Category: Parenting

News from the convention, Day 2

Posted on by Suki

Following are my notes about the National Assn. for the Gifted Conference in Denver from this weekend. Click here for Day 1.

My first workshop of the day was about asynchronous development and featured Linda Silverman (her list of accomplishments is long; the latest is a book called Giftedness 101 that is no doubt worth buying if you are just starting to explore giftedness), Jim Delisle (master teacher whom I later heard give a fabulous talk about teaching middle schoolers to write), and Stephanie Tolan (writer about giftedness and also novelist whose books feature gifted children and sometimes homeschoolers). Because of my schedule I couldn’t stay the whole time, but I got to hear Silverman discuss various views of what asynchronous development is and how various thinkers about giftedness have characterized it over the years. The most moving image she gave was from Australia, where they talk about the “tall poppy syndrome.” Silverman pointed out that the imagery is rather disturbing: in a field full of beautiful flowers, some are taller in their thirst for sun. But in order to maintain a field full of sameness and fairness, the tall poppies are literally beheaded. Think about how schools often treat kids who are ahead in light of that image.

The next talk I went to was about twice-exceptional learners. I will have to look up who gave the talk because I forgot to write it down and I am presently typing this on an airplane. [Ed: Beverly Trail and Claire Hughes] For those of you who don’t know this terminology, 2e learners are gifted learners with disabilities [read my blog post about this]. They present an even more difficult case for integration into a general classroom than “regular” gifted kids because it’s so hard to address both their deficits and strengths at one time. The speakers emphasized, as I’ve heard a lot lately, the research shows that kids with disabilities do better if you teach to their strengths and don’t focus too much on their deficits. It’s really easy for these kids to become fixated on their shortcomings because in school that’s all that gets talked about. Because the kids’ deficits often make producing work harder, they shine in situations where they develop their critical thinking and conceptual skills while not having to depend on skills that they struggle with, such as writing or calculation.

Sylvia Rimm gave a talk called “My top 10 for preventing and reversing underachievement.” Just glance at sylviarimm.com to see the breadth of her important career. This talk was a fast-paced trip through what she has learned about kids and parents in her many years in the field. I especially appreciated her comments about united parenting, which is something we always struggle with. In a family full of intense people, it’s really hard for the parents to step aside and support each other. Yet Rimm highlighted this as one of the keys she has seen to producing functional adults on the other side of the journey. Just so she didn’t leave any parent in the room not feeling uncomfortable, she also talked about other common parental foibles, such as overpraising young children so they come crashing down when a sibling appears or when they go to school and don’t get praised constantly. She also talked about how parents can set up and nurture competitive, difficult relationships between siblings by comparing their kids and unwittingly pitting them against each other. She also acknowledged something I have always suspected to be true: two children families are the worst for sibling rivalry and difficult sibling relationships. Those of us with two have to work even harder than the rest in this regard.

There was so much meat in her talk, I’m just going to have to go buy her books! Also, she promised lots of articles available for download at her website.

An absolute standout session I went to was about Young Adult books by Bob Seney. [I couldn’t find any primary website about him but lots of hits on his name and “book list” – he releases a yearly book list that I highly recommend.] Seney is a retired professor who adores YA literature. For years he has given the same presentation at NAGC: knowing that the rest of us parents and teachers don’t have time to read all the new novels that come out in order to guide our kids to the best ones and the ones most suited to gifted readers, he does it for us. To think that I almost walked out of his talk because there was another one I was torn about missing! For your information, his standout YA novel of the year was by Kenneth Oppel, writer of the truly excellent Airborn series. The latest is a retelling of the Frankenstein story, and you can be sure that it will be on our household’s reading list this year. Given how busy I am, I felt so deeply grateful for what he’s doing. By reading and vetting for a specific type of reader, he offers parents and teachers a way through the jungle of new books published each year. (If you are interested in the topic of gifted readers and what they “need,” check out Halsted’s “Some of my Best Friends are Books.”)

