Kingdom of Knuffel

Indeed, everybody should learn how to cook. The basics at the very least!
Otherwise how can you be really independent?

Parents should be teaching basic cooking skills, sure, and also washing your clothes, and operating appliances in general, and changing a light bulb and fixing a broken pipe, and keeping within budget, and being a polite person, and many other things.
But school should provide that sort of knowledge for those whose parents don't!

When my parents were kids there was a subject of the kind, but it was extremely sexist: guys learned the fixing and girls the homemaking.


Some parents are over-supportive, I guess that's the case with yours.
They think you are great, and because they want you to realize it they'd rather overdo their praises than express anything that might sound slightly discouraging.

But in my opinion this may backfire: If you realize there is still so much room to improvement, you simply start to disregard the opinion of the people saying "it's great", you start to think they don't know any better.
And at that point instead of being encouraging it may work the opposite effect...


I try to convince my son that what's important is making the effort, that the path is what matters.
But it's quite hard, most society focuses on achievements, on goals. And I fall to it sometimes too.
Being a parent is kinda hard, we all do our best.

It's depresingly amusing that in the XXI century there are still activities "for men" and "for women". And social behaviours which are "masculine" while others are "feminine".
Seems so dated.

I've been told so many times that I'm buying my son stuff that is "for girls" (and some of them even in front of him!) that it's a miracle I haven't punched anybody in the face yet.



Of course they mean well, be gentle with them

Being a parent is the best job on the planet though.
You're not only raising your child, you are also giving them guidelines to go into the wild wild world and become whoever they want to become - knowing you'll love them whatever they choose to do with their lives.

Amura wrote: 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.

This.

I think it's useless to pump math, history and everything in the kids, when some kids really struggle with learning the stuff that's set up by the government. Hence I said that schools here are set up for failure. Bad thing is that many people feel like a failure and that'll follow them their entire life.

In a perfect world, I'd love to see that it's possible to let everyone focus on things they are good at. Good at art? Leave the stoopid math. Yeah, you need a basic knowledge, but does someone really turn into a better person when they learn about sinus and cosinus when they're 11 years old? Some will love it, please go on with it.

And yeah, basic life skills would be good to teach, cooking/sewing are good one's but also budgetting, learning about basic costs of living and maybe filing tax forms? Maybe even basic electricity knowledge, fixing a switch. I dunno...

We actually had a class that contained making tomato soup, a healthy sandwich, some tips about money. Only thing it lacked was sewing on a button, but there were basic skills. Yeah, some might be boring and the whole class was kinda laughed off, but it wasn't that bad I think. :)

Hey, don't call my beloved math sloopid
But, yeah, there is no point in forcing someone to abandon their interests just to make time for things they don't love or have any motivation to study.
Also because you can learn anything else later. It's not a "learn it now or abandon all hope forever" kind of situation! Now focus on art, maybe later you want the maths, who knows.


I'd probably exclude younger students in this reason, beause at younger ages it's great showing them the pleasure of learning just for the sake of learning - and they are extremely inclined to learn anything you show in an interesting manner - but teenagers and younger adults? Let them be.



PS: Trigonometry here is taught at 15, I hope when you said 11 it was a random number that crossed your mind and not the age at which it's taught there...