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from Chapter 8
One Kind of Excellence: Ensuring Academic Achievement at La Salle High School
...La Salle High School (a fictional name but not a fictional school) was chosen for study because the graduates of that high school well exceeded expectations as to academic success in their freshman year of college. Considering the relatively high socioeconomic status of La Salle’s population, its graduates were predicted to do well in college, but they did even better than graduates of other schools similarly situated....
...advocates of educational reform agree that a rigorous curriculum accompanied by high standards should be part of what we mean by an excellent school..... Simply asserting [high standards] or even requiring them by imposing dire penalties does not in itself ensure success. La Salle High School did not simply stipulate academic excellence as a standard; it instituted procedures and structures that were aimed at providing the support that such high expectations required. No school is a perfect school, but the way in which La Salle High School was organized provides one way to approach the problem of providing academic excellence for all.
"character ed" through academics
Our impression, relative to programs in other high schools being observed, is that at La Salle the mandate for academic excellence has become the medium through which the staff communicates with students. This is a distinctly different emphasis from that taken by programs that focus more directly on aspects of social development or on adolescent problems. The La Salle administrators perceive that the academic focus provides a more benign environment with respect to negative labeling than would a direct attack on students' problems in terms of emotional and social adjustment.
In some respects, the academic focus tends to mitigate negative labeling because it generally is restricted to dealing with specific student behaviors as opposed to identifying personal character traits; for example, there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, telling a student that his or her absences are affecting the quality of schoolwork and, on the other, suggesting that those absences reflect a pattern of avoidance or are indicative of an emotional disorder. The relationship between absence and failure to achieve well academically can be seen by the student as temporary and subject to correction, while the labeling of the same behavior as abnormal suggests a serious and even permanent condition. In this way, the focus on academics may serve to avoid at least some potentially destructive labels. In general, the formal system of authority that prevails at La Salle is premised on encouraging students' attention to academic tasks and not on putative emotional disorders.
The formal structure of authority also prescribe general procedures aimed at groups of students. All students in their junior year, for example, take a test designed to measure general mathematics competence. Those students who do not pass this test at least at an 80% level of proficiency are required to take a mathematics refresher course. (This constitutes about 25% of the junior class.) Up to this point, this process ma be perceived as simply an examination-driven approach to ensuring that La Salle students have achieved a prescribed level of competence. However, even after the mathematics refresher course, a few students still will not have demonstrated 80% proficiency on the skills tested, and it is for this small group that new mechanisms are set in motion. Rather than leaving these students to their own devices for developing mathematical competence, each of the students is further required to attend a mathematics laboratory at which individual problems with mathematics are diagnosed and treated on a case-by-case basis. These cases ranged from a simple lack of skill development to dealing with psychological phenomena such as reducing the effects of test anxiety and even developing means for teaching certain geometric functions to a blind student. (This meant producing teaching devices as no commercial devices were available.)
In instances such as these, it is highly significant that, while the formal structure of authority imposes high expectations on all students, it also provides extensive support services and requires students to use those services. the proficiency requirement in mathematics would in itself be virtually meaningless unless a regular screening process existed to identify those students having difficulties and, more important, involved a carefully delineated procedure for correcting them. It is in this sense that la Sale's approach differs from the more common "standard raising" approach to achieving academic excellence. Frequently, schools, school districts, and state departments of education seek to achieve excellence simply by testing alone, by raising minimum requirements on such tests, or by simplistic mechanisms such as incrasing graduation requirements. Because support systems for students are lacking or inadequate in some of these cases, excellence is not actually advanced, only proclaimed.
In spite of La Salle's general success in using academic development as a medium for maintaining authority in the school setting, the school goes to considerable lengths to deal with the problems presented by certain students who simply do not accept the school's authority structure as being legitimate. The major burden for dealing with problems of discipline and truancy falls on the two building co-principals, who are "the court of last resort" at La Salle. The principals report that in general their official approach is to take a hard line with both students and parents ("the student will have to shape up or get out") but in practice, they tend to work behind the scenes to keep the students in school. The behind-the-scenes work mahy include intervention and student advocacy with the student's teachers and establishing contact with local employers to attempt to secure a job for a student. (The job can then become a part of the negotiation process--"If we got you an afternoon job, would you be willing to remain in school during the mornings?") It is common for one of the two co-principals to send a student to the other when he or she feels unable to deal effectively with a particular case.
