Jun
14
2013

The Big Break

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I’ve often mentioned how parenting is about patience. Parenting is also about letting go, and letting children take chances, some of which can result in injury. Are we responsible, as parents, to try to mitigate risk where possible? Absolutely. In fact I have 100 square yards of bubble wrap on order. But I wonder if it’s also unfeasible to eliminate all risk from the lives of our children. And, if we did eliminate all of the risk, how would they learn how to cope with it?

This question has reared itself in front of me today. Our youngest plays goalie for his soccer team, and was participating in a goalie clinic with a friend of his from the team, who is also a goalie on the team. I guess that could be assumed. Fracture

I was about to meet with someone for coffee and to talk education and the role of parents when I received a call from the coach. Ethan was hurt.

Twenty minutes later as I walked onto the field to find my son, I saw the coach sitting next to him, and my son looking quite stoic, his arm resting on a jersey, and a piece of cardboard, a distinct turn in his forearm just below his wrist where the arm should have been straight. Oh boy. This was worse than I thought.

I came to find out from piecing together stories from the coach, the dad of the our son’s friend, and our son, that the boys were playing so well the coaches had them play up against 16 year-olds. I knew this was happening on Monday of this week, but trusted the coach in thinking they were up to the challenge. In a 2 v 2 drill a girl with a particularly strong leg — who the goalie coach had instructed to not shoot from within 20+ yards — blasted a shot at net. Our youngest snapped his right hand out to block the ball, the force of which snapped the two bones at the tip of his forearm.

Later I questioned the coach about the prudence of having 11 year-olds step in as keepers against 16 year-olds, but really I was questioning myself, whether I had done enough to protect my son.

Whether it’s rationalization or not, I still think it was the right decision to allow him to play up. We cannot wrap our children in bubble wrap and I have no problem sending him onto a soccer pitch where some of the players he has faced actually are attempting to do him harm in the heat of the game, as compared to a skillful young woman with an insanely strong leg trying to simply get the ball past the keeper.

SmilingWhat happened was a freak accident, which we cannot prevent from happening to our kids, and best yet, he’s already smiling again. He’s quite sad that he’s going to miss his first sleep-over camp, and that he’s going to miss the remainder of this soccer season, but he’s already talking about getting back on the pitch, getting back in goal, and what he can do next time to stop a ball struck by that girl, and not get hurt.

Don’t know about you, but I think that speaks volumes about kids being able to handle much more than we think they can. I guess I can cancel that bubble wrap order.

Jun
05
2013

Parenting: The Grand Experiment

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Last night, for the first time…maybe ever (and I’m not proud of that)…I shed my arrogant façade and was open to hearing what someone else had to say about a topic I feel like I know something about: parenting. The occasion was a parenting workshop entitled “Goldilocks Parenting.”

Of course I was intrigued by the title, because it fits in with how I think we should approach parenting: not too hard, not too soft.

While I should not have been surprised, the theme of the presentation hovered around the Goldilocks zone of parenting thought, but it used the tools of brain research.

Just like with discussions about education, and education reform, talking about “parenting” is a flawed pursuit from the beginning. First you have to ask if you are talking about parenting infants, preschoolers, school-aged, middle-schoolers, or high-school-aged children. Then you have to address whether you are trying to modify undo patterns, or create new ones (really one in the same). And of course you have to ask, is it the child whose behavior you are looking to change, or your own.

The presentation was made by Bill Sommers. A life-long educator Bill has taught in some of the best and worst school in the country. He has coached many educators, and turned around failing schools. As he said about relationships during the presentation, it only takes one person to change a relationship. If you change your behavior, the other person involved is going to have to change theirs.  Of course his comment is arguable, but as a rule is true.

Which was one of his other refrains during the presentation. Everything he said can work, and nothing he says may work, which is the great thing about parenting…as well as relationships, and education, and politics, and anything where two or more people are involved.

So much of the success we seek lies in how we approach parenting…or relationships, or education, or…you get the picture. Are you going in with an already predetermined outcome? Are you going in with an open mind? Are you closing off opportunities before they arise? Are you leaving doors open for opportunities you haven’t even imagined yet?

So much comes from how we communicate with others: verbally and non-verbally. What words are you using? When you offer criticism are the words already implying that the person you are criticizing won’t be able to succeed regardless? And what is success?

So when you look at parenting, what do you see as success? A child who comes out in your image, or a child who develops into an adult in the image he or she imagines for him or herself?  While this question seems rhetorical, it certainly is not. I consider myself quite open minded, and hoping to guide my sons to become the young men they hope to be, but at every turn I have to fight my inclinations for them to become the men I want them to be.

And still I worry.

I had a great parenting mentor when our boys were infants: our pediatrician. She said, “Your only job until they’re two is to keep them alive. Forget all of those videos. Talk to them. Keep them alive.”

