Today’s Advice

Occasionally it occurred to me that as our kids went through their preschool years, they exhibited pretty much all the major psychiatric disorders. Obsessive-compulsive (“I will only use the pink plate!”), delusional (“I didn’t draw on the wall, my baby doll did.”), hearing voices (“My imaginary friend told me”), depression (“This is the WORST thing that ever happened to me!”).
Perfectly normal kids go through periods of kleptomania, compulsive lying, obsessive tics like hair-pulling, violence toward their peers, etc.
I’m not sure what it means. Do you? Perhaps we have to work through out all those things in order to get our brains ready to settle down and be boringly sane. Some of us, I guess, don’t make it that far.
It occurs to me that the way we run our schools and many other services for kids, we really want it to be neat and simple, like a factory. First you melt the metal, then you pour it into the mold, then you let it cool, then you remove the mold. Then voila! Fully formed human! How hard could that be?
The No Child Left Behind law actually requires schools to get all children proficient. According to Wikipedia: NCLB requires “100% of students (including disadvantaged and special education students) within a school to reach the same state standards in reading and mathematics by 2014.”
Problem is, as we all know, we are not all the same. By definition, the average means that there are people above the average and below. No matter how you try to enlarge the average, there you have it: people above, and people below. Some kids are never going to read well. Some kids are going to hate math till they’re 15 and get obsessed with fixing cars and realize that they need some math. Some people are going to live lives which are perfectly suited to having a basic literacy in reading and math. Some people — hopefully our presidents and doctors and at least some of our lawyers (joke) — must have a higher level of achievement in reading, writing, and analysis. Many of our great scientists cannot write a readable letter to their parents. Some of our great writers need other people to balance their checkbooks.
The very kind young man with Down’s Syndrome who has helped me to my car with my groceries does a very good job. He has mastered chitchat — “How are you today?” — and social graces, waiting till I opened the trunk and then asking where I want my groceries. He earns his wage, yet he has, I assume, not made it up to the average in reading and math. Who cares?
The worst thing you can accuse a politician of is not caring, so perhaps laws like NCLB are their way of making sure we all know that they care about ALL of us. No matter that some of us will not be proficient in reading no matter how many afterschool tutoring sessions. They care, and thus we MUST become proficient. Their re-election depends on it.
It seems like there are two competing forces in American culture. On the one hand, we live in the first country to be founded on the principle of individual liberty. On the other hand, from Puritan times we’ve had this strong desire to force our communities into conformance. The former has allowed us to make some of the most amazing scientific advances in the history of humanity; the latter has kept many people from their pursuit of happiness.
Everything has a trade-off. Being a kid is fun, but once you’re ready to become an adult there are some kid things you have to give up… like your imaginary friends.* Teaching your kids to follow their creative impulses may allow them to invent an amazing cure for cancer, or it may just allow them to be domineering monsters. How can you know?
People are incredibly complex things. As soon as someone tells you they’re not, cross that person off your list of people to listen to. That’s my advice for the day. An e-mail list about homeschooling gifted kids that I subscribe to was set on fire the other day because some blogging moron wrote a piece called “Your child is NOT gifted.” She simplified the process of making children behave well into a simple “you didn’t follow this rule” formula.
Don’t take it to heart. Forget about her. Our children are such weird, creative, and complex bundles of molecules, we’ll never figure them out. Faced with that reality, how can you believe anything but that you’re doing your best, each day that you’re faced with a new reality in this crazy business of raising children?
*ps: OK, so I won’t actually advise you to give up your imaginary friends…they can come in handy.