Thus, it appears that the formal and highly visible authority structure co-exists with a somewhat hidden and informal, but reasonably effective, informal authority structure. In other words, there is a human face behind some of the formal procedures.
Changing Course: American Curricular Reform in the 20th Century
by Herbert Kliebard (chapter 8 coauthored with Calvin R. Stone)
p. 119-120
If character education programs (and Kindness Projects) elsewhere are anything like character education here, I vote no.
Good character, inside a school, is about doing your work and striving to excel. When a student is not doing his work and striving to excel, that should be the school's center of attention, not "FOCUS" words scotch-taped all over the front window of the foyer.
Eyes on the prize.
"La Salle High School" - tracking, placement, accountability
38 comments:
Imagine that measurement and remediation program that LaSalle performs in the junior year, extended to every grade level. That would be something extraordinary.
I'd bet that if that were in place, the junior year pass rate would be in the high 90s.
Brilliant program at LaSalle. How I'd like to see that spread around the country. Thanks, Catherine. This is a post I'll come back to.
As for the Focus words (see link)...sportspersonship? (scrawled on a playground ball, no less). I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
re: this bit
---there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, telling a student that his or her absences are affecting the quality of schoolwork and, on the other, suggesting that those absences reflect a pattern of avoidance or are indicative of an emotional disorder. The relationship between absence and failure to achieve well academically can be seen by the student as temporary and subject to correction, while the labeling of the same behavior as abnormal suggests a serious and even permanent condition.
There are many other related reasons why focusing on the behavior, not some amorphous emotional pattern, is better for students.
For one, stressing the behavior is something within control teaches an important lesson in life, regardless of one's emotional issues. It teaches that one key TO emotional stability is controlling one's behavior, regardless of how one FEELS. So even if the source really is a permanent or serious condition, it gives a way out--by changing one's behavior.
Secondly, talking about behavior is nonthreatening. It does not require disclosure by the student as to why they are failing to hit the behavior in any sense other than if they wish to say "I don't know how to do that"--no intimacies need be shared, no secrets.
Third, talking about behavior is better for adolescents, and particularly young men, who often still lack a vocabulary for discussing their internal mental and emotional states, as they just haven't developed that internal life yet.
Character Ed is just the natural outgrowth of therapeutic curriculum. This goes back to something Victor Davis Hanson says: one of the great changes in the last 50 years in education has been the creation of what he calls "therapeutic education" that encourages self indulgence. The New Criteron had a fantastic issue devoted to education a couple months ago.
http://newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-new-learning-that-failed-3833
is the VDH piece.
Excerpt: "Traditional liberal arts education assumed that there was a difference between popular culture—films, television, hit music, cartoons, comics, slang, and pulp fiction—and university learning in at least three areas. First, there used to be an appreciation that a few seminal works of art and literature had weathered fad and cant and, by general agreement, due to their aesthetics or insight, or both, spoke universally to the human condition. The evolution in the character of Achilles in the Iliad or the plight of the Melians in Thucydides’ history explored human dilemmas that innately appealed to the reader—but in a manner of sophistication, depth, and beauty not offered by a sit-com or comic book.
Second, there was the old assumption that professors, through long training, were necessary to guide students through such classic texts. Dante’s Inferno is a difficult poem that can best be elucidated to students by someone who knows Italian, or who has studied Renaissance Italy, or is acquainted with the intricacies of Florentine culture and politics. In contrast, a Stephen King novel is accessible to almost anyone without prerequisite knowledge or help.
Third, there was an appreciation of a manner of formal thought and beauty that separated some high art and literature from more popular and accessible counterparts. But once the university destroyed this divide by introducing popular culture into the curriculum and its purveyors onto the faculty, then there was no distinction made between readily accessible information and singular works that required effort and care to appreciate their value."
But this is a nice video clip:
http://fora.tv/2008/04/29/Victor_Davis_Hanson_on_the_Therapeutic_Approach
where he talks about it too.
(Also, VDH has a GREAT bit on what's wrong with vocationalism vs liberal arts education in college, too. http://fora.tv/2008/04/29/Victor_Davis_Hanson_on_Vocationalism)
Imagine that measurement and remediation program that LaSalle performs in the junior year, extended to every grade level. That would be something extraordinary.
This is my dream.
FIND OUT WHAT THE KIDS KNOW.
Vicky-- The book you need (I think) is DuFour's Whatever It Takes. I've been planning to get things posted from it but just haven't gotten to it yet.
If you Google "professional learning communities" and DuFour you should come up with one or two good things he's written.
DuFour was principal of Adlai Stevenson High School when he decided to switch his focus from "instruction" to "learning," i.e. results.
The school apparently had a massive increase in achievement level that they've sustained over... 15 years, I think. Perhaps more.
At this point the concept of "PLCs" has been around long enough that it's in danger of being destroyed by lousy implementation. (I have a good article on that, too -- will email to you.)
My own district, I gather, is adopting the PLC model. However, thus far there is nothing like a real PLC concept happening since the entire district continues to be run from the top and teachers continue to attribute student failures to learn to student characteristics & hire themselves out as tutors. In a true PLC model, none of these things would be happening.
Next year quite a large amount of time will be devoted to PLC meetings. This will be lost classtime for students, who will e dismissed early so teachers can meet in their Professional Learning Communities.
Since teachers have unions and parents don't, that time came out of the kids' school day, not the teachers'.
Given the fact that the district is preoccupied with character education, interdisciplinary teaming, and "supporting" the goals of students who don't want to go to college, I assume that PLC meetings will be heavily devoted to analyzing the students and their parents rather than to studying assessment results and adjusting instruction accordingly.
But we'll see.
Paul - do I have your email?
Oh - I must, since you're a member.
hmmm....
I'll send he DuFour articles to you, too. I'll be interested to hear what you think.
Secondly, talking about behavior is nonthreatening. It does not require disclosure
Absolutely.
As far as I can tell, it's critically important with any child & any adolescent to maintain a respectful distance. Kids are developing identities & boundaries...there should be no requirement that they reveal thoughts and feelings.
Character education in my experience -- and my kid has been subjected to a HUGE amount of character education -- is a very bad thing. At its worst it's punitive & intrusive; at it's best it's trivial and an object of fun amongst the students.
Ed thinks the latter is even worse. He says you should never adopt programs and attitudes that elicit feelings of irony & contempt for adults in children.
Another thing: I have lived long enough to see that Laurence (sp?) Steinberg is right: "authoritative parenting" is far and away the best.
My understanding of authoritative parenting is that the parent doesn't focus (primarily) on his children's feelings & internal states.
If you Google "Authoritative Parenting Involves Balance" and "Ronald L. Pitzer" you can see a good, short summary of Steinberg's research.
Catherine,
Thanks for that pointer to positive parenting!
One thing though that I find interesting, though I disagree with was in the discussion of Granting Psychological Autonomy
--One reason this [that the dimension of] granting psychological autonomy has been overlooked.. is because that literature consists heavily of studies of young children. The psychological autonomy dimension does not emerge as a critical variable until ...around age 10 or 11, and begin to establish an independent psychological identity.
I agree it's been overlooked, and probably for the first reason given. And while it's clear that early adolescence is a critical time, I wonder if it's really true that this dimension doesn't emerge as a critical variable until a kid is 10. I don't buy it. My 2 yr old has feelings and emotions. They are real internal states, and his wants and needs need respecting whether in his temper tantrums or in happy times and sad times. The more I respect those feelings, the more even at 2, he can have confidence, assuredness, and expression of emotion. I just need his behavior to be reasonable. I need him not to hit, say. But I don't need to deny he's truly angry. Same with a 4 or 5 year old. And I bet that especially in certain children who are cognitively self aware around the age of 5, that the criticality of granting this autonomy is there at 5, too.
I agree, perhaps with a bit of a proviso.
With C, my default position from the get-go has been that his feelings are his. I've followed the rule that it's bad to "psychologize" people of any age; it's much more respectful to take what they say about themselves at face value. (This has been an issue between Ed and me at times when I've broken this rule, btw. He's broken it from time to time with me, too, and it never ends up well.)
