To new readers:
Welcome. To make it easy for you to get a sense of the whole story told in this blog, these posts are listed in chronological order. The regular blog (where you can post your comments and read comments made by other readers) can be accessed by clicking on “Blog: Helicopter Mom.” Your comments are always welcome.
Dear President Bush, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein,
(January 16, 2007) I know you are doing your best to try and improve the performance of all public school children. I commend you for your efforts. I also know things are not going so well for you. I have some behind-the-scenes information that can help you. What follows in this blog is a first-hand look at the time and effort parents all over the city are expending in order to help their children do well in school, and the toll that it is taking on our personal and professional lives. Many of us feel as if we have re-enrolled in elementary or middle school. My husband, who is an attorney, told a client that he is unable to conduct out-of-town depositions next week because that is when his midterms are scheduled for. When his client looked at him uncomprehendingly, my husband explained that it is our 7th grader who will actually be taking the tests, but that my husband and I will be taking turns studying elbow to elbow with our son, since studying for tests is a skill his elementary school never taught him.
There are many, many skills his public elementary school—deemed one of the top 200 in the city, by the way—never taught him. Among them were: how to subtract, how to divide, what length and width is, and where to put commas in a sentence. As for semi-colons, until recently, my son had two words for them: “What’s that?” But our son sure had fun in elementary school. Instead of teaching him probability (which is something she herself did not understand) my son’s third grade teacher taught the class all the lyrics to “Yellow Submarine” as well as to assorted show tunes. Our son spent the entire last half of 5th grade rehearsing for the 5th grade play. During class time! When his pregnant 5th grade teacher left to have her baby in December of that year and I inquired as to whom would replace her, she replied, “Don’t worry. They don’t learn anything during the second half of 5th grade anyway. It’s all about the play.”
So how did this school become one of the top 200 in the city? It was thanks to the efforts of parents, who had finally caught on to the fact that they needed to either teach their kids math at home, or have them tutored for their state and city tests. (The scores on those tests are the only benchmark used to determine if a school is one of the top 200.) The scores improved so much that the principal was promoted and now teaches other principals how to improve their school’s scores. What a joke. The principal, wrongly, gave full credit for those scores to herself and the work of her teachers. I surveyed parents and found that every single child who did very well on the 4th grade standardized state tests was either tutored, or taught math at home by his or her parents. Children who did not do well had parents who, innocently, believed that the school was teaching the kids what they needed to know or who supplemented incorrectly. (They drilled their kids on math facts as opposed to teaching them concepts that would appear on the 4th grade test.) Their children paid for their innocence since, in New York City, a child’s scores on the 4th grade standardized tests determine which middle school he will be accepted to. Not surprisingly, the kids whose parents taught them the concepts that would be on that test, or who were lucky enough to afford tutors who did that work for them, were accepted into the highest performing middle schools while those whose parents left their child’s education up to the elementary school are now enrolled in the lower performing ones.
Mayor Bloomberg, before you overhaul our school system yet again, I beg you to really look at what makes a difference in how children perform in school. The difference lies in giving each child the individualized help he or she needs, either via parents, tutors, or astute teachers who inform parents of what type of supplemental work needs to be done with the child at home. (Even the very best teachers in New York City generally have at least 27 other kids in a classroom to attend to and are usually unable to give each child the indidivual attention he or she needs.) It will make no difference if you take the “good” teachers from the “good” schools and put them into the “bad” schools, as you plan to do. You are assuming that the low-performing schools have “bad” teachers. You are wrong. Two of the best teachers my kids ever had at their “good” schools were hired away from “bad” ones. My older son’s former kindergarten teacher previously taught kindergarten in a low performing school in Harlem. There were no books in her classroom.. The teacher’s parents bought the books for her classroom with their own money since the parents of the kids she taught couldn’t afford to do so. The kids she taught often didn’t show up at school because of some problem that was happening at home. The parents didn’t show up at parent teacher conferences. There is only so much one single teacher, no matter how outstanding she or he is, can do. To ship this teacher back into a low performing school would not change the real problem, the fact that these kids are not getting the support they need at home. Switching teachers from “good” to “bad” schools will not make a dent in the performance of the “bad” schools.
Last November, The New York Times ran a front page article announcing that U.S. schools were “slow in closing gaps between races.” It stated that in spite of President Bush’s attempt to leave no child behind, little progress has been made towards closing the performance gap between minority and white students. (The article did name two schools where minority students had made large gains. The principal of one of those schools attributed the gains to after-school tutoring by volunteers in black churches, while the other principal said progress resulted from “focused instruction , frequent diagnostic testing and (no surprise now) several tutoring programs.” In schools where children did not receive individual support from either a parent or a tutor, despite what the article called “concerted efforts by educators,” the test-score gaps were so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school were reading and doing arithmetic at the same level as whites in junior high.
That is not true of the African- American and Hispanic students at NEST+m, a rigorous K-12 school in New York City with astonishingly high test scores. There, African-American and Hispanic children are on par, or ahead of, their white classmates. It made the front page of The New York Times when the chancellor discovered that NEST+m, was interviewing parents and asking them how much support they were willing to provide their children at home before accepting, or rejecting, their children.
My older son is now a 7th grader at NEST+m. During our admissions interview, we were told that a child’s success in that school hinges on parents being ready, willing and able to academically support the child at home. We were asked if we were willing to commit to providing a large level of support. “Definitely,” I replied. “We’ve been doing that since third grade.” (That’s why his test scores were high enough to earn him an interview at NEST+m, an opportunity very few children were given.) A group of NEST+m parents emailed each other after that Times article appeared. One of them bristled at Joel Klein having a problem with the fact that the school chose students with involved and active parents over non participatory and non active parents. “Does he not know that the success of a child does not lie solely (with) the school but with the family and guardians involved?” the email asked about Klein. “How ignorant is he? If it were not for the combination of parent/guardian AND school/teacher efforts NEST would not have achieved the kind of academic level that it has now.”
That truism applies to children of all races at NEST+m. One of my son’s closest friends at that school is an African-American boy from Harlem. Academically, he outperforms my son. Not surprisingly, his mom is more adamant about, or perhaps is more effective at, being a helicopter mom. Want proof? Last fall this boy came to our country house for the weekend. The kids did hours of homework and studied hard for a social studies exam they were having on Monday. Then, since it was a beautiful, sunny Sunday, we took the kids fishing, something my son’s friend had never done before. The boy marveled at the beauty of the bay we were at and collected a few lovely beach rocks to bring home as a memory of this outing, which was clearly very special to him. My heart filled with joy as I listened to him oooh and ahhh at the beauty of his surroundings. A few minutes later, as my husband was showing the boy how to cast out a fishing line, my husband’s cell phone rang. It was the boy’s mother calling. “I just wanted to make sure he is studying,” she said. “Um, no,” my husband sheepishly replied. “It’s such a beautiful day that we took them fishing.” Silent disapproval came over the line.
Everything you will read in this blog is true. Read it and weep. Then please do something to stop the madness happening within our school system since everyone is losing—both the middle class and the poor. Realize that fuzzy curriculums like TERC and Balanced Literacy appear to be effective because parents at the “good” schools using those curriculums are teaching their kids the crucial fundamentals those curriculums leave out. Once those fundamentals are in place, then those curriculums are able to teach children what they were designed to teach. But without those fundamentals children’s performance sinks like a rock. Savvy parents who are tuned in to the right word-of-mouth parenting network know that. Recent immigrants or members of our city and country’s lower socio-economic strata do not. They trust that our city’s public schools are going to give their kids the fundamentals of a good education. Many of the schools are not doing that.
Mr. Bush, there are lots of problems with No Child Left Behind but at least you are trying to give all children the fundamentals that they need and my hat goes off to you for that. If it was not for mandated city and state testing, I would not have realized how much was being omitted in my older son’s elementary school curriculum and would not have known what to supplement at home. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, I am beginning to think that perhaps you honestly do not realize how important fundamentals are. Mr. Klein, you are all for the Whole Language-inspired Balanced Literacy curriculum because of your own personal experience. You became a reader when someone gave you a book on baseball. But you were able to read it because someone else had already taught you phonics. If that rudimentary information had not been drilled into your head when you were a schoolboy, you would have been as lost as many of our city’s children are, now that they are not getting a systematic exposure to phonics. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the massive amount of research that says so. Then look at why Balanced Literacy appears to work in “good” (read “wealthy” schools)—because parents at those “good” schools are teaching their kids phonics at home!
Please realize that until you empower immigrants or parents in our country’s lower socio-economic strata with the same knowledge, time and money that middle and upper class parents have to devote to supporting their children—or tutors who can do it for them— you will never be able to close the achievement gap that exists between rich and poor schools. By pointing out the importance of parents, I am not minimizing the work being done by teachers. My 12-year-old son refers to them as the heroes of America and I agree with him. But teachers have to teach the curriculums they are mandated to teach and they have to teach them to 28 or more kids each day. In the end, it is parents who make the crucial difference. It’s time someone had the courage to stand up and speak that truth. I am that person.
Sincerely,
Helicopter Mom
I never intended to be a helicopter mom
(January 16, 2007) I did not set out to be helicopter mom. (By that I mean a mom who hovers over every single detail involved with helping her children succeed in school.) I always thought of myself as a very well balanced person who had my priorities straight. As a parent, my goal for my children was simple: I wanted them to be happy. In that I have succeeded. I have two healthy wonderful boys—Older Son, age 12, and Younger Son, age 6—both of whom sparkle with joy and vitality and both of whom are a pleasure to be with. When they were preschoolers, I never pressured either one of them academically. Instead of drilling them on the sounds that letters make, I took my kids to the playground or let them play with blocks, or cars, or trains at home. When I hired my younger son’s preschool teacher to be his babysitter, she suggested I buy some educational games for her to play with him. I demurred. “He gets enough academic work at preschool,” I said. “At home I want him to just play with his toys.” (Younger Son, especially, had a real need to build and create things and I wanted him to have the time to engage in that love and need.)
At the time I was a doctoral student in psychology (I still am) and my child-rearing decisions were supported by the academic and psychological experts I came in contact with. For example, when my husband and I toured NEST+m, an academically rigorous K-12 school on the Lower East Side, the principal said the most important thing parents could be doing with their future kindergarteners was taking them to the park or on playdates so that they could learn to get along with other children. As a doctoral psychology student taking courses at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, I heard fellow doctoral students scoffing at a mother who had asked one of them to recommend a person who could “cognitively stimulate” her toddler. “Tell her to let him play with blocks,” said one of the doctoral candidates. “That’s what kids really need.” When I interviewed child development researcher Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., author of Scientist in the Crib, for a Parents magazine article on how to cognitively stimulate your baby, Gopnik told me that parents had totally taken cognitive research out of context. “Normal, middle class homes are full of all the cognitive stimulation a young child will ever need,” she said. She warned that parents had turned cognitive stimulation into a job and were stressing out themselves, and their children.
Not me, I thought. My kids were happy. They were smart without being pressured. They were both curious little people who loved to learn. There were no flashcards in my home. Friends and relatives gave our kids electronic games that beeped the sounds of the letters but I found them totally annoying. They sat unused in the closet. From time to time I did try to introduce the sounds of letters to Younger Son, but he turned away in disinterest. He did the same in preschool when his teachers taught “the letter of the week.” His interest would come in time, I knew. There was no reason to push. Early reading has not been found to be a predictor of later academic success. Early reading was not helpful but pushing, I knew, was detrimental. Kids who were forced to learn to read too early grew up to hate reading.
My older son had never been pushed to read. I was forced to become a helicopter mom to him because his elementary school was not teaching him the basics of what he needed to know—you know, things like math and grammar! But it did teach him how to read. Older Son, like Younger Son, began reading in first grade. Today, Older Son loves reading and he is in the 97th percentile in reading in the country. His reading ability earned him an invitation to participate in the Johns Hopkins talent search, so that he—along with other super-bright kids—could be further groomed academically during the summer. My smart, skate boarding, hockey-playing son proclaimed the kids on the cover of the Johns Hopkins brochure “dorks.” He loudly stated that he didn’t want to go to school in the summer. He was a 6th grader at the time and his every waking moment was taken up with school work, seven days a week. He couldn’t have playdates and couldn’t participate in after school activities. He couldn’t even watch TV or read a book for pleasure. He needed, and deserved, a break. He needed, and deserved, a childhood. We knew that if he continued to be pushed the way his middle school was pushing him, he would lose his love of learning. We threw the Johns Hopkins invitation in the garbage. If there was one thing I knew about myself, it was that I was not a pusher.
That was then. This is now.
Now, I have a 6 year old in a talented and gifted school in uptown Manhattan. Uptown is the key word in that sentence, even more important than “talented and gifted” although that certainly matters too. We live downtown. Downtown preschools do not send home worksheets for homework. Downtown parents do not drill their kids on letter sounds. Uptown parents do. Result: many children in uptown schools start kindergarten knowing how to read. Younger Son did not know how to. He was the only kid in his kindergarten class who did not know all the sounds that consonants make. Fellow kindergarten mothers, women I like and respect and who are now my friends, would sit on the bench in the school playground last year and talk about how they were teaching their kids to read at home. Their kids didn’t like it. Their kids complained. But they were learning how to read.
I was not teaching my child because I thought Younger Son wasn’t ready. Also, I didn’t have the time to teach him. Every spare moment I had was spent helicoptering Older Son—helping him survive his brutal transition to NEST+m. (Not only was NEST brutally demanding, it regularly tossed out kids who could not keep up.) And I was sure Younger Son’s school would teach him how to read. After all, that was one of the reasons we schlepped uptown to bring Younger Son to his wonderful school—to avoid all the teaching I had needed to do when my older son went to our neighborhood elementary school. (That school now has a new principal and things are much better there. For example, kids are now expected to know their multiplication tables (this was actually discouraged when Older Son went there) and rehearsals for the 5th grade play now take place after school.)
Younger Son was in a great school. His kindergarten teacher was doing a stupendous job of teaching Younger Son the sounds that consonants make. I figured his first grade teacher would do an equally stupendous job of teaching him to read when he was good and ready. Turns out, Younger Son was ready in kindergarten, and I didn’t realize it. Turns out, his school’s Whole Language-based Balanced Literacy curriculum was failing him miserably and I didn’t know it. (Whole Language believes kids pick up reading by being surrounded by literature, the way they pick up the spoken language and that the systematic teaching, and drilling, of phonics is unnecessary. Phonics is done, but only in a very limited way. Balanced Literacy is the curriculum Joel Klein has put into almost every public school in the city, God help us.)
In kindergarten, Younger Son would often say things to me like, “How do you really spell that?” and then sigh in frustration when I urged him to sound the word out and use “invented spelling” the way his school advised. (Invented spelling has kids write down the sounds they hear and not worry about spelling the word correctly.) He also frequently said, “In school when we read they tell us to look at the pictures, but that’s not reading. I want to really read but I don’t know how.” I trusted the school would teach him.
Now I know better. Now I know Younger Son, like most kids, needs to learn phonics in order to learn how to read. Now I am pushing phonics. I have turned to the other mothers for help and advice. They have given it freely. Now there are flashcards in my home. And phonics workbooks. And spelling board games like “What’s g-n-u” and “Spelling Bee.” Younger Son and I create Sight Word Bingo cards in the little spare time we have between me supporting Older Son and Younger Son reading books and sight word flash cards and filling out pages in his phonics workbook. I wake up making lists of words that have the short “o” vowel sound in them. I have become a woman obsessed. I walk around phonetically sounding out words on street signs and subway ads, and urging Younger Son to do the same. I want to bring Younger Son to the same place the other parents have brought their children.
Right now he is in a very different place. Now, while the other kids in his FIRST GRADE class are bringing home spelling words like “because,” “there,” “their,” “should,” and “could,” Younger Son is working on “of” and “all.” I talked to Younger Son’s teacher and told her I felt like I was teaching Younger Son to read at home all by myself and that I needed the school’s help. Younger Son is now being pulled out of class for phonics work with the school’s reading specialist. His teacher and I are in constant contact and Younger Son is making great progress. The other day he said, “I’m really good at reading!” He is, but he’s still way behind the other kids.
