Part Parent

“… and what about this last section?” I ask.  

“It’s Writing.  Sentence Improvement.”

“So how will you do these?”

“Read the sentence first to see if anything sounds off.  Then trim it — cross out interrupters, prepositional phrases and modifiers.  Eliminate the wrong answers.  Guess if I have to.

“How many will you do?”

“At least half, but they go easy to hard, so if I need to I’ll skip the last ones.”

“Very good.”  I close the book.  “I think you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she says, and she means it. “This helped, like, so much.”

I walk her out to the living room, say goodbye to her dad.  “I’ll miss seeing you — ” I say, and mean it just as much.

“I know; me, too,” she laughs.

“I’m proud of you,” I finish.  “I know you’re going to do a great job.  Let me know how it goes.”

“We’ll call you with the results,” her dad says, as they close the door.  “Thanks again.”

I wave, turn on the porch light, lock the deadbolt behind them.  

That fluttery feeling — out in the real world, what will happen? Will she meet her goals?  Did I do my job?

This must be what it’s like, interrupts my subconscious.  Being a parent.

True Grit, and Other Virtues

The recent education issue of the New York Times had lots of great fodder for discussion and / or blogging. After the Russian pieces, I read an excellent feature that brings together two highly-rated headmasters — one from a charter school in low-income Harlem, one from a staggeringly expensive country school in Riverdale — to discuss the difference between great students and great people.

The difference, of course (of course!) is character.  And they have admirably narrowed down that nebulous category to eight key ideas like zest (enthusiasm,) grit (perseverence,) and my favority, curiosity (wanting to know just for the sake of knowing.)  They promote these virtues with posters, lessons and even a character report card on which each student is ranked by all of his teachers.

Can you teach virtue, as such? It’s a perplexing question, one I’m sure every parent would love to be able to answer.  Children need to see examples of it in action, of course, but they also need to learn what “it” is and why it is not only honorable, but useful (the charter program first began studying character in an effort to learn why more of their students didn’t go on to finish college.)  Maybe this is the way, or the way to the way.

Beyond the Call

Between construction delays, two hurricanes and an earthquake, things were off to a slow start this year, and administrators pleaded with us to be flexible in rescheduling events whose dates had already come and gone before classes began in earnest.  One casualty was Back-to-School Night, which was rescheduled twice and finally combined into one massive evening of upperclassmen, underclassmen and teachers.

The fun part of Back-to-School Night is watching the parents rush around, confused and harried, trying to find the classrooms their daughters use every day.  They take the stairs and arrive, huffing and puffing, with just as much anxiety as the students.  “Am I in the right room?  Did the bell already ring?  What did I miss?”  This is supposed to make them empathize with the students, but I think it has the same effect on us — when we see how difficult it is for an adult to keep pace, we’re a little more forgiving of the children of whom we expect so much.

This year, however, my grad school schedule interfered with the event, and I didn’t want to miss the second class after (due to an e-mail problem) I had been completely unprepared for the first one.  My principal was kind enough to excuse me once I told her I was planning to let the families of my students know ahead of time.  

So I wrote a letter and made sixty copies of it to send home with my students.  Their parents read and signed (and some even added a “Thank you” at the bottom, which warmed my heart.)  In compiling the notes, of course, some were missing, so the afternoon of the event I sat down with the school directory and spoke to about a dozen answering machines and one slightly-confused relative.

For the handful whose phone service wasn’t working (full voicemail, no voicemail, dead end) I resorted to e-mail, sending out a note with the same message: I was sorry to miss them, I had posted a copy of my class policies online, and they should feel free to contact me if they had any questions.  All told, the communication took at least as long as the event itself.

So it was lovely, the next morning, to receive an e-mail from one parent who was grateful for the communication, which she said was “beyond the call.”  She added that her daughter, typically a math person, was “actually looking forward to English this year, so you have made a great impression.”  

Sometimes one little note is all it takes.  This one is going in my portfolio for sure.

Going to Extremes

Next time you’re looking to kill half an hour, read this fascinating trilogy of pieces about an American family who placed their three children in a Russian-language school in Moscow.  They first floundered, but finally found their footing and flourished.  (Accidental alliteration?  Never.)

My thoughts about their experience were very strong, but also very conflicted:

1. Good for them!  Not enough kids get to have an experience like that.
2. Would the kids have wanted that experience, though, if they had asked them?
3. Of course not.  Left to their own devices, most kids won’t even brush their teeth.
4. Is education supposed to be stressful to the point at which kids don’t have enough energy to have fun on the weekends — only to recover?
5. That kind of attitude has landed our country at the bottom of the test-score pile.
6. Who cares about test scores?  Are they really learning?
7. They’re learning a foreign language, and fluently!  You know you would have loved to do that as a kid.
8. Yes, but I would have wanted it to be my decision, and I would have wanted it to be in a less insular and pampered environment.  For $10,000 in yearly tuition, they should be flying to the moon by now.
9. Your own school costs more than that.  So does the school where you teach.
10. My school’s not in Moscow.
11. Moscow has the fourth-highest cost of living in the world.  Baltimore isn’t even ranked.
12. Are you actually doing Internet research to support your argument against yourself?
13.  … 

It disintegrated further from there, but I’m not settled, even if the odds seem to have won the day.  Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting story.

A Different Way of Thinking

So my first-period students are handing in their essays, and one doesn’t have hers.  Only she doesn’t say that; she speaks the words I dread most. “Did you get my dad’s e-mail?”

I didn’t, because her dad e-mailed me around midnight the day before.  I log on after class and it’s seven or eight paragraphs, articulately detailing his daughter’s new diagnosis of ADHD.  She didn’t finish the paper because she left part of it at school, and she tried to restart it at home but ran out of steam and worked herself into a frenzy. He finally told her to go to bed and he would talk to me about it.

I don’t even think about writing back.  I pick up the phone and call him at work.

The thing about parents is that most of the time, they just want to talk.  I hardly said a word during what turned out to be a 20-minute conversation.  When I did speak, I affirmed his feelings: I, too, want his daughter to be successful in spite of her disability.  I agreed that there was nothing wrong with his daughter, and mentioned that girls often receive a later diagnosis than boys because they tend to lack the hyperactivity that’s a telltale sign of the condition.  I pointed to the online syllabi that spelled out every single assignment for the quarter.  I explained that late work would receive a 10% penalty each day unless the student had requested an extension before the due date.

And then I told him that, just this once, I would accept the paper late with no penalty.  Because I could already see that his daughter was a special person, one who wanted to do the right thing and needed some extra help to be able to do so.  I offered to meet with her during lunch one day to discuss how I could help her best.  I didn’t rush him off the phone, even when the late bell informed me my class was waiting.  

This is what happens when teachers are educated: last year, I would have rolled my eyes at what I viewed as indulgence and coddling.  Now I know something now about ADHD and the stigma that comes with it, about the struggles families have to keep their kids afloat with a diagnosis they don’t fully understand.  

Yes, school’s been underway for less than two weeks.  But even so, this is an extraordinary amount of patience for me, the world’s biggest blowhard.  I suppose it comes from understanding the father’s point of view: he loves his daughter and wants her to succeed.  That means that sometimes he doesn’t know when to stop talking.  Other times, as Ron Clark pointed out yesterday, it may lead to uglier actions, more offensive words, barriers that are hard to break down.  But last week, it was harmless.  My class was glad for the