Category: Culture

What inspiration looks like

Posted on by Suki

We took our yearly pilgrimage to the Maker Faire on Sunday. Ever since we discovered this event’s magical properties, it’s been a regular on our calendar. Yes, there were disappointments. We searched in vain for our favorite place — the room full of overstocks, rejects, and just plain junk where you could put together whatever your imagination could come up with. That didn’t happen this year. We noticed that for the kids, there were a lot more booths with very closed-end, focused projects that didn’t seem as inspiring as the open play we remembered from previous years.

But despite the disappointments, I think we got what we were looking for: yet another example of children inspired… in two very different ways.

We pretty much immediately had to split up. Our children go at different paces, and are interested in completely different things. Our son, 11, likes to survey things from a distance. He was the kid marked “slow to warm” in preschool. He needs time to adjust and consider. Our daughter, 7, flits around a room and then dives in. She was the preschooler who couldn’t be torn from an activity once she found it.

Listening to music in the alternative music room.
Listening to music in the alternative music room.

At one point when I was with our son, we spent a long, slow time in the experimental music room, playing the instruments and talking to the creators. I got a text from my husband: “She is in needle arts heaven.” He had been stuck at a booth where they handed her beautiful yarn and free knitting needles and worked with her on her knitting skills.

Later, our son went off with a friend and I relieved my husband in the inspiration-watching job. Trying to shepherd her through the Expo Hall to see what I’d missed, she was attracted by a fabulous mess of materials on the table for U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. She immediately grasped the concept of the activity — design a spaceship or satellite that can withstand the heat of the sun — and started to go. She took one of the plastic cups they provided as a base and started alternating electrical tape and foam. At one point I thought perhaps we were nearing the home stretch when she started to decorate the outside with gold foil. But she turned to me and said, “I bet you think that gold is decoration. It’s actually a special sort of insulation. You won’t be able to see it when I’m done.” And sure enough, she added two more layers on top of it. In the end, she did decorate her capsule with red diamond-shaped bits of electrical tape over the silver of the outside of the capsule, and it was time to test.

Busy hands making a space capsule
Busy hands making a space capsule

The whole time, the two people manning to the booth watched her with curiosity. In the time since she’d sat down, three other children had arrived, built, tested and left. She presented her capsule. “I’m ready to test,” she said. The man stuck a probe into the capsule with great difficulty — there was a lot of insulation on that thing! We got a chart where were were to record the temperature as he placed it under two hot lights. The changes were tiny.

“That’s very well-insulated,” he remarked.

This is a girl who was going to keep her astronauts safe!

Meanwhile, our son mostly looked. He enjoyed playing with a math program on one computer, and playing with the old Commodore system in the historical computers section. But it wasn’t until much later, when we were home and his sister was in bed, that his inspiration started to show. He started to talk and talk as we sat together and built a paper star structure from Wolfram Alpha. We didn’t talk about things specific to the Maker Faire, but he was spouting ideas and questions until well after his bedtime. It was one of those nights where time took a backseat to inspiration.

I think one important part of parenting is to watch to see what inspires your child, and then help set up that situation over and over until the child is ready to grab inspiration and make it into something. You never know what the inspiration will be, and whether there will be any obvious product. A child who loves to watch car races might grow up to be a racecar mechanic, but then again, might grow up to be a nuclear physicist who enjoys smashing atoms. The important part of parenting is not to determine the product, but to provide support for the inspiration. Since not all our kids can be TV producers and video game designers, we can help them see the possibilities when we turn off the screens and get them out into the world.

Watch your step! A visit to Quail Hollow

Posted on by Suki
This ponderosa pine has adapted to the local ecosystem
This ponderosa pine has adapted to the local ecosystem

This weekend we did something rare and marvelous and free: We visited the Santa Cruz Sandhills.

I had heard about this tour of a sensitive eco-system at Quail Hollow Ranch that was off-limits to visitors except once a year. I didn’t know much more than that, but just the fact that so few people see it made it sound special enough for a visit! Once a year, in late February, a handful of lucky people (who remembered to put it on their calendars) sign up for an April tour. Then come April, you meet in a group at the farmhouse and go off-trail to see the tiny wonders of the sandhill.

Our guides were Sean, a local naturalist, and Lee, longtime Park Interpreter at Quail Hollow. They weren’t just leading us on an unusual hike — they were initiating us into a small group of avid preservationists who see the delicate eco-system as a precious resource, fast-disappearing.