When they were toddlers in preschool, when I was so wound up about our oldest not being out of diapers at three, when others of his peers had already long shed their diapers – without accidents – a fantastic preschool teacher said, “Relax, he’s not going to be in diapers when he’s 16.”

With the boys in grade school the focus became their education, but with the foundation from their younger years I began to read more about the process, and talk to educators about finding balance: not to be a helicopter parent, but not to be disengaged either.

Now the oldest is in middle school. A parent of a high schooler at the presentation asked a question about how to motivate her daughter, who explicitly said she was performing well in school to please her mother, and for no other reason.

I fear that result. But I don’t want to be so focused on that fear that the fear comes to fruition. And frighteningly I won’t know the results until we get there.

Parenting: the ultimate experiment.

Jun
04
2013

Supplemental Education

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Just when I was about to come down hard on my oldest son for his slipping grades, we got to the root of the problem, which I wonder if it is a problem at all. Except for the first quarter of the school year, his grades have somewhat ping-ponged. The final grades for each quarter have been more than adequate – B’s and A’s – but interlaced through the quarter have been D’s and F’s on homework assignments.

I have to keep my mouth shut, trusting my initial message to him that I don’t worry so much about homework grades, as it should be where you practice and determine on what you need more work. But some of those grades….they really have been testing my patience, and my own beliefs in how he should be approaching school.

After an enjoyable dinner we were sitting at the table and he brought up what else was going on in his life. He’s been helping two girls in his grade with two very difficult issues: one suffers from anxiety / panic attacks, and the other is a cutter. Yes, you read right. And yes, seventh grade.

Courtesy of http://www.killyourclutter.com/

Courtesy of http://www.killyourclutter.com/

I paused and looked at this young man who has been texting and taking time out of his life to be a good friend, to help his friends, who happen to be girls, to safely get through challenging times in their lives.

Of course the conversation came around to making sure he was talking to adults a little more often than he has, that some of the issues he’s trying to help his friends through are a littler larger than your typical 13 year-old is able to handle, but in that moment whether his academic performance was or is 99% of his ability or 85% of his ability became inconsequential.

I’ll take 85% of his efforts in school any day if he’s using all of that extra effort to be a good human being.

Jun
01
2013

Dinner Time

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So many articles directed towards parents emphasize the importance of sitting the family down around the dinner table. We, sadly, don’t do it enough, but we do make a big enough deal about it that our boys know it’s important.

Courtesy http://www.preschools4all.com/

Courtesy http://www.preschools4all.com/

When the boys were very young, getting them around the dinner table was a chore. Breaking them away from Legos, skateboards, video games, or the TV was unnecessarily excruciating. Making a dinner that everyone would be happy with – a wife who wanted low calorie, one son who thought salt was spicy, and another who would only eat carrots as a vegetable – tested my patience enough. The struggle of where we would sit often was more than I was willing to handle, which lead to ebbs and flows between eating at the table and eating around the television.

Now the boys are involved with after-school activities – music lessons and sports – which often leaves only 35 minutes after school before heading one child or another out the door to one activity or another. Sometimes the activities are back-to-back, and rarely do the activities of the two boys align in a way that makes a night go easily.

Curiously, however, when I am not buying a Jimmy John’s sub for one to eat as dinner in the car, and feeding left-overs to the other who is home, and am actually able to make a dinner for the family, the boys carry their plates not to the TV, but to the table. They’ve come to know it’s a time when we can all catch up, and talk, and reconnect, and get to know each other again after multiple days of running from event to event, and rarely all together.

Last week was one of those typical, yet unfortunately infrequent nights around the table. Maybe it was that we trusted it was not going to snow here in Minnesota again for a while. Maybe it was the phase of the moon. Regardless, we had a blast. Not just fun. Not just a couple of memorable quips. The entire dinner was filled with stories traded by everyone. Laughing. Poking fun at each other. Poking fun at ourselves. Serious stories. Really connecting.

And to top it off, the boys actually took their plates from the kitchen table to the sink. No, they didn’t wash them, but at least their plates made it to the sink. My youngest came up to me as I was placing plates in the dishwasher, and hugged me. He looked up and said, “That was a great dinner, dad. I’m going to remember it for a long time.” And I know he wasn’t talking about the chicken.

May
19
2013

I still love you

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Mornings I drive our oldest to school. There is a school bus he can take, but when he asked for a ride instead, because he found the ride on the bus terribly annoying, I jumped at the chance to drive him. I saw it as an opportunity for us to have a daily check-in, to catch up on stuff, and get a gauge on how he was doing and feeling. My inclination was correct, and we have spent the past four months catching up from 8:30 to 8:50 AM, just the two of us in the car.

