Advice requested: limiting time spent helping others in school

[expecting-joy]

Dd, 7, is complaining about the amount of time she is asked to spend helping other children in her class and running errands for her teacher. Any BTDT advice? Is there a certain amount of time that is reasonable? She is only just now listing everything for me and it does sound a bit much, especially since it is bothering her. She is afraid she'll hurt students' feelings and her teacher will be mad if she mentions not wanting to do these things.

[whatsnextmom]

You just need to talk to the teacher. Some kids really love tutoring and being teacher's helper (like my DS) and some hate it (my DD.) DD's reasonings were sound. For starters, she wasn't a good teacher in elementary. She had no understanding of how others learned and she'd get impatient with what she felt was "just not trying." She didn't like having her classmates so dependant on her and always interupting her work to ask questions. She felt it colored her relationships with the kids because she had trouble putting aside the frustration/annoyance she felt IN class towards them in order to play with them at recess and afterschool. She didn't mind the errands but she never had a teacher that didn't "share the wealth" in that area. We just told her teachers that tutoring made her uncomfortable socially and it stopped. I suspect you could add a little "she worries that getting to do so many of the extra errands is upsetting the other kids."  

In case you are wondering, at 14, DD takes tremendous joy working with younger children through theatre and through Scouts. She ended up quite the leader in middle and now high school able to watch for the needs of the whole group and handle kids who aren't pulling their weight positively. She has an aiding job at her youth theatre and you can't believe how much satisfaction it gives her. She did her whole Scout Silver award choosing to work with children. She may not have started out a great teacher but she's really good at it now.

[Tigerle]

Originally Posted by whatsnextmom 

In case you are wondering, at 14, DD takes tremendous joy working with younger children through theatre and through Scouts. She ended up quite the leader in middle and now high school able to watch for the needs of the whole group and handle kids who aren't pulling their weight positively. She has an aiding job at her youth theatre and you can't believe how much satisfaction it gives her. She did her whole Scout Silver award choosing to work with children. She may not have started out a great teacher but she's really good at it now.

I think it makes a huge difference whether you are supposed to tutor your peers, slipping into and out of a teachers' role, or tutoring or aiding younger children - where it's natural that you are so much better at whatever it is you're teaching or helping them in, and whether it's 2 grade levels or 5 grade levels is immaterial. Unless the teacher manages to create some equality in the relationship by having the children swap roles (highly unlikely with a kid as gifted as yours, I suppose) it creates an unhealthy dynamic and sets up the tutoring kid for resentment (or, as I have recently read here to my surprise, a kind of weird hero-worship) by classmates. And it makes a huge difference whether you (and the tutee!) are pressured into that role or whether it's occuring naturally. Disclosure: the few times I was told to tutor peers in elementary and middle school (no choice about it for either of us), it was a disaster. However, by the higher grades of middle school, friends asked me to tutor them in maths and physics and this worked wonderfully, with both sides getting something out of it.

Maybe you can just keep silent about your DD's wishes in this - just talk about your own apprehensions and the other kids' needs and feelings, eg it might make everyone uncomfortable in the long run that your DD is set up for tutoring and being singled out for running errands so much, and that she isn't old or mature enough for the tutoring role to be helpful for both sides (just in case her teachers have a hard time conceiving of a gifted kid having needs, too...). After all, there is no reason why a non-gifted kid can run errands and get more chalk from the office or whatever - after all, if the errand-running is spread around, missing a couple minutes of classroom time won't make a difference, kids love it when they are chosen and made to feel special and helpful, and struggling kids need all the encouragement they can get, right?