5 posts tagged “education”

In E's homework folder I found this math worksheet he'd done. He got a big, fat zero on it. At least they don't give letter grades in Grade 1. Math is one of E's favorite subjects, so naturally he was sorely disappointed.

I'm looking forward to the rest of long weekend for Martin Luther King Day. I'm grateful that E's school honors the holiday in a significant way. On Friday, there were presentations by the first, fourth, and fifth graders during which each child spoke individually in front of the whole school. (This is one of the nice things about going to a small school: in under half an hour, you can hear every single kid across three different grades can say something meaningful.) The first graders each presented a wish starting with "I had a dream..."

E said, "I have a dream that people would be kind and make good choices, and that school would be good for everyone." (Tim thinks he must have picked up the "good choices" part from me ;-)  I get all choked up with this stuff; it gets me every time. Other kids had wishes for saving the environment, helping lost pets finding their way home. One boy dreamed of having more math. Gotta love first graders.

Before we decided to send E here, I had concerns about chapel as part of school. Since I'm not religious, I was worried about time spent in someone else's faith, how E would fit in, what he would take home, and how to deal with things like communion (it's kind of nice but doesn't taste very good). Fortunately the school is quite progressive and is able to secularize. One story about miracles translated into a message about optimism and believing in possibility for change; it could have gone so many other ways that I might have found disturbing. But perhaps what I most like about chapel is that it's a gathering place for the whole school, where, over the years, the kids take small steps in becoming confident public speakers.

So back to MLK... I'm thrilled that the whole school gets involved, all the way down to the lower grades. But... E has spent the past few days asking questions about segregation, racism, bombings, and the assassination. He asks how people could be so cruel, how firefighters - the consummate good guys - could spray water into a crowd of black folks. To E, racism is bewildering, unfathomable. He's deeply bothered, as no doubt he should be.

He's six, though. And if had my druthers, I'd much prefer the subject be taught in terms of character, moral courage, and what it means to be a hero. I'm not trying to deny the dire human condition leading up to the civil rights movement, but, at least for my kid right now, it seems like too much info.

I've spent a good part of this year trying to understand why school isn't working for E. When we couldn't ignore it anymore, I started doing a lot of reading, talked with experts, and joined some wonderful online communities. Now we're struggling with what to do for next year. School application deadlines are just around the corner. Spaces in grades beyond kindergarten are virtually non-existent. There are so many things we love about E's current school, except he's learning almost nothing academically, developing some bad habits, and ends up before- and after-schooling with crazy intensity.

Anyway, I thought I'd post a Vox collection of some helpful books about gifted children and their education. I wish I had given this more thought a couple years ago, when E was in his last year of preschool. Whoops.

"A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children," by James Webb, is a great starting point and offers more thorough coverage of important issues than other books of this type. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, Deborah Ruf's book, "Losing Our Minds," was probably the most illuminating for me; she details five levels of intellectual giftedness and the implications for educating kids at each level, including the profoundly gifted. Susan Assouline's book "Developing Math Talent" offers some helpful ideas to take to schools; since math is taught sequentially, a child who is several years ahead basically gets driven crazy at grade level - unlike reading where the content more easily adapted for a range of abilities. Some schools give extra work to those who finish early - and this seems unfair and downright discouraging.

So with a possible school change on the horizon, the year ahead feels uncertain for us. On one hand E's current school is wonderful and in other ways it's a pretty bad mismatch. I just hope that any changes we make will bring enough good to make up for what we might be giving up.

Wow, it's been a while since I've felt so bothered about something like this... There's a posting on the Silicon Valley Moms blog titled, "The Problem of the White PTA."

I think the post reeks of racism - yet I don't think most people on this collective blog see it as profoundly shallow and unproductive as I do. I can see some readers nodding and saying, "Hmmm, interesting problem about those Asians..." After sending it off to a bunch of my mom friends, along with the Anti-Racist Parent website, I couldn't resist tossing in my two cents. Maybe I'm being over-sensitive, but it really touches a nerve and bothers me on so many different levels.

[The editors of SVMB eventually took down the post, as well as a really lame follow-up from the same author.]

A couple interesting videos going around... At last year's TED conference, Ken Robinson suggested that people are born creative but have their creativity sucked out by an education system that's wrongly focused on right answers. He asserts academia is designed in its own image and perpetuates a narrow value set that no longer adequately prepares students for the future.

(Just consider the enormous extent to which our society has invested in the SAT, how it's scored, and how it's used.) Since technology and innovation depend on original ideas, Robinson urges us to create an education system that fosters divergent thinking and facilitates the success of those with creative talents. We only need to look to these notable college drop-outs to see the need for creativity and risk-taking.