And along those lines, here's another good post on how to get little ones to help you tidy! And another very worthy one (with pictures!).
Here's an interesting article on why a woman decided to be a SAHM. I like the feel of this article--I might chronicle my own journey soon in a post!
Now for something complete different: Here's what's supposed to be a feel good article about teachers in Reader's Digest: 20 Things Your Child's Teacher Won't Tell You. It's written by the American Federation of Teachers, so it's slanted. I find things like this a little difficult to read. One point, for instance, says:
4. We don’t arrive at school 10 minutes before your child does. And we don’t leave the minute they get back on the bus. Many of us put in extra hours before and after school.
Ah, but I know teachers who DO arrive 10 minutes before (or sometimes after class is supposed to begin) and they leave early. Some do work long hours. But not all.
The truth is some teachers are amazing. Some do have a calling. But not all do. I don't understand why teachers get so defensive about this. If you're a great teacher, parents will know it. We parents talk about who the good teachers are. We try to arrange to get our kids into your classes.
If you're a lousy teacher, though, parents know that, too. We're allowed to criticize electricians, pastors, plumbers, and cashiers. Why is it so sacrosanct to not criticize teachers? Hint to you teachers: it makes you look incredibly thin-skinned, and makes us not take you seriously. We love the great teachers. If your unions would stop whining, we may appreciate the rest of you a little more, too. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but that's how we feel! You do yourselves no favours when the line taken so often in the media is, "teachers are awesome. They do a great job. The fault lies entirely with parents." We know some parents are lousy, but not all are, just like with teachers. When you take "it's everybody's fault but ours" line, it sounds like you're just passing the buck, and it's hard to respect someone who does that.
Another note: whenever I post on teachers, I invariably have commenters questioning my right to post on this, because I homeschool my kids.
That assumes that the only people who have a stake in the education system are parents whose kids are there right now. But I have friends with kids having great trouble in school because of teachers, or curriculum, or bullying. I have nephews and nieces in the school system.
But more importantly, aren't we all stakeholders in the education system? First, we're stakeholders simply because our tax dollars go to fund it, and so we all should have a say. But secondly, we're stakeholders because all our future doctors, nurses, clerks, garbage collectors, lawyers, designers, and computer engineers are currently in school. If we care about the future of our country, we care about schools, whether our own children are in public schools right at this minute or not.
I hope that addresses that concern!
What do you think on these issues? Any great suggestions for kids' chores? Why did you decide to stay home (if you do)? Any thoughts on schools, teachers, or thin-skinned unions? How do we help teachers and parents get on the same page again? I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of these issues!
And now I've got further proof that my thesis is correct! Apparently in California, it is extremely rare for a teacher to be fired for classroom behaviour. It's other stuff. They can teach horribly, and they still get a pass.
Here's an example of one guy who obviously needs to be fired:
The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.
He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.
Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy.
"Look," Polanco allegedly said, "you can't even kill yourself."
The boy's classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.
"See," Polanco was quoted as saying, "even he knows how to commit suicide better than you."
Initially the guy was fired, but a review board overturned that decision.
Apparently in my home province of Ontario it's easy to get fired--but I think that's only in the first two years. After that, the union thing kicks in and your job is pretty much protected. And I still think that's a crying shame.
If we truly value children, and truly value their education, why don't we demand the best possible teachers for them? Why is it so hard to fire them?
There are some areas of our society where unions have done an incredible amount of damage, and I truly believe this is one of them. Many marvelous, gifted teachers I know have left the teaching profession because they get no reward for standing out from the crowd. It is really heartbreaking.
We homeschool, so I don't deal directly with this. But many of my friends have spent an entire year grappling with bad teachers, bad principals, bad everything. And often it seems like nothing can be done. And the kids are the ones who suffer.
I don't understand why the group that sends me the most hate mail tends to be teachers.
I write a syndicated column every week, and frequently I write about education issues simply because it's supposed to be a family column. I get lots of hate mail, but whenever I criticize the teaching profession, the hate mail increases exponentially.
