I’m in the mood to write something political, but nothing is catching my attention right now. Domestically, we’re on hold as the cabinet gets reshuffled. Can’t say much about that, other than “nice color system, Ridge.” And the major things that are going on, like the Ukraine, are outside of my expertise. Can’t say much, other than “go good guys.” I thought about writing about the recent developments in NY’s school finance case, which is important and all, but snore-city.
In the two minutes that I have before Ian wakes up for his nap, let me just write something personal.
Tonight I have Jonah’s parent-teacher conference, and I’m torn about what to say.
On the one hand, he’s certainly not being challenged. He’s coloring pages in workbooks (god, I hate workbooks) that are so easy. Big v. little. Red v. Yellow. He adds in his head now and could be doing much more advanced stuff at school. Same for reading.
On the other, he’s having a good time. He likes his friends. He likes getting everything right. At this age, isn’t having fun more important than doing sums?
Do I say anything to the teacher? I could risk alienating her and getting a reputation. But he really should be challenged. Not only because being challenged is good, but because our world is getting more competitive. Should I worry about competition from more driven nations? Do our kids need to be smarter than we are?
Apt. 11d 
Doesn’t most of the evidence seem to indicate that we’ve gotten progressively stupider (as a nation, as a relative matter) from at least the 1960s? We’ve had some bad times during that time, but we’ve had some awfully good times as well. So I’m suspicious about claims about economic primacy resting strictly on intelligence (which, I thought the claim was, is primarily genetic) or smartness (which I assume incorporates education).
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I don’t know that we need our kids to be smarter than us, but it’d sure be nice. However, isn’t this more a question of the speed of development? Just because you cram a kid’s head with stuff faster doesn’t mean he’ll necessarily get farther. I think giving a child the tools to succeed is more in teaching them how to think in a critical manner and make decisions versus things they will learn by rote (state capitals, etc).
Doesn’t the “flashcards from the womb” concept backfire sometimes? Anecdotally speaking, relations of mine were crammed with knowledge from birth, but it didn’t ensure success or their ability to make good life decisions in any manner. The “volume over quality” sort of thinking may, in fact, have closed doors for them.
Hey, I’m no expert; just an anecdote, a little food for thought. You tell me. Love the blog; I’ve been reading it since its earlier incarnation.
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I was just about to ask if our kids will know to ask if they’re smarter than “us” or than “we are.” You beat me to it.
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I want my kids to be smart, but more importantly, I want them to be happy. A long time ago, I read that Emotional Quotient book about different kinds of intelligence and I really liked it. Not perfect, to be sure, but I like the idea of encouraging people to appreciate skills in different areas. I always feel smarter than the teachers when I go to conferences (I am an A.B.D. which doesn’t help), so I usually just try to listen to what they say and appreciate that they have a tough job. No way would I want to be in a room full of 9 year olds. But I have questioned what they’re doing with my kids when I felt it was appropriate.
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I would pose another question – do our kids need to be intellectually challenged from the get-go? Obviously, the answer is yes.
But the conundrum is not what they learn in school it’s what they (and you) bring to school that matters most.
I speak about this because my wife teaches kindergarten and we constantly have this discussion about what part parenting has in a child’s progress at school?
Based on what my wife tells me the most important factor of a young child’s development at school is the child’s home environment. And the most important attribute or trait (according to my wife) that the child must have to be successful at school is “love”.
If that child is loved (feed & clothed is nice too) he/she will find comfort in the classroom (because most classrooms are loving places). Without that underpinning the child in confronted with myriad problems that can only be addressed by the parent and/or eventually by CPS. (Hunger, anger, poverty are all issues that impact the ability of that child to learn and grow.)
However, most parents (so I’m told) expect the school to do the bulk of teaching. Most feel that the school or teacher should shoulder all the responsibility for the educational growth of that child. My wife is fond of saying that she should be teaching the parents rather than the children – because for some reason most parents (regardless of socioeconomic circumstances) aren’t very good at parenting or teaching their children how to behave or learn. (An example would be parents jerking kid out of school because of a particular curriculum or class – and then blaming the school for not teaching the kids the correct values/behaviors. Is it not the parents’ job to teach values and respect – not the schools?) I digress…
It is not merely a question of should our children be smarter than us – it’s a question of can we contribute to a positive cycle of learning and growing so they are not forced to live by our standards of smartness/dumbness but rather they find their own level of excitement and joy in learning.
They can only learn that joyful process from you the parent.
I believe that it’s teachers like my wife (who give so much love to her kids) who can contribute mightily to a child’s smartness – but it’s the love of learning that you give them that matters most.
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Is your son happy? Or is he bored? If the latter, more challenge—no need to alienate the teacher, unless she is terribly ridgey she will want to do the right thing for your child too.
