This is me, at least during social studies and language arts lessons in my segregated gifted classrooms full of rich kids whose parents paid for private IQ testing and essentially bought their way into the GT program. (I also have ADHD, but wasn't diagnosed until college). The basic workaround is that I was usually allowed to read a book under my desk, provided I was caught up in class, at least half heartedly participating in the lesson, and not distracting my classmates. I believe this was almost always a private arrangement between myself and the teacher--I don't think my parents got too involved outside of the annual IEP conference (IEPs were for all students in my home state with "exceptional" needs, not just students with learning disabilities).
It might be worth reading up on the needs of gifted kids, or the kinds of texts assigned to teachers pursuing gifted education certification. That way you'll have some data and research behind you, and might be able to make it sound less like you're asking for special treatment just for the hell of it.
Thanks, Heebie.
Tried to tell the teacher on orientation night that previous teachers have needed some strategies and I was happy to help her with things that would work, but she brushed me away. Said she'd seen all the kinds of kids there were and she'd know what she was dealing with right away. Cool! Okay.
But then, after a single week, she called me in, wanting to know how to get him to sit down and do the kind of work that he doesn't want to do. I told her what works for me...sort of like what Heebie suggests..."I know you want to do X, Y, Z, so do your homework and then you can have at it." He's really pretty compliant, then, unless he spaced out during the instructions and isn't sure how to start. I also told her that talking to previous teachers would help, because it's a small school and they all had successful strategies. No dice. I ended up emailing last year's teacher for help, myself, with the new teacher copied on.
This has been escalating for several weeks. I'm not worried about his grades. Those will come. I'm worried that he's going to have a horrible year with a teacher who doesn't understand how to motivate him and seems to just think he's a cruelly unmedicated ADHD kid.
1: Yes, I would imagine that if I were to have Kid tested, he would probably show both GT and ADHD characteristics. I think I should probably read substantially more about both.
I don't know if this will help, but can you tell him that learning to rely on inner resources during boring times is a skill to cultivate in itself, like balancing on one foot? My parents were extremely anti tracking, and they told us if we were smart enough to be bored, we were smart enough to learn how to make entertain ourselves while not disturbing anyone. I got to be really really good at daydreaming while half paying attention, a skill that serves me well to this day.
This is exactly what made elementary school living hell for my kid. (And for me and Dr. Skull, back when we were in school.)
We tried everything, including very nearly daily conferences with her teachers and the "Head of School," which was what they were calling the lead teacher at the Montessori school back then. No dice.
We only even had her in this Montessori school which we absolutely could not afford b/c the Montessori Method was supposed to work better with kids like this -- yer little clever punks who will not put up with doing the work because the teacher says to do the work, never mind if you think the work makes sense.
And the first few years at the school, the Montessori school did work that way. Then this new Head took over, and turned it into a Christian Academy, where submission and Learning to Follow the Rules and Obey Authority were more important than anything.
Her advice, as well as the advice of the teachers she had hired, was that we had to punish our child in order to teach her now, while she was still young enough, that there were Just Some Times when you had to learn to do what you were told to do.
It didn't matter whether SHE thought it made sense to fill out a math worksheet every morning to prove she knew the times table -- it mattered whether the teacher had told her to do it.
Why, how would she ever hold down a job if she couldn't learn to follow stupid orders now?
tl;dr The solution *we* arrived at was pulling the kid from school and home-schooling her for 4 years, until she started high school.
Solution may not apply in all cases or in all areas of the country, but it was ideal for Fuck Smith, Arkansas.
6:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
#6: This is also good advice. Half the reason I'm a novelist today is how mind-numbingly bored I was all through public school in Louisiana. I started writing novels in school in 3rd grade and never quit.
7: Yes! This was me, too...a doodler-daydreamer in class. I'm totally fine with him spacing out and drawing comic books; he's been doing that since very early elementary. But when the teacher is emailing me about the Fs? He's also clowning in class to impress his friends. I see his grades. I know he's struggling with doing assignments. I guess I do sound like I'm hovering, but to be very clear here, she's the one contacting me about him.
I need to strike a balance between being just involved enough to be helpful and being a strong advocate for a kid who needs to know that Fs and this teacher's opinion are not a reflection of what he's capable of.
We literally begged the teachers (Montessori has team teachers) to give her extra/alternative assignments. Like, you know, instead of having her write this paragraph everyone else is writing to demonstrate they know what a topic sentence is, when she's been writing you college-level essays since the first week of class, maybe you could assign her to write an essay on a subject of her choice?
No dice. This is the assignment. She must do the assignment. Part of education is learning to OBEY.
And us, at home: "You could just write the paragraph, kid. Why not just write the paragraph?"
"It's boring and it's stupid."
"If you don't write it, you'll have to stay in at recess."
(Since Montessori didn't give grades, that was about all they could do to her.)
"Fine. I'll stay in at recess."
The teachers wanted us to punish her at home -- and by "punish" they meant "beat" -- but hell if we were going to go along with that shit.
Whoops, I meant 6.
But I was GT-tracked. The program was pretty weak. A single pull-out class and then years of accelerated math. Nothing else, really. The rest of the time in school, I doodled and daydreamed. The thing is, I eventually figured out how to do really well in those "boring" classes, and I am thinking Kid will, too, unless he shuts down completely.
Wow, delagar, the "no grades" thing makes Montessori sound ideal...except for the punishment part.
The dialogue in 13 is very familiar to me. A decade or more on, though, I wonder if we shouldn't have gone the medication route.
This is why I was so confused about Chris Arnade's idiotic front-row kids deal. Grade school was too easy for me, so teachers were fine with me sitting in the very back and reading computer magazines all day (this was the early 80s). It was the strugglers and troublemakers that were in the front.
Strongly endorse everything in 6, was what got me through.
seems to just think he's a cruelly unmedicated ADHD kid
I'm curious what the teacher did/said to make you think that this is her attitude.
"Commentariat: I bet 3/4 of you recognize this from childhood? what made boring classes tolerable?"
Sleep. Sweet, sweet desk-drooling sleep.
20: Shell shock.
The principle at Kid's (public) kindergarten called me into her office toward the end of his horrible year there and was actually describing medications. She stopped just short of telling me my kid needed to be medicated. I was horrified. Ended up taking Kid out of the school and putting him in a secular private school with tiny class sizes. He has done very well here for several years now. But when this new
teacher called me in, the first thing she really seemed to want to talk about was ADHD. I guess maybe I jumped to conclusions and made a judgement about what she must be thinking.
20: Shell shock.
The principle at Kid's (public) kindergarten called me into her office toward the end of his horrible year there and was actually describing medications. She stopped just short of telling me my kid needed to be medicated. I was horrified. Ended up taking Kid out of the school and putting him in a secular private school with tiny class sizes. He has done very well here for several years now. But when this new
teacher called me in, the first thing she really seemed to want to talk about was ADHD. I guess maybe I jumped to conclusions and made a judgement about what she must be thinking.
20: Shell shock.
The principle at Kid's (public) kindergarten called me into her office toward the end of his horrible year there and was actually describing medications. She stopped just short of telling me my kid needed to be medicated. I was horrified. Ended up taking Kid out of the school and putting him in a secular private school with tiny class sizes. He has done very well here for several years now. But when this new
teacher called me in, the first thing she really seemed to want to talk about was ADHD. I guess maybe I jumped to conclusions and made a judgement about what she must be thinking.
Don't know how I ended up triple-posting that.
Do you need me to come show you how to push the buttons again?
she seems to be silently thinking that I'm a bad parent for refusing to medicate him for ADHD.
