OmegaMom

The newsies are agog at the notion that Miley Cyrus has (gasp!) revealed herself (gasp!) in a truly artsy pic by Annie Leibowitz, and by (gasp!) a picture of her lounging against her boyfriend that (gasp!) shows her midriff (o the shock, o the horror!).  Stories are written saying that she is setting foot on the primrose path to ruin that has been taken by other teen stars lately–specifically Britney and her ilk.

Our culture is totally schizophrenic.  On the one hand, we’re practically drowning in pictures and videos of scantily clad females doing all sorts of things that one might expect scantily clad–or unclad–females to be doing.  Licentiousness abounds.  On the other, a 15-year-old has a few pics taken and suddenly Moms Of Pop Culture Unite to prostrate themselves upon their chaises longues, hands to their foreheads, having the vapors that the Queen of Pre-Teen Clean is allowing herself to be defiled.  The hordes of teeny tweeny Hannah Montana fans are suddenly going to transform into an army of mini-Lolitas, and it’s All Miley’s Fault.  Prudery rears its ugly head.

OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here, big time.

OmegaMom is also rolling her eyes at an article about "When Young Teachers Go Wild On The Web".

Kozmik All help us:  22-year-old teachers have MySpace pages.  And they…and they…omigawd, how can my trembling fingers write this??  They have pictures on those pages!  Pictures of (gasp!) themselves holding (gasp!) bottles of tequila!  Or, even worse, paintings they have done showing women’s lingerie peeping out from under upflung skirts.  Or (shudder!) paintings of frontal nudes!

(One does wonder if those paintings were anything like these…)

And they say things!  Like "rocking out with some deaf kids.  It.  Is.  Awesome." 

Or talking about bl0w j0bs.

Or showing posters about cartoon sperm.

What is wrong with these teachers?!  Have they no decorum?!  No reserve?!  Aren’t they aware they are molding young children’s minds?!  How dare they have lives of their own!  How dare they have thoughts of their own!

Now, granted, each and every one of the things mentioned above could be taken too far.  Let’s not show pictures of orgies featuring oneself in the buff.  But in and of themselves, my opinion about the examples in the article is…well…um…hell, these are 20-something teachers.

I was party-hearty girl until I reached my early 30s.  Well, not as "hearty" as some, but I went out, I drank, I partied, I danced, I stayed up all weekend long, I had hangovers, I talked sex with all my buds, I toked joints, I had sex, I listened to rock-n-roll.  And if the web and blogs had been around then, I’d probably have blogged about all of the above.

It might have been drearily boring.  I have to admit that my overwhelming response to most blogs or MySpace pages put out by folks in their late teens and early 20s is that they are an appallingly vacuous, inane collection of stream of consciousness gossip, in conjunction with angsty poetry.  This is why, when I use the "next blog" button on Blogger, I go through about fifty blogs before I find something I would consider even vaguely interesting.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Shoetree, the dotter’s kindergarten teacher, having a webpage with a poster about cartoon sperm, or paintings of frontal nudes, or talking about "rocking out" with anyone; she is, after all, older than me, and more staid.  But if she did I wouldn’t care, because she’s a damn fine kindy teacher who my dotter adores.  Which is, after all this bloviating, my main point:  Folks, teachers have Real Lives.  Yes!  I know it’s a surprise, but, hey, there it is, and it’s my pleasure to pass this piece of arcane knowledge on to you.  Teachers are Real, Live Human Beings who, amazingly enough, have been known to go to parties, or fall in love, or be indiscreet.

In a refreshing departure from administrative powerhunger, some administrator actually said that webpages should be handled case by case.  (What, no standardized testing?!)  On the other hand, another administrator type had this to say:  "We all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach…"

Dear lord.  We are doomed; the only people who will go into teaching or politics twenty years from now are people who are upright, humorless prigs…

Gazing back into those misty, halcyon days of college, I dimly seem to remember something called "study groups".  At the beginning of the semester (or quarter), you’d collect names and phone numbers of other folks in your class who were interested in studying together, then you’d set a time, and someone would be tagged as the person to glom onto the first good study room or carrel at the university library.  You’d meet, everyone would have their textbooks and class notes, someone would bring noshes, and you’d spend a few hours going over the notes and exchanging answers and ideas about the homework.

"Y’know, I tried number 48, but I kept getting hung up!  Did anyone figure that problem out?!"