Lately it's related to this column, called "Teaching Disabilities", which I wrote last week. In it, I posited that a lot of the problems that kids may have in school may be due to poor teaching, as is evidenced by the rate of success of early intervention programs which drive down the learning disability rate exponentially. Intervene early, and teach phonics, and suddenly kids don't have learning disabilities.
In the column I never said all teachers were bad. In fact, I included this paragraph:
My husband, as a doctor, knows that not all physicians are wonderful. He’d be wary if someone he loved had to be treated by several of his medical school classmates. I’m sure good teachers feel the same way about some of their fellow educators. They know who can’t teach worth beans, but they can’t say or do anything about it.
I took care to say that some teachers are good. At the beginning of the column, I also said this:
After all, not all teachers are good teachers. Over my public school experience I had about forty teachers. Five were exceptional. The vast majority were competent, but sometimes blah. And then there were those who actually made me stupider
I never said that the vast majority were awful. I said that there were exceptional teachers. I never maligned every teacher. I even said that it may be the methods, and not the teacher, that is at fault. And the teacher is not necessarily responsible for the methods, after all.
But the emails I've received back from teachers accuse me of hating teachers and doing just that. I don't get it.
I know a lot of teachers (they seem to be overrepresented in my group of friends). Most are just wonderful. I have several close friends (Kellianne, Wanda, Anita, Lisa, Heather, Tom, Evelyn, Rob, Adrian) who are just great teachers. They love what they do, they feel called to it, they care about the kids, they feel privileged God has let them serve in this way.
But then there are others who complain constantly about the unfairness of everything. The marking is too demanding. The kids are horrible. Everyone expects too much out of them. I don't understand this. I really don't. They get the summers off! I know it's hard to teach (that's why I didn't go into it), but they made that decision to launch into that career. They are better paid than most university grads. They get a lot of vacation. What is it with the constant griping?
I know it's a hard job, but lots of people have hard jobs. And at least teachers have a degree so that if they do quit, it's easier to find another job. Teachers in Ontario, the province where I live, are getting a 12% raise right now in the middle of a recession. So why so defensive?
Surely teachers must realize, too, that not all teachers can teach? My husband realizes that not all doctors are good doctors. I know that not all writers are good writers. My dentist knows that not all dentists are good dentists. So can't teachers know that not all teachers are good teachers? Can't you write a column that says that some teachers can't teach and not get teachers beating you up over it?
I know it's a minority (I've had a whole lot more positive emails from parents than I have from teachers), but I do wonder why teachers are so sensitive to perceived slights. Is it that they sense the resentment from parents and others about the terms of their job? Is it because they know that not all kids are getting a good education?
Now I also know that I write in a rather inflammatory manner, too. That's the nature of a column (and it's the nature of a 600 word limit). I can't make all the points I want to make, or soften as much as I may want to. But I also don't want all my columns to be squishy. I do want to make people think, and I don't apologize for that.
But why is it that teachers respond in anger so much more than other professions when I write? I'm honestly clueless about this, so any help would be much appreciated!
Each week my syndicated column, Reality Check, goes out to half a million households. Here's this week's, guaranteed to get me in a wee mite of trouble. See what you think:
When a child in grade three can’t read, we normally assume that child has a learning disability. But is it always the child’s fault? Isn’t there the possibility that the child could be suffering from a teaching disability?
After all, not all teachers are good teachers. Over my public school experience I had about forty teachers. Five were exceptional. The vast majority were competent, but sometimes blah. And then there were those who actually made me stupider. If they had said nothing at all, but had just given me the textbook to read, I probably would have come out ahead.
Unfortunately, school boards often find their hands tied when it comes to firing bad teachers. The unions have such entrenched rules that awful teachers and principals are often shuffled around from school to school. Few are ever fired for anything other than sexual assault. Yet does that mean that every teacher currently teaching is gifted?
Some children do have genuine learning disabilities. However, education professor Jay P. Greene, an expert in intervention to reduce learning problems, found that early intervention reduced learning disabilities from upwards of 22% in some states to between 2 and 10%. That’s a huge difference, showing that quite often the problem does not lie with the child. It’s the teachers, and the methods, that cause kids to fail to learn. I had a friend who took her daughter two grade levels ahead in reading by going through Hooked on Phonics with her. Others hired private tutors and suddenly their children “got” math. They weren’t learning disabled at all, despite what the parents were being told by the schools.