This really speaks to me. I have been there with my own kid, and can still vividly recall a parent-teacher conference where his fourth-grade teacher basically diagnosed him with "attentional issues" because he sometimes sat still and daydreamed in class, but sometimes fidgeted too much at his desk. And btw, I did then take him to a couple of experts (a child psychiatrist and a pediatric neurologist), and they each declined to diagnose him with ADHD. But I can still recall that awful feeling that was half anger (she's wrong! and she shouldn't be labelling children like that...) and half guilt (but what if she's right?! and I'm a bad parent to disagree...), and 100 percent anxiety.
He's in high school (grade 11) now, and while the road is still a bit rocky, I can tell you that things got better in middle school, and much better (so far!) in high school. In high school, he's not bored the way he was in elementary school, and he has learned not to fidget.
My kid is in college, and thriving like she was born to be there, which, you know, she was.
Too bad we can't just send bored ten year olds off to be freshmen at the u.
8: Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum. Tomorrow: wag
What was the point of all those stupid multiplication table worksheets? "Hey kids, while you're here in the Purgatory of School, you can taste a little bit of the Hell that is Work."
There's a point to memorizing the multiplication table, certainly. The only problem with the worksheets is if they don't let you stop once you know them.
It just seemed ridiculously arbitrary to make memorizing products of multiplication a constant struggle to speed up. If you wanted to do one single thing that would improve virtually everything in this country, it would be to get people more comfortable with reading more and faster.
When Adam delve, and Eve span,
Where then was the arithmetician?
When Adam delve, and Eve span,
Where then was the arithmetician?
I just want to express appreciation for this.
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel:
To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion
Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind
And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious task:
Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread:
In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All,
And call it Demonstration: blind to all the simple rules of life.
-- William Blake, Jerusalem, Chapter III
(I still think kids need to learn the multiplication tables, though, possibly even by rote memorization).
Hooboy, this triggers, don't it? Dayyum. A bunch of responses, from most dour to most positive:
(1) [really dour] Y'know, most gifted children "top out" at some point. Having them learn at some point how to plod, is useful, b/c when they top out, they'll have to resort to plodding, not their "gift"
(2) [somewhat dour] Public school is really useful for gifted children: it teaches them how to socially cope with the room-temperature idiots they'll spend the rest of their lives around.
OK, enough of dour. Both of the above were true in my life. But SHIT, if I'd been able to spend those years actually learning neat stuff, I might have topped out a whole heckuva lot higher, ffs. What a *waste*. Now, some maybe useful thoughts?
(3) "Too bad we can't just send bored ten year olds off to be freshmen at the u." Why the F not? When I was a sophomore in my "honors math class", there was a 12-year-old girl who was completely able to do the work. So what if she was 12?
(4) Multiplication tables are important to learn by heart -- I can attest to that, having failed 4th grade math, then learned them by rote (under threat of the lash) and finding I had a talent for math&logic. BUT: once they're learned, the child should not be made to do it over-and-over-and-over. For such classes (and perhaps grammar is like that?) maybe negotiate with the principal that your child takes exams sufficient to prove mastery, and then is moved to upper-grade classes? And if necessary, maybe that means college? Or high school? I took classes at the community college in RPG (blecch) programming, and while it was drivel, at least it was new and interesting to learn, and much better than the sewage they were teaching down at the high school.
TL;DR: see if you can arrange for your child to "place out" of classes, and take classes at upper grades or college.
(5) A key issue here is that your child must demonstrate mastery, and you must negotiate with the school what that demonstration consists in. Your child has to understand and believe that this demonstration will help them get ahead, and be happier. But under no circumstances accept the school's bullshit about how there's no way to judge, or your child should just shut up and take it.
When my youngest sister was ... 5 (?) she was bored in school. My mom complained; the superintendent of the school district (who had been my vice-principal in HS) told her "you shouldn't have taught her how to read -- then she'd have something to do". Mom pulled my sisters out and sent them to a private school. They sure had a better school experience than I did -- since I didn't learn a goddam thing from my teachers from 6th grade on.
(6) Grammar: If your child is able to do college-level writing, you *for* *sure* should find a way to negotiate that with the school. Hell, just have a high school teacher give assignments that your child completes independently. Anything else is a waste.
(7) MIT Open Courseware. Or something similar. Maybe your child can follow some of those courses, and once they demonstrate ability there, you can use that to get your child out of these bullshit classes. Also, once your child is out of those classes (and this will require time-committment that maybe you don't have) you could/should spend that time sending your child to other things. E.g. ... ballet lessons? Skating? Music?
I guess there's a pattern to my suggestions: if you're OK with your child spending less time with their age group (and this -does- have downsides), then just figure out how s/he can "place out" (and get bumped a grade or 4) to a level where the work will be sufficiently challenging. Which, frankly, might be college. B/c shit, I remember Algebra I, and then half of Algebra II was just Algebra I *all* *over* *again*. Kill me. Kill me.
the superintendent of the school district (who had been my vice-principal in HS) told her "you shouldn't have taught her how to read -- then she'd have something to do".
Yeah, a teacher once told my mother much the same thing. She shouldn't have allowed me to learn how to read before first grade, and therefore it was my mum's fault if I was out of step with the prescribed curriculum.
I feel like I should add that, at age 52 looking back, I don't think I was "gifted". I was just pushed pretty hard by my parents (and responded well to that pressure, I guess), and even that was enough to make the gap between me and my peers (and, heck, my teachers) so gigantic that I didn't actually learn anything after 5th grade (sure, I learned: I taught myself Trig over christmas break, so I could help a girl I had a crush on (who was taking Trig, natch)). Enough to render those 6 years a total waste, educationally.
I cannot imagine what it must feel like for a truly gifted child, to be stuck in such a place. It must be hellish.
24: Hi Mom. Ultimately, I blame you for all of this, of course.
Oof, another thing to add: A -positive- experience with teachers. And a negative one, too.
In 2nd grade, Mrs. Duggan saw that I was getting thru the "SRA" readings pretty quickly. So she had me do all the 2nd grade, then all the 3rd grade, then a lot of the 4th grade reading assignments (and quizzes, etc). Was really enriching.
And then, in 3rd grade, Mrs Cushing .... had me redo the 3rd grade work. I started noticing that I'd read the stories before, and within a week realized that this was the *same* *work* I'd already done. Of course, Mrs. Cushing didn't give a damn.
Ah, well.
If the teacher doesn't understand what they're dealing with, or if they're too dolt-stupid (yes Virginia, there are stupid teachers also) they need to be pushed aside. If the principal doesn't understand this, the child needs to be given an exemption to spend part of the day elsewhere. Or maybe a sizable allocation of pot to make the day more bearable.
25. The number's above the comment, and I'm a damn noob at commenting here. Again. Mom. Button pushing: your best-taught lesson. Thinking before I push the buttons? Not so much.
26 (That's the comment, I mean, really): Yes, exactly! And it's good to hear that middle and high school are better. My sense is that if I can get him through these lower grades undamaged, that will be the case.
34: Yes, I think it would help a lot to get kid bumped a grade or several in science and social studies, where he's really the most bored, miles ahead, and is disruptive because of it. MIT courseware is probably the perfect thing to turn him on to, at least at home, but that's guaranteed to make the problem worse in terms of tuning the teacher out. (In writing, he's a long way from writing college-level essays and probably could use the 4th grade grammar education.)
A -positive- experience with teachers.
I've posted about this before, but I never liked math (sorry, heebie!), never thought I could crack the codes. Math just intimidated me, and made me feel hopelessly stupid. Whereas English lit., and anything to do with words not numbers, is where I felt most at home.
In grade 10, though, I had Father McPsycho for my math teacher, and my fear of the scary padre vastly exceeded my fear of math. I ended up with an "A" in the class, which grade I achieved through sheer terror: I lived in dread of being called out and publicly ridiculed by Father McPsycho. And yeah, he would call people out, and mock them for their stupidity in front of the entire class. He was mean and sarcastic, and pretty much psychologically twisted. He had a long-running feud with our school principal, Monsignor L., and he used to publicly mock that good-hearted monsignor, too.
