I Yelled At Her

Busy busy Monday I had yesterday doing absolutely everything.

Anyways.

Asha is now taking English lessons from the kewl Teacher Claire, together with Adani. I swapped Asha over to English from Mental Arithmetic as she needs to firm up on her spelling pretty soon. Aliya is still doing her Mental Arithmetic by choice. I picked them up on Saturday and had a long chat with Teacher Claire.

Adani is assessed by Teacher Claire a self-starter, eager stduent and with appropriate attention span which makes it easy for her to concentrate and progress. Ayisha on the other hand, has short attention span and is very easily distracted. It's not that she doesn't know the stuff, she just finds OTHER stuff more interesting to look at. And I had to agree with her, and kicked myself in the backside for not realising this sooner. I suspected Ayisha of everything, worse things but this, though very obvious, just whooshed by me.

This explains why in exams she's pretty much exceeds her normal home and class work cos she has to concentrate under strict supervision but when she's asked to do something, unless you're centimeters away from her, it doesn't get done or it does in a long time and shabbily sometimes. And this also explains why she's having a bit of trouble progressing in her Kum0n in that she knows them at the required time, but wastes time being distracted.

I really like and trust this Teacher Claire as she seems genuinely interested in the girls' progress and she takes special regard of Ayisha, even putting her on her lap for Asha to focus on the task at hand. And Adani & Asha adore Teacher Claire. So, pardon my bulging eyeballs when she told me that the whole of December she's not gonna around and a replacement teacher is coming in her place. Sigh!

Anyways.

Intervention with Ayisha. TV in the house is turned off between 9 and 10 at night, every night, well, probably with the exception of the Kum0n nights. And everybody ages 4 and up will READ through this hour. Anyone below, depending on moods and temperamental will do as he pleases, though reading normally takes his fancy.

The hour begins with kum0n for 15 minutes, then the reading begins.

But it all did not go so smoothly every night. The night before, I sat with Ayisha yelling at her for 20 minutes while she does her English exercises. I think I yelled myself hoarse and felt really really bad that night. She cried a bit but impatience and sheer lack of control on my side, egged me to yell some more. If I had been a bit more apathetic and see that she was trying, I wouldn've been a better teacher and a better mother. I yelled at my own daughter! Preposterous. I should be shot and I still call myself a mother.

Yesterday's drive to the office, I thought about this and it hurt that I did that again and again and again, no matter how much I vowed never to do it again. MrGart has accused me of being so MrsGoodyTwoShoes in my blogs that I never published things that are demeaning to me. I did not retort back cos he wins anyway. There's not much that I can do except to again and again not to lose my patience. But it's a hard thing to do when you're being smothered with every other requests in the house when all you wanna do is to help the one who needs it most. Women they say are great multi-taskers, but we do it at the expense of our sanity and that sanity often hangs by a thread before it snaps.

There are 2 things that MrGart says that hurts me the most. One is that he thinks that I'm a fake for not telling ppl that I am a mean mother to my kids and the other is the way he describes to everybody how easy it was for me to give birth to everybody and that I don't deserve the attention I do because I was on epidural. It's bad enough that I have to fend myself from ppl who think that I'm such a woos for taking epidurals, to have myself described as such by a person closest to me is almost cruel.

Anyways.

I suddenly feel sad and gloomy which I think a trip to MidV's Metr0's Preview Sale will cure soon. Hmm.