Category: Parenting

The sleepless season

Posted on by Suki

My homeschooled teen decided he wanted to take the AP Computer Science exam. So bright and early the other morning we turned up at a local high school where he would take the test. Everyone was wonderfully kind to him (no sneering at homeschoolers in our community… well, at least none that I see on a regular basis). The teacher administering the exam was a kindly older sub who often works at the school. I joked to her that getting a homeschooler to the other side of the county before 8 a.m. was an unusual chore.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s that sleepless season for students. Yesterday a little boy in my class put his head down on his desk and went right to sleep!”

The thing is, it’s not the sleepless season for millions of children around the country who are home educated and some other number who go to sensible private schools. (I suppose there is a sensible public school out there somewhere, but not in my neck of the woods.)

What do I mean by sensible? A school—or a homeschool, for that matter—makes sensible decisions based on what works for students. Period. Yes, the reality of a limited budget does have an effect on decision-making. So do a host of other considerations. But none of those considerations should override the basic mission of education, to do what’s best for the students.

So why is the spring not sleepless season for homeschooled students, some private school students, and perhaps some mythical public school students? Because research has shown us loud and clear how important sleep is to learning, and has also shown us that teenagers’ sleep patterns are different than children’s. And when school administrators are parents, or are directly answerable to parents, they tend to notice that teens do much better if their classes do not start at 8 o’clock in the morning.

“Period 0” at our district high school starts at a brutal 6:40 in the morning. Period 1 is not that much better at 7:45. Teens are probably waking up by Period 3, which starts mid-morning. By then, they’ve zombied their way through two important classes. Not only does the school not take into account teens’ natural sleep rhythms, which tell their bodies to stay up later and sleep in later. But the reality of a modern high school student’s life is that it’s quite impossible to get to sleep early even if your body is willing, given the amount of homework that gets piled on top of anything else they might want to do with their lives. It’s not uncommon for middle schoolers to have to stay up until 11 to finish their homework; many high schoolers are regularly up past midnight, then drag out of bed at 6 to get to school on time. All this and they’re supposed to be getting 9 hours of sleep per night.

At various times during his school years, my son went to private school. We were never comfortable with having to pay tuition—it always had to be balanced with not paying for something else. But one of our major considerations was that private schools listen to parents—they have to. For two years our son attended a school an hour’s bus ride away…and still left home later than he would have going to the elementary school down the hill.

So let’s get this straight: Spring is not “sleepless season for students.” It’s a ritual that we have chosen and can just as simply discard. AP tests do not have to start at 8 a.m. School does not have to start at 6:45. Yes, I’m sure all sorts of other considerations came into play when these decisions were made, but the best health and education of the students was clearly not a major criterion.

Separating individuals from the crowd

Posted on by Suki

Before we had children, my husband and I thought that the G-word (“gifted”) was funny at best, elitist and misguided at worst.

Then we had kids.

Anyone who has a developmentally disabled child knows that their child is different, sometimes from the day that child is born. Other people know, it, too. While the parents learn to reset their expectations and raise the child they got with love and compassion, the people around them get a quick education in valuing individual human lives. Every decent person learns to accept, at the least, and hopefully cherish the child for his or her own self. Though parents sometimes grumble about other parents wanting “special privileges” for their developmentally disabled children, in general we all abide by the rule of not criticizing the parents for the child they got.

Not so when it comes to gifted children, however.

Parents of gifted kids hear all manner of nasty things, including (but not limited to):

  • Your kid isn’t that smart
  • You’re just saying that to pump up your own ego
  • You’re just pushing him – let him have a “normal” childhood
  • You’re an elitist
  • You think your kid is better than mine

There is very little understanding out in the wider community of families that those of us with kids like this just got the kids we got. It’s not our fault, nor can we take credit for it. And just as parents of developmentally disabled kids got a package that they need to accept whole and raise as best they can, parents of gifted kids have to accept and raise their children to the best of their ability.

I’m not going to debate the ill-chosen word “gifted” here – given that I refer to it as if it’s a swear word, I suspect you know what I think of it. (And if you don’t, read about it here and here.)

What I do want to point out is that no matter what word you use, when you have a child who is different from the norm, you need to raise the child you got to the best of your ability. And sometimes that means that you do, in fact, ask for “special privileges” for your child.

No one argues that kids with athletic ability should not be allowed to play on more competitive teams in order to maximize their learning of their sport.

