Category: Culture

All in a week’s play

Posted on by Suki

My son and I went down to LA so he could attend the state science fair for the second time. It’s quite an exciting thing, to see so many kids who are into science and are willing to put their work out there to be judged. Unfortunately, the state science fair’s listings don’t include the kids’ schools, so I couldn’t count how many homeschoolers were there. I recognized at least four homeschoolers from Santa Cruz—the same three as last year plus a sibling who’s now old enough.

One of the fun things about the science fair is that science-minded families, whose kids are usually spread thinly throughout different schools, get to come together. Our kids don’t have to dumb themselves down for acceptance, and parents don’t feel the need to apologize for our kids’ abysmal social skills. (Though many of these kids have pretty impressive social skills, so there goes another stereotype.)

I also get to see a few other school parents I know, which is really fun because our paths don’t cross very often anymore. One conversation I had reminded me how our lives have diverged from school families’ lives. The mom I was talking to is someone I’ve known for a long time, and she was talking about how her daughter didn’t like to miss school. I joked that in our case, we miss school all the time!

Her answer was very interesting to me: She responded that it must be exciting for my son to get out, given that he’s homeschooled. Now, it’s possible she didn’t mean to be negative or critical – it’s the sort of thing people say in conversation. But when you say, “It must be fun for your son to get out” to a homeschooler, we hear, “We know you are an overprotective parent who isolates her kids by keeping them home from school.”

As I posted a month ago, the things that people say to homeschoolers don’t always get received as they might imagine. It’s possible this person didn’t mean to imply that my kids are somehow deprived, but since this is the sort of thing we hear a lot, we can’t help but hear implicit (and many times explicit) criticism in statements like these. The other thing we can’t help but do is laugh to ourselves about their naiveté—about how little school families seem to understand our lives.

The state science fair is very exciting for my son, that’s true. But it’s not exciting because it’s such a contrast to his usual life. For us, getting out and about is the ordinary state of things. Staying home a lot is something he and I only dream of.

I look at my son’s last few weeks and wonder if the general public could really continue to think of homeschoolers as deprived of appropriate interaction with the world if they had to tag along with us for a few days. Here’s a short list of some of the things he did (and this is on top of doing all the “school” work that we do at home, plus all of his classes which take place outside the home, plus his online math tutor, plus…. well, you get the idea):

  • Fun in the snow with another homeschooling family
  • A stop at the most awesome museum: The Fossil Discovery Museum.  [We saw a sign for it in Chowchilla, which is off Hwy 99, which goes to Fresno. It’s built around a huge cache of fossils they found in the garbage dump across the road (really!). The man who took us around the museum, it turns out, is an adult homeschooler. He got into helping out with the dig, self-educated himself, and is now ABD (all but degree) a paleontologist, and is about to go back to school to get the degree he already has all the knowledge for.]
  • When we got back my son had his art class with the most excellent Yvette Contois of the Art Factory. (OK, that’s an ongoing activity, but I thought I’d give her a shameless plug.)
  • A trip with me to the Makers Factory to do an interview. While I interviewed, they got a personal tour of the cool tools they have there.
  • Meeting friends at Pogonip (on a school day) and going for an excellent hike on which my daughter adopted her new pet, a darkling beetle named Abyss.
  • Creative writing club, which we organized for a really great group of highly creative, thoughtful homeschooled writers.
  • Planning with one of the teachers in our homeschool program about the upcoming student film festival, which was planned and run entirely by middle school kids.
  • I admit we were so dragged out with all the running around that week that we skipped a fabulous field trip on Friday so we could hang out together at home and garden, play, and work. We also skipped about four other really cool homeschooling activities (out of the house, with other kids) that we could have done that day.
  • Science camp up in Yosemite with his homeschool crew.
  • The new Math Circle happening up at UCSC for middle/high school students.
  • A homeschool Presentation Day where he presented his work in Minecraft to a bunch of other homeschooled kids and their parents.
  • More intense work on the film festival, meeting with students and teachers.
  • Having his Minecraft crew over to our house for Minecraft club (which means that the kids actually interact with each other and play outside in addition to playing online… and the moms get to drink tea and gab!).
  • A fabulous fieldtrip to Point Lobos, swim team, sister’s softball game….