In my Numeric Analysis class (one of my favorites, really!), our prof gave us take-home tests for the mid-term and final.  He fully expected us to work in groups.  They were some of the hardest–and most fun–exams I had in my college experience.  Our study group met for hours in the library, in the break room in the basement of the math building, out on the lawns.  We worked hard.  We worked our butts off.  We thought deeply.  My mid-term response was 20 pages long; my final response was 30 pages.

We also had classes where it was probably assumed by the professor that we were working alone on homework and studying.  But even in those cases, hammering out the answers to more difficult problems with other students helped all of us understand the basic concepts better.  And those who got answers easily explained to those who didn’t, and gained from that aspect as well.

These days, it seems, such study groups often convene on the intertubes.  Specifically, at places such as Facebook.

One professor at Ryerson University, who apparently had a requirement that students were to work on assignments alone, discovered that a student had set up a Facebook study group for his class.  That student is facing expulsion and 147 counts of academic misconduct, one for each member of the study group.  His B grade was changed to an F by his professor after the Facebook group was discovered.

So many different ways of looking at this.

The professor didn’t want students working out answers to problems together. 

If that is the sole issue here, why weren’t all the other members of the study group equally penalized?  Why didn’t every student who was a member of the online group have his or her grades reduced/revoked?

As I understand it, each student was assigned different questions; since they were all different, was requesting help cheating?  Is the requirement to work on homework assignments alone a good requirement or a bad one?  Do students learn better by sweating through the problems on their own, or by helping each other find ways to reach the solution?

Different students respond in different ways to different approaches.  Some students do not like to work in groups at all.  Some students like to work in groups for some classes, but not others.  Some students work in groups all the time.  Some students work in groups to get off easily–but how does that help them when it’s time to take a test?  Some students who work in groups learn that they do all the work and others take the credit.  Some students learn better through reading, some through working through problems on their own, some through discussing, some through teaching others.

Questions of pedagogical approach aside, there are those who think that in this case it’s an open-and-shut case of cheating.  Others say that no-one posted specific answers to any problems and that mostly it was an ongoing session of tips and tricks on how to approach the problems. 

One blogger said that someone knowing they were getting the wrong answer indicates that they were cheating, because otherwise how would they know the answer was wrong?  Well, hell, I could always tell when I was getting the answer wrong–because nothing would check out when I worked the problem backwards.  Or else it just "felt" wrong.

I don’t know.  I think requiring college/university students to work alone on homework assignments is not the best approach; I think that by that age the student knows whether s/he wants to collaborate or work alone.  I also feel that the students who are actually getting specific answers from others without doing any of the work are cheating mostly themselves.  They’re the ones who will end up doing poorly on quizzes and tests.  They’re the ones who won’t be able to do the basic work when they get into a more advanced course.  They’re the ones who will constantly be scrambling to keep up or cover up as they move into the workforce.

What say you?

For a very spirited discussion on this subject, from both sides, check out The So-Called Facebook Scandal at A Blog Around The Clock.

Any ideas?

Wow!  My homeschooling post has generated a lot of chatter, new viewers, and an absolutely lovely take-off a la Mark Antony’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, written by Dana, which is an absolute must-read and much classier (and classical) than my rantlet.

Some very valid objections to homeschooling were voiced, as were some equally valid supportive points.  I’m trying to pull the various commentary together into a coherent whole that I can respond to, but it may take a while to work my way through this.

First, we have the objections to homeschooling and a few good points about public schooling:

• Kate suggested that out-of-the-home-school gives one survival instincts that are priceless in the corporate world…which can be true, but to me can be seen as a sad commentary on both schooling and corporations.  I know far too many nerds who only "survived" middle and high school, blossoming only once they were out of the strictly age-regimented, slightly Lord-Of-The-Flies world that the school system provided them.
• Lisa had a neighbor with 10 children who "homeschooled".  I put the word in quotes because apparently this family’s idea of homeschooling was to just let the children fend for themselves.  Unfortunately, yes, this can happen and does happen.
• Johnny points out that his eldest niece lost out on science and math teaching because of the prejudices of the science/math teacher in his sister’s homeschooling co-op.  This makes me sad and mad and frustrated–because any niece of Johnny’s is likely to have been more than capable of understanding and liking the scientific viewpoint.
• Dosia was homeschooled until she took control of her own life and enrolled herself in the local public school system in her sophomore year.  I salute:  that took immense guts.  I don’t think I could have gone against my own parents in so forceful a way at that age; I was a beige adolescent who liked to fade into the background as much as possible, and didn’t discover a real backbone or real courage until I had been living on my own for quite a while.  Dosia’s take is that her parents had insecurities and biases of their own that they impressed upon their children, and not having any other outlet, the children absorbed that set and have been struggling ever since to restructure their lives.