No one argues that talented musicians should be stuck in orchestras with beginners until they hit the age of 18.

Yet many people argue that kids who have mastered a subject at school should be educated exactly the same as the other children. Not only do people argue this with a straight face, but they tell parents who are looking for an appropriate education for their children that there is something wrong with trying to provide an appropriate education.

Research shows that the United States, never a very comfortable place to be a “smart kid,” is slipping behind in educating our top students. Though in some ways students as a whole are performing better, our top students’ scores are stagnant or falling. I believe this is a direct result of our cultural distaste for separating students based on “intelligence.” As budgets were cut during the recession, gifted programs were the first to feel the ax.

The parents of children with advanced academic abilities are loathe to speak up when their children’s needs aren’t served because of the backlash they feel from other parents as well as teachers and administrators. When money is tight, the argument goes, why should your kids get “special” treatment? So gifted education suffers, few teachers are trained in how to differentiate for their brightest students in the classroom, and families choose from one of the short list of options: homeschool, pay for a private school, or just grit their teeth and bear it. The latter option is the most common, given that most families can’t homeschool and private schools are not necessarily more likely to serve their children’s needs.

I don’t believe that changing the word we use for these students will change attitudes (though I do advocate for changing the word – scroll down in this pdf to find my article). I believe that what we need is a fundamental change in the way our culture looks at intellectual ability. I believe we need to embrace it the way we embrace other qualities in our children. To do this doesn’t require us to believe that gifted children are better in any way – all children are precious, each as an individual human. All that’s required is that we accept that humans come in a range of colors, sizes, personalities, and abilities, and that we need to meet each child where he or she is in order to serve the child’s needs.

Until we make this shift in our culture, I fear that nothing fundamental can be done to insure that we are serving the needs – academic, social, and emotional – of high ability learners. You can’t help someone go the right direction if you refuse to pick them out of the crowd and show them the way.

The g-wordThis blog is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page inaugural Blog Hop on The “G” Word (“Gifted”). To read more blogs in this hop, visit this Blog Hop at www.hoagiesgifted.org/blog_hop_the_g_word.htm

Unreasonable expectations, part 1

Posted on by Suki

This is the first in a two-part post about the new tests being administered through the Common Core. To find out more background on these tests, visit the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium.

It’s that season again, the one that used to involve lots of filling in of bubbles. This spring, Google is giggling all the way to the bank as our schools purchase carts full of Chromebooks to have their students take the new, Common Core-aligned computerized tests.

Reports have been filtering in from around the country, with tales of crying children, broken software and hardware, and lots of overworked IT guys. But I wondered how things were going locally and talked to a teacher from a shall-remain-unnamed local public school. (Not my daughter’s school—her class hasn’t gotten to take the test yet because the district is worried about too much net bandwidth at one time so they’re spreading out the pain.)

The tests are new, and this year they “don’t count,” which actually doesn’t mean that they aren’t taking data from the results. The data, in fact, will be very important. We the parents, however, will not get to see our children’s scores, nor will the scores be used to fire our beloved, hardworking teachers. Not yet, at least. The data they’re taking is supposedly going to improve the test itself, and from what my teacher-informant tells me, there’s room approximately the size of California for improvement.

Reliability of the test itself

This is the issue that, it seems, the state is most concerned about, but frankly, it’s the least of our worries. My informant tells me that there were questions that required answers to proceed, but the test offered no spaces in which to put answers so the students couldn’t proceed. OK, that’s a simple software problem, but since the teachers aren’t supposed to “help” the students in any way, kids like my very literal daughter would have just sat there, unable to proceed.

There was no way for my informant to judge the quality of the content of the tests, but I’m sure we’ll find out that these tests have all the same problems as other standardized tests: multiple choice questions for which there are two, truly valid answers; deliberately misleading questions; fuzzily worded questions that don’t actually have a valid answer, etc. That’s par for the course in state-designed tests, and I really don’t know that there is a fix for it.

Appropriateness of the test for the age group
examcomicFrankly, I don’t think any standardized test should be administered to any child under the age of, say, 12 except in situations where you really need certain specific information. The very word “standardized” says it all—by creating a common standard you end up judging seals by how well they climb trees.

However, that said, if we must test younger children we can do two important things to make sure the test is appropriate:
1) Don’t make the test too long.
Let’s face it, even if the above-average 3rd-grader can sit for an 8-hour test over three days, most kids suffer.
2) Don’t create a test the requires tools that some kids might not have mastered.
For example, the old bubbles were a challenge for some kids, especially those with trouble tracking their eyes from the booklet to the answer sheet.