The one time I put myself in "therapist" role with C. was two weeks after 9/11, when Ed flew to CA. C. was terrified & so was I.
Two days before the buildings were hit, we had gone to Rye Playland with another family, where I took C. and Jimmy with me on the single most terrifying ride I've ever experienced. Jimmy was out of his mind with panic, and looked as if he was trying to get out of the cart, which would have killed him instantly. I couldn't stop him; I was seated across from him and couldn't get to him. All I could do was keep my foot on him and tell him over and over again that he was OK; meanwhile C. was terrified and may have been crying. The dad from the other family was in the cart next to us and was trying to reassure C. and Jimmy from where he was; he's a macho ex-football player type, & he was shouting pep talks over the din of the ride and Jimmy's screams.
(btw....none of us had the faintest idea how scary this ride would be just from looking at it. The thing just went round and round, for g's sake.)
Two days later the planes hit the towers, and C. connected terrifying-roller-coasters with planes-hitting-buildings.
When Ed flew to CA, C. was a wreck. He was spending every night obsessing over roller coasters, and how he wished there was a roller coaster that went all the way to CA so you could take the roller coaster instead of an airplane.
This went on and on, and I found a way to suggest to him that what he was "really" worried about was his dad on an airplane.
It worked...he was worried sick about the prospect that his dad would be flying back home on an airplane & the conversation he really needed to be having was about all the safety measures that would be in place on his dad's return flight. Once we could talk about all the ways his dad's flight was going to be safe, he was quite a bit better.
That was some of my best "work" as a parent, EVER, so I can see the attraction of becoming your child's therapist.
But it's a bad path to go down.
My experience has been that kids of any age need to feel that they have some boundaries & some privacy the adults don't invade at will.
We had a psychology moment yesterday.
C. got up and said he'd had a weird dream about his new school. The bus was here and he couldn't find his clothes.
I laughed and said, "That's an anxiety dream."
Then he went inside and told his dad, "I had a weird dream," and his dad laughed and told him "That's an anxiety dream."
Then Ed told him Freud wrote about anxiety dreams, and we both told him what form our own anxiety dreams take (we both have anxiety dreams where we're supposed to get to a class & can't find it because the building is completely different!)
That's the kind of talking-about-feelings that works. Your kid brings something up, you address is matter-of-factly, and you link it to Human Universals.
That said, I would like to add that I do believe in harping on character flaws.
Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do by Laurence Steinberg is a terrific book, btw. He's wrong about schools, but he's wrong for the right reasons (i.e. schools, as presently constituted, do not overcome family culture).
Around here we had some funny moments with Steinberg because one of the things he found - this was in a 10-year, NIH-funded study - was that Asians, as a group, have an "A" culture; whites, as a group, have a "B" culture; and blacks & Hispanics, as a group, have a "C" culture.
That is to say, if you ask an Asian parent what a good grade is, he'll say "A." A B is a bad grade.
White parents say "B," and black & Hispanic parents will go for a "C."
When C. was in 6th grade, he came home with a C on a math test and Christian - who is black & went to high school in Yonkers - said, "That's great!" at practically the exact moment I said, "That's terrible!"
That was a Moment. Culture war!
My attitude was: OK, one of us is going to win, and it's going to be me.
Right around that time, 6th grade teachers were drawing bell curves on their blackboards (excuse me: white boards), explaining to the kids that they were all in the middle of the hump & that the grade for the middle of the hump was a "C," and a "C" was a good grade.
All over town, parents were having to explain to their kids that a "C" is not a good grade.
This is why the administration thinks we're pushy.
Yep. Administration thinks you're a pushy parent. Other parents think you're a pushy parent. Anonymous thinks you're a pushy parent...
A very recent comment to my blog is a good example.
Perhaps you should let the school teach age appropriate material instead of pushing your child ahead at home.Obviously you are one of those parents trying to accelerate your child at home (Singapore Math) Or, if you think you can do a better job, homeschool.
Apprently supplementing Everyday Math with Singapore Math puts you in the pushy parent category.
Does the commenter think you're not homeschooling?
Parents need a union.
They have one in France.
I've been thinking about unions for parents lately because of a lousy situation here involving one of the star teachers at the high school, who was summarily removed from her job last August and demoted to the middle school. No reason given.
It was humiliating & appalling. 200 students wrote the superintendent asking her to restore the teacher to her position at the high school. No dice. They do what they do.
The move was costly to students who had planned to take the teacher's very advanced course in Spanish. Lots of them dropped out (I don't have the exact figures). I assume more dropped AP Spanish. (This teacher's students had fantastic AP scores, too.)
Moreover, because of the logistics of the job-switch (a superb middle school Spanish teacher was moved to the high school), the high school didn't teach Spanish 1 freshman year at all.
So: a number of students' education was harmed by this move.
Those students and their parents had no recourse apart from writing emails and being told that the administration wasn't free to discuss "personnel issues." We parents & taxpayers don't need so much as an explanation when school quality is directly harmed by an administrative action.
Our job is to vote in the budgets each and every year, raise money, and "appreciate eduction."
Things were different on the teacher's side because she had a union. She hung in there and by the end of the year the district had been forced to hire an attorney to review the case.
Which we parents and taxpayers paid for.
The attorney took one look at the case & said, "Give her her job back."
Who gives back the lost year of Spanish to the kids?
I'm experiencing serious vicarious pleasure in this teacher getting her job back, I must say.
This is a star teacher. She is revered -- and she has the "stats" to prove it. She's so good that all kinds of kids take Spanish 5 (I think it is) just because she teaches it.
I found out about the situation last September, shortly after school began, and found it galling. It was one more case of the administration doing what it wanted to without regard for the students & families.
Plus it's an awful way to treat a person, PERIOD.
Now that C. is safely away from the district, I'd like to add that our school board includes two attorneys.
The school board signed off on the move.
This is the same school board that will be giving the middle school principal tenure next year.
By the way, I do realize I've told the bell-curve-on-the-white-board story a zillion times now.
That's by design.
Concerned - I almost forgot!
A friend of mine just took her kid to the school psychologist of one of the hoity-toity public schools around here for an ADHD assessment.
She ended up loaning him her Singapore Math books because he's tutoring his kid in math over the summer.
His district has Everyday Math.
You'd think that when you've got school psychologists remediating Everyday Math at home, something would give.
But no.
"Ed thinks the latter is even worse. He says you should never adopt programs and attitudes that elicit feelings of irony & contempt for adults in children."
Like group punishment. I received a detention note for my son this year that indicated that he was rude and disrespectful. It was hand written and had an exclamation point on it. There was no indication that many kids got the same note. When I asked the principal about it, she joked that she was really surprised to see my son's name on the list. Oh, and yes, it was for everyone who was in the vicinity.
"we both have anxiety dreams where we're supposed to get to a class & can't find it because the building is completely different!"
I still have a dream where it's late in the semester and I realize that I haven't been going to one of my classes.
Steve - Group punishment violates the student's right to due process.
The middle school, under the current principal, used group punishment routinely for a year and a half, at which point it abruptly stopped.
The following is the text of an email written by the attorney for the school board association in another state:
The problem with group punishment is that it violates the students' due process rights. Basic due process for student discipline requires that the student be told what they are accused of doing and the evidence against them described, and then they are given an opportunity to tell his side of the story. Goss v. Lopez. Manifestly, this is not and cannot be done in a whole school or whole
class situation. Also, the student handbook is usually the "cookbook" for student discipline, and is an expression of school board policy in this area. I'm willing to bet that if you combed that, you would NOT find "group punishment" anywhere in it as a possible punishment, for excellent reasons.
Also, it is very disfavored to use a writing assignment as discipline--kids don't need help to hate writing! How, exactly, does it further instruction to write such a useless essay? If the principal doesn't "get" the concept of
violating the Constitutional rights of an entire middle school student population, it is possible that the Superintendent or the school
district's attorney would. You may want to take this to a higher level. The good news about being "out there" with the administration over "math wars" is that you have nothing further to lose by making waves. So, make nice big ones.
Why is group punishment so popular if it is so obviously illegal? I think it is probably because teachers have zero training in basic school law as part of a
typical teacher preparation degree, and most administrators have one or two classes in it at most, as part of the degree program that leads to certification as a school administrator, which is usually taught by retired school
administrators, not lawyers. Talk about triple hearsay!
I copied the administration and school board on this email.
Your principal should probably see this.
Group punishment shouldn't be happening.
oh my god
that dream is so awful I'll probably start having it myself just through the power of suggestion
I still have a dream where it's late in the semester and I realize that I haven't been going to one of my classes.
Omg that's exactly my dream. It's a week before finals and for some reason I glance at my course registration and realize I registered for a course I haven't been attending and it's too late to withdraw. And it's always history or something like that, with lots and lots of reading...
"Group punishment shouldn't be happening."
Perhaps it's a matter of picking my battles. I made my displeasure known, especially since the note that came home only indicated my son. By the way, my son told me that it was mostly boys who got detentions. The girls disappeared fast and for many boys, detention is a badge of honor.
The problem I have is that it's hard to get an accurate story from my son. He might not be misleading me, but his stories miss key points. Now that he is older, I get a better picture, and it doesn't make me feel better about all of the past years.
"The teacher did what?" is a common question, but there is not much I can do about it because I don't have an accurate story. My son told me that the math teacher tore up a girl's math homework in front of everyone because she just did the even problems which had the answers in the back of the book. There might be more to the story, so once again(always!), I have to reserve judgment. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to be a fly on the wall. I am more than willing to accept that my son exhibits bad behavior, but school is like a black hole. No accurate information comes out. I think many teachers depend on that fact.
Then there are the teachers who use sarcasm and flippancy to control kids. At best, it might work with high school kids, but my son had a fifth grade teacher who didn't have a clue about how it was affecting the kids. She wanted the kids to think she was cool.
Omg that's exactly my dream. It's a week before finals and for some reason I glance at my course registration and realize I registered for a course I haven't been attending and it's too late to withdraw. And it's always history or something like that, with lots and lots of reading...
Eeeek, I have variants on that one, too. The same general scenario: for some reason I have forgotten that I signed up for the course, it is now too late to drop it, and too late to make up all the work -- in my case, it is always a science course (chemistry, zoology, geology, etc.) and there is no way to make up missed labs and field assignments. Then I try to find my way to the professor's office to work something out and get lost in the maze of buildings (which don't resemble the buildings of the university I attended).
I liked science courses and did reasonably well (majored in classics) so I am not sure why I have this nightmare. History courses were less of a challenge in some ways -- in my day, many of the profs let you choose how to respond on the final exams (all essay-type questions). You could answer 1 question, for 100% of the grade, 2 for 50% each, up to 4 for 25% each. One told us that very few people opted to answer only one question. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.....
I did it, though, and don't remember my grades except they were As and Bs, so it must have worked out OK. Brevity was never my strong suit so I liked being able to blather on and on in detail.
Science was tougher, you had to command a lot of very specific information and be able to analyze and solve new problems, not just explain things. My prolixity was less of an advantage.
I read somewhere that a majority of university-educated people have some form of the "exam dream" from time to time. I wonder if competitive athletes have something similar, relating to sporting events?
The problem I have is that it's hard to get an accurate story from my son.
I felt this way at first, but then discovered it wasn't a problem, although Ed continued to be wary. Whenever a problem came up, Ed would say we didn't have evidence or maybe the other kids wouldn't corroborate C's story, etc.
But that's looking at things the wrong way, IMO.
2 things:
First, and I'm speaking as a nonfiction writer, you never know what really happened if you're hearing about something secondhand.
You don't even know what really happened when you were there yourself. Other people's accounts may be completely differently from yours.
Before you draw any conclusions about anything, you have to find out what other people think the situation is.
I've never had a teacher or an administrator act put out over an informal & friendly query along the lines of: "The kids seem to think X has occurred --- did they get that right?"
I'll also ask if I've gotten the situation right. This is a sincere question. Trying to know what's happening from afar is not easy, which is what you're talking about.
Ed kept thinking we needed "evidence" or "proof," but what you actually need is clarification.
Second, the critical issue isn't exactly "what really happened," but the fact that your kid thinks something bad has happened.