A purple sea of lupine blooms in a field below the sandhills
A purple sea of lupine blooms in a field below the sandhills

I learned a lot even before we veered off the trail into a faint trail off-limits to daily visitors. The sand up in the hills above Santa Cruz didn’t come from the ocean. Long ago, it came down from the Sierras and took up a brief (in relative terms) residence in the Central Valley before the land buckled and sent it tumbling into the ocean. It stayed underwater just long enough to gather the skeletons of sea creatures before the land buckled up again and formed the Santa Cruz Mountains, trapping the sand high up above the redwoods and the beaches.

The resulting sand is rich with sea fossils and has distinctive features that made it the sand of choice to make the concrete used for the Golden Gate Bridge. Unlike true sea sand, its particles are not rounded by long abrasion. Their flat sides form a stronger and more durable concrete, which of course is what we all want. So much of the sandhill ecosystems up in the hills are now nearly empty quarries. Sean pointed out that they are saved by the fact that they are the mechanism which makes the wonderful aquifer water enjoyed by residents of SLV, so when the quarries go deep enough to

My half a brain didnt retain the name of this flower!
My half a brain didn't retain the name of this flower!

encounter rising water, they have to stop or lose the entire aquifer formed by that natural purification system. However, the Sandhills at Quail Hollow alone are untouched by human industry, except this new, less-lucrative industry of keeping this delicate ecosystem alive.

Along with the very rare plants found actually in the sandhills are some curiosities right there on the trail. Most notable is the Ponderosa Pine, which outside of our hills is found only at elevations above 3000 feet. The ones at Quail Hollow are adapted to the local ecosystem, and probably couldn’t survive anywhere else. You can identify them by their unique honeycomb pattern on the bark, and the fact that woodpeckers just love to use them for food storage.

As our hike took us up a hillside, through a grove of trees, and out into a scrubby landscape, there were some immediate differences. First of all, it really is a hill of sand. A weak topsoil creeps in along the edges, but the path was as sandy as the entrance to a beach. Second, the colorful cards that each of us held in our hands, detailing the

Sandhills poppies are an adaptation of California poppies with lighter flowers and purple foliage
Sandhills poppies are an adaptation of California poppies with lighter flowers and purple foliage

various aspects of the special Sandhill species, got one thing wrong: these plants are tiny, sometimes unnoticeable right under our feet. Outside of the looming pines, this is a miniature world of precious monkey-faced flowers and the haze of spring blooms hovering just over the sand.

Check out the website for longer descriptions of these plants, some of which are cousins to plants at lower elevations. We learned that these plants have evolved in a world of little competition, since so little will grow in sand. Over the years conservationists have realized that a hands-off approach isn’t what’s needed: they saw that as plant debris broke down to form a small layer of topsoil, ravenous grasses would move in and kill off the delicate little sand plants. So now they clear off the plant debris to keep things pleasant for the less aggressive, endangered species.

And they also keep the people off. As we entered the sandhill, both guides pointed out that the pink haze around us was spring-

A pretty little annual flower
The Ben Lomond Spineflower forms a haze of pink over the sand.

blooming Ben Lomond Spineflower. This delicate little creeper just loves the trails, because no other plants are growing there so they will be left alone. So we had to step cautiously so as not to crush the little things as they eked out their tenuous survival.

Up at the top of the hill, we could see other patches of sand on neighboring hills, almost all of them victims of quarrying. But we stood in a marvelous little world, which was all the more special because it wasn’t ours. We can’t just tramp through there anytime we want. We were invited ambassadors, being primed to go out and treasure this magic from afar.

And then it was over. We’d seen the plants, many of them blooming, and talked about the creatures such as the Santa Cruz Kangaroo Rat, so named because it hops on its two powerful back paws like a kangaroo. We watched excited woodpeckers soar from pine to pine, flashing the white spots on their wings. And we descended back into the main part of the park, noticing the sudden drop in temperature as we once again walked on forest floor.

A pretty little annual flower
A pretty little annual flower

As we sat down to eat our picnic at the table next to the farmhouse, the seven-year-old sighed with a jaded air. “That wasn’t so special,” she said. Her father and I smiled at each other. Not so special now, but someday she too might treasure the experience of seeing something so small and fragile that humans need to be kept away except on a sunny day in April.

Woodpeckers fly from pine to pine, showing off the spots on their wings
Woodpeckers fly from pine to pine, showing off the spots on their wings

Note: Quail Hollow’s wonderful afterschool science program, which was a victim of county budget cuts, will be returning for a brief visit this spring. If you live nearby, check it out!