This test fails miserably on both counts. This year’s test was shorter and my informant said her 3rd-4th graders did OK, but she can’t imagine them hanging on for next year’s 8-hour test without some of them suffering terribly. Just because we adults have become office drones attached to our computers doesn’t mean our 8-year-olds need to be! If we really want to know their achievement level, why do we administer tests in such a way that will make it impossible for them to do their best?

And then there’s the whole question of asking young children with varying degrees of familiarity with technology to be able to use a computer with a trackpad, little tiny icons, and little tiny boxes they have to click in. Imagine the difference between the speed of a well-off kid who owns her own iPad and a kid who has no computers in the home—this is clearly not fair and clearly not developmentally appropriate. The number of hours of exposure in school is not enough by third grade to expect mastery of these physical skills by kids who don’t practice at home.

Digital educational design
I had a very bad feeling when it was announced that our tests would all be delivered by computer. Yes, there are some great aspects of this. No more tracking from booklet to answer sheet. No more one-test-fits-all since computers can adaptively offer questions at each student’s level. No more checking patterns of erasure after the teachers have had unmonitored access to the tests.

On the other hand, I started in digital educational design in the 90’s, creating the first online classroom materials for our local community college. The teacher I worked with on one project had learning disabilities and was a passionate advocate for his learning disabled students. Instead of a paper textbook, he and I created a website that had resizable text and also audio versions of the text. (Since screen reading software wasn’t advanced at the time, he recorded the whole thing!)

This experience led me to be keenly aware of the fact that online educational tools create very different challenges, and not everyone who is hired to design these tools is really qualified to do it. (I’ll save my rant about the quality of educational IT in general for another time!)

My teacher-informant reported a shocking first fact: Her school had “chosen” not to let the students take the tutorial that teaches them how to use the test environment first. How is the state letting this be a choice? Obviously, any school administrator who looks at the enormous pile of curriculum they’re required to get through is going to try to “save” tutorial time for something else. But in order for the tests to be effective, each and every student should be required to use a tutorial until s/he reaches a minimum standard of proficiency on the tools. Any student who can’t get up to speed on a tutorial should not be allowed to continue with the test.

This should be obvious to the people who designed the test, since (theoretically) we’re not designing these tests to prove that economically disadvantaged students are “stupid,” right? (Or are we?) You might think that I’m exaggerating how much trouble these kids have with the technology. However, my informant’s students are largely not low-income, yet she reported a number of problems, most of which she was not allowed to help with:

  • In the first part of the test, the students themselves are required to type their name in all caps (Chromebooks don’t have a caps lock key), an i.d. number with mixed numbers and letters, and a session passcode that had both 0’s and O’s in indistinguishable type.
  • And then there’s the use of icons with no text, one of my major pet peeves. Yes, there are those who think in pictures, and they all love Ikea’s instruction sheets. The rest of us, though, need language. I’ll let my informant describe what it was like to watch kids with varying levels of exposure to modern technology deal with this: “The kids don’t know the speaker icon is for hearing stuff. Some can’t read the directions. For example, they are given a paragraph and the directions are, Highlight the sentence that is out of place. They don’t know that they are supposed to highlight a sentence. They are looking for the dot to click or the space to type something. AND I CAN’T TELL THEM they are supposed to highlight a sentence.” Cuz that would be helping, right? And God forbid we let teachers help… the kids might learn something.

Continued:

Click here to read why the tests don’t test what we think they test, and why our expectations for this test really are unreasonable.

Firmament

Posted on by Suki

Most of life goes on as we plan. We make our to do lists and write events on our calendars, and for the most part we keep with the program. Occasionally I find myself deleting something from a to do list that I realize I am never actually going to do. And relatively often, usually late in the day, I beg off on something I’d wanted to do but is just one too many events for that day.

But then there are those hiccups in life that push everything else aside. Ours came in the middle of the night last week, when our phone rang with the caller ID displaying my husband’s mother’s name.

I was the one who picked up. I knew, as soon as I heard the tone of her home care provider, Pamela, what the news was going to be. My mother-in-law had died in her sleep, simply stopped breathing after complaining of flu-like symptoms at bedtime. The paramedics were unable to revive her.