All this headed into the weekend of the state science fair, which started with my son accompanying me to San Francisco for a concert I was singing in, eating really fabulous Thai food in SF, going to a party at the composer’s house, staying in a hotel, and getting up very early to get to LA and set up for the science fair.

So… back to what homeschoolers are thinking when you say things like you imagine our kids don’t get out much. From our perspective, it’s school kids who don’t get out! Your kids go to the same place every day with the same kids and the same teacher. Yes, they do fieldtrips. Yes, they can also take part in competitions and go on cool vacations. But on a day-to-day basis they stay in one place, interact with the same people, and have very few unplanned interactions with adults out in the real world.

Now, I’d like to point out that I’m not criticizing the choice to send kids to school. I did it for years and may do it again! But it is so interesting to contemplate how differently we can mean something from how it’s received. I think this is the case whenever there is a large difference of experience between the two speakers—the same thing happens between people of different races or nationalities, people of different professions, people of different educational backgrounds. Because homeschooling is still a rather unusual thing to do (even though they say it’s getting so much more popular), other parents make assumptions that they don’t question about what our lives are like.

Since we got home, we’ve been going nonstop again and even though I wrote this in a cafe in LA, I’m only now publishing it. So the next time you pity us poor homeschoolers for being deprived of social interaction, remember:

It’s all in a week’s play for a homeschooling family!

Daddy’s little genius

Posted on by Suki

There has been a small rash of these news stories recently: Kid gets extremely high score on IQ test, applies and gets into Mensa. Parents rush to news outlets to make sure Precious Petunia gets her 15 minutes of fame.

I shouldn’t be so mean, but it really makes me feel mean. These aren’t 15-year-old whiz kids who are looking for fame. This is a 4-year-old who likes Barbies and Legos, or a 3-year-old who likes to play with water and test tubes.

There are many aspects of these stories that I have no problem with. I have no problem with parents wanting to get their kids IQ-tested if they feel that they will get meaningful information from the test. A lot of parents choose to IQ test because aspects of their kids’ learning confuse them, or because they suspect that their kids have learning problems that are masked by their ability to compensate in other ways. Other parents get their kids IQ-tested because they don’t really believe that their kid has special learning needs, and they need the number to make it real to them. Other parents get their kids tested because they have to in order to get into programs or to get services.

I also have no problem with parents pursuing opportunities—like Mensa—for their kids. There is a fine line between helping exceptional kids thrive and pushing them to bolster the parents’ egos, but I try to assume the best about parents. Through experience, I’ve learned to give the parents the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. So I do that, and I assume that families choose to apply to Mensa because they think that there will be some genuine benefit to their kids.

However, a few aspects of these stories give me big problems: First of all, entering your preschooler into a media circus just because you like the flashing lights and fun music. No preschooler needs to be the subject of an article in national news. Preschoolers need a sandbox to play in. They need adults who talk to them seriously about things they care about. They need small and fuzzy things (living or not) to love. They need really excellent stories told to them by adults both orally and through books. They need the opportunity to follow their passions and they need to feel safe and cared for. But they do not need to be the focus of adults who do not know them, do not love them, and do not care about what the attention will mean to them as they grow older.

Secondly, families who push their preschoolers into the spotlight totally miss the point about what IQ means. I do not believe, as it is fashionable in some circles these days, that IQ is totally meaningless. Anyone who has spent time with people on different sides of the IQ spectrum know that it is something that makes people different. Saying that IQ is meaningless is like saying that no one notices that one person has dark brown skin and another has light pink skin. Noticing the difference is not the problem; the problem is what you do once you notice. If we agree that all human beings are important, all human beings have potential, and all human beings should have their potential nurtured, then I think we’re all on the right path and there’s nothing wrong with noticing differences and trying to understand them.