This morning, I had coffee with The Other Mother. Her son is Younger Son’s reading partner. They are the two worst readers in the class. Not surprisingly, they are the only two kids in the class who were not taught how to read at home. (I have to repeatedly say in this blog that I am not in any way bashing my son’s school. They have to teach to the curve and the parents at my son’s school are raising the curve in a tremendous way. Realizing the Balanced Literacy curriculum is not working for Younger Son, the school is now taking steps to provide him with the phonics work he needs at school too. Every school should be as responsive and warm and nurturing as his.)
I asked The Other Mother if she thought we should talk to our kids’ teacher and ask if she would teach our kids basic phonics skills in the classroom. “She does teach some phonics, but what she teaches is way over our kids’ heads,” she said. (The class is currently working on naming all the possible words that have the “i” sound, in them including my, height, freight. The simple short vowel sounds were never covered in any systematic way.)
“Face it, we missed the boat,” said The Other Mother. “We should have taught them at home and we didn’t. The ship sailed without us and we have to do what we can do to help our kids catch up.”
I am helping as fast as I can. I have visions of a huge ship filled with hordes of tiny children with their noses in chapter books while my blonde, adorable son waves for them to wait from the desert island he has been stranded on.
If I could, I would keep Younger Son home from school for a few months and teach him to read. We would do reading, and reading only. But I can’t do that. I work. And worry. And the ship with all those kids reading way above grade level keeps sailing on.
Welcome to my life.
Haven’t thrown up in a few hours? You’re going to school!
Older Son was out most of the week of January 8th with the stomach flu. That week, he called around to his friends, asked what the homework was, tried to do it but was physically unable to. He was still throwing up at midnight on Thursday night. Friday morning I let him sleep late. When he woke up he didn’t feel queasy anymore and was hungry for the first time in a week. A good sign. He had black circles under his eyes, he could barely walk and his clothes hung on him. But he wasn’t throwing up. That meant one thing. Older Son was going to school.
It broke my heart to send him. If the NYC school system was different, I would have let him stay in bed, watching TV, resting and recovering, the way I would have done when I was a child his age. But, as my best friend often tells her husband, who refuses to get caught up in the madness of supporting their son at his well regarded private school, “It isn’t 1975 anymore. It’s 2006. The world is a lot different than when we were kids.” The world is indeed different, at least for kids who are getting a “good” education.
Older Son is in the world of NYC public schools. That means that admission to middle school is done on a competitive basis and so is admission to high school. The only grades high schools look at when deciding whether to accept, or reject, a child are the ones from 7th grade. As one former middle school teacher told me, “If your kid doesn’t get into one of the screened high schools you may as well move to the suburbs. The unscreened high schools are a disaster.” (And unsafe.) In order to get into a screened high school, Older Son’s grades need to be as high as possible this year. Kids with 90 averages are regularly rejected from the top high schools. At the most recent high school admission fair we were told that admissions are simply based on a child’s grades. We were told the schools do not take into consideration the fact that NEST is much harder than most other middle schools. However, at a tour of one of the screened high schools I was told that they know which middle schools inflate kids’ grades and which ones are tough and they do take that into consideration. In any event, grades matter. In fact, to even to be allowed to continue to NEST’s own high school, Older Son needs to maintain an 85 average, which is like maintaining a 100 average at most other NYC middle schools. So… as long as he can stand up and keep his food down, he has to go to school. Otherwise he risks missing too much.
Needless to say, Older Son was not happy about this. “I hate my school right now,” he said as we sat in his pediatrician’s examining room. “We can never have a break.”
“You can’t, honey,” I empathized. “I’m sorry. The school system in New York is crazy and we just have to do what we can to cope with it.”
The doctor examined him. I explained that we needed a doctor’s note for him to return to school. She began to fill one out saying, “He should be able to go back to school on Monday.” Monday was three days away.
“No!” I cried. “Not Monday. Today. He’s going there right now.”
“Now?” she said. “He was throwing up at midnight. I wouldn’t send him to school today.”
“He has to go to school,” I said. “He’s missed too much already. You know how they are at NEST.”
She nodded in understanding. Her own son had attended NEST high school for a few years. He found it much too demanding and begged to be transferred to another school. He now attends a private school uptown. Against her better judgement, and my own, the pediatrician wrote a note saying Older Son could go back to school that day.
Most of Older Son’s teachers are harsh. Unrelenting. Unbendable in their demands. But they are also unbelievably dedicated. They are available almost around the clock to answer emails from kids asking questions. They meet with the kids all the time to sort out any confusion. They have the remarkably difficult job of taking young brains, many of which have not been previously subjected to anything resembling academic rigor, and turning the owners of those brains into outstanding thinkers. But they are not touchy-feely in the way they go about it.
Didn’t do your homework? No problem. You get a zero and the zero counts towards your grade.
Didn’t show your work on the math test even though the directions clearly said to do so? Half credit off for each instance of not following directions. Result? Instead of the 100 you would have gotten because you got all the answers right, you’re getting an 80. (True story. Happened to Older Son. More than once.)
Kids yell and scream and moan at the unfairness, at the harshness. And then they start rising to the expectations they are being held to. The only other options are to fail or to go to other public middle schools, places where parents complain their kids are hardly learning anything. Places where kids are allowed to take open notebook tests. Where words are spelled wrong on the teacher’s word wall. (I actually saw this at a well regarded uptown middle school.) Where teachers say they understand the children may be too busy to exceed standards and that’s O.K. They can simply meet them. (I heard a middle school teacher say this to a classroom of kids at another well regarded middle school.)
Kids at NEST have taken their gym teacher’s words to heart. Whenever the kids complain that he is pushing them too hard, the gym teacher barks, “You don’t like it? Go home!”
God. I love that school and I hate it at the same time. Read on to see why…
Preparing for midterms. The beginning.
This is the story of how Older Son began preparing for his 7th grade midterms at NEST+m. This is also the story of how the demands of an academically rigorous school affect not just a child, but an entire family. It is the story of how helping Older Son prepare for his midterms drained my husband and me, and how almost every single moment we had together as a family was devoted to that preparation. (Or to teaching our younger son how to read since his school’s Balanced Literacy curriculum was not doing so) And last, but not least, this is the story of the level of support most, if not all, children need to get at home in order to thrive in academically rigorous schools.
A former executive board member of the NEST+m PTA tells the following story: A few years ago, the city thought it would be a good idea to take a few kids from low-performing schools and transfer them to NEST+m so that their problems would be solved by whatever the kids at NEST+m were getting inside their school building. The school had to be doing something right, the city figured, since NEST’s test scores were off the charts. The city figured it had to be because of NEST’s low class size. Or its good teachers. Or its demanding curriculum.
You know what happened to those kids who transferred in to get the benefit of what NEST offered? They flunked.The only thing those kids succeeded in doing was slowing down the rest of the class. Those kids did not return to NEST+m the following year. The school alone was not enough to solve their problems.
Here’s a look at what those kids really needed and what, I’m sure, their working class parents, sadly, were not able to provide:
Six days before midterms begin:
Older Son organized all his class notes to prepare for studying. His social studies teacher (one of the best teacher’s he’s ever had because not only does she teach well but she is drilling study and note taking skills into the kids) made it a requirement that all the kids get an accordion folder for their notes and handouts. (If they didn’t get this folder and bring it to school they would get points taken off their grades. Of course.
They get points taken off their grades for seemingly any and every minor infraction at that school. But, hey, the kids all got accordion folders. Read: their parents made a special trip to Staples and bought the folders for them.) The teacher told the kids to label each section up to chapter 10 and place all their notes and homeworks for the first four chapters in the appropriate sections of the folder.
Older Son made labels, put his social studies notes in the correct sections, then made up study folders for math, science, social studies and Spanish and put the appropriate papers into each folder. He did his homework and then, miraculously, he had time to play, something he rarely gets a chance to do. We ate dinner together as a family. We laughed and talked and enjoyed each other’s company. This was the last time we would do this until midterms are over.
5 days before midterms begin
Husband and I are aware that Older Son needs to start studying.
However, Older Son has homework. He also needs to hand in a revision of a feature article that is due tomorrow on Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
His English teacher had returned other kids’ first drafts of their articles last week when Older Son was out sick. Those kids had the whole weekend to work on their revisions and could now turn to studying. Older Son’s teacher returned Older Son’s to him today even though Older Son has been in school since Friday afternoon. He didn’t return it to Older Son on Monday or Tuesday, probably because he was preoccupied with the kids taking their 7th grade ELA exams on those days. Older Son pointed out to his teacher that the other kids had had more time than he did to work on their revisions. The teacher did not care. Older Son asked if he could have an extension of time since he is supposed to be studying for midterms this week. (First time Older Son has ever asked for anything like this.) The teacher said no. Older Son completed his revision.
This led to me reading his revision and going ballistic. Older Son had made only minor changes and had completely ignored the teacher’s major criticisms.
Not following rubrics had been a major issue at the beginning of the year and had resulted in Older Son going from being an honor role student last year to not doing so hot in the first quarter of this year. We talked to his teachers and the Middle School director about this but they assured us that this was normal. They said that lots of kids just plow on to the task at hand without focusing on the teachers’ comments. After realizing there is a direct correlation between following teachers’ directions and grades, Older Son has been very carefully reading rubrics and giving the teachers what they ask for.
Yet, for some reason, he hadn’t addressed his teacher’s criticisms tonight. In my other life as a freelance journalist, I have done many interviews on kids and school performance and have heard that certain kids will tune out to a teacher and a teacher’s demands if the kids feel they are not being respected.
Maybe that’s what was happening here since Older Son clearly felt it was unfair he had been given such a short period of time in which to do this revision.
Doesn’t matter.
If he doesn’t address those comments he will get a lousy grade. If he didn’t have a mother at home who was willing and able to read his essay, he would have handed in what he’d done and would have definitely gotten that lousy grade.
After asking why Older Son didn’t address teachers comments in the first place and receiving only a shrug as an answer, I hand the essay back to Older Son and say, “Read what your teacher said and fix what he said was a problem.” (Teacher’s comments were absolutely on the money, by the way.)
In the meantime, Husband has begun what will end up being a five hour project—reading through all of Older Son’s science notes for the first half of the year and matching them up in chronological order to the rubric given for the test.
Think this is easy? Get a load of the FIVE PAGE typewritten study guide for science—just one of FIVE midterms of the same level of intensity Older Son and his classmates are taking this week. (There is a link to the study guide further down in this post.) Actually the amount of studying that needs to be done for English is significantly lower but to make up for that, the English teacher will assign homework throughout midterm week. Then he will go on to give the kids a ball-busting grammar section on the midterm that even he told his classes was “mean” and “tricky.” So much for imparting a joy of learning and establishing a positive, supportive relationship with your students…
Organizing every single piece of paper in chronological order would have been a dreadful and probably impossible task for Older Son, who is definitely a Big Picture learner (more on that in a later post) and does not naturally focus on details.
Dad DOES focus on details but the project drains even him.
Requires carbs, even though Dad is on a low-carb diet.
Older Son and Husband share a package of Oreos as Older Son begins work on the 51 problems his math teacher has sent home as a review packet for the math midterm, which is on Friday of next week. The kids are to hand in the review packet on the day of the midterm. They will be graded on it. The teacher will not be providing them with the answers to those problems until after the exam. Therefore, the kids will have no idea if they got the answer right or wrong. Therefore, unless they are totally stumped by something, they will not know if they have answered the problem correctly or not.
The ineffectiveness of this “review” is astonishing to Husband and me. I wonder if I should email the teacher about this. Husband says no. Says the teacher will take it the wrong way. Husband says he will do the problems himself tomorrow and then compare his answers to Older Son’s. Otherwise, since Older Son will not be getting the correct answers from his teacher until after the test, he will not know which ones he got wrong. Therefore, he will not know which types of problems he needs to work on.
Next I turn to working with Younger Son on his reading. I listen as he reads to me and then I supervise his work in a phonics workbook. I play knights and army JUST FOR FUN (!!!) with him for 10 minutes. Then I read him a chapter in The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
I have Younger Son read the sight words he knows on one page of that chapter. Both he and I are pleasantly surprised at how much Younger Son is able to read. I keep Younger Son company as he brushes his teeth and then I tucked him into bed.
Then I review Older Son’s second revision of his essay. It is close to perfect. I am aware of how much son can do when he puts his mind to it. I wonder why he doesn’t just do it the first time.
After kids are in bed I research a book called “Recipe for Reading” online. I had picked up Younger Son at school today and talked to Younger Son’s kindergarten teacher about Younger Son’s upset at being behind the reading curve in his first grade class. I told the kindergarten teacher that I was one of the few mothers who had not done phonics at home with her kid. Teacher was not aware of how much parents had done at home with phonics. She recommended a book called ‘Recipe for Reading,” which spells out the rules of phonics and which she uses when she tutors kids.
Tonight, I find a great website with all sorts of information on how kids learn to read. I spend half-an-hour reading it and note that, according to this website, Younger Son’s reading is totally age appropriate.
But I need to make Younger Son’s level of reading appropriate for HIS school. During open school week I had sat in on Younger Son’s first grade science class. The kids had been studying magnets and that day did an experiment looking at what objects will be picked up by a magnet. They were to record their observations in writing on a sheet the teacher gave them. She also gave them a list of the objects so that they would be able to check off which ones they had investigated. Among the items on the list were: red octagon jewel, stainless steel washer, white plastic spoon. Most of the kids in the class read that list just fine.
I had to read it to Younger Son, who still had not even learned how to read “hop” or “pop.”
After the class, I mentioned to the teacher that not every child in the class could read that list.
“The assistant teacher is here to help them,” she said.
Yes, but no child wants to be singled out for reading help. Not in Younger Son’ school.
My child wants to be able to do what his classmates can do. The moment that I saw what many of his classmates could read—and what my son couldn’t—if the moment that my Helicopter Mom rotor really began spinning.
That was the moment when I knew I had to step up to the plate and do what I could to teach him to read.
After researching reading on the internet, I order Recipe for Reading.
I am done supporting Younger Son for the night. I am available for conversation and other things, if you know what I mean, with Husband. Has been a while since we’ve done other things.
But Husband is busy underlining Older Son’s science notes with a yellow highlighter. I do not interrupt him.
I read ahead in The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the book I had read to Younger Son that night. (I am too tired to find any grown up reading.) The book is about a brother and sister who have run away and are living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I come to a paragraph in which the sister asks her brother why he hadn’t taken art appreciation courses with her.
“The summer before last?” the brother asks.
“Yes. Before school started.”
“Well, the summer before last, I had just finished the second half of first grade…It was all I could do to sound out the name of Dick and Jane’s dog.”
I note that the Mrs. Frankweiler book was published in 1967. If it was a current book, the brother in the book would have been sounding out Harry Potter’s name at the end of first grade, not Spot’s.
I stop reading and mull this over for a minute.
I look at Husband.
His brow is furrowed as he sits at the desk in the bedroom, underlining sentences in Older Son’s science notes with a yellow highlighter. (to get a sense of what Older Son will need to know for his midterm, see the science midterm rubric.
I begin to feel slight anger towards Husband because he is so focused on outlining, and is not making any effort to focus on our relationship, something we have both realized has been sorely neglected since the school year began.
Instantly, I realize I am not being fair to husband. Realize Husband is not highlighting important points in science notes by choice. Husband would rather be watching TV and relaxing or doing other things. Husband and I have not watched TV since the school year began. (Other things are too personal to get into but our batting average on that is not much better.)
I realize that if husband was not doing the outlining, I would be doing it. This makes me feel much better towards husband.
I say, “Is this not insane what we have to do?”
Husband knows I am referring to how much outlining and organizing he is doing at the moment and how much of it I have done at other times.
Last weekend I told husband I was on total overload. That I could no longer carry the bulk of the burden of being Younger Son’s reading teacher and curriculum developer and Older Son’s exam prepper and also earn a living as well as prepare, serve, and clean up after meals, and do all the other assorted things that go into keeping a family of four going.