The day was finished with a keynote by Robert Sternberg, whose interest is creativity. Now, I’ve been to a few conferences, and I can say that keynote speakers are not always the highlights. Often they are chosen more for their star power than for how well their message works for the conference audience. But NAGC outdid themselves this year with speakers who don’t necessarily have much to do with gifted ed per se, but have great messages for this audience. Sternberg talked about how creativity is a choice, and then he went on to detail the results of having made the choice to lead a creative life. He did this both through examples from his own life and also with famous examples of companies and people who came up against obstacles in the path of creativity and either overcame them or fell flat. Sternberg is a very funny speaker but also offers a lot of food for thought about what a life well lived is. I’m not familiar with his work, but if he has a book for young adults, every teen should read it. “Choosing creativity,” he said, “creates its own obstacles” but is also its own reward. A very fulfilling way to end the day.

Perpetually a day behind, I spent the evening in my hotel room catching up on Friday, watched the end of A Color Purple and had a good cry with Whoopie, then collapsed in bed to prepare for another day of cognitive overstimulation.

News from the convention, Day 1

Posted on by Suki

I am at the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) convention in Denver, CO, and it is NOT the evening of the first day of the convention. Yesterday evening I came back to my hotel room to write and I sat in panic in front of my smartphone: “I have way too much STUFF in my head to write!” Instead, I went through the program and planned the rest of my days here, ate chocolate, and went to bed early.

So here I am at Day 2, ready to write about yesterday.

First a note: Why am I here? Why “gifted”? To answer those questions, please click “About Suki” above to learn about all my various pursuits, my feelings about the incredibly stupid word, “gifted,” and other interesting (or not) trivia.

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On the way to the conference I read a wonderful book that anyone with a frustrated teen should check out: Forging Paths by Wes Beach. Here’s the review I wrote that will appear on Amazon.com once I can figure out how to post reviews on my phone…. or more likely when I get home!

In my recently published book, From School to Homeschool, I lamented that the stories of gifted homeschoolers had not really been told yet. That was before I read Forging Paths. Though the “kids” in this book are almost grown when they start on their paths, and what they do isn’t what most people would call “homeschooling,” each one of these unique stories adds to our collected understanding of what is possible when it comes to getting the education we need. Wes Beach’s book centers around the stories of individuals who chose unusual paths, but even in their individuality, they offer us new templates for the way education can happen. Inflexible, one-size-fits-all education is a thing of the past. Books like this one are starting to write the story of the future, in which all kids and adults are able to forge the path that is right for them in seeking the education they need and crave.

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NAGC is to your local gifted conference as a meta-study is to a small-scale experiment, or whiskey is to wine, or Proust is to Brian Selznick. Different beasts, all worthy in their own way. (OK, I must admit that the only time I ever drank whiskey I threw up, so I have my opinions in that regard.)

I started my day yesterday with Temple Grandin and thousands of other adoring audience members. If you don’t know her, Google her and learn what she has to say. She’s our first (as far as I know) autistic motivational speaker, and she deserves all the applause she gets.

I got much from her talk, but here’s what I came away with: “Making kids do the same thing: absolutely beyond rubbish!”

Grandin has no patience for sweet-talk — she tells it like she sees it, which is rather differently than the mainstream. But on this point I share her point of view completely. Our schools are completely misguided — not just for the diagnosably different child that she was, but for all children. Why do we make the poor souls learn the same thing at the same time? Who ever thought that was a good educational approach for two children, much less a nation of hundreds of millions?

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Frank Wang is “the math guy” — you can apparently see his funny videos on Youtube. I’d never heard of him, but one hour with him sold me on his approach to math. He was a self-described “dumb kid” who found his own way of making it through the world. He explains advanced math concepts in fun ways that any kid would enjoy. Although he no longer runs a for-profit company, he says his games, and more invented by a buddy of his, are available at mathfun.com and kaidy.com. Enjoy!

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Layne Kalbfleisch from Kidlab has lots to say about brain research, and much of it would conflict with what you hear in the popular press and in popular books about learning and the brain.

First of all: There are no “right brain” and “left brain” learners. We all use both sides of our brains unless our brains are physically damaged. Interestingly, those people whose IQ test scores put them in “gifted” show more symmetry when they are using their brains for tasks. Even more interestingly, the higher the IQ, the less of the brain gets activated in difficult tasks. Definitely food for thought.

I loved this talk. If you’re a brain research junkie, or if you previously thought you should take everything Malcolm Gladwell writes as fact, check out what she has to say.