What’s important to understand is that IQ is descriptive, not predictive. When you say that someone has a 130 IQ, you are describing the sorts of gymnastics that their brain is able to do. When you say that they have a 160 IQ, you are describing a person able to do very different gymnastics. Gifted education experts point out that someone with an IQ of 130 (very, very smart) differs from someone who has an IQ of 160 (profoundly gifted) as much as someone with an IQ of 100 (average) differs from someone with an IQ of 70 (developmentally disabled). IQ is a handy construction that allows us to quantify the level of gymnastics a brain can do, and the level and quality of stimulation a brain needs and is capable of handling. As a descriptive number, IQ can be helpful in some ways for working with some kids.

IQ, however, is not a prediction. It is not a skill. It is not a gift. And it is definitely not, as all of these articles erroneously say, “genius.” One of the most famous, longterm experiments in IQ and its predictive qualities was done at Stanford by Lewis Terman. Terman wanted to know how having a high IQ affects people in the longterm. So he tested lots of people and accepted only those with the top IQs into his program. He followed these people for many years, and came to a (for him) surprising conclusion: IQ is predictive of nothing. IQ does not predict success, in money or fame. IQ does not predict happiness, marriage stability, health, or longevity. People with the highest IQs are completely normal in all other ways.

So what does this mean about our cute little geniuses? Obviously, it means that the word “genius” is misapplied when it refers simply to IQ. Einstein was a genius, and did have a high IQ. But he was a genius because of what he did. Many others with his IQ lived and died in obscurity. Other geniuses became geniuses without the benefit of a super-high IQ. People call them geniuses because of what they did with their lives.

As a parent, my heart goes out to these little people who are so abused by our press. To be called a “genius” by Huffington Post when you’re 3 is no gift. It’s a curse. How can a child ever live up to such a start in life? When she starts to develop into the flawed and incomplete person she will become, will she suffer from the fear that she’s actually a fraud? How mortified will she be when she finds out she doesn’t know everything, and never will?

Here’s my advice to parents who find out that their preschooler has a “genius” IQ and want to make sure that they help their child reach his or her potential*:

  • Make sure they have plenty of time to play in the sandbox.
  • Make them feel safe and loved.
  • Tell them stories and give them excellent books to read.
  • Listen to their ideas and take them seriously.
  • Speak to them like they are people, and allow them to have opinions and make mistakes.
  • Make sure they have fuzzy things (living or not) to love and cuddle.
  • Try to open up opportunities so they can explore their passions.
  • Love them, and make sure they know that you’ll love them no matter whether they become geniuses, billionaires, happy, productive people, or anything else.

I know, this would make a very boring news article that would never get picked up by the Huffington Post. Trust Avant Parenting to give you the advice that’s guaranteed not to make your kid rich or famous…unless they work hard to get there on their own, regardless of the number they drew out of the IQ box.

*By the way, this is my advice to any parent, no matter what the IQ score, if any!

It’s that happy STAR test season again!

Posted on by Suki

It’s that happy season again, STAR testing time, when kids across California sit in a room and fill in bubbles with #2 pencils. The kid think they just have pencils in their hands. But in this era of NCLB, students actually hold the fate of their teachers, schools, and districts in their sweaty little palms. Parents fret that kids think these tests are too important. Teachers fret that their students might not take them seriously enough. District officials fret if the mix of skin colors that show up for the test tilts too far to one side, and hope that the parents from the wealthy side of their school’s neighborhood haven’t decided to keep their kids home “sick.”

I have strong memories from my years of standardized tests. In the third grade, I took a statewide standardized test that informed me that I should become a mathematician. I was crushed. I knew I wanted to be a writer—did this mean I couldn’t do that? I didn’t tell anyone of my fear, but you can bet I made sure not to like math nearly as much as I did before.