Last weekend, I asked if he would be willing to shoulder the bulk of midterm prep.
Husband said yes. Husband is a nice guy and a very involved father. Husband also saw that if he did not say yes I was in serious danger of losing my mind.
My readers, I know you are mostly women and I know you are the ones shouldering most of the burden of schoolwork. I recommend that you have your husbands try it for a week.
My Husband has always helped but never to the degree he is helping this week.
Over and over, this week he says, “I can’t believe I went to Germany last year during finals week. I can’t believe you did this all by yourself.”
And midterms are still days away.
And while he was away in Germany during finals week, I also did everything else that needed to be done at home, you know things like noticing that I had a younger child and making sure that child didn’t go to school with a milk mustache.
If I hadn’t been so busy helping Older Son last year maybe I would have also noticed that my younger child was sending out every conceivable signal that he was ready to read and that the curriculum at his school wasn’t teaching him to do so in the way he needed to be taught.
This week I am functioning as the maid and the cook and Younger Son’s sole companion so that Husband and Older Son can focus on schoolwork.
Husband vows that this year he will find out in advance when finals are so that he will schedule his semi-annual business trip to Hamburg around them.
Regarding the outlining he is now doing, Husband says, “If I don’t do this, Older Son will be up until 3 am. If he’s up that late every night he will get sick again and will miss all his midterms.”
He goes back to outlining.
4 days before midterms begin
(Jan. 18, 2007, Thursday). First words Husband says to me in the morning are “I can’t believe how well prepared I am for the science test. If I had known this much when I was a kid I would have gotten into Harvard.”
I laugh. I am glad we are laughing about this. I am glad we have each other. I realize that there are almost no single parents at NEST. I know of only one. And she is able to pay for a tutor.
Does this mean that children of single parents do worse on their standardized tests? This year, I need to pick a topic for my Ph.D. dissertation. I think that investigating the school performance of the parents of single children would make a good study. I remember that the parent of a second grader at Younger Son’s school pointed out that most kids at that school were only children so their parents could devote lots of time to grooming them. I put investigating that possible study topic on my mental to-do list.
Deep inside, I worry that between needing to earn a living and support my kids in school I will never have time to do a dissertation. In worry that in order to ensure that my kids get a good education I will need to put my own dreams on hold.
At least until they are in college.
Or maybe grad school.
Maybe I can do public relations for Younger Son when he becomes an architect. Already, his gift for building and design is apparent to all who see his creations. But he can’t go to architecture school until he learns to read. So I still have my work cut out for me.
Later, Husband shows me front page article in the NY Times. The headline says, “Bloomberg Seeks Further Changes for City Schools.” I laugh again and wonder how Bloomberg would feel if he knew New York City public school parents were laughing at his bumbling attempts to reform the school system. Husband and I wonder why Bloomberg continually keeps on fixing the wrong thing. We wonder how he and Klein can be so woefully out of touch as to what is really wrong with public schools. Klein actually recently had the city pay millions of dollars to put the Balanced Literacy curriculum into the public schools. He did this even though research clearly shows children need phonics in order to learn to read. He did this even though the entire rest of the country has moved away from Whole Language. He did it because Balanced Literacy was working in the “good” schools.
Hello?
Why, oh why, do politicians continually not look at what parents of the children at those “good” schools are doing at home? Why do they not realize fuzzy curriculums like TERC and Whole Language appear to work because the kids at “good” schools are being taught the fundamentals that they need at home?
It’s probably because the politicians’ kids went to private schools and the politicians were able to afford tutors to help their own children. (Somehow I can’t imagine Bloomberg learning the 8 comma rules so that he could teach them to his seventh grader who never learned them in elementary school and isn’t learning them in his high-performing middle school either because the way his 7th grade English teacher teaches grammar is by having the kids in the class read the deadly sheet of rules outloud in class. For example: “Use commas between coordinate adjectives that modify the same noun. Do not separate adjective of unequal importance.” The teacher then does very little to make those rules come alive and sends home absolutely no homework in them. (So I will translate what those sheets say and I will print out worksheets from http://www.edhelper.com/ on commas and quotation marks the night before Older Son’s English midterm but I am getting ahead of myself here…)
No, don’t think Bloomberg ever translated obtuse comma rules for his children. He probably paid someone $125 an hour to do that. We were so desperate for Older Son to learn grammar that we actually paid someone $125 an hour last summer. My husband schlepped Older Son uptown two mornings before work (which is all the way downtown in the financial district) and sat with him while he was tutored by a wonderful English teacher from Dalton. (If you email me I’ll give you her name and number.) We stopped after 2 sessions when we decided we couldn’t afford it. Freelance journalists who are completing their Ph.D.s do not make a lot of money… Politicians make more. Especially those who have started their own radio stations. They had the time to do so since they weren’t at home tutoring their kids.
Unlike most public school parents of successful kids, politicians never had to learn their children’s science or social studies curriculums in order to be able to quiz them for their exams.
Some parents talk openly about helping their kids. Others claim their kids do it all themselves. Don’t believe them. After his class finished taking their first social studies exam this year, Older Son’s social studies teacher said to the class, “How many of your parents know more about the Mayas and Incas than they did before you started studying about them?” Every single child in the class raised his or her hand.
Many parents had openly complained to the teachers about how much micromanaging they needed to do in order to have their children succeed at NEST. A few parents continued to profess that their kids were geniuses and were managing on their own. The teacher probably wanted to get the true story from the kids. She got it.
I say to Husband, “I should contact the mayor and tell him to read my blog so he knows what really makes a difference.”
Some day I will contact the mayor.
Not today. I don’t time to communicate with the mayor. I don’t even have time to communicate with my own husband!
It is still early morning and Husband is already stressed about midterms. Older Son is unfazed. He is not the one who stayed up until 1 in the morning highlighting points that match the rubric in his science notes. Older Son wakes up cheerful and calm and is more concerned about remembering to bring hair gel to school. He and a few friends have planned to gel their hair that morning in the school bathroom. I recently took a course on Adolescence at Teacher’s College at Columbia University. I remember the question my professor had asked at the start of the semester: “How can you tell when a child has entered adolescence?” The answer was, “They preen. They start to really care about their appearance.”
The answer was not: They begin to meticulously organize themselves for their midterms. That is something their parents do for them when the children enter adolescence. That is why research has repeatedly found that their children’s adolescence is much harder on the PARENTS than on the kids. True story. More on that later.
4 days before midterms, continued…
Husband is a name partner in a law firm. That means he does not need to punch a clock and his time is, basically, his own. On the rare occasions that something is wrong with our car, he is able to bring it to the car dealer during the week so that it doesn’t interfere with our time together as a family on the weekends. In the past, he has always brought his work with him to the dealership, happy to have a few hours of undisturbed work time. The guys at the dealership know he does this and they always give him a desk in one of their offices to work at.
This morning Husband brings out car to the dealer but he does not do his own work. (If he does not work he does not earn money, since lawyers are paid by the hour.) Instead of doing his own work, Husband tackles the 51 problems on Older Son’s math midterm review packet. One of the salesmen eyes the calculator and ruler he is using and says, “I thought you were a lawyer. How come, today, you look like an engineer?”
“I am a lawyer,” Husband replies. “I’m just studying for my midterms.”
Husband came home at 2:30. He does not go to office because he still has hours of math to do and he wants to begin checking his answers against the answers Older Son got tonight.
Evening: Older Son spends the whole evening completing his math work sheet. He cannot do it a little bit at a time because he needs to also start studying for his other midterms. Next week we want him to spend each night reviewing only the notes he is being tested on the following day. We don’t want him distracted from Social Studies by math.
Husband spends the whole evening completing his math packet. Neither he, nor Older Son nor I could figure out how to tell the probability of a family having three girls and one boy. We tell Older Son to ask his teacher how to get the answer to that one problem.
Older Son tells us that his math homework for tonight was to complete the first page of the review sheet.
Ah! we think. Reasonableness at last! Homework that is tied to reviewing for the huge midterm. And if it’s homework, that means the teacher is going to check their answers and, hopefully, review them with their kids so that they can actually know if they got something wrong and why they got it wrong.
Husband looks visibly relieved. If the math teacher did that, the burden of doing all of this math would be lifted off of his shoulders. “Is she going to give you the answers and go over what everyone got wrong?” Husband asks.
“No,” says Older Son. “She’s just checking off that we’ve all done it. She’s not looking at our answers.”
Husband goes into kitchen to search for more Oreos.
Older Son continues doing math.
He already has dark circles under his eyes, and midterms are still four days away.
After the kids are in bed: Husband continues working on math.
I write a letter to the reading specialist at Younger Son’s school detailing how bad Explode the Code 1 1/2 is (that is what she wants me to do with him at home) and asking if we can move on to book two of that series. (An excerpt of that letter, which gives a glimpse of how I spent time with Younger Son this evening: “Younger Son HATES Book 1 1/2 even though he enjoyed Book 1 and likes working on Book 2. He finds the pictures in Book 1 ½ really confusing and, frankly, so do I. He argued with me tonight that the man on page 19 didn’t bite his lip even though “lip” is the word the workbook wanted him to write. He kept staring at the picture trying to figure out what the man was doing since it sure didn’t look like he was biting his lip. Picture number 1 on that page also had Younger Son moaning in aggravation.. The guy in the picture looks like he is holding a tray, not a pan even though “pan” is the word the book is looking for. Younger Son kept saying, “This book is terrible!” (I agree! I would love to keep him excited and happy about doing Explode the Code instead of moaning about how the picture in Book 1 ½ don’t make any sense. From what I see he’s really ready for Book 2 (he is really excited and challenged by it) and Book 1 ½ is doing more harm than good.”)
I need to pick a dissertation topic for my Ph.D. and wonder if I can write a case study of how one previously sane woman (that would be me) is being driven insane by the process of getting her children the fundamentals of a good education.
After I finish letter, Husband is still doing math in the bedroom. He marvels at how quickly Older Son completed his math packet. He complains that Older Son still refuses to show his work, a habit he picked up thanks to the TERC math curriculum at his elementary school. (Don’t get me started on that.) He marvels at what a great math student Older Son has become thanks to the math at NEST. (TERC math was why we turned down Older Son’s spot in one of the top District-2 middle schools and chose NEST, which has a different math curriculum.)
I remind Husband of what last year was like for him. Every night, when Husband came home from work Older Son would greet him at the door with questions about his 6th grade math homework. Husband would sit down at the dining room table (sometimes without taking off his coat) and explain the math to Older Son. Many times the math teacher sent home homework on a topic she did not teach the class and then would GRADE the kids on that assignment. Always, as you read about this insanity, and about parents who are doing way too much, remember how important grades are in NYC middle schools. At NEST last year, grades determined whether or not a child would get thrown out of the school. (Smart, hard-working kids were indeed booted out or left voluntarily because the work load was too great.) This year, grades determine what high school a child will be accepted to next year. They also determine whether a child will be accepted to the NEST high school.
Being near husband is so stressful that I go into the living room. Do I read for pleasure? Do I relax? Do I call a friend on the phone? (Do I still have any friends? I haven’t seen my best friend in over a year. We are both too busy teaching our kids.) No, I do not do any of those things.
What do I do? I skim 15 Dick and Jane stories, the same ones that had been mentioned in the Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler book I am reading to Younger Son. I had bought the Dick and Jane books at the recommendation of another first grade mother in Younger Son’s school. The mother said that the school does not like these books but she found them very effective for her child. Her child began going to SCORE at the age of 3 and now reads at a third grade level. (I felt physically ill when she told me this.) She said the repetition in the Dick and Jane books is great and that they really helped her daughter. This was on one of the first days of school in September. I said, “I trust the school knows what it’s doing but don’t you think you should tell the school how effective those books were for your daughter?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Don’t trust the school,” she said. “You can never trust the school and you can’t change them either. Let them do what they do. Then you do what you need to do at home.” (This was in early September and how I wish I had listened to her then. It took me until October to start teaching Younger Son how to read at home.)
While my husband outlines Older Son’s science notes, I methodically examine each Dick and Jane story. I think they are great. Through repetition, they support many of the sight words kids learn in first grade. (Most first grades, anyway. In my son’s school the kids appear to have learned their sight words in utero.) However, in order for Younger Son to be happy with the books, I would need to explain to him why certain words are pronounced the way they are. I would need to explain why “Sally” and “funny” end in the long e sound, instead of a “y” sound and why the “a” in “Jane” is pronounced with a long “a” sound.
I pull out all my Explode the Code books (I have up to level 4) and look through them to see how they handle the “y.” Brilliantly. Instead of getting into a whole long explanation they say if a “y” is at the end of a short word like “my” or “by” it makes the long “i” sound. If the “y” is at the end of a long word it makes the long “e” sound. O.K. Younger Son can handle that. So can I. As for “Jane” I decide to tell him that it’s an example of a rule that exists but that he doesn’t have to know the rule yet. I will tell him that an e at the end of a word changes the sound of the vowel and that in the case of “a” it makes it make a long “a” sound but that, for now, he just has to know that word is “Jane.” That way he will rest assured that there is a reason to pronounce it the way he needs to.
I had asked his former K teacher, his first grade teacher and his reading specialist for recommendations of books Younger Son could read for pleasure that would systematically build on his knowledge of phonics and the sight words he has mastered. Neither one knew of any. The hardest part of teaching your child to read is finding reading materials to support him in his next step. I felt better knowing that for the next few weeks I had a plan for Younger Son that I could implement by rote and that would continue bringing him to the next level.
I go into the bedroom to start getting ready for bed. Husband is still doing math. Husband is stressed and exhausted. He says, “My head is swimming with numbers. I don’t know how Older Son does it.”
With great urgency, he says, “I don’t understand probability and negative exponents. Will you take over on those problems to see if he got them right?”
“Sure,” I say calmly. It’s very easy to be calm if you are not the one shouldering the bulk of the support that is needed. (You know, little stuff. Like what the correct answers are to a 51 problem math review packet that has taken husband over 12 hours to dope out.)
“What were you doing?” Husband asks as if he has just realized I hadn’t been in the room with him. (We used to hang out with each other in the evenings after work. Before school took over our lives.)
“Reading Dick and Jane books.”
Husband nods and raises eyebrows.
Ever since he was in kindergarten, Younger Son has been sending out distress signals, trying to communicate that he needed to be taught phonics. Of course, he didn’t know the word “phonics.” He’d use little boy language to communicate his need to me, saying things like, “In school they tell us to look at the pictures. That’s not really reading. I want to really read Mommy but they aren’t teaching me how.” Until this year I did not realize that what Younger Son was really saying was, “Teach me phonics please, mommy!” Now that I know how imperative a good base in phonics is to a child, I am spending my time doing things like figuring out how to explain why Sally ends with a long e sound and the vowel in Jane is a long “a.” I am a woman with a mission and I want to share my mission with my husband. So I say to Husband: “Dick and Jane books are what Younger Son will read next. He’s ready for them. He can decode blends fine now. I’m sorry I’m telling you all this because I know you’re over loaded with math but it’s what I was doing and I’d like to share it with you. The Dick and Jane books have the words “Sally” and “funny” and “Jane” in them. Younger Son will want me to explain the rules behind why they’re pronounced the way they are.” I detail exactly how I will explain those rules.
Husband looks at me, blinks hard and we both laugh. “God bless you,” he says. “If it wasn’t for you, Younger Son would not be reading.”
I know that what he says is true.
3 days before midterms begin
(Jan. 19, 2007, Friday)
In the morning, both Older Son and Younger Son run around the apartment yelling, ““It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” It was the first snowfall in a very mild winter. “Can we go sledding in Central Park tomorrow?” Younger Son asks, giddy with excitement.
“Yeah!” Older Son’s eyes light up. “Can we go sledding?”
I don’t say a word as I continue to make coffee.
“Oh,” Older Son says. “No. I have to study for midterms.” There was not an ounce of self pity in his voice. He stated it as a simple fact.
As an almost-psychologist, I have studied the impact stress has on people and how to alleviate that negative impact. People cope much better with stress when they know when the stressful event will end. So I said, “It will be over in one week. You have one week of really hard work ahead of you. When it’s over, you can have Alex over for a sleepover. (Alex is one of his best friends.)
