Domestic Psychology

Dress like an idiom

// November 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // holidays, school

Halloween costumes are not allowed at our elementary school. Instead, the Friday before Halloween was “wear orange” day, which is pretty much every single Friday’s uniform for people of all ages in all of Knox County. On Halloween, the fourth graders were given the assignment to dress like an idiom.

I thought this was a pretty ingenious way to blend learning with silly. We spent hours talking about idioms and how to make sense of them visually. The adults quietly mumbled several dozen completely inappropriate idioms and costumes, like a fake backside worn on the front of your body.

Eventually we agreed on an idiom that wouldn’t require major clean-up on a busy evening with Trick or Treating. A tiny pail was laced into a shoe so that it clanged and bounced with every step. I told Amy to grin and say she was kicking the bucket. In my mind, I pictured Jimmy Durante’s ever so silly bucket kicking scene in “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.”

Unbeknownst to me, her father decided that wasn’t enough background information. He told her aaaaall about the origin of the idiom and described examples with humans and animals. I found this out when she was describing her day to me and repeated her graphic monologue about her chosen idiom.

Amy will be very lucky if her classmates don’t start calling her Wednesday Addams. Doug will be the person talking to Social Services when they pay us a visit.

meeting new people

// August 15th, 2011 // No Comments » // kid quotes

Noah: “I talked to the Mayor on Friday and today I met the Superintendent.”
Me: “How did you meet the Super?”
Noah: “Well, I didn’t know you pull the cord to make the trolley stop, so, I missed my bus stop and got to school late. When I went in the office, the Principal was talking to someone. The Superintendent came over to help me.”
Me: “What did you talk about?”
Noah: “I told him I was late because I missed my stop and had to walk.”
Me: “What did he say?”
Noah: “Bummer.”

Bye summer. Hello school.

// August 11th, 2011 // No Comments » // flickr, school

After Zoo Camp times two, Jedi Camp, Apple Camp, Boy Scout Camp and an unsupervised beach vacation for the girl teens, summer break has ended. The backpacks have been scrubbed clean of exploded deodorants and pencil shavings and filled with all of the requested school supplies. Flip-flops have become weekend shoes and new sneakers are neatly stacked on each child’s backpack.

We have teacher assignments, class schedules and a city bus pass. We have met our new teachers and the two youngest children have filled their classroom desks with supplies. Well, Amy neatly arranged her desk and gently placed a single sharpened pencil in the groove at the top of the desk. Evan shoved everything inside his desk, declared “done” and bolted out of the classroom.

Tomorrow morning, Noah will ride a city bus to his brand new school. Monday, the two youngest will begin school. Two weeks later, Sarah will take the long, long Megabus ride to New York.

I miss them already.

Reading

// June 19th, 2011 // No Comments » // books

I don’t know what helped Tommy learn how to read. Since he had a ‘do worksheets or I’ll shrug’ teacher for Kindergarten, I know that he didn’t learn to read at school. At home, we did flashcard drills, watched a million hours of PBS, drew letters in shaving cream and wrote with chalk or crayons daily. I read out loud, taped words to everything in the house, made alphabet soup to play with our food and spent weeks talking in rhyme. Before he turned six, Tommy could read. Once he had a basic grasp of reading, he read anything and everything, improving so rapidly that he finished everything Tolkien before middle school.

Sarah learned to read because of and for praise from her Kindergarten teacher. Sarah’s teacher made every child in the classroom feel loved and in return, the students worked eagerly for the teacher they adored. After Kindergarten, Sarah continued to be a good student, but she didn’t read for pleasure until she discovered Harry Potter.

Noah learned to read from his big sister. Sarah forced Noah to spend hours playing school. She hovered over him with books so frequently that he began Kindergarten with basic reading abilities. His Kindergarten teacher refused to acknowledge this and spent most of her time forcing him to use his right hand and reprimanding his behavioral objections to using the wrong hand and sitting still. By the end of Kindergarten, Noah preferred being immersed in a book over doing anything else. Noah still loves to read. Right now, Noah is reading. He won’t stop until he finishes this novel. Then, he’ll find a new book and start reading again.

Amy’s Kindergarten teacher taught her to read. Amy improved her reading skills at the same speed as her peers until she discovered the Kindle. The Kindle was the spark that made Amy love reading. I regularly find her reading while hiding under a blanket far past her bedtime. Most of the time, I pretend not to catch her.