As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper about cultural bias in testing. The theme was suggested to me when, as a volunteer at a local school with a high immigrant population, I administered an “English” test to a girl from Venezuela. One question showed a picture of a girl in ice skates standing next to a sign that said, “Danger: Thin ice.” My sweet little student looked puzzled, and asked me, pointing at her eyes, “ice?” Well, yeah. She’d never seen a frozen lake before. Or ice skates.

Did I mention that this test had been developed for Puerto Rican children in New York? That was in the eighties, when cultural bias was just starting to be understood.

I remember when a few years later, my 100% English fluent boyfriend had to take the TOEFL as part of applying to grad school, since he was a non-resident from a non-English speaking country. He said that the recording they listened to was so bad, he couldn’t understand half of it. And his English was so fluent, few people knew he wasn’t born and raised here.

In case you missed this part, the TOEFL is supposed to test how well people understand English, not how extra-sharp their hearing is.

Despite all this, I don’t hate standardized tests and think they should be abolished. They have a job that they do well, when they are designed well to do that job. The job they do well is offer up a number correlating to how many correct answers a person got on a specific day on a subject that can be tested with multiple choice answers. Subjects that can be tested well are basic math skills (though ambiguously worded word problems are always a problem) and subject mastery (details of disciplines like biology). As long as the test-writers don’t try to make the test interesting by including cultural information (my daughter refuses ever to answer a math problem involving football, a game she has never seen played), some basic picture of the student’s knowledge and skills can be created.

The problem is, Americans have jumped on standardized tests like we built the railroad to the West: full steam ahead, don’t worry about how many Chinese laborers you hurt in the process. We have this idea that the tests can tell us something about how well the students think (impossible), how well their teachers teach (ridiculous), and whether their district should be allowed to continue administering their own schools. On the basis of standardized tests, we are told that our government can fire everyone working at a school (Ed. Secretary Arne Duncan’s pet project), as if having kids turn up to learn from strangers will somehow scare their brains into compliance. On the basis of standardized tests, we think that we can decide which teachers need more pay, and which should be fired.

Furthermore, the different parts of our government are making decisions independent of each other, so they end up using testing like a carpenter who uses a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. California’s STAR test is designed to measure students against each other. It’s designed to put 50% of the kids taking it under the line, and 50% over. When they try out new questions on the STAR test, they don’t want to see if it’s a good question based on whether kids get it right. They want to see if it’s a tricky enough question that the right number of kids get it wrong. So when your child is in the 50th percentile of the STAR math portion, for example, that says that half the kids did better, half the kids did worse.

No Child Left Behind, however, stipulates that all schools must get 100% of their students above proficiency. How do you test proficiency? You give kids questions based on what you think they should know, and if 80% of them get it right, you say, Wow, our schools are doing OK. You don’t say, Wait, we need to make that question less clear so that not so many kids get it right. But that’s what the STAR does. If you don’t believe me, download their sample questions and take the test. You’ll find ambiguities and obscure elements all over it. Any thinking kid takes this test and finds that even in sections that should be clear, such as math, there are ambiguities. The test is not trying to figure out what they know: it’s trying to trick them into failing.

We’ll be doing STAR tests this year. Our district is pressuring our little program (which officially doesn’t have to test because we are happily “statistically insignificant”) to get our testing numbers up. They don’t seem to care about our scores. They care about those cute little tushies warming chairs, grasping #2 pencils, and filling in enough bubbles to make it valid. It’s a silly game. We homeschoolers, if we’re doing our jobs well, know what our students’ strengths and weaknesses are. Last year, I laughed when I saw my daughter’s STAR math results – they were exactly what I would have predicted. Luckily, my daughter actually thinks the tests are fun (and looks forward to the popsicles handed out afterwards), and my son has grudgingly agreed to waste time that would be much better spent on his computer, just to humor me.

