Throughout the summer I'm going to be rerunning some older columns of mine that I wrote before I started this blog. I'm too busy vacationing and doing nothing to come up with new posts! But I thought you'd really enjoy this one, from back in the fall of 2003.
Recently, my husband and I met with some friends whose third grade son was dreading school. Reading for him was tortuous, and so school had become a jail sentence. The teacher’s solution to this seemed to be to “share the pain”. He was now to read aloud to a parent for 20 minutes each night.
I don’t know about you, but if I were an 8-year-old boy who already felt that I couldn’t read, being asked to read out loud at home would be a nightmare, even if it were necessary. And can you imagine sitting through that as a parent? Why not simply bang your head against a wall!
Perhaps the reason we’re producing such poor readers is because we take all the joy out of reading. Two years ago, my daughter was in senior kindergarten with a wonderful teacher. The school had an admirable goal of encouraging kids to read with their parents, and so launched a “book-in-a-bag” program, sending home a new book every night. But listen to the type of book they chose: “Look! The sun. Look! A bunny. Look! A turtle. Look! A cloud. Look! It’s Mommy!”. So kids who are struggling to read learn that reading is not only hard, but that it’s also mind numbingly boring.
Of course, today’s schools aren’t the only ones to blame for this inane level of story telling. The Boomers grew up with the infamous Dick and Jane: “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick run. Run, Dick, run.” If I had to sit through that, I’d soon be having murderous dreams: “See Dick die. Die, Dick, DIE!”
I won’t go into a discussion about why these books are structured as they are, because that’s a subject for a whole other post. Let me just say here that many kids have little incentive to read: it’s hard and it’s no fun. Let’s see how we can take the school’s two ideas—to read with your kids and to help them practise reading, too—and make these actually enjoyable for everyone. Instead of banging our heads against the wall or keeping our eyes open with toothpicks, let’s huddle on the couch together with a good book. If you want to raise a reader, that’s the recipe. It’s quite simple: Read great books to your kids. Even when they’re older.
Too often we stop reading to them because we figure they should read to themselves now, but then we miss a wonderful opportunity to connect as a family. Do you remember your favourite books when you were young? I cried when Matthew died in Anne of Green Gables, laughed with Jo in Little Women, and rejoiced with Laura in Little House in the Big Woods. As I experience these adventures again with my own daughters, it’s almost like meeting long-lost friends.
We suggested our friends go to the library and check out classic books to read to their son—like C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series—and maybe some easier ones he can read himself. But some boys will always prefer the real and the gory over make believe, so non-fiction books on killer sharks, volcanoes or mummies may pique their interest better. Then we suggested our favourite trick: make his bedtime a firm 8:00 (it varies now between 8 and 8:30), but let him stay up until 8:45 if he’s reading. What kid will say no to that? As children read more, reading becomes a natural part of life and stops being so intimidating.
Some kids develop a mental block to reading because it’s so stressful at school. Sharing good books together at home and letting them read leisurely themselves takes the tension out of the activity, and lets them enjoy something for which there is no substitute. Then, when you do work on reading at home, it’s in the wider context of enjoying books together.
When your children fall into a book, they experience a world they may never be able to otherwise. Maybe if we introduce them to this magical world, they’d be more eager to read, and less likely to think of reading—and the schooling that goes with it—as an unpleasant chore.
The summer is an awesome time to read to your kids! One year, in our camping trailer, we read three books from the Little House series. When I was 14, I remember reading them on a sailboat to my younger cousins. Our first readaloud chapter book was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when the kids were 4. They could handle a chapter a day, and it only grew from there. Today they never stop reading (though Katie hated to read on her own until she was about 11).
What are you reading to your kids?Tell me in the comments, and let's compare notes!
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's, based on a news story I asked you all to comment on last week.
Thirteen graduating students from Quinte Secondary School [in Belleville, Ontario] have given us a whole new reason to despair for our country’s future. Their parents pooled resources to rent a bus to take them to their prom and then to take them to the after-prom party at a private residence where alcohol would be served. The school, however, warned all students that group transportation (which tends to be associated with alcohol) and any kind of intoxication would not be tolerated. Nevertheless, they showed up in a bus, with some of the students already drinking, and they were denied admittance. Several parents are now calling for monetary reimbursement and the firing of some school administrators.
The Belleville daily covered this story in rich detail, accompanied by a photo of the kids, girls holding up their prom dresses. The paper evidently chose to slant this story towards those poor students who missed out on the biggest moment of their high school life.
Why?
Those students were told that they were not to arrive in group transportation, and they did. They were told no alcohol would be tolerated, and several of them admitted to a reporter that they ignored that warning. Sounds like an open and shut case to me. After all, going to the prom is not a right; it’s a privilege. And by the way, why do you need to rent transportation to take you to and from the prom to make sure you’re not drinking and driving if you’re not going to drink until you get to the after-prom party? Besides, parents, providing alcohol to minors is still, last time I checked, illegal.
The consequences for breaking the rules were spelled out, and the students chose to disregard them. It is not the school’s fault if girls chose to spend $700 on a dress, and then broke the rules so they couldn’t get in. No one forced these girls to drop that kind of money on a prom dress (I spent less than half of that on my wedding dress, for pity’s sake). No one forced them to disobey the rules. No one forced them to drink.
And what about the other QSS students who were at the prom? Do they not matter? Why should kids who have not had any alcohol have to put up with potentially intoxicated peers at their prom? Besides, if any drunk kids had caused an accident or injury, the school would have been sued. The school had to stand its ground. That’s why I’d have written a much different headline than “Students Lost their Prom and are Angry”. I’d do: “Courageous Principal Stands Her Ground On No-Alcohol Prom”, or “Principal Sticks to Her Guns despite Parents’ Threats”.
Yet while I find the kids’ actions deplorable, we cannot entirely blame them, for they were raised by parents who evidently felt it was more important to be their children’s friends than it was to encourage them to respect authority. That “blame your parents” thing, though, can only last so long once you’re an adult. These kids have now graduated from high school, and so they have entered adulthood. It’s time they owned up.
They made a mistake. And by posing for a picture in the newspaper and complaining about their treatment, they compounded that mistake by broadcasting that error in judgment far and wide. What employer in this community is ever going to hire them? They have shown that they do not respect authority, don’t listen to instructions, think rules are for everyone else, and if anyone challenges them, they raise a huge stink.
So here’s my advice: go to the principal and apologize. Accept responsibility. Be an adult. At least you might get your self-respect back. And then, perhaps you’ll earn the respect of the rest of us in this community, too.
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I've found my column fodder for next week! As many of you know, I write a weekly column in a bunch of papers out here in southeastern Ontario, and recently something happened in my hometown that is just so--outrageous--that I have to write about it.
But I thought before I tried I'd ask you all what you think! Maybe some of you can come up with some great lines of selective outrage I can throw in.
So here's the scenario:
A group of parents hire a bus to transport 13 kids, who are still 18 and under (the legal drinking age in Ontario is 19) to the prom, and then afterwards to a party where they will be drinking alcohol.
The principal announces two days before the prom that kids arriving in group vehicles will not be allowed entry, because group vehicles tend to encourage drinking.
The kids come anyway in the bus, and some are already drinking. The principal denies them entry. Now they threaten to sue.
"Students lost their prom and are angry", is the headline, complete with the kids holding up prom dresses they didn't get to wear. It quotes one dad (Travers):
Travers said while the parents and students feel they deserve an apology there's also the financial issue that needs to be considered and the fact these students lost out on an important night.
