His mum does his homework for him!?!?

I’m guessing that this isn’t just an Italian thing, although my host mum did tell me that University Students are allowed to collaborate with their parents on their dissertations, but yesterday I was shocked to see how active some parents are in their child’s education.

Yesterday the teacher who I give private lessons to asked me to stay an extra half an hour to help her son practice for his trinity speaking exam. Basically what he needed to do was prepare a topic, give a small speech about it and then answer some pre-prepared questions. Simple enough. Now I know the teacher well enough to know how much she pushes her kids. She is always finding educational talks to send them to, signing them up for three months learning English in the UK, etc, so I’m fairly sure it was her who pushed him to do the trinity course and it was her idea for him to practice with me. What did surprise me though was that the teacher had chosen the topic, written the speech and chosen the questions for her son. He came home and she handed him everything and told him to go learn it.

I was completely in shock.

I’d never heard of any parent going to that much hassle for this child. Maybe it’s because my parents took such a back seat during my education. I was left to my own devises, which is probably why I am so stubborn now. I hate people trying to offer me help or advice with my work if I haven’t asked them for it. While I appreciate that is trying to help her son achieve a good grade, I think it’s a little OTT. Firstly because the grade he receives will not be a realistic evaluation of his own capabilities in English, secondly because it evidently made the process much more difficult for him. He was reading through the speech and he didn’t understand a thing. Not because the theme was to hard, or because he doesn’t understand English, but because they were not his words, it wasn’t his way of saying things. Even if he had wrote it in very poorly structured sentences at least HE would know what he was trying to say. You could see him stressing out trying to remember the phrases when I asked him questions. He ended up getting upset and blaming his mother for writing it to difficultly, which was rather rich don’t you think.

At the end of the day none of this is my business but it was something new that I had observed that needed a place to be stored.

p.s. The post before this was my 200th post. CRAZZZY.