My husband, as a doctor, knows that not all physicians are wonderful. He’d be wary if someone he loved had to be treated by several of his medical school classmates. I’m sure good teachers feel the same way about some of their fellow educators. They know who can’t teach worth beans, but they can’t say or do anything about it.
Teaching is difficult enough at the best of times, and it’s getting increasingly difficult when more and more children are from chaotic home environments. But that’s all the more reason to want higher quality teachers. I’m not sure, though, that that’s always what we’re getting. Education writer Joanne Jacobs recently asked on her blog, “are children dis-abled or dis-taught?” I think quite a few are simply dis-taught. S. Allen Cohen even came up with a term for this a few years ago: Dyspedagogia, from dys, meaning bad, and pedagogia, meaning teaching.
Perhaps it’s not fair to say that a teacher should be able to effectively teach twenty-five children all at once, all of whom learn in slightly different ways. But if it’s that difficult, why are we doing school like this in the first place? And if it is difficult, then why label the child? Maybe what they have is a natural response to an unnatural situation.
Our school system is set up to preserve teachers’ jobs; it isn’t set up to give children the best education possible. If it were, we’d have more teacher review, more ability to fire teachers, more parental control of schools, and more flexibility in what programs and methods were offered to our children. But we don’t, because schools are run by the government for their own ends, including teachers’ job security and benefits.
Next time someone tries to say that a child isn’t learning because they are somehow disabled or their parents are morons, why not ask if instead they could simply be suffering from dyspedagogia? Then sit back and enjoy the confusion.
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I didn't really mean to start a debate on homeschooling with my preceding post, but I'm getting comments and emails about it, so I thought I'd try to tackle it again.
First, I do not believe all public schools are bad. Actually, the one my nephew is in is one of the better ones in our city. But for most kids who are very bright, a regular classroom is just not enough intellectual stimulation. How can it be with 25 kids? That doesn't mean they won't get a good education; it just means they'll be bored a lot.
And I agree with Jules' comment below that some homeschoolers are below grade level, just as some public schools are below standards. That's definitely true. Not all homeschooled kids do great (though studies do show that on the whole homeschooled kids do better than schooled kids). I do believe, though, that homeschooling, if it's done well, will produce a better educated child. Please note--"if it's done well". I know it's not always done well! But learning one on one will always take less time and will be more in tune with the child's learning styles and capabilities than a classroom with 25kids will be.
We just love homeschooling because it works great for our family. It won't work wonderfully for every family, and not every family can do it. I certainly don't think every family should! And my post below was not meant to say that. I was just announcing something that was going on in my family--we are now homeschooling my nephew, under his parents' supervision--and I'm having fun with it.
I think with every form of education there are pros and cons. The cons to homeschooling would be the lack of sports (though our group makes up for that), the lack of friends, the lack of opportunity to learn teamwork. These, though, don't outweigh what we believe are the benefits for our kids. Different families will have a different list of pros and cons and will have to weigh them accordingly.
So I have no problem if people decide differently from us.
What I do have a problem with is people emailing me or saying that I shouldn't complain about the public school system, because their children are doing fine. That's great for your children. But it doesn't change the fact that my nephew was bored and demoralized, or that my daughter was unchallenged and bored when she was in school, too.
Come to think of it, I was extremely bored all through my public school experience. So was my husband. If we had had the opportunity to learn like my daughters have, life would have been very different.
So every parent has to do what they think works best for their family. Pray about it and make the decision for your own family. We're all entitled to our opinions, and God often leads different people in different directions for different reasons. That's fine with me. I hope it's fine with all of you, too!
Anyway, enough of all this! I don't want to make this into a homeschooling blog. I'd much rather talk about housework or marriage or parenting. So we'll see what I come up with next!
We have a wonderful homeschooling group in our little community. We get together for sports, skating, track and field, and sometimes more academic subjects. The youth socialize together. It's great.
But whenever we go, my family brings the average number of children down. Most families have 7, 8, 9, 12, or even 5 kids. We had two.
Until now. My nephew, Alex, has come to join our little brood. So now we have 3!