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After that talk, my own feeble brain went into overload mode (someday they will be able to tell me what my brain looks like when this happens) and I needed a glass of wine and a quiet room to digest.

More later when I get to Day 2. I apologize in advance for typos and weird formatting and lack of hyperlinks. [I’ve now added a few – Ed.] This is my first conference without a laptop. I’m using my smartphone and a cool Bluetooth keyboard that my husband gave me and which I have apparently wrecked one of the keys of and yes, I know that is quite dreadful grammar but as I said….. This Is My Brain on Overload! More later.

This is exhausted me in my hotel room!

image

Excellent opportunity to see a world uncovered

Posted on by Suki

For my coastal California readers, I am posting a short piece about the trip my kids and I took with some friends to the beach yesterday. All this week, we’re having negative tides at very convenient times:

Tue 3:56PM -1.4
Wed 4:44PM -1.7
Thr 5:33PM -1.7
Fri 6:25PM -1.4

A negative tide is when the low tide goes down to its lowest point in its cycle, thus exposing sea life that lives full-time underwater. It seems to me that negative tides generally seem to happen at highly inconvenient times, which is why this week is so fabulous. Not only homeschoolers, but even school families can make it out to the beach to meet the neighbors they seldom see. [See some resources for learning about tides with your kids below the photos.]

Here are some (not so great cellphone) photos I took at Natural Bridges State Beach. It’s truly amazing what you can see. If you go, make sure to slow down because many of these creatures blend in with their surroundings quite well.

Miles of mussels
Miles of mussels crowded along the sandstone cliffs

 

Sea Star
Fat, happy sea stars crammed themselves into crevices

 

mystery
This mystery being was not the only thing we couldn't put a name to.

 

Anemones
The anemones along the wall of the last remaining "natural bridge" were a completely different color!

 

Resources (thanks to Susan Greathouse for these):

Simple video describing tides:

http://studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams/jams/science/weather-and-climate/tides.htm

Virtual lab on tides:

http://glencoe.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0078786797/student_view0/unit3/chapter11/virtual_lab.html

Tides and gravity interactive lab:

http://aspire.cosmic-ray.org/labs/tides/tides_main.html

More advanced tutorial on tides:

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/welcome.html

 

The library: home away from home for homeschoolers

Posted on by Suki

One of the indispensable parts of homeschooling is the public library. I have no idea whether people who make decisions at public libraries take us into account, but we are some of the heaviest users of this system of shared knowledge. No matter their political bent, one way to freak out a homeschooler is to tell her that her local library might lose its funding.

I was musing about what my family uses the library for, and how we could better let our local library systems know what we need. It seems to me that homeschoolers could come up with a list of services and products that support homeschooling so that people making decisions about how to fund their local libraries would know what we use.

Below is a list of what my family and other families I know use and treasure in our local library system. If you are a homeschooler and want to add to this list, please leave comments below.

1. The books

Seems sort of obvious, right? Except that the purchase of physical books is getting less funding in libraries these days. There’s a trend toward funding more electronic services, and that’s great (see below). But the fundamental thing pulling homeschoolers into libraries is the books themselves. If we bought all the books we needed, we’d all go broke. And many of our kids are not interested in electronic books. They want the paper object. We want something we can curl up with on the couch, either as a family read-aloud or a personal get-away. We like the pictures. We like the experience of looking for the physical book on the shelves.

2. Interconnected libraries

Homeschoolers are more likely than school kids to have unusual interests. This is a natural offshoot of how they’re learning. If you let a kid drive the bus a bit and determine what he wants to study, he is more likely to make idiosyncratic choices and to explore his choices more deeply. Lots of homeschoolers report that interlibrary loans are essential to them, especially if they live in a rural area with a smaller system. Every homeschooler I know in my community uses the online book ordering system extensively.

Similarly, it’s great when us rural folks can go up to the big city and get borrowing privileges there. It took me years to exploit the perk that all California residents have of going to San Francisco and getting lending privileges there. We don’t use it for physical items (though we could), but we do use their website.

3. Physical meeting spaces

Though the public has this weird image of homeschoolers sitting alone at the kitchen table, most of us spend a huge amount of time out in our communities doing things together. And although some communities get organized enough to put together unaffiliated homeschooling centers (our local one is the Discovery Learning Center – drop on by!), most homeschoolers depend on their local libraries for meeting spaces.