A positive-negative experience, I guess. I spent much of that year in a state of abject terror, but I learned that I actually could do some math if compelled to do so.
Why did the Montessori School make every Upper El student fill in the (exact fucking same) times table worksheet every morning?
This was the question I asked as well.
"Students need to learn math facts," was the answer.
Well, sure. Okay.
What my kid learned was all sorts of interesting ways to memorize the patterns of the numbers on that worksheet -- that was the first couple of weeks ("Look, ma, the nines all go in a diagonal like this, and the fives like this, and...")
After the third week she refused to do the worksheets at all.
Each year they did a different math worksheet. Math fact worksheet. It was addition in grade two, and subtraction in grade three, and so on.
When I was a kid, we had similar worksheets, but they covered things like adjectives and analogies and while they were just as dull, and while I *also* refused to do them, at least they weren't the same fucking worksheet every single day.
Did I ever tell y'all how I almost flunked fifth grade? And then sixth grade also.
And yet here I am, a full professor, with my own office. It's got windows and everything.
By the way, I still don't know my math facts. Almost none of them.
And yet! When I got to college I made not just an A in College Algebra and Finite Math, I made *high* A's in both. Like 97 in one and a 96 in the other.
I submit to you that worksheets and memorization are no way to teach math.
Probably not a good example to follow.
42: DON'T BE SO SURE ABOUT THAT. ALL ASIAN PARENTS DISAGREE.
42. Mental arithmetic really is one of those things you will use after you leave school. It's quicker and easier than using a calculator. Learn your tables.
I had one of *those* teachers when I was 7 (3rd grade equivalent in our system). As far as I remember, I just clocked out that year and picked it all up the next year without missing a beat, but jebus she was a horrible excuse for a human being.
I was lucky enough to have good inner resources. I did a lot of quite sophisticated world building that year.
I read a lot in primary school (elementary school). It was fine. There were also generally worksheets or workbooks or maths or language things that I can could do, that were of varying ability level, or where I could just do a lot of them really fast, by way of not being bored. I didn't get much special attention -- which was fine, I wasn't ignored either -- but there were generally things I could do when I'd done the stuff everyone else was doing.
I _did_ have to do the stuff everyone else was doing, though, even if I found it easy or unchallenging. Which, imho, is fine. Being a special snowflake only goes so far.
xelA was getting quite badly behaved at nursery before he left (last week!) I think partly for boredom reasons. He's 4. It's not like he's showing signs of mind-boggling intellect, but he's clearly at the smarter end of the 4 year old bell-curve, and he was getting frustrated. He _cried_ this morning because he wasn't going to school today. Which I think is probably a sign that his first 2 days at school went OK.
I was bored in school until I got to college (which is when I had to learn how to actually work to learn things). I didn't have ADHD, so I was never disruptive, but boy was I bored. Good teachers let me read in class, or ignored the chess games I played with another bored kid who sat behind me.
41 & 42: I sort of learned my multiplication facts and later my trigonometry facts, but to this day if I have to use trigonometry I re-derive the identities in my head rather than having them at my fingertips.
What is enraging about the stories above is that medicating kids seems to be the first resort rather than the last of a bad teacher.
I do think, as per some other people's comments above, that being able to cope with being bored, and being able to cope with adults who are basically unsympathetic arseholes are core life skills. Also the ability to deal with unsympathetic arseholes without advertising your contempt for them.* As is the grinding-shit-out-because-you-have-to skill. Chet's comments above about topping out and being able to cope when you do are really important.
* one of the things -- not pointing fingers at anyone specifically, and definitely not anyone in this thread -- that always annoys me about 'G&T' type threads on Unfogged and elsewhere (and there have been many) is that people resent not being liked by, or popular with, people they had nothing but contempt for and thought themselves better than.
My experience was mostly different. Teachers would usually let me do what I wanted as far as quiet reading after they realized I had learned all the material. I think this is one advantage of being in a small school (and having had father who was previously on the board of that school?).
And like, what were they going to do, send mini-Moby to the next school down the road?
Yeah, my elementary school had milk-crates of paperbacks in the back of most of the classrooms, and while I think I wasn't explicitly allowed to be reading, my teachers generally weren't interested in busting me for it.
Well, he used the fact that his kids were enrolling and he didn't want risk favoritism as an excuse to not have to run for school board.
Personally, I actually can't remember a goddamn thing. I can remember some doodling and out-of-window staring, and a small amount of being an asshole, but essentially there's nothing.
My sixth grade science teacher had a system of cans with cards in them. You had to answer a certain number of cards in a certain number of cans for the quarter. This was all hand-made and decorated by her and then laminated. Must have taken her weeks over the years. Anyway, there was a shelf of reference books that we were to use to find the answers. I learned pretty early on that she decorated the cards with pictures cut from older copies of some of the same books we were using for reference. And certain books had certain styles of illustrations. So, it was pretty easy to find the book, flip to the picture, and find the exact answer. I would have been done in minutes except that I would just read from some other section of the book until I noticed class time was over.
Which made her, obviously, an excellent teacher, albeit inadvertently.
It just seemed ridiculously arbitrary to make memorizing products of multiplication a constant struggle to speed up.
It's not! If you can't internalize basic math facts, then when you come across it in the next level of difficulty, it jerks your concentration out of the context and you lose your place. In order to do System II math, there are certain fundamentals that need to be System I, if you wanna get all TF&S about it.
xelA was getting quite badly behaved at nursery before he left (last week!) I think partly for boredom reasons. He's 4. It's not like he's showing signs of mind-boggling intellect, but he's clearly at the smarter end of the 4 year old bell-curve, and he was getting frustrated.
Our kids had this experience, too.
I personally was not bored and reading in the back or doodling, like you punks. I spent school with my arm in the air waving wildly so I could answer, or mostly just calling out my answers without being called on. Also asking questions about whatever caught my fancy without raising my hand, and getting the class off onto tangents. I mostly enjoyed myself, but there were some teachers who truly despised me. I think I posted here a long time ago about my 5th grade teacher who went to shocking lengths to keep me from being in the 5th grade play, which I'd been really excited about being in.
56: This somehow reminds me of Newt explaining excitedly to me in middle school how he'd figured out how to get through bio class without doing any work at all. "If I look at the syllabus, I can figure out what each class is going to be about. Then I can watch some Khan Academy videos beforehand so I already know what the teacher is going to be talking about. In class, I can zone out and just do the homework because I already know the material, and by the time class is over, the homework is finished and I don't need to do anything."
I laughed at him and told him he was doing great at bio, but kind of terrible at not-doing-any-work.
College classes are a great option for high school aged kids. I took my first one when I was 13. It was still pretty boring, because I'd spent two weeks reading Calculus the Easy Way (highly recommend! it has cartoons and stories!) and didn't realize that the hard stuff I didn't understand in the end was from the very end of Calc 2 and so there was nothing for me to learn in Calc 1. But it was still a fun experience. And then I took some more advanced classes at a good college when I was 15 and that was a great experience where I actually learned a lot. Just being at college was exciting enough that it was fun even when the material was going too slowly. The only trick was that we couldn't afford it and the sneaky ways to do it for free ran out.
57: I'm pretty sure she was fully stocked with verts. She'd been teaching for 30 years by that point and was certainly sharp enough.
Sometimes I think smart 13 year olds really should just go to graduate school. When they finish their Ph.D. they'll then be at the right age socially to go to college. (This is obviously unworkable, but going to college at age 13 is also problematic for social reasons and for "you can't get a job when you're 17" reasons.)
61: Maybe the chair he sits in to watch the Khan videos is that much more comfortable?
