“Children and adults are never solitary individuals, immune to the social and cultural forces around them.”

I have worked in a few private schools back home with different age groups and different types of families. However, at least in three of these schools, I’ve had a conversation with parents about their kid, where the title of this post will come up: “That doesn’t sound like my kid at all”; “I’m speechless. It’s the first time I hear such behaviors”. Later on (guilty of charge) teachers in the meeting gather to give feedback from the meaning, to exchange how impossible this sounds. One may argue that it is impossible that the kid, as center of a discussion, has never shown a particular behavior that seems common in school.

When it was my turn to be a parent, I found myself asking one of my kid’s teacher if she had spoken with the teacher my kid had the year before, so that she was aware of a particular behavior seemed to show at the beginning of the school year. She smartly replied that she had not talked to the teacher from last year, and that she wasn’t going to talk to her, until at least two months of school had passed. She wanted to get to know all the kids through her new eyes, without anyone putting judgmental ideas into her head. That, I believe, is a tight approach to the descriptive part of a Descriptive Review.