"Some of these girls spent in excess of $700 but we feel the thing is that they ruined the prom for all these students," he said. "It's supposed to be the highlight of the end of their school years and they took that from them."
The group of 13 students — including the cost for their prom tickets, the rental of the bus and the purchase or rental of suits and gowns — spent approximately $4,500 for their prom.
What do you think? What should I say about this? I'm rubbing my hands together in glee with the ripe pickings already, although I'm also feeling a little guilty about being so excited because I should really feel a little more sympathy for these kids--they've obviously been raised poorly. I need to remind myself of this post on gentleness daily!
Let me know your take! (And bonus marks if you throw in how you feel about the way the paper slanted the story).
My girls and I took a walk last week on a particularly windy day by the waterfront. The water was incredibly choppy. But just a little ways out from shore swam two swans, right near a rocky barrier, with their little babies, only a few days old, huddled up on a rock. They were protecting their babies from the wind by staying near the rocks that were breaking the waves. Great parents!
Isn't that a parent's first instinct: to protect their children? I thought about that when I heard about this news story. It's a heartbreaking one. In Milwaukee, a mother is complaining because her 4-year-old daughter is repeatedly being attacked on a school bus. She comes home with bruises. Two pairs of glasses have already been broken this year.
She complained to the school, but they did nothing except to blame the fight on a 4-year-old girl. So she called the local news station, who sent a cameraman out to follow the bus on two different days, and caught on tape kids running out of seats, punching each other, and in general causing tremendous chaos.
Ms. Edwards says, “My main concern is for her to go to school and learn and be safe”.
As the bus pulls away we follow it. Watching and waiting to see what happens. Back at home the girl’s mother is fighting back tears she says she can’t believe her daughter has to go through this every day.
Edwards adds, “She continues to get hurt. Why? That hurts as a parent”.
Why is a 4-year-old getting on a schoolbus everyday where she is getting bullied?
Now I don't want to turn this post into a haranguing of the mother. As far as I'm concerned, she's the best parent in this story. She at least contacted the school and the school board repeatedly, and then contacted the news agency. It doesn't seem as if any of the other parents have done anything (since the school board said they have had no other complaints about that bus). So here is a mom who obviously loves her child. Pictures of the girl are all over her house, which is nicely kept. This is a good mom.
But even good parents can be caught up to reflexively do what everybody does--namely, put your child on a school bus. That's what we do to get our kids to school, and we start to feel like we don't have a choice because that's what everybody does.
You do have a choice. Perhaps this woman has fewer choices than many, because it looks as if she is a single mom. Maybe she has no other way of getting her child to school and still make it to work; I don't know. It's just another heartbreaking example of why we need two parents.
But you are the parent. You don't have to make your child go through a horrid situation at school just because "that's what everybody does", or "it's inevitable." You can pull your child out of school and raise a huge fuss to get them into a different school (it looks like that's what this mom is trying to do by contacting the news agency).
You can drive them to school yourself, or volunteer to be the school bus monitor. Or, in desperate straits, you can homeschool. Now whenever I mention homeschooling people get upset at me because they can't for whatever reason, but it is a valid option. We've been homeschooling since Becca was in grade 1, and you can remove your children from the school system. I had one friend who took her child out of grade 2 for six months just to teach her how to read, and then put her back in once she learned. The school hadn't taught her properly, and her confidence was faltering. So she bought Hooked on Phonics, worked through it with her, and all was well.
You don't have to put up with the things that school does. You don't have to put your child in sex ed, for instance. If the school says it's mandatory and you can't get out of it, don't make a fuss. Just schedule all their doctors and dentists appointments for those particular times.
If your child's school is holding a dance for grade 5, your child does not have to go. If your children's grade 8 class is having a coed sleepover to celebrate the end of the year, you don't have to let your child go.
We do have choices. We do not have to reflexively just do what everybody else is doing, and think that "this is just terrible, but what other choice is there?"
There is always another choice, and that choice is to just say, "no." "Enough."
Those swans knew how to protect their babies, and we need to learn how to protect our babies, too. So don't go with the waves. Find a buffer, and use it. You're the parent, and it's okay to say, "you're not doing that with my kid."
Amid all the hoopla about what the appropriate sex education curriculum is, we have missed the obvious. And so I present you with another way of looking at the issue:
It's simple. It's easy. And it's just clever enough to work! Spread the word: Pants! They do wonders. If you keep them on.
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. I didn't want to publish last week's on Friday because of the Easter weekend. It seemed sacreligious. So here it is, better late than never!
Back a few centuries ago, shame meant something. If you transgressed the community's values, you were an outcast, a scarlet letter, a source of derision.
We've tossed shame aside because we don't want to be cruel, but I have a brilliant idea of where shame could make a welcome comeback: I think we should make it a source of great shame to raise kids who are brats.
Think about how many of today's problems are caused by the fact that so many kids are holy terrors. Teachers have difficulty teaching, no matter how small the class size, if there are even one or two kids who won't sit still, who swear a blue streak and who terrorize other children. In response, we've created anti-bullying programs, and values education, and "Student of the Week”, all to try to give these bratty children an incentive to not be so bratty. It doesn't work.
So to all parents of brats, let me be frank: you are making life very difficult for the rest of us. And, as one blogger recently wrote, brat is not a learning disability.
A child may have ADD, but that doesn't mean he or she is mean, or violent, or cruel. It simply means he or she has trouble paying attention. If your child likes punching kids, or talking back to the teacher, or swearing loudly, he or she is likely not suffering from a psychological disorder. He or she is more than likely suffering from a parental disorder.
Schools cannot make up for lack of parenting. They can institute lunch and breakfast programs, write new curriculum, and hire teachers' aides to watch the out-of-control students, but in general, if a child doesn't behave at school, it's because he or she has never been taught to behave at home.
A century and a half ago, 18-year-old school marms managed one-room schoolhouses with way more children than your typical grade one class today, but they were able to do so partly because the kids behaved. And it wasn't just because the school marm had the ability to rap one's knuckles with a ruler. It was because if word of a child's misdeeds made it back to the parents, that child would be in a whole other whackload of trouble. Parents refused to tolerate brattiness.
I'm not saying schools don't contribute to the problem. I know one boy with ADD who acts out at school but doesn't act out at church or at home, because he simply needs structure. His open, multi-grade classroom doesn't give enough structure, and he can't handle it.
But not paying attention is completely different from being mean. And when teachers have children in their classrooms who talk back, who won't stay in their seats, and who hit and yell, then how do we expect other children to learn? It's not fair to the kids who do want to practice their multiplication tables and read in peace.
We must have compassion for badly-behaved children who are in the care of the Children's Aid Society, or who have grown up with truly horrific home situations. Their behaviour is a natural reaction to the horrors they have been dealt, and I hope that our schools and our children's welfare system can at least make a stab at getting these children on healthy footing. But many of the mean, badly behaved children I know have parents who should know better. You are not supposed to be your child's friend. You are not doing your child favours if you never discipline, never set limits, and give children everything they want. You're creating monsters the rest of us have to deal with it. And that is truly a shame.
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Well, the story just got worse. Now a school in Chicago has banned brown-bag lunches, requiring the children to eat in the cafeteria, because they don't trust parents to send healthy things.
Now, I understand the sentiment. I've helped out in public schools, and the number of kids who bring nothing but pop and chips for lunch is truly atrocious. But I completely agree with Mona Charen, from National Review Online, about this. She says:
Like any good mother, I hate to see kids eating chips and candy for lunch. But what the liberal coercive humanitarians can never see is that their intrusiveness further diminishes parental responsibility. We want to encourage parents to do the right thing for their kids, not remove the responsibility from their hands and thereby implicitly encourage carelessness.