“Yeah,” Older Son says. “But then they’ll probably load us down with homework.”
I can’t argue with the kid. The homework keeps coming even now, even though the kids need to study for midterms, even though some of the homework has absolutely nothing to do with the tests the kids would be taking. The math teacher is continuing to teach new concepts that will not be on the midterm and is sending home homework on those concepts.
Husband says he has been so busy completing his copy of Older Son’s math review packet that he hasn’t been paying attention to when his bills are due. I don’t even know if I paid the rent this month. Rent invoice might be in the massive pile of paper clutter that has accumulated on the dining room table. I make a mental note to look for it later.
I think about how if we were rich, I would have tutors homeschool my kids. But not only are we not rich, we are getting poorer by the day. I am spending my work days writing this blog for which, at the moment I receive no income. But I went for a Ph.D. because I am aware of how hard being a mother is in our society. I went for a Ph.D. so that I could help mothers cope. At the moment, this blog is my way of helping other Moms. Doesn’t it help to know you are not alone in what you are experiencing? It helps me when I hear from you. (Please post at the bottom of my posts instead of emailing me. That way other moms can read your comments too.)
I am relieved when Husband says, “It stopped snowing.” Now the kids won’t be missing out on anything. At least not on anything that has to do with snow.
Lunch with best friend
Please note that this entry is not complete. In order to ensure my Best Friend remains my best friend I have asked her to review anything personal I say about her in this post before I post it. I am posting the opening in order to secure it’s correct chronological order before going on and posting other info. Thanks for understanding!
HERE IS THE OPENING:
I have had many blessings in my life. One of them is having a Best Friend for Life. We became best friends in second grade and have been comforting, supporting, and informing each other ever since.
We have celebrated, or consoled each other through the ups and downs of various relationships. We were maids of honor at each other’s weddings. We took turns having babies. First her, then me, then her, then me, then, finally, her. Thanks to her, I knew about the joy and the sleepless nights and foggy days of newborn motherhood before I experienced it myself. Now, we live just 23 blocks away from each other. And we almost never see each other. We hardly ever even talk on the phone. We both have friends who know much more about our day-in-day-out lives simply because those are the people we come in contact with through work, or our kids’ schools. I don’t know the names of her bosses or office colleagues, and she doesn’t know which magazine I’m writing an article for at the moment. I don’t even know how tall her kids are, nor does she know that about mine. But we don’t need to know those things. Our friendship is about her and me. We don’t need to talk often to know that each of us will always be there for the other. Whenever we do talk, we pick up right where we left off. There is never any awkwardness. It is always just the two of us, talking about whatever is most important and closest to our hearts. Guess what we will talk about today?
You are right. From the time we sit down to eat, our entire conversation will be about what each of us is doing to support our kids in school and how that is affecting us. But I am getting ahead of myself…
At the moment, I am waiting for Best Friend in her office lobby. She steps out of the elevator and scans the lobby, looking for me. Best Friend looks beautiful, as always. Her long blonde hair is pulled back in a ponytail, as it often is these days. She rarely has time to wash and blow dry it on workday mornings. Her face lights up when she sees me and I feel some of the tension inside me melt.
We hug.
She tells me I look good.
“Come on,” I say, in that don’t bullshit me voice I can use only with her, my husband and my kids.
She stops bullshitting me. “You’re tired?”
I nod. She says, “You look great to me” and, suddenly, I feel myself beginning to look, and feel, better. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go.” We head out onto the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan.
We begin walking. “How are you?” we both say at the same time. As always, the one with the most pressing need to talk goes first. Today it is her.
OK. BEST FRIEND IS SCREENING PERSONAL STUFF ABOUT HER. I CAN TELL YOU THE POST ENDS WITH HER ASKING ME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TERC MATH CURRICULUM AND HOW I WAS ABLE TO TEACH JAMIE “NORMAL” MATH. POST ENDS AS FOLLOWS:
I share my tips, then tell her the good news. The TERC curriculum is being revised as of this fall to do, guess what? Exactly what parents have been begging for, exactly what parents have been supplementing with at home, for years. See the article I co-authored on these revisions at http://www.insideschools.org/nv/NV_terc_math_dec06.php?061219
That article is the edited version. The first draft follows in the next post. When I finish writing about the events of midterm week at NEST (which I have taken a delicious break from this afternoon) I will also post links on TERC math for those of you who have been asking me to explain TERC math. To make you all feel better, it is actually an excellent curriculum when it is combined with the teaching of traditional math facts and formulas. Now that those math facts and formulas will become a part of the curriculum there should be no problem with it. The only problem will be in schools paying for the revised curriculum. As Suzanne Werner, a math specialist for Region 9, noted—this will be “a budget issue” for many schools. If your child’s school uses the TERC curriculum, do everything you can to make sure the school is able to purchase that curriculum this fall!
TERC curriculum is being revised!
In what is being hailed as a victory for parents, many of whom have been openly critical of the TERC Investigations math curriculum used in many District 2 schools, the curriculum has been revised by its publisher to include many of the items parents have been requesting for years. For example, the revised curriculum expects children to master all the basic addition and subtraction math facts, as well as the multiplication tables. Also, traditional algorithms will now be taught, in addition to other more conceptual procedures for solving math problems. In the past, many parents were told by teachers using the TERC Investigations curriculum not to have their children memorize math facts and not to teach them algorithms. Doing so was believed to interfere with the children’s understanding of underlying math concepts.
Parents were given what Daria Rigney, District 2 superintendent, called “a sneak preview” of the revised curriculum by DOE representatives speaking at a Community Education Council District 2 (CECD2) meeting on December 13, 2006. Rigney stressed that the curriculum will not be published until February and that District 2 has not yet implemented any of the changes, despite a public notice released by CECD2 in November announcing that “District 2’s math curriculum is changing.” This public notice caused many parents to think District 2 was switching to a new curriculum.
Michael Propper, president of CECD2, said he “received a lot of heat” for the wording of that announcement and that many people called it “inaccurate and misleading.” He defended his choice of wording by saying he wanted parents to know they were about to get “an affirmation that the curriculum could be better.”
Some parents also thought the changes to the curriculum were initiated by District 2 in response to a report released in September by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) recommending more of a focus on basic math skills. However, the TERK revisions were not driven by District 2 and were not tied to that report, said Rigney in an interview. “All curriculums are revised from time to time and the publishers decided it was time to issue a new textbook and curriculum,” she said. “But math minds were involved in the NCTM recommendations, as well as in the TERC revisions. They are all taking the same things into consideration.”
The TERC revisions are based on five years of research that included surveys of teachers, administrators and parents. According to Rigney, in addition to asking for knowledge of basic math facts and familiarity with algorithms, parents also asked for more tools to help their children with homework. To that end, the revised curriculum will include a textbook, called the Student Math Handbook, that parents and children can refer to for help.
Although the DOE representatives did not come right out and say teachers had been critical of the TERC curriculum, they did say that the revised curriculum spells out goals more clearly for teachers too. The revised curriculum gives more of a “connection between homework, practice sheets and the day’s lesson,” said Kerry Cunningham, regional instructional specialist in elementary mathematics for Region 9. “What might have been guesswork on the part of the teacher is now more explicit.”
“If our teachers are smart, our kids will get smart,” said Rigney. “If the teachers don’t know it, the kids won’t know it.” (Duh! Sorry, couldn’t help myself…)
After the curriculum is published in February, the Region 9 Mathematics Department will share it with schools and SLT teams. In the spring, math coaches will conduct workshops on the revisions for classroom teachers. Then, “each individual school will decide how and when they are going to roll this out,” said Suzanne Werner, regional instructional specialist in mathematics for Region 9. She said “we are looking towards full implementation by September” but noted that the curriculum “has to be purchased” and that for schools this will be “a budget issue.”
For samples and more information on the revisions see http://investigations.scottforesman.com/index.html.
A picture is worth a thousand words
(Wednesday, January 31, 2007) After lunch with Best Friend, I head to the Barnes & Noble in the Citicorp building. A mother from Younger Son’s school had told me that she’d bought a bunch of workbooks there for her child. “They have a great selection,” she’d noted. The very first thing I see when I enter the children’s section literally knocks the wind out of me. It is an entire shelf of academic workbooks for preschool and elementary school children that is absolutely impossible to miss. The picture below is of just one half of that display.
Clearly, those workbooks are being bought by parents for use at home: What surpises me most about this display, is the abundance of workbooks on sight words. I have a 12-year-old child who learned how to read in school. I had never even heard the term “sight word” until one of the other moms at Younger Son’s school told me that learning sight words really speeded up the process of her own son’s learning how to read. (She should know. She taught him herself.)
Looking at this display, I wonder why there was now such an abundance of information on sight words available to parents. Why had the amount of parental involvement in teaching a child to read increased so much in such a short period of time? And why had I not known about it?
Have I been living under a rock? No. I have simply been living and working downtown. Downtown is different.
I look through these workbooks but decide I prefer “Explode the Code” and the sight word list from www.theschoolbell.com that I use for playing sight word bingo with Younger Son. But I do pick out three Kumon math workbooks for Younger Son. As a TERC veteran, I know I will need to start supplementing Younger Son’s math as soon as he becomes a fluent reader. His math homework for the past 5 weeks has been to play games that are part of the kids’ “attribute study” unit. I can’t tell you what an “attribute” is because a sheet explaining it to the parents was never sent home. I can tell you it has something to do with recognizing shapes because Younger Son had to cut up a bunch of shape cards in order to play the games which had names like “Guess the Missing Piece” “One of These Things is Not Like the Others,” “One Difference Train” and “Two Difference Train.”
Math is Younger Son’s strength. He has a natural affinity for it. From the time he was in preschool, he has always counted everything he saw, on his own with no prompting from me. Last summer, he ASKED ME to buy him math workbooks. (He knows they exist because of all the math workbooks he saw his older brother complete when I was supplementing his TERC math curriculum.) Any time we were on a long car drive, Younger Son would ask me to do pages in the math workbooks with him. FOR FUN! Since I’ve been pushing the reading at home, I haven’t done a speck of math with him, other than the very little, very strange math homework his school sends home. I know that, right now, learning to read is more important for Younger Son than nailing his math facts. Kids can always catch up on math facts. If they miss out on learning to read in the early grades, it will be much, much more of a struggle for them to catch up.
Clutching the Kumon workbooks like the valuable treasures they are, I then head over to the Early Readers section. A very nice salesperson comes up to me and says, “Can I help you?”
“No thanks,” I say. I know what I’m looking for. I’ll know it when I find it. Then I think maybe other parents have been in here with the same questions I have. Maybe she CAN help me. So I say, “Yes, actually. Yes, you can. I do need help. In fact, I am in desperate need of help.”
She smiles. “From `no’ to `desperate’?”
“That about sums it up,” I say. “I didn’t think I’d need help teaching my son how to read. Now I am desperate.” I tell her an abbreviated version of Younger Son’s reading saga. I tell her I am looking for books that will support his sight words and move him forward phonetically. Books with “ck” and “ch” and “sh” in them.
She brings me to a carousel for “Beginning Readers.” Many of them are “I Can Read” books from Harper Trophy. Even their Level 1 (preschool to grade 1) books would be over Younger Son’s head. (At this point I might be having palpitations except I remind myself that Older Son learned to read LATER than Younger Son and Older Son is now in the 97th percentile in reading in this country.) As I skim through the books, I wonder who ranks their ability levels. A book called “Dinosaur Times” for preschoolers and first graders has the words “world,” “different,” “dinosaur” and “everywhere” on one page. Another page has Stegosaurus and then phonetically breaks it down for kids: “steg-uh-saw-russ.” I say I’ll pass on these books.
She then brings me to the Dr. Seuss and Random House’s “Step Into Reading” section. She recommends “Are you my Mother” and “Go Dog Do.” She knows what she is talking about. I tell her those books are great but I already have them. She recommends examining the rest of the selection, looking for the words “Beginner Books” on the binding. “Those sound like what you’re looking for,” she says. Out of the selection available, only one book is right for Younger Son: “The Cat in the Hat: Cooking with the Cat” by Bonnie Worth. I buy it and head even further uptown to pick up my little boy from school.
I know our entire weekend will revolve around Older Son studying. Our entire lives revolve around Older Son studying. Today, like a swimmer who takes a last breath before diving into deep water, I want to savor and enjoy Younger Son in a way I am rarely able to do before diving into a weekend of midterm prep with Older Son. For that reason instead of having him take the school bus home, I am picking up Younger Son after school and we will head over to see the mummies at the Met.
Because Older Son will be home alone studying, I don’t want to spend too much time hanging around after dismissal even though I really love talking to the moms at Younger Son’s school. I figure Younger Son and I will go to the Met, have fun, and then head home. But Younger Son, who is an extremely social child, begs to have pizza with two of his friends before we go to the museum. Realizing he rarely has a chance to do this, I say O.K.
Whenever we take our kids for pizza, the moms and I always sit with the kids. Today, I pull the other moms aside so that I can ask one of them, whose kid is a fluent reader, about—you guessed it. I’m a one-trick pony these days—how she taught her kid phonics and what made her do so. She says she realized she needed to do something with her kid when “reading wasn’t happening and it should have happened in kindergarten.”
She and her child worked with Hooked on Phonics all summer. She tells me the pros and cons of the system. (Workbooks were great. Her kid hated the readers that came with it and wouldn’t read them.) I tell her how shocked I am at how many parents taught their kids phonics at home. She says, “We should share this with the school. We should set up a meeting. It’s too late to help us, but it would help future kindergarten classes so they won’t have to go through what we went through.”
I tell her I will let the school know about it. (More on that in a later post.)
A trip to the Met with Mommy
At the Met, Younger Son has a wonderful time observing his favorite mummy and armor exhibits. I have a wonderful time observing Younger Son. It has been months since I saw him for who he is, as opposed to as a child who needed my help learning how to read. But now I delight in him and there is a lot to delight in. When we enter and the security guards check our knapsacks, Younger Son points to his bag and mischievously says to the guard, “You missed the piece of art I hid in there.”
“You have a Monet or a Van Gogh in there?” asks the security guard.
“Monet,” Younger Son responds.
“That’s OK,” the guard says. “We have a lot of Monets. You can hang on to yours.”
Younger Son grins, and then heads straight for the Egyptian Art exhibit, home of his beloved mummies. We had visited the exhibit last week with two of his friends and Younger Son became fascinated with the false door in one of the tombs. He thinks it opens, somehow, to reveal a false passageway and he wants to find out more about it.
Two security guards are standing near the tomb with the false door. Younger Son asks the guards if the false door has a button that makes it open but they have no idea what he is talking about. They direct him (him, not me) to the information desk. Remember, Younger Son cannot read big words yet and he heads for Membership Services instead. I simply follow. Today I will follow my son wherever he leads me. I am here to enjoy him, not to teach him how to sound out “mem-ber-ship-ser-vi-ces,” something I actually think he could do. The two older women at the desk listen very seriously to Younger Son’s question. One of them says, “Oh, trap doors are scary, aren’t they?”
Younger Son nods. “Can you get out if you ever got stuck in there?”
“I would want to know that too,” the woman says. She points to the information desk by the front doors. “Those people can help you.”
With characteristic determination, Younger Son heads for the desk and stops when he reaches it. I follow. “Yes?” says one of the women sitting behind the desk. She is addressing me. Younger Son is so little, she cannot see him standing in front of me.
“Just a minute,” I say. I bend over, take off Younger Son’s knapsack, place it on the ground and pick him up so that the woman can see him.
“Oh!” she says. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” Younger Son responds, and asks her his question. She also doesn’t know the answer but writes out the phone number for the Egyptian Art department and hands it to Younger Son, telling him what hours to call so that he can get the information he needs.
I am totally impressed with the people who work in the museum. They, in turn, are totally impressed by Younger Son. They have all smiled in delight at me when he wasn’t looking.