What my kid learned was all sorts of interesting ways to memorize the patterns of the numbers on that worksheet -- that was the first couple of weeks ("Look, ma, the nines all go in a diagonal like this, and the fives like this, and...").
Now that's mathematical potential!
I wonder about 64. I wouldn't actually have been capable of doing postgrad at 13, but maybe undergrad; and may underachievement at college involved a failure of respect for lecturers. If I'd done it at 13 maybe I still would have been obedient enough to succeed.
49.2 is also something to think about. Helping the other kids understand what they missed in class can do wonders for the contempt/popularity thing, plus it fills time to reduce boredom, and it usually means the kid helping understands things better than before.
Hypothetically, by the time you get to high school, kids with older brothers will remember you helping them through algebra and older brothers can buy beer.
Won't get you a girlfriend though. Just beer.
I did take my kid to certain college classes when I was home-schooling her (the ones I was teaching, like Chaucer and History of the English Language), and she got a lot out of them. She placed out of all her university English classes, for instance, which = 9 credits of classes we don't have to pay for.
So that's nice.
45: You are probably right. Since I never learned basic math facts (I still don't know the times table, and I can't subtract 7 from 22 with a gun to my head, unless you let me use a calculator), I couldn't tell you.
Fun story, which I mighta told here already. When I was a little baby TA, giving my first exams and figuring grades for the first time, I worked really hard to keep everything on a scale of 100, because that was the only way I could figure the grades. When my supervising professor, my Greek professor, saw what I was doing, he very gently showed me how to divide for averages -- like if there were 135 possible points on the test, and the student got 75 points right, how to figure out what that averaged out to.
If I'd had a teacher in 5th grade who had taught me math, instead of just making me memorize "math facts" and fill out worksheets, that would have been so cool.
You have twenty fingers and toes, so you can work it out and then add 2.
49: This touches on two big problems.
1) I don't wanting Kid to become contemptuous toward his teacher for not having sympathy for his boredom...I agree wholeheartedly that he needs to learn to keep his mouth shut and his mind sufficiently on task when he finds tasks to be dull and repetitious.
2) The teacher's emails are driving me crazy...she seems to honestly think the work is "too difficult" for him. Apparently, she hasn't looked carefully at the (truly remarkable) test scores the school has on file from last year and from previous years or listened carefully to the things that come out of his mouth. I am hoping last year's teacher will point this out because otherwise, I think this year's teacher will just write me off as whining about my misunderstood snowflake.
Is there only one classroom per grade? Is there any chance of just letting Kid move to a different classroom?
Oh, hey, Pause -- remember I told you about that friend of Sally's who you'd met when she was a four-year old tackling her father in some math department meeting in your grad school university?
She took the first two classes in that U's Calc sequence as a high school student, and just entered the same U as a freshman. They are so hilariously uptight that they won't take their own credits for placement -- they required her to take a placement exam before enrolling in Calc 3.
74: Three classrooms starting in 4th...about 12 kids in each class. He actually switches to another teacher's class for math, and she has been very good so far. Good homework; started off easy with rounding, now they've moved into factors of numbers and are incorporating a little pre-Algebra. (Kid is fine on multiplication facts..."oh, you want to watch YouTube? How fast can you pound out a multiplication table for that treat?")
I ran into trouble asking if he could switch teachers when we had that awful year of kindergarten. I think the teacher he was with was insulted, although she griped about him constantly (god, where to begin with that story?) This school is so much smaller and we've had such a great experience so far that I hate to burn any bridges like that. This teacher has a very strong personality.
I have a littler kid with some needs on the other side of the academic spectrum and he is absolutely thriving in the small groups. I actually cried when he started bringing books to me on his own to listen to him read. Very proud of himself.
You feel old? I have to live with these people. Sally is a goddamn legal adult, and while Newt isn't, he's a freaking giant. And I gave birth to the two of them. I'm this close to checking myself into a nursing home.
75: Nice!
Being at a school now where students are constantly trying to game the system with transfer credits (e.g. taking your hard classes at the community college in the same town) I understand why a lot of private schools take such a hard line. But it is pretty hilarious in that case. Math depts. generally don't really care about prereqs really, so I bet she wouldn't actually have had trouble enrolling in Calc 3 without taking the placement exam (even without having relatives there). But freshman year advisors are often mathphobic and give terrible advice, so taking the placement exam is simpler.
Yeah, it's weird it seems to me that if a teacher and student don't get along for whatever reason the teacher would be thrilled to get him out of the classroom, but instead you seem to be right that people feel insulted in practice. I don't really understand why.
The teacher's emails are driving me crazy...she seems to honestly think the work is "too difficult" for him. Apparently, she hasn't looked carefully at the (truly remarkable) test scores the school has on file from last year and from previous years or listened carefully to the things that come out of his mouth.
I have no idea whether this is going to do any good, but have you thought about maybe meeting with her and trying to get her on board with the idea that your kid is a discipline problem, as opposed to an academic problem, and the two of you need to brainstorm a way to solve the discipline problem?
Because it sounds like he kind of is. Bored with the work is a thing that happens, but being able to slide by regardless without pissing off the authority figures too much is an important skill that it sounds as if he doesn't have. And it'll be a lot easier to get her on board with recognizing what's going on (that he's capable of doing the work, he's just irritated enough by it that he's being resistant), if the angle you're coming at her from is less "My special snowflake can't be required to do work that bores him" and more "My bright kid acts out when he's bored, can you help me figure out ways to get him to behave himself appropriately?"
If you're agreeing your kid is misbehaving, you're not calling her the problem, and she might be more cooperative in figuring out some positive reinforcement that'll get him back on track (like, get your work done and you can read whatever you want when you're done, or something like that.)
Also, the classroom placement decisions at this school are as big a mystery to me as they were in public. I tried requesting a teacher when we first got in to the school (Kid in 1st grade) and was smoothly ignored, only to discover that the teacher Kid was placed with was absolutely perfect for him. I stopped questioning. But now, yeah, I'm starting to question again.
79: I can neither confirm nor deny that that sort of thing may have taken place.
I'm only the second best mathematician from my hall freshman year. The better one wanted to start directly in a graduate class, but our advisor (who was a former George W. Bush speechwriter) wanted him to take Calc 3. The student eventually won that fight.
81: Yes! He is absolutely a discipline problem and it needs to solved; the improvement he has made in the past couple of years has been vast, but there's a long way to go. He's can be a talker when silence is required, a negotiator when things aren't up for negotiation, and a sneak when he thinks he can get away with it. My hair is going gray fast.
When this teacher called me in for that first meeting, I acknowledged that right away. I told her I will do and support whatever she needs me to do to support him in a way that is complementary to whatever her teaching style is. This has always worked for me in the past. "I am absolutely on board with whatever you, the teacher who spends your day with him, feel is the right way to proceed." I reward him when it's going well, I remove privileges in a way that gets his attention when he is acting out...he is capable of controlling himself. The adults just needs to present a solid front and the consequences have to be consistent between home and school.
It really was a weird meeting, because she seemed to have the "I've seen it all, but I've never seen anything like this and am at a loss, so how are you dealing with his ADHD?" kind of attitude.
Aw, geez. If you're coming at her from that angle, and she's not working with you, she's the problem.
Oy. This really may be terrible advice. But what I did in a few similar situations is explain the concept of conscious hypocrisy to the kids. "Yes, she's unreasonable and this is all kind of idiotic. On the other hand, she can make your life difficult. If you keep your head down and do the work, it'll make her happy, and there's a better chance that she'll let you do something amusing in the extra time. Otherwise, learn to daydream. This too shall pass."
Explicitly supporting the kid's perception that something is, on some level, bullshit, may make it easier for him to cope with the fact that he has to suffer through it anyway. I mean, that worked okay on my kids, but we're all weirdos, so I have no idea if it's a good idea generally.
