Class War in the Classroom

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In a perfect world every kid would get their own teacher who could guide them through each subject in life with expertise and patience and compassion. Challenge them here, catch them up there, untangle this, focus on that.

But of course that’s not the way the things work and the groups they are taught in are based on the year they were they born and not their capabilities or lack thereof. So, as a result we have “gifted” kids, “average” kids and “Not So Smart (NSS)” kids. 

You cannot apply one of these labels across the entire spectrum of things a kid does. There are gifted kids who are hopeless at sports and gifted guitars players who don’t read well. There are brilliant mathematicians who haven’t couldn’t throw a Frisbee to save their lives and some amazing athletes who are also academically brilliant and there are captains of industry who are completely illiterate.

The definition of a gifted kid is one who shows strengths in one or more areas and is easily bored and wants more of a challenge in those areas. 

I have asked this before: Who does that formula NOT apply to? 

If kids were grouped together according to their level in each individual subject this labeling wouldn’t occur and kids would get help where they need it and challenge where they could use it.

Instead we have articles like this one that talk about how gifted kids are in a bit of a bind because sometimes being clever makes it hard to socialize, they hide their smarts to “fit in”. Can the same not be said of average and NSS kids? Of any of us? Old or young, smart or otherwise? Isn't socializing hard enough without being labelled according to academic skills? Don’t NSS kids hide their disadvantages the same way smarts kids do? Doesn’t one kid hide their inability to read the same way another might hide their ability to understand physics? Aren’t we all susceptible to ridicule based on how much we know, how much we don’t know, how tall or short thin or fat we are? But where we can’t change our height, we can learn and get smarter, in the right environment.

There’s a class war in the classroom and it is stunting our collective growth.

What if all the kids who read at a grade 2 level were grouped together regardless of age?

What if all the kids doing grade 5 math were grouped together regardless of what year they were born?

It’s the way swimming lessons work and no one dies. It’s the way university works and no one dies.

Kids would move from one subject to the next in groups that were assembled by understanding rather than age. When a level is mastered the student moves to the next group at their own rate.

If everyone can suck at things and excels at others the thrill of pointing it out dies.

Wouldn't everyone eventually feel secure enough to show/admit their weaknesses, get help and thrive? 

Wouldn’t it mean that a teacher would be talking to a group of kids who were all on the same page and no one would be acting out because they “so get it” and are bored or can’t  “get it” and act like the class clown rather than be seen as the village idiot?

And rather than an article like this that says we need to do more for our gifted kids we would be doing more for ALL our kids and they could all very well be gifted at something? 

Something they, in the current system, may never discover because of how far they get left behind or crappy they feel?

Teachers & Parents as a Team

This article talks about research that shows how kids with counting skills in preschool fair much in math down the road and it's worth a read, especially if you have really little kids.

That makes sense, we all know what reading to our kids before they get into school does for them. What I found interesting was this paragraph:

“[The] low-income children aren’t learning math skills anywhere because parents think the children are learning them at school, and teachers think they’re learning them at home,” Dr. Manfra explained in the release. “This is a problem because it gives parents and teachers the idea that it’s not their responsibility to educate the children, when it’s everyone’s responsibility. This is problematic because, when the children enter kindergarten and are at lower math levels, they don’t have the foundational skills needed to set them on paths for future success.”

I reckon it’s safe to say this can occur across all household incomes and situations.

We all understand that teaching is everyone’s job and it’s constant. But parents in all income brackets can be surprised when they discover their children cannot read as well as they thought or maybe struggle with math.

It can be for any number of reasons, maybe they can’t see or hear from where they sit but haven't told anyone. I didn’t know my child needed glasses until one day she was standing right in front of the TV screen and that’s when I found out she had been moved to the front row in class. 

It could be an discovered learning disability or learning style. Or they could be inadvertently snowing you...

I remember thinking my son was a genius the way he read a book one night without any real hesitation . I thought; “OK, the penny dropped, he gets it, he’s reading now. Cool.” Then we went to the next book and he read it like it was in foreign language. What the...? “The teacher read us the first book in class today Mom, so I remembered it.” A-ha.

Math can be tricky too. Give a kid two numbers to add and and unbeknownst to us he hasn’t a clue but he takes a stab and is only one number off. We pat him on the back, tell him he was close and doing so well!

Teachers have big classes and many demands, parents are no less busy but when we all take the time to investigate a child's comfort level, skill level and actual abilities we will know better if they need help. 

One of the easiest ways to find out how a kid's reading is progressing is download an app or game they have been dying for that has new instructions. You’ll soon find out what they know by how much reading help they ask for.