Then we look at some viewpoints from homeschooling proponents:

• Adso of Melk rightly points out that the dynamics of teaching 30 kids versus teaching three are vastly different, something totally glossed over by the author of the article.
• Dawn, a teacher who homeschooled three of her children, mentions in passing NCLB.  I despise NCLB with a passion, because I believe the way it is implemented almost forces school districts to "teach to the test".  In the Best of All Possible Worlds, school systems would sneer at the very idea of "teaching to the test" and proclaim, loudly and proudly, that providing children with good educations will allow them to pass the tests with flying colors any time.  Unfortunately, when federal funds are tied to test scores, pride and self-confidence take a flying leap out the nearest school administrator’s window.
• Erika says that her neighbor, a teacher considering homeschooling her kids, is also concerned about the way that NCLB "ties the hands" of teachers.
• Crimson Wife notes that the original article’s author has degrees in Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education.  I admit my jaw dropped when I read that.  For some reason (perhaps the poor writing, lousy structure, and the fifty kazillion spelling and grammar errors) I had just assumed that the author was a high school student, writing in response to an assignment.  I confess:  I didn’t even look to see.  That’ll teach me.

The problem, of course, is that the process and end result of homeschooling is highly influenced by the abilities, motivations, and determination of the parents doing the schooling.  On the one hand, public schooling does try to adhere to certain standards across the board, though how well the application of those standards works is spotty…on the other hand, over-standardization of homeschooling in an attempt to avoid egregious problems would end up making it a Mini-Me of the public school system.  On the one hand, you have cases like those mentioned by Johnny, Lisa, and Dosia, where homeschooling has clearly failed, either outright or in part, to produce well-balanced and well-educated end results (adults)…on the other hand, you have cases like those cited by Dawn and me, where the parents were determined to provide the best education they could for their children, while ensuring that the socializing aspects of childhood and adolescence were equally attended to.

I haven’t investigated longitudinal results.  If anyone can point me to studies done by universities or educational associations or well-respected thinktanks, I’d be interested to see them.  The problem I have is that many opponents of homeschooling tend to see it as a religion-driven method of indoctrinating children into specific religious worldviews, and throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, by waving their hands at the extremes.  The same happens on the other side, of course.  Me–I’m a numbers person.  I like studies.  I like hard numbers.  So sue me.  If someone is going to argue that homeschooling is either Bad or Good, I want to see solid evidence to back up that argument.   I’ve got anecdotes galore on both sides, but the plural of anecdote is not data.  Give me data.

OmegaGranny has, at times, hinted to me that I might consider it, motivated, I think, by worries about the mediocrity of the public school system.  I’ve thought of it.  But I personally don’t think I’d homeschool; my dotter is strong-willed and I am short-tempered, and that combination can be deadly. 

On a side note:  Folks noted that I used the F-word.  Ahem.  Yes, I did.  What can I say?  Yo!  Dudes!  I grew up on the near-nort’ side of Chicago, near Cabrini Green!  I worked in journalism!  My peeps, they use those words!  I could use "messed up their children", but that’s a dreadfully mild way to describe what some parents do to their kids.  There are times when a good F-bomb is about the only way I can express my indignation succinctly and clearly.

So I got three votes for the economy and foreclosures, and three votes for homeschooling.  And one that said "I’ll read anything you write!" (BadMutha, you sure know how to make me blush!  And, honest, 75-100 is not too shabby as regular readers.  Nothing like The Big Guys, but still not too shabby.  I say so as someone with an average visit of just around 100.)

Since Mrs. Fibgy voted for the economy but said she’d be interested in the homeschooling critique critiquing, I used that as a tie-breaker.

Whilst wandering around ScienceBlogs last week, I came across a snippet of a "critique of homeschooling" on Greg Laden’s blog.  I followed the link to this article.  I read it.  Really!  I actually forced myself to read it, even though my former editor’s brain kept shrieking, "ACK!  ACK ACK!  ACK ACK ACK!" and my analytic brain kept grumbling "cherry-picking, dammit!" and my marketing brain kept snickering, "Ooooh, yeah, let’s get some more stereotypes in there, why don’t we?!"

