I have a fairly predictable routine right now. The mornings are devoted to my various writing projects. The early afternoon segues into errands and exercise. After 3, the boys suck up all the attention, until Steve gets home around 6:45. When things are going smoothly, it’s a very nice and well-rounded day. Lately, the work time is bleeding into the errand time, so we don’t have paper for the printer or butter in the fridge. The kids have a lot going on, so I’m attending school concerts and fielding phone calls from the school bureaucracy during work time. The house needs some repair work, so I have workers stopping in to give us estimates during dinner time. Routines are off, in other words.
We’re in the process of moving Ian from one special ed program to a different one. Right now, he attends a regional transitional autistic program in a public school about 30 minutes away. Ian’s program caters to kids who can be mainstreamed for some classes, but need supports and additional help in a special classroom. Ian goes to a regular fourth grade class for math, social studies, and specials, but his home base is the special classroom. His teacher helps him out with reading and social skills. He gets extra help with speech and handwriting.
In the fall, he’ll move to a similar program in our new town. Since the town budget passed this spring, there will be room for him in this school. I attended a bunch of meetings this spring about the switch. Steve and I are very worried about the transition. We’re worried about how Ian will handle this big switch, and we’re worried about the program itself. Will there be kids who have similar strengths and weakness as our kid? Will he really be a part of the new school? Will the teachers have the right training? But it will be nice to have Ian finally in the same school district as Jonah. Maybe he’ll even get to know other kids in town.
Other than the programmatic concerns, Ian has been very low maintenance this year. His speech continues to improve. And he’s generally a super happy kid, who gives us no grief.
Jonah had some bumps this year, as he made his own transition to teenager land. We had to readjust our parenting style, so we had some of our own bumps. Being a teenager is more than just managing the fuzz on the upper lip and the mood swings. It also about gaining certain life skills.
This spring, Jonah had to learn to take ownership of his responsibilities, and we had to learn to let him make mistakes. For example, if he has four hours to do four homework assignments, he can’t spend four hours on the first assignment and then rush the last three assignments. He had to learn to manage his time. It’s very, very hard to sit back and let him fuck up, but he needs to fuck up in order to learn. So, I had to learn to detach myself from the situation.
Jonah also had to learn how to recover quickly from adversity. In December, a substitute included his name along with the usual suspects on a list of boys who were disruptive. The main teacher punished Jonah and the usual suspects with three days of lunchroom detention, which involved sitting in a chair silently for the lunch period. No reading or homework allowed.
Jonah was outraged, because he said that he wasn’t disruptive. He said that he didn’t say a single word during the entire class period. Since Jonah has never been in trouble even once since kindergarten, I believed him. Jonah wanted me to correct this injustice. But I didn’t. I didn’t call the school. I didn’t want to use up my one “outraged parent phone call,” in case I needed to use it again in the future for something big. I also wanted Jonah to learn how to deal when unfair things happen in the future, because unfair things happen all the time when you’re a grown up.
I’m still not sure that I did the right thing by not intervening. Did I teach him to be submissive to authority? Did he lose trust in me? Sometimes parenting is tough.
Apt. 11d 
Oh, poor Jonah and poor you re the unfair punishment. The first thing I’d say is that I wouldn’t necessarily believe him. I know that’s an awful thing to say, but I’ve seen any number of kids lie or simply misinterpret their role in a situation. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people. It just means they’re kids. I think you did right not to intervene because it’s not simply about learning that unfair things happen but that you have to deal with situations yourself. I tried and failed to get S to deal with what she considered (and I agreed) was an unfair lunchroom policy in 5th grade, and I urged her to write a letter to her principal to explain why the lunchroom aides were being unfair. She wouldn’t. I told her that then she would have to live with it.
Yet I get what you’re saying about being submissive to authority. I see it in my college students all the time. I prefer to treat my 18 year old college students as adults. I’m not there to punish them. They’re paying good money for me to teach them something useful and/or interesting. Yet they still act (and sometimes it is acting, and sometimes it is habit) submissive to me. I don’t want submissive students. I want students who demand answers and ideas from me. I’m still trying to figure out how to do this, especially when a growing minority are from cultures where the student-teacher relationship is seen as a submissive one.
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The sub couldn’t pick Jonah out of a lineup, I bet. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, it’s just that there’s no chance of ever getting to the bottom of the case.
I still have nightmares occasionally where I have a totally new class, I don’t know the names of any of the kids, and I don’t have a lesson planned. Being a substitute means living that nightmare every day.
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I’m really horrible with names of kids at my son’s school. I’m even worse with the names of their parents. I keep them separate in my head, but you can’t actually call somebody “The mom who wears yoga pants everywhere” or “dad who swears at kiddie soccer refs.”
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Teaching one’s children to maintain a proper relationship to authority is an issue I have wrestled with also. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that there is no clear answer to the question in adult life. When should we obey the government (or the individual policeman), when should we resist silently, when should we protest, when should we rebel? And the same questions apply to the (private sector) boss, landlord etc.
I have mostly inculcated my own approach of internal disrespect combined with, usually, external obedience. That may not be the best approach to life, but it is my own (and my wife’s too, really). Our daughter will ultimately have to figure this one out for herself.