Her death was not completely unexpected – she was 89 and suffered from a variety of smallish health concerns. But what is smallish in a younger person can be life-threatening in the elderly, and we knew that just as she could conceivably live for years more, she could also go anytime.

Gram
She was an ardent admirer of both her child and her grandchildren!

Her death was a shock, and we are all saddened and miss her a lot. But given the circumstances, it was about as good a death as one could hope for. She surpassed her life expectancy, nurtured strong family bonds in her very large extended family, and maintained active friendships with people throughout her life—from those she’d known since she was a child to those she had met recently in her years in Florida.

My husband and I went to Florida to pick up the pieces, and found that she’d left us one of the best gifts we could remember: Her papers were in order, with very few questions and oversights. I can only imagine the chaos that we would have stepped into if she hadn’t been so thoughtful and organized.

Life goes on and we continue to make plans and put things on the calendar. But as my husband said on the plane, it was as if a piece of the firmament that our family’s life was built on had dropped out, leaving us all off-balance. We’ll miss her dry wit, her unswerving faith in her child and grandchildren, and especially that quality in her that led nearly everyone she met to consider her a friend worth having. Everyone from neighbors who had recently moved in to the woman at the medical device company reacted to her easygoing Brooklyn charm. And once they got to know her, they were never let down. We hear the same story from everyone: she was a great friend, mother, grandma, and mother-in-law.

We’ll miss her.

Addendum:

My husband writes:

I just realized that I misspoke: the firmament is the sky, thus we could not build our lives on it. 🙁 I meant to say fundament… although that has the unfortunate alternative meanings of buttocks or anus. My mom would have loved that. 🙂

I guess you could alter that sentence to say something about living under that firmament.

I have to say that living “under” one’s mother-in-law doesn’t quite work for me! But I agree that she would have thought the pun with “fundament” quite funny, so please feel free to replace firmament with fundament in all of the above!

Parenting tip #324: Don’t be indispensable

Posted on by Suki

When we had our first child, there were naturally things that I did better or things that my husband did better. And quickly, as new exhausted parents, we fell into a trap: We let ourselves become indispensable.

It took me years to understand how dangerous this trap is. A few successes in packing snacks for my kids going on an outing with their dad, and suddenly my packing snacks became a necessary part of each outing. My husband puts a child to bed successfully with no bedtime call-backs and no nighttime wake-ups, and it becomes his de facto job.

Both of our kids were pretty inflexible about a change in plans when they were little. In preschool jargon, this is called “difficulty with transitions.” My husband and I joked that our kids could set up a non-negotiable new tradition in our household just by experiencing something once. So if I once put chocolate milk powder into a child’s milk, suddenly, they had always wanted chocolate milk powder, they will always want chocolate milk powder, and the world will end if we’re out of it and they want milk.

When you have kids higher on the intensity scale, you know how easy it is to fall into this trap: One time things go better getting a kid out the door if you get his jacket and shoes and help him put them on, and suddenly you are a slave to the jacket and shoes routine. You know that every child-rearing book on the planet is reminding you that it’s best to let kids muddle through doing things on their own, yet you also know that the doctor’s appointment is in 15 minutes, you have a ten-minute drive, and somehow it always takes at least 5 minutes to exit the door and sit down in the car with a seatbelt on.

So you let yourself become indispensable one more time.

(‘Just this once won’t hurt’ is, of course, the addict’s refrain.)

Both of my kids are double-digits now, and you’d think it would become easier to keep from being indispensable. But even with older kids, it’s easy to fall into the trap.  I still find myself working hard against my mothering need to “make it all better” for my kids. I see them struggling through something and know that I could do it better, faster, easier. Or I find myself doing something that I really should have them do, just because it’s more expedient. Or I give in to a demand that we both know is unreasonable, and once I give in, suddenly it’s my responsibility to take on the task—even when you have teens, a repetition of one can set a new routine that’s hard to break.

Recent research has shown what parents have known (and ignored) for eons: when you let kids muddle through, not only do they become more self-sufficient, but they actually learn better and more deeply. Part of parenting is knowing when to step back: when to let the other parent put a child to bed even if it results in a tantrum, when to shrug and say “that’s life” when kids make ridiculous demands, when not to help even if you know things will go better.

For my part, I had to do it again this morning. Having been presented with a demand that I simply could not fulfill, I just had to answer, “Hm, I wonder how you will solve that dilemma.” My mothering instinct was screaming at me to make it all better, but at least I knew I had science on my side!

Now available