If your child comes home thinking he was group-punished with a pop quiz that he flunked -- which happened to C. this year -- that needs to be cleared up one way or the other. If he's wrong, he needs to know he's wrong.
In other words, you are concerned about your child's perceptions. If your child misunderstood the situation you want him to know what actually happened. If your child understood the situation correctly, you can then decide whether you want to pursue it.
One last thing. I found that when the kids got to 7th and 8th grade their reports about the school were amazingly accurate.
In 6th grade they could come home with cockamamy tales -- not a lot of them, but some. But not in 7th and 8th.
I remember one time, back in 6th grade, C. and ALL of his friends -- every last one of them -- thought the math teacher had allowed one of the smart girls to grade their math quizzes based on their behavior or their effort or something.
I was pretty sure that couldn't possibly be true, but I had to ask, and I did. Needless to say, I expressed a lot of doubt about the story: "The kids all seem to think one child in the group graded them on effort." (I avoid using "you" if I can. I don't want a question to sound like a veiled accusation.)
The outcome of that situation reinforced for me the importance of getting a clarification especially when you think your child got it wrong.
In fact, the teacher had done nothing of the sort, but the kids all thought she had, and they were furious at the girl who had been allowed to grade them.
THEN, after the teacher told them she hadn't done that, they STILL believed the girl had been allowed to grade them, and they were STILL mad at her!
That experience made it clear to me that your child's perceptions need to be addressed.
I don't think anything like that took place in 7th or 8th -- and if you think about it, it shouldn't.
Most teachers are able to communicate clearly with students. Yes, some teachers have difficulty teaching the content of the class --- but that's because the content of the class is hard for the kids.
When it comes to communicating simple concepts, like: "I'm giving you a pop quiz to punish you for acting up with the sub" ---- most teachers can get that one across.
I realize that's a backhanded compliment. What I'm saying is: teachers have very good communication skills generally. Clear speech, simple sentences for younger kids, etc. When C. & his friends were in 7th & 8th grade, if they came home reporting that a teacher had said "X," usually she had in fact said X, regardless of whether X was good, bad, or in between.
(btw, I don't know to this day whether the teacher regarded the pop quiz as a punishment. C. wasn't present on the day when the class acted-up with the sub, so she re-gave the quiz to him, also as a surprise - she pop-quizzed the re-take - & he flunked it again, which she seemed to think served him right. So we had bigger fish to fry at that point.)
My son told me that the math teacher tore up a girl's math homework in front of everyone because she just did the even problems which had the answers in the back of the book.
yeah....see, that's the kind of thing I'd ask about
I realize most parents wouldn't, but I would.
I would frame it as a question, AND I would make clear that I'd heard the story from more than one kid.
I'd suggest that maybe the kids didn't understand what happened.
That kind of behavior has to be "called."
When schools lock parents out, when the kids have no advocates inside the school (which by definition they don't), somebody has to speak.
You don't have to say much.
You just have to indicate that you're paying attention.
Remember that great study where they posted the pair of eyes over the self-serve tea stand in a psych department?
The feeling of being seen improves self-control.
People need oversight ---- everyone does. Most people, anyway. (I definitely include myself in that category. When I'm writing a book, I need to be BUGGED.)
Schools should open up their doors and bring the parents back inside.
There'd be a lot less trouble if they did.
I wonder when people started having anxiety dreams about school?
As opposed to about something else?
What do hunter-gatherers have anxiety dreams about?
I wonder if dogs have anxiety dreams.
I'd love to know what athletes dream about (what kind of anxiety dreams).
I think mine is always about not being able to find the classroom.
Everything is different - the buildings, the hallways - everything.
I can't find my way and I have to get there now.
I read somewhere that a majority of university-educated people have some form of the "exam dream" from time to time.
Yup, I've had that dream more than I care to remember: the surprise exam, the forgotten term paper, and so on. When I was in grammar school, I even had dreams where I had an overdue library book that I couldn't manage to find.
Other anxiety dreams: being chased by some menacing person, and the door's lock mechanism wouldn't work; trying to dial a rotary phone that didn't have a stop; climbing long, rickety stairs that lacked a railing, and one side was completely exposed to the floor(s) below. Dunno what these dreams mean, though.
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