Reply to Capital Cotillion for Beauvoir Son

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "Capital Cotillion for Beauvoir Son"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=anonymous] The two girls in my DD's public (gasp) school that got invited to join Mrs. Simpson's last year in fourth grade are [b]the two girls in the class who mock and bully the special need girl in the class. Literally they are the worst two. [/b]Their parents of course think they are angels but they are the girls that are most adept at monitoring what they say based on who is watching. [b]Are those the kind of social graces they teach?[/b][/quote]

[quote=Anonymous]I'm not sure why that makes me a cyber bully, but it's the truth, and yes, [b]my DD is the special needs child so I happen to know this first hand. Its appalling. [/b]So I say, if its just a guise to get your kids to hang out with other privileged kids, great. Own it. If its truly because you believe it helps with social graces. [b]I'd say, spend more time on behavior in their home and community first. Because from what I've seen these kids have a long way to go. [/b][/quote]

Hi PP, I posted on page 38 of this thread at 15:31. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what your child is going through at school; I was a special education student myself and occasionally was bullied for my physical disability, although nothing like what it sounds like your DD is going through. I know how damaging bullying can be, so my heart breaks that your DD is dealing with this, and I'm even more saddened to hear that it's from two girls whose families at least pay lip service to the idea of the importance of manners and proper behavior. Obviously the behavior you have described from those girls is completely unacceptable and the exact opposite of good manners. The very basics of polite social interaction require, at a minimum, never purposefully being rude, cruel, or bullying towards another person. As a parent, I would be disgusted and ashamed if my daughters behaved as such, and as soon as I knew what was happening I would take swift action to put a stop to my girls’ behavior and make amends to your child insofar as was possible. I completely agree that the parents of those young girls need to spend some serious time teaching their children about kindness, respect, and appropriate peer interactions. Shame on them for allowing the problem to get to this point.

That said, I’m not sure you can rightly put any of the blame for this on cotillion. The cotillion program is not intended to teach the fundamentals of “everyday” social interaction necessarily; it is generally presumed that a young person of an age to participate in such a program will have learned the foundations of kindness to others and basic manners from the adult mentors in their lives, primarily parents/guardians. You mentioned that these girls tend to put on an act of being well-behaved in front of adults, so it is entirely believable to me that, unfortunately, their parents and the cotillion instructors may have been snowed by their politeness in front of authority figures and may not have realized that the girls were badly in need of some foundational character training and manners instruction from home rather than simply the supplemental cotillion classes.

The “social graces” that cotillion is intended to teach are manners and skills specific to interaction in a formal context. Politeness and kindness to others is an obvious foundation, but again, if these girls are accustomed to meeting behavioral expectations when they are being monitored by adults I can easily see how the cotillion instructors would see only their best behavior and honestly believe they are learning the appropriate skills and manners being taught in the lesson. Introductions, small talk, dancing, and dining are all quite distinct from everyday behavior in school with peers; cotillion is intended to teach the former and presupposes that students are reasonably adept at appropriately conducting the latter. Being upset at the cotillion program for not catching that the girls are not demonstrating good conduct in areas of their lives not designed to be addressed by the cotillion class makes little sense to me. Ideally, the adults in these girls’ lives would catch that they are regularly behaving cruelly to peers while putting on a veneer of politeness, however I think that is primarily going to be the role of their parents and of the teachers of the class in which they interact with your child, so I think it would make more sense for you to be upset with one of those individuals for failing at their task of guiding the girls and securing an emotionally safe learning environment for your child.

I cannot speak to how the majority of the students in cotillion classes interact with peers in their daily lives at school, however I certainly do not think the level of cruelty you have described from these girls is typical or representative. This is only conjecture on my part, but I would like to think a majority of families who care enough about manners and social skills to send their children to a supplemental program designed to teach and reinforce the more formal variations would also have invested time in the basic foundational character training of their children or wards. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics