Good Schools Require Saintly Parents

Ages ago, when my daughters were babies, I knew a smart, inspiring woman with two young sons. Her boys were quite impressive, too, both in the way they carried themselves and in their accomplishments. I asked my friend where they went to school.

She told me the name of the Chicago Public School where they were enrolled. She then highly recommended the teacher/administrator who shaped the program there and later became a principal at another CPS elementary school. My friend added that if I wanted to find an excellent school for my daughters, I should find the woman and the school.

Which I did. One of my daughters attends that school, even though the (yes-it's-true) amazing principal has since retired. The new principal has retained much of her educational philosophy and most of her staff. But almost immediately, the new principal ditched the practice of assigning homework over Winter Break. Yay!

Still, my daughter occasionally gets an assignment that pretty much requires doing homework over the holidays. I suppose the quality of teaching developed under the former principal is too deeply ingrained. These teachers teach, after all. And so, this year, my daughter's group assignment - to film a 4-5 minute commercial having to do with the reading of Brave New World - is due Jan. 6th. School resumes Jan. 4th. Are you kidding me?

What do you think about that? I don't know anymore. On one hand I'm annoyed, because scheduling six 8th graders around family plans is tedious and difficult. On the other hand, getting six 8th graders together is socially fun, and I'm sure they all took something positive away from the experience.

The mom who hosted the event? I'm sure she took a gigantic headache away from the experience. After 6+ hours of dealing with technology issues and personality issues and the teenage stomach, this woman deserves public thanks, a hug, a beer. Or, maybe a get-out-of-chaperoning pass for the remainder of the year?

Happy Father's Day

At the store this afternoon, I was thinking of something else my father told me once. This was his advice when we told him we were having twins:

Earn!

My Father, the Unschooler

My father’s mother immigrated to this country when she was 11 years old, in 1919. As the story goes, she did not speak any English, and school officials put her in the second grade—with the 7 and 8 year olds. That, as the say, wasn’t working for my grandmother, and thus ended her formal education.

My father graduated from high school, but never finished college. School was never as satisfying to him or as intellectually rewarding as the public library.

Five of his six children have college degrees, though. His sixth child, never went to college. He was born in 1974 with Down syndrome, and went to school longer than all of us. He wore a cap and gown at his formal graduation—at the age of 26.

My father doesn't tell stories about his success at school, because there wasn't much. He tells stories about his success at life. My father is an autodidact. Growing up, I remember him writing and painting and reading and listening to music. To this day, he studies philosophy texts and books on quantum physics in his spare time. Right now, he's teaching himself how to speak Spanish.

He taught himself, and in doing so, taught us.

A Very Good One

I’m sure there were many, many ways in which my father wanted to influence his children. Too many to list here. The crucial things, I absorbed unconsciously growing up in our big, loving family. For example, he wanted us to know he respected our mother. He wanted us to know he was available for us whenever we needed him. He wanted us to know he would always tell us the truth.

When I was all grown up and married, he told me he wanted to be a good father. How I love that he added the qualifier! Wanting to be a father wasn't enough.

He wanted to be a good one.

A Lovely Night Out. And Yet.

I was thinking about my father’s “before the age of 15” credo on Friday night, at a dinner with a group of moms I’ve come to know through my daughter’s school. Our children are growing up together in an urban environment, and so when we get together, we talk a lot about what our children know and don’t know. About what academic (and life) lessons they learn (or don’t learn) at school.

At one point during the evening I realized that two of the mothers felt perfectly comfortable having their sixth graders read and discuss Night by Elie Wiesel, but felt completely uncomfortable having an in-depth discussion of the “facts of life” with these very same children.

This seemed inconsistent to me—parents who believe their children intellectually and emotionally mature enough to handle the work of Elie Wiesel, but do not believe the same children intellectually and emotionally mature enough to handle “the talk.” (I mean, I can’t imagine that a child’s questions about the human body are more difficult for a parent to answer than questions about the human soul.)

A healthy, honest, and meaningful dialogue with your children on the subject of human sexuality and reproduction takes time to develop. Years. What are you waiting for ladies? Fifteen will be here before you know it. . . .

Thoughts on a Saturday Morning

My father—a father of six—once shared with me his personal parenting philosophy:

If you want to influence your children in a certain way, you should probably do so before they turn 15.

My father’s view is that after the age of 15, children aren’t paying much (if any) attention to their parents, even if you think they are. There’s a 15-year window of opportunity available to parents, and then the window snaps shut.

I love that imagery. It’s been a useful parenting tool for me. I don’t know if Dad is right or wrong, but as a mother of two 12 year olds, I’m guessing he’s closer to right. Interestingly, the closer our daughters get to age 15, the more right my Dad’s words seem to me.

This week at Barking at Kathy, I will reflect on my father’s wisdom, and on why his words reverberate for me.

Musa, Musa, Musa

I’ve been watching my daughters’ Tae Kwon Do class since they started in January. I’ve learned a lot about my children sitting there as an observer. For instance, they’re impossibly flexible. They are also loud and fast and aggressive. I realize I’m not in the habit of describing my daughters with these words.