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. This is one of those columns I wrote ages ago and never had the guts to publish. I made a few changes to bring it up to date and sent it in last week because I didn't have time to write a new one. I think I'm going to blasted in the Letters to the Editor section for this week's!
When I ask my young friends what their least favourite subject is, they invariably say “history”. I’m always amazed, because history’s so exciting! But perhaps the problem is not our illustrious and rather violent ancestors, but instead the way schools teach it.
In England, for instance, Vikings were once rightfully depicted as fierce raiders. But not anymore. Since 1994, England’s textbooks have depicted them as farmers who settled in Scandinavia and “expanded” from there (no word about how that expansion was carried out). That’s too bad, because Vikings are great fun to study! There’s blood, gore, pillaging, backstabbing, and all kinds of hair-raising tales. Yet kids will now be forced to learn about how the Vikings wanted to settle in France because of the longer growing season. It’s history without all those nasty bits, which, not uncoincidentally, is history without all the action.
It’s also history without any context. Although almost all students will hear about America’s history with slavery, for instance, fewer will learn that slavery was practised by almost all cultures until relatively recently. Nor will they hear that slavery is still practised in some parts of North Africa, two hundred years after it was abolished in the British empire, largely by the crusade of several Christian politicians, and one hundred and fifty years after it was abolished in the United States by the blood of both black and white. Yet don’t these facts matter if we’re going to try to understand slavery’s causes and legacy?
I don’t know what Canadian textbooks are like, though I had a peek with some geography resources we purchased at a library sale. The University of Toronto published a series of pamphlets covering all the countries in the world. We bought about 80 of them, and while perusing them I came across several interesting “facts”. Did you know that Cuba has complete freedom of religion? It’s too bad those priests and pastors in Castro’s jails haven’t been informed of that. And that after Israel declared independence in May 1948 a civil war broke out? I thought it generally was not called a civil war when five foreign powers invade you (in this case, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq). That’s like calling World War II the French Civil War.
It’s as if the goal is not to teach facts, but to make sure kids have the right opinions. We’ve begun censoring ourselves horribly. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being rewritten, with the infamous “n-word” changed to “slave”. CNN recently apologized for using the word “crosshairs” on its broadcast, since reminding people of Sarah Palin’s supposedly vitriolic rhetoric might inspire violence, forgetting that they themselves recently had a news show called “Crossfire”. We’re so interested in advancing the right opinions that we’re changing history. Yet how can kids—or anyone for that matter—form a coherent opinion without the facts?
I am reminded of a story a professor at NYU once told. On the first day of classes every year, he asks the students, “Who said, ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’?” Usually no one hazards a guess. So one year he gave a hint. “He was German.” An African-American girl offered, “Martin Luther?”, at which point all the students started to snicker. The professor was flabbergasted. Martin Luther was a German, and he did write about religion, so it was actually a good guess. Then he heard one boy whisper, “Don’t you know he was black?” The students assumed she meant Martin Luther King, Jr. What saddened the professor was not that they didn’t know the answer (it’s Karl Marx); it was that they didn’t even understand their own ignorance. I hope we put a stop to this historical revisionism, before ignorance is all we have left.
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I have two dear little friends who call me "Aunt Sheila". On Facebook I'm listed as their aunt (not in my main account, which many of you are on, but on my personal account where I only have all my teenage friends from church and my children, who I don't want seeing all the links to all the sex posts here on Wifey Wednesday :) ).
Anyway, these two girls are sisters, the third born and fifth born of fourteen children. They are lovely, and good friends with my own girls.
A few weeks ago they took off to South Dakota to attend the marriage of one of their best friends, who, at the time, was only 17 (it was just a few weeks before her eighteenth birthday). She was marrying someone she had known all her life. They had only been courting for a few months, but they were sure that they should marry. And so marry they did.
This whole thing caused a great deal of discussion in my household. Is it okay to marry at 17? She hasn't even seen the world! What if she doesn't want that kind of life, but only discovers it when she's 25?
I don't know the girl, I don't know her circumstances, and I really don't want to judge. But my initial reaction (which most of you will rebel against, so be forewarned), is that I don't think it's that bad.
Here's a girl who loves God, and a man who loves God (he's in his early twenties). They know each other well. They've lived in ranch country their whole life, and want to have a ranch themselves. He has a house for them. He has a steady job. And that's the life she wants.
But that's not the only reason I think it's all right. It mostly boils down to this: She has been doing the work of an adult since she was 12 or 13. She's one of the oldest in a very large family which has adopted a ton of kids. She has learned how to manage a farm. She has learned how to feed a ton of people at a time. She knows how to clean a house. She has organized chores, looked after money, budgeted, and cared for children.
She's ready.
But it's not that she's ready BECAUSE she knows how to be a housewife. I didn't know how to cook and clean well when I married, and I figured it out afterwards. That's not the important part. It's that she's been treated like an adult since she was quite young, and she's matured faster than most teens today.
My own girls, for instance, will probably not be ready for marriage at 17 (oh, please, don't let them even think about it, Lord!). They haven't led the kind of life this girl has. And they want more out of life than to stick to the confines of their family. But when one is treated like an adult from an early age, I think one acts like an adult.
Once again, I'm not saying I absolutely approve of this marriage; I don't know the girl, and I don't know the guy, and I don't know the circumstances beyond what I've shared, so please, let's not get into a debate about this particular marriage, because that could be hurtful to the parties. I'm just saying that I think it's POSSIBLE for a 17-year-old to be an adult, if they are treated like an adult. After all, two centuries ago girls were routinely marrying at 17 or 18. Even a few decades ago it was happening. It's only been in the last fifty years that we have extended adolescence into the early twenties, or even late twenties.
As Allen writes, “We place kids in schools together with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other kids typically from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. We group them all within a year or so of one another in age. We equip them with similar gadgets, expose them to the same TV shows, lessons, and sports. We ask them all to take almost the exact same courses and do the exact same work and be graded relative to one another. We give them only a handful of ways in which they can meaningfully demonstrate their competencies. And then we’re surprised they have some difficulty establishing a sense of their own individuality.” And we wonder why it’s taking so long for them to mature.
He goes on to address the issue that teen brains are not the same as adult brains with this:
But Allen speculates that our parenting style may indeed be causing their brains to be this way. Brains of teens a hundred years ago might have been far more mature. Without painful real-life experiences, modern teens’ brains never learn to tell the difference between what they should fear and what they shouldn’t. Without real consequences and real rewards, teens never learn to distinguish between good risks they should take and bad risks they shouldn’t. “We park kids on the sidelines, thinking their brains will develop if we just wait, let time pass, as if all they need is more prep courses, lessons, and enrichment courses. They need real stress and challenges.”
Perhaps we are hampering our kids from growing up appropriately because we don't treat them like adults.
One thing my children can do is navigate airports. We've been in so many, including third world ones from our missions trips, that they can go up to any counter and demand service, ask for a change in flight, ask just about anything. They're good at airports. And I take every opportunity, when we're out and need to figure out something, to have them go and ask. I want them to feel mastery of their own world.
But that's such a small thing. The big things are the things Allen talked about: taking risks, being productive, having meaning, having real work. Most kids do not have this. And it's no wonder, then, that they don't grow up.
I know many of you reading this blog don't have teenagers as I do. You're still in the baby years of parenting. But if I could offer you any important advice, it would be this: do not be afraid of demanding from your children everything they are capable of. And they are capable of far more than we think.