Wow, that was some garbled grammar, wasn't it. Should really proofread these before pushing buttons.
Oh, part of the hypocrisy talk was to point out that staying at least somewhat checked in was important, because an annoying thing that happens when you zone out of a class because you know everything already is that you miss the transition to when they're teaching stuff you don't know, and that happens a lot. There's nothing worse than ignoring the work because it's beneath you, and then getting brought up short when you realize you genuinely don't know what's going on a few weeks later.
86: Wow, LB, that's something to think about. He responds so well to being spoken to and treated like an adult...not sure that I can trust him yet not to go and say something about conscious hypocrisy to her.
Kindergarten story: Kid had a friend who had similar issues. I didn't realize this until I had Kid's friend over to the house. Holy shit, all I could do was count the minutes until Friend's mom came back.
I told Kid, "no, you can't have Friend over anymore until you guys can be better listeners."
Friend's mom called: "Did you tell Kid that he wasn't allowed to play with Friend anymore?"
I don't remember doodling, reading extra, or misbehaving, at least not in a significantly disruptive way that led to school discipline. As mentioned long ago in some grade-skipping thread, I went to a weird private school that combined two grades and a quirk in the way they distributed classes meant that I was always in a class with the next grade up. Most work was organized according to small groups - not group work, just different assignments for each group - and I eventually worked my way up to doing almost all of the work of the grade above until I got skipped into 4th grade since I was essentially already in it. Somehow there was a shift again in the class combinations and my fifth grade also had sixth graders, but I never caught them before I changed schools.
I went to public school from 6th grade on and I guess I got by through taking whatever eagerness I once had to push ahead and learn on my own and crushing it. I more or less settled on trying to do as little as I could to get into the same range that was the highest I could get if I'd really tried. An A is an A even if it's not the highest A, so what's the point, classes are just going to do what they're going to do.
I did "accelerate" a bit with math, but that had to be done in the summer. I took a college math class my last year of high school and it was different than high school calculus in that homework wasn't required and lectures were three days a week and the professor, if not the material, was less engaging than my previous high school teachers. I didn't do that great on a midtterm, but that was probably related to not doing the homework and skipping some of the lectures and running out of time while working out a proof I'd decided not to memorize the night before. It was pretty similar to the calculus test I'd bombed in high school for similar reasons.
I also took a college English class and a history class as a high school student and they were marginally better, especially the history class. In retrospect, I should have realized I was going to fucking hate college if I continued to live at home because that's exactly what happened. And then I went on to hate a couple of graduate schools. I don't make great life choices, is what I'm saying, and I learned that from school.
88: Yes, I think the message that "She is working on this curriculum for a very good reason and you will do yourself a favor to cope with it and make a sustained effort," is worth repeating to him.
I mean, the wheat observation? That's important. Not so much about wheat itself, but learning to notice physical characteristics and phenomena (professional scientist, here) is what scientists do.
I don't know how to sell any kid or adult on "you need to suffer so your future self can benefit." There must be a way to be reasonably frank about the suffering (well, and about the costs to one's future self: you can be misera-bored for a few years of playing along now or bored FOR YOUR WHOLE LIFE as a thwarted underachiever). The work sucks, but keep trying to do it as fast as you possibly can? Keep a log of how much time you spend on dumb homework and try to beat your best time? Rewards proportional to all the time you've wasted making yourself miserable? Something like that.
A somewhat mortifying story from my own childhood: the mind game I relied on during tedious soccer games was imagining that it was a military operation to rescue innocent people from their evil captors (context generally WWII), and I had to draw on all my focus and stamina for as long as possible. It seemed just distantly possible, to my young mind, that I would end up in the middle of a real-life catastrophe, at which point it would be a very good thing that I had spent so many years doggedly playing midfield and pushing the limits of physical and mental fatigue. If your kid is of a pragmatic cast of mind and likes playing/winning competitive games, maybe the "win at the game of life" speech is enough on its own. In general, if it were my kid, I would try to appeal to a goal that they find compelling, even a pure-fantasy goal. Not "go to college." Suffering through a bad year of school can seem like a pretty big sacrifice, and the offset has to be substantial.
I can't really offer any advice apart from that. It's too early for my own parenting to be tested much. As a kid I was much more of a basket case than most of you, and there are really zero useful lessons. Sharks are great, though.
I actually kinda liked the multiplication tables, because you could try to beat your best time if nothing else, and also I don't think they were daily(?, maybe they were) and were something you could stop doing once you'd reached some benchmark that I don't remember. We also did some timed addition test, which took longer because we had to carry numbers uphill in the snow between columns, but I don't remember a lot of worksheets on that one.
The thing with that kind of rote work, for me, anyway, is if it takes literally a few minutes I'd just do it. Schoolwork that came home was the bigger complain and procrastinate struggle for me.
86.2 - My parents (both lawyers) had very similar pro-hypocrisy talks with me and my sister at various points in school.* This particular approach may be a lawyer thing. IME the conscious hypocrisy method pretty much works in terms of getting through school OK, since learning the rules of the system in order to game them to your needs is in fact a higher honesty in education (and life) that permits more education -- the tribute that virtue pays to vice to stay virtuous, or something.
*not due to extreme giftedness, more just "here's how to make life under the rules tolerable by figuring them out."
For instance, I don't remember learning times tables at all, though certainly I did it.
Newt has mentioned to me that when I try to explictly explain how and why to treat people decently and productively, I sound like a sociopath. I'l take 'it's a lawyer thing' as slightly less depressing.
Also, impressionistically I can do mental arithmetic considerably faster than almost all my students, literally all of whom have Asian parents.
Despite all the above, I'm probably going to head over to a university library this weekend, in my free time. Go figure.
Teaching it helps a lot, I think. My mental arithmetic was never fantastic when I was in school, but got blazingly fast and accurate when I was standing up in front of a classroom making up problems on the fly. That lasted a couple of years after I came home, but it's long since faded back to not great.
Asian kids are only better than their peers at arithmetic in the US because we've abandoned phonics for identity politics.
I don't teach arithmetic. I essentially haven't done any math since high school. These kids are doing math worksheets every day. Lots of them.
86.2 But what I did in a few similar situations is explain the concept of conscious hypocrisy to the kids. "Yes, she's unreasonable and this is all kind of idiotic. On the other hand, she can make your life difficult. If you keep your head down and do the work, it'll make her happy, and there's a better chance that she'll let you do something amusing in the extra time. Otherwise, learn to daydream. This too shall pass."
Funny, my dad was saying something like that to me about my current job not long ago.
It also works for kidney stones. Stay hydrated kids.
"It seemed just distantly possible, to my young mind, that I would end up in the middle of a real-life catastrophe, at which point it would be a very good thing that I had spent so many years doggedly playing midfield and pushing the limits of physical and mental fatigue."
Heh. I literally tried this with my kid -- who, as you know, is Jewish. "How will you handle the Nazis when they come for you if you can't even do this?" I would demand.
I would say it on hikes, too (she was something of a baby on hikes, wanting to rest ALL THE TIME). "How are you going to run away from the Nazis if you can't even climb a hill?"
My kid always answered the same way: "I won't," she would say blithely, although occasionally she would vary that with a patient, "Mom, the Nazis aren't coming here. This is America."
Joke's on her, I guess.
Agree with 86.2 and 94.part of education really is learning to obey the rules and respect authority. And part is about how to not obey the rules and get away with it without pissing authority off. And another part is when it's okay to say "Screw it" and break the rules openly and piss authority off to no end.
One of my kids, very bright with as they say "executive function" shortcomings, managed to get himself expelled from high school. Also two years probation. Was not a great time and was complicated by other issues (your guess is correct), but after some struggle he pretty much figured out the distinction among the three things I mentioned above and when to go down which path.
