a broken system S
family ties
"Even though the public perception is about building bigger and better brains, what the research shows is that it's the relationships. It's the connections, it's the people in children's lives who make the biggest difference," said Ellen Galinsky in Frontline's Inside the Teenage Brain. She goes on to remind us that our teens - despite media bias that claims otherwise - are yearning for a real relationship with family. Frankly, I've never really held that quality over quantity of time time spent with our children is (by sheer virtue) the preferred method. Granted, I'm not talking about abusive or completely indifferent parenting as examples. Rather, those families that spend so much time apart on their own pursuits, that they consider an hour or so a week spent together as "bonding time." But I don't really understand how you can have one without the other, because it takes time to build trust in a relationship. A relationship doesn't happen when you're busy doing something else.
My family knows that my father's diabetes changed our lives, but probably in ways his physician might not have predicted. (Because we humans are so fallable, after all.) My dad had enjoyed alcohol quite regularly on the weekends, but when I was about eleven, he'd started losing weight suddenly, and collapsed one day at work. He came out of the hospital a week or so later, and was literally a changed man. Except for the occaisional beer on warm summer evenings, he never touched the harder stuff again. We had dinner at 5:00 (there were five of us total, I was the oldest child) every evening. We even started having game nights as a family, and the Monopoly board would sit out on the dining room table for days at a time. (We always ate in the kitchen - the dining room was reserved for holidays, primarily.) He worked at Weyerhauser for nearly 30 years in the pulp division, and we went camping nearly every weekend in the spring and summers. We had motorcycles he kept fixed and running - and my mom kept the pantry well stocked for our many trips in the trailer or tents. I know for myself, a few hours of "quality" time spent sporadically would never have garnered the memories that our quantity of time did.
My mom was fortunate to have been able to stay at home with us. And as a beautician, her kitchen also doubled as a salon for her regular clients and several other neighborhood mothers. Did we have fights? Of course. Did we argue and squabble? Naturally. Did we throw tantrums and try to get our parents to take sides? Were our parents there to notice? Yes and yes. Were we the perfect family? Of course not. But did we grow and learn and know that we were loved unconditionally? There is no doubt in my mind. They were there (whether we liked it or not) and I'm certain that as a teenager, I'd have liked my parents and siblings to have been home a lot less... Perhaps now that only my brother and I are left, my memories are fonder, somehow. I know they are tinged with regret at my often-selfish behavior as a child. We see our behaviors much clearer through the lens of time - or at least see the consequences of them.
I bring up my childhood rearing, because I think I was pretty average as a "preteen" - and I wonder if that, too, is an American invention. Leon Botstein's interview in Phi Delta Kappen was fascinating. I know that I excelled as a junior high school student, because I was allowed to continue taking art at the high school most of those three years. It was in the middle of seventh grade that I was sent to the high school to learn silk-screening (as per my previous blog), but I don't know if I mentioned that I was encouraged to stay. I was surrounded by older teens, and while they no doubt saw me as a " kid," never made me feel unwelcomed. (Probably helped that one of my early projects was a re-creation of Led Zepplin's album cover - and I printed enough copies for everyone who wanted one.) Looking back, I can see how that integration of ages impacted my self esteem. There were role models I came into contact with whom I would never have met otherwise. I didn't hold back their learning - because age had nothing to do with it. Age isn't really a factor - it's who you are. While I was no Doogie Howser, I didn't hold back the older kids from learning, either. And clearly, neither the junior high or high school administration had a problem with it.
I couldn't agree more with Botstein's opposition (and Ken Robinson's or John Gatto's for that matter) in the segregation of our youth in school institutions. In large part because the separation of learning by ages seems arbitrary, and is made worse in today's culture because "we don’t have extended families living together at home anymore. We don’t introduce our children early enough to the real criteria by which life is measured, and we allow them to develop hothouse criteria of their own that turn out to be totally irrelevant in life. We don’t teach them that the real rules of life are not the rules of Hollywood, not the rules of pop culture, and not the rules of high school. And we certainly don’t teach them to develop their mental faculties" (Epstein, p. 662). What a disservice we have done to our children - by encouraging them to stay children, and for what purpose? How does it soothe our egos to keep them from maturing?