Evan had a wonderful Kindergarten teacher. He had (and still has) two parents and four siblings reading to him every night. We practiced his sight words until he didn’t even pause to read them. Amy bribes Evan to play school a few times a week. With all of that, I truly believe that the tipping point for Evan learning to read was texting. He started out sending gibberish messages on my Twitter account, then proceeded to texting family and friends with my phone. Now, Evan and Amy regularly chat with the text program on their DSiXLs.

All of this is a very long way of saying that every child learns differently. Their strengths, weaknesses, motivations and enthusiasm come in endless varieties of combinations. There is no assembly line formula for teaching children to read. Eliminating proven techniques for helping students learn to read is a recipe for failure. Failure for the neediest, highest risk students. The future for children who don’t learn to read is dismal. Allowing it to happen because it’s someone else’s child is a human tragedy. The money we save now is nothing compared to the cost of supporting and cleaning up the acts of desperation by those who didn’t learn.

Dear TN legislators,

// May 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // politics, school

Please do not pass legislation mandating school calendars. Leave that decision in the capable hands of local school boards.

You already know how low ACT scores, graduation rates and subject area benchmarks are for Tennessee’s children. You have seen the reports from Tennessee universities that most incoming freshmen need remedial coursework before they can begin their college level classes. Business leaders have repeatedly told you that they cannot operate in Tennessee with the illiterate workforce that currently exists.

Our high school students are too valuable a commodity to weaken their educational system with this ‘compressed calendar’ movement so that companies can have cheap summer labor. School IS a student’s job. Our students need more education and not less education. Our state needs a more highly skilled workforce to survive in the current and future economy.

Our state needs to focus on jobs. Jobs require a literate workforce. Future jobs require a highly educated and skilled workforce capable of innovation. Our students need more math, more science and more critical thinking skills. Our students need less summer vacation, not more.

Please do not take control of local school calendars away from the communities which they serve.

Cathy McCaughan, parent

Class size matters

// April 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // school

A few weeks ago, I helped small groups of students review a math skill while their teacher spent time teaching a new skill to a few students at a time. The teacher did the important work that varied from easy to difficult, depending on the student. My task was a bingo type game that should have been fun.

The students hated the math bingo game. The ones who understood the skill were bored. The ones who were still learning the skill, were unhappy in a million different ways. In exchange for completing one full bingo game without problems, I let them take turns typing in the answers to the exact same skill on an iPad game. This was unanimously popular.

One student understood the skill. Even though she was bored by the bingo game, she made it entertaining for herself. When another student struggled, she whispered in their ear. I could have adjusted the level of the iPad game to make it more difficult and she would have figured it out. This little girl was so self confident that she sparkled. In an auditorium style class of 100 students, she would still learn. She wouldn’t blend. She would stand out and be known. Class size will not matter to this little girl. She is going to thrive.

Another little girl was still figuring out the skill. She may have been on the cusp of getting it or she may need to step back several steps to relearn the building blocks of the skill. I couldn’t tell, because she was so paralyzed by anxiety over how she compared to her classmates, that she couldn’t focus on anything. She was concerned that her question was harder than someone else’s. If her question seemed too easy, had I deliberately given her an easy one? She tried valiantly to be invisible, to let someone else think for her, to just survive until lunch. This little girl needs a small class. She needs to be seen. She needs to learn to sparkle.

The education reform movement is a thinly veiled effort to do many things that are not in the best interest of children. Schools should not be factories with test results serving as quotas to keep jobs and save schools. Children are not assembly line products. Students are so much more than ACT scores.

Education is not a one size fits all process. Class size matters.

Dear Knox County Schools,

// January 5th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // school

I don’t feel any stronger about school being cancelled than I do about school being open. Have school open during winter weather. If I don’t trust the bus, we will drive the children. If our neighborhood roads are glazed with ice, we will stay home. Cancel school for winter weather. We will stay home and have fun. School, no school, either is fine.

I do object to the ‘wait until 5 in the morning’ to decide on a plan. Once we get up and start looking at websites to learn what you decided, the children are up and ready to start the day. If we knew the night before, the children would get a little bit of extra sleep to make up for the hours they spent, past their bedtime, asking repeatedly if there would be school. I can’t begin to imagine how working parents scramble for childcare at 5 in the morning.

As a child, we ALWAYS knew that the ten p.m. news would have the full list of school closings for the next day. That was a different time zone, but you really should be able to decide by 11 p.m. The sun isn’t going to melt anything between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Phone the officers who work the problem neighborhoods and make the call before the nightly news. Please.