But we all know what game we’re playing: We’re not testing them to find out what they know. We’re testing them to make a bureaucrat happy. And if my kids’ good scores help their school and district a little bit, well, I’m OK with that. But these tests, I make sure they know, are meaningless in the scope of things.

Even if they get in the 99th percentile in math, as I did in third grade, I’m not going to announce to them that I know what their career path should be. No test can tell me something about my kids that I don’t already know just by talking to them, working with them, and loving them.

The best website for your school

Posted on by Suki

For a number of years I had a specialization I didn’t really seek out: designing websites for educational use. It started when I was consulting for the Small Business Development Center at Cabrillo College and created a career-research website for Cabrillo. Then a Cabrillo teacher hired me to make an interactive website for his class. This was in the late-90’s and as far as I know, distance learning was hardly talked about yet.

From there, I started to help the various schools I was involved with create better websites and more efficient electronic communications. Then I started doing similar work for for-profit educational businesses. Until recently, I still had clients hanging on, but since my life has been going off in a different direction, I am now only keeping my pro bono work for schools we’re involved with.

Over the years, I noticed how really awful most schools’ websites were, and how chaotic and complicated their communication systems were. Whenever I could, I’d help a school try to work this out, though there was almost always a lot of resistance. I won’t tell you how long it took me to get one school to use a single calendar that could be jointly administered.

Since I am now officially free of my paying clients, I thought I’d try to reduce my experience to a few tips that educators can use to make their electronic communications better and more efficient.

Websites:

1) Your website is your face to the world.

Perhaps, when I started doing this in the 90’s, a school could say that their website (if they had one) was superfluous. Now it’s almost always the very first contact parents have with your school or program. And it amazes me how many schools leave this very important entry point to uncommitted parents or incompetent semi-professionals. You need to take your website very, very seriously. It should meet the needs of all your “clients”: current parents, prospective parents, prospective staff, and even alumni. And as a journalist, I can’t emphasize how important it is to have good, well-written information on your website. Journalists who get lost in a maze or find outdated information on your website may just choose to feature another school in their articles.

2) Your website showcases the sort of education you offer.

If your website is boring, your school looks boring. If your website has lots of typos, your school looks ineffectual. If your website has outdated information, your school looks like a place where things only happened in the past.

3) Your website is flexible.

Don’t think of your website as one thing: consider all the ways you can use it to reach your community. The front page should have clear links for the different types of users: parents, students, staff, community.

4) Your website does not have to be fancy.

Have you ever gone to an educational website and faced a 30-second flash extravaganza that you had to sit through? Music that blared out of your computer without warning? Lots of pretty pictures but no information? It’s frustrating and off-putting. Get to the point and get there quickly.

5) Your website is informative.

What do people want to know when they go to the front page? Is that information front and center? It amazes me how many schools don’t have their address and phone number on the front page. And schools that, for example, list an e-mail address that no one is in charge of responding to (true story), or have contact forms that don’t work (this on a website for a Cabrillo College program for kids that I tried to use a few weeks ago).

6) Your website is dynamic.

If you aren’t willing to keep the website up-to-date, don’t put current information on it! But really, you need to make the commitment to make your website dynamic. The public is going to use it, whether you want them to or not.

7) Modern web tools are easy to use.

My last paying client was a school that I’d built a website for years before. We built the website at that time in a way that required knowledge of web design to edit it. Last month, I transitioned them to a Google Site. OK, it’s not nearly as pretty as the original website I designed, and it doesn’t have the cute animations an artist mom made for the original site. But now the staff has direct access to all the information. They aren’t depending on remembering to tell me when something changes — they own the site and they go in and make the change. I really encourage all schools to look into Google Apps for Education — the set-up was quite easy and the maintenance couldn’t be easier.

