I'm a good listener.
I can understand others, but I'm a bit too prone to give advice :|

I suppose nowadays talking about depression and many other mental issues is a bit easier that it was in the past.
But there are still plenty of people who dismiss them as something "made up" or "exaggerated" v_v



So today we had the first meeting with our son's new teacher. She's very nice.
She mentioned that he might be a gifted student, that it's a bit soon to know for sure yet (he's 6) but there are some evidences that suggest it.
I don't know, it's kinda cool, but on the other hand I don't like labels...

I guess there is so much to learn about health, that we only manage to know about those topics which are closer to us.
My mom was diagnosed depression when I was a child, but I've always thought they should have digged deeper. There is something else there.


I don't know how to translate it.
We call them "students with great aptitudes", in the same sense you would say "gifted" in English. But probably the proper term is slightly different.

Prodigies are gifted indeed, but not all the ones considered gifted students are prodigies. Most of them are just gifted in a few areas of their interest, and plain normal or even bad at something else.
Although from an academical point of view it means something for teachers (who know they can and should provide different tasks for that student) it's not nearly as impressive as your friend.

So you say gifted to mean exactly the opposite...
Languages are so amusing!


I think there is always something each person is good at.
It's just that sometimes those things are difficult to quantify and sometimes they are undervalued.
People nowadays are obsessed with "usefulness" and with "qualification", but there are other aspects that are not measurable - and people who are good at those tend to be look down on.

Hi again. :)

I think that's the main problem with education. Children are taught one way and everything has to be measurable so it can be compared. People are all different, for some it would work better, I think, if they could just learn in practice. But that's something most people look down onto. While in real life, the world needs way more people who just work with their hands, not everyone can get a degree. But most people can nowadays and many people are left with a degree but without work?

Dunno.

School is quite hard here, asks a lot from the children and not all succeed. I sometimes think that maybe the school is set up for failure on purpose. 'Cause in the end, they need way more factory workers than people with academic degrees....

I guess "gifted" became some sort of euphemism?
It's strange that it's used for something that means quite the opposite, but I guess that's the same thing that happens when you say someone is "special" but you actually mean they are strange as f*.
(Also I'm quite an strange person myself but I don't think I'm special at all, so maybe that's why I don't get the euphemism.)


As a teacher I think it's terrible that people consider everything that's taught should be "useful".
Because in people's minds that means "with direct correlation with money making". And there are plenty of "useless" things that are required in order to get to the point where the useful is feasible at all.
But sometimes we are so shortsighted...

We don't have cooking/repairing classes either, I guess they sound a bit too old-fashioned. Who wants to be the one doing the cooking and repairing, you should be learning useful things to have a high-salary job which allows you to pay other people to do the cooking and repairing for you!

And so our obsession with degrees leaves us with more helpless generations.

We do have sex ed though - but mainly because teenagers nowadays learn it all wrong from pornography, and unless someone tells them that's not normal sex they do believe they should be reproducing the kind of weird stuff they watch.



As a teacher I've always found amusing that parents often focus on what their children are worse at instead of what they are best at.
If a children is good at art and bad at maths, maybe you should provide further art education instead of trying to keep them away from arts and force them to learn maths - but usually parents think otherwise.
Because, again, following a fixed path seems to lead to "useful" results.