When children are force-fed violent entertainment

Every family I know has had the experience: They were in a public place and their children were exposed to violent entertainment that they didn’t choose. If you’re at the shopping mall or a restaurant, you can vote with your feet. But when you’re in an airplane, there’s nowhere to go.

One of my favorite organizations, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, is lobbying United Airlines to stop playing “PG” movies after an incident where a family objected to their children being force-fed a violent film while on a flight. United treated the family like they were the ones who had a problem, but clearly, any organization that thinks that it’s right to force everyone on a plane to watch objectionable material has a seriously damaged moral compass.

Appropriate for kids?

“For parents who travel with young children, being unable to escape from violent and/or sexualized media is an all-too-familiar experience.”

Please join me in support CCFC’s effort to curb this practice:

Tell United Airlines: No Media Violence on Overhead Screens

For years, United Airlines has refused multiple requests from parents and advocates to stop showing violent movies on overhead screens. But after a flight crew’s overreaction to a family’s efforts to shield their children from the violent PG-13 film Alex Cross (pictured), the airline has agreed to review its policies. For parents who travel with young children, being unable to escape from violent media is an all-too-familiar experience. Let’s change that. Learn more and add your voice to the nearly 2,000 parents who have urged United to stop showing violent PG-13 movies on publicly-visible overhead screens by visiting http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/action/tell-united-no-media-violence-overhead-screens.

Helping teens navigate MOOCs

One of the well-known phenomenons of homeschooling is that kids tend to become accelerated in their areas of passion. No longer being held back by the offerings of school—and the low expectations of many educators—even if they aren’t academically advanced in general they often soar ahead in their favorite subjects.

At the end of the day, a MOOC is still just a talking head on a screen. It takes human interaction to facilitate the deepest and most important learning.

For my son, that subject is computer science. His big motivation for homeschooling is having more free time, and what he does with that free time is program, read about programming, and see what other programmers are doing. When he was younger, he read through any computer manual that someone would hand down to him. He blew through every programming class aimed at kids even before we found them, so that every time we found a new option, it no longer suited him. Finally, we enrolled him in some online courses through our local community college, which were bland but got him used to the way classes worked.

This year, we decided to try out MOOCs. In case you don’t know (in which case, I’m concerned about that cave you’re living in!), MOOCs are the latest thing that will change the future of education. Yes, iPads are SO 2012. Now, everyone who can get a pulpit to preach from says that MOOCs are changing the educational landscape, and will eventually make going to a physical university obsolete. (I plan to address the question of whether that particular sky is falling in a future post.)

However, it occurred to me that we have learned a lot about MOOCs this year, and I might be able to give a few pointers to others who are thinking of using them with their homeschoolers.

1) MOOCs are not educational manna from heaven

Not all MOOCs are created the same. We’ve seen a pretty high quality on Coursera, where they are quite rigid about quality control. But they’re not all going to be life-changing for your child, or even at all of interest to them. The first one we signed our son up for stated very clear requirements that our son met, and within the first video blew past those requirements and started to ask for Calculus-level math mastery. Oops. Other pitfalls may be that the professor may present in a dry manner that doesn’t draw teens in, or that the level of work just simply may be too demanding.

2) MOOCs are not a big investment, for better and for worse

So obviously, my son dropped the first class he signed up for. This easy-come, easy-go nature of MOOCs is a blessing, but also a pitfall. Immediately, I realized that if a teenager knows that you can just drop out of anything anytime, with no consequences, that might lead to less than optimal commitment on his part. So we dropped the class, but made sure to talk about why it was the right decision (“clearly, they misstated the math requirements”) and where to go next. Later in the year when our son hit a particularly tough patch in a class he was doing, he pointed out that he could simply drop out of it with no consequences. We had to have another talk about making commitments and sticking with things.

3) There’s a MOOC for every interest, for better and for worse

I was drooling over all the history, philosophy, and art, but I had to remind myself that those are not his areas of passion. Because of reasons #1 and #2, it’s really important to guide kids to choosing classes that they really can stick with and get something from. The educational smorgasbord has its drawbacks just as the cloistered academy has its drawbacks. So we took quite a lot of time thinking carefully, not only about whether he was able to handle the level of a course, but also about whether he was personally committed to the subject matter and would stick with it.

