The Comfort Room
Kid 3 represented his class at the Regional Spelling Bee yesterday. I've never been before (Kid 1 was a regular), and it's held in the nearby big city, so I block out my calendar two months ago to ensure I can attend.
What I didn't realize, until the day before, is that I would be the head judge for the other grade. This turned out to be a coup...a real blessing...because I don't know what I'd do if I had to sit around the gym waiting for things to happen up in the individual classrooms.
Anyway, being a judge gave me an inside look at the process...of which, the most bazaar step was THE COMFORT ROOM.
Each grade is in a classroom (about 50 kids). The judges are up front at a table. No parents or teachers allowed inside. Kids get up and spell. If they are wrong, a high school volunteer escorts them to the comfort room where there is cookies, juice, and a very compassionate administrator there to console if necessary.
As an employer, its the comfort rooms of the world that create the most problems for me when I have to deal with these people as adults.
It's been said many different ways, but I'll say it again:
Everyone shouldn't get a trophy, not everyone is a winner, losing builds character...and,
We DON'T need comfort rooms.
posted by Hollywood at 4:22 AM
2 Comments:
Well, we all need comfort from time to time...but I get what you're saying. In my world, we call our comfort room...
...home.
Where we use moments like misspelling a word to teach things like why you shouldn't get a tropy, not everyone wins, what you can learn from this, etc.
I can't get over how much over-parenting and icon-making of our children we do as a society.
7:35 AM
I disagree. When I was in second grade I was in a regional spelling bee and missed a very simple word that I actually knew, because I was so nervous and couldn't think straight standing in front of all those people. I sat in the front row, publicly humiliated, with tears streaming down my face because I was so disappointed in myself.
A "comfort room" would have been a great idea. It doesn't mean that I should have earned a trophy (even I, as a seven year old, knew I didn't). There's a world of difference between comforting someone in their loss and everyone getting a trophy. it would have been much better to have been able to grieve my spelling bee loss in a private, safe space, than to have to sit there with everyone else hearing me cry. Everyone may not be a winner, but everyone has worth. And I'm not saying this is the same thing as making an icon of your children, thought I'm sure Brent gets that.
And so Jill doesn't have to say it (and may I point out the irony, due to the subject matter of your post) it's BIZARRE, not BAZAAR.
5:20 PM
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