We are not put on earth to coddle our children or to give them a great life. We are put on this earth to equip them for a life they are to lead FOR GOD. We are not equipping them if we keep them from maturing, and much of life conspires to do that, from the media, to school, to recreational activities. Do not leave it to the schools or the church to help your child mature. You do it. Give them chores from an early age. Teach them to manage money. Teach them to be comfortable talking to adults by giving them lots of opportunities to meet interesting people. Teach them to cook and clean so they feel independent and capable.
Start when they're young. A 3-year-old can put his/her toys away. A 5-year-old can handle an allowance. An 11-year-old can make spaghetti and baby-sit siblings. A 14-year-old can have a part-time job or figure out a business to start for the summer. Make sure your children act as maturely as they can at each stage of their development, and for this they will require you steering them in the right direction. As you do that, their brains will develop. They will think on more mature lines. And it might just be that they are ready for far more than is commonly expected when they are 18, 19, 22, or 23.
Even if they don't get married at 17! (And I do hope the vast majority of them don't even think about it!)
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's, which was inspired by a blog post I wrote last week.
In San Francisco, many formerly happy children are now very sad. A few months ago, the Board of Supervisors decided to ban Happy Meals, because they offer toys to entice children to eat something unhealthy (never mind the fact that McDonald’s offers milk and fruit as an option). All restaurants that offer toys as incentives for unhealthy meals must now cease and desist.
Personally, I don’t think Happy Meals are great nutritional choices for children, either, though the occasional one will do no harm. Nevertheless, what concerns me more is this propensity of government to step into what is essentially a parent’s job.
Society works best when the family is the main social unit. Even dictators across the ages have known this, since one of the first things they do to increase their control is to weaken the family. In Mao Zedong’s Great March across China, female soldiers who gave birth on the 6000 mile trek were encouraged to leave their babies with peasants, for the good of the revolution. Today China forces women to abort second and third children, for the good of the country. In the Southern United States, during slavery, children were sold away from their parents to sever bonds. Dictators hate the family, because families form allegiances tighter than the ones we have to the state. And then we’re less likely to listen to what the state tells us to do.
For a society to be strong and free, then, the family has to be strong. But the more society starts doing parents’ jobs, the less parents will feel the need to do them.
To use another example, Michelle Obama, in her quest to slim the waistlines of America’s children, has expanded the feeding program for poor children, so that now up to 2,000,000 children will be eligible not just for school breakfasts or lunches, but for three meals a day, 365 days a year. The government will feed your kids!
Isn’t feeding children a rather basic responsibility of parenting? Besides, you can feed a family of four on $150 a week, if you cook from scratch, don’t buy cereal and ice cream, and plan carefully. And food banks are available to make up the difference.
Yet Ms. Obama thinks the government would do a better job. Has she considered the cost? It’s not just the people preparing the food, buying the food, and serving the food. It’s the army of nutritionists who plan the menus. The consultants hired to figure out what green vegetables kids will eat. The commodity experts hired to give their opinion on what prices will be in a few months. The state bureaucrats hired to lobby the federal government for a greater share of the pie. The federal bureaucrats hired to oversee the budget and decide what states get it.
Or we could just ask parents to feed their kids.
Lest you think this is just an American phenomenon, our own premiere is expanding kindergarten so that parents don’t have to care for their children barely out of toddlerhood, either.
Some parents are really and truly awful. But the more the government steps in, the more we tell those parents, “You don’t even need to try.” More and more, governments are doing what parents should do. They are teaching kids about sex. They are teaching them values. They are baby-sitting them. And yes, they are feeding them. And then we wonder why parents don’t step up to the plate.
We can’t afford a society where parents aren’t responsible. We can’t afford it fiscally, and we can’t afford it morally or socially. So I think it’s time we say to parents, “You’re the parent. Act like it.” I wish some politician would say that. That would be a politician I could get behind.
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Last week I took four teenagers (two were my own) down to New York for a Bible quizzing tournament. That means twelve hours, in total, in a car with these girls over the course of the weekend. And we got into some really interesting conversations.
One of the girls is a senior in high school who is very bright and very motivated. She finds it really difficult to process the fact that so many of her fellow students just can't write. She reads their papers, and thinks, "But you've been speaking English your entire life. You can speak a sentence. Why can't you write one?" She once got into a conversation with her English teacher about this, and her teacher said that there is a school of thought that in 100 years, tenses will disappear from our language. We're getting so lazy in the way we talk and write that difficult grammatical usages will slowly disappear.
We have more technology than ever, but people don't seem to know as much.
Around the same time as this conversation, I received an email from a university friend with a link to a Grade 8 final exam from 1931. It's got Geography, Civics, History, Literature, even Penmanship. Check it out. It's HARD! Way harder than we teach kids today.
I often get rather depressed at the lack of education kids get nowadays. I know that makes me sound like a fuddy duddy, but I think, with all of the problems we have to solve in the world, how can we do it when people can't handle more than a soundbite? When they don't know history to put things in perspective (ie. they don't know that Jerusalem actually has always had Jews living in it, for instance, and was the capital of the Jewish homeland basically forever). Or how can we attempt to even think about how to handle dictators today when most people do not know about Chamberlain's "peace in our time" speech?
But it's easy to attack the school system. My bigger issue, though, is that the church is doing very little to combat this. You would think that church would be a place which would emphasize learning; traditionally we have. Indeed, many denominations were born to be more "intellectual" compared with the "common people". Higher learning was originally all theology; everything flowed from that. It was assumed that to be a Christian meant that you were slightly more educated because you read the Bible and thought about it. And since Christianity encompassed all that you could know about God's creation, then higher learning all flowed from that theology.
But today in church we don't really require thought. We focus more on emotion. I find it difficult as a speaker to get past this; I do a much better job at weekend retreats when I can get more in depth into a subject than I do at the one-time events. But it is a challenge because people don't always WANT to think. And yet at the same time, our generation thinks that we are smarter than previous generations (despite that Grade 8 Geography Test).
One of my daughters' main complaints about Christian education, whether it be at church or at camp or at retreats, is that it always focuses on the same stories: David & Goliath, Noah's ark, Joshua, Joseph, Jonah. Rarely do you require kids to actually think. And the Bible stories are NEVER put in context. I read a study done recently of the incoming class at Moody Theological Seminary, I believe it was, and less than half could put these four events in chronological order: Moses, the exile of Judah, David, John the Baptist.
People just don't know the basics--even people who have been Christians their whole life.
And if we don't teach context, whether it be with the Bible or with history, then we aren't raising children to be really educated or to really be able to think. You'd think the church would be spearheading this, focusing on Bible memory and real Bible understanding, but instead we focus, too, on shallow things and entertainment. And then we wonder why twenty-somethings lose their faith.
I wish I knew the solution, but I don't. I think we were far smarter before there was TV and when families read together at night.
My only solution is for my own family: we don't have a TV, we homeschool, and we make our kids memorize. But that won't help the society at large. So what do we do? I really don't know. I'm at a loss. Anyone have any ideas?
There's been a lot of talk over my post last week criticizing the 3 meals a day, 365 days a year feeding program Michelle Obama is attempting to expand. I said it was terrible, because government was taking over a parent's job.
In the comments, some agreed, some didn't, and some were noncommittal. The issue for many was, what else are we going to do? We can't remove kids from their homes, and we have to feed them.
I agree, but I want to step backwards for a moment to see why this is the wrong thing to do.