Reading, Writing & Arithmetic

// November 30th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // parenting, school

While one of my children graduates from high school in a few weeks, my youngest child is in Kindergarten. The difference in their education is tangibly different. When my oldest children started school, we played games like breaking everything down into circles, squares and triangles. My youngest child know the geometric shapes based on the number of sides. “That’s a hexagon. It has two trapezoids inside it.” I played games with the alphabet and street signs with my oldest children. My youngest child sounds out every word he sees and follows up with a discussion of why some sounds are silent.

My youngest child is learning faster. He is taught differently. His classroom has higher expectations. The amount of homework has eliminated the need for workbooks and flashcards that I used with my older children.

The classrooms in the elementary school are technicolor in their diversity compared to the mono-ability classrooms that my oldest child experienced. When my oldest son was in school, I had teachers and parents complaining to me that they didn’t want those kids in their classes. Hiding the children who look, act or learn differently is no longer the norm. Schools are helping build a kinder, more compassionate generation of people than the trolls who comment on newspaper websites. We are building on strengths, both internal and external.

As beautiful as the evolution of elementary education, I am wary of creativity and play being shoved aside in favor of testing training and memorization once children leave elementary school. The future may be wrapped up in science and technology, but creativity and imagination are the seeds of innovation. The strong foundation of elementary school should be the basis for learning problem solving in middle school.

Short sighted people who scream that high schools with the most challenged populations should be closed are taking something important away from the elementary students who are working hard to install the operating systems that will allow them to reach their potential. We need more schools, not less. The well-intentioned NCLB has morphed into a monster that punishes schools and teachers who are struggling with students whose obstacles are overwhelming and life threatening.

Our schools have come a very long way and they continue to change for the better. I look forward to seeing the embracement of potential and feeling of hope that is taking root in elementary schools as it spreads and grows to the teenagers who so desperately need it.

Repeat daily

// October 28th, 2010 // No Comments » // kid quotes, school

“What did you do at school today Evan?”
“I went to *art.”
“What else did you do?”
“Worksheets.”
“Anything else.”
“Ate lunch.”
“What did you eat?”
“Something brown, but I didn’t finish it.”
“What else can you tell me about your day?”
“That’s too many questions. I’m done talking.”
“Okay. Thanks.”

*Or “music” or “the room where we get to paint” or “gym cause it’s the best place in the whole school”.

TCAPs: No jolts here

// September 21st, 2010 // 5 Comments » // parenting, school

The front page of yesterday’s paper warned parents to be prepared for a shock to the system when their child brings home last year’s TCAP scores. It comes after MONTHS of notes, e-mails, articles and parent meetings saying the exact same thing. The TCAPs have been so hyped that I can’t believe anyone is going to be surprised by good OR bad results. I’m even willing to go out on a limb and predict our family’s results.

First, is the middle child who was in the eighth grade last year. At last year’s TCAP meeting, the test booklet was distributed with the scores to help parents understand the areas of concern to their child. Ideally, it was to be used to create very individualized tutoring plans. My child’s scores were excellent, but when I asked him how he felt about the test without showing him the scores, he replied that he felt pressured by the time limits. So, I had him sit at the kitchen table and take the test again. He was told that there were no time limits, but in less than the allotted time, he scored perfectly. In every area of the test, he missed zero problems. The TCAP is a useless measure for my middle child. I may have him take the ACT this summer just so I have a better idea of his educational needs. I am certain of one thing that he needs. Because he spends every free moment with his nose in a book, he has an excellent vocabulary on paper, but an inability to correctly pronunciate the words he has read, but not heard. We need to figure out how to work out the kinks in his speech before he starts college. I expect his TCAPs to have mistakes based on time limit anxiety and not ability.

The other TCAP results in our family will be for the youngest girl. She will take her first TCAP this year and I will still make a prediction on her results for next year. Based on her lip quiver and manipulative “Math is haaaard” attempts to get an older sibling to give her the answers to homework, I expect terrible math scores and good language scores. This is not the school’s fault. This is just a red flag that she needs to do more math until she gains the skills to confidently tackle new concepts. Her brain doesn’t have an operating system yet and WE have to help her download one.

Now, I wait. Not in anticipation of a jolt, but for the confirmation of what every parent already knows based on the level of work their child is doing. The work you see at the kitchen table every afternoon. The work you see when they take online quizzes and play with educational software. The work you hear when you read together in the evenings. TCAPs are tools that schools should use to measure the curriculum. They should not be a surprise to parents.