Here they are doing math on their first day of school. They look miserable, but they were actually just hard at work. and the mugs are full of hot chocolate and marshmallows, which is how we always begin our day.
Alex is thrilled to be here so far. He was the one who asked to come. He's three weeks younger than Rebecca, but they're not at the same level because we've been homeschooling Becca all along, so she's doing high school work at this point. Alex is just as smart, I think, but he developed some sloppy habits in math in school that we're going to cure him of! I'm trying to get him through a whole math textbook in the next three months so he can move ahead and won't be in the same book next year as his cousin Katie who is three years younger!
The girls like it because it's a change. After seven years of just the two of them, it's nice to have someone else around. I think I like it for the same reason. And Alex?
He is just sick of being bored at school. He's sick of homework that has no educational value (we don't do homework. They just get their work done in school). He's tired of all the teasing and social garbage that goes on in the playground. He's tired of not being challenged.
I find school really wastes kids' minds. He could be doing stuff so far ahead if he was simply allowed to work at his intellectual pace. Keith teaches the kids one or two days a week and he's been doing chemistry with Rebecca, so he started Alex on it yesterday. It's basically a high school course, but the kids can handle it if you explain it well. And they're learning Latin and Greek.
For history, we're at the Depression. We spent about an hour yesterday talking about the Stock Market Crash and how stock markets can crash. And we talked about how banks could crash then, but not now. We didn't write a lot, but we talked a lot. They learned a ton. And he loved it. He said they never talked about anything important at school.
I don't know how long he'll stay with us. We're homeschooling the girls all the way through high school, and I don't know if he'll want to go back to school at some point. But I'll get him prepared for harder subjects, anyway. And he's just thrilled that he gets to do hard stuff!
His first comment, when we were in a meeting about homeschooling him, was, "I just want to learn as much as I can." Now that's a good attitude! I hope it lasts (in 13-year-olds you can never tell), but so far he's great. But it makes me sad for how little the kids learn in public school. What a loss of great potential! But more on this later.
One of the things that saddens me the most about schools is how much they usurp from parents. They teach sex ed. They teach character. They teach morals and values and hygiene and health, things that were once the purview of the home. And they teach the basics in ways that we parents never learned them, making it very hard to help with homework.
It's easy for a parent to feel that he or she is not qualified to teach anything at all. We should leave it to the schools. We provide the nurturing and the physical care, and the schools provide everything else.
We homeschool, but I think this is the way society is trending.
And we as parents need to realize that much of what the school teaches is counterproductive. What do kids learn in the playground? Being popular matters. Brand names matter. Being cool matters. None of that is true as an adult in the way it is as a child, but it is taught nonetheless.
But Joanne Jacobs argues that schools also teach kids to be unemployed.
In a recent survey urban middle school students were asked the questions, “How many times can you be late (or absent) in a month and hold a regular job?” Over half the students responded you could be late as often as you had a good excuse. Almost half responded you could be absent any time you had a good excuse.
They believe they deserve a second, third, fourth and fifth chance after making mistakes. They’re never accountable for their actions.
Many urban youth not only believe that a good teacher can make you learn but that s/he can always make it fun as well. Naturally, every effort should be made to make as many things as pleasant as possible, interesting, and certainly engaging for students. But fun cannot be the ultimate standard for judging the work of teachers. Students frequently must learn hard and complex things. Many of these “things” require memorization, intense concentration, and repetitions which are fatiguing.
If schools accede to and support an ideology that “good learning is always fun,” what do they actually teach students about work? Should good feelings come from having fun activities, or should one be taught to feel good by accomplishing things?
Then kids leave school and no employer will put up with the attitudes these kids have.
So it all comes back to us. Do we realize that our purpose as parents is to raise independent, godly adults, or do we think our purpose is to make sure our kids have fun and enjoy the early years? I'm not saying responsibility can't be fun; I'm only saying our priorities have to be correct.
Kids need to do things they don't like (like practising piano; my daughter is very grumpy right now about that). They need to learn to clean. And they need the TV off during dinner hours. Life does not revolve around them, and if we moms try to make sure that our kids' lives are endlessly happy, we're actually doing them a disservice.
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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