First, I think this idea--that poor people can't feed their kids--is extremely insulting to poor people. My mother was abandoned when I was 2 years old. She had to get an apartment, get a job, and work her way up the ladder. It was tough. One month she didn't have enough money for rent. The church found out and lent her some. The next month she paid it back. She refused to accept charity, and she wanted me to know that she raised me herself.
She grew up in a house with no running water--even well into the 1960s. And yet she did well for herself, as did her sisters. Her parents coped.
There are readers of this blog who are on food stamps. I know some of their stories. One month one woman was desperate because the food stamps arrived late and she was worried. But it never occurred to her to not feed her kids. She visited a food bank temporarily, and then all was well again. They're getting back on their feet after a period of unemployment.
I have another friend who is in subsidized housing with her five children. Her money is extremely tight. But she cooks from scratch and they never, ever go hungry. They may not have cable, but they have food.
Many studies have shown, too, that those with the least disposable income are not those on welfare or at the bottom of the income scale. It's the "working poor", those who don't qualify for welfare, and thus don't qualify for Medicare in the US or the drug/dental plan in Canada. They don't have the government income supports, so they have to pay for everything. And they end up with less in their pockets than many who have such subsidies. But they press on because they want to raise their children themselves.
To say that the poor, who have access to welfare, food stamps, food banks, and churches, cannot feed their kids is excusing the poor from a basic responsibility. Our main responsibility, as parents, is to feed our kids first. And the income supports and charities are there, if one is motivated enough to find them. To not feed your kids is to not do one's most basic responsibility. It is not a problem of poverty; it is a problem of culture. I am reminded of some of the prophecies in Isaiah, where Isaiah repeatedly says that the famine will be so bad in the city that people will eat their own children. When I was a child myself and a teen reading that, I thought, "Oh, my goodness! How could anyone ever be that poor?" You see, I thought the passages were a description of their economic hardship.
What I only realized later, once I became a mother, was that those passages were not meant to describe how poor they were but how depraved they were. Honestly, would you ever be poor enough to eat your children? Nope. Inconceivable. If they were, the problem was not their poverty but their culture (which is probably why they were being judged by God in the first place).
We are in the same situation now. The problem is not income but culture. People would rather let the government feed their kids because then they have money for other things that they want more. And the more this happens, the more it becomes ingrained, "I do not have to do basic parenting functions. That is up to the government."
If people stop doing some basic parenting functions, what makes you think they won't stop doing more? Once you stop thinking of yourself as primarily responsible for your kids, and think that the schools are, or the government is, then you will stop doing all kinds of things that kids need you to do.
Being poor is not a crime. Most people who live in poverty do care for their children, and to say that the poor can't feed their kids is an insult to the very hard-working and proud people throughout our continent who are struggling in this horrible economic time, but who are not giving up on their role as parents.
The culture is the problem. And by doing these feeding programs, we are only ingraining a culture that says, "somebody else should raise my kids." How is that good for children?
If government stopped, people would be forced to feed their children again and take over some basic responsibilities. And if they didn't do that, then yes, I think government should step in and take those kids.
Perhaps that's stupid of me to say, because I know there aren't enough foster homes, and I know many foster homes are horrible (although all the foster parents I know, and I know quite a few, do such a great job that the kids want to stay). But until there are consequences to not doing a basic job as a parent, we are not going to see the culture change.
A better idea, I've always thought, is to stop giving money in welfare cheques to single/teen moms, and instead set up homes where women live in community, with social workers. Say 10-15 rooms, with a woman and a baby in each, where they learn to cook together, balance the budget together, and play with their kids together. They would get some job training, too, and then after a few years they would be expected to fend for themselves.
To give a 17-year-old a welfare cheque that allows her to live in her own apartment if she gets pregnant is just stupid. If a 17-year-old knew that if she were pregnant, she'd have to go live in a home and actually work, maybe we'd see fewer kids becoming single mothers.
But that's just my idea, and perhaps that's naive, too. I don't know what the solution is. But I do know there is something sick in our culture when the government thinks it has to feed 2,000,000 children 3 meals a day because parents can't/won't do it. That's not a poverty issue. It's a cultural issue. And we must, we simply must, change that culture.
UPDATE: A reader sent along this link for a volunteer group that's not just running a soup kitchen; they're teaching lower income people how to prepare produce, to help learn healthy eating. I think this is a far better model (private charity) than government help, and if someone were to individually want to help, this is a great place to start. I just don't think government should have a role in it.
I heard a news article this week about how Michelle Obama's Healthy Kids Initiative (or whatever it's called) is aiming to feed 2,000,000 children three healthy meals a day, 365 days a year. No longer will it just be breakfast during the school year; they're going to feed kids all the time in a push to reduce childhood obesity.
The analyst was praising this initiative.
I have to ask, "are you nuts?!?"
Let's think this through for a moment. How many government bureaucrats is it going to take to feed 2,000,000 children three meals a day?
1. All the people who cook the food 2. All the people who serve the food 3. All the people who purchase the food
But it doesn't stop there. There's also:
4. The nutritionists hired to create menus. They'll have meetings, and conferences, and mega phone calls to discuss all the different things they should serve.
5. The consultants hired to study which green vegetables kids will actually eat.
6. The university graduate students hired to actually conduct these studies.
7. The professors hired to analyze the results and share them with the consultants.
Then let's not leave out the finance guys.
8. The commodities experts hired to give their opinion on which commodities will be relatively more expensive by the end of the year, so that menus can be altered to reflect the cheapest, healthiest food.
What about government bureaucrats?
9. The accountants hired to oversee the program. 10. The managers hired to oversee the accountants.
And let's not forget the states:
11. The bureaucrats each state hires to lobby the federal government for more share of the federal dollars for the state meal programs.
12. The federal bureaucrats hired to analyze the submissions by the state governments and decide how to divvy up the money.
And it goes on, and on, and on.
Let me be really radical here. I know food is expensive, but on a relative basis, it is cheaper today than it ever has been, as a proportion of one's income. If one is thrifty, and does not buy prepared food, cereal, or ice cream, one can feed a family of four on $125/week (in the U.S. anyway; up here in Canada dairy is way more expensive).
Food banks are available for those whose money is really stretched.
If you cannot feed your children, you should not have your children.
Isn't feeding your kids one of the most basic parenting responsibilities? If the state starts feeding the kids, then what are parents supposed to do? We're absolving them of the necessity of being parents. And then we wonder why kids misbehave.
I understand the rationale for breakfast feeding programs; kids who are hungry don't learn as well. That doesn't mean I agree with them necessarily, though. If a parent doesn't feed a child breakfast, that should be grounds for removing the child from the home.
So Ms. Obama, I agree kids need to eat more healthily. But this is not the way to do it. How about we get back to the idea that parents feed their kids? I know it's radical (actually expecting responsibility from parents), but it would do a lot of good.
I have a dear 17-year-old friend named Rachel. She is a delight; intelligent, articulate, motivated, kind, funny. We can have conversations about literature, morality, God, and just plain life. She's in the youth program that I run at church.
But right now Rachel is completely stressed, and it's all because of a magazine.
You see, in her senior philosophy class, she has an assignment whereby she has to create a 20-page magazine using a computer software no one has taught them how to use. The magazine must portray a philosophical theme. It must contain a table of contents, several advertisements, and several different types of articles (how-to, interview, essay, fiction).
That may not sound like much, but she showed me the prototype yesterday in church and I just gulped. They want it to look like a magazine--complete with graphics, photographs, appropriate fonts, etc. etc. And it's 20 freaking pages.
