Twenty Years Ago: November 2003

 I must have had a cold for all of 2003!  November in 2003 was rainy and my son had a cold, too. While later in his life, I would wish for rain to cancel baseball games, in 2003, I dreaded rain because it did not cancel his soccer games. Can you see how much I loved sitting outside watching my children’s sports? 

My elder child was trying to battle her way into the school’s gifted program. She was upset that she was not selected and I had to hide my relief, “There are so many problems with that program. If she was selected there would be more issues than if she was not. Let her do her “gifted” thing in high school. I do not see that those who have been TAP’d have any advantage over those who do not. Often, they are more arrogant and more concerned with grades. Some are brighter, most are not. This is a blessing in disguise.” Of course, my child did not agree – until she got herself into the program in middle school. Then she understood what I was talking about. Oh, well. 

In November of 2003, I was phenomenally busy, “I am fighting the overwhelmed feeling. This weekend, I’ll take my Sunday School class to Willowcreek. On Monday, I’ll get essays. I need to get a Shabbat service ready for 12/5. Mango Street and the Book Circle unit are coming up and I don’t feel like either is fully developed. I am feeling like a ton is on the horizon. My grades are done, the parent notices are due. Get me to the end of the year.” 

I was also preparing our yearly holiday card. Prior to digital photography, getting a good picture could take months: shoot a roll or two, have it developed, reject the results, rinse and repeat. Fortunately, in 2003, I had my first digital camera. However, my three editors/critics could be very demanding; they wanted only their finest images on our yearly greeting card. It took a while to come to an agreement. 

Like this year, November meant a Saturday at Windycon. Since I was preparing to officiate at a bat mitzvah, I was debating whether to see one more mitzvah on a Saturday or travel to the convention. I made the healthy choice and gave myself a wonderful Saturday of celebrating science fiction and fandom. 

It was in 2003 that I integrated my Sunday School curriculum. In 2001, I taught comparative Judaism and in 2002, I taught comparative everything else. Why it wasn’t clear to me that was out of balance then, I am not sure. Perhaps because I was out of balance, too. So, I reorganized religions by theme and philosophy, had five field trips per year, and acknowledged that, since my students were going to many of their friends’ mitvzahs, we didn’t need to go to Reform and Conservative services. They were getting more than enough of those. 

In November 2003, I took my Sunday School class for our first trip to the megachurch in Barrington, Willow Creek. It was a foundational experience for them – and for me. We have been going back to Willow Creek every other year since then. 

The dog’s issues amped up in November. It was clear that the dog was now blind. I joked, “We have decided that we need to hire a seeing-eye person for the blind dog. Well, not really, but poor PJ is really struggling and it will be a few weeks at least until he gets better, if he gets better. It is really tough.”

I took my new Humanities class on a field trip to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. This raised my level of busyness to a brand-new pitch, “Teach until afternoon, meet with the team, come home, go back for the faculty meeting, come home for dinner and give PJ his meds and then go back for the field trip. I’ll be home again around midnight! But it will be a good day, even if it is an exhausting one.” My optimism must have substituted for my lack of sleep. 

If I was questioning the value and manner of grading my own students, the grades my children were earning furthered that process, “Over and over, I question the value of these report cards. In the short story we discussed in Power Reading today, ‘Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog,’ Edison invents an intelligence analyzer and predicts that we will be able to ‘grade people as easily as we grade oranges.’ Isn’t that what it is all about? I read my Humanities kids’ self-evaluations. One thing that came up a few times was their resistance to our grading system. Kids want to be graded. What a shame.” 

It is interesting to look back twenty years and see who was important in our lives then and now – and who we no longer see. We used to spend a great deal of time with neighbors who had kids the same age as our children. There were several families with whom we had both family and couple dates. We don’t see any of them anymore. However, there are folks with whom we were close that we see regularly. Yes, there is a message there: relationships based entirely on the kids didn’t last.

So, teaching, Sunday School, running Shabbat services, getting ready for a Bat Mitzvah, the neighborhood homeowner association (the annual meeting had to be planned), planning winter and spring break travel, taking care of a sick and blind dog, and the kids’ activities made November of 2003 a very long month. I am tired just writing that list. Oh! I noted that I joined the school crest committee at school. Did I ever say, “NO?” 

Reading For Treasure: Thinking about Learning

Reading for Treasure is my list of articles that are worth your attention. Click here for an introduction!

Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids: Kids learn more from what we do and how we behave than what we say. This article from The Atlantic argues that kids know that, although parents say they want their kids to be kind and caring, achievement and happiness is far more important – but in ways you might find surprising, kindness will serve them better in the long run.

I was a Low-Income College Student. Classes Weren’t The Hard Part: Professor Jack of the Harvard Graduate School of Education shares his powerful experiences about being a low-income first generation college student. It is clear from both his story and his experiences as a college professor that our university system neither understands nor adapts to this important population.