Of you go.  Read.  Go on, go go go.  I’ll just wait right here.

Done?

First, let me reveal a snobby bias:  A poorly written article automatically prejudices me against the author’s viewpoint.  I hang my head in shame.  Lots of people who Think Good Thoughts can’t write their way out of a paper bag.  But clunky construction, poor verb-subject agreement, awkward (or nonexistent) segues, and downright errors in articles make my eyes cross and my brain stutter.

But, hey.  We all know that this particular post of mine will be inevitably riddled with errors, this being the Way of the Kozmik All.  "Whom the gods destroy they first make proud" and all that.  So let’s take that as a given, and I don’t want to hear any grumbling from the roaring mob about how not only am I a snob but an utter hypocrite to boot.

Let’s get to the substance.

The author ranks the reasons for homeschooling as:  Violence in the school system/safety and desire to provide better education.  She mentions in passing that many homeschoolers are religious, but doesn’t list that as a reason.  She waves her hand at "my research" but doesn’t say where she researched or what information she got.

So I had a go at looking for reasons for homeschooling.  The U.S. Department of Education performed surveys of homeschooling parents in 1999 and 2003.  The "most important" reasons for homeschooling given in the 2003 responses were:

That "concern" about the environment included drugs and peer pressure, not just "safety".  And having an "analysis" so poorly written that reason #2–religious or moral instruction–was conflated with other reasons and not discussed separately bugs me.

Then the author goes on to sniff at any concerns about the school environment, asks homeschooling parents what the crime rate is in their neighborhoods (?), and immediately takes off after…

…all those psychotic moms and dads who homeschool their kids and abuse or kill them.  Like Andrea Yates.  Or a lady named Deanna Landrey, who beat her kids with rocks to Save Them From Satan.

Because the Big Problem with homeschooling, dontchaknow, is that the kids are socially and physically isolated, and that’s a good way to hide child abuse.  Aside from the everyday horrors of not being socialized.

I stop here to say, yes, I know that there are, indeed, plenty of homeschooled kids who are socially isolated.  And social isolation is an excellent method of hiding abuse.

But then I look at all the homeschooling families I know of.  I worked in ITS with two.  I’ve made friends with a bunch via the web.  The parents of one of the dotter’s friends (another child adopted from Guangxi, whose birthday is one day later than hers) are homeschooling their child.  And the parents of one of her fellow ballet dancers are more homeschoolers.  Every single one of these parents has been using what’s known as a "home schooling co-op".  Some have been religiously oriented.  Some have been definitely non-religious.  All the kids that I’ve met are happy, healthy, dreadfully social children.  They go on homeschooling co-op field trips.  They play sports with other homeschooling kids and in the soccer leagues and the softball leagues and dancing and gymnastics.

The author goes on to say that those who are concerned about their kids’ educations should be more concerned about homeschooling than public schooling, because there are no requirements for teaching in a homeschool and the parents won’t be able to teach all the various subjects.  Amazingly enough, most of the homeschooling parents I know recognize quite well when they’ve reached the limit of their knowledge, and turn to the homeschooling co-ops for help.  Their children get taught science or math by parents in the co-op who are (gasp!) scientists or mathematicians.  They get taught English by parents in the co-op who are literature or English majors.  They learn online.  Or their parents study the subjects before their kids reach that point, so they can guide them.

Ah, but public (or private) school teachers are certified!  They’ve studied pedagogy!  They’ve done student teaching!  They have all the latest teaching theories under their belts!  They know how to handle 16 to 30 kids at once!  In some states, they need masters’ degrees!  A person without all that preparation simply can’t teach children!  Because they don’t Know How To Teach!

To which I say–pish tosh.  Again, the homeschoolers that I have encountered are wildly motivated to get their kids to learn.  Some have specifically taken their children out of school systems because…because…their kids weren’t learning.  All that teacher training, the masters’ degrees, the certification, the theories…and their kids weren’t learning.

To top it all off, she says that homeschoolers will share their biases (not "there bias’s") with their children.