We head for the tomb, and read the signs hanging in front of the false door. Younger Son gets the answers to his question. It’s not a trap door. It’s a pretend door to symbolize the entrance to the other world, and is a place where sacrifices were done. “Let’s get out of here,” Younger Son says, when he learns that. “This is scary.” He heads for Arms and Armor and then asks to visit the Temple of Dendur. “But let’s go to the bathroom first, Mommy. I want to really enjoy this but I have to pee and I can’t enjoy it if I have to pee.” This is a kid who knows what he needs, be it phonics or a toilet.
After a bathroom stop, we learn that the Temple of Dendur was at risk of being completely flooded forever by a new dam that was being built in Egypt. Younger Son is enthralled by the pictures and the words I read him telling the story of how the Temple came to be in the Met. I think about having him sound out some of the words but this is about him and me. For the first time in a long time, this had nothing to do with his learning how to read.
After we’re done, I take my totally impressive 6-year-old to the café across from Arms and Armor for a chocolate chip cookie. “Should we get one for Older Son?” he asks. Instantly, I feel guilty. Younger Son and I are enjoying our time together and Older Son is home alone studying. I call Older Son to see how he is doing. God forgive me, but I am so glad that I am not there with him. I am so happy to be out and about, exploring the world with Younger Son.
“Hi Mom,” Older Son says on the phone. “Have you seen my flashcards for Spanish?” Spanish is the first midterm Older Son will have next week.
“No.” In my quest to turn Older Son into a totally independent learner, I have given him a wooden magazine holder, as well as a designated place on a book shelf to put all of his school papers. He puts them away. Not me. So I have no idea where his flash cards would be. “Is Daddy home?”
“He just called from the subway. He’ll be home in a minute.”
Good. That means I can enjoy my time at the Met with Younger Son without feeling guilty that Older Son is home alone. I must confess I am glad that I am not home looking for Spanish flashcards. I savor Younger Son savoring his chocolate chip cookie. I could do without his chosen topic of conversation, but I stick to my plan of letting him lead me wherever he chooses this afternoon.
A few minutes ago, Younger Son had stopped in horror to stare at a crucifix hanging over one of the doorways in the Met. “Is that Jesus?” he’d asked.
“Yes,” I’d answered.
Now, as he eats his cookie, his questions and comments about the crucifixion keep coming. “Wow, that must have hurt Jesus so badly,” he says. “Why didn’t Jesus fight? How did they get the cross to stay up in the ground? What made Jesus actually die? Was it the blood dripping out? Was it the hot sun and not eating or drinking? How long did he stay on the cross? Why did they nail prisoners to crosses back then? Why were people so mean? Was Jesus sad that he was crucified? Wadda-ya mean no one went to heaven before Jesus was crucified? I thought God was nice. Why would he want his own son killed so that perfect strangers could get into heaven?”
In time, we finish our snack, and our conversation, and head home. I savor these last moments of alone time with Younger Son. He asks if we could please take one of the yellow van taxis home, instead of a car taxi. I say, “There aren’t any.” But he spots one coming down Fifth Avenue. (He is the most enterprising person—not child, but person—I have ever met.) “There’s one mommy!” He runs along the sidewalk until he passes the line up of taxis idling in front of the museum. He raises his hand and flags down the passing cab from the edge of the sidewalk.
The cab stops for him.
This kid could grow up to be president, I think. But first he’s got to become a fluent reader.
As Younger Son steps into the taxi he has flagged down, I wonder what it will take to get him to focus his keen determination on moving ahead in reading. He reads now, but only the daily quota I have set for him. And he never asks about the words he sees in his environment the way he used to do when he was in Kindergarten. In Kindergarten and in the first half of first grade, the Balanced Literacy curriculum failed him. In kindergarten, he had asked me to teach him how to read and I didn’t know how to. Now I know how. Now I, and his school, are doing all we can to repair the damage we’ve done, not to his ability, but to the determination and self-motivation he had a year ago for learning how to read. I only hope we aren’t too late.
Uncle Irving died. So did Older Son’s flashcards
Younger Son and I arrive home to learn that two tragedies have occurred. Husband’s uncle has died and Older Son’s huge stack of Spanish flash cards (which he needs to study for Monday’s midterm) is gone forever as well.
Older Son rolls his eyes at me. This means Husband has been yelling at him, probably quite loudly, about the nowhere-to-be-found flashcards while I was blissfully enjoying the taxi ride home with Younger Son.
Husband is on phone with his cousin, son of the deceased uncle. Uncle had been 92. He had been very ill and we had known his death was imminent. But any death, even an expected one, hits hard. Husband is consoling cousin, who is very upset. Husband is a very empathetic person. Husband was not close with deceased uncle, who had lived in Atlanta for decades, but I know he is literally feeling his cousin’s pain. Also, Uncle’s death must be bringing up Husband’s pain over losing his own father just a few years ago. Whatever he is feeling cannot be easy and I want to fully support him.
Husband hangs up and tells me the details of his uncle’s death and how his cousin is doing. Uncle’s body will be brought to New York for burial. Funeral will be on Sunday. We briefly talk about how sad it is. Then Husband’s gaze falls on Older Son. Husband takes a deep breath and fury comes over his face. “HE LOST HIS FLASHCARDS!!!” yells my normally calm, loving and supportive Husband. “How the hell could he have lost his flashcards? Do you know how long I worked on making those flashcards?”
Spanish is the only subject, so far, that Older Son now handles completely independently. At this point in the school year we have no idea what he is learning in Spanish, or how he is learning it. His teacher is doing a superb job. Older Son is getting great grades and he can now hold a conversation with Spanish speaking people he runs into. But he began studying Spanish at the end of the first marking period, after giving French a try. He realized Spanish was spoken everywhere in New York and that he had made a mistake choosing to study a language he would never really need.
Luckily, the middle school director and the Spanish teacher allowed him to switch to Spanish even though the year was well under way. We promised we would do all we could to help Older Son get up to speed on what he had missed. To live up to that promise, Husband made a tremendous stack of flash cards of all of the Spanish words in the first few chapters of the textbook. This was no easy task because, even though the textbook had the Spanish words, it did not have the English definitions of those words! There were hundreds of them and Husband looked up the definitions for all of them.
Now those words would need to be reviewed for the midterm.
Now those flashcards are gone.
Husband is having such a fit about it that I, who a minute ago, was full of love and a wish to support him, now wish he would just shut up. But I let him rant. I have ranted plenty of times, myself. I have said things to Older Son like, “Your school is ruining my life! I can’t take it anymore!
So husband rants about flashcards, then rants about the funeral. “How the hell are we going to go to the funeral?” Husband says. “Do you have any idea how much material Older Son still has to study? There’s no way he can go to the funeral.”
“Older Son will go to the funeral,” I say. Last year, one of Older Son’s classmates did not go to his GRANDMOTHER’S funeral because he needed to complete a social studies project. The boy was not doing well and rather than talking about how to support him, the school was talking about throwing him out. (That principal is no longer at the school and things like that no longer happen, thank God.) But good grades still matter because it is good grades that will allow our children admission to a “good” high school in which children will need to work equally hard in order to gain admission to a “good” college. Where, based on a recent New York Times article, they will be totally bored and unchallenged because they have already learned everything kids used to learn in college in high school.
Does that make sense to anybody?
Let’s talk about that after midterms.
At the moment, husband is tearing apartment apart looking for the flashcards even though he has already looked in every conceivable place they could be. The contents of Older Son’s tremendous bookbag—so heavy that it is on wheels—have been dumped onto the floor. Contents of drawers have been emptied and replaced. The cards are nowhere to be found. Husband rants louder. Finally, I say, “I can’t listen to this anymore. Younger Son and I are going out to dinner.”
Older Son pipes up. “Hey! What about me?”
“You can come too,” I say.
Husband looks at me, hurt.
Oh God. What am I doing? Who am I becoming? What is the stress of Older Son’s schoolwork doing to us as a family?
“I’m sorry,” I say to Husband. “I know this is killing you. I know how hard it is. But I can’t take it anymore.” That is true. That is why poor Husband is carrying the entire burden of midterm week. I have been teaching Older Son skills and subjects his schools did not teach him since third grade. Now, besides answering any questions Older Son may have about school work, I am also devoting myself practically full time to figuring out how to help Younger Son to read. I am at the total end of my rope. I tried to do something to help Older Son last night and I couldn’t. I looked at the math problems and they swam in front of my eyes. I told Older Son to ask his math teacher about the probability problems I had promised Husband I would handle. I tried to read a page in Older Son’s grammar book and the words just would not go in. Older Son will need to do English on his own. For all other subjects, Husband has stepped up to the plate.
As I am recovering from burnout, I am observing Husband experience what has totally fried me—juggling the demands of work, life, and a child’s school work. (And he is handling only one of the kids’ demands, not both of theirs the way I usually do.) I am also aware of the terribly negative effects Older Son’s schoolwork is having on our family’s life. At the moment, I am sorry that we ever sent him to NEST. His friends at other schools are not working anywhere near as hard. But the parents of some of those friends are complaining that their kids are hardly learning anything at all in middle school. That certainly is not the case with Older Son. He has certainly learned a lot.
In fact, Older Son has blossomed at NEST. He stands taller. He is more self confident. He is remarkably articulate and can hold a conversation with anyone about anything. Before he went to NEST he didn’t think he was smart. (That’s because his elementary school never administered tests. He had no way of knowing what he knew.) Now he knows he’s smart. There’s no arguing the point. He was hand-picked to attend one of the most selective schools in the city. He has seen that if he works hard and studies in a certain way, he will ace his tests. Adjusting to NEST was the biggest challenge of his life. The first time he took a test at NEST he got a 51 on it. When he showed me the grade, I said, “I didn’t know you were having a test. You know, when you have a test you have to study for it.”
His totally honest response was, “I do?”
You can see why I, and Older Son, had our work cut out for us when he started middle school at NEST. You can see why I became a helicopter mom. Coming from a progressive school where kids constructed their own knowledge—and the teachers had no idea what that knowledge was, or whether it was accurate—to a traditional school like NEST where you are expected to regurgitate facts was like suddenly needing to walk on your hands instead of your feet. A total change of orientation and processing. It was not easy.
Now that they are 7th graders, Older Son and his friends are finding NEST easier. They walk and talk a little bit like Marines who have made it through boot camp. They are proud that they have been tested by NEST and survived. Only we, and the other parents, are dying because of it.
Is it worth it?
I don’t know.
Would we choose it again?
Long pause. Given the other options out there, I would have to say yes. We would.
And so, I buck up.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s move beyond this. The flashcards are gone. Older Son, go make new ones.”
He stands up taller. “I don’t need to make flashcards. I know the words now. I just need to review my book.”
“Okay,” I say. “Go do whatever you need to do to do well on your midterm.”
He sits down on the couch with his Spanish books and starts studying.
I order Chinese food, set the table and even light candles on the table. My mission for this upcoming week is to make it as normal as possible. When the food arrives, we sit down to eat.
Older Son is happy and excited as he tells us about the invention he and his friends have conceived for their science project. He tells us they are making an egg cracker. The egg will roll down a ramp, knock over a row of dominoes, which will knock over something else (forgive me but I didn’t catch the exact details) which will make a match strike itself again a coarse surface, which will make match light up and get lowered down and light a flame under pan which will then cook the egg, which will have been cracked by a hammer and dripped through a strainer into the pan.
Husband and I stop eating. We look at each other and then at Older Son.
“You need to make it simple,” husband says.
“That sounds interesting but very complicated,” I say.
We will have our work cut out for us after midterms, we both think.
Older Son goes on to say that, besides studying for midterms, he also has homework. Instead of reviewing material that will be on midterm, math teacher is teaching new topic. She has assigned homework on the new topic. (Can’t tell you what it was, sorry. Husband can’t either. This is point when kids become independent learners. When parents cannot handle anymore.) English teacher has also assigned homework. The kids are to keep a log of all the media they watch over the weekend—number of hours of TV, Nintendo, radio, magazines.
HOW MANY HOURS OF MEDIA YOU WATCH? I say to Older Son.
He nods.
“What planet is your English teacher on?” I holler. “Does he not realize it is the weekend before MIDTERMS? He thinks you are going to be watching TV?” My kid will end up not even going to his great-uncle’s funeral never mind watching TV.
Older Son shrugs. “I’m sure he’s going to be watching TV this weekend so I guess he figures we will too.”
Does this teacher not realize the load these kids are toiling under? Apparently not.
After kids are in bed: Husband is in a panic again. “There is no way he is going to be ready for those midterms,” husband says. “When we took midterms in college we had time to study for them. He has Spanish on Monday, Science on Tuesday, English on Wednesday, Social Studies on Thursday and Math on Friday. There is no way in hell he is going to have time to study for everything. He can’t go to Chelsea Piers tomorrow.”
Older Son has been looking forward to golfing for a few hours tomorrow with Husband at Chelsea Piers while Younger Son attends a birthday party at the bowling alley there.
I argue that we can’t take that away from him. “He needs a break. Otherwise he’ll resent all this school work. Going to Chelsea Piers will motivate him to focus and study. It will be his reward.”
Husband says nothing. I know that means that he feels Older Son shouldn’t go but he’ll let him. I write out Older Son’s schedule for the weekend:
SATURDAY
Morning: Study science.
Break: Golf with Dad at Chelsea Piers.
Afternoon: Study Spanish.
Night: Assemble and organize English notes based on rubric English teacher handed out.
SUNDAY
Morning: Study Social Studies
Break: Funeral.
Afternoon: We decide Older Son cannot go to the cemetery. I will stay with kids at mother-in-law’s house, which is near the cemetery. Older Son will study while great-uncle is buried and for a few hours afterwards.
Evening: We will all join cousins and great-aunt in sitting shiva. Older Son can study in the car on the way there and on the way home.
Then, next week, he will simply review for each subject on the night before that subject’s exam. He will be fine, we decide. He’s already been tested once on this stuff and he did very well on most of his tests. We remind ourselves that this is just a review. A review of MASSIVE quantities of information but, still, only a review. We both feel less stressed. We both go to sleep.
Food for thought…
A few weeks ago, Husband said, “If, when we were single, someone had told us that this is how we would be spending our nights and weekends, we would have thought they were crazy.” His words keep popping up in my mind this week. Just thought I would share them with you.
Two days before midterms…
The problem with having a kid studying in a small New York City apartment is that you can’t get away from the studying. Ever. Everywhere you turn there are books or papers or a computer or a studying child.
When I wake up Saturday morning Older Son is already sitting at the dining room table, taking the tests for each science chapter that are available online. Older Son takes note of what he got wrong, and why. Husband then goes over what Older Son got wrong with Older Son. When they are done with that, husband begins to quiz him. I close the door to the bedroom: Even with the door closed, I can still hear:
Husband: Oxygen has 8 what?
Older Son: Mumbles something in a low voice that I can’t make out.
Husband: The molecular (mumble) of oxygen is 15.99. So how would you find out how many neutrons?
Older Son: Mumble
Husband: Not 15. 15.9.
Older Son: Mumble Mumble.
Husband: Always protons first. You gotta remember that.
Better him than me, I think. I am very aware of how lucky I am to have a Husband who helps.
I am going to get my hair cut. I haven’t had time for a haircut since July, when I was working as a freelance editor at InStyle and needed to look nice. When I think back to those days of working in an office, it is like remembering a blissful vacation. Believe me, working in an office was indeed like being on vacation compared to what I am now responsible for. When you work in an office you get to take the train to work, alone, and read magazines until you get to your train stop. At work, you get to sit at a desk and do work that you love. You even get to go out to lunch! At Time, Inc. there is an employee cafeteria where the food has been cooked by someone other than you. The M&Ms they sell there are fresh and not left over from last Halloween like the ones at home. You get to b-s with other grownups at the water cooler.
Every day, work would appear on the desk in my beautiful office. I would complete it and when I went home I had nothing to think about other than how I would enjoy my husband and my kids. We went out for bike rides. We watched movies. We went out to dinner. My home was neat and clean! My neck muscles were relaxed. They did not crack the way they do now when I move my head.
