Category Archives: For parents

For “Rick” — who lives where he works

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“Rick” is my union rep. I haven’t used his services, but he takes his union position seriously. He doesn’t gossip. He’s smart and funny, a middle-aged, African-American man who eats what he wants against medical advice — trying every so often to fix his excesses with a salad or two — and sometimes says what he thinks. He’s got a gift of quiet. He listens. Every so often, he shares his thoughts.

We were talking about the new retention policy, which appears to be another version of “we don’t retain nobody, nohow.” As noted in other posts, I understand where this policy originates. The research supports social promotion. The socially promoted have better outcomes in school and life overall. That point’s no longer debatable, even given the sometimes shoddy nature of social science research.

Here’s what Rick said, though, in a viewpoint that deserves cyberspace and cybertime:

“The thing is, those people in the Board Office, they go home at night to Lake Forest or places like that. They don’t live here. They’re just passing the problem on and it’s no problem for them. They don’t see these teen-age kids who didn’t make it through high school and who can’t find a job. I see them. They are standing on the street corner outside my house. They have nothing to do. They’ve got no way to make money. They’ve got no prospects.”

Rick is a big guy and he carries a natural authority. But he’ll admit to being scared of those kids on the street corner. Those kids don’t have a lot to lose, he tells me. The numbers here are hard to tease out. Crime statistics for the area baffle local residents and have led to a number of articles on the trustworthiness of crime statistics reported by police departments. Our crime statistics, like our graduation statistics, are honestly hard to understand when you are viewing them from the local stage. If 500 people finish at a middle school and 200 graduate from the high school across the street, when the graduation rate is over one-half of students, what happened to the missing bodies on the stage?

Regardless of the numbers, I can see why Rick is worried. Gang activity runs rampant in this locale. Drug abuse has become standard fare. What do you do if you have no education, no job and no legitimate job prospects? The underground economy offers one way to scrounge up cash. We had a middle school student murdered a few years ago when he flashed a bunch of money at some older peers. I’d guess that money came from drugs. I don’t know for sure. I know I held crying teachers who had known the boy, helped them down long, sad hallways. I watched a school mourn a kid who had already begun moving toward that street corner, regularly skipping school and ignoring classes.

What happens when we pass Napoleon on from eighth grade to high school when he is reading at a fourth grade level and doing math at a third grade level? Statistically, we improve his odds of long-term success, according to the studies. But what are those odds of success? Mostly, they range from poor to abysmally awful.

How costly is the decision to drop out of high school? To quote the PBS article “Dropout Nation,” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/dropout-nation/by-the-numbers-dropping-out-of-high-school/,

Consider a few figures about life without a diploma:

$20,241

The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF). That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,424 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree.

12

Of course, simply finding a job is also much more of a challenge for dropouts. While the national unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in August, joblessness among those without a high school degree measured 12 percent. Among college graduates, it was 4.1 percent.

…

63

Among dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, incarceration rates were a whopping 63 times higher than among college graduates, according to a study (PDF) by researchers at Northeastern University. To be sure, there is no direct link between prison and the decision to leave high school early. Rather, the data is further evidence that dropouts are exposed to many of the same socioeconomic forces that are often gateways to crime.

In Rick’s view, when we pass those kids along, we pass along our problems to the community — and he’s right. Those high school students who can’t read, write or multiply often drop out of high school. Year by year, our lowest performers may be digging themselves into deeper holes until we finally offer them an out, legally allowing them to exit school. Then many of these kids enter the underground economy, the only economy where they can make enough money to support their lives and habits.

Rick watches these kids on his street corner while administrators determining district retention policies drive safely home to comfortable, suburban houses in areas where the majority of high school kids move on to graduate from college.

Missing the euphemisms of the past

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I am perusing lyrics. Sometimes I download songs to make CDs for my classroom. The kids like music but I can’t turn them loose on YouTube. They are a little unclear on the concept of “appropriate.”