I'm sorry to harp on about my own childhood (but in that nature of a blog, that's to be expected, isn't it?) but I always knew that I would have to work to earn save for college. I started working the week I turned 16. And worked steadily through high school to earn enough for my first year's tuition for college. As neither of my parent's were college grads (my mom had earned her high school diploma, however), we never discussed applying for scholarships. It never even occured to me that I might have qualified. (That is the one big area that high school failed me. I wasn't even aware I could have applied for one - and I had a 3.9 gpa. Go figure.) I never even questioned that I would need a job as a teenager - it's just what you did to earn your way. And when I moved to Seattle to start school, I found a job in the University District that same summer at a gas station/mini mart. And stayed there for the next three years. And I thank God again for allowing me to be raised the way I was, with the values, morals and recognition (belief?) that hard work pays off. We are better people because of the struggles we endure. (Good ol' Göethe!)
curiouser
In another area as well, Leon Bostsein's interview was illuminating for me. And I wondered if he'd met or read what Dr. Kaku spoke of regarding science and the mind of the child. They spoke nearly identically of the curioristy a child has toward science and nature, and the fact that our schools are doing irrevocable damage in the way we are (traditionally) teaching science to our kids. In Why High Schools Must Go, Botstein says: “Take curiosity. Every parent knows that a child wants to know things about the natural world. They’re not worried about who Thomas Jefferson was. They’re worried about why the sun rises, why it snows, why the stars glitter in the sky. Every child wants to know. Their most important question is why. But our worst pursuit in schooling is the teaching of science, even though it should be our most popular subject. This has to be because of the way science is institutionalized and transmitted. There isn’t something in our development that shuts off our curiosity about the natural universe” (p. 661).
At the risk of being repetitive, I get to see that curiosity in my grandson. And in a few years, my new grandaughter, as well (Last weekend was a busy one! I took care of Leif while his mom was having his sister.) My son is in the Marine Corps - and gets to meet his new daughter when we all drive down to San Diego in two weeks to see him.) I bought a few new toys to keep him entertained - but instead we spent the first afternoon down at the river just throwing rocks and watching a black labrador chase a ball endlessly into the middle of the Willamette River; the second afternoon we walked across the bridge to the Carousel and playground and spent the entire time rolling in the grass, following insect trails, playing on the equipment and riding the colorful horses. Oh, and answering the question "Why?"
Getting back to Botstein's suggestion of the need (or lack thereof) for middle schools—could our schools (and politicians) address this compulsory separation of children into three levels? Would they consider jettisoning middle school from the equation? Or does it really stem from our puritanical background as a nation (p. 663)? It's easier to always do what we've always done, unless we believe otherwise. I understand the need to protect our young, but when did that morph into guaranteeing that our teens stay young? Or at least trying to keep them from maturing and accepting adult responsibilities. We've successfully taught the theory of entitlement to our culture, it certainly doesn't stop with teens.
Botstein advocates a K-10 system: elementary and secondary, with no middle school level. "The middle school is nothing but a reflection of the American puritanical discomfort with early puberty," he said. "We wanted to separate the early adolescents from the children and the grown adolescents. So we created the middle school, which is to me an idiotic notion. It’s idiotic because, again, it increases age segregation. Younger and older role models are absent. We need a two-level system that ends in the 10th grade, after which we can offer a variety of interesting options: work, national service, education in specialty areas, and, of course, college" (p. 663). Going further, we know that learning doesn't end after high school. Our brains don't just stop firing synapses when our bodies stop growing. We don't seem to have trouble recognizing the success of community colleges at combining diverse age groups. If we understand the importance of mentoring at the adult level, how much more so for our youth? Whether they recognize it at the time. I couldn't verbalize it as a junior high student (see how I continue date myself with that school level - I don't really know when it changed to "middle" school anyway. Is that term less perjorative? More PC?) but I know now the effect mixing older students into my learning enviroment postively affected me. And I know that the same was true as a non-trad at Western. It works both ways. Piaget might argue that children learn at specfic stages. And that is true. But Vygotsky understood better the impact of learning from our peers - and learning with them I think, as well.
"smaller" changes ahead
I didn't think to pursue an option other than public school for my own kids. They both hated their high school experiences. Both were bored and defeated in class. I didn't really get it, because my own memories kept me from understanding how much the teaching and learning environment has changed in the past two decades. And how much students have changed. I saw infantile behavior at ages that astonished me (after many teacher-parent conference meetings, I learned quite a little about what the teachers were struggling against). Both of my kids ended up getting their GEDs as a result. I really didn't know any other way to help them - because private schools weren't even on my radar at that time. In all these changes of educational systems and students' environments, I can't help but wonder at the effect of the biggest (bit-sized) change of all in our culture: the digital revolution. And how everything we do has changed as a result, whether as children, teens or adults. Reading books and articles by Steven Johnson, Clifford Stoll and Nicholas Carr has made me much more aware of the effect of online connectivity in our minds and our behaviors. Are our brains changing? If our young people had difficulty focusing before, how much more so now, that "multi-tasking" is seen as a gift from the gods in terms of productivity. Nothing could be further from the truth in my mind.
Would my memories of family meal times been different had we all been plugged into mp3s and smartphones? Would my reading and critical thinking skills have been developed in five second bytes of information? Even if students could be taught in environments geared less toward age restrictions, will the constant access to technology allow them to recognize the advantages of a mentor sitting two feet away over the voices two thousand miles away in their earbuds?
I've digressed beyond focus of this blog - but I'll continue that thread of thought next week.