I just love sticky monkey flowers, one of our cutest natives.
I just love sticky monkey flowers, one of our cutest natives.
This diminutive Santa Cruz Monkey Flower was hard to find.
This diminutive Santa Cruz Monkey Flower was hard to find.
This is a battle-scarred veteran of the war against non-native eucalyptus. Theyre planning to use a bulldozer next, as the tight bands didnt do the job.
This is a battle-scarred veteran of the war against non-native eucalyptus. They're planning to use a bulldozer next, as the tight bands didn't do the job.

Standards for everyone!

Posted on by Suki

I didn’t need any more convincing that Alfie Kohn is one of the clearest thinkers about education out there. When my son was in first grade, his teacher handed out a copy of his article on why homework is unnecessary. I’ve been a fan ever since.

A friend pointed me to this article that he wrote for Education Week about national education standards. As usual, he’s right on the money. This is his summary of No Child Left Behind:

Today, we survey the wreckage. Talented teachers have abandoned the profession after having been turned into glorified test-prep technicians. Low-income teenagers have been forced out of school by do-or-die graduation exams. Countless inventive learning activities have been eliminated in favor of prefabricated lessons pegged to state standards.

And here’s what he says about imposing more of what preceded that wreckage:

Advocates of national standards say they want all (American) students to attain excellence, no matter where they happen to live. The problem is that excellence is being confused with entirely different attributes, such as uniformity, rigor, specificity, and victory.

I’m not a great believer in the conspiracy theory of education that some homeschooling advocates cite: They’re actually trying to make school dumber and dumber to get kids to become more compliant adults who will churn out widgets in Mr. Big Man’s factory. Mr. Big Man, of course, went to fancy prep school and Ivy League college, so he has no stake in public education except in that it churns out his perfect workers.

Perhaps I would have believed that theory in 1958, but now? As we all know, America needs more creative, scientific thinkers and more entrepreneurs. We’re importing those people in scores while we bore our children into submission in our test-driven schools.

I think what’s happening is that people who are well-educated are just completely out of touch with what got them there in the first place. They all think, ‘I did well on standardized tests so that’s what it means to be educated.’ I have to admit that I was one of them before my kids forced me to open my eyes. I always knew that I had largely hated school, that high school was a big waste of my time and I ended up dropping out. So why was I so focused on my kids going to “good” schools and getting “good” grades?

Before I had kids, I figured our local neighborhood school would be fine for them. When I saw how incredibly boring it was going to be, I started to look at alternatives. My son’s first grade teacher introduced me to the idea that even public school didn’t have to be boring. Learning about homeschooling made me focus more on what education really is.

Let’s face it: every child is different. A child can’t be tested for efficiency like a condom or a stapler! Each child has his or her own strengths and weaknesses, things that excite him or her and things that are just plain boring. Our job as teachers is to encourage the strengths and excitements, and to gently address the weaknesses and lack of interest.

My son now goes to one of the best private schools around. “Best” in my definition, of course. We just had a meeting with his fifth grade teacher. His teacher told us that he figures his first semester job is getting to know the kids, helping them form a community in the classroom, and gaining their trust. Yes, that’s what he does for the entire first semester.

The second semester is all about gentle encouragement (i.e. pushing) to remedy their weaknesses and to encourage them to expand from their focused passions. My son’s school does standardized testing in a few grades, but they aren’t testing whether the teacher is doing a good job. The test of the teacher is that grown-ups who had him when they were in fifth grade are still starry-eyed about what he did for them. The test of the teacher is that my son, who was at the top of the standardized test scores and has achieved the learning goals for fifth grade, still wants to go to school.

Here’s the problem with a standardized nation: how would my son’s teacher look as represented by numbers to someone in an office in Washington D.C.? Frankly, he had nothing to do with his students’ test scores. My son went into fifth grade at the top of the curve. My son’s test scores are largely reflective of his parentage, our parenting, and the whole of his school career. Standardized tests can’t measure whether his teacher has him fired up to learn and be a good, concerned citizen.

That’s what school needs to do: excite kids, teach them how to build on their passions, remedy their weaknesses to the point that they can become functional adults who contribute to our society. Not all kids are going to be proficient in all subjects. If they were, what a boring nation we would have! All those scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who are snapping up our green cards don’t want to be here because we are “proficient” and “standardized.” They want to be here for the passion, the opportunities, and the grand vision of this country. That’s the only standard that I want.

