I’m watching Zombieland (thanks to Benoit, who posted about it), which is actually pretty funny, although it DOES make me uncomfortable. One of the characters is a 12-year-old, and one of the running jokes (it’s a comedy; it’s only “runnning” in that it comes up multiple times) is that she doesn’t know who anyone famous is — not singers nor actors nor politicians. And of course the answer is: “She’s twelve.” Of course she doesn’t know.

When I worked with Maria at FLENI in Argentina, with autistic kids (see: the beginning of this journal), she sometimes commented about how hard it was to remember what normal kids were like. Where should these kids be in their development? Because of course diagnosis comes based on how people differ from what is normal. A child who is language-delayed and can’t use sentences at age six is severely delayed — but not if every child does that, and then begin to speak normally by seven. Right? But you need to know the points of comparison before you can make these judgments.

So in some sense I’m thinking of this year teaching as me setting a yardstick of “what children should know.” Of course, it’s not really true (besides that I’m also doing some psych work on the side) — but at the same time, I’m definitely taking note of the wide variety in learning styles, of where these kids are developmentally. For example, my three-year-olds have a lot of trouble with even the simplest things. They don’t pay attention well, they have a lot of trouble learning more than one word at a time. Because they’re three. The five-year-olds, on the other hand, are almost ready to enter primary school; of course they’re able to repeat, even if they can’t really speak English. So with three-year-olds I speak a lot and get them to repeat sounds; I work on familiarizing them with English. With five-year-olds we can do some vocabulary, even if not all of it sticks. And sounds — it’s not as though they’re learning in the same way as, say, thirteen-year-olds.

But I notice things where I have to step back and say to myself, “Justin, they’re only ten.” Which is why I started as I did. I was telling two of the girls I give a lesson to about Chanukah (which is now — Happy Chanukah, folks), and asked them if they knew any Jews. Nope. So I explained to them that there weren’t many Jews in Spain because they were kicked out five hundred years ago; they understood that. But I explained also that many Jews came to the US after WWII. That, not so much. They had heard of WWII, but they didn’t really know what the Holocaust was, nor who Hitler was. Which surprised me until I reminded myself: they’re only ten. They’ve never studied history. Of course, I think many ten-year-olds do know what the Holocaust was — but it’s just not important to people here. When would it have come up? These girls are watching Twilight: New Moon, not Inglourious Basterds. So yeah: children learn history, they learn culture. It takes ‘em a while. Just as their brains mature as they grow, so they can learn more easily at an older age.