Here's my question: what is the educational value of this assignment? It's a philosophy class. I can understand the teacher wanting to see if they can carry a theme over into different types of articles and ads, but then ask them to just write the articles, and do some sample ads. Why set it up as a magazine? It is not, after all, an art class or a computer graphics class.
Rachel is trying to keep her average in the mid-90s to get scholarships to universities next year. So she is putting a ton of work into this magazine, so much so that it is all she has talked about in over a month, despite the fact that she has other work. Think about real magazine editors; they work full-time to create such a magazine. Rachel is supposed to do one for homework over the course of a month.
How is she supposed to get it done? And done to her standards (she never does things halfway).
It reminds me of the time that my oldest daughter took a grade 9 French class online through our Board of Education (we homeschool, so it was her first exposure to public schooling). One of her first assignments was to create a poster, complete with graphics, that explained ten things about her. She had to write sentences (like I have one sister, or I do not have any pets), but then she needed to put pictures with the sentences and make it interesting to look at.
She spent hours on this assignment, getting the right graphics and creating a poster. But what did searching out graphics on the internet have to do with a French class? She wrote the sentences in 5 minutes flat. She didn't learn any extra French using Flickr Creative Commons to find the right pictures. It was a make work project.
I think often teachers assign these sorts of things because they think it will make them more interesting, but all it does is add hours to homework assignments for little benefit. I have no problem with creating nice graphics, by the way--but those were not the learning objectives for the course. And in Rachel's case, the learning objectives included understanding basic tenets of philosophy, not spending a ton of time understanding how to use the professional version of Adobe Publisher, or whatever it's called.
The high school students I know seem to fall into two camps: the ones who do the minimum amount of work, and still pull off 75-80, and the ones who are up until 2 every morning trying to finish their entire assignment, and pull off 92s and 93s. The amount of work you have to put in to get a 93 instead of an 80 is insane. And it doesn't teach you anything more about the subject matter.
It doesn't begin in high school, either. I have spoken to kids in middle school and below who also had ridiculous assignments, involving copious amounts of glue and magazines and scissors and other things that did nothing to teach you the subject matter. I remember one child who had to present the multiplication tables in a 12-page booklet, teaching them 12 different ways. I have no problem with that; so far so good. But they also had to use 12 different art mediums, and they had to use different fonts and different looks for each page.
Why not just spend a few hours forcing the children to actually memorize their times tables (this child didn't know them by heart, and this exercise wasn't helping). We spent far less time on multiplication than this child did, but my kids can rattle off 32 * 64 or 78 * 12 pretty easily, because they learned the basics first and can do it in their heads easily. And they didn't learn it by creating booklets with glue. They learned it through tons of timed drills.
And so I repeat: what is the point of all of this homework? If it has an educational value, with a learning outcome attached, I am fine with it. But so much of it seems like a make work project to keep the kids busy, rather than actually showing that they have mastered something significant.
I have no problem with art, by the way; what I do have a problem with is insisting that children create something visually appealing in a class that has nothing to do with that.
Our kids have too much homework, in the sense that they have too many ridiculous assignments. If they were bringing home book reports and essays and creative writing assignments and history timelines and maps to fill in, I'd be okay with it. But too much of what they do doesn't teach the content area anyway; it just keeps them busy and--most importantly--it steals family time.
My friend Rachel has other things she'd like to do this year. She wants to work more to earn money for university, but she doesn't have time. She'd like to socialize a bit more (she hardly has any time for that). She'd like to make it out to youth group more. She'd like to be on the rugby team, or some other sports teams. But there simply is no time.
Why are we stealing the life of 17-year-old kids with ridiculous assignments? High school should not be only about work; it should be about preparing kids for life, which includes having an active volunteer life at church, earning money, saving money, negotiating and navigating relationships, getting exercise, and spending time with family.
I hope that her teacher reads this and apologizes, because she could really use an apology right now.
Here's the scenario: Your 11-year-old son is on a soccer team where the coach believes winning and losing are not categories that should ever be discussed. He believes in complete equality, and so each child is given equal time on the field.
The team loses every single game. The kids feel horrible about themselves. They make up stupid names for their team. They pout.
Then one day, out of the blue, you get the opportunity to coach for just one game. What do you do?
That's the scenario that journalist Barry Rubin faced on his son's team. And so he coached that game, putting the good players on the right positions and keeping them in for more of the game. The team won!
He writes:
I worried that the boys who played less of the game and were given seemingly less significant positions would be resentful. But quite the opposite proved true.
With the team ahead, they were thrilled. One shouted from the sidelines something I thought showed real character: “Don’t let the good players do all the work!” Instinctively, he recognized that some players are better, but he wanted to bring everyone’s level up rather than down. I’m tempted to say he was going against what he was being taught in school.
They played harder, with a bit more pressure and a less equal share of personal glory than they’d ever done before. But after the victory, they were glowing and appreciative, amazed that they had actually won a game. Yes, winning and being allowed to give their best effort as a team was far more exciting and rewarding for them than being told they had done wonderfully by just showing up, that everyone should be treated equal as if there were no difference in talents, and that the results didn’t matter.
Suddenly, I noticed that one boy’s mother was really angry at him, claiming he hadn’t showed good sportsmanship because he was too happy over the victory. Not seeing anything that might have provoked her outrage, I wondered whether this was a suggestion that one should apologize for winning. Still, the bawling out didn’t put a damper on his big smile.
Competition is an interesting conundrum for parents. We don't want our children to feel badly about losing, and we don't want them to think that winning is all that matters. But at the same time, there is no doubt that many children are motivated to try harder if there is some sort of competition.
In the not so distant past, competition was a regular part of childhood. Every school had spelling bees and math bees. The kid who made top marks was lauded. Sunday Schools had races and contests at each picnic, and even the adults got into it. Churches had baseball teams that played against each other--and often took it very seriously! Almost everyone was involved in some sort of competition.
Today, I would say that a minority of children are. We have taken competition out of many institutions. Most churches don't have Sunday School races anymore. They don't have big baseball tournaments between rival congregations. Schools have eliminated tag and spelling bees and other contests. And why? Because we don't want children to feel badly about themselves.
My children are currently involved in a HUGE competition. I know it sounds geeky, but they do Bible quizzing with our church. Last year they had to learn all of 1 and 2 Corinthians, and they had four meets a year in our district. The top 10 made it to internationals (both my girls went). Our first quiz meet for this year (we're studying the book of John) is on Saturday. They've been studying like crazy.
Does the competition help? You betcha. Without it, they would never have the incentive to learn the material as inside out as they know it right now. When you have to compete against somebody, you have to push yourself to do your best. You discover things inside yourself that you never knew you had. You discover skills and mental prowess that were lurking there but never showed up.
My children really only compete at Bible quizzing and in music and public speaking festivals, but I do like the competition because it encourages excellence. Is it good for every child? Maybe not in huge doses, but I do think each child should be in some sort of competition at some point, because I think competition mirrors real life.
Our society is tying itself up in knots to cover up this one central fact: human beings are not equal in skill. We're equal before God, and we're equal in worth, but we are not all equally skillful. Some are smarter. Some are faster. Some are more coordinated. That is just simply fact.
Nobody wants to acknowledge this, though, because by saying someone is faster, you're simultaneously saying that most are slower. Yet is that so bad to know about yourself? I know it's difficult to accept, but I think it would be worse for a child to grow up his or her whole life and think they were above average, only to start working in university or start trying to land a job and find that they're not considered a good catch. We need to know where we have areas we have to grow in.
Not everyone will land every job. Not everyone will get into every school, get the recording contract, win that scholarship, marry the most beautiful person. Life is full of competitions everywhere, and we have to get used to dealing with it, and to pushing ourselves, where appropriate, so that we can shine.