4) Forums are not replacements for in-person interaction

This is a significant difference between a MOOC and an in-person class, or even an online class with a live instructor. When you have tens of thousands of people taking a class, the advantage is that if you have a question, it’s pretty much guaranteed that someone already had that question and someone else already answered it. But while forums are a great way to disseminate information, they aren’t a great way for teens to develop their critical thinking skills. Really, there is no replacement for being in a room (or an online room) with other people who share a passion (or are at least committed to getting through a class) and can talk and argue. Also, access to a good professor, someone who really does know more than you and really can get you to stretch your intellectual boundaries, is a very valuable thing that the MOOC cannot provide. The talking heads are very interesting and erudite, but they can’t chat after class and they can’t recommend a book to read or an idea to pursue. And your fellow students on the forum are spread around the world and have no connection with you. Unlike students in a real-world class, you aren’t going to be able to get the back-and-forth that is so important to academic growth.

5) Be prepared to be a Teaching Assistant

It’s the unusual teen that can bounce into a college-level class and be able to take care of the small but important details: Your teen will likely need you to be there to help pace the work, schedule the assignments, find ways to answer questions not answered in the videos, and navigate the online systems. One of the hardest parts of the courses for my son turned out to be the mechanical aspects: Remembering to get assignments on the calendar so he didn’t find himself in a crunch the day before; remembering to read the fine details of how to submit the assignments in order to get full credit; understanding grading (since he’s homeschooled) and figuring out how the grading reflected how much work he needed to do on the next assignment. His father and I were there to guide him: his father focused on details having to do with the subject matter, and I focused on making sure he got his assignments in on time and paced the lectures so he’d be able to make the next deadline. No matter how good the MOOC, your teen will need you to be there to act as TA.

6) Consider trying to connect with others

I think that the MOOC experience would be greatly enhanced for teens if they had someone else to learn with, not necessarily to watch videos with but to talk to and get feedback from. This summer my son and a friend are going to take a MOOC together, which I’m very excited about. Although my son really learned from the classes he took, I saw that he wasn’t nearly as engaged as he would have been had he someone to talk about it with. I think it will be great for him and his friend to be able to get that social back-and-forth that you get in a real life class. I think the truly optimal experience would be for a local adult to lead teens in “sectionals” along with the classes. I can imagine a future in which MOOCs are used not as the end product, but as the starting point for local teachers. Imagine how great it would be not only to get MIT-level computer science and Harvard-level political science, but also a real-live person to guide you and give you feedback.

Though I’ve heard plenty of talk about how MOOCs are going to kill college as we know it, the way I see them, they’re just a new, useful tool. I think homeschoolers should evaluate how they can use this tool in their homeschools, but don’t expect that you’ll be able to hand off your kid to a computer system to get the job done. Teens still need guidance, especially in the new wild world of the MOOC.

At the end of the day, a MOOC is still just a talking head on a screen. It takes human interaction to facilitate the deepest and most important learning.

Book review: Children with High-Functioning Autism

I have recently come upon two books that I think are important books for those of us with “quirky” kids to read. This is the first of my reviews—the second will be about The Explosive Child, which I’m still digesting! If the topics of these books speak at all to your child’s quirkiness, I highly recommend them.

Children with High-Functioning Autism
Claire Hughes-Lynch

Book coverIn general, I don’t expect that books on autism will give me much insight into my parenting challenges. I regularly speak to parents with kids who have profound disabilities and feel like I’m whining about the comparatively small problems we face. I’m in awe of parents who face all the difficulties of raising children who may never be able to live independently.

I was intrigued by the title of this book, however, because I often have conversations with parents who have chosen not to pursue diagnosis for one reason or another. These conversations drift into the subject of how various of our kids, spouses, and even ourselves could probably be placed on the high end of the autism spectrum. Lots of the kids who fit into the scope of this book aren’t diagnosed, for a variety of reasons. But the parents of those kids will find interesting and thought-provoking information in its pages.

Hughes-Lynch is neither a medical professional nor simply a parent. She was a teacher in special education and gifted education before her children were diagnosed. This gives her a particular point of view that I think is novel: she writes both as a parent, frantic for information and insight, and as a professional who is now seeing her profession from the other side.