If he’s happy at school (I seem to remember he’s quite young from previous posts) don’t worry yet. Its the boredom that will hurt him.
I think the sort of challenge that stimulates intelligence hardly ever comes from school—school is about a uniform toolset (most and especially public school, at least). Playing after school has more challenge for intelligence that anything in the classroom. If he’s happy and succesful early in the process, he’s going to expect more of himself when things get a little harder.
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I like what Dan said, but most teachers never phrase things that way. When I go to parent-teacher night, all they talk about is curriculum. Here’s what we do in math, science, etc. I want to know what their philosophy is. I want to know what I can do to help. The only session close to this that I recall was my son’s kindergarten where the teacher actually said what time she thought our kids should go to bed and that they should have a good breakfast. Some people might have been offended by that, but I wasn’t. I thought that there might have been people there who didn’t know what was appropriate. For example, my son has difficulty keeping up with homework. The teacher didn’t have any suggestions for what we might do at home to make things better–even after I asked. Heck, this is my first time through this. She might have some insight. Anyway, now that I’m totally off topic . . . 😉
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I had a similar situation last year with my oldest (now a first grader). At the first parent-teacher conference the teacher told me: “Do not expect her to be reading by the end of the year.” She explained that they did not teach the kids to read at all in kindergarten. There was no justification and I was speechless. My daughter was (and is) no prodigy, but she’d been writing letters and making rudimentary attempts at reading for about 2 years by the time she started kindergarten. I felt that she was more than ready to begin formal reading instruction. The result of that policy was that at the end of the year my child, who had spent 35 hours/week in school from September to May, couldn’t do and didn’t know, much more at the end of the year than she had at the beginning. She liked some aspects of school but academically it was boring. For those who argue that school isn’t all about academics my response would be: then what is it about? If she wasn’t in kindergarten to begin to learn to read, manipulate numbers and other academic subjects, then why was she taken from my custody 35 hours/week?
She’s at a different school this year because I have a job teaching at the new school. We like it a lot better, but we’re still having issues (like the monthly multiple choice history tests where getting two answers wrong is a B and the students have already figured out that an A is good and a B is embarrassing but they cannot describe what they are learning in history class). Since I’m teaching at this school (and struggling with assessment issues myself), I have no idea whether I should broach the topic and if I do, what to say.
Anyway, I believe that if a child is ready to learn to read/do arithmetic/write cursive/whatever, we (parents, schools) should support that by providing the lessons and materials the children need to master these skills and gain that knowledge. Giving them coloring pages might be entertaining, but it does not support the learning process as much as I think it should.
Good luck with the conference!
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The issue of pushing young children academically has been on my mind all week. Not only did I have concerns that my five year wasn’t being challenged enough, but I’ve been also checking out pre-schools for next year for my two year old. I sat in on a Montessori program yesterday. I had been impressed with reading skills of other children who have been through the program and liked the idea that children can progress at their own rate.
But i was disappointed by what I saw. The kids were discouraged from playing with each other. There was no pile of kids pushing cars around the room and joking, as kids do at that age, about potty jokes. The kids were industriously working on projects. But maybe too industriously for kids that age. There was no development of social skills. Little opportunity to be creative.
I don’t want my kids to be bored at school. I barely remember elementary school, because I was bored out of my mind and daydreaming about Narnia or Underdog or something.
The opposite of bored doesn’t have to be super industrious. I don’t want them to be serious too quickly. To lose the chance to experiment and to play. I don’t want them to be too serious, but is that a foolish desire considering changing global economics?
What happens at my kid’s school is extremely important to me, because school has him for far more time than I do. He gets home at 3:30. There’s not much time for me to do much with him between outside play, dinner, bath, bedtime stories, and bed by 7:00.
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I was completely and utterly underchallenged throughout grade school. I turned out OK.
Actually, while it would be stupid to go too far down this strip, I think there is something to be said about learning to handle boredom. There are times that I get the sense with the students I teach (they’re at a super-elite northeastern university) that folks have been so solicitous about their boredom, careful to engage them fully, at every single moment of their lives. It follows that they are seriously deficient for the most part in the auto-didacticism category – which is the most important one, in school and out…
I taught myself almost everything I came to know through 8th grade. And way more importantly, I taught myself to teach myself…
(BTW 11D – my Pre-K to Grade 2 years of boredom were spent at St. John’s School, Hillsdale, NJ. And then we moved to Morristown and the rest is history).
