My Children Class

This term is the first time I get EC (Elementary School Children) class level 1 that consists of the first grade of elementary school students. There are six boys and seven girls. I find one new characteristic which is different from the FSC (First Step to Communication) class that contains junior high school students: the boys and girls in EC class get along better than those of FSC class. It seems that the first grade of elementary school students in my class don’t recognize any barrier yet between the two different sexes. It is okay for them to sit together. On the contrary, the FSC students always group themselves, boys sit with boys, while girls with girls. When I ask them to work in groups, they will strongly oppose me if I ask one group/pair consists of the two sexes. They just want to work with the same sex, one groups must consist only boys, or only girls. When I give them an assignment that will make them compete to each other, they will show big satisfaction when they beat the other group that consists of the opposite sex; showing like boys and girls are created to beat each other, to be the winner. LOL.

Adult classes that consist of senior high school students, college students or employees no longer show this special characteristic. They work well with anybody, no matter what sex their partner is.

I want to relate this to my review of “Little Manhattan” movie where boys and girls get along well when they are in kindergarten/nursery school, but they start to feel like a big and strong wall separate them when they come to the first grade of elementary school. Gabe starts to be attracted to a girl—or falls in love—when he is ten years old, perhaps in the fourth/fifth/sixth grade.

In Indonesia the case is a bit different. As in my EC 1 class, the boys and girls still get along well, they don’t mind sitting next to the opposite sex. They start to show disgust—or well, avoid working together in one team, LOL,—when they go to junior high school. Three years later, after they are in the senior high school, they start to get along well again.

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