I would love to work in an office again but I can’t. Not until the kids are home for summer vacation again. During the school year, I need to be home in the afternoon to support my kids in school. And so I work full-time from home as a freelance writer. That means I start working the minute the kids leave for school and keep on working until they come home and then I become a cook, a teacher and, of course, their mother. During the work week, I almost never go out to lunch. I, simply, work. This is not as bad as it sounds since I love my work. But I also like being around people and would love to work in their company. But I don’t have time to do all the extra things you have to do when you work in an office full-time, like shop for nice clothes, blow-dry your hair every morning and take the subway to and from work. I don’t have time to commute. I don’t even have time to go to the doctor. I have a suspicious looking mole on my back that a dermatologist really should have a look at. I can’t remember the last time I saw my gynecologist. My eyeglass prescription has changed, so I have a hard time reading but I have no time to go and get my eyes checked.
But my kid got 100 on his last science test!
I was so proud of him I posted that test on the refrigerator.
He took it down and stuck it in his science folder. When I asked him why he didn’t want his test hanging on the refrigerator, he said, “I don’t want to be reminded of school when I ‘m home.”
I wonder why…
Before I leave for haircut, I tell Husband I am putting chicken nuggets in the oven for Younger Son. Without looking up from Older Son’s science notes, Husband says, “375 degrees for 10 minutes.”
I stop in my tracks and stare at him. Just last weekend—the weekend on which I announced that I couldn’t do as much as I was doing anymore and that he would have to take over—Husband had asked ME how to make chicken nuggets when I asked him to do so. Last weekend I had looked at him as if he was a moron and, not very politely, said, “Read the directions on the box.”
Now I hug Husband and give him a kiss. “A week ago you had to ask me how to make them and look at you now! You are a changed man.”
He is. He is exhausted. Disheveled. Grumpy. All because he is helping his son prepare for midterms.
By helping son he is helping me.
I love husband more than I have ever loved him before. It is because of him that I am, finally, able to go and get my hair cut. I walk out the door and feel like a human being for the first time since September.
AT CHELSEA PIERS
At the birthday party in the bowling alley, I see the moms from Younger Son’s school who are my friends. I wave but I do not join them the way I usually do. I am introduced to a mom whose son is in the other first grade class. From Younger Son, I know that her son is also being taken out of class for phonics work. I have never met this woman before in my life. I pull her aside and tell her Younger Son is also being pulled out for phonics instruction. We bond instantly. We find a private place to sit and compare notes for the rest of the party. Guess what? She didn’t teach her kid phonics at home either. I tell her we are in previously unexplored territory of parents teaching their children at home coupled with an unsystematic approach to phonics in the classroom. I tell her our kids are doomed if we do not teach them phonics. We compare notes on what we are now doing to help our kids. As we talk, I trust the other mothers will make sure Younger Son does not clobber anyone with a bowling ball and vice versa. I would do the same for them if they were drowning, the way I am drowning now.
AT HOME
When we get home, Husband goes back to quizzing Older Son. Talking with the other mother whose kid is also behind the class curve in reading has exhausted me. My stamina is usually that of a workhorse. Lately, I tire easily. I hate being tired but I know I need to tend to my fatigue. Other people go on vacation. I spent my last vacation in December researching how to teach Younger Son to read and printing out sight word Bingo cards and long-vowel game boards from the internet, even on my birthday, which was three days after Christmas. I have earned my fatigue. I should not be ashamed of it. And I don’t need to fight it since beloved Husband is here to help Older Son.
I decide to do something I haven’t had a chance to do since Older Son started school this year—I watch a DVD with Younger Son. We lay down on the bed together and enjoy Lassie. Younger Son lays either on top of me or right next to me the entire time. I am so aware of his little-boyness. I am so aware of how much I am missing of his childhood by being so focused on schoolwork, both his and Older Son’s. I am so aware of how content he is to be watching TV with Mommy. I am so happy we had the chance to do this together, at least on this one afternoon.
While we watch, Older Son walks into the bedroom a few times to get scrap paper. He lingers in the room, looking at the TV. I know how much he wishes he, too, could lay down and watch TV for at least a little while. But I don’t say anything and either does Older Son. He watches TV standing up. (Is 3 minutes of watching Lassie enough to satisfy the requirement for the media log English teacher wants the kids to keep this weekend?) I know Older Son knows that if he sits down to watch the movie, I will tell him to go back to work. He stands motionless. I don’t say anything for a while and then, gently, say, “Go ahead, Older Son” and he goes back to studying.
After the movie, even though it was such a delight to do something just for fun with Younger Son, and even though school work is the last thing I want to do, I say to Younger Son, “It’s reading time.” I show him the Dick and Jane book I have picked out for him—“Go, Go, Go.” I tell him Dick and Jane is a series of books and that he will be working on these now, the way he worked with the Bob Books. I tell him that the Dick and Jane books have some words that may seem weird to him because he hasn’t learned the phonics rules for them yet. I tell him I will teach him two rules today. I say, “You don’t have to remember the rules, just know that they exist so that these words will make sense to you.”
I write “my” and “Sally” on a piece of paper.
I point at “my” and ask, “What’s that word?”
“My,” he says.
“Good!” Then I explain (exactly the way Explode the Code Book 3 does) that when y is at the end of a short word it make the long “i” sound. When it is at the end of a long word it makes…”
Younger Son cuts me off and says “the eee sound.” He correctly pronounces a long “e.”
“Good! How so you know that? Did you learn it in school?”
“No. I just know it.”
He may have doped it out but, deep inside, I hope he learned it in school. I would really like to think that he is learning SOMETHING in his classroom that will actually help him as a reader and that the word study they are doing is not all completely over his head.
I point to the other word on the paper. “And this word is `Jane.’ The `e’ at the end of it doesn’t make any sound. It changes the way the `a’ sounds from being like `a’ in bat to `a’ like in cape.”
“Okay, let’s read mommy,” says Younger Son.
He reads three stories (they are very short) and does great.
He then completes three pages in Explode the Code.
Then I want to evaluate Younger Son’s knowledge of sight words. The ones he’s been getting at school—both from his teacher and from the reading specialist—are from the latter end of the Dolch list, or do not appear on that list at all. (The words from the reading specialist included words like “friend,” “gone” and “done.”) I want to make sure Younger Son knows all the really easy sight words before he goes on learning the harder ones. After all, that’s what will make him a reader—knowing the words that appear most often on the page. I have printed out the 11 lists of sight words (they are presented in order of frequency of use) on http://www.theschoolbell.com/, a website run by a first grade teacher in California. She even provides a cover you can print out so that you can make a nifty little booklet of all the words your kid needs to know.
I have taken Best Friend’s advice to heart. I will not present the words as a big list to Younger Son, for fear that this will intimidate him. I have kept each list separate. I start with “Dolch List 1.” This lists the most frequently used words in our written language in 4 columns of five words each. I cover the last three columns with a blank piece of paper and have Younger Son read the first column. He reads: “the, to, and” and then, much to my surprise, pauses when he comes to “he.” Sight words are words children must read instantly, without any hesitation. If they hesitate, it means they haven’t yet completely learned them. After a few seconds he does read, “he.” Then he reads, “a.” I uncover the next column of words and he reads “I, you, it” but when he gets to “of” he says “for.” He gets “in, was, said” but does not nail “his.” He does great with “that, she, for, on, they, but” but does not know “had.” I am shocked that while Younger Son knows many harder sight words, he does now know four words from this very rudimentary list.
I stand up. Younger Son gets busy with a toy plane on the bed. I think he isn’t paying any attention to what I am doing. Using a pink highlighter, I quickly circle the words Younger Son did not instantly recognize. I then have him read words from Dolch List 2, again covering up the columns we are not reading at the moment. From this list Younger Son does not know “with, is, her, out, be, little, down”. I stand up to circle the words again but Younger Son says, “Let me do it Mommy.”
“Do what?”
I didn’t think he had any idea I was testing him or that I was making note of which words he didn’t get.
“Circle the words that I don’t know so we can make flash cards for them,” says my kid. He knows exactly what I’m up to and he’s all for it. As I watch in astonishment, he highlights in pink every single word he did not recognize immediately on that whole list. No intimidation on his part. No worry. Just matter-of-factness. He is totally with the program.
We then move on to List 3 and List 4. On List 3 he does not know “do” and “so.” I am stunned and very worried. Then I think about the Whole Language books he has brought home for homework, as well as the phonics readers he’s worked on with me. I don’t think Younger Son has ever seen the words “do” or “so.” So how is he supposed to know them? From List 3 he does not know “do, so, would, yes, were” and hesitates over “when, what, see, will.” From List 4 he hesitates before saying “went, an, its, into, red.” He says “come” instead of “came” and does not know “now, very, ride, just, blue.” He highlights each of those words as he hesitates over them.
“I don’t know a lot of them, huh, Mommy?” he says.
“You’ll nail them in a week,” I say. (Believe it or not he does nail a lot of them. In fact, he already knew some of them but did not recognize them in this different context, but more on that later.) Right now, I am very, very, very worried but I try not to let my worry show. Younger Son goes off to play while Older Son continues studying. We had thought Older Son could finish studying science in the morning but he studies it until 6 p.m. (The physical science part of the curriculum he picked up completely from school but the chemistry part of it is tripping him up.) After he is done with science, he turns to Spanish.
When he is done, he plays his beloved Flight Simulator computer game for 45 minutes. I decide that having a little down time is more important than organizing his English notes, which is what he should have been doing, according to the to-do list I wrote for him last night. I let him play, even though he is pale and has remarkably dark circles under his eyes. This is all the media time he will log this weekend.
At bedtime he asks if he can read “for fun.” Thank God reading is still fun. I say yes and he picks up a novel and climbs into bed. I can tell you his reading material is high quality but it has nothing to do with what he is studying in school. At the beginning of the year he picked up one of the books I had taken out of the library when he was studying the Maya and Aztec peoples. Older Son flipped through the book standing up and said, “I used to love to read these kinds of books when I was in elementary school. Now that I’m tested on this stuff, I hate them.” He closed the book and never looked at it again.
Is any educator out there listening? Maybe progressive elementary school wasn’t all bad after all. Maybe someone with common sense will one day open a school that is somewhere in between over-the-top progressive and over-the-top academically rigorous. Maybe then our kids will actually get an excellent education that will not require so much parental support. But until that happens Husband and I are here to help.
One day before midterms…the morning
January 21, 2007. It is 9 a.m. Older Son and Husband are reviewing science again. Younger Son is watching TV. I go into the bedroom, close the door and boot up the computer. I grab one of Older Son’s English books, “Simon’s Saga for the SAT 1 Verbal,” and start looking up the definitions for the 20 SAT vocabulary words Older Son will need to know for part of his English midterm.
That’s right.
SAT vocabulary words.
The kid is in 7th grade. Thanks to the shitty education he got at his “top 200” elementary school, the kid doesn’t know how to spell words like “sentence” and he still mixes up when to use “there” and “their.” But he can tell you what perambulate means.
Most of the kids at NEST+m (and in many other middle and high schools) don’t know how to write cursive. They can’t read it either. One NEST+m mother said her kid can’t read the comments the kid’s teachers make on his schoolwork since the comments are in cursive. Maybe that’s why Older Son’s teachers print their comments.
Researchers and policy makers are so busy looking at why so many kids struggle in middle school. They should take a look at the lack of skills being imparted to these poor kids in their elementary schools. I have discussed this with Dr. Olga Livanis, the intermin principal at NEST+m. The woman is a brilliant educator but her hands have been tied this year by a small group of parents and teachers who have been rudely, outspokenly, adamantly, against her. They are in the minority, as PTA and School Leadership elections (held two times!) proved. As of this day—one day before midterms—NEST+m parents are still awaiting the outcome of the C-30 process, which will decide if Dr. Olga Livanis will remain principal of NEST+m, as most NEST+m parents hope, or if someone else will be chosen to lead the school. This year, as intermin principal Dr. Livanis has not made too many changes to the curriculum although she has great plans for the curriculum if she is officially put at its helm. At the moment, there is no one to complain to about a lack of basic skills being imparted to these children, even as they plow ahead and learn esoteric words most Americans have never heard of and will never need to know, except to ace the SAT, which Older Son and his classmates are not taking for another five years. So, while the parents wait to hear who will become the official principal, the kids continue to swim upstream again a curriculum that is way over the top in its expectations of them.
If Older Son had a sane amount of school work to do, I would have him look up his own definitions. He WANTS to look up his own vocabulary definitions. No 7th grader wants his mommy looking up his vocabulary words for him. When it is not midterm week, Older Son does his schoolwork on his own. I know how important it is for kids to do their own schoolwork. I know that when researchers looked at why kids from a high-performing suburban school district did terribly in college they found that these kids’ mothers had done their homework and projects for them all the way through middle and high school. These kids were never allowed to develop as learners. I know how important it is for Older Son to develop as a learner. I am working towards making him a totally independent learner. I also want him to feel competent and capable
But Older Son is running out of time and we are banding together as a family to help him. I know he will reciprocate when midterms are over. He always freely offers his help to me when I need it. He is the one who fixes the computer when it crashes, who changes batteries in the computer mouse when they run out, who knows how to program the VCR. He empties the dishwasher, puts the laundry in the washer and drier, carries bags in from the car without being asked to do so, and even makes pancakes on the few Sunday mornings that are not crammed full of homework. I am not worried that I will damage his sense of capability by helping him out. He already knows he is capable. He knows he can look up his own definitions. He also knows he is not super-human and that it is OK to accept help when it is offered.
I have typed just 10 vocabulary words and definitions when Younger Son comes into the bedroom. Instead of being happy to see him, my heart sinks. He is going to slow me down. He is going to keep me from accomplishing everything I need to get done this morning.
We need to leave in two hours in order to be on time for Uncle Irving’s funeral. I still need to feed kids, pack kids’ dress clothes for later shiva call, prepare pasta salad for shiva call, make sure Older Son has all the books and notes he needs so that he can study at Grandma’s house, dress myself…and more.
Because Older Son still has so much to study, husband and I have decided that in addition to skipping the cemetery part of putting Uncle Irving to rest, he cannot go to the funeral service either. Husband calls his mom to let her know that the kids will both stay at her apartment (alone) during the funeral, which is being held just a few blocks away from her building in Queens. I will then stay with them during the actual burial so that they are not alone for too long. I am sorry I will not be present at the cemetery for Cary’s cousins, whom I love, but I feel I have no choice. I need to quiz my kid on social studies, which he has not even begun to review.
I can’t begin to do anything on my own long to-do list until I finish typing up the definitions to Older Son’s vocabulary words. But I can’t type because Younger Son is climbing into my lap. “Huggie mommy,” he says.
I hug him and he hugs me. For a loooooooonnnnnnggggg time……
Instead of relaxing into his warm little body, I impatiently wait for the hug to be over. When he finally pulls away, Younger Son says he wants to type his name.
I want him to go away so I can finish Older Son’s vocabulary list. (It feels so good to actually finish something once in a while, doesn’t it?)
But I am a good mother. I know he needs me and, so, I let Younger Son type his name.
I try to think of a way to keep him on my lap and finish the vocabulary words at the same time. I say, “Hey, you want to learn a very big word?” (May as well kill two birds with one stone. It’ll be one less word to review with him when he’s in 7th grade.)
“Sure,” my 6-year-old chirps.
I teach him the definition of “daunting.” Earlier in the year when Older Son and a classmate of his went on a tour of Stuyvesant High School, the person giving us the tour said the homework load at Stuyvesant was “daunting.” At the exact same time, Older Son and his classmate—without even looking at each other—recited the definition of daunting outloud: “Frightening, intimidating.” That word had been part of that week’s vocabulary unit. They had certainly learned it well! And they were struggling under their own load of “daunting” homework.
I teach the definition now to Younger Son and he scampers away to show off his new found knowledge to Older Son and Daddy. They don’t give him a chance to talk. Instead, they yell at him for interrupting Older Son’s studying.
Younger Son comes back to me, deflated.
I hug him and say, “Older Son’s midterms start tomorrow. He has a lot to get done before then. Now go watch TV.” He does.