At the end of this last week I asked why his social studies grades were lagging behind his other grades. I gave him an opportunity – an out – by asking if the issue was the subject matter, or how it was being presented. I offered up how when I was his age I turned off to social studies and history because it was so focused on memorizing dates, and what I wanted to know about was why people did what they did.

His response? “Every day we have advisory where we do a grade check. I’m aware of this.” And yes, his attitude was quite defensive.

“Well, if you are so aware of it, what are you doing about it?” I inquired.

Silence.

In classic early-teen fashion, he shut down. What I was subtly impressed by was how he looked at the cell phone in his left hand, so tempted to open it, and check it, really doing nothing more than finding a way to avoid continuing the conversation with me but he resisted. He looked down at the phone, slowly started to lift it, then put it back down in his lap where he had been holding it

In classic parent-fashion, I felt a welling of emotion, screaming from deep within, saying “Well you better listen to me, you little so-and-so,” but this time I held it back. Instead, I remained calm, and continued, “So what do you plan on doing about it?”

We talked about study habits, and some bad habits I had let develop over the course of the year. I also let him off the hook: there are only three weeks left in the school year, state standardized tests are done with, and there are no new real behavior patterns I’m going to establish with him in such short time. He is on notice, however, that next year, eighth grade; study time will be quite different.

I could see he still wasn’t happy with our conversation. I suspect he felt I was intruding, that his grades were still good enough to have him on the honor role, and, therefore, what he was doing was perfectly acceptable. What he didn’t see was that I was watching how he studied, and I had spent his seventh grade year balancing how much I intruded on how well he was doing, and I came to the conclusion that the grades don’t matter – something I’ve felt all along – but that making sure he has solid study habits before high school starts is imperative, which is why I capped our conversation with something else.

I said, “Listen, kiddo, I know you’re not happy with me.” He slumped deeper into the passenger seat of the car. “But I also know that you’re just doing your job.” His posture changed. “You’re pushing back, thinking you know what’s best for you. And you should. If you didn’t I’d wonder what was wrong with you.” I could see he wanted to smirk. “But I’m doing my job. There’s a reason you still live with your parents. You don’t know what you don’t yet know, and I need to do my best to get you to see that.” His smirk softened.

There was a silence in the car for a moment, and we both looked at each other. “My other job is to be patient, to let you push back, but not to back down. And no matter how pissed you get at me, know I still love you.”

We had reached his school, and we pulled up to the drop-off spot in relative silence for the last two minutes of the drive. He started climbing out of the car, and I called after him, “Four-fifteen pick-up?”

He looked back in the car. “Yeah. Love you, dad.”

“I love you too.”

The door closed – the door of the car – but another door had opened.

May
09
2013

Who has a voice?

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Everyone has a voice in the education reform debate. Some voices are louder than others. Some voices are more ubiquitous than others. Some voices make a lot of sense to me. Others, not so much. While many will disagree with each other, we have to all agree that everyone has well-meaning intentions: to make education better.

As I’ve discussed before, making education better means different things to different people, but that’s not the point of today’s post. What I find intriguing, and what is on my mind today is the venom with which opposing groups attack each other.

There are many groups, organizations, and individuals concerned with education reform. One academically-oriented group – the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado – consistently publishes eye-opening papers and articles detailing the players, large and small, in the education reform debate: ALEC, KIPP, the US Department of Education to name just a few. I am a great fan of their work.

A consistent contributor to NEPC is the educational historian Diane Ravitch. I’m a huge fan of her work as well.

A recent NEPC post by Ms. Ravitch, however, disappointed me, not because the content was misleading, or incorrect, but because I see well-meaning organizations and individuals spending so much time discrediting others. She questions the Gates Foundation’s funding of everything that has to do with education in America, insinuating their funding of organizations on both ideological sides of the education reform debate is an attempt to control the dialog.

Maybe.

But maybe this is a red herring.

So far in the education reform debate, when one group sees another group with an alternative ideological position, one typically tries to discredit the other. Just as with our dysfunctional political discourse today.

Why does this sniping occur? Because someone is trying to control the dialog.

I’m just as suspect of one group discrediting another as I am of another group providing funding to everyone.

And until everyone who is concerned about education reform decides to start working together, just like our political system, nothing will except for small local changes will ever come to pass.

Apr
30
2013

Education Reform for Business or Learning?

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In a recent Diane Ravitch blog post she casts a doubtful eye upon the newly ubiquitous national education standards known as Common Core Standards.

While the article is a very interesting critique on how the Standards came to being, and what the process of their creation means to the course of education reform, what is, perhaps, more interesting are the threads of responses to the posting.

As of 8:00 AM Central Time, 4/24/2013, the top-most reply by a user named “Forrest” immediately illustrates one of the underlying reasons education reform struggles for success: the conflict between the interests of business and the interests education for the sake of education.

