by Orana Velarde | Sep 18, 2017 | Asia, Being Thankful, Education, Homeschooling, Orana Velarde, Sri Lanka
What are you supposed to do when you can tell that the school your kids are in isn’t exactly what you’d like a school to be like? Not everyone has the luxury of just moving kids from school to school just because they don’t like it. I am thankful that our constant nomadic lifestyle let’s me make drastic decisions like taking the kids out of school and doing a year of homeschooling before moving on to the next country. The road of decisions getting here wasn’t exactly easy though.
Basically, we’ve taken the kids out of school and I’ve given up my free time so I can homeschool them as best I can. Everyone gets up later now and I admit it take lots of patience to get them interested in anything but I’m trying and I hope the decision was a good one. Whenever I think of the teachers notebook slapping my son, it becomes completely worth it
Before
For about a year I managed to get up before 6 am to wrangle my kids out of bed, into uniforms and every day was tougher than the next. It was hard for me to hear the little one cry every day about not wanting to go and how much she hated it. The older one put up with the daily routine but grew to also hate it. We all ended up hating it.
I obviously put up with it because well, school life is like that right? You get up unwillingly and go to school and go on with your life. But something just wasn’t clicking.
When we were in Bali they loved their school. The little one was allowed to go in pyjamas with the uniform in her bag and the teacher would dress her nicely and even braid her hair into “elsa” braids. My son has always been rambunctious but not once did they notebook slap him across the head there.
The year they spent in the Cambridge style school here in Colombo could have easily been a torture for them and I was telling them to suck it up because I needed my space.
Insert the mom guilt.
Those five free hours in the morning were mine, all mine and no one else’s! But things just kept getting worse. My daughter was constantly picked on by a little boy, every single day and the teacher took months to finally intervene. She was miserable and her only friends would switch to Sinhalese at any time, leaving her out of conversations.
The first day I took the kids to that school, it had me wondering; a first grade teacher was yelling at the top of her lungs about rules while the kids sat as still as possible in their seats in a room way too hot for comfort. I sort of brushed if off because it was the end of the school year, but later I feel bad that my kids had to put up with these teachers for a whole year.
I can’t tell you if the teachers are bad or just have had too much, they were nice sometimes and horrible other times. My son got notebook slapped quite a few times because he was tired of writing. My daughter was told to put her head down if she didn’t want to work. She wasn’t given other choices, like coloring or puzzle building. She was four.
Are all “academic style” schools like this now?
Forcing four year olds to write and read by the time they are five?
So, I took them out of school completely. I sent an email to the school which they never answered back, not even with a “bye bye it was nice to have you here”, nothing. Good Riddance, I say.
We are Expat Homeschoolers once again.
My son has come to hate the art of writing but he loves making up stories, my daughter says “no pencils allowed” everyday and I have to figure out other things to do with her. She will trace letters but won’t let me tell them what they are. She still can’t count to ten properly but you know what? I doesn’t matter, she will learn eventually. I have a feeling one year in that school has left a bit of a mark that now I have to erase.
I’ve lost those five free hours that I used to have but at least my kids aren’t being forced to spend their day in a hot uncomfortable room being picked on for being different and made to work incessantly with a fear of notebook slaps!
How do you feel about your kids’ school? Do you ever just want to take them out and do the schooling yourself? I know I have the luxury of doing something like that, and I am thankful to be able to.
by Orana Velarde | Apr 10, 2017 | Asia, Asia and Oceania, Childhood, Children, Education, Orana Velarde, School, Sri Lanka
Kids are out on holiday for the next two weeks. Funny how it’s Easter Holidays in some places, Spring Break in others, and here it’s the Buddhist New Year. In the end it doesn’t really matter what it is I’m just glad I don’t have to wake up at 6 am to convince my kids to eat something before heading out dragging heavy backpacks and in my son’s case; an uncomfortable uniform and terrible shoes.
I still can’t believe my 4.5 year old daughter brought home SPELLING homework for the holidays. I’m in shock as to why she would need to do spelling at that age. It pains me, she hates going to school just because it’s all WORK WORK WORK. She does not have fun and she’s not even out of Kindergarten yet.
My kids have been going to a “Cambridge” School for the past year and thankfully my son is ok with it. He likes to learn so accepts the heavy backpack and uncomfortable uniform. I am surprised that he always gets a C in Art and I don’t care that he is in “position 21” of 22 kids in the class. I couldn’t care less.
When there are parent teacher meetings previous to exams, some parents write down notes as to what needs to be studied. I sometimes don’t even go to the meeting and most of the time my son misses one day of testing cause we travel so much. I’m not sure what the teachers think of us.
My daughter’s teacher calls my home complaining that she is “missing so much work”, I have no heart to tell her that I don’t care.
So why do my kids go to school? Why don’t I just homeschool them if I think the school is just suffering?