I have been scanning lyrics. I had to scratch “Crank That” by Soulja Boy. I wince to read lyrics such as the following:

“Aim to fresh up in this bitch
Watch me shuffle
Watch me jig
Watch me crank my shoulder work
Super man that bitch.”

That song doesn’t belong in the classroom. I had doubts about the line where he super soaked the hoe, too. I certainly can’t include songs that employ the word “nigga” twenty times. I scratched that fellow who was running through his hoes like Draino. I am not going to download his compatriot who had too much rum and brandy and woke up with some strange woman whose face he did not know.

THIS IS THE GOOD LIST. The list created by my other class was almost a total wash-out. I am going to be able to purchase about two-thirds of this set of requests. Still, at the end I wonder, where is the romance? No wonder we had five girls pregnant, all at the same time, in the middle school a few years ago. What are these girls hearing? Songs create societal norms. More people ought to be paying attention to the lyrics of today. I actually like some of Drake’s songs but I wouldn’t want my 12-year-old boys and girls listening to him.

Eduhonesty: I’m getting old, no doubt. I sound like an elder of the tribe, bemoaning my children’s and grandchildren’s musical choices. But I’m not wrong that the music of 2015 has become raw and explicit in a way that denigrates and diminishes romance. Dogs in heat would probably write these lyrics if they used drugs and wrote music. Human beings ought to have progressed beyond a life lived in heat.

Cool kids

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From ‘Cool Kids’ Don’t Stay Cool Forever, Study Suggests

By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer
Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

“The cool kids were also at greater risk for criminal activity and substance use problems at age 21 to 23. In fact, acting old for your age in middle school was a better predictor of drug problems in adulthood than was drug use in middle school.”

Eduhonesty: I don’t find this surprising. I’ve seen it too often. Kids crave excitement in early adolescence. A few seem to live for that rush. All you have to do is stand in a hallway when a fight starts. While some kids have the sense to keep their distance, others gravitate toward fights like bugs to bug zappers. They want in on any action. Crowd control becomes imperative at the same time that it becomes almost impossible. Since fights tend to start in crowded areas, like packed hallways during passing periods, teachers may struggle to diffuse a crisis even as kids rush toward the excitement.

The cool kids tend to be the exciting kids. “May you live in exciting times,” the old Chinese curse says. A curse for middle-school students might be, “May you have exciting friends.”

I offer this post as a cautionary note for parents. Parents who are becoming worried about their kids chosen peers need to act fast. Once a kid has become part of that cool crowd, he or she has often taken up risky behaviors that will be tough to extinguish. Parents might be able to stop some kids from learning to act older than their age by diverting those kids into different recreational activities or steering them toward less mature peers. Best efforts to stop risky behaviors come early, before Tommy or Jenna know where to score and whose house is empty during the afternoon.

Different students, different dynamics

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I listened to a colleague vent yesterday. He is having regular problems with a group of students. I have a few problems with a couple of those kids, but not many. Another one who is receiving multiple referrals and write-ups from him has been working hard and doing very well in my classes. But I also have problems with a number of students who behave well for my colleague. Teaching is a relationship game and many of the variables are outside our control. If Luis does not get along with his mom, that relationship may transfer into trouble for other women. Sara’s mouthiness may drive the teacher in room 203 nuts while making the teacher in 204 laugh, often balancing out any trouble. Mike may hate social studies but like science or vice versa, transferring his feelings to the adult in front of the room. Some students respond well to stricter environments, but others work better under looser regimes. (Strict tends to work better academically, I believe, but that’s not true for all kids, especially those with attention deficit hyperactivity difficulties.)

Eduhonesty: One of the great challenges of this job is trying to understand and appreciate every child. A child who feels appreciated will work harder and more enthusiastically than one who does not. A child who feels understood is less likely to throw a wrench into the classroom works simply for the fun of it.