One of the things that I think helped was when he and two friends got busted while sitting just off the road in a car in a woodsy location smoking weed. I asked him why they didn't just put up a neon sign "Hey bust us" and suggested that next time they get out of the car and step 20 yards into the woods so that they could throw the pipe away when John Law showed up. Also reminded him that maybe 50 million people in USA smoke weed and virtually all of them manage to do it without getting arrested, so would he please reconsider his approach.
I can't here executive function without getting this song stuck in my head.
your guess is correct
You're Shia LaBeouf's dad?
105.3: Was my dad's policy on my drinking beer.
He probably wouldn't have been so relaxed about pot, but who know? It never came up. But he did defense the first marijuana possession case in the county. He even won by arguing the search was illegal.
Anyway, at the time it didn't strike me as odd, but really nobody around me smoked pot. We knew people who had it, but they were all twenty years older.
delagar: "If I'd had a teacher in 5th grade who had taught me math, instead of just making me memorize "math facts" and fill out worksheets, that would have been so cool."
In 5th grade, we didn't memorize facts. B/c we were supposed to have -done- with memorizing them (thru 15x15) by the end of 4th grade. As I said, I failed 4th grade math b/c I couldn't do that. I'd suggest that your school suffered from the soft bigotry of low expectations.
As heebie pointed out, there's a certain amount of basic math knowledge you *must* have at your fingertips, in order to do more-complex stuff *at* *all*.
But this isn't limited to math. There's a reason why the SAT stresses Latin and Greek cognates -- if you don't have a working vocabulary of such cognates, you're going to find it mighty difficult to comprehend adult-level writing, and might end up having the verbal skills of a common Trump *grin*. Now, a STEM guy like me could claim that that's rubbish -- I can just GOOGLE for any word I don't understand! And I'm sure that you, a college-level English prof, would smack me down if I were in your class, and for good reason.
I recently had a shocking experience in a Peet's coffee. My tab was $2.85. I gave the (h.s. age) kid $10, but she rang up $5 (surely by accident). I noted that I'd given her $10, and at this point, the register read "change $2.15". [yes, already an electronic register.] She couldn't figure out what change to give me. She calls a(nother h.s. kid) colleague; the two of them can't figure out what change to give me. They get out a calculator, and figure out it's $7.15. I stood there, dumbfounded. I mean, this isn't rocket surgery. It's "oh, another fiver". I'm sure there's an English-prof version of this. Just to be clear, I've -never- had this problem in a bodega. It seems that the basic arithmetic skills required to make change, are only available to poor immigrants, feh.
I'm sure you're right, Chet. Louisiana schools suck, as I often tell my students.
Memorizing Latin and Greek cognates is also pretty useless, I will add, for anyone who wants to understand the language. Learning Greek and Latin (about five years of Latin and two or three years of Greek, although I took five years of Greek as well) is hella better.
112: the charitable reason they couldn't figure it out is that they felt flustered and self-conscious. A lot of people have a ridiculously low threshold for when math becomes intimidating and they get emotionally flooded. In a quiet room by themselves, they could most likely think it through.
I recently has a cashier at a 7-11 fail to ring up the proper change in a way that suggests I should never use cash there again. Probably an innocent mistake, but something about it made the apology sound a little like "I didn't think you'd notice."
We had a Peet's coffee, but it turned out we weren't fancy enough to appreciate it so they took it away.
92
Um...I maybe pretended I was part of the resistance for much of elementary school. That or some Three Musketeers-era spy bullshit. Every hike I went on was me doing some top secret mission to pass on secret information or a reconnaissance mission or something. Actually, everything I did I just pretended was doing something else. Unloading the dishwasher? Every glass I put away saved someone's life, and I only had X amount of time to complete the task. It also helped me get through chores quickly.
My husband had horrible experiences in school as the too-smart-for-his-own-good kid with authority issues, and it got worse in high school as poor grades kept him out of the advanced classes. He ended up failing out of high school. On the one hand, I met him in my graduate program, so many paths blah blah. On the other hand... he does have significant problems that are masked by his intelligence and specialized training and that relate to not being able to push through "topping out," or grunt work generally. He's found learning a foreign language utterly miserable, and doesn't really have the stamina for the amount of rote learning and drudge work that is necessary to get proficient.* He has a horrible time writing grants, which are difficult, boring, painful, and generally come with weird arbitrary rules, implicit and explicit. When I was in the field and not supervising him, he got in a weird fight with the NSF about conforming to their extremely rigid formal conventions, and somehow thought I would be sympathetic. He honestly probably only got the grant he did because I fought with him over including the "what they want to hear" type stuff, which he didn't want to include on principle.**
Any job, even a fun rewarding one that lets you do what you want a lot of the time, is also going to require boring and irritating stuff, often as a prerequisite.
*I don't think he sucks at languages, but he's clearly not obviously gifted, and he grew up bilingual and only ever studied languages closely related to his first language, so he had a huge natural advantage over his English-speaking peers.
**(Left to his own devices, his grant applications would go like, "My plan is to research X, however I make no promises as to my success, because the future is unknowable and data collection is challenging and there is a large chance that this project as conceived is unworkable.")
123
Have you picked a fight with the NSF?
We can team up for the nubilty/MIL grant application.
My son is upset at Spaniards because 'diez' is ten but in 16 through 19, you need to do 'dieci....' If somebody could go slap one, he's appreciate it.
's s/b 'd.
It's hard to type through ranting.
If he's like this at school, I need to get all of his teachers a bottle of whisky.
Is this a thing that varies from one Spanish-speaking country to another, or have I just forgotten? I could have sworn I was taught "diez y seis", "diez y siete," and so on rather than "dieciséis", "diecisiete", etc. Looks like Google turns up examples of both.
The nice thing about being an adult is I don't have to care.
Thanks to the time stamps, I know that he's been ranting for over nine minutes continuously.
129: Have you offered for his consideration the difference between 'ten' and 'teen'?
I'm not even going to tell him that exists until he's had a good night of sleep.
Somewhat related, I can say that for many kids with ADHD, getting medication is AWESOME. I've seen dramatic changes back to the kid they used to be, and while my own med (Dexedrine) isn't perfect, I am so much happier and complete executive function type tasks once I've taken it.
I convinced a friend to let her preteen daughter seek testing and try drugs. In the first week, kid was thrilled how much easier it made it for her to calm herself down and act a little more thoughtfully.
I felt the same way about Copenhagen.
Danes get all fussy when you put them in blister packs.
139: I know that medication can be very helpful, and I did have several long talks with Kid's pediatrician during kindergarten, which I realize isn't the same as actually having him evaluated, but it reinforced my fear that since ADHD seems to be lifelong, if he ended up taking a med, he was going to need it to function for the rest of his life and he was just so very young for that. Please know that I am NOT making a judgement about parents who do choose to go that route because their situations are different from mine and they do it in the best interests of the kids they love.
140. The city, the horse, or the interpretation?
119: The desk clerk in this hotel is from Galicia, but she's very sweet, and in any case I don't think it's fair to blame a Galician for the sins of Castellano.
119: The desk clerk in this hotel is from Galicia, but she's very sweet, and in any case I don't think it's fair to blame a Galician for the sins of Castellano.
Possibly I could blame her for the sins of a hypersensitive post button.
I've been thinking again recently about whether I should look into ADD medication. My dad has found it very helpful. I don't enjoy the affects of caffeine or nicotine, so I've been apprehensive about trying uppers. Also one of collaborators said that her experience was that it helped her concentrate, but that it didn't help her concentrate on the right things but instead just procrastinate in hyper-focused ways and that she suspected I'd be similar. My image is that I'd finally be able to concentrate enough on 2048 to get that damned 16384 tile, but wouldn't write any more than I do now. But I'm experimenting this year with coffee right before teaching, and it's going well. So maybe properly timed speed would help too. Like what if I only took it once I'd started writing?