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Your kids are smarter than you, already! My daughter is in fifth grade now. Starting in about third grade or so, I began to notice how much more is expected of her than was expected of me (or at least what I remember was expected of me) at that age. Could she be pushed more? Perhaps. But she also has her own specific array of things she is good at and things she needs to work more on. The general expectations, however, seem much more rigorous. She clearly reads a heck of a lot more, and is assigned much more reading than I was at her age. She writes more, and has more formal attention paid to her writing, than I did. You’ll be happy to know that the University of Chicago Everyday Mathematics program introduces pre-algebra concepts in fifth grade. I am sure I did not see such things until seventh or so. So, I agree with those who say don’t worry if your son is not bored and having fun at school. The challenge will increase. And you will lose even more time with him when you have to deal with an hour or more of homework a night…
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Like everyone else, we want to find a balance between play and work, between boredom and pressure. A little bit of both is good (I really like what CR had to say about learning to handle boredom, and the social deficiencies that may follow from having lived an overly-attended and solicited life.) Basically, it’s important try as hard as one can to create a world at home which can respond well to where one’s child is at any given time, to give them space or to selectively pressure them as appropriate. Right now Megan, our third-grader, isn’t being challenged in school at all when it comes to reading: there’s no real encouragement for her to read longer, more challenging books, to expand her vocabulary and imagination. So Melissa has volunteered to read to Megan’s class once a week, and talks with the librarian, and we both throw books at Megan at home and keep after her to improve her reading. She’s gotten ahead of many of her classmates in this area (after a slow start; in first grade she was still lagging behind), but if we don’t supplement the best efforts of her teacher, her skills in this area may well atrophy.
With math it’s the opposite. While she can certainly handle the math she’s getting in the classroom, it’s not a snap for her; she has to work at it, which is good. Neither Melissa nor I are particularly interested in indoctrinating Megan at this point in the norms of the meritocratic world awaiting them, but we do want to her to learn how to adapt to and learn new things. Who knows? Maybe next year, or the year after, it’ll be math or something else that we’ll need to supplement, while her reading teachers will be giving her all she can handle.
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Learning to handle boredom, make-work, and mindless worksheet drills — these are valuable skills that will serve Jonah well on his journey through school and probably on his journey through the workforce as well. Even exciting, high-dollar real jobs have boring mindless worksheet elements.
It’d be nice if the world were designed to challenge, stimulate, and enrich our minds. It isn’t. It pretty much goes along, each organism doing its own thing, without regard to whether or not you and I find the end result intellectually exciting. *Can* we live in a world where our minds are challenged, stimulated, and enriched? If we choose to do so, yes… but we’ve gotta make it happen for ourselves.
I’m not saying that you have to spend every waking moment looking at the world in new and different ways (your eyes would get tired, for starters) but be open to the learning opportunities that are available in everyday life. For Jonah, be prepared to enrich outside of school if he has interests that aren’t addressed by school. He is young and may not be able to enrich himself yet.
(What sort of learning opportunities am I talking about? Nothing earth-shattering. I learned something interesting about making grilled cheese sandwiches last night as I was fixing dinner… see here.)
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Nice discussion on here…
Along the same lines: it’s the same thing that terrifies me about those tvs that you see mounted in SUVs and minivans all the time now. Is there any better situation for helping the little one to get in touch with him/herself than those long, long car trips. Is there any situation in which you learn more about the world you live in than in staring out the window on your way somewhere?
What kind of world will these children expect to enter when they mature?
God, can you remember how long car trips seemed when you were young? How quickly everything flies past now? What would you have missed if you had missed those empty hours?
But now we’re heading for entertain/medicate/entertain/medicate/entertain… Are we really surprised?
(And I’m not an anti-tv guy in general, was raised in part in front of it, and once again, I’m OK… It’s the tv in cars that really scares me…)
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Wow…a variety of thoughts on this subject! I’ll add my two cents. It’s extremely important that kids be able to play, be creative, and develop the social skills that come with these tasks–especially for boys! (I could also go into a long tangent about how are schools are doing a diservice to boys on a number of levels in the classroom, but I’ll refrain.) But, it’s NOT ok to be bored in the classroom. Children should be given the opportunity to develop to their FULL potential.
All that said, please DO NOT be afraid to speak with your childs teacher. I have a very bright kindergartener with a wonderful teacher that has worked very hard to keep him engaged in learning this year. She has told us bluntly that she fears he’s a strong candidate for “tuning out” in the classroom because he’s so far ahead of the curriculum. At our last parent teacher conference, she told us she’s throwing out the math workbook for him because in her words, “he’s bored out of his mind” with it. Instead, she’s giving him more challenging individual work. As for reading, she’s giving him the tests from first grade rather than her own because he’s already reading books.
My question is, what happens in first grade?
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Some random thoughts:
Until I began investigating classical education, I used to appreciate the fun and games approach to learning. But consider the education the great minds received. Even the education available just a few generations ago, say, your grandparents’ era, while maybe not classical, was certainly more rigorous than we have today. If it was good enough for them…
I don’t think it hurts to push academically; it’s when children are over booked with all the extracurriculars everyone suffers. They still need time to explore and be creative, to just enjoy and get to know their world.