I finish typing the words and print out the list of definitions. In the printer I find something Older Son must have printed out last night. It is a description of a car racing computer game called RalliSport Challenge. This printout is a sign of a young boy trying to be a boy, and not a studying machine. I stick it in the drawer where Older Son keeps all his personal papers. He can look at it when midterms are over.
Next, I walk into the kitchen to make the pasta salad for the shiva call. Husband and Older Son are working nearby, at the dining room table.
Husband says to Older Son, “What’s the formula for momentum?”
Older Son: “P equals m times v.”
Husband: “What’s the formula for acceleration?”
Older Son: “Delta V over Delta T.”
I marvel that my kid actually knows, and likes, that stuff. The last time we went bicycle riding together he kept saying how every time he pedaled fast, or turned, he kept thinking that he was accelerating and how various forces were changing in his bike and his body. He wanted to know if there was a way you could make a living using that kind of information. We told him engineers use those concepts. So do pilots, which is what Older Son wants to be when he grows up.
I think about how great it is that science relates to the things Older Son loves in his day-to-day life. At the moment, Husband is less pleased about it. Husband is yelling at Older Son because, instead of regurgitating formulas, Older Son is talking about the speed and acceleration of the go-cart he is saving up for.
Instead of being able to use Older Son’s interest to further what he is reviewing with him right now, Husband yells, “Will you please stop going off on tangents? Focus! We have 45 minutes left before we have to leave for the funeral and I haven’t even showered yet!” He hasn’t eaten either. Neither have I.
The rest of the morning moves at a frenetic pace. I try to be a normal Mom to Younger Son while I rush around getting self and kids and assorted belongings ready to go. Younger Son is sitting on the couch, quietly working on a Disney winter scene sticker book that Santa brought him. I am very aware that it has no educational value whatsoever and I don’t care. Even though he is behind the curve in reading at his school, I am still determined to allow my kid to be a kid.
Younger Son is holding a snowman sticker in his hand. “Mommy, I need your opinion. Where do you think the snowman looks better? On this page or this page?”
I know him well enough to know that he has already picked a place for the snowman. He doesn’t really need my opinion. He is asking that question only to connect with me. I walk over and kiss him on top of his head. I say nothing about the snowman and watch as he places it on one of the pages. “Looks nice,” I say and walk away.
I feel like I am always walking away from him, like I never, ever, have the chance to spend the time I would love to spend with him. And, too often, I yell at him to hurry up.
I hurry to finish the pasta salad. Husband jumps in the shower. Watch how I get snippier and snippier as I get more and more rushed:
“We can’t be late for the funeral!” husband yells from the shower.
“I know,” I say.
I have just had Older Son try on his Oxford dress shirts, which he hasn’t worn since the summer. He owns two and they are both too small on him. The only dress shirt that fits is one with the NEST+m logo on it.
“You have to wear this,” I say as I fold the shirt and put it in the bag.
Older Son shrugs and goes off to get the khakis and belt he wears to school as part of his school uniform. Thank God my son is easy going. Thank God he doesn’t care that he will be going to the shiva call looking like he should be performing in a school assembly. He feels comfortable with our cousins. He knows they love us and we love them. Our cousins have seen Older Son dressed to the nines in the blazer and dress pants that used to fit him. They have also seen him in jeans and t-shirts and a bathing suit. They will overlook the fact that he joined them to sit shiva for their father in his school uniform. They will overlook the fact that I don’t have time to run up the street this morning to the Gap and buy my kid a dress shirt.
Won’t they?
Now is not the time to ask Husband this question.
“What is Older Son wearing tonight?” Husband yells from the shower.
I am in the bedroom. I don’t have time to walk to the bathroom to answer Husband. In order for him to hear me from the bedroom, I yell, “I’ve taken care of it. I’m packing his clothes now.”
“Does he need khakis?” husband yells from shower.
“Yes,” I yell. “He has them.”
“Khakis?” husband yells louder.
I walk into the bathroom. Through clenched teeth I say, “I said I’ve taken care of his clothes.”
Husband’s head pops out from behind shower curtain. He wipes shampoo away from his eyes. “Why are you yelling at me?” he asks.
“Because I said I have taken care of it and you keep asking me questions.”
“I didn’t hear you,” Husband says.
“Well, stop yelling at me from the shower. At least wait until you can hear my answers before you have a conversation with me. Otherwise I have to stop what I am doing and come in here to you and I don’t have time to do that.”
Husband does not say a word. He goes back to showering.
Shit, I think. I can’t believe I yelled at Husband. He deserves a medal and a back rub for everything he is doing at home. He does not deserve to be yelled at.
I walk back into the bathroom and apologize.
In the tone of voice he uses when he turns on his delicious, dry humor, Husband says, “Funerals are a pain in the neck.”
That is his way of saying he knows I am stressed and that he understands and that he forgives me for yelling at him.
I smile. I love the way Husband and I reconnect by using humor. Fights rarely turn into a big deal with us because one of us almost always tries to repair any damage we’ve caused in a light-hearted way.
“They are a pain,” I say.
That is my way of saying, I realize you’ve forgiven me. Thank you.
Husband and I then talk at the same time.
He says, “Couldn’t he have died at a more convenient time?”
I say, “Couldn’t he have waited to die until midterms were over?”
Husband and I laugh, even though neither one of us thinks Uncle Irving’s death is the slightest bit funny.
Uncle Irving had been a loving husband and father. Uncle Irving knew that a strong marriage was the foundation of a strong family. If he was still alive, Uncle Irving would have understood that Husband and I were using the timing of his death to reconnect with each other. Uncle Irving would have given us his blessing.
In the moments it took Husband and me to reconnect, the kids have started fighting. Younger Son has come up with an idea for another one of his constructions. He wants to make a plane using one of Older Son’s rectangular erasers for the airplane body. Older Son is refusing to give him one, even though he has two erasers and even though he is not using either one of them right now and even though he has gone back to studying and should be worrying about that instead of about an eraser we can easily replace.
“It’s mine,” says Older Son.
“Let him use it,” I say.
“But it’s mine.”
“Let him use it,” I say, louder.
“But it’s mine.”
I watch myself erupt in anger as if I am a third-party observer. “GIVE HIM THE ERASER NOW!!” I yell. This is how stress affects people, I think. It makes them unable to cope with squabbling children. It makes them yell at times when, normally, they wouldn’t.
Yesterday afternoon while Younger Son and I were watching Lassie, he asked me why the mother got so mad at the boy when the boy mentioned Lassie’s name. (The family had needed to sell Lassie in order to buy food and the mother had just learned that her husband had to go off to fight in the war and the boy was saying he wanted Lassie back.) At the time, I had explained to Younger Son that the mother was stressed and that the boy’s comment made her feel bad and she felt frustrated because she wished she could get the dog back for him but she couldn’t. So she needed him not to talk about it anymore.
Now, I try to explain my needs clearly to Older Son. I try to be the good and calm mother I usually am. “I need you to give Younger Son that eraser. He is patiently hanging around while you study and we get ready and if he wants to build something using that eraser you will let him. Okay? Uh…uh…uh…”
I want to say my son’s name.
I know I know it.
As my son looks at me, wondering what I am trying to say, I realize I cannot remember his name. This is what stress has done to me. Studies have shown that stress affects your memory. Once, one of my over-taxed friends was so over-burdened with supporting her own kids in school that she was constantly forgetting things. It happened so often that she was afraid she had early Alzheimer’s and actually went to see the doctor about it. The doctor told her all she needed was a vacation. He misdiagnosed her. What she actually needed was a tutor for her kids.
Finally, my son’s name comes to me. “Older Son!” I say, laughing.
Older Son is looking at me, waiting to find out why I am laughing. I continue laughing as I say, “I forgot your name!”
I am laughing so hard that I double over. “I can’t believe I forgot your name!”
Older Son turns back to the computer. “That is not funny, Mom.”
Usually, Older Son is the first one to want to share a laugh. People often comment on his wonderful sense of humor. I look to see if he is smiling, if he’d said, “that’s not funny” in a joking way.
I see that he is dead serious.
I can’t stop laughing.
Older Son looks at me again and says, “Mom. That is not funny at all.”
Of course it isn’t funny. None of this is funny. I cannot believe how the over-the-top demands of one school and the absurd Balanced Literacy curriculum at another school are affecting me and my family.
If I wasn’t laughing I’d be crying.
My kids hate it when I cry.
And so I let my stress, my frustration, my anxiety out through laughter. And through this blog. And, somehow, more and more of you are finding the blog. Thanks again for reading and for passing the word on to other parents that they are not alone in needing to teach their kids what they the kids should be learning in school.
Husband talks to Joel Klein
February 6, 2006: (Fast forward for a moment to a few weeks after midterms.) Husband attends a meeting with Joel Klein about the proposed school reforms.
Husband tries to tell Klein that his fuzzy curriculums work in the “good” schools only because parents or tutors are supplementing them at home with skills that are not being taught in the schools.
Klein does not listen.
Klein totally misses the point.
Klein goes off on a tangent.
Husband says to Klein, “You are so busy defending that you are not listening.”
Husband is applauded by the hundred-or-so parents in the room.
Klein goes on with his prepackaged bullshit. The parents stop listening to him. The parents sit there and read a press release you can see in the post following this one, as well as xeroxed copies of the first two entries from this blog and an article Husband distributed called “Whole-Language High Jinks: How to Tell when `Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction Isn’t.’” You can read it too at: www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=367
Noting that all the parents were engrossed in the Helicopter Mom handouts and not listening to Klein’s BS, one of the meeting’s organizers said to another: “What are they all reading?”
They were reading this blog, Chancellor Klein. You should read it too. You will then see the real reason “good schools” are successful and why it seems like your Mickey Mouse curriculums work.
It’s because parents at “good” schools are teaching their kids at home.
You refuse to hear that.
Until you really hear and see and understand that, you will be unable to fix New York City schools because you will continue to fix things that are not broken.
What all the parents were reading while Joel Klein talked
HEADLINE: What really makes a school high performing: Survey finds that it is parents, or the tutors parents hired, that account for school’s high test scores.
A recent survey of parents at one of the top 200 public schools in the city found that the higher the child scored on his or her fourth grade standardized math test, the more parents taught their kids fundamental math skills at home, or had them tutored. (That’s why now the majority of kids in fourth grade at that school are now enrolled in after school math tutoring.)
In one of the top talented-and-gifted schools in the city, many parents whose kids are reading at, or above, grade level taught their kids phonics at home to compensate for the hit-or-miss phonics that are part of the Balanced Literacy curriculum that the chancellor has, tragically, put in place in our public schools.
To see firsthand how much parents are teaching their kids at home in order to make sure they get the fundamentals of a good education, check out Helicopter Mom, a blog about what it really takes for a child to succeed in the NYC public school system. Helicopter Mom takes you behind the scenes of the life of a real-life NYC family with kids at two of the “best” NYC public schools. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll relate. Then, hopefully, you’ll be inspired to post your own story (just click on “comments” after any post).
Maybe if Klein and Bloomberg realize how much parents—or the tutors parents hire—are doing to raise kids’ scores at the “good” schools they’ll start making changes at the “bad” schools that can really make a difference for all kids, not just for kids who have parents like us.
Klein’s deputy chancellor had millions invested in a company that provides TUTORING SERVICES to failing NYC schools!
Feb. 9, 2007. This morning, Husband snorts while reading the New York Times.
I look up from making coffee. “Is Bloomberg changing the New York City school system again?” I joke.
Just a few weeks ago Bloomberg announced yet another reorganization in his bumbling attempts to fix New York City schools. Given his proven ineffectiveness, given the HARM he has caused by putting Balanced Literacy into all New York City public schools, maybe he was now reorganizing his reorganization.
Husband doesn’t laugh. He says, “Klein’s deputy chancellor just gave up stock worth millions of dollars in a company that gives after-school tutoring to kids from failing schools.” The stock was in the Edison Company, which is best known for setting up private charter schools that probably teach phonics, as opposed to Balanced Literacy. The company also has a subsidiary, Newton Learning, that, according to the Times, “provides tutoring for students in failing schools…Under that contract, the company was paid more than $9.6 million in the 2005-6 school year.”
All the pieces as to why the DOE public school curriculum is so bad began to fit together in a way that makes me feel ill. Could politicians really be so corrupt? Could it really be possible that they have paid millions of dollars for a reading curriculum that has been proven to NOT teach kids to read so that they could then pay millions of dollars to tutoring companies that then teach kids phonics in a systematic way so that the kids CAN learn to read? Could it be possible that they, or their employees, or their golfing buddies, then make millions of dollars from the profits these tutoring companies are turning? Or from the profits private companies setting up charter schools are making?
(Tutoring, by the way, has grown into a 4 billion dollar industry whose revenues have increased by 15 percent a year since 2001 and whose rate of growth is expected to continue over the next few years, according to Eduventures, a Boston-based educational market research firm.)
Can politicians really be pulling such a scam on innocent NYC parents who are too busy working and teaching their kids how to read at home to notice?
I envision sweet little kindergartners and first graders of all races—black, white, Hispanic, Asian—in our public school system struggling to dope out Whole Language readers that make no sense to them because they have not been taught to decode the sounds that letters make. To help these struggling kids, public employees are bankrolling tutoring companies to provide phonics instruction after school so that the public employees’ bank accounts can get fatter and fatter and fatter.
For weeks now, I have been struggling to understand why NYC public schools would use a curriculum that has been proven not to work. “Do you think they’re screwing up the school system on purpose so that they can make money off of it?” I ask my husband.
The question seems far fetched.
Impossible.
But one fact is impossible to overlook: By screwing up the public school system, Bloomberg has cut a straight path for his business buddies to come in and make fortunes by setting up charter schools. The thought of it seems too Byzantine, too John Grisham-ish to be true. But, now that it’s entered my mind, the thought won’t go away.
Husband says either Klein and Bloomberg and their pals are making money from making the public schools so bad, or they are naïve idiots who know absolutely nothing about education and have put blind faith in their business friends, who are taking total advantage of them.
Which scenario do you vote for?
Husband votes for the first one.
I vote for the second.
I have seen Joel Klein speak a few times. Once, Klein and I had a long, impassioned conversation on the staircase at Tweed Courthouse. (This was last year when I was one of the NEST parents who successfully fought to keep a charter school out of NEST.)
I actually really liked the guy.
I actually really thought he had a tremendous job that he took very seriously and that he was trying hard to do his best to help all New York City children.
My advice to Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg? Be careful who you trust. It seems that some of your highly paid employees and consultants may be taking total advantage of you. They are making you look like fools and they are hurting our children’s ability to learn reading, writing and arithmetic.
Lately, every article about your harmful tinkering with the NYC school system talks about your disconnect, about your arrogance, and about the sense New York public school parents have that you’re living in a bubble. It’s time someone burst your bubble.
Like medical doctors, your credo when it comes to setting up an educational curriculum should be “first do no harm.” By putting in ineffective curriculums like Balanced Literacy, you are doing harm.
I should know. My 6-year-old son, Younger Son, was almost one of your Balanced Literacy victims. (Balanced Literacy teaches phonics only in a hit-or-miss way. There is absolutely no systematic instruction in phonics.) If I hadn’t taught Younger Son phonics at home—the way the vast majority of parents at his talented and gifted school had done with their own kids—he would have continued to be at the bottom of his class in reading. Now that he knows phonics, he has shot up in his ability, leaving the teachers and administrators at his school wondering how his meteoric rise was possible.
I have one answer: phonics.
The damage caused by Balanced Literacy to so many children in our school system came too close for comfort in my own home.
Younger Son survived. Younger Son is now a happy and voracious reader. But I worry and worry about all those other New York City children you continue to harm day, after day, after day while you or your buddies or employees continue to make a profit off of their lack of progress.
Shame on you.