I do think that there are some personalities that are less able to handle competition, but I warn you against labelling your child like that prematurely. I never thought my youngest daughter would do well in Bible quizzing. She hated memorizing, she was too social, and she hated anything resembling work. She didn't like competition up until that point.
I was going to discourage her from joining, but she wanted to give it a try, so I said yes, telling her not to expect to do as well as her sister did.
In her first year of quizzing, she won top rookie. She was better than her sister. And I never saw it coming.
At internationals she didn't do as well, when the competition was harder. She had to learn what it was not to be the best. But she was an excellent teammate to those who were doing well, and she encouraged them, and she didn't take it personally that she didn't meet her goals.
Competition has made her so mature, but I never would have thought in a million years that she would do as well as she has.
Perhaps it's time to bring back some form of competition again. Let's have Scripture memory contests in our churches. Let's do more spelling bees. Let's play more board games at home! Teach kids what it means to be a good winner, to try hard, and to succeed; but also teach them what it means to not get what they were hoping for, and how to be happy (or at least gracious) towards those who do.
Isn't that closer to real life than this equality charade we're trying to pull off? Or do I have it wrong? Tell me what you think for your own child, because I know each family is different!
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
Every now and then, an idea explodes through our collective consciences, challenging our notions about how life works. It happened in the fifteenth century when Galileo argued that the earth was round. It happened in the eighteenth century when upstarts in North America decided they wanted to govern themselves. And I hope, for some of you parents, it may happen as you ponder this thought: What if parenting is not about helping your kids accomplish certain tasks, but instead about raising them to want to accomplish those things by themselves?
Take the frantic morning routine that sends many parents careening for the Tim’s drive-through in desperation before it’s done. You yell and plead for the kids to get up, to no avail. So you yank off covers, rifle through drawers to find clothes, and hunt for the glasses Sally can’t locate, all while stuffing lunches into backpacks.
No one else seems to be able to hear that bus countdown that is ticking loudly in your own mind. Just when you’ve finally finished ensuring all your offspring is properly attired, one announces that he forgot to do his math homework. So you hunt for a piece of paper and a pencil and start multiplying, while you shove a cereal bowl towards him. By the time the children mount the bus stairs you’re exhausted, and it’s not even nine o’clock yet.
Unfortunately, most parents focus on helping their children complete tasks, instead of helping their children own those tasks. What kids really need is not a mom or a dad who runs around afterwards picking up all the pieces. Kids need to learn to be responsible for themselves, or they’ll wind up moving back in when they’re 23, hoping you’re still around to get them off to their dead-end job. We are accepting too much responsibility.
I read of one mother who was so frustrated by her typical morning that she warned the children that if they missed the bus, and made her drive them to school, then they would have to clean up the kitchen that night in exchange. She explained the new arrangement, and then she shut her trap. She didn’t nag them about homework, or backpacks, or lunches, or breakfasts. She let them figure it out. They soon learned that they didn’t really enjoy cleaning out dirty pots and pans. And lo and behold, she got her mornings back.
Our society seems to believe that children’s behaviour reflects completely upon parents, and so parents tend to do too much to cover up for kids’ failures. All we’re doing, though, is encouraging irresponsibility. Why not make children responsible for the things that are rightly theirs? If they don’t get their homework done, they fail the test. If they fail the test, they lose TV and video game privileges. No more griping over homework. If teens want a car, they have to pay for the insurance, which means they have to get a job. And if they’re late for that job, they lose it. Their problem, not yours.
If your three-year-old can’t behave on a playdate, you leave. You don’t coax them or bribe them or flatter them. If your eight-year-old can’t find his hockey equipment, he misses the game. End of story.
Allowing children to fail teaches children what real life is all about. Turning ourselves into pretzels to help them get through that playdate, finish that homework, make that bus, or afford that cell phone doesn’t teach them anything except that irresponsibility doesn’t matter.
If you’re running ragged trying to fix your children’s lives, quit it. The world isn’t going to stop spinning if they miss that bus. Galileo figured that out six hundred years ago. Maybe it’s time we caught up
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As many of you know, I homeschool, but I don't want this post to be about homeschooling. Most of you, my readers, don't homeschool, and I just simply want to present a very real problem, and then ask what we should do about it (without necessarily getting into a fight over homeschooling in the comments, if that's okay!)
While I do homeschool my girls, they also take a few courses from an online school, run by our Board of Education in my province. Rebecca has done Science and some senior level math (to get the high school credits, to make it easier to get into university), and Katie is now doing French and grade 9 Science. I teach everything else. It's a good mix.
But I have no illusions that the Science is actually taught well all the time. Katie's first assignment of the year, for instance, was really about becoming acquainted with the help that is available on the internet. She had to formulate 4 questions, one in each area of Biology, Chemistry, Astronomy, and Electricity. Then two of the questions she had to research in an online library run by the Ministry of Education, and two she had to ask using the "Ask The Teacher" resource run by our Ministry as well. Students can sign in at night and ask high school teachers (not their own) questions they're having problems with.
Here was our chemistry question: We've been talking about honour killings abroad, and how in India and Pakistan acid is often poured on women's faces. She asked, "why is acid called burning when it's not hot? Why does it actually burn?"
That sounded like an interesting question to me. Here's how the online conversation went:
Teacher: It burns because it's a chemical reaction. Katie: What's the reaction? Teacher: It's a reaction that burns the skin. Katie: Yes, but how? Teacher: You're not supposed to know that yet. Chat turned off.
How's that for encouraging learning?
Rebecca took the same course two years ago, and had the same assignment, and had the same experience with one of her questions she asked ("what is heavy water"?).
I told Katie to just reproduce the conversation, as it was, and put it in her assignment, and then we spent about 3 minutes searching the web for the answer (because I honestly don't know how acid burns skin; I wanted to find out). We found the answer, and wrote it down, telling her teacher that the Ask The Teacher thing is useless.
Here's the thing: Teachers are supposed to TEACH. They're supposed to inspire a great love of learning, a curiosity about the world, that is insatiable. A child who has an insatiable curiosity will do well in life, because they will always be expanding their horizons.
Instead, though, teachers often cut off any kind of imagination because it doesn't fit with what they're trying to teach (or because they don't know and they don't want to seem ignorant in front of students). But this isn't really teaching.
Coming from a homeschooling background, my attitude whenever we come across something I can't answer is to say, "Wow, that's interesting. Let's figure it out." And we do. The girls learn how to research, and they get answers to their questions, even if they're years ahead of where they're supposed to be in school. Who cares? If they're interested now, let's go for it!
Schools, though, usually don't have time for such pursuits. Now I know there are teachers who are exceptional, who do encourage this sort of thing, and perhaps we'll have teachers in the comments section saying that they would have figured it out as well. That's great. But on the whole, this does not happen, and to say that individual teachers may be different doesn't really help. The problem is that as an institution, education, the way we do it now, does not encourage curiosity. It encourages conformity, and more of the "just be quiet and listen" method of learning, which is not engaging whatsoever.
It reminds me of one of the reasons we decided to homeschool in the first place. Rebecca was starting senior kindergarten and was reading Amelia Bedelia and Junie B. Jones books on her own. (She was an early reader; Katie was not. Same household. Same reading out loud to kids from 6 months old on; but Katie didn't read until she was 6 1/2. So it's not necessarily that we caused Rebecca to read early; I think she was just intellectually ready). Anyway, the school would send home these "book in a bag" programs to encourage kids to read, and they were 10 page books with pictures that went something like, "It is sunny. It is cloudy. It is raining." You get the idea.