For me, it was an easy choice, but hard work

Posted on by Suki

My mother (Mary N. Wessling, who’s a medical researcher) pointed me to this article in MedPage Today: Are Physicians Too Quick to Medicate ADHD?

The article posits whether family physicians are prescribing ADHD drugs at a too high rate to kids they see, without referring them to a qualified mental health professional. Clearly, this is the case. And clearly, the medical establishment has abdicated responsibility for it.

When my daughter was a preschooler, I was told by a doctor that it was common knowledge amongst doctors that you can diagnose ADHD by giving stimulants to kids. “If the stimulants work to help them focus, then it’s ADHD.” I believe that this is still a common belief amongst physicians, even though it’s been proven without a doubt not to be the case. Look at the recent New Yorker article about how college kids are taking black market ADHD drugs so that they can focus better when studying for tests. These are not college kids with diagnosed ADHD: these are kids who have always done just fine in school and have never been diagnosed as hyperactive. And surprise, the drugs help them focus, too.

A while back I started to research various theories of behavioral problems. I would have had no problem getting an ADHD diagnosis for my daughter (many doctors fill parent requests for ADHD drugs without much investigation if the parents say the child needs them, especially if a school recommends them). But I didn’t want to drug her. I wanted to figure out what was going on. She was a hyper-smart, funny, loving, creative person who in certain situations (like school) completely lost it.

What I found in my research[1] is that there are two worlds out there: there’s the world of the psychiatrist we saw who didn’t question that she needed drugs; she just wanted to figure out which one. Then there was the other world: practitioners of all sorts of therapies from Western to Eastern, concerned parents, and some Western-trained psychologists were all asking the obvious question: Why do we have ADHD now and not before? What has changed?

The answer is one that any amateur sociologist could have given: Our lifestyle and culture have changed. Our expectations of children have changed. Where we live, what we do, and how long we do it for has changed.

This is how my mother puts it: “We give disease names to behaviors that previously have just been considered difficult. That is not to say that things were better–these children were often the recipients of damaging physical and psychological abuse called ‘discipline’. We now have many more resources  and information available.”

This is how the phenomenon is described by James T. Webb[2], a leading expert on gifted children (who are, he admits, often “quirky” and unusual): “I think our society has become increasingly less tolerant of quirkiness. Our schools, too. … In psychiatry and psychology, the number of diagnoses has proliferated increasingly. … For example, the unruly child is now seen as a diagnosable disorder, Oppositional Disorder . The town drunk now is an alcoholic and that’s a disease. There’s been a redefining. I think it’s been overboard.”

So this change has led to drugging children for what was once considered part of the normal continuum of human behavior. What’s shocking is not the research that revealed the success of therapies including diet change, having unstructured play time, and more time outside. What’s shocking is that our MDs just seem to have missed that boat. They are going happily along in their search for more and better drugs, and totally ignoring all the evidence that says that drugs are not the answer for many or possibly most of these kids.[3]

From the MedPage article: “Teachers and parents are looking for a quick fix,” added Mark D. Smaller, PhD, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Chicago who was not involved in the paper. “They’re reluctant to look at what’s behind that behavior, at what’s going on at home.”

The article cites child abuse as one possible cause of ADHD. Yes, that may be the case, but that rules out all the rest of us: the loving, imperfect parents who are just trying to raise their kids with the knowledge we have. And I don’t think that those parents would react badly if after explaining their child’s schedule to their pediatrician, the pediatrician suggested, “Perhaps you need to cancel tae kwon do one day a week and go for a long walk in the woods.”

Some of the alternative prescriptions for behavioral modification cost money: homeopathy, for example, is usually very expensive and not covered by insurance. Some of them take a lot of time: occupational therapy, for example. Some take a lot of change in the home: parenting changes, diet changes. But most of them are as cheap as a big bottle of fish pills from Costco. An hour walking in the woods with your child, finding out what he’s thinking about, giving him loving advice from the person he knows best.

But things that are hard are sometimes better. Yes, drugs are easy and cheap. But what does your child learn from drugs? That she can’t control her own behavior. That she can’t look at her environment and realize that it’s not good for her. These are not lessons I want my children to learn. I want her to know that she can make herself strong and healthy, that she can depend on herself and trust herself.

Last week one of the teachers in her homeschool program took me aside and said a few words about the changes she’s seen in my daughter.[4] One thing she said really hit me. “With a lot of kids who start behaving well in the classroom, you can see that they’re holding themselves back. They’re stopping themselves from doing things they’ve been told not to do. But your daughter has fundamentally changed. She’s enjoying her time in the classroom and she is doing what comes naturally to her now.”