Um.  Yeah…?  Do you know of any parents who do not share their biases with their children?  The only way I can think of for parents to not share their biases with their offspring is to…well…just keep their mouths shut.  All.  The.  Time.  In addition, the implication that teachers in school systems don’t share their biases with the children they teach is mind-boggling.  In every way, in every word, in every path of teaching, those teachers do share their biases.  The kids learn a whole slew of biases from the school system.  And from their parents.  And from their aunts, uncles, friends’ parents, and everyone they encounter.

Of course, being exposed to one, and only one, set of biases isn’t the best of all worlds in my mind.  Many parents do homeschool precisely because they don’t want their precious loinfruit to have their ears sullied by the word (or concept) of evolution, or sex education, or Harry Potter books.

I am not an apologist for homeschooling, trust me.  I do think that some people are quite capable of fucking up their children via homeschooling.  But to use an "analysis" such as this one to trash homeschooling is insanity.  This article is so full of stereotypes, misconceptions, scare mongering, lack of citation, and just bad writing, logic, and grammar, that it is, in my opinion, totally worthless.  If you’re going to disapprove of homeschooling and attempt to persuade someone that it’s a bad idea, this is not the article to use.

The dotter is quite mumchance about her days at school or at after-care.  Trying to get her to talk about it is…well, you either do a version of Twenty Questions, or wait until the Feeling Game at bedtime, at which point some info may (may) come out.  The Twenty Questions approach needs variation, so I can:

1. Ask whether she had gym, library, or music that day.
2. Ask who was teacher’s helper.
3. Ask what book was read today, and what it was about…

You get the drift.  It’s like getting blood from a stone, and I’m sure we’ll be getting the "Where did you go?"  "Out."  "What did you do?"  "Nothing." conversation when she’s older.

So the other day, when she said that she had had gym that day, I asked her, "So what did you do?"

She shrugged and said, "I don’t remember."

AAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!

Desperate to get some detail out of her, I asked, "Did you do cartwheels in gym today?"

Dotter shook her head.  "No, we’re not allowed to.  We might get hurt."

OmegaDad and I blinked at each other across the table.  After a moment, I asked, "Did you play games in gym?  Like…like Red Rover?"

Dotter shook her head again.  "No, we can’t play that.  Someone might fall down."

We blinked again.  OmegaDad said to me, in an aside, "Oh, goodness no, we can’t have that!" and then asked, "So what do you do in gym?"

Dotter said, "We do exercises."

Bleah!

I can report, having been at a school do in the gymnasium where there were oodles of youngsters with their families, that many of the girls know how to do cartwheels.  This is a relief.  Even though I am consumed with envy, because I was never able to do cartwheels, being too wussy to actually get my legs straight up and about.

And I am definitely not a fan of, say, Dodge Ball, which I remember as a source of stinging baps from balls hurled with vigor by the bigger and more bullyish of the boys.

But…but…sheesh, guys–these are five-year-olds!  Making them do exercises?!  Gak!  Way to go to make physical activity really appealing and a life-long passion, eh?!

I am tempted to go into a tirade that starts with, "In my day, sonny, we had to walk to school uphill both ways!"  It just makes me sad that some fear of litigation, or general dismay at kids being kids, has led to this.

The weather forecast calls for cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

And cold and snow.

Not too cold yet, though.  Twenties and thirties.  We have had two snows so far, last night’s giving us about four inches at the house.

The dawg loves the snow.  He barrels about in the snow, shoveling it with his nose and flipping it into the air.  Then he bounces around, pees, poops, shovels some more snow, and bounces some more.

The sun is coming up at about 9:10 a.m. and setting at 6:15.  At Small Mountain University Town, the sun is rising at 6:42 a.m. and setting at 5:38…we’re now off by an hour of daylight, and rapidly decreasing.

We had our first parent-teacher conference today.  Mrs. Shoefetish and Mrs. Brian assured me that the dotter was doing quite amazingly well academically.  We actually got a “report card”.  Goodness.

In terms of the kindergarden curriculum question, the report card specifically looked at kids being able to name colors, shapes, count to five, know their first and last name.  They’ve gone through six letters of the alphabet.

The dotter was praised for her creativity; she likes to make “books” during free time, and apparently the other kids at her table are so taken with the books that they’re starting to make them too.

MIL called this evening; in an attempt to keep the dotter quiet while OmegaDad spoke on the phone, I pulled the dotter aside to do some drawing.

Somehow this morphed into us doing clapping games.