Nurturing the Crazy Creative Soul

The kids I have known well…myself, my siblings, and my kids…are wildly, weirdly creative. Though I am a creative person, I also have the soul of the scientist. Whenever anyway says, “This is the way it is,” I think, “Who says so? How did they test that hypothesis?”
Today my daughter and I were having a really laid back homeschooling day because yesterday evening at 6 p.m. she was diagnosed with a massive double ear infection that she hadn’t even complained about till 15 minutes before. It turned out that we were in the doctor’s office to deal with my almost-ten-year-old’s minor fractured wrist (yes, it was that kind of day!), when the pain of the ear infections suddenly came to the front of her creatively active brain and she started to moan. Luckily, there was a doctor in the house.
Bck to creativity. So this morning I was basically following her lead, because she deserved a day off if she wanted one. A kid in school wouldn’t have had to go to school! (When I or one of my four siblings was sick, our mom let us stay home, hang around in bed, and drink Seven-Up. There was some Midwestern theory about Seven-Up calming upset stomachs. Our scientific minds did not argue with that theory since we got soda pop so seldom!)
The six-year-old creative genius started to unload the shelf of borrowed stuff I keep separate from the many stuffed shelves of stuff we own. Our stuff she gets to treat as she would like (creatively). Stuff we borrow I have to keep reminding her we have to treat like other people treat. For example, one does not decorate the boxes containing educational materials from the Resource Center, no matter how plain and white and uncreative that box may seem!
So she was unloading the shelf and looking at all the things we’ve borrowed from her school library and the Educational Resource Center. A talking clock. Nix. Pattern blocks. Double nix. Hm…what are these? Base ten blocks? What do you do with those? I absolutely hadn’t been planning to do math, but the law of homeschooling is that you have to go with it. So we unloaded the bag and looked at the ones, ten bars, and one hundred blocks. She was intrigued.
I got a piece of paper and separated the areas into 100’s, 10’s, and 1’s, then wrote a two-digit number and showed her how to represent the number using the blocks. That was intriguing. Then we added another two digit number to it, and she saw herself adding two two-digit numbers that she wouldn’t have attempted to add without the blocks. Hm…even more intriguing. “I want to do one with a hundred block,” she said. So I started to set up a number like 235. Then she started to do something…weird.
Homeschooling for me is all about holding my tongue. Because frankly, I’m one of those people who really likes teaching adults. You want adults to do something, so you get up in front of the class and say, “Do this.” Teaching children is like speaking in a sign language that they are making up one step ahead of you. It’s terribly frustrating for people like me, who like things laid out in straight lines. You just can’t ask a kid, “What’s your hypothesis?”
So I watched her. She was chaining up the little 1’s blocks, which were made to stick together. She made a chain ten long, measuring it against a 10’s block. Then she looked at the ones area in which I had written “3”. She picked up three 1’s blocks, and instead of putting them in the 1’s area of the page that I’d created, she started adding them to her chain. Bite your tongue! I commanded myself, and amazingly, I did. She hitched up three ones to the left side of her chain of ones, and then removed three ones from the other side. Those three ones, she proceeded to place on the paper in the correct place.
I know that if we’d been in a classroom with other children to distract me, all I’d have seen is that difficult girl playing again instead of doing her math. But in fact, she was not only doing her math, she was really GETTING her math. She was taking her chain of ten ones, popping new ones on one end of the stack, and popping off old ones at the other end. Exactly what a computer scientist might do.
This is the sort of creativity that turns into something meaningful. Later, when she got really excited that she had paint on her hands, and she painted the outside of the paint tubes with paint…that was creativity gone nutty. But the creativity with the base ten blocks was her way of exploring the pathways growing in her brain. It was darn cool to watch. The sort of thing that teachers in a classroom seldom have the luxury to notice.
So normally you wouldn’t introduce the idea of carrying a ten over from the ones area into the tens area on the first day, but she had already gotten that concept. I knew it just from watching her creative play actively. So we went on to that concept, and she got it, and then she said, OK, that was interesting. Now can we go outside and play?