149: My experience with Adderall is that it does well at solving the problem of concentration but definitely does not help the problem of getting you to do something you fundamentally don't want to do. It might be helpful in conjunction with other techniques (like the one you mentioned) to deal with motivation. IMO, there is so little cost to trying medication (it works very quickly and can be discontinued just as fast; you can choose what days and times make sense to be medicated and return to your baseline whenever you want) that there's no reason not to. I am really inconsistent about taking mine (for many of the same reasons I need to take it in the first place), but whenever I do take it after a break I remember how helpful it is.
I struggle with this a bit. I left school at 15, boredom was only part of the reason.
Years later when I decided to go to university I needed high school prerequisites I realized you could do all the material by correspondence in less than 6 months. At that point I kind of wished I had never been in the public system, thinking I could have been finished completely before the age when things went sideways.
Years after that I realized the social stuff I had learned in elementary school would have been really, really hard to reproduce.
I don't know where that lands. If I had grown up UMC I probably would have had a very different path. As it was I went a path I wouldn't recommend to anyone, but its mine.
I'm really torn though, betwe n recommending you get out of that system as quick as you can, and you stay in and learn to deal with it. Both seem to have valuable life lessons, they are just different ones,
Sorry, soup biscuit, but I just can't leave a thread hanging like that. I would never rest again.
You don't even have the excuse of an impending execution.
Exactly. I have no guarantee my mind will be put to rest.
Goodness knows that I have no idea how to parent a kid like this (but this will be us most likely in a few years -- both kids are precocious and #2 seems not to believe in the existence of boundaries of any kind), but I was one, and I think the 'conscious hypocrisy' line worked well for me as an elementary schooler. 'This is how you play the game' worked for me.
That said, it is not a bad skill to learn how to deal with situations that aren't immediately interesting or useful. A lot of life is like that. I'm *not* saying 'suck it up', but being able to entertain oneself is a useful skill.
Perhaps relevant: my dad's response to the kindergarten teacher who recommended that I be held back (I didn't like to sit still) was to point out that I was bored out of my goddamned mind, which seemed to have an impact at St. Bernard's. My third- and fourth-grade teachers were great, and basically structured class so there was a decent amount of free time -- we were supposed to be working on letter books or spelling or whatever, but those of us who could already read or had aced the spelling pre-test were allowed to sit on the sofas in the back and read or play Oregon Trail on the computers.
So maybe the strategy with the teacher is to meet her halfway? Kid can't distract other kids (that's not fair to them), so you'll work on that with him, but if he can do the worksheets, she has to let him quietly read or program or whatever he likes?
Mostly on-topic, copy/pasting from an email to lourdes:
I just looked closely at the first-grade teachers' note to parents about homework.
"Please review your child's homework with them. Homework will ONLY be checked for being complete, neat, and turned in on time. Reading logs will be checked and recorded weekly."
So... if we want [our kid]'s mistakes corrected so she learns anything from doing the homework, we have to do it ourselves. The fact that this is straightforward outsourcing is clearer to me now. Well, okay, no illusions! (But... is this the compromise between the "homework" and "no homework" factions? It's inherently useless, so we'll eliminate the only pedagogically useful part of it, which is feedback, because that's too time-consuming; but we will literally assign it as busy work?)
Help me out here: 1) there is a word for dumping productive labor onto the consumer, a la IKEA furniture construction, isn't there? I can't remember if it ends in "-sourcing" or not. 2) While your brilliance and accomplishments speak for themselves, anonymized commentariat, I am a little taken aback at all the defenses here of busy work for its own sake. I mean, sure, you sometimes need to grind through things, but surely there is an upper bound to how much time should be spent in that way, as opposed to learning and creating?
3) Should I review my daughter's homework with her? I feel I probably should.
3) on a case by case basis? I wouldn't assume that it's always going to be useful, but if you look at it and realize that she's, e.g., not getting how to add two-digit numbers, it makes sense straightening her out. (But I agree that this should be happening in school, and it's perpetuating inequality assuming that parents are responsible for academic instruction.)
1) Dunno.
2) Oy. I may have sounded like I was defending busywork. I'm not -- in an ideal world every child would only be doing well-tailored, pedaogically productive work, and it sounds like the school in the OP isn't getting anywhere near that. What I was advocating was two things: First, picking your battles. Becoming a discipline problem in the face of boring schoolwork doesn't get the kid better schoolwork, usually. It gets the kid identified as a problem, and kept away from the opportunity to do more interesting stuff. If there's a likely-looking route to a more productive school experience, the kid should be taking it, but just resisting the dumb shit is probably going to be counterproductive.
And second, getting what value there is out of the experience. Even a very bright kid probably doesn't literally know everything that's being taught in elementary school. The only way to spot and absorb the genuinely useful stuff is to stay at least somewhat engaged in the whole mess.
157.1: Externality? I don't usually hear it used in quite such an intentional way, but otherwise it sounds right. The book _Shadow Work_ uses that title for a similar kind of thing (self-service gas and grocery checkout, say).
If I have learned one thing it's that if you raise children to expect an answer to "why I am doing this?" before doing this, you'll never get any help setting the fucking table without a fight.
Possibly that would have happened anyway, but still I find myself unreasonably disconcerted with the fork being on the wrong side.
Have you mentioned the alphabetical order trick? Reading from left to right, it's fork-knife-spoon.
It was not a problem about knowing the right order.
Oh, if you figure out how to overcome recalcitrance, let me know. For that, I've got nothing.
158: Not so much defending busy work, as the idea that not everything needs to be maximally interesting in order to be valuable, and it's easy to confuse the two when you're a kid. And none of the work in the OP sounds like busy work, just things that the kid either has already figured out or doesn't like. (I'm not sure how old the kid is here, but I'm guessing around 11?) "How to edit something for grammar and punctuation" -- something that is good to know! Not everyone knows this. "Group poster about communities" -- probably dull and frustrating, but not exactly busy work, and I hated group work with a passion. "Observations about wheat" -- I'd be bored to tears, but again, this doesn't sound like a busy work assignment (if it were observations about marshmallow cannons the kid would probably be all over it.)
In my day, we had large nuns who could (I saw it) pick us up with one hand and who are now on Facebook being one of our few past teachers who just aren't having anything to do with Trump.
Nia's teacher has said she's not giving homework to anyone this year because "literally no one brings it back ever, so what's the point?" but she's got some apps we can use at home too and is going to give Nia some skill-building worksheets she can do at the afterschool program while other kids are doing homework, which should also help as part of getting her caught up to where she needs to be after a super rough year last year. This doesn't have any particular connection to the question other than that I feel like I'm at the other end of a telescope from classes with 12 kids where medication is something a parent can easily opt out of. (I'm going to try to get her antidepressant titrated down when we go to her appointment tomorrow since I don't believe it does a darn thing, but we'll see.)
I don't accept your apology Mossy. That was a terrible thing I did.
LK, you're making me relive 7 years of absolute hell, our lives ruined by school systems' insistence on busywork. It was maddening. And did real damage. I will never forgive them for it.
(I mentioned at the time -- 2010 or 2011 -- the call from a teacher to tell me that the kiddo was failing her class despite getting an A on every test for failure to turn in busywork. I was polite and cooperative, but couldn't help observing that this didn't actually sound like failure. At some different point in the conversation, she stressed how important it is that they grade homework, because some kids aren't any good at taking tests, and this gives them a chance at a decent grade.)
IME, fighting these people is useless.
On the practical side, I think that most of the important learning, even (especially?) in elementary school is outside the class room. You certainly expect to teach your kid history, government, love of reading and math, grammar, scientific method, as well as all the decent values. Reviewing homework is an awful chore, but puts you in a more explicit role not only with respect to the busywork, but also as teacher of first and last resort of the important shit that lies behind, above, beyond the bare essentials the state is trying to get across.