You remember clapping games?

I learned one new one; we raced through Pattycake; we did “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea”, though neither of us remembers the specific clapping pattern; and we ended up laughing uproariously at each other.

That was fun.

Lest you think that all is fun and games with the dotter, let me say both OmegaDad and I were amazed that the dotter got exemplary marks for “following directions” and “behaving appropriately”, and just nodded our heads and rolled our eyes at the “still learning” “score” on “respecting the rights and property of others” category.  I am now beginning to suspect that the dotter is Miss Sweetness and Light at school and saves up all her snarkiness for us at home.  Man, oh, man, can she whiiiiiiine!

But this evening was quite fun.

We are still waiting on the finishing touches of the relocation company buying our house.

Grrr.

As soon as that check hits our bank account, we are out buying OmegaDad a car of his own.  Or OmegaMom a car of her own.  Or whatever.  This one car dealio is driving both of us nuts.

Also as soon as that check hits, I am picking up the phone to call the local blind installation company so we can get some insulated cell blinds put in.  And drapes.

One of the intriguing things about having a child in the house is that you (the adult) realize just how many things you take for granted that are hard to learn (for kids).

Walking.  That’s a big one.  A toddler demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how difficult walking upright really is.  It requires immense concentration.  A sense of balance isn’t intrinsic–it requires practice.  It takes months of constant practice before a toddler can turn the Frankenwalk into something graceful and thoughtless.  Daily practice.  Hours and hours of it.

Somewheres along the line, after all that practice, the brain switches from conscious effort to unconscious act.

It’s fascinating.

Dimes, pennies, nickels, quarters.  It’s only with a kid around that you really grasp the idea that it’s utterly senseless, to the naked eye, that the different sizes of these different coins has no correlation to the “worth”.

Then we come to reading.

English is a language with lots of input from a variety of other languages.  It’s a mutt, pure and simple.  There’s Latin.  There’s Saxon.  There’s medieval French.  There’s a slew of native American words, from a variety of different native American language families.  There are Arabic words.  Made-up words.  Acronyms.

Then there are regular verbs versus regular verbs.

Then there are the archeological remnants of old pronunciations that linger on, like a linguistic appendix.

When you get down to learning to read, how do you distill all these disparate ingredients into a set of rules?

Take, for instance, the word “knight”.  Once upon a time, it actually was pronounced somewhat like it is spelled–kunihcht, with that ch being one of those gutterals that modern Amurrikans can’t handle.  But a child just learning to read, and sounding out the letters…you have to explain, well, the “k” is silent.  Why?  Um.  (Here you can diverge into two vastly different approaches:  “It just is.”  Or “Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a Germanic language that pronounced the ‘k’ in a word like that, but as time went on, people who spoke English slurred that ‘k’ more and more until it simply disappeared…but our spelling still shows it.”)  Then you have to explain that “igh” is pronounced “eye”.  (At least, in this case it is.)  And decide whether to do the short version or the long version or the medium version (”English is a funny language, dear”).

Or the letter “e” in all it’s variety.  Why, for example, is the “y” at the end of the word “variety” pronounced “eee”?  Why did we stick “y’s” there, instead of something else?  Why is the “e” at the end of most words silent, but in “the” and “he” it isn’t?

How about “ed”?  Why is it pronounced just like it looks in the word “red”, but not in “looked”?  Why does it sound like a “t” there?

And on and on.  And on.  Oy!  It’s a miracle you guys can read this bloggage at all!

This is brought to you courtesy of the dotter, who read her first full page from a Jack and Annie book today.  Woot!  (OmegaMom is doing the Snoopy Dance.)  Yes!  A full page!

But man.  That one page of The Magic Tree House #2,721 was full of such pitfalls that adults (read:  OmegaMom) skip right over as they read, while children (read:  OmegaDotter) stumble over and question and wonder why.

Yes, in reality there are rules.  But there are so many of them!  And so many exceptions!  And so many rules that depend upon the placement of letters!  And lots that depend upon the word itself!

And, yes, it’s easier than ideographic languages, such as Chinese, where a literate person has to learn between three and four thousand individual ideographs.

But, still!  Good lord.  OmegaDotter was simply exhausted by the end of that one page.  It takes a child an immense amount of focus to do something like that.  Thank heavens for the vast variety of reading material out there, so that most kids can find something to read that interests them enough to motivate them to focus that hard, that gives them a reason to continue to practice, practice, practice.  Because the only way to internalize that intricate, labyrinthine mazework of phonetic rules is to just keep plugging away at it…just like learning to walk.