There are large sections of these books that won’t apply to many families directly, such as navigating the public school IEP and 504 plan system. But on the whole I found the author’s approach a novel and helpful one. She dissects the job of parenting a quirky child – in her case, one diagnosed autistic but also gifted, another diagnosed PDD-NOS – and separates out the various issues that parents will face. But on top of that, she follows up with knowledge and insights gained from her professional life. The result is a very balanced book, with both the mother’s passion and willingness to try everything, as well as the professional’s insistence on standards and data.

It’s a welcome book that recognises the difficulty of calling a high-functioning child “autistic”.

Hughes-Lynch writes:

“Despite the warning signs of autism, there often are signs of significant strengths that can signal high-functioning autism. “Experts” can watch children and say, “Nope, I don’t see autism” because the child is making eye contact, or is listening to you, or is engaging in imaginative play, or is talking—behaviors that often are not found in children with more traditional autism. These are the challenges that families face: there is “something,” but what? Giftedness? Autism? Anxiety? Asperger’s syndrome? These children often defy easy classification and are ultimately amalgams of many different, overlapping issues.”

Her insights about how autistic kids’ reactions are different from the norm offer parents a way to classify their children’s behaviors and weigh them against other high-functioning children’s behaviors:

“When autism has hijacked their reactions, children appear unable to control anything, and when they are momentarily in charge of their autism, they can be “too good.” There often is very little middle ground.”

The book is a goldmine about everything from support to therapy, with lots of pointers to research and other books. The one drawback of the book is that she cites lots of research that has become dated, given how quickly autism research is moving. So readers should check data that she cites before believing that they are still current.

Otherwise, I think book helps out in a couple of grey areas: Not for parents of profoundly autistic kids, it focuses on the unique concerns of children who may even be gifted learners and are more likely to be able to “graduate” from their autism into an independent adult life. Also, this is neither the story of a parent’s journey through autism nor a book written by a clinician – it spans both genres in a helpful and insightful way.

 

Book Review: Raising Creative Kids

Raising Creative Kids
by Susan Daniels and Daniel Peters

Susan Daniels and Dan Peters of Summit Center are well-known in the world of gifted psychology. Daniels is co-editor of the wonderful compilation of essays, Living With Intensity, which tackled the joys and pitfalls of raising, educating, and being intense, gifted people.

In this new book, Daniels and Peters move over slightly to feature thoughts on parenting, educating, and nurturing creative kids, a group with a large overlap into the world of intensity. The authors show that understanding and raising highly creative children can be just as much a challenge as raising intense children.

Raising Creative Kids opens by making sure the readers are “on the same page” regarding what creativity is and who has it. The answer, of course, is that everyone can have it, but that our society, especially in our numbers-obsessed schools, works hard to squelch creativity in the name of order and quantifiable learning. Daniels and Peters argue that in this time it is especially important to recognize creativity, whether it expresses itself as award-winning visual art or, perhaps more often, as incessant talking at inappropriate times, inability to focus on rote learning, lack of organizational and scheduling skills, and other hallmarks of the creative soul.

Much of the book centers on defining creativity and offers suggestions on nurturing it. But in the last three chapters, the authors get to the heart of the question: how to parent creative kids, how to teach them organizational skills, and how to prepare them for a successful life in the 21st century.

This part of the book focuses on solving the problems that arise from the “dark side” of the creative personality. Creative kids may be difficult to parent, given that their tendency is to explore rather than follow rules. They often have trouble at school because the creative mind can sometimes coincide with slower development of executive function—the part of the brain that governs decision-making and prioritization. And being highly creative doesn’t necessarily lead to being able to develop that creativity into what the authors call “Big C” creativity—moving from unfocused creativity to focused, purposeful creativity.

This book succeeds in digesting a lot of information from studies and technical journals into a clear, helpful guide for parenting creative kids. Daniels and Peters offer advice on nurturing vs. permissive parenting, teaching organizational skills, and encouraging children to keep developing their creativity in a world that often seems to promote following rules and getting the “right” answer over all else.

Flexibility and ability grouping

For many years, the word “tracking” has been taboo in American education. The general consensus has been that separating the “Bluebirds” from the “Meadowlarks” imposes a class system in the classroom. Everyone points out that kids know what the groups are, whether or not euphemisms are used: the smart kids and the stupid kids. The rich kids and the poor kids. The white kids and the black kids.