Same with math. Open their piggy bank and tell them can buy something then ask them to count out ten pennies they need or the three shiny big silver coins and seven brown ones or twelve of anything.

If it doesn’t look like “learning” or school work then they aren’t trying to prove anything to you and are more comfortable to say - “I don’t know what that word is.” or "How many is ten?”

We can’t expect that teaching just happens at school and nor can teachers know how much we do at home so it’s team work that helps the child thrive.

Although, as the article says, it’s hard for the low income family kids, it can happen in any family. 

Parents Have to Parent!

A little girl at a local school is being bullied. One of the bigger boys is "tea bagging" her. Often.

I’ll let you look it up. One note; this version is done clothed. 

Kids - mostly boys - learn about it playing Halo when battle winners gyrate their crotch over a defeated opponent.

The fact that an 11 year old girl is having this done to her - repeatedly - is disturbing.

More disturbing is that another kid in the school has been paying the boy to do it to this poor girl. 
How is it that kids have managed to get to be 12 years old and not know that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable?

The girl's parents have gone to the school to demand action. But the schools don't know what kind of action to take anymore. Nasty behaviour has slowly crept into the schools over the years and it is not being dealt with. Most schools seem to have given up and it's hard to blame them, it's got to be frustrating to have the parents deny culpability just like their kids do. 

"Not me!" Has become: "Not my kid!"

Used to be a teacher would catch a kid doing something wrong, pull them up by the ear, march them to office, call the kid's parents and they would have to come and get the kid, take him/her home and the principal would give the parents what-for.

But something has happened. Somewhere along the line the schools lost the power to tell the parents: "Either your kid smartens up or he/she can’t come back here." 

As a result abhorrent behaviour is left unchecked and kids have no idea what is intrinsically wrong and few pay any consequences for misbehaving.

Parents are afraid to speak to one another directly about each other's kids to discuss things lest they be black-balled by the Mommy Group, ostracized at the soccer filed or name-called on Facebook. I don't recall my mother ever being more interested in her friendships than our well being and our behaviour. Seems today all kinds of things are ignored so that moms can remain "in" while they quietly seethe about one another's kids. Waste of time.

So as a last resort we turn to the schools to discipline the kids - but that's not their job. They are meant to teach the kids. We are their parents.

Policy at the school should be: 

The school tells the kid to knock it off and no amount of whining or crying is going to change things.

They then call the parents and demand they come pick up their kid and give them a refresher in what's right and wrong.

No more chances, if he/she does it again it's a week's suspension and the school doesn't care if you don't have childcare set up for such a situation, that is your problem, maybe use some of your vacation days to sit with at home and teach your kid about life instead of taking another trip to Hawaii so the kid thinks they get rewards for being an ass.

Parents need to be parents so teachers can teach.

Travelling Cyberspace With Your Kids

"... our kids are growing up in a virtual Neverland: a place where they’re learning to navigate the world around them without the emotional and social experience of adults. It’s not because our kids have raced off to this mythical island to escape us; rather, it’s more like we’ve given them the island, but don’t know how to get there ourselves." Sarah Brown Wessling, excerpt from first article linked below

If you lived forever you would never have enough time to read all there is on the subject of technology. Some folks think it’s ruining our kids and our lives, others think the opposite but very few waffle in between without an opinion.

We have two Minecraft junkies in the house. We don’t have a problem with that. The kids know that when we say: "Okay, that's enough, you have five minutes to shut it down then we are going outside or to read/ to draw/ to play a game." they know not to whine or complain otherwise they won’t be allowed back into their favorite cyber world.

Recently my 10 year old had a social studies unit about natural resources and she told me she could see how what she was learning about the real world applied in Minecraft. She needed to collect coal to light her fires so she could cook her meat to get more energy reserves than she would if she ate it raw. If she had enough coal to keep her torches burning at night the zombies couldn’t come kill her. She had to dig deep into the ground to find water and coal and she had find sustainable resources to survive. Pretty cool if you ask me, nothing I did in school was relatable with Etch-a-Sketch and Slinky.

The iPod is their pen, Google is their library and social media is their new stomping grounds. In the same way we would learn Sign Language to communicate with our deaf child, we need to learn the language our techy kids talk or we leave leave them alone in a world they must navigate for themselves. 

Learning about this stuff is sounds like a scary proposition but it’s not as hard as you may think and learning a little will go along way to understanding what your kids are doing and who they are doing it with. Or, if they are not online yet, it will make it much easier for you to allow them into traffic when the time comes - because, make no mistake, they will have to get into one day - with or without your help.