A Daily Act of Faith

Today I went to my son’s school to have a meeting with his teacher. It’s his first year at a new school, and the first time he’s been at a school that I haven’t been involved in on at least a weekly basis. So my situation with my kids right now is an exercise in opposites: he goes away for the day and I trust that he’s learning, that he’s happy there, and that he’s happy with his friends there. She stays home every day and I know exactly what she’s learning, when she’s happy, sad, frustrated, or excited, and who she plays with and how they get along.
We chose his school because we had always planned to send him there… someday, when he was older. But as we searched for the right place for him, someday because tomorrow, then today. His teacher painted a portrait of his days at school that didn’t surprise me: he’s an avid learner, fits in well, and can be very emotional. No surprises there – we chose the school because we thought it would fit his personality.
In the academics, though, she did surprise me. As of last year, his two most disliked subjects were writing and math. His dislike of math was created: a teacher mistook his grasp of concepts, which is well beyond his grade level, for a mastery of skills. These are two different things. My kids are great at concepts. But doing the work to master skills depends on their interest. Once that teacher put him in a math group with kids a full year ahead of him in skills, he struggled. He could have kept up with them on concepts, but he didn’t know how to do the stuff on paper. So he decided he was no good at math. His teacher last year spent the year trying to undo that belief and fill in the gaps in his skills. This year, he no longer talks about being bad at math, but he still seems to hold a grudge against it, as if math had been a bully last year and he doesn’t quite believe that it wants to be his friend this year!
Writing was something he always struggled with. I recognized his struggle. When I taught writing to adults, there were always people who reacted to my suggestions in the same way: Why should I describe the car I was driving? Why would anyone care what Aunt Sophia was talking about? They were the people who just couldn’t understand that it is the details that make writing come alive. “One day I got in a car accident with my Aunt Sophia” is not a story. But if the car has personality and history, and what Aunt Sophia was talking about before the accident creates an emotional connection, and if the writer can tie it all together in a way that gives the reader that “aha moment,” then it’s a story. Some people don’t get that, ever. Some people can learn it. Some people seem to know it instinctively.
This year my son got it. It started with the fact that his teacher let him choose a subject and he chose to write about computers. He adores computers. He likes computer manuals for bedtime reading. He talks about computer software like the kid who is obsessed with dinosaurs or Star Wars or horses. He can go on and on for paragraphs, so he did. He saw that he had a subject he was fascinated by that his teacher admitted a lot of ignorance about. He knew that it was the details that he’d have to use to catch her. So he put them in. It was the longest piece of writing he’d ever done.
Once the spark was there, he could apply that lesson learned to other writing assignments. His teacher showed me a pop-up book he made about the life of a sea turtle. The writing was detailed and full of imagination and liveliness. He took obvious care with the creation of the book. When she told me that she thought his great strength was writing, it was surprising, but not surprising. He has a teacher who is able to impart what is beautiful about creating a work of writing. She’s also being successful in helping him see what is beautiful about learning math. Teaching is the process of uncovering the beauty of learning for each child. And for each child, the beauty is different.
Sending a child to school is such a different experience than homeschool. Sending your child away is an act of faith in other people, that they will recognize your child for the beautiful person you know he is, whatever faults he may have. Keeping your child at home is an act of faith – in yourself: faith that you can see your child’s strengths when what calls out to you are the weaknesses, and that you will be able to show her the beauty in each part of her learning that will inspire her to go on.
Education itself is an act of faith. By educating our children, we are making a statement that humanity has created an important body of knowledge. That it’s important to pass it on. That our children will have a world still when it’s their turn to pass on the knowledge and skills. It’s really hard to believe in doomsday when your kid has just learned to write down his thoughts. You just have to believe that those words are there for something, that our thoughts will endure.

It’s Educational!

I can’t remember when I heard about the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. I’ve been on their mailing list for a number of years, and they are consistently measured and serious in their dedication to pointing out how our children’s lives have been commercialized. As far as I’ve noticed, they don’t make up overblown campaigns about nothing the way that some organizations do. I think that they’ve got enough really shocking stuff to go after…they don’t have any dead air to fill!
They have just announced their first “TOADY” awards — I highly recommend you go to their site to check out their nominations for the worst toys of the year. And you can vote on your “favorite” as well.
CCFC has its work cut out for them: Their main mission is to point out how much junk is sold directly to kids, often with parents’ permission and encouragement. From them I learned that if a packaged food at the supermarket has a commercial character on it, that food is likely to have more fat, salt, and sugar than comparable foods without commercial characters. They have documented that watching TV programs with commercial characters, which then appear as toys, food containers, food, toothpaste, diapers, clothing, shoes, and more, actually dulls children’s natural imaginations. Kids get hooked into corporate consumer culture early, and then the corporations get them for life.
I think I’ve mentioned in my blog before that different preschool teachers, with no word from me on the subject, figured out that our kids didn’t watch TV. How did they know? Kids who are saturated with commercial characters start to learn early the standard storylines and characters. When they do “imaginative” play, they reenact rather than make up their own stories. Preschoolers learn social behavior by mimicking what’s around them. Shows marketed to kids teach them behaviors that teachers start to recognize. One teacher told me that she knew every kid in the class who watched Power Rangers.
The further issues that CCFC confront concern the content of kids’ shows. Violence, of course, has been a standard for years. Cartoon characters model problem-solving for kids: don’t like what your friend did? Hit him! Blow him up!
Another issue that they publicize is one that is terribly important for all parents of girls to consider: the role of girls in kids’ shows is often diminished and sexualized. Where boys are the ones who go out and do things, girls are the ones who, at best, help, or, at worst, are the victim. Girls are taught that how they look is more important than who they are or what they can do. Of course, girls can never measure up to Barbie or the Bratz, and they will always look in the mirror and see something lacking. It breaks my heart to hear a little girl say negative things about her looks when she should be happy in her body and developing her mind and her friendships.
Another issue that they bring up is how hooking kids into television is taking away from the role of family and parents in their lives. One of the toys they nominate is a stationary exercise trike that is hooked into the TV. Instead of having to go out and play with your kid, both of you can hook into your stationary exercise machines and ignore each other! Children need to know that their parents are there to guide them, and that they are more interesting to their parents than anything else that might take up their time.
Children’s health and intellectual growth is another important issue they tackle. The toys that they criticize often encourage a sedentary, unimaginative lifestyle. More kids than ever are suffering from obesity, diabetes, and attention problems. Those kids need to turn off the TV and get out and live a bit more. Unfortunately, just the propensity toward diabetes is now making many children in this country have a lower life expectancy than their parents — for the first time in our country’s history.
CCFC has great tips for parents to help them choose toys that will truly be fun AND educational for their kids. But the first step will be turning off the TV so that the kids start to notice the real world around them again.

