a fussy person who is always planning to make beautiful and quality products for young children to use, I stopped by to have a good look. I decided right then that I have to go back tomorrow morning to take a few shots. I would like to take pictures of the leaves in various stages of development. It is a pity that I didn’t have my camera with me today. At home, I sometimes even take pictures of general items to create flashcards. My ongoing language project requires heaps of pictures and what can be better than creating my own.

Greedy me would like to buy another digital camera with at least 8.0 megapixels and 12x-18x optical zoom next. It is hard to settle on one from a growing selection out there in the shops. New technology is introduced regularly. I just saw the new iPod in the paper today. This nanny will have to work really hard to keep upgrading.

Nikon D300

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Accepting Gifts – Flowers

Being a nanny, I receive gifts as tokens of appreciation from my employers. Being a nice nanny, I thank them each time for going out of their way to get me gifts. Being a nanny, I also receive different types of gifts. These are usually things that my employers no longer want. They range from theatre tickets to flowers and cakes. I always decline things like theatre tickets or vouchers. (How rude, huh?) I accept other little things. It makes them really happy to be able to ‘assist’ me.

In this post, the unique gift I will talk about is FLOWERS. Thoughtful employers who know me well will never buy me flowers. They definitely will not present me with a bouquet at this time of the year when I am usually suffering from hay fever even though I do try to keep my hay fever under control by taking medication. Because of side-effects, I sometimes try to go without my medication to see if I will be magically cured. It never works. In fact, come to think of it, my hay fever was especially bad in the years when I was looking after Alexandra and her siblings.

When I first started looking after Alexandra, I told her mum that I suffered from hay fever at the end of each year. It obviously didn’t bother them that much or they wouldn’t have hired me. Alexandra’s mum respected my problem with flowers at first. Then she started to drop hints about how bare her house looked without flower arrangements. I ignored her comments but my nose couldn’t stand the new flower arrangements popping up in my work environment (her home). With medication, my hay fever was just under control. Instead of just suffering from hay fever at the end of the year, it became a year long thing. I just had to put up with it quietly. In the last few months that I worked for this family, she presented flowers to me on two different occasions. The second one was given to me a few weeks after the first in October and November. In terms of hay fever, that is usually the worst time of the year for me. Being a nanny, I accepted these flowers graciously. I ought to be grateful when they were just trying to cheer up my miserable life. By the way, the flowers were not bought especially for me. The first bunch was a mini flower arrangement that had been sitting in the sister’s office since the Monday before they gave it to me on a Friday. The second one was a bouquet. Alexandra’s mum and aunt were meant to have lunch with a relative but that was cancelled. I was ‘lucky’ to be given the bouquet that was meant to be for the aunt in the first place.

The day I received the bouquet was also a Friday and she returned home late. Instead of leaving at 5:30 pm, I didn’t leave till nearly 7:00 pm. My friends were all waiting for me by the time I got home. Someone made a joke about the bouquet that I had in my hand when I walked in. My eyes were already watery because of it. That person made a comment about my employer’s bravery for giving me flowers again. Another person suggested that I should have thrown it away before entering the apartment complex.

On the following Monday, I was asked by Alexandra’s mum if I liked the flowers. I thanked her and then said the dumbest thing after that. I told her the casual comment made by my friend. That sent her up the roof. She turned around and told me sternly that I as an employee had no rights to choose what to be given and should be happy that I was given a gift at all. I wasn’t happy with what she said but I was angrier at myself for telling her that. I learned instantly that no matter how friendly my employers presented themselves to me, there will always be a line between us. I, as a nanny should never cross that line. I am usually pretty careful with what I have to say but I really don’t know what happened that time.

I will post a few other stories of accepting ‘unique’ gifts from Alexandra’s mum another time. I sometimes wondered if she was bullying me through kindness. Did she give me the flowers (knowing full well that I suffered from hay fever) just like how she added the mini Nuttela packs into Alexandra’s lunch box (knowing full well that the little girl’s kindergarten is a Nut Free zone)?