The child could "read" it even if they couldn't read because of the pictures, and it was supposed to enhance reading readiness.
The school would send home these books, and I would send back Junie B. Jones for Rebecca to read at school. The teacher knew Rebecca could read, but it didn't stop her from sending home these "baby" books, because that's what all kinds were supposed to be doing. There was no room to take a child who was excelling and move her forward. She just stagnated.
John Taylor Gatto has written a ton on how the school system, as a whole, is completely antithetical to real education, because it kills imagination and it kills true comprehension. It actually dumbs students down, because it squeezes out that which makes us smart--the quest for knowledge. Certainly an exceptional teacher can make a difference, but it's the institution that is bad--the idea of having 30 kids of all different ability levels learn together just because they share the same birth year. And then the stuff they learn, and the way they teach it, isn't necessarily ideal for learning.
It just makes me sad. Katie and I laughed off the incident last night, but it still makes me cringe when I think of all the kids who could otherwise be learning in a different environment, wasting away in school. And I do mean wasting away. I absolutely hated school (even though my marks were very good) because I was bored out of my mind. I always learned more from reading books than I did from school. And yet we force kids to endure this.
What's the answer? I really don't know. Homeschooling is an answer for an individual family, but it isn't an answer for society as a whole, because obviously not all families will ever homeschool. But I think we have to do school completely differently. Not just look for better teachers--there aren't enough of them. I think we need to do school differently. I just don't know what that would look like. Any ideas? Or have you ever been frustrated like this with your child's school? Let me know!
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
I have a little friend who, when he was only five, did a horrendous thing. He bit a boy at school. This particular boy had been pestering him for months, and my little friend lashed out by sinking his teeth in. A human bite, unfortunately, is not clean, and it sent the bully on a trip to the Emergency Room. Meanwhile my little friend was given quite the verbal lashing by the principal about how violence is never the answer.
His mother, a good friend of mine, was quite perplexed about how to react. Personally, I told her, I think his transgression was twofold: he used his teeth rather than his hands, and he did so at school where violence is never permitted. Other than that, was he really so wrong? Kids have been fighting back against bullies for time immemorial, and it’s often quite effective in getting bullies to back off.
Taking the publishing world by storm a few years ago was The Dangerous Book for Boys. It doesn’t give secrets on how to get your mothers to feed you chocolate or how to get your way with women. It simply talks common sense about things that have been part of boyhood almost forever, until our generation forgot them. Things like how to tie a knot, how to fish, how to jump from a rock into the water, or how to survive in the wilderness. These were the plotlines of most boys’ novels until relatively recently, when we started to believe that what boys truly desired was to share their feelings.
When places like schools try to curb boys’ natural impulses to be active, risk-taking, and even a bit violent, we run the risk that children will start acting out inappropriately in places with less supervision. If boys are told they must sit still and listen to books all day, they’re more likely to go off the rails after school. If boys can’t play tag at recess because it’s too competitive, or they can only play if everyone gets to be “it”, we aren’t going to curb their natural boyhood impulses. They’re simply going to express them in other ways.
Over the years we have taken all the danger out of childhood. We do this in the interest of safety, and few could argue against bicycle helmets for children, or against safe playground equipment, or for playing with matches. But there is a part of boys, and even many girls, that still yearns for risk.
Remember the playground equipment when we were young? You ran a risk every time you used the teeter totter because you had to trust the guy on the other end not to jump off suddenly. And what about that merry go round? They’re removed from most playgrounds today because if you get a few bigger kids creating momentum, a smaller child could go flinging off. Of course, that’s why many boys ride them in the first place—the flinging part is the attraction! But that’s all the more reason to get rid of these dangers.
As schools banish anything resembling danger, much of the adventure of childhood is being removed. For all children, but especially for boys who tend to gravitate towards risk-taking more than girls do, this isn’t always a good thing. That’s why The Dangerous Book for Boys is needed. It’s a philosophy to bring adventure back into family life, even if the schools are squeezing it out because they’re afraid of being sued.
Most boys love seeing things explode, or collapse, or go bang. They love starting fires, sleeping outdoors, and even killing things. It’s time for some adventurous, adult men to step up to the plate and let boys be just a little bit dangerous. What else is childhood for?
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Last year, I began the school year complaining about an advertising campaign by Staples in Canada, "It's the most wonderful time of the year". Here's the ad:
I always found this insulting to kids. I wondered how children felt, watching that ad, getting the feeling that their parents were happy to be rid of them.
I was thinking about that while I heard the radio ad last week, when I also read this article on the nature of "real life". Tessa, a friend on my Facebook Group, was writing about the phenomenon that happens every year around this time of parents expressing delight that children will be back at school and they can get their "real life" back. She talks about this assumption that real life is when we are free from responsibilities, free from the repercussions of having kids, marriages, jobs, or life. She says:
When a woman gets pregnant, she’s bombarded with social messages that tell her she is supposed to “want her body back,” and the pressure begins to keep pregnancy as short as possible. When she breastfeeds, she’s not only told she’s supposed to “want her body back,” but to “want her life back,” something that can only be done by weaning the baby, of course, since breastfeeding is clearly not a part of life and “life” seems to be comprised of as many tactics as possible to physically distance yourself from your offspring. Case in point, when her child becomes school age, the woman is supposed to rejoice in sending the child away (to “real” school, of course), so she can finally “have her life back” again.
I have to admit that at times I yearn for solitude, or vacation, or just a day to curl up in bed and read a novel with no one bugging me. Now that the girls are older, that's more inclined to happen, but I still have work responsibilities with my writing, and deadlines, and blogging, and emails, and manuscripts to write.
But I think, for many, there is more going on here. Why do we yearn so much to be free of kids? Why do we yearn so much to be carefree again? I think there's this conception that the pinnacle of life is complete leisure and entertainment, without having to make dinner, or potty train anybody, or clean up toys. I know parenting is exhausting, and everybody needs a break every now and then. But parenting is my real life, not sitting in a hammock reading a book. My work is my real life, not goofing off all the time. I enjoy breaks, and we need rest, but the rest should be the exception, not the rule. What is wrong with actually enjoying the life that we have created for ourselves? To live for the brief snatches of time when we have no responsibilities seems like such a shallow life. If you're doing that, you're saying that your everyday life is miserable. Who wants to live like that?
I think we need an attitude shift that begins to appreciate work and routine and responsibility, rather than resents the fact that we have to work. Life was not supposed to be a giant party, and yet that's how it's often portrayed in our popular culture.
Personally, I do look forward to September. It is a good time of the year for me, because it represents new challenges, and new chances, and new opportunities. I get to plan what I want to accomplish this year, and what I want to do with my girls. Because we homeschool, it doesn't mean that I'm without my girls, or celebrating getting my "real" life back. What I am celebrating is a schedule once again. I find it often difficult during the summer because we don't have a schedule per se, and everything is always changing with vacations. How do you get meals made, housework done, exercise fit in, when things aren't the same? So even though September is busy, I like it because I feel like life is back again.
But that "life" is still with my girls. That "life" is still with my husband. Work is still involved. And I'm happy with that, because I like feeling as if my life has a purpose, as if I am moving towards something, as if God is making something important out of what I give Him everyday. If life were just about leisure, I wouldn't have that.
My real life has begun again, and I'm happy. It's a real life that takes work, that's busy, and sometimes I wonder if I can fit everything in. But I'm glad that it's here, because it represents everyone I love. And what would my life be without that?
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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