I threw this post into the “For parents” category because I see a need to bring out a couple of corollaries: A child who feels unappreciated will often work as little as possible. A child who feels misunderstood will often challenge authority. I could extend this list of troublesome behaviors, but I am following my gut to an important point: If your child says, “My teacher does not like me,” please follow up on this. Some kids should be moved into more supportive rooms. Administrations will resist, as will offended teachers, but 180 days of being made to feel unappreciated and misunderstood by an adult who controls your day can do a great deal of damage. At the very least, your child needs support and coping strategies if you can’t fix the problem.

Fortunately, this problem remains rare in my view. Teachers mostly enjoy their students. If they don’t, they don’t last in this profession.

Some kids cry

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Watching kids on the last day of school can be fascinating. Reactions run the gamut from ecstatic to despairing with a fair amount of anxiety, relief, excitement and confusion in the middle. If you want to know about a kid’s home life, I recommend watching that kid when summer begins. The picture’s not all about home life, of course. The quiet that introverts welcome naturally dismays the kid who likes to be the center of attention. In my school district, siblings and order of birth can be important. If you have to babysit the four who came after you, the end of the school year does not signal the beginning of fun and relaxation.

In the midst of the happy crowd running to the bus, I saw dejected faces and a few criers.

Eduhonesty: While we are amassing these mountains of mostly unused data, we might add one more survey, the one about how students feel about summer vacation and what they expect to do during that vacation. That information could help us identify students who need more support during the school year. We often don’t know enough about their home lives until a crisis hits, especially in the case of our more reticent students.

For parents: If you are reading this blog, you probably don’t need advice from me on how to manage the summer months. But I’d like to throw in one suggestion: Why not create a daily family reading hour? During this time, the whole family reads when possible. We learn from what we see. My mom was always seated in a corner armchair with a book, a picture of peaceful contentment under a hanging, stained-glass lamp. I sat on the couch across from her.

A note on dreams and bilingual students

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The Dream Act has been floating around and through the media for years now. What exactly is the Dream Act?

The Dream Act is legislation designed to help young people who grew up in the United States , but who are trapped by their immigration status — or lack of an immigration status. Those lucky enough to be born here are U.S. citizens, but students born elsewhere end up condemned to live in a sort of legal limbo, limited by their parents immigration status. The children of the undocumented are also undocumented, even if they started kindergarten here and their high school has a cumulative folder inches thick that documents their academic progress. Currently, these children have no easy path to long-term legal residency, even if they have not seen their “home” country since they were less than a year old. Many of these children barely speak the language of their home country. Most cannot write that “home” language well enough to be considered literate.

Bilingual programs often group these children together. Together, they extinguish each other’s dreams.

“You can’t be a nurse,” one says to another. “You don’t have papers.”

Paperless children give up easily and early for the most part. Teachers can try to keep them on track, but the fact is that undocumented children can’t be nurses. They can’t pursue any employment that requires a background check. Yet 10 – 14 million undocumented persons are thought to be living in this country. Their children go to school. We have created a tremendous pool of children with limited hopes and dreams.

Eduhhonesty: The Dream Act should have been passed a long time ago. We need a law that provides a clear path to citizenship. Personally, I’d favor a combination of military service and college that allows immigrant children to earn citizenship.

We need to foster dreams in our students. Aside from the moral issues, the Dream Act would be extremely practical. These children aren’t going “home.” The vast majority of these children are going to grow old in this country. Currently, some of these undocumented adolescents are classroom management nightmares. They don’t care about school because they quite correctly see that doing their homework and working toward college may have little or no benefit for them. They come to school to socialize. They disrupt their classes and see no reason why they should do otherwise.

I can manage these students with pep talks, reminding them that the future may be brighter than the present. They may receive citizenship. They may be able to go to college. My life would be vastly easier, though, if I could honestly tell the aspiring doctors that they need to study science so they can be ready for medical school. By middle school, these kids know the barriers facing them as they attempt to climb into America’s cognitive elite and middle class. My pep talks are tough sells to an already-cynical audience.

A child who has grown up in the United States should have a shot at the American Dream. To quote the last few lines of the poem on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Let’s lift the lamp. Let’s create the law we need. By the time these kids have completed twelve years of schooling here, they have become America’s children.