But recently, lots of people—including pretty much everyone who advocates for gifted education—have been revisiting the idea of ability grouping. The writer of Should it be OK to place students in ability groups? points out that ability grouping today doesn’t have to be what it was in the past. I agree—as always, I think that the best education is the most flexible.

My son was in a public charter school for first and second grade where he was in a mixed-grade classroom. This type of classroom is definitely harder for the teacher—she could never just relax and give all the kids the same assignments. The great thing about it was that because all the kids started the year knowing that they were at different levels, there was no animosity to being put into separate groups based on their abilities.

At the beginning of the first year, my son was a novice reader. By the middle of that year, he was reading Harry Potter. As a novice reader, he really appreciated the fact that the teacher read aloud (to all the students, reading and pre-reading) and that he was never made to feel like there was something “wrong” with him because he couldn’t read. As an advanced reader only a short time later, he was thrilled to be put with the more advanced readers so that they could read a book together that challenged and interested them.

Because being at different levels was a reality in the classroom, there was never any idea that a) the kids in the advanced group were better in any way, or b) that kids were destined to stay in the group they were in. Most of the first graders were reading an easy book for their reading group, but none of them assumed that they’d still be in that group by third grade. That idea wouldn’t make sense.

This is where traditional schooling ideas clash with the reality of what’s good for kids’ education: Most kids in our country are age-segregated, making fluid ability-grouping harder. When you do leveled reading groups in segregated classes, there’s a much higher possibility that the students are going to see the grouping as “tracking”—sticking them in with the slow kids or the smart kids “forever.”

Although I agree that this is a problem, I don’t agree that because this is a problem, there should be no ability grouping. Kids who are voracious readers when young shouldn’t be tortured into reading JEasy books because it makes their classmates feel better. This is simply not a choice that is any fairer than making slower readers feel dumb.

So how can a traditional school fulfill the needs of its different readers? First of all, the teachers can work hard not to convey even a hint that slower readers are in any way “less smart” than their fast-reading compadres. Any adult can tell you that the age at which they learned to read had no bearing on whether they became a functional, successful adult. But adults who were made to feel stupid because they didn’t learn to read on someone else’s schedule can certainly tell you that they felt the attitude of the teacher, which bled over into the students and their parents. Everyone knew who the “stupid kids” were.

The next thing teachers can do is to construct more fluid classrooms. If they do ability grouping for reading, they could make sure to mix the groups up for an activity that doesn’t need to be differentiated, or is in some way naturally differentiated. For example, elementary school science projects can involve kids of different levels if the project is open-ended enough so that the more advanced students are able to — and encouraged to — do more.

Another thing the teacher can do is to devote some time each day to reading out loud. This allows the children who are still stuck in stiflingly boring leveled readers to hear good writing and good stories. (Now, we could also argue about using stiflingly boring leveled readers at all, but that’s another argument altogether.) I have actually never been with a group of students of any age who didn’t appreciate a good book read out loud, but teachers often leave reading out loud for kindergarten only, as if they’d never heard of the bustling market for audiobooks for adults. On top of that, if teachers encouraged students to write in their notebooks or doodle during reading out loud time, the kids who need to fidget would get as much out of it as the kids who need to need to keep their brains busy.

Finally, ability grouping works best when the schools themselves are more fluid. For some reason, it’s assumed that younger kids can’t deal with more fluid classrooms, moving from one space to another or in with different groups of children. But of course they can—we already stigmatize the gifted kids and the kids who are behind in some subject areas by doing “pull-out” programs. So what if every student were in a pull-out program? Ability grouping doesn’t have to stop at separating out only the outliers.

This article in Education Week sums up the pro’s and con’s of ability grouping. “Emerging research suggests that, in some cases, flexible ability grouping can in fact benefit students.”

The key here is flexible: All children’s needs can be served as long as the system is flexible enough to accommodate those needs. The past bad reputation that ability grouping got was because of its inflexibility: it was used to track low-performing students permanently into another educational sub-class. But that is not a permanent feature of ability grouping, but rather a predictable result of inflexible education.

Now available