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This is a tough one for us, too. In general, we are not squeaky wheels. We also think that there’s a lot of entitlement in the attitudes of children around us, and that it actually is entitlement to demand that life always be fair. What we hope is to teach them that they are owed justice and fairness about the important things. But that less important things aren’t worth the battles, but even more important, they’re not worth the systems that would have to be in place to demand fairness and justice in the school. If a sub has to follow the constitutional protections of due process in order to maintain classroom order, we’ll loose out on classroom order (just like we do give up some security for freedom).
So we would have let this one go, too. If we were confident that our kid wasn’t disruptive, we might try to figure out, with the kid, why the mistake was made (were they with disruptive kids? was some behavior classified as disruptive without our child knowing about it? in an extreme, were they picked on because of their race/gender?). Then, depending on the answer, we might sympathize or suggest behavior modifications or suggest that though they’ll have to deal with the punishment, we believe their innocence.
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I would not have interfered, either. But if he really felt that he was treated unjustly, I would have had him write a respectful letter to the main teacher with his side of the story.
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Middle school memories. Subs often get names wrong. I happen to think it’s a mistake for teachers to single out students for misbehavior after the fact which the teacher didn’t witness. As I recall, our eldest “got in trouble” for such an incident for misbehavior with a sub. It was a neat trick, as she was not in the classroom at the time. On that occasion, we let her “handle it” herself, which she did by talking with the teacher. She was furious; it lessened her trust in that teacher. As she pointed out, the teacher had to have known that she would never have done anything with that group of troublemakers–even if it had been good behavior!
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This is the age when they have to start handling these things themselves, unless the issue turns so serious that it has lifetime consequences (jail, suspension, expulsion, . . . .).
It’s tough, though. I’ve noticed for a while that all parents want their kids to be judged by their outlier positive skills, while being supported in the other skills. But, to function in the real world, they really have to learn the whole package, right? the brilliant math skills, but also how to talk to the teacher if you think they’re wrong or how to fix the error in the computer and all the rest.
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Since others have commented on the situation with the sub (and I think, while difficult, it was smart to not get involved), I think the bigger issue is time management. Teaching children these skills at a young age is crucial. And, I think you need to let children fail in order to succeed. Of course, how does one teach their children good time management skills? A friend really helped her children to “break down large assignments over time” and I see the eldest child who finished sophomore year at college succeeding wildly.
I think it’s laudable to note, “we’ve adjusted our parenting style.” This shows that you are adapting as your children adapt.
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Kudos to you for actually letting your son learn a valuable lesson. Too many well-meaning parents claim ad nauseum that it is so important to “let their kids fail” but they never seem to actually have the stomach for it.
I still carry the lessons of the two school injustices I was victim of with me after all these years. It has taught me empathy – people can be falsely accused of all manner of things. Eyewitness testimony is suspect. There are times to push back, there are times to just accept.
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Once our children hit middle school age, we ask, “Do you want us to contact the school?” 99% of the time, they will say no. It does let them know, though, that we are not dismissing their claims out of hand.
Our default inclination is to let the kid handle things himself, with role play of appropriate approaches to adults in authority if necessary. There is a period in adolescence in which teens will wildly misinterpret adult intentions and reactions. Giving them a framework to interpret adults helps them to not overreact. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/onereason.html)
I would not dismiss a teen’s account, “oh, that teacher hates me” out of hand, though. It is possible, if not nearly as common as teens think. Some people just don’t like each other. Sometimes they’re a teacher and a student.
The hardest part is learning when to step in. In my opinion, a parent should step in when a student is being tracked into low-level courses. Scheduling courses is a thankless job. On the other hand, a kid tracked into a low-level course will not get out of it, because he won’t have the prerequisites for more challenging courses. In my opinion, schools function as sorting mechanisms. A parent willing to visit the Guidance Department and sit there can get results.
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Regarding tracking, obviously it depends on the school. Our daughter managed to get herself transferred from the low (no calc) math group to the medium (AB calc) group entirely by her own efforts (i.e., she worked hard, did well in class and possibly mentioned to the teacher that she could handle more). This meant a lot more than it would have if we, like some other parents, had called the headmistress and complained.
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“This meant a lot more than it would have if we, like some other parents, had called the headmistress and complained.”
Yes, it does. My kiddo is shy about asking for what she feels she deserves and it is the skill that we work the most on. Parents, teachers, friends can only look out for you so much; eventually you are in situations where it is is only your responsibility to make sure you are treated fairly.
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PS: I’ll add that all the data shows that asking for what is fair is a particular problem for girls and women, and thus, an important skill to get them work on that early.
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Y81, that sort of flexibility comes with private school tuition. Other schools are not able or willing to change student placements.
Using her interpersonal skills, a cousin was able to talk the school guidance department out of placing her son into Multi Media Art, rather than chemistry. The guidance department had a bias against students taking a standard college-prep curriculum. (They were also not convinced that anyone should take more than one (1) AP a year.) As that particular high school did not offer calculus at that time, knowing her son had parental backup persuaded the guidance department to approve an independent study in calculus, rather than, I suppose, Multi Media Art or Personal Finance. (Note to Amy P: Yes, it’s probably not a bad idea to take a course in personal finance, if competently taught.) This kid is now a successful college student, majoring in the hard sciences at university. He wanted and needed the sort of college prep curriculum which is standard in the suburbs.
Different high school. A friend managed to get her high honors kid into honors math, by dint of camping out in the guidance department. This kid is now successfully attending a top 20 university. This high school tells students right out, they may not receive the schedule they want or need. Some students didn’t have suitable schedules until well into the fall term this year.
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