It seems to me that libraries are probably not generally aware of this, and they seem to serve our needs better or worse depending on location. I know a large homeschooling group that gets great support from their local libraries in the form of free meeting space, but that’s certainly not true of all library systems. Our local system rents rooms for rates that homeschoolers simply couldn’t afford, so I don’t know of any homeschooling group that meets regularly in them.

Some library buildings have areas that are open for quiet meetings within the general library space, which is very useful. Often when homeschoolers need to get together, it’s to quietly go over something with a small number of kids. Homeschoolers who use charter schools need to meet with their teacher/consultants and libraries can be good places to do this if there is space where quiet conversation is appropriate. In general libraries could better serve small groups by designing informal meeting spaces into the general layout when possible.

4. Free and low-cost educational opportunities

Most library programs are really geared toward pre-school or after-school populations, and this, of course, works for homeschoolers as well. But one characteristic of homeschoolers that isn’t taken into account is that we tend to include a wider age range of kids, and our kids thus don’t develop the “natural” aversion to doing things with kids of different ages. What that means is that preschool story times are likely to attract homeschoolers with both younger and older kids, and some homeschooled kids enjoy preschool story times longer than the school population would. My daughter had no interest in giving up our library’s story time until she was seven, and that was only because we had other things to do at that time.

Afterschool programs that attract homeschoolers might see that they also get a wider age range than they expected. A very young chess player may turn up at the chess program that usually attracts upper elementary and middle school, and a teen who loves puppetry might be happy to come to a workshop meant for younger kids. Libraries can support this by not setting restrictive ages when possible and allowing parents to come along to programs when it’s appropriate for the child. (A fair number of homeschoolers also have special needs, and it may be necessary for the parent to stay.)

5. Electronic resources

Lots of homeschoolers are on a shoestring budget. In order to homeschool, they forgo one spouse’s income, and sometimes single parents homeschool and work simultaneously. The digital offerings of libraries are very important to these families. Families that can’t afford Internet access at home benefit greatly from using the library’s computers. And families who can’t afford expensive online subscriptions for things like language training software or manuals benefit significantly from these services. (Since there are almost always drawbacks to using public subscriptions, companies shouldn’t worry about “giving away” their services to libraries – since Rosetta Stone stopped letting libraries have online subscriptions, it’s doubtful that their sales have gone up significantly.)

I know that my family, for one, could use the library’s online offerings even more if we kept it in mind. My San Francisco library card gets me access to Grolier, which is a compilation of a large amount of respected encyclopedias and dictionaries. The next time my middle schooler is tempted to go to Wikipedia, I can give him another option. My local library card gives me access to archives of the Los Angeles Times and National Geographic. These libraries clearly have treasure troves of information online, and it would be great if they also offered workshops to homeschoolers and educators about what these services are and how to use them.

6. Reasonable terms and fees

A friend of mine recently lamented that when the library e-mail notification system went down for a few days, she accrued three days’ worth of overdue fees…on 90-some books! Unfortunately, our local system has raised the fees to $.50/day, which may not sound like much until you’re a homeschooler (or teacher or preschool parent) who has scores of books out at a time. The way I see it, my family loves the library and supports it with donations. But we prefer to make tax-deductible donations when we’re moved to, not non-deductible donations in the form of excessive overdue fees. There should be caps on the fees, and there should be backup systems for faulty computers and lost e-mail.

In general, my local library is very responsive when the community lets them know about problems and concerns. But they do have a way of making decisions without input from important groups of people. Yesterday at a parent meeting someone announced that our library has stopped allowing users to log in and put holds on items that are on the shelves in their local libraries. Though this sounds like a great way to save the librarians’ time, all the moms in the room who had little kids were aghast – this feature had saved them (and library patrons) the hassle of dragging packs of kids through the stacks in search of a book.

Public libraries are a fundamental part of community life, and now that homeschooling is growing in popularity, we’re starting to make up a significant portion of library patrons. I would hope that libraries are starting to notice us and consider how they can I our needs as well as possible within their recession-tightened budgets.

How could your local library meet your needs better? Let them know!

Save California schools tomorrow

Posted on by Suki

It may be too little, too late, but I feel compelled to write about a pressing issue in California that very few parents seem to understand: The funding of our schools.

