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Give it to Me Straight! I Swear I Won’t be Mad!

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Give it to Me Straight! I Swear I Won’t be Mad!

David J. Balan
Sep 25, 2008
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Give it to Me Straight! I Swear I Won’t be Mad!

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I have an American friend (same guy as in this earlier post) who lived for a number of years in Mexico.  He married a Mexican woman, and while he always spoke to his kids in English, their real first language was Spanish.  He recently moved back to the U.S., and he enrolled his oldest daughter in kindergarten.  The school gave her some kind of language evaluation, and they concluded that she was slightly behind in English, and said they would like to give her some kind of limited special instruction if her parents wanted it.  My friend and his wife were inclined to go along with what the teachers thought, but they wanted to know the answers to a few common-sense questions: how behind was the kid really, was what they would do for her during the special instruction time really worth giving up whatever she would miss in the regular class, and so on.  The problem was, they were having a hard time getting any straight answers out of the teachers, and they were pretty sure they knew why: these very nice, well-meaning teachers were so worried about offending them that they couched every answer in a million caveats and weasel words.  My friend said he said he was dying to say something like: "I hereby unconditionally vow not to sue you, hate you, or speak or think ill of you in any way.  Now will you please just tell me what’s going on with my kid?!?"

Don’t get me wrong: that hyper-sensitivity comes mostly from a good place, and I certainly don’t want to go back 50 years when a kid like that would just be thrown in the deep end of the pool.  But come on!

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Give it to Me Straight! I Swear I Won’t be Mad!

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Give it to Me Straight! I Swear I Won’t be Mad!

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

You're being rather contrarian. You're reading a great deal into a very little evidence. When did asking a simple question become a form of contrarianism?

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

Don't get me wrong, the teacher has a real problem here. If I was the teacher, I would also be eager to send the signal that: (i) the kid really had the problem I said she had and that my saying so wasn't just me being biased against her somehow; and (ii) that whether or not the kid got signed up for the extra help it wasn't going to influence how much I liked her or how I was going to treat her in the future. And if I was the parent, I would want to be convinced that this was so, and part of the way that the teacher could convince me of this would be, frankly, a display like the one my friend got.

Also, as much as I would like to think that I am a "give it to me straight no matter what" kind of guy, I don't rule out the possibility that my courage could fail me if the news was bad enough. Maybe not, but maybe yes. So this is also not completely simple.

But still, come on!

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