I am horribly behind.
I am so behind that, for me, it isn't today, it's still yesterday, or possibly the day before.*
......................
For the time being, here's something fun:
A 1983 study conducted by McClelland and Pilon backs up the link between achievement drive and performance. These researchers conducted achievement tests on thirty-one year old adults whose mothers had been extensively interviewed twenty-five years earlier by Sears, Maccoby and Lewin (1957) regarding their child rearing practices. This study reveals that the highest correlate to achievement drive is clearly the mother’s belief that it is very important for her child to perform well in school. This was true across all socio-economic strata, with the highest effect among the children of white collar workers.
How to Increase Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence by Carmen McGuinness & Geoffrey McGuinness, pp. 5-6
I'm going to have to finally get around to writing my Richard Elmore posts on the subject of wealthy suburban schools.
* comma splice intentional
I'm about to head off to school (no school today) for my two-hour slot for parent-teacher conference. Oops. That's a student-parent conference, where my son will tell me his strengths and weaknesses. The teachers will be available for questions, but it will all be focused on what my son has to do. We will also get to see his portfolios, those things they've collected over the quarter and not sent home.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm not a quarterly parent. I have nightly "conferences" with my son. I work to make sure he understands his homework and teach him the things that the school fails to do. I don't need no stinking parent-son conference. I need to talk to the teachers about why on earth they don't hand homework back except once a quarter. (My son gets to see the graded work briefly, and then it gets collected and stuffed into a portfolio.) How can I help my son if the homework loop is not closed? The school only sends home a sticky note once a week with rubric or check marks on it. There is no way to correlate that information with his work.
I talked with someone this morning who thought that most parents were "quarterly" parents. I detected a "blame the parents" attitude. I disagreed. Schools need to state exactly what they expect from parents. Parents (or society) can't be a black hole for blame. The most I have ever seen is that parents need to make sure that kids are well-fed, have a quiet place to do homework, and that they make sure the kids do their homework (not teach them) and come to school. I have seen some comments that schools want parents to work with kids on things like learning the times table (help them do their job), but I haven't seen anything else defined exactly. I want to know exactly what they expect from us parents so that they can't use us as an excuse.
I am waiting to get the state testing results back so that I can see my son's verbal/writing marks. I want to compare that with his top marks from his school. If it's like last year, the state's trivial test sets higher expectations than my son's school. I will ask them why he doesn't get top marks on the state testing. My son has the ability and my wife and I provide the support.
Oh yes. And if you do too much, you're a helicopter parent. I have to make my son's success look natural.
ReplyDeleteWe had a similar parent-teacher set-up with my LD son when he was in middle school. I was supposed to bring him and we would all sit while he went through his little rubric about his strengths and weaknesses. No real information was passed between us.
ReplyDeleteI complained about it and they decided I would have the first part of the meeting without him. Then, he would come in at the end.
There are many things that need to be said in a meeting that the child doesn't need to hear.
Presently, the other son is bussed over to the high school for two classes. Both meetings with the high school teachers were great. He is performing well and is a great kid. Here are his scores. Nice kid. Pleasure to have him in class.
I am almost positive that when I meet with the middle school teachers they will paint a much
more dismal picture of a child not paying attention and not trying hard enough in spite of his 99th percentile scores across the board on state tests and formative assessments. This is how it's always been so I don't expect it to be any different.
It's just great to finally have input from high school teachers.
SusanS
As to the comma splice:
ReplyDeleteSPOGG says, "It is true that sometimes, comma splices aren't grammatically incorrect. Really simple sentences can be joined by commas..."
Martha Brockenbrough
Things That Make Us [sic]
"There are many things that need to be said in a meeting that the child doesn't need to hear."
ReplyDeleteIn our case, our son is there, and several other student-parent groupings are in the same room listening in while waiting for their turn.
The presumption is that all problems belong to the student. Homework doesn't come home and grades are poorly explained, but somehow, my son has to decipher the vague, non-linear rubric expectations and teacher comments to figure out how to improve.
We all have had teachers who give few clues about what they want. It requires mind reading. My son has a school full of them. I think they do it on purpose. If they taught carefully and the expectations were clearly defined, it would easy. They don't want learning to be too easy.
Afterwards, I just felt like following the path of least resistance. I'll make some comments to the principal, but it won't cause any fundamental change.
Catherine-- what a time this is. So on the one hand we have these research results, on the other if we step over a line, we're helicoptering. There's got to be a middle ground. One parent commented that we have to make the success look "natural." What are the other forces at play creating this antagonism between parents and the educational system--- it couldn't be a crashing economy, an impossible competitive (and expensive) college system. Nope, well, let's keep trying to figure it out....
ReplyDeleteConcerned about the pressures on kids and parent about success, I wrote a book, Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness. The focus there is that if a conventional educational system focused only on superstars and grades is not meeting our kids' needs, that we need to teach them to find their own purpose and satisfaction in life and buffer from the inevitable disappointments that they will face. Well, these are important lessons regardless of what's going on with our educational system, but given the current state, it is essential.
So... we're not behind, but the system sure is.
Tamar Chansky
www.freeingyourchild.com