Or she could be on drugs. I think we made the right choice. [5]

1. My article: Alternative treatments for behavioral problems

2.  My article about James T. Webb and the evolution of knowledge about the particular social/emotional problems of gifted children.

3.  I am well aware that there are children who desperately need medical treatments for real, difficult problems

4.  Some details of the changes we made in our daughter’s lifestyle, including diet and environment

5. My news article on this topic on the Gifted Children Examiner.

How to fix our schools? First, ask the right question.

Posted on by Suki

A friend forwarded two articles about the state of education in California and all the political wrangling: How do we best improve our schools? How do we get more federal money? What is the effect of teacher’s unions on reforms? What is the effect of charter schools on kids and on neighborhood schools?

I realized that some of my strongly held opinions make me just step away from arguments like this and say, “They’re arguing about the wrong thing.” In both arguments, test scores formed the basis for “proving” that one approach was better than another. But depending on how you read the data, you can use test scores to prove pretty much anything!

Here’s the problem with test scores: It has been proven that one way to predict a school’s test scores with alarming accuracy is to look at the zip codes of the parents. It’s also been proven that a way to predict a particular student’s test scores is to look at what scores the parents would get. Schools have so little effect on test scores that when all these politicians argue about them, their arguments are invalid right from the beginning!

You can look at my own family as an example: two PhD parents. Our high school grades were all over the map – from an excellent student to a poor student. Test scores for all of us? Right at the top. Doesn’t matter how well we did in school, because that’s not what standardized tests are testing.

So then come all the arguments about charters. Their scores are lower, thus they aren’t succeeding. Their scores are higher, thus they are leeching the best students from the public schools. See? The scores can be used to mean anything that people want them to mean, and thus they are meaningless!

Here’s how I think we should “fix” our schools:

First, I believe that for one chunk of students, CA public schools are too academic. These students should be given an education appropriate to what they’re planning to do in life. They don’t need to be forced to take all sorts of academic classes that eventually convince them to drop out of school. They need well-equipped shop classes, classes in money management and health, classes in bookkeeping and law clerking, and other sorts of practical classes that will engage them in becoming productive. No wonder they drop out: school has nothing to do with their lives.

On the other hand, the old method of “tracking” students based on their class and race was stupid: students should choose tracks based on their interests and their plans. They should be able to jump tracks anytime they want, just in case they wake up one day and realize that what they really want to do is be an English professor or a rocket scientist. And community colleges should be there, well-funded, to help everyone if the path they chose in high school doesn’t end up working for them or if the jobs in their field dry up.

For students who want to go on to higher education, programs should exist to support their needs also. In that case, high schools should focus the more academic classes on kids who are trying to get into a university and who will need higher level math, higher level research skills, and advanced sciences.

The second major change that I think needs to happen is in the structure of schools. The idea that a school draws kids based on their location rather than based on their interests and needs is outdated. Schools should be based on an area of expertise, and students should be allowed to attend full-time or just by the class. A kid who homeschools should be able to take a math class at the high school, regardless of his age or “grade.” The school should get funding for the classes it offers, and if a class isn’t well attended, it gets cut just like at a college.

As a result of this, everything would need to become more community-based. I’ve heard a persuasive argument that kids’ sports should be taken out of schools and turned over to communities — I think this would become necessary. Kids would join leagues just as they do in sports that are not traditionally supported by high schools. Schools would start to need to serve kids’ needs rather than administrators’ needs.

I’m not totally anti-testing: I think all kids should be tested a couple of times during their education to make sure that problems are caught early and that we are providing all our kids with the tools they really need in modern life. But once schools become more fluid environments, having something like the California high school exit exam would be meaningless. More kids would be able to graduate from high school with meaningful degrees, and they wouldn’t have that dreaded feeling that their lives are set in stone by the age of 18. That reality is one that died in the last century.

All the arguments about improving our schools are meaningless to me until the idea of school gets into the 21st century. Few people think that the old model ever worked, if they really look at it. It’s just what they’re used to, and change scares people. Just look at the health care debate: Before it became a possible reality that change was going to happen, everyone agreed that our health care system was broken. As soon as a bill was being put together, all of a sudden people hugged onto their awful, overpriced, overbureaucratic health plan like it was their beloved baby!

Incremental change is happening in education in places like Santa Cruz County, but we need to identify the right questions before we can create a system that works with our modern culture.

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