Numberjacks can solve your problems!
OK, full disclosure. Numberjacks can’t solve ALL your problems, but it can help you when you come across issues at school. And by that I mean when your child comes home and reports that “Mr or Mrs X said such and such to me and made me do it.”
You know how this plays out: you drill your child for more info, cross-examine like a detective from Line of Duty and fly into a private rage, determined to march into school the very next day and demand some answers, goddammit! How dare they?!?! etc etc etc.
So you march into school, or put pen to paper at 11pm after a couple of glasses of wine, and launch into a tirade. And after that’s all happened and the teacher creeps out from behind the cushions in the reading corner, with eyes the size of saucers, twitching and flinching, you go home feeling rotten and as though every member of staff in school hates you.
And you haven’t even spoken to your child about it, beyond you doing your DS Arnott bit.
Right then. Rewind for a second. What’s actually going on here? You’ve gone all Mama/Papa bear for what reason?
Let me talk to you about Numberjacks.
A couple of months ago Pippa came home from school saying she was MADE to watch Numberjacks. If you have ever seen Numberjacks, you’ll know what it’s like – a maths programme with sinister overtones, written by child-hating nut jobs on crack. No, but really, it’s horrible. How it ever came into being without a 15 certificate is beyond me. Shudder.
A few months prior, Pippa had come home saying she’d seen it at school, and proceeded to weep at bedtime out of sheer terror that number 6 or 9 was going to come and get her. That night was a nightmare-ridden maths based horror, let me tell you, and nobody got any sleep. We chatted to school and they said ‘never again, Mrs Hill, will Pippa have to endure the horrors of Numberjacks! If we ever put it on again she can go off somewhere quiet and read a book.’ Job done.
So, when after a few months, we heard that Numberjacks was back and that Pip’s request to read a book had been met with a refusal and she was told to sit on her bottom and stop making a fuss, I did what any parent would do: I hit the roof. I ranted and I raged and I DS Arnotted like a machine!
And then, after I’d sworn and paced and ranted at Mr Happy and told him ‘we’re removing her from that school,’ I had a moment of clarity. What if it wasn’t up to me to solve this problem? This Numberjacks scenario hadn’t happened to me, had it? It had happened to Pippa. The relationship and trust that had been violated, as she saw it, wasn’t MY relationship – it was hers and Mrs X’s, and if Pippa could play a part in resolving the issue, surely that was better than me marching into school brandishing a cat’o’nine tails the very next day?
So we sat down together and I asked Pip what she wanted to happen: To never see Numberjacks ever again. And how did it make her feel when the teacher didn’t listen? : Upset and scared. What could we do so that Mrs X would know how she was feeling? : Draw a picture, write a letter.
So, that’s what we did. Pippa drew her feelings (a sad face, a scared face) and I told her to tell me what to write in the letter. I wrote it down word for word as she said it. A four year old’s own words, in their own jumble, have far more power than a 42 year old’s curt, angry correspondence.
We went into school the next day. We asked if we could have 5 minutes of her time. We saw Mrs X together, and I told her that Pippa had some feelings she felt she needed to share about Numberjacks. Pippa handed over the letter and I helped her to explain how she felt. That was all I did.
Mrs X’s eyes went all glassy, and she scooped Pippa up, promising her there and then that Numberjacks were gone for good. She thanked both of us and that was that. Pippa skipped off happily. And Mrs X kept her word. Numberjacks was never heard of again.
A few days later Pippa received a thank you card in the post from Mrs X, thanking her and telling her how proud she was that she went and spoke about her feelings in a grown up way.
Teachers are invested in our children. They’re trying to get a job done with all the pressures and demands that go with it. And sometimes they get it wrong. I didn’t need to point the finger at Mrs X and tell her so. By allowing Pippa to take ownership of the problem, with my support and help, she was able to resolve the issue by herself and, in doing so, probably got a much better resolution than I could have.
The Numberjacks thing gave us the opportunity to explore a problem that existed outside of the family unit and home environment and the chance to find out how to resolve it. Is swooping in and solving the problem for your child the best option? Certainly it allows YOU to get YOUR feelings off your chest. But what about your child? Where does that leave them? Pitted against the perceived mean actions of the teacher.
Maybe you can find a way to resolve an issue at school by including your child in that process and, in doing so, give them an experience in what they’re destined for, and what we are ultimately preparing them for…independence.
It also taught me that Numberjacks really is a horrible horrible programme! ? That’s the Spooky Spoon, floating about intimidating folk, scaring the bejesus out of tiny viewers. ?