You may wonder: Why should I, a homeschooler, care about the public schools?

First of all, my kids are both enrolled in a wonderful public school program that allows us to homeschool while keeping our ties with public education and our community.

Secondly, I think all of us should care about our public schools, whether we’re parents with kids in them, parents with kids in private or homeschool, adults who have never been parents, or adults whose kids are grown. Our public schools are an absolutely vital piece of our democracy that is being allowed to crumble. Yes, I’d love a world in which every family has the money, the education and the inclination to be homeschoolers, but that’s not the case. We need an educated population in this country simply to understand our voter booklets, not to mention to do most of the jobs that we need done. We import more and more of our educated workers because we’re doing a worse and worse job educating our own.

So what’s the big deal today with education? It’s actually tomorrow: If we as a state don’t vote to support Proposition 30 tomorrow, our already strained-near-to-breaking public school system is going to be decimated.

The misunderstandings that I’ve heard about school funding fall into a few categories:

Our schools are doing great—this is all just to get more money for bureaucrats

Well, not really. First of all, adjusted for inflation, our schools are not doing great. In the 60’s, California was at the top of the heap in K-12 funding. And is it any surprise that the kids educated in the 60’s went on to start Silicon Valley… in California? Our schools are now at the bottom of the heap in funding. Once you take into account inflation and the growth of the student population, we have been consistently cutting our schools’ funding for years. I agree that schools are too heavy on administration and don’t get enough of the money into the classrooms, but this won’t be solved by starving our schools.

The schools get the lottery

2%. The lottery is a tax on the poor that hardly affects our schools at all.

Schools keep asking for more but doing less

That is how it seems, isn’t it? Schools seem to be always begging. But let’s look at a few details in what they’re doing with the money. First of all, the biggest issue of all, is probably one that most parents aren’t aware of at all: Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, but they didn’t fund it. Our schools went from being able to give a substandard education to kids with disabilities (a horrible situation) to having to siphon up to 40% of their general budgets into special ed, thus ensuring that all the kids were going to get a substandard education (even worse than horrible). If you’re looking at a chart of school funding, you should see a huge leap when schools were suddenly required to give a “free and appropriate education” to kids they they’d been able to ignore before. But there was none. Our schools are being sucked dry by a morally good but fiscally awful law.

Then there’s No Child Left Behind. The federal government again passed a law with great intentions, but it put huge new burdens on schools with little funding to help out. NCLB costs California schools millions for all the testing. Really, the yearly testing should just stop, today. But since it’s not going to stop, the schools need to be given the money they need to fulfill the law.

Then there’s the real estate boom and crash. Property taxes, already artificially low because of Proposition 13, plummeted in recent years, and nothing has been done to make up the lost money.

And finally, schools aren’t doing less: every year we expect more and more of them. In order to have well-educated, 21st century students, we need to have 21st century education for our teachers and 21st century equipment to learn with.

We don’t need another tax

That I agree with. Wouldn’t it be great if all the fantastically wealthy people in this state fixed our public school system? Of course, some of them have done lovely things (mostly for their own kids’ wealthy school districts). But for the most part, once people make more money than they need for their lifestyle, they just bank it. They don’t give it to the schools, they don’t give it to charities. Yes, if all our wealthy people were Warren Buffett, things might be different. But they’re not. This tax is structured to take a little bit more from people who really aren’t going to notice the difference. If you’ve never been wealthy and don’t know any really wealthy people, you might think that this is “unfair.” But believe me, all their crying and bellyaching is just for show. You’re not going to see a dive in sales of yachts, private jets, and caviar after Proposition 30 takes effect. We have fabulous wealth in this state, and it needs to be used more wisely.

***

Proposition 30 is right on the edge. Historically, propositions that are this close the day before the election don’t pass. Our state simply can’t afford to cut education more. We need better schools. We need well-trained teachers. We need more variety of choices. We need education for kids we assume are not going to become productive members of society just as much as we need education for kids we think are going to become productive members of society. (And we may be surprised, years down the line, to find out which kids fall into which category.) We need to fund our schools, and Proposition 30 is what we’ve got this year. Think you can do better? Each one of us is welcome to run for governor next time around.

Click here to read more about school funding and Proposition 30

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