Earlier this week my daughter’s sixth grade class went downtown on a field trip to Chicago's Harold Washington Library to do History Fair research. While the children were diligently pursuing their assignment, a strange man approached one of my daughter’s classmates and asked her to follow him. She went to get her teacher instead.

I found out about the incident when my daughter called me after school with the worrisome details. She said the whole thing was creepy. There was a pause in our conversation—because, as you can imagine—she was creeping me out, too. But before I could come up with the words to make her (and myself) feel better, she made this statement:

“If anybody ever bothers a friend of mine again, I’m gonna practice my tornado kicks on him!”

Thank you, warrior daughter. I feel better already.

The DIA Today

Since our family was visiting Michigan this weekend, I braced myself at breakfast for reading the Detroit Free Press. I grew up reading this Motor City paper, and I expected to see most of its pages devoted to the Cerberus purchase of Daimler Chrysler. I was surprised to see a huge article about the massive makeover of the Detroit Institute of Arts in a last ditch effort to rescue it from debilitating financial problems.

According to the article, “The DIA, which once received $16 million a year in state funding, now gets just more than $1 million and hasn’t received anything this year because of a moratorium on arts grants. The museum has raised more than $300 million since 1997 in capital funds, but tens of millions of dollars—that otherwise could have generated income as part of the endowment—were needed to plug holes in the annual budget.” (The holes in the budget run between $12 million and $14 million per year, according to the article.)

On the drive home from Michigan, I read an article in The New York Times, mentioning the bestselling Dangerous Book for Boys and tying it to the concern over a decline in traditional play by today’s kids. We’ve heard all this before, ad nauseum. Of course kids need idle time—time to let their imagination wander and time with their families.

This article doesn’t make me feel guilty, because my children are consummate imaginative players. And when we go to Michigan, they disappear for hours with their cousins, inventing new games or climbing trees or just hanging out. However, in the eleven years that my children have been visiting the Detroit area, we have never visited the DIA. Even though we are museum supporters. Even though we are frequent visitors and members of Chicago’s museums.

There’s no excuse for never having taken our daughters to the DIA. Except laziness. And I suspect that’s why attendance is low at the DIA and the museum finds itself in such a precarious situation. Families are just too busy, and going to the museum is just another trip to make.

But I can vividly remember my first visit to the DIA and the impact it had on me. As a young girl, I went with my friend’s family, and on that lovely visit I saw the work of Diego Rivera for the first time—his huge fresco murals Detroit Industry rocked my world. It makes me sick that I haven’t brought my daughters to see this stunning room (zoom in for maximum effect).

So, it is the article about the DIA that makes me feel guilty. Wouldn’t it be nice, parents, if all we have to do to raise our parenting game is unplug the technology and kick the kids outside?

That’s too easy, I’m afraid. Please, get out there and take the kids to the museums. Have them invite a friend to come along. Field trips and vacations aren’t enough exposure. Kids need to go to their local museums, explore them, and get to know the treasures they house. That takes time and effort, and it’s not easy.

It's not just about our children. It's about our culture.

Depressed Children

Our children were sad going to bed last night and sad getting up this morning. I know this because they told me so, using the blunt English that fifth graders wield like a sword. I can hardly blame them, though, because today is the first day back to school after Spring Break. I asked them if sad was really the right word. Wasn’t disappointed a better choice? Or frustrated?

“Sad is the right word, Mom,” my daughter reiterated.

To try to cheer them up, my husband and I used all our reliable tools—hot breakfast, upbeat music, Dad’s morning humor, and the reminder of Grandpa’s impending arrival today and tonight’s spaghetti dinner with their cousins. But we couldn’t get a smile out of the girls.

When I dropped them at school, it was snowing.

Snow has lost its luster. Hot cocoa has lost its luster.

School has definitely lost its luster.

Spring Break at Home

It's Spring Break at last, and our family isn’t traveling this time around. Instead, we’re hanging out in Chicago, hosting Easter dinner on Sunday, and then heading back to work and school on Monday.

It’s kind of nice sleeping in, eating out, reading, playing a long game of Monopoly. (And I still have all week to buy new gym shoes for my daughters!) Nevertheless, I do have to parcel out my requests for help from the girls, because they are in full vacation mode. So I just now asked them to clean out their backpacks and bring me their lunchboxes to fumigate. One child came to me with her lunchbox, and nothing else.

“No important papers?” I asked.

“Nope!” she said, hurrying back to what she was doing.

Hmm. . . .

My other daughter handed me the lunchbox and a two-inch-high pile of graded papers going back to early January. Homework assignments, tests, essays. It took me 15 minutes to unfold, de-wrinkle, and stack them right side up before I could even look at them closely. Also buried in the pile— four “Notices of Strep Throat”.

Is it any wonder parents rarely know what’s going on at school?

Chess Runs Amok

A thought-provoking movie I like to watch every once in a while is “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” I was thinking about it again after reading last week about the recently botched CPS citywide chess tournament.

Both the movie and this story show how adults often deflate children by ruining something they love.

I wish we could stop doing this.