This morning my kids were talking and used the term “griefer” - I asked, they explained. A griefer is a person who causes problems in a game. I could have Googled it too.

When I was a teen I could have discussed buying, deseeding, rolling and smoking a bag of pot right in front of parents in terms they would not have understood. Had they been curious they had nowhere to go to find out about my lingo, man.

It's all there. You can poke around on your own, ask to watch they are doing, read about it. It doesn't have to be huge volumes of information but at least learn as much of their native tongue as you would learn Spanish to be able to order a beer in Mexico.

The more you know about all this, the less you will worry about your kids when they are on line. The more you can talk about it with them the less likely it is they will get into trouble out there.

Here is a good article to get you started. Parents Need to Step Up Their Tech Game

Here is a link to infographics, one of the quickest ways to get up to speed on a subject.

Here is a cool article about how MineCraft being applied in schools.

I Want to Be Born in 10 Years

The other day I was sitting with three friends around my age (50-ish) and we got to talking about what we thought the future would like. We all wished we were younger so we'd see more of it. We were born too soon. You don’t hear people say that very often, most folks wax nostalgic for their own youth or some generation before theirs into which they wish they had been born, romanticizing what was.

We four, on the other hand, all want to be around for what will be. We want to be kids today. Or better yet, born 10 or 20 years from now and be techno-babies rather than techno-immigrants. It’s going to a wild time up ahead. They say world knowledge will soon double every 11 days. Mind -boggling.

One of the group said he thinks this rapid accumulating knowledge will fix all the world’s problems from cancer and environmental issues, to long line-ups at airport security and sticking zippers. I am hopeful that he is right, especially about the zippers.

There are going to be some cool things all of which our kids will be exposed to, perhaps invent themselves or be part of. And I believe there will always be more good things than bad things - just as it's always been.

My kids are 10 and 8 and we often talk about what amazing things they may do in the future as a job, pastime, or simply in their day-to-day living. Flying, is always a big one. Curing disease is a topic my daughter is very adamant she will have a hand in. 

Recently we got around to discussing to privacy. I think there will be big dough in ensuring privacy. Clancy, my daughter, suggested maybe she could invent a piece of jewelry or special clothing that emits some sort of scrambling signal so no one could capture your image with a camera unless you want them to. I suggested my son could then develop the camera tech that would work despite his sister's invention and then she could update her gizmo to work against his new camera and so on and so on and they could keep each other in business by being friendly adversaries.

Who knows what lies ahead? I can’t help but wish I were younger and could be part of it. 

Here's some new and cool and 'futuristic' stuff - a 20 year old has invented a gel that stops bleeding and instantly fires up the healing process (and it wasn't the server at a local restaurant last week who didn't know there was such a thing as a soup spoon...for my soup):  Here's the article about the gel

What 90% of Schools Are Not Teaching

I was speaking to a young friend yesterday. She is one course away from finishing her masters and will owe about 50K when she walks out the door. She was lucky to have had scholarships and help from her folks to pay the undergrad degree so $50,000 is "all" she owes. She’s in kinesiology, has prospects and will likely get work right away but she’ll be paying off debt for a long time before her hard-earned money is hers.  

If you never went to university, like me, then it's hard to imagine those first delicious pay checks being shared with someone else. My partying days, last minute trips to The Dominican, first second-hand car, studio apartment in downtown Montreal,  dinners out with friends, futon ... I could never have done any of that on my radio station receptionist salary if I owed even a small amount of money.

There has been lots in the press over the last year or so about young adults graduating owing big dough but without jobs to go to. They work in coffee shops, grocery stores, retail outlets while their degree collects dust, their loan collects interest. If they decide to go back and take another program that holds a better promise of employment then they have take on more debt to pay for that.

More and more kids are choosing careers which are in need of people rather than follow their own interests. So we should expand our children's interests now, while they are young...

The jobs are our little kids will be doing have yet to be imagined let alone show a clear path to them.

One thing is for sure, there will be a huge need for coders. It may not sound like something your artists, musician, voracious reader, or ballerina may like but you may be very surprised. It's not just for mathmeticians. My kids have started fooling around here, at Code Academy, and love it. When I told them that learning code means they can one day develop their own app, video game, or Minecraft server they bought in big time.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg put this together and it's been all over the press and internet this week, I showed it to my kids and they couldn't get over how young all these millionaires are, how cool their offices are and, as my daughter pointed out - how many are girls.

We teach them to read, let's teach them to code. Here are some reasons why:

Sources: the College Board, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Sources: National Science Foundation, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Read more here