Because I need those free hours to be with myself, even if I mostly end up doing errands for the house in the end. I need to have those hours to be able to work in silence ( I have to go to the coffee shop or the maid will talk to me while I’m trying to work on the computer). I’m a bit glad when the maid doesn’t come for one reason or another, it means I can come back from school drop off, help my husband get off to the office and I can get back in my pijamas until noon. And yes, of course I feel guilty!
We have decided to stay one more year in Sri Lanka, I hope my daughter doesn’t suffer too much with the “no crafts, no playing” schooling style of this school. I always tell her, you won’t have to go to this school forever, just for a little more. In the next country I will find you a more artistic school, I promise.
For the past few weeks people have been telling me to go to the supermarket on Monday because the rest of the week I won’t be able to get any provisions, cause everything will be closed. They must be exaggerating right? Who knows. We managed to organize an out of the country trip to where it’s also Buddhist New Year but mixed with Carnaval. We are going to Thailand for Songkran, where the kids will probably learn more about life and stuff than in those hot uncomfortable classrooms where they work work work.
In the end, all they really want to do is travel. School is just to give them some kind of routine. I hope the next year will be ok for them.
by World Moms Blog | Oct 10, 2016 | 2016, Asia and Oceania, Babies, Celebrations, Children, Culture, Health, Maternal Health, Mission Motherhood, Multicultural, Orana Velarde, Sri Lanka
As part of World Moms Blog’s collaboration with BabyCenter’s Mission Motherhood®, our World Moms have been writing posts on maternal health around the world. We have made it to the finish line, and this is the last and 24th post in the incredible one-year series!
Orana Velarde in Srilanka interviewed 8 mothers in Sri Lanka and discovered a diversity of new baby traditions:
“Recently, my family and I moved to Sri Lanka, an island country in the Indian Ocean, off the southeastern coast of India. I know, not your everyday, run of the mill motherhood adventure, but that’s my life!
Once here, it was not long until I began to wonder about the customs and experiences of the local mothers. Sri Lanka has four official religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. Every religion has different beliefs and ceremonies, which makes this land a very rich cultural experience. What was I missing out on? What would surprise me? So, I took to my local mother’s group to interview some moms, eight of them, in fact! The results were exciting…”
Read the full post, Sri Lankan baby traditions: Shaved heads, chanting and more!, over at BabyCenter’s Mission Motherhood®!
Thank you to BabyCenter for the opportunity to provide content on maternal health from around the world this past year, and thank you to all of our World Moms who participated in the series!
World Moms Blog is an award winning website which writes from over 30 countries on the topics of motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. Over 70 international contributors share their stories from around the globe, bonded by the common thread of motherhood and wanting a better world for their children.
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by Orana Velarde | Aug 3, 2016 | Adolescence, Asia, Orana Velarde, Sri Lanka
I haven’t hugged my oldest daughter in almost three years. It will be three full years in October. I will never forget the last hug we had at the immigrations desk in the Phuket airport when the officials were checking her travel documents.
She was happy to be going back to see my sisters and her friends and I knew it was the best plan of action for her. Now all that has worn off and I just miss her terribly.
There are situations in my life that make it hard for me to go and visit so I just wait and wait for the day that it will magically happen.
The little ones see their sister on skype once in a while but it gets harder for me every time. The smallest one asks when we can go ride horses with my sisters; one of them is a junior jockey and the other wants to be a veterinarian. My son wants to visit the city where his big sister lived as a baby in the mountains of Peru.
I sent my daughter off on a plane to Peru on her own when she was almost 15.
The author’s daughter when she was 10 years old.
My mom sent me off on a plane to Peru on my own when I was 17 and I since then (21 years) I have seen her for two weeks every year at most. I though that this experience would make me tougher for the situation with my daughter but I was wrong; what it has done is make me feel what my mother felt. This feeling is a complete emotional disaster.
I used to write hate letters to my mom for sending me away. My mom did it in the hopes of giving me a more stable life, my daughter asked to go back because she missed her old life. She is stronger than me, definitely smarter than me and I respect that so much.
She wants to be a musician and an orchestra conductor. I couldn’t be more in awe of that. She plays the piano piece she is practicing with for her music college exam over skype sometimes. She does so well. She is excited about going to the conservatory and studies hard to get good grades. She is lucky to not have as many hang ups as me.
Every few months I get messages from people saying how they ran into her and what a wonderful and beautiful young woman she is. My mom used to get messages about how irresponsible and crazy I was, with an unhealthy dose of drug use that was obvious in my demeanor. I even get messages that say, she isn’t crazy like you were.
Thankfully even when history repeats itself it isn’t all exactly the same. I am happy about that. I am happy she feels comfortable in the place where she is at; I never did and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
This is an original article by World Mom Orana Velarde in Sri Lanka