Not mine, but a mini-rant prompted by two separate questions on two separate boards I frequent.

One was from the mom of a just-turned-4-year-old in preschool whose teacher had informed the mom that her child was “behind” because he couldn’t use letter sounds.  In other words, he was “behind” because he couldn’t go “buh, buh, buh” when presented with a “B”.  The kid did great guns with the alphabet songs, loved being read to, has a vocabulary that would befit a 2nd grader…

The other was from the mom of a just-turned-4-year-old also in preschool who was thinking of Kumon for her kiddo to tutor him in doing straight lines/curvy lines because, once again, someone made her think he was “behind” because he wasn’t drawing nice straight lines or nice curvy lines.

My succinct mental comment to both comments, in toto:  WTF?!

To expand:  Really.  What.  The.  Fuck.

I’d like to say that if one of the dotter’s preschool teachers had cornered me when she was just turned 4 and given me the same prognosis, I would have laughed in her face.  Unfortunately, I’m quite aware that as a first time mom I lean toward the “I’m clueless, you’re the expert, you must be right” approach.  My WTF is from my superior position as the older, experienced mom of a 5-1/2 year old, looking back.

In addition, I have the experience of knowing what the dotter’s kindergarden curriculum is like.  Right now, they’re doing…one letter per week, focusing on the sounds.  One number per week.  (All stuff the dotter got in her last year in preschool, but soaking in a bit more and beginning to “click”, IMO.)

I read those two questions and my immediate desire is to find those preschool teachers and read them the riot act.  Fer cryin’ out loud.  Kids in preschool are supposed to be having fun.  Circle time.  Playing with Legos™.  Dressing up.  Running around outside.

Everyone claims my dotter is smart, but I can tell you she certainly wasn’t phonemically aware at the start of her fourth year, nor did she do straight or curvy lines very well.  In my few encounters with Mrs. Footstool, her kindy teacher, the general impression she has passed on to me is that the dotter is doing quite well “academically” (socially?  Eh.), so it appears that her lack of those apparently essential skills hasn’t caused her any difficulty.

If any of my readers are preschool or kindy teachers, it would be nice to get a comment or two from y’all about whether my response is more the norm, or whether these two preschool education fascists pressing these kids are more in the know.  (Yes, I know my labeling them that way gives undue pressure to lean towards saying, “Yo!  OmegaMom!  You’re De Man!” but, hey, it’s my blog.  )

(SpaceMom:  Thanks for letting me know my email was down!

To all:  Does anyone know what note opens Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor?)

Over at ScienceBlogs, they’re doing a blog challenge with DonorsChoose.  The Questionable Authority has an especially impassioned plea.

DonorsChoose is an organization where teachers across the country can submit a project with a wishlist for funding.  Donors can shop the projects, select one that resonates, and then provide funds–any portion of the requested amount.

DonorsChoose is doing a blog challenge for the month of October, and yours truly, OmegaMom, has decided to toss her hat into the ring to see if I can get my readers to pony up some funding for some very simple requests.

I’ve selected three projects.  One is a teacher who would like to have a heavy-duty electric pencil sharpener for her classroom.  Another is a teacher who needs staplers.  A third is a teacher who needs dry-erasers for her whiteboards.

Now.  Just sit there and think about this for a little while.  Pencil sharpeners.  Staplers.  Dry erasers.

We’re not talking particle accelerators here.  Nothing fancy.  Nothing that requires large amounts of money.  Pretty basic supplies.

In fact, the amounts needed for these projects are so small that it makes me sad.  My stapler teacher needs $134 for a bunch of heavy-duty staplers to use in the classroom.  The teacher who wants the pencil sharpener has used manual sharpeners and has previously snagged one from a closing school (!!), and they keep breaking.  The dry-eraser person made his/her own white boards for the students a few years ago, but needs a constant supply of markers and erasers.

Help OmegaMom buy staplers, pencil sharpeners, and dry erasers at DonorsChoose.  I’m going to stick my donation thermometer over in the sidebar.  OmegaMom gets an average of about 100 readers per day; if each of my readers dropped $5.20 into the donation bin, these three teachers would get their projects funded.