Communication:

There is no reason why a school needs to communicate via the old-fashioned monthly print newsletter anymore. Electronic tools are free, easy-to-use, and can be adapted for the few “off-line” parents you might have left. Here are some tips:

1) Don’t make an e-mail address optional on your registration form. Declare that you communicate electronically and demand an address. Lots of parents will leave this blank if you give them the option. (Of course, always include a checkbox for “I don’t have access to electronic communication and will need paper copies or access to a school computer.”)

2) Create ways for the school to communicate both formally and informally. A blog or discussion list allows parents and teachers to exchange informal information. In these days of budget cuts, a blog by a teacher about an upcoming project might just tweak a parent’s memory that she’s got the materials you need in her garage. Formal communication needs to be teacher-controlled and trustworthy. If you have an online calendar, it must be correct and show schedule changes on a daily basis.

3) Some staff will be very resistant to change. When you make the transition to electronic communication, it has to be non-optional. Resistant staff eventually come around…. or retire! 🙂

4) You can create so much good feeling in a parent community by keeping everyone connected with what’s going on in school. Photos, student projects, descriptions of events… anything you put up there will give them confidence that your school is a vital, exciting place for their kids to be.

5) Online information is free. Nothing you can do about it — free information is here to stay. So rather than fight it, use your website to give away as much information as possible. Don’t make parents come to the office to get a piece of paper they need — make it available online. Recommend web tools. Have your librarian (if you’ve still got one) blog about new books in the library. Draw your community in, and use all these great new tools to build even better education and community for everyone.

 

Crippling self-doubt

Posted on by Suki

I had a conversation recently with someone whom I respect greatly. She’s a great person, a loving mom, and has a successful career. But partway through our conversation, I had a realization: She suffers from crippling self-doubt.

I didn’t mention it to her. Perhaps it’s just me projecting, but I’m somewhat of an expert on crippling self-doubt.

I used to mull over everything anyone said to me, trying to find the hidden insults and innuendo. I used to stop myself from doing things because I’d step outside of myself and think, Who would want *me*, of all people, to do *this*? I used to worry about what “people” would think.

I don’t know who those people are, but they ruled my life.

Some good things happened in my life:

I married someone who supports me. Even if it’s something he has no interest in himself, he will congratulate me and say I did a good job. Even when I start doing my “negative self-talk,” he’ll tell me I’m full of it. When I think something is no big deal, he’ll make a big deal of it. He points out my successes, when I see that I haven’t yet reached my end goal. He tells me he believes in me.

Another good thing that happened is that I ran out of time. Literally: I just simply don’t have enough time to do everything I need, want, and must do. So a few things had to go. Organized closets? Gone. Clean fingernails? Often not the case. Crippling self-doubt? Don’t have time for that today.

Finally, I became a mom, and the first time you hear your kid doing that negative self-talk thing that you do…. that’s when you realize how awful it is.

I guess I’d say I’m still ‘recovering’ from my crippling self-doubt habit. Tonight I am reading — for the first time ever — at In Celebration of the Muse, a huge Santa Cruz event that celebrates the feminine muse. Years ago, I wanted so desperately to read at the Muse, and was devastated that I wasn’t chosen. This year, I saw the call for entries and I popped something in e-mail. Frankly, when I received the invitation to read, I didn’t remember what I’d submitted! So in that way, I am ‘recovered.’

But as I was dressing, I got out my fabulous red dress, the one I bought second-hand one day when I was feeling fabulous, and I thought, Hm. Can I carry this off? Perhaps I should wear sober black.

But In Celebration of My Muse, and In Celebration of Overcoming Crippling Self-Doubt (for tonight, at least), I am typing this now all dressed up in my red dress.

OK, so I cut out the shoulder pads. I wasn’t feeling quite *that* fabulous.

I hope I will see my friend there, and I will give her a hug, and I will pass her some of my anti-CSD love.

From one busy mom to another: Just do it. When are you ever going to get the chance again, to do today what you want to? Tomorrow, you’ll be on to something else. Something else to love, fear, and conquer.

Ganbatte!

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