The Speech

Yesterday my homeschooled daughter threw an impromptu inauguration party at our house. It’s tough to get homeschoolers out of their houses before 9 a.m., but we had a group of six to watch the speech, then eat and play. At my son’s school, every class stopped what they were doing to watch the speech and then talk about it.
I can’t remember this happening before. Schools usually ignore inauguration day speeches, for the most part. There is definitely a sense that things are different this time around. Such a big fuss was made about Michelle Obama saying she was proud of her country for the first time, but I knew exactly what she meant. Before inauguration day lots of commentators were talking about how important this election was for African-Americans. I noticed that the inauguration day coverage I heard dropped the African part of that. As one woman (African-American) who was interviewed said, “Now we’re all Americans.” We can all be proud of our country now.
The kids gathered around our television probably don’t realize what they were watching. Perhaps sometime in the future they’ll remember that day the way that we often remember momentous days. The ones I remember are largely negative, though — October 17, 1989, September 11, 2001.
One of the moms had to say to the kids, “Be quiet, we’re watching TV!” Then we all giggled — this isn’t something you hear homeschoolers say very often.
When Obama got to the part of his speech where he listed various religions practiced in the US, one of the moms inserted “Pagans!” right before he got to the one that fit all present, more or less: “Non-believers.” When Rick Warren started his prayer, one of the kids said, “Why is he talking about god, Mommy?” So even though he chose a preacher who endorses exclusion in his sermons, Obama was more inclusive with one word than other presidents have been. It was nice to hear “non-believers” in a sentence that didn’t also have the word “un-American” in it! Everyone finds their own way to “god” — through religion or helping others or contemplating nature or creating beauty. It’s great to hear a president, OUR president, admit non-Christians into the society of good people who want to help their country. It’s been a while since Jefferson…
It would be nice to think that Obama could wave a wand and fix things, but even though his power to personally set things right is limited, I do think that starting his tenure as president with a sense of goodwill and inclusiveness, and being very clear that we all have a role in where our country goes, is going to provide the push that we all need — in the long run.
In the short run, California schools are running on empty because our state government hasn’t disbursed funds. Our teachers are still getting paid, but who knows how long that’s going to last? Next year our schools will probably have a shorter year, fewer days at school for kids who need more, not less. Our teachers will have more vacation time — perhaps it’ll be enough time that they’ll be able to find a part-time job to make up for what they’ve lost in their real career. Then they’ll find out (if they aren’t tempted already) that if they can get a job, almost any job is easier (and often better-paid) than being a teacher in our public schools. And come the next fall, what’s going to entice them back? Hopefully, they’ll be steadfast in their commitment to educate our children, because it doesn’t seem that they’re getting much else to keep them going.
But parents can make sure that learning goes on, even when the good teachers are starting to look around and wonder if they’re appreciated. First, they can support their teachers. A teacher I know says that at the elementary school where she just started this year, there are almost no parent volunteers. Even if your teacher is too busy to ask, take a look around and notice what might be needed, and offer to do it.
And parents can make sure that learning is happening outside of school, even if they aren’t homeschooling. Get your kids away from the TV and video games and back into talking and interacting with you. Sit everyone down for real meals, eat real food, and express real emotions and ideas. Read a book together. Go for a walk in the rain. Be happy there is rain to walk in!
We’re all in it together, and what we do in our own lives does emanate outward. President Obama’s got a lot of work to do. We can all look around and see what needs to be done.

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