Dream Catcher or Dream Maker

 Dream Catcher or Dream Maker

 

I want to be a professional basketball player.   I am 5’1” and poorly coordinated.  But being a professional B-ball player has always been my dream.   My parents do not want to be the people to tell me that I cannot catch this dream no matter how fast I run.  They do not want to destroy my dream.  Is that a good idea?

Many kids with disabilities have lots of dreams they are chasing to catch.  Some of our students want to be professional rock music stars.  It looks like a great gig.  All of that money and all of that adulation.  WOW! Seems great.  Truth is most folks without disabilities aren’t going to do that.   But suppose a child wants to be something more mundane.  Maybe my child wants to be a veterinarian.  She really loves animals and wants to work with them.   For starters there are no schools of veterinarian medicine in Maryland so she would need to go to the school in Virginia that has an agreement with Maryland.  And it is very tough to get in as you might imagine.   Well what if my child loves to cook and wants to be a chef in a restaurant.  That should be easy.  There is more to being a chef than just being a great cook.  The hours are LONG.  The pressure intense and there is often a lot of noise and hollering in a commercial kitchen.  Can your child handle all that? 

Most importantly when is the right time to tell my child that he/she is just not going to catch that dream.

The truth is the sooner we help our kids look at reality the better.   Making informed choices for adult careers is not destroying dreams, it is making different dreams come true.

As parents and teachers we need to make the full reality of any dream we want clear.   There are more variables to choosing a career than just “liking” to do some part of the work.  Sure it is important to want to work with animals if you are going to be a veterinarian.  But there are lots of other “work with animals” jobs that have different demands that might more reasonably fit a person’s skill set.  Working with our kids we can make differing dreams come true.   And we should.  We do not serve our children’s best interests if we waste the career preparation time available to us letting our children think they can catch that dream.  We need to work with our children to engage all of their talents and align those talents with the demands of another dream that together we can make come true.

Working with the advantages available we can make dreams come true for our children and stop chasing the ones that are just a bad fit.

Bad for reading, bad for America

 Bad for Reading, Bad for America

 

The average adult American cannot pass the citizenship test that Immigrants need to pass to become citizens.   Almost half of all eligible voters don’t vote- although maybe this year with such strong feelings on both sides we might see more folks voting.

In recent years there has been a heavy push to increase reading instruction and reading test scores.  But the number of hours in a school day are finite so some other subjects had to give up time to reading.  First went the arts, then went physical activity and most recently social studies have suffered.

A recent Thomas B. Fordham University study by Tyner and Kabourek correlated reading comprehension ability with reading achievement.  They concluded that the puny history lessons are not only bad for good citizenship they are bad for reading comprehension.

The study found that students who received just an additional 30 minutes a day of social studies instruction in grades 1-5 do better in reading than do students with less social studies.  Their conclusion is that social studies is the only clear, positive and statistically significant effect on reading ability.  

We teach teachers that kids need to first learn to read then we can worry about social studies.  Our kids spend much more time on reading instruction than do the children of other developed countries but they don’t read as well.  It is the common wisdom – but false- that kids will pick up social studies and science once they have learned to read. And for many schools, reading means just decoding.   These big blocks of time for reading and math are not being tested to see if they are doing the job as intended.  

Louisiana, not noted for its excellence in education, has begun to push the trend in the other direction.  Literacy curricula that use social studies curricula to align with reading are discovering that kids are excited about the lessons of history and about how and why things turned out the way they did.  They also learn some geography along the way too.  And, not surprisingly, reading comprehension scores have gone up.

Rebel teachers may find it easier to sneak in some lessons on history and government as they teach their students to read.  After all, not nearly as many eyes on the teacher when she/he sneaks those content lessons into a virtual  class.  

That might not only improve the students’ reading scores, we could also turn out better educated citizens.  That would be better for reading scores but also better for America.

Failure can be a good thing

 Failure can be a good thing

People often try to avoid failure.  But it can be a very good thing.   After all we don’t learn very much when we succeed but when we fail, we learn a lot.

Distance learning can avoid failure.  After all parents can be sitting right there to make sure that the student does not fail at all.   If necessary, parents will do the work for the child.  Not good.

Failure teaches us where we need to improve.  Failure shows us how we can do better.   Failure can be the final straw to push us towards a better path for our future.   Failure can teach us a great deal about ourselves.  It can teach us not just what we have done wrong but it can teach us what we have no interest in learning.  Children need to fail in school.  And then to push forward to succeed.

But children need to fail safely because too much failure can beat us down and make us think that we can never learn or that we are stupid. Failure needs to be close enough to victory that we will try again OR far enough away from victory that we chose another path.

Distance learning again separates the haves from the have nots.    Some students have lots of parental support.   Perhaps even too much support.  Parents are visible in the virtual classroom hovering behind the student.  Parents make comments about how they are “working together” with their child to ensure the child gets the work correct.  These kids do not succeed at learning but they get very good at learned helplessness so that the parent takes over and does the job for the student.   Children are learning the wrong skills.

Other kids get no help at all.  Parents are not available to help for a variety of reasons, other children, job responsibilities or even lacking the necessary skills.   Those students may well be overwhelmed by the distance learning tasks and may feel that success is just too far away and they cannot reach it.

The greatest failure of all, is the learning lost to all of our children during this time.   The lost learning will not be regained.  The kids who have not learned to read will be years catching up if at all.   The students who have suffered great social emotional damage are going to need a great deal of counseling to overcome what has been lost.  In urban and rural areas thousands of students have dropped out of school just by attrition without any formal process.  They will not be back and their futures will be forever impacted.  What gifts could they have given to our society that we will never see.

Failure can be a very good thing.  It can teach us about ourselves.  It can inspire us to greater heights and it can beat us down.  Like Goldilocks, we need to have the porridge just right.

 

What did you learn in school today?

 What did you learn in school today?

 

There is an old folk song that begins, “what did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?”   It seems that in spite of Trump’s threat to withhold funding from California if it begins teaching a new curriculum called the 1619 Project Curriculum, he can’t.  There is a federal law that forbids the federal government-including the president and/or Congress- from meddling in a school’s choice of curriculum.  It is that simple.  Curriculum is a local decision.

The New York Times developed a history curriculum of the same name that California has chosen to adopt.  Trump has also threatened that the U.S. Office of Education “look into this too” with the threat of more federal funds being taken away from California.

The 1691 Project argues that the United States doesn’t originate in 1776 the year of the Declaration of Independence but instead originated in 1619, the year the first Africans were brought to this continent and enslaved.   The project then traces the impact of slavery on all of the country’s founding principles.   The curriculum can be adapted for all grade levels.

Under the Every Child Succeeds Act, which is the current primary source of federal funding in schools, the U.S. Office of Education can’t even endorse a program of study.  Nor can it make existing funding conditional on certain curricula or types of instruction.  The law does not allow any federal stamp of approval on a curriculum or sanction of one over another.

Education and curriculum in the United States have always been a very local affair. There is no mention whatever of education in the U.S. Constitution.   It is relatively recently that the federal government got into the business of significantly supporting education with money.  Even so, federal funds only make up about 5-8% of public school funding.  

There is a saying that all politics is local; the same is true for education.  So what our kids learn in school today, very much depends on what the local boards or possibly state boards decide.   Sorry Mr. Trump, that issue is not on the president’s plate.