Let’s open the door.

Motivation and dreams

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Lack of motivation stymies many of my best efforts. I can make the lesson fun. I can integrate critical thinking into my content. I can leap through all the flaming hoops that administration throws at me. In the end, though, a percentage of my kids remain mostly outside of my influence. A review of their academic histories show this lack of involvement has been the pattern for years. Some kids fall off the edge, doing an academic nosedive after years of satisfactory efforts, but others have been clinging to the edge of satisfactory forever.

Eduhonesty: I’d like to offer a piece of action research to any educators looking for a challenge: As I’ve talked to my classes about their plans for the future, I’ve noticed an association that should be investigated. My motivated students tend to have dreams for their futures. Those dreams may be unrealistic and grandiose. If we stacked all the aspiring future NBA players end to end, they might reach from Chicago to Cleveland for example. But dreams provide leverage for teachers and possibilities for students. Failed NBA players may still receive college scholarships. Failed veterinarians may maintain grades that offer multiple healthcare career options. Dreams can get children to finish high school.

I have a number of children without dreams, though. They aren’t working. They aren’t trying. Parental pressure may push them through high school graduation, but their own efforts won’t get them anywhere. I wonder, where are the dreams? Why aren’t there dreams? Were there ever dreams? Does this lack of aspiration sap intrinsic motivation?

I intend to pick up this thread in the next day or two.

No healing here

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“It’s not the wound that teaches, but the healing.”
~ Marty Rubin (Credit to Bob at Lakeside Advisors in Seattle for the quote.)

I’m going to pull a quote from a previous post a couple of days ago:

What, exactly, is the point of crushing the hearts and minds of young children by setting a standard so high that 70% are certain to fail?

Eduhonesty: A great part of my concern about the current testing situation lays in the fact that these children and young adults never get to heal. They stumble from (standardized) test to test to test throughout the year, not including the many exams given by teachers, some of which are highly inappropriate since they are designed to prepare kids for standardized tests for which they remain unready. Common Core prep tests given in the classroom may be years beyond actual academic learning levels of students. With luck, the teacher has at least taught some or most of the material on the test. In the worst case, the teacher has taught very little of the material because his or her students aren’t ready for that material, but administration has required the test. This gives kids regular opportunities to bomb in the classroom as well.

A classroom test should reflect what the teacher has taught. If I give a test and almost all the class fails, I designed the test badly. Those test results are my fault, not theirs. Students have a right to expect that if they listen to me, do their homework and finish their reading, they will get a decent grade on the summative test. Students who faithfully do their work should never be clobbered in the end-game.

We have no idea of the long-term effects of regularly causing large groups of students to fail exams that we frequently tell them are vitally important predictors of their future.

I wish Arne Duncan and other advocates of wide-scale testing were not so cavalier about what we are doing to children in our pursuit of rigor and data, two words I am coming to loathe. So many dubious practices are justified by using those words.

Small ponds

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“Arnesha” thinks she’s the best. She’s smart, she’s pretty and she’s at the top of her class. She’s swimming confidently through this small pond, confident that her ecosystem is in control. The fact that real estate determined her school district, and that her school district is damn near broke, has no effect on Arnesha, or at least none that she recognizes. She does not realize that her 8th grade honors math class has been doing fifth grade math. She does not know that her English scores put her in the bottom 5% of the state. Her school’s in the bottom 2.5%, after all, and next to her classmates she looks pretty good.

Arnesha has no basis for comparison. Only during the occasional track meet does she encounter the outside world but she is not in the classrooms of the schools she visits. She does not see the advanced math on those blackboards, nor the unfamiliar words on the word walls. Arnesha is insulated from the failures of her district.

Eduhonesty: This girl will get into college, at which point the story will become one of resiliency. If she is resilient, she may make it. She has gaping holes to fill in her background knowledge, but she’s a fighter. When she plunges from the top of her class to the bottom, she will suffer a massive shock. Will she drop out of college? I hope not.