To read about the slimy, dishonest way the Balanced Literacy curriculum made its way into New York City public schools see: “This Bush Education Reform Really Works” by Sol Stern. www.ednews.org/articles/7295/1/This-Bush-Education-Reform-Really-Works/
Two other articles really worth your time are:
“Where the Mayor Went Wrong: Would you want to study at a Bloomberg school?” by Diane Ravitch. www.nychold.com/art-wsj-ravitch-050512.html
“Whole-Language High Jinks: How to Tell When `Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction’ Isn’t,” by Louisa Moats, Ed.D. www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=367
I did not know what this story would really be about
When I first started this blog I thought I was only writing about how much NYC parents have to teach their kids at home these days. In the process, I documented a first-hand indictment of how the Balanced Literacy curriculum at my 6-year-old son’s school completely failed to teach my son how to read and how I was able to, quickly, save him.
Magic cure: phonics.
His school got on the phonics bandwagon with him too.
May every other parent be as lucky.
Is your child a “Big Picture” or “Little Picture” learner? It’s the most important thing you need to know to help him succeed in school.
When Older Son graduated from his progressive elementary school—where tests were not administered and teachers did not focus on imparting a specified set of facts to students—and started at NEST+m, an academically rigorous, traditional middle school, we knew he would need our help. We, like most NEST+m sixth grade parents, supported him in making what Emily Armstrong, the PTA co-president at the time, publicly called a “brutal” transition. We taught him how to take notes, outline his chapters and memorize endless facts he would then need to regurgitate on tests. Older Son adjusted well to the new academic demands. He even made honor roll! When he began 7th grade, we stopped supporting him, not because we were mean but because he had done so well in sixth grade that we thought he was ready to soar on his own as an independent learner. What happened? His grades during the first quarter sank like a rock. Older Son bled points on his tests and homework assignments because he consistently did not follow directions or read rubrics. For example, even though his answers were all correct (which means he should have gotten a grade of 100 %) Older Son often lost as many as 20 points on each math test because he didn’t read the directions, which said things like “in order to get full credit, make sure to show your work” or “write your answer in full sentences.” In class, Older Son did not take detailed notes. He’d simply write down the general idea, or main point, or nothing at all because he felt he already knew what the teacher was teaching. (This did not exactly do wonders for his grade when his teachers conducted notebook checks.) At home, when Older Son outlined his textbook chapters on his own, he would sum up the main points, instead of focusing on the details he would be quizzed on. When he wrote up his first science lab report, he didn’t bother to look at the rubric the teacher had handed out. He just wrote up what he considered the most important points. His grade? 20 out of 100! As incident after incident like this piled up, as his grade-point average sunk lower and lower, our conversations with our son basically sounded like this: “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU???” His response would always be, “I don’t know.” He didn’t know why he didn’t take notes. Or read the rubric. Or read the directions. We were very worried. We reached out to the school for help. We talked to his teachers and the middle school principal about it but they reassured us that not reading directions was normal for many 7th graders. “They just plow on and do what they think needs to be done,” the middle school principal told us. “It’s normal.” One of Older Son’s teachers told me that he had done the same thing when he was in middle school. O.K. But did that teacher’s middle school take off 20 points per test each time he engaged in this “normal” behavior? Did his 7th grade marks determine which high school he would be accepted to, the way they do in New York? No. But Older Son’s school was extraordinarily harsh in its grading, and his grades would determine whether he would be accepted into a good, or lousy high school. They would even determine whether he would be allowed to continue at the NEST+m high school! So we had to find a way to change our wonderful, kind-hearted, very smart kid. We had to find a way to make his grades reflect his level of intelligence. And then, one day as I was taking a shower and mulling over what we could say that would get through to Older Son once and for all, I remembered something that would turn out to be life altering for him, for me, for my Husband, and for our relationship with our son. (And even for how our 6-year-old son, Younger Son, needed to be taught to read, but more on that in a later post.) Because of what I remembered, I realized we wouldn’t have to change our wonderful son after all. We would only have to work with what I would come to realize was his inborn, perfectly normal, way of processing information and solving problems. I would never have thought about information processing when dealing with this issue. (Husband and I were not very productively throwing words like “lazy” and “dumb” at our 97th-percentile, clearly very smart son. Needless to say, our using these terms did not exactly foster a positive parent-child relationship.) Luckily, in the shower, I remembered an article I had written for Parent’s magazine on introversion and extraversion. (If you’re interested, that article is posted in the “elementary school” section of this website.) For that article, I had interviewed many experts in the field of personality type. I had learned that everyone is born with a predisposition towards a certain personality and that many psychologists view personality as being made up of four different parts. One part was a predisposition towards introversion or extroversion. A second part involves how a person processes information and solves problems. In short, that aspect of personality determines whether a child, or adult, is a Big Picture learner (some theorists also call these learners “intuiting” or “global”) or a Small Picture learner (also called “sensing” or “analytical.”) I remembered one school psychologist telling me this was the most important fact any teacher could know about any of his or her students. I can now tell you that it is the most important fact any parent needs to know too. In a nutshell: Big Picture Learners: Are more concerned about understanding the big picture, as opposed to little details. When they read a textbook, they will read to get the gist of an entire chapter. If they come to a complicated or boring paragraph that they don’t understand, they will skim over it and read on to get “big picture” of the whole chapter. You can be sure that unless a parent (or teacher) teaches them the importance of this step, they will NEVER re-read that boring paragraph once they have the big picture in their heads. When you ask them if they read the chapter they will, truthfully, say, “Yes” but you will then be totally stumped as to why they do not remember certain details about it. Do not read directions. As Elizabeth Murphy, Ph.D. writes in her excellent book “The Developing Child: Using Jungian Type to Understand Children,” Big Picture Learners “tend to skip reading directions. (They) admit that they look at the examples provided for an assignment and figure out what to do on their own.” (By the way, 75 PERCENT of students are Big Picture Learners while 65 PERCENT of teachers are Little Picture Learners. No wonder teachers and students so often butt heads over the kids not reading directions.) Do not take notes. They jot down general ideas only. Do not like rules. They prefer to dope out the way things work for themselves. Little Picture Learners: * Are more likely to get hung up on details they do not understand as they read. They will be unable to move on to the rest of the chapter until they have understood the part that confused them. They need to understand each part before they are able to grasp the whole. (Foreshadowing of posts that lie ahead: Younger Son is a Little Picture Learner. Little Picture learners need to learn in a sequential, systematic fashion. Little Picture learners need systematic exposure to phonics. * Need directions. They want to know exactly what is expected of them. * Take detailed notes. * Need rules. These rules (such as the rules of phonics) help them learn things in a systematic, sequential manner. (Pity the Little Picture Learner whose school uses a constructivist math curriculum like TERC!) There will be much more on this topic in later posts, as well as entire transcripts of interviews with the most prominent experts on personality type in the country. (I’ve found my dissertation topic. Hurray!) But, for now, let’s return to One Day Before Midterms. I had realized Older Son was a Big Picture Learner back in November. From that moment on, I began helping him process his schoolwork in a way that would help him be able to spit the information back on his tests. In later posts, I will detail the various steps I took but I knew the most important thing for him to do was outline his textbook chapters. This would help him catch important details he would otherwise simply gloss over when he was reading. (His social studies teacher was doing a fabulous job of also stressing the importance of outlining to all her students. But she insisted that the kids use the Harvard Outline format and, of course, took off points if any part of the formatting was incorrect, even if the content of the outline was perfect. For Older Son, the Harvard Outline was not detailed enough. So the poor kid would make one outline to hand in to his teacher for homework and another outline that he would actually use to study from.) When I returned to Grandma’s apartment after Uncle Irving’s funeral (last mentioned in the “One Day Before Midterms…Morning” post), I quizzed Older Son on the outlines he and I had separately made of his Social Studies textbook. (If you want to teach your own Big Picture Learner how to make a good outline, I recommend making your own outlines too. At first, your Big Picture Learner will, inevitably, not include enough details in his version. You can teach your child which details to include and you’ll also have your own outlines to use to quiz him for his midterm, which is what I am doing now at Grandma’s apartment. As your child gets better at it, you will no longer need to make your own outlines and can go and get your nails done instead…) Older Son and I lay on the floor in the living room of Grandma’s bright and lovely apartment. I ask him question after question from his outline and he answers each question, perfectly. As we review, Younger Son plays nearby with his cars and absorbs everything Older Son and I say. (Younger Son knows more about social studies than any other first grader I’ve ever met. If you ask him, he can still recount what Older Son learned in 6th grade about all the reasons Christopher Columbus was a bad guy. He can also hold his own in a debate about why Columbus Day should no longer be celebrated as a national holiday. I’d rather be baking chocolate chip cookies with my 6-year-old than have him learn the NEST+m middle school social studies curriculum through osmosis but, hey, you have to roll with the cards life hands you, right?) As we work our way through his four, long chapter outlines, it becomes clear that Older Son knows his Social Studies. All of it. I had forgotten everything there was to forget about the Mayas and Incas. There was not a single detail Older Son did not remember. Doing his own outlines seems to have worked. (It did. He ended up getting a 97 on his Social Studies midterm, all because he now knows he is a Big Picture Learner and needs to make outlines and take detailed notes so that he does not gloss over the details.) Of course, realizing the Older Son had his Social Studies down cold, makes me realize we could have all gone to the cemetery for Uncle Irving’s burial. Now, it is too late.
“Get your own box!”
Husband arrives at Grandma’s house. He has come to pick us up and drive us to Westchester to sit shiva with the rest of the family. As Husband double locks Grandma’s door, Younger Son looks at the box of Cheez-Its I am holding. His gaze lingers on the words on the back of the box. I say nothing but I don’t take my eyes off of him. He reads, “Get your own box.” Husband, preoccupied with thoughts of death and sadness, walks towards elevator. Husband is used to Younger Son asking to keep every box that enters our home so that he can use it to make one of his architectural structures. Husband thinks maybe Older Son and Younger Son are arguing over a box. They have argued over stranger things. Younger Son shifts his gaze from the box to me. Silently, his gaze asks if the words he read were correct. “Yes!” I say with a big smile and lots of enthusiasm. “What great reading! That’s exactly what it says. Good for you!” That was the moment I’ve been waiting for. The moment when Younger Son began, at least this one time, engaging with words in his environment the way he used to at the beginning of kindergarten. Back then, he would often ask, “What does that say?” about words he saw on the subway or stores or billboards. After his Balanced Literacy curriculum exposed him to book after book full of words he couldn’t possibly read yet, he became intimidated by words and stopped asking about them. “Get your own box,” would become momentous words in Younger Son’s personal history of learning how to read. He has taken one step in what is still a big journey. Again I wonder, as I so often do these days, if Younger Son will ever apply his great sense of determination towards tackling the monumental process of learning to read. If he does, there will be no stopping him. If he doesn’t, we will have a problem.
How’s your Valentine’s Day going? February 14, 2007
If your life is anything like mine—and it probably is if you are reading this blog—then your Valentine’s Day will not resemble a traditional Hallmark scene, in spite of your best efforts to be romantic. But if you take a minute to look beneath the frantic busyness of the life that you and your husband share, you might find the love your husband has for you is even stronger than Hallmark could have imagined. However, you have to take a minute to look—really look—at the ways your husband is saying he loves you. And that may not involve taking you out to a romantic restaurant.
Husband and I did our best to have a romantic Valentine’s Day. Two whole weeks ago, Husband asked, “Would you be able to meet for lunch or dinner on Valentine’s Day?”
His question showed that he not only remembered Valentine’s Day, but that he definitely wanted to take me out to celebrate it. It also put my preference before his. It also acknowledged that, since I work from home and pick up Younger Son from the school bus every day, my workday is very short. It showed that Husband really knows that I don’t like to go out for lunch. (I usually eat it standing up in the kitchen.)
If we had a normal life (read: no child enrolled in an academically rigorous middle school) I would have said, “Dinner.”
Instead, I said, “Let’s wait and see how much homework Older Son has, or if he has a test the day after Valentine’s Day, before we make reservations anywhere. That way we won’t be disappointed if we have to cancel.” Turns out Husband is driving Older Son to Brooklyn this afternoon, and picking him up at night, so that Older Son can complete a science project with two of his classmates. Older Son also has a big social studies test tomorrow. (I’ll bet his teacher is going out to dinner with her husband tonight. She doesn’t have any kids enrolled at NEST+m.)
I told Husband that I don’t need to go out to eat on Valentine’s Day to know how much he loves me. Husband showed how much he loved me when:
1. After I said I was totally burnt out from helping the kids so much with their schoolwork, he did all of Older Son’s midterm prep. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that they should give out Olympic medals for the stamina that took. (On both Older Son and Husband’s parts.)
2.This morning, when we both heard little Younger Son start throwing up at 5 a.m., Husband leaped out of bed and was the first one to reach him. He also cleaned all the vomit that was all over the floor.
3. He surprised me with a beautiful arrangement of flowers this morning, right after I got back from putting Younger Son’s sheets into the washing machine in the laundry room down the hall from our apartment. The flowers were exactly the kind I like—a small arrangement of wild flowers and miniature roses. For the first ten years of our 17-year marriage, Husband would buy me big, impressive arrangements that really didn’t do anything for me. After I told him the truth about what kind of flowers really made me happy, he’s made sure to buy what I like, rather than what he would have chosen as being more romantic.
4. He went to a lot of trouble to surprise me with those flowers. He’d made a special trip to the florist on his way home from work last night. (Since we live in Manhattan, that meant an extra two trips on the subway during rush hour.) He left the flowers with the doorman last night and then snuck them into his closet after I had left for school. (I am taking my very last Ph.D. course on Tuesday nights, from 6-10 p.m.)
5. Even though he went to the florist, he was home in time for me to go to my class and then he fed the kids and checked Older Son’s homework.
6. He designed and set up this website for me so that I would be able to post this blog.
7. Even though he is swamped with a big case at work, he is leaving the office early today to pick up Older Son and his friends after school and drive them to one of the boy’s houses in Brooklyn so that they can finish work on the science project that is due the day after tomorrow. Tonight is the only time this week that the Dad overseeing this stage of the project was available. (I guess those parents aren’t going out to Valentine’s Day dinner either.)
8. He makes me laugh. Just this morning he snorted while reading The New York Times. This is new behavior for him that has started in just the past few weeks. His snorts have come to mean that he is reading an article about Bloomberg and Klein making some other ridiculous change to New York City public schools. Yesterday he snorted because (true story) they are opening a public school that will teach half of its classes in Arabic. (When Husband told this to someone at Younger Son’s school yesterday, they refused to believe him.) This morning, when he snorted again, I steeled myself for another crazy plan from our mayor or schools chancellor. Pretending to read the lead article, Husband said, “Bloomberg has done away with teaching math and reading in public schools. He says the kids learn it better at home anyway.”
Husband and I laughed and laughed. I hope that you and your husband find time to laugh together today. The ability to laugh is what is helping me and my Husband survive the brutal work load our kid’s middle school curriculum has placed on us and the fact that that curriculum keeps us from being able to do normal things people do as a family, like have other couples over for dinner on Saturday night or go to the movies. Except for the kids’ roller hockey games, which they adore and we would never have them give up, our weekends are, inevitably, devoted to homework. (But we have adapted even to that—we socialize with other parents at the hockey rink!)
Being able to laugh helps us remain close, even though we don’t do the traditional things that are supposed to bring you close as a couple, like go to the movies or out to dinner. We don’t even watch TV anymore.
But we do love each other and we both know it.
To help you notice, and understand, the way your Husband shows he loves you, in between taking care of Younger Son today—rubbing his back while the poor little kid throws up, making sure he drinks enough fluids, and changing the TV channels for him—I will be posting articles in a new “relationship” link on this website. (You’ll be able to access them in a few days after Husband has had a chance to activate that link since I have no idea how to do it. Another thing Husband does for me.)
Those articles are written by three friends of mine and many of them are based on cutting-edge marriage research presented at the annual Smart Marriages conference organized by Diane Sollee, founder and director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples education. (For more info see www.smartmarriages.com.)
I attended that conference for years when I was relationship editor at a national woman’s magazine. That conference helped make my marriage what it is today. That conference may have even saved my marriage because the first conference I ever attended took place during one of those very rocky and stormy times that all good marriages go through at one time or another.
This blog continues. Click here to go to Part 2.