Like any endeavor – artistic, commercial, spiritual, or otherwise – successful endeavors typically begin with an intended direction, even if that direction is abstract, like trying to figure out the meaning on life.  What do we want public education to accomplish? Do we want public education to serve and feed the needs of business, do we want it to produce well informed, and good citizens, or do we simply want to expose students to learning for the sake of learning? Do these goals have to be mutually exclusive?

Unfortunately, the current pedagogy in higher education in the United States will also make this decision more difficult. We follow a very phalli-centric, male-oriented way of thinking in how we teach and make decisions in this country. To succeed in academia to the level of a PhD means distilling your vision of whatever you are studying to a very narrow view. Yes, there are institutions that have inter-disciplinary studies, but they are not as numerous as one would think.

Do we need people who are focused and know everything about subjects like nuclear engineering? Absolutely. But because we have so few inter-disciplinary studies in our educational system is the same reason we turn around after 50 years and discover how carbon emissions are dangerous, that hormones given to animals affect human beings, and that the disposal of plastics can lead to catastrophes like the Great Pacific Gyre.

So what will our great democracy determine is the will of the masses if and when the electorate is asked – on a region by region basis – what is most important? Serving the needs of business, or exposing students to learning for the sake of learning? And given how education reform is unfolding, will parents ever be posed this question in a forum that actually effects policy? Time will tell.

Apr
24
2013

Yes, We ARE Guinea Pigs

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“We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.”

This is a quote from a recent article by Diane Ravitch on her blog, dianeravitch.net.

I – and many others – have considered Diane a guru of education reform. The rest of her article is classic Ravitch, but I just have a hard time with the above quote. It seems so…naïve.

Isn’t that almost anything we’re trying when attempting to reform educational policy and standards in such a short period of time? To effectively vet a new method of teaching our students using accepted academic research methods would require a decade, or more, to judge and prove the effectiveness of one method over another. And there are obviously no other previous methods that we’ve used over the past 100 years of organized, standardized public education, otherwise we would be using those methods. Right?

We’re in an interesting time in history, recognizing there is a fire smoldering all around us, and yet we don’t know what to use to put out the fire. Neither salt, water, nor smothering are options. We think we are surrounded by this conflagration within a city. Are we instead in the wilderness, which has built up century’s worth of underbrush, which simply needs to burn?

Right now we have to accept that, yes, and our children are guinea pigs. Some are going to benefit, and others are not, which really isn’t so different from the status quo.

Such a realization, however, should not stop us from trying to find an answer, and to finally control this smoldering mess.

Apr
11
2013

The silver bullet for education reform

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There’s a reason there’s no front runner in the education reform debate.

Look at some of initiatives that have existed: Teach for America. KIPP. Kahn Academy. STEM-focused schools. Every initiative has their champions and detractors. Each has elements that can be shown to be extremely effective for at least one group of students.

No system – and I mean none – can statistically prove that it is an effective solution for every student sub-group. There’s a reason no system can accomplish the Herculean task of reforming education in this country; we are looking for a single system to effectively educate every student, every type of learner.

Doesn’t this seem ludicrous?

Name a system or institution in this country that has been able to effectively serve such disparate communities as those we ask our public school systems to serve.

So when we look at education reform, should we be looking at a classically American approach to solving problems: the silver bullet? Maybe education reform is going to be far more difficult that we wish, that we have to look at larger cultural shifts. Maybe it’s time to do something that at this time in our country’s history is going to be very difficult to accomplish: cooperate.

What if we were able to combine multiple methods: federal and local, public and private, Teach for America, KIPP, Kahn, and more?

Am I delusional in this thought? Absolutely. But how else are we going to accomplish what everyone agrees is the goal of public education in America: providing opportunity for every student? From what the statistics have proved so far, there’s yet to be a single solution that works for everyone, but combined, we may get closer to meeting that goal.

Apr
06
2013

What defines success in education?

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Education reform is doing better than people think, but, conversely, will never ultimately be successful as long as we continue following the current reform paths.

No one will argue that whatever path you are on in the quest for effective education reform that it is complicated. And the person who claims education reform is simple, that it there is a silver bullet that will solve all of the problems, is either terribly naïve, terribly arrogant, or both.

That education reform is complicated is, unfortunately a product of our living in a capitalist centered democracy. The struggles mirror the political and social struggles of our country, the struggle between federalism and state’s rights, the struggles between religious studies and secular studies, the struggles between the haves and have-nots.

This struggle has been going on within the United States since its birth, but the motivation of the struggle has changed over the years. Today, the struggle is as much about the United States retaining its position as the dominant player in global politics and economics as it is about the betterment of the next generation of students.

So the question must become, “what defines success in education?”