From “From High School to the Future: A First Look at Chicago Public School Graduates’ College Enrollment, College Preparation, and Graduation from Four-Year Colleges” out of the University of Chicago: April, 2006. Authors: Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, and Elaine Allensworth; with Vanessa Coca, Macarena Correa, and Ginger Stoker

The study paints a discouraging picture of college success for CPS graduates. Despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of seniors state that they expect to graduate from a four-year college, only about 30 percent enroll in a four-year college within a year of graduating high school, and only 35 percent of those who enroll received a bachelor’s degree within six years. According to this report, CPS students’ low grades and test scores are keeping them from entering four-year colleges and more selective four-year colleges.

Other sources paint a more dismal picture. The CPS numbers include magnet school graduates, so the numbers for schools like Arnesha’s will be considerably lower than that already depressing 35% average. I would not be surprised to find that the number of four-year-college graduates from Arnesha’s school runs under 5%.

This post is for parents, parents who live in our economically-challenged zip codes. Mobility within these zip codes runs high. Arnesha’s classmates come and go regularly as rentals change and family situations change. If you are a parent struggling to find affordable housing, I’d like to strongly suggest you look up local school test scores and other school information before you commit to new housing. Your children will be much better off in a two-room apartment in an academically strong school district than in a four-bedroom house in an academic disaster zone. Zip code should not be destiny, but… woulda, shoulda, coulda. Often location makes all the difference. Most kids end up somewhere in the middle of the class. You want to find a class for your boy or girl that is at least at grade level according to test scores, and preferably higher.

Another cutter

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I just found out I have another cutter. That makes two this year that I know about, although they are almost certainly not the only two. What is cutting? Cutters deliberately injure themselves by making scratches or cuts on themselves with a sharp object. Scissors work well, but a bent paperclip serves in a pinch.

Before I started teaching, I viewed cutting as a rare psychological ailment found mostly in textbooks. My view has changed. I’ve even reached the point where I now break cutters into two categories, scratchers and true cutters. Erasing the top layers of your skin or etching a ex-boyfriend’s name into an arm definitely cannot be ignored, but it’s not the same as gouging the word “death” into an actively bleeding arm. I’d also like to know the number of students afflicted with this need for painful self-expression. I’m certain the number is high. The following paragraph comes from the website for Focus on the Family (http://www.focusonthefamily.com/lifechallenges/abuse_and_addiction/conquering
_cutting_and_other_forms_of_selfinjury/a_window_into_a_cutters_world.aspx):

Experts call cutting “the new anorexia” because, like an eating disorder, it is a self-destructive attempt to control painful thoughts and unexpressed emotions. Current research places the number of self-injurers at about 4 percent of the general population, and as many as 10 percent of American teenage girls. Cutting is the most common form of self-harm, but up to 75 percent of all cutters rely on diverse methods, such as burning, pulling hair or punching walls.

Cutters hide the cuts and scars with long sleeves and concealing clothing. They are often discovered when a close friend comes to a teacher or social worker for help.

Eduhonesty: Parents and teachers need to watch for long sleeves and pants in warm weather, an extreme need for privacy when changing clothes, and unexplained scratches, scars or bruises. If it’s hot outside and you haven’t seen an arm or a leg for weeks, cutting needs to be considered as an explanation. In a time when teen suicide is every school counselor’s nightmare, cutters need therapy and support.

This problem needs to be passed on to a mental health professional immediately.

I feel sad as I look out into the room at my cutters. How did they get so stressed? What can we do to help? Mega-testing certainly does not help. I am exempting one of these two from tests right now. I am taking extra credit work from the other. Both are far behind the regular student population and I am sure that adds to their burdens. As we eliminate self-contained special education classes, we might consider the effect of being plunged into a mainstream classroom where you will almost certainly find yourself at the bottom of the class.

As schools create and exacerbate self-esteem issues, I also wonder to what extent schools are contributing to any increase in the number of students who have chosen to take out their frustrations on their own bodies.