How Revising Math Exams Turns Students Into Learners, Not Processors: Thinking about our thinking is metacognition. It is not enough to just solve the problem, we want students to really understand the process and think behind problem-solving. This article from MindShift talks about how a math teacher upended her teaching based on the ideas from writing revision. Math teachers, what do you think of this?

New Study Finds Gifted Programs Favor Wealth Over Ability: There are more wealthy students in gifted programs? Really? I don’t think any of us are surprised. Here is the opening line from this article, “A new study confirms that lower-income elementary students are far less likely than their wealthier counterparts to be placed in gifted programs. That’s even when those students go to the same school and display the same levels of academic achievement.”

Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers: The Atlantic’s article focuses on what parents can do to help their children develop a true love of reading and not merely see it like eating their veggies.

I am currently reading Brand by Henrik Ibsen.

How to Get Your Children Into the Right Colleges

It is never too early to start the college process. As we all know, the college your children attend will directly create their future success in every way. The right school is important economically, socially, academically, and this is true for the child as well. In fact, if you haven’t started thinking about how to ensure that your children get into a really good school, a school that will be the envy of your friends and the members of your social group, a school that you will be proud to put on your bumper and sweatshirt, you are basically screwed. Too bad, your child is going to some cut-rate Acme college with all the other schlubs.

But that is NOT you! You are in control and on top of this critical and crucial process and all you need is a roadmap.

We know the things you have already done: you moved to a community with really good schools. You started to drill your children even in utero. You went through numbers, letters, taught your children multiple languages and begin computer programing with baby blocks. You spoke to your children in Sanskrit, Latin, and Esperanto.

You enrolled your child in sports as soon as they could walk. Of course, you chose individual sports because one can’t really count on those other parents to support your children. In their free time, your children should take humanitarian trips to exotic locations, start businesses, run political campaigns, and make guest appearances on national talk shows.

A unique musical instrument is a must! Everyone has caught on about the oboe and bassoon. Your children have mastered the theremin and didgeridoo!

You read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to your children daily. They are political experts ready to lead their debate teams, congressional clubs, and PACs.

Side note here: if your children resist all these activities, don’t like the drills and skills, you have a loser. Sorry. Be strong and make them what they need to be. Don’t take no for answer. Children can be made in their parents’ image – or even better. Even if your children remind you of yourself at their age, there is still hope.

It is never too early to start to work on the ACT, SAT, and SOB. A test a day keeps bad colleges away, I always say. The more familiar the children are with the tests, the closer you are to that perfect score. Have them start taking the test in the second grade. This will qualify them for gifted opportunities galore!

The gifted track in school is key! Do whatever it takes to make sure your child has a gifted label. Sometimes this may mean visits to doctors and other professionals for evidence. Check with your neighbors for the professionals near you who dispense the diagnoses you desire. If the gifted track is not working, then your child needs special accommodations. It is one or the other, of course! Those expensive tests will come in handy again because extended time is great on college entrance exams!

Homework is a family affair. Work with your children to make sure they understand how you do their homework. Simply doing their homework does not ensure good school performance. They must carefully observe and be able to explain what you have done for them.

Summer is not a break! Computer, writing, architecture, science, and countless other academic camps and gifted summer programs are a must! Make sure they are at a college that everyone will recognize. This begins the relationship. They will have gone to the right school even before they finish the eighth grade!

You will need professional help. A college consultant should be engaged no later than sixth grade. Pick someone who brags that they can get their clients admitted to any school! This expert will give you a break by taking over all the uninteresting form filling and writing and hoops that you must jump through. You don’t have time for all that and your children would just do it wrong or not at all. Pay this specialist to do it for you! They fill out the applications, write the essays, and hound the children. You can continue your wonderful parenting!

If your kids say they want a say in the process, remind them that this far too important for children. They just don’t understand. Someday, they will!

Sign up for every honors class your school offers. Make sure your kids are taking AP, IB, or FU as soon as possible. Send the teachers of these classes generous gifts, and train in your student in teacher handling techniques such as complimentary strategies, kissing up, and “I want to be just like you” tactics. Remind them to tell each teacher that “you changed my life” at least once a semester.

Since your hired gun is doing the heavy lifting, you can sit back and enjoy the constant college conversations. Remember, when you tell people where your children attend, the response should always be awe and envy. Fourteen to twenty-five applications are the absolute minimum. Don’t worry about costs! The worth of a good school is priceless! Admittance is its own reward.

By the end of these eighteen years, your children will have become academic, athletic, and artistic superstars who will achieve and earn more than your peers could imagine. Eventually, they will thank you for all your hard work. Once you are done, you can start a business helping younger parents navigate this perilous journey.