Talk's pretty cheap from a guy whose kids are done with school.
Regarding busywork, I recently had to stifle my pride at my son's grades. In a school where 90% will get you an A, he got six As and one B in a recent quarter without scoring as high as 91% in any of his classes. No wasted effort!
The Missus does not approve of that attitude. She was upset with him for not doing better in the classes where he got As.
Oh, good. I had things to say but kind of missed most of the conversation. I think that, in retrospect, at least some of the busy work was probably helpful. I can do quick mental math and make estimates faster than most folks I know, and it's legitimately helpful. So is reading boring stuff to get the useful/relevant info out as quickly as possible. My current job has a lot of bureaucracy that folks find daunting, but I generally do OK with it. Eh, another form? OK. Another signoff? Fine. I did what most people here seemed to do: finish my stuff and then read quietly. I had a system in high school for doing homework in class so I rarely had it to take home (eg finish math in French class, French in history, etc.). I also was a teaching assistant (forget what they were called) and spent time grading papers for the (grateful) teacher. I was also pretty eager and probably a smartypants and didn't have many friends until I made it into tracked classes in middle and high school.
But really, my advice for folks with pain in the ass children is to maybe visit class once or twice if you can. Slip in the back without telling your kid. Then, be honest - is your kid being a serious nuisance? Where are things going off the rails? Could your kid read quietly without getting distracted in that classroom? Is the teacher a legit asshole? (If so, get kid switched ASAP.) I like the idea of skipping a grade or switching up for more challenging work since that should be easy for everybody, but I think if you haven't actually watched what's going on, it would be worth the time.
Most adults I know with borderline ADD or ADHD don't medicate and seem to have found careers that play well with their quirks, but for folks with more severe problems, medication has been an amazing wonderful breakthrough that makes them regret they didn't try it sooner. It makes a huge, obvious difference from an outsider's perspective. So, if your kid is old enough to have an opinion, maybe ask him or her for input? Hard to know what it feels like in someone else's head.
167: I admire your ability to see your kids' different personalities and abilities and needs and get then what they need. It must be a higher degree of difficulty raising kids who are having such a different (in some ways) experience of childhood than you did.
172: Thanks. It's probably easier in some ways because at least the oldest and youngest have so little in common with me and for all of them I'm not going to be coming with the same expectations of similarity I might have for a biological child I'd raised since birth. Mara is both like me in temperament and similar enough to have undone my argument that there was no point passing on my genes, to the point that her mom and I even had our gall bladders out at the same unusually early age among many other medical similarities. They're wonderful children with their own strengths that are different from (and typically better than) mine and that gives me the push I need to stand up for them and behind them to the best of my abilities.
158: on my phone now but yes, the perpetuating inequality thing worries me. Which implies that I think there is a snowball's chance in hell that inequality won't get perpetuated, which is cute, but I have the life I have and it probably isn't polite or remotely useful to offer a grading and reviewing clinic for all the first graders after hours. I'm also seeing this in a vacuum, after not even a month of school and very little contact with the teacher. But the fact that they *are* reviewing the homework explicitly for cosmetic rather than substantial qualities...
More later, esp to CC's comment which I'd like to do justice.
Oddly, I have very little memory of being bored in school as such. I definitely wanted to be doing other things much of the time, but I did not experience this as understimulated superior intelligence at all. I just thought I was a hopeless misfit, which is a neatly self-fulfilling prophecy. I was also, uh... "ruled by emotions" is an understatement.
You guys are awesome! I'm feeling so much better....
Here's an update for you all after yesterday: Kid's teacher from last year came through. Kid now has a checklist for all the things that he needs to have done in class before he can read material of his own choosing, AND she told the new teacher that the absolute best way to get Kid on board with ANYTHING is to 1) find ways to turn him into a leader/helper ("Get your work done, Kid, so I can send you to [take this stack of papers to the office for me]/[go make some copies]/[take these books to the library]...") and/or 2) notice and mention whenever he is on task.
Kid loves to feel like he is trusted to do "grown-up" tasks and busts his ass to do a good job, so there's really no worry about him being mischievous when he's off on an errand. I feel silly for not thinking of it because this trick started two teachers ago.
I have to confess, my contribution was less positive. I just told him that (since my mom (Helicoptor mom's helicoptor mom) pays for a chunk of his tuition, we usually tell my folks his grades, even though I know that grades aren't the end-all), HE is going to be the one who tells them his grades at the end of the quarters from now on. That really has his attention; he doesn't want to have to tell to his "Nana" he's making Fs.
So, there are pieces of a plan in place and he seems to be on board. Last night, he brought home a bunch of his work and wanted me to check it all, even though I was inclined to put it off until this morning.
It's early to tell, but I'll keep you posted.
AND she told the new teacher that the absolute best way to get Kid on board with ANYTHING is to 1) find ways to turn him into a leader/helper ("Get your work done, Kid, so I can send you to [take this stack of papers to the office for me]/[go make some copies]/[take these books to the library]...") and/or 2) notice and mention whenever he is on task.
Oh, huh. You know, I wonder if the current teacher has a gender thing going on. (I mean, of course she does, we all do. But I wonder if part of the current problem is a gender thing.)
I've got a girl and a boy, and at home they are a lot alike. Very bright, very verbal, very opinionated about doing things their own way, but very willing to be helpful and active doing things for people they respect. Every teacher Sally ever had turned her immediately into an informal teachers' aide/pet, which was great for her. The same personality on a boy, though -- teachers identified Newt as smart, but were much less likely to recruit him as an assistant. He got kind of shunted off to the back of the room or shushed rather than having all that energy exploited.
I hate the 'schools are prejudiced against boys' narrative, and Newt certainly wasn't that badly treated. But I do think there's a gendered narrative that boys are innately unable to function in a classroom, so there are a lot of teachers who maybe blind themselves to how to make them fit in harmoniously.
...and Kid has certainly not helped that stereotype by falling back on an old, old habit of behaving like he is innately unable to function in a classroom!
The teacher who started sending him on "helpful trips" was one who had been teaching for many decades. Then, his third grade teacher was in the class right next door, so she was more familiar with the situation from the beginning of her year and knew that the Wise, Experienced Teacher-Next-Door could trust Kid to be on his best behavior.
It's not the first conclusion that a teacher might jump to for a boy OR a girl..."Oh, this kid is off-task and kind of a headache, so why don't I just trust him to go skipping off down the hall by himself."
Oh, yeah, it all depends on the specifics of the kid. I just think of it because I had such a well-matched pair, who got treated so differently.
That both 1 and 2 are not just the ways classrooms are run strikes me as sad, but I know that's typical. It's hard to remember to stay on top of it as the adult, but that's what works best for almost all kids.
I agree, Thorn. Buy-in on the part of the kid goes a long, long way.
As someone who taught older kids in between-careers, I know that there's so much to be said for small class sizes. I briefly taught chemistry classes and labs to class sizes of 30+ in public school. If I ever needed to send someone off on an errand, it was likely to be the quietest, most compliant person in the room (Sigh. Usually a girl, I suppose. Self-reflection is wickedly uncomfortable.)
And it's so hard to have time to give each kid the positive feedback that they need, especially when there are others who are testing your ability to keep calm and not give in to the temptation to stash some whiskey or something in your desk.
At open house yesterday, Pokey's teacher spontaneously told us how she makes him the helper and that he's in charge of setting up various stations in the classroom, and that she uses it whenever he seems bored. So that is a nice data point for a teacher not falling into gender stereotyping on that.
Also, c/f 60, he is so desperate to answer every question that when she calls on a different student, who gives the right answer, she'll still let Pokey answer, afterwards, and give the same right answer. That seems to make him happy.
Heebie is raising a mansplainer. God help us all.