Finally Excited to take a class!

After our false start 4 months ago, we finally started our Foster/Adoption classes today. We will have classes from 9-4 for the next three Saturdays. The class consists of prospective foster and adoptive parents. There are 4 facilitators in the class--2 social workers from our local Child Welfare Agency, a foster and adoptive mom, and a college professor in Early Childhood Education who is also an adoptive mom to three sons. In keeping with the place where we live, the social workers spent the majority of the morning talking about the rights of children. Needless to say, the “right” that was most emphasized was the right of the foster and adopted children to have the foster or adoptive parents provide access to images, movies, books and magazines with different types of gender and sexual identities that the children may decide to take on. They really hammered this point and finally one prospective foster parent asked what the rights of the foster and adoptive parents were! It was unspoken but clear to all that she meant the rights to have religious or personal convictions about bringing materials in their home depicting lifestyles that they may not agree with. One social worker really stammered through the answer and finally said she would bring a list of the rights of parents to the next class. am really curious what is emphasized in the pre-foster and adoptive classes in the Midwest!

I am always fascinated by group dynamics and it never fails that in every class I have ever attended, there is always one student who answers almost all the questions, tries to finish the teacher/professor’s sentences, as well as tries to clarify for the teacher/professor and the class what the teacher/professor meant! This class is not much different. We had tons of moments of comedic relief with our class “representative”. Our representative is taking college classes in Early Childhood Education and she took such pains to let the class and professor know that she is a good student and remembers all the terminology from her ECE classes! At almost any given moment, you could see people’s shoulders shaking or tears streaming down their faces as they tried to suppress their laughter—the four given speakers each used different techniques to try to ignore our class’s spokersperson so that they could move the class along. The techniques had varying degrees of success!