Don’t you wish your parents had done this?

Readers Win!

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me fell like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”  - Nora Ephron

People who love to read have a huge advantage. Fostering a love of reading in children may be one of the greatest gifts parents and teachers can give.

Readers learn important thinking skills. They must be decoders and analyzers. Readers have to make sense of information and discover patterns in it. They must remember details and put them together. Readers learn to look at the big picture and the tiny mosaic tiles that make it up.

Readers must sustain attention. There is an epidemic of attention disorders. While there may be many causes, the fast visual pace of games, movies, television, and websites does not encourage children to focus. Reading does. A child must concentrate for a prolonged period of time to read. Even small children can learn to sit and listen to an adult reading. That is why it is critical that parents read to their children even before these children recognize letters or words. They learn to maintain focus.

Readers live in language. While some backward places are still teaching vocabulary through drills and lists, the current research tells us that, if we want kids to develop their vocabularies, they must read. It is not enough to memorize a word and its definition; there must be some context for that meaning. Meaning disembodied dies.

Years ago, I took over a class that was designed to strengthen students’ vocabularies. The prior teacher had given students dictionaries and had them look up lists of words and memorize them. We refocused the course on reading. The first year I taught the reading based curriculum, kids would identify words from the prior year. “Mr. Hirsch, this word was on the last year’s list!” When I asked them what it meant, they could never remember.

Like music, reading is about decoding and translating. Readers learn to love that process. Although students can get hooked into reading with an interesting topic, many readers will read anything because they like the process of reading! It is better to read something interesting, true, but intense readers will read because the act itself is fulfilling.

Students who look critically at their reading will learn to question, evaluate, and imagine. They realize that there are different ways to see the world and they must find strategies to weigh differing points of view. Readers become critical thinkers!

A study even found that one of the best predictor of student success in school was not parents’ income, level of education, or school quality but the number of books in their homes. My parents’ library was a message and a goal for me. I wanted to be able to read the books my folks were reading. It gives me great pleasure when my children want to read the books on my shelves.

Reading is the primary skill. Reading is the basic foundation of learning and thinking. It cannot be overemphasized. Strong, focused, and critical readers are the real gifted students! 

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein

In Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, all children are above average. Most places are like Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town; parents see their children as special and wonderful and they are right. Every child has gifts.

Yet our educational model does not reflect this. We cling to outdated concepts of tracks and levels and increasingly obsolete labels like honors and gifted. Instead of asking if students are gifted, we should ask how they are gifted. As any parent will tell you, children grow in spurts and fits. Just because my child knows her colors doesn’t mean she can count. A child may be at the top of the class one year and then the others catch up. Kids aren’t programmable. The only constant is growth but it is not consistent, even, or regular.

This constant growth is a challenge. Today, a student struggles with the abstract concept of theme in English class. Yet, as he moves into what developmental psychologist Jean Piaget calls formal thought, he is able to understand and analyze meanings and messages in a piece of literature. Children’s development is often the reason why some are more academically able than others.

If all the kids made these leaps at the same time, education would be much easier. Unfortunately, human beings don’t develop like products on the assembly line. And just because some children achieve a landmark early doesn’t mean that they are smarter or “gifted.” Just because others take longer does not mean they are less able. Something difficult yesterday might be easier today. Something that was no problem yesterday could cause issues today. And this growth is influenced by parents, teachers, peers and environment. Is there a good test to account for all that?

One of my first teaching experiences was working with “academically talented” students in a summer program. As I trained to work with them, I envisioned a bunch of middle school eggheads. When they arrived, I met regular kids who, for a wide variety of reasons, were advanced in specific areas but behaved like any other junior high kids.

Then I became a high school teacher and students would announce that they were in a special gifted program in middle school. I could see that some of them had skills that were more developed than their peers. For many, I could not. Most of the students who came from the middle school gifted or talented programs felt very entitled and displayed an arrogance that made me very uncomfortable –especially since most of the time, I didn’t see much basis for it.

These kids had been exposed to different lessons than their “regular” classmates. That gave them an advantage. Some of them performed better in class. But many “regular” kids could keep up or surpass them. I learned that, when I gave extra attention, “special” lessons, and praise to students – any students, they excelled. I have taught honors classes and classes that mixed students of different “ability” levels. I have worked with “disabled” and “remedial” students. I have news: all kids are gifted; all kids are talented, and all kids do better when they receive extra special attention.

Labeling our children or their classes does everyone a disservice. Children experience huge changes in their cognitive abilities well into their college years. There are a very few profoundly gifted students. I have taught one or two of them, and there is no debating their “gifts”. And let’s be clear: their gifts are at least half curse. Do you want your children to go to college at age thirteen? These are the gifted few.

The rest of our kids are above average.