The book I’m currently reading, Climbing Parnassus, has an interesting bit about the duty of training students to become ideal citizens. The author, Tracy Lee Simmons, introduces Vittorino da Feltre, founder of the Renaissance’s Casa Giocosa school: “Vittorino believed in opportunity for all — or at least all of the talented. He too held that nature had not fit all people for learning. To get the most out of study, one needed not simply capacity for learning, but a “taste” for it; learning ought not to be forced upon a student unequal to its rigors and intellectual largesse.”
I was fortunate to find a school for my four year old that balances academics and playtime, sort of a Montessori Plus environment. They have their work time and their play time. Maybe you just missed the free play part of the day? My older two are homeschooled and will continue to be unless I can find a better fit for them academically.
Go with your gut. If you think your little ones have the capacity and the taste, go for it. If you feel he’s not being sufficiently challenged, speak up. You can always supplement.
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P.S. We are by no means “flashcard” parents! This kid is just a sponge and he’s learning at his own speed.
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several points, which I’ll try to keep quick:
1. We had the parent-teacher conference last night and I was very, very diplomatic about Jonah’s ability v. the worksheets. But she was deadset against giving him more difficult assignments. Enrichment starts in January, I was told. I told her about the work that we do with Jonah at home, and she singularly uninterested. She has no interest in working jointly with parents or making any alterations in lesson plans. She told us to have him practice making better m’s.
2. I really don’t think we should be training our children to be mindless bureaucrats in school. I don’t think the boredom of waiting around for the teacher to move to a different assignment and then listen to a lesson plan that you know backwards and forwards is good for children. I think we should be training them to be creative, to take challenges, to push themselves, to question rules. No, them don’t need to be entertained with videos or catered to by doting instructors. But the school day could seriously be condensed to four hours and then for the other two hours, they could be taking hikes, reading books, doing community service, getting a job, painting, whatever.
I don’t think we should romanticize boredom.
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CR — Just saw in the local paper that andrew guiliani goes to St. John’s. They had a big picture of Rudy at the last football game. Donna must live somewhere in the area.
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Given your experience in the conference, you’re either dealing with a teacher who is way old-school, overwhelmed & overworked, or both. (I guess there is always the third option: a teacher with no imagination.)
You know your child best—and each child (and each person) learns in an at least slightly different way. Push on the system wherever you can to get what you think he needs. Don’t worry about the theories, and too much or too little, you’ll do right (assuming you’re not hyper anxious within your own agenda, which doesn’t sound likely based on your writing) because you are in tune with your baby. Check with other parents in older grades, they can give you tactical tips and flag the dragons, both teachers and administrators. Another useful process, if you have any time at all and the system allows it, is to volunteer in you boy’s class. Just assume overall that the public education system is an antiquated relic of the 1880s, saved only from utterly ruining its inhabitants by the heroic activities of a large minority of teachers and a smaller one of administrators. You know best!
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I wasn’t really thinking of boredom as being bored between or during a lesson, but more like the downtime one naturally finds during a day. It sounds like your conference didn’t go so well. I said somewhere that I always feel smarter than the teachers and probably will until at least high school. Which means, I think, that most of the time I know what is best for my child. It’s hard to convey that diplomatically. I’ve usually been encouraged to do things with my children even if I don’t get much direction about it. It’s too bad that your teacher didn’t see you as a partner. I like your idea about using down time for other things–like hiking, painting, etc. In the older grades, I’m afraid, that time is used to teach to the test. Sigh.
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What a great discussion.
I feel like a slacker parent sometimes because I honestly don’t care if my 5 year old is reading or doing math or whatever. (But she’s still in preschool, so it’s a little different from the school age children.)
What I *do* care about is that she is developing a love for learning…a love for exploring…a love for reading.
Does it really matter if they are reading in Kindergarten vs. First Grade? Or adding sums in their head in first grade vs. second grade? Eventually, they’ll all be reading and adding.
My daughter is starting to read. But not because of any program or lessons or workbooks or flashcards. She just started getting really interested in it and started to figure it out. Pretty much on her own. (Though we do a lot of reading at home.)
If she spends her entire day at preschool coloring pictures, I think that’s fine. Maybe she’s coloring dinosaurs and when she gets home, we’ll look them up in our dinosaut book and read all about them. Coloring may not be challenging to her…but as long as it is something she enjoys and is interested in, is it bad?
Again, this is preschool…so it’s a bit different from a school age child. But I seriously know more than a few people that are upset because their *preschool* isn’t teaching their kids how to read.
My philsophy might change dramatically next year, when she starts public school. But for now, my only “goal” for her is to enjoy the process of learning and learn how to “learn.”
And I’m really curious: Why the letter “m”. Why not, say, the “q” or the “g”? How can one single out a particular letter? Seems odd….
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