Don’t get me started, though, on the sad commentary this makes on the amount of money spent on, say, NCLB versus plain teaching supplies…grrr.

(Ahem.  Just realized that this could be construed as an attempt to guilt my readers into dropping $$.  Naw, please don’t feel pressured, it’s an experiment.  Whatever we collect will be more than $0 [I’m dropping a few dollars myself], so that’s all too the good.)

(Also, I’d like to clarify #34 in my last post–it reads as if I were saying that bloggers who are similar in thought/tone as yourself [me] aren’t interesting.  Ahem.  Not at all what I meant–I meant to include the second group as “interesting bloggers who are not similar in tone or style or thought as yourself”.  Now I’ll go somewhere and write 100 times on a blackboard, “I will try to write more clearly.”)

So.  Doin’ the Snoopy Dance here.  Just proud and bustin’ out all over about it.

Jack and Annie #485,271 is called “Carnival at Candlelight”.

We finished it last night (our first chapter book!).  The dotter wanted to look at the cover.  She started sounding out the word “Carnival”.

“Kuh…kah…kaarrrr…karrrennn…karneh…karnehvvvv…karnehval…”

She sounded it all out on her own.  And then she sounded out “at” and “candlelight”.  And though she needed help with the “juh” sound in “magic”, she sounded that and “tree” and “house” out.

(It’s “karnEHval” because I was pronouncing it the Spanish/Italian way because it’s a specific holiday, rather than a carnival at the fair.)

Woohoo!

Don’t push, don’t push, don’t push, says OmegaMom to herself.  Let her do it at her own pace, says OmegaMom to herself.  Don’t push!

Speaking of pushing, Jiaozi has a great series of posts up about the kindergarden experience kids encounter these days.  Read ‘em and weep.  I am so thankful that the dotter’s kindergarden (so far) is relatively laid back–they’re doing a letter a week, a number a week, things that the dotter already knows, but they’re doing it slowly and gently and not pushing it which gives the kids time to just…be kids, get to know each other, learn the rules of the school game.

OmegaBro, my fuddy duddy brother, has a (gasp, it’s not possible!) 13-year-old and 11-year-old, and has been dismayed by the amount of homework and pushing they’ve gotten in all their school districts.  There’s a lot of debate about the role of homework and the necessity of homework and how much homework kids should do…but there’s my Ph.D. bro who doesn’t remember doing that much homework in elementary school and still managed to get three college degrees trying to figure out what is best for his kids.

I read to the dotter.  She loves to write words, so we’ve been working together on sounding things out so she knows what letters to use–”What sound starts ‘horse’?  Huh-huh-huh.”  “Rrrrr–what’s that?”  “What’s the last sound?  Horssssse.”  And suddenly she’s turning it around into looking at letters and turning it into a sound, rather than taking a sound and turning it into a letter.  I’m pleased as punch, and I’m pleased that we haven’t made it a chore or made her dislike it, and I’m desperately holding myself in check so that she discovers how much fun reading can be (once you practice it) all on her own.  There’s a small amount of dismay in the foreshadowing on her reading coloring page that she is to turn in once a month to Mrs. Shoehook–this year, the kids are just coloring in an item for each day they are read to or read; next year, we’re going to have to specify how many minutes we’ve read/she’s read, and how many pages.  Sigh.  I just want her to learn to love it.

Today, OmegaMom went to a scary place that she had never entered before.

It had large, echoing hallways filled with strange people.  Slashes of vivid colors.  Odd smells.  Strange sounds.

She felt a frisson of fear as she opened the large doorway and walked in…

…to the local elementary school’s “Register your kindergarten open house”.

AIYEEEEEE!

No!

It’s not possible!  OmegaDotter is not that old yet!  No, no, NO!

But, yes, she is.  And the school seemed just wonderful.

I reserve my right to be dubious in the future, but the kindergarten teachers were nice, the “activity center” lady was enthusiastic, the hallways were bright and cheery and covered with colorful artwork, it sounds like fun…

OmegaDotter was thrilled.  She loved it.  She kept asking me, on the drive to ballet class, just when “autumn” was, and why was it going to take so long?

I will admit, when I realized that we were actually there, actually getting the packet to register her for (::gasp!::) kindergarten, that this was a Real Live School that we were looking at, my heart skipped a beat or two.

Man, how is this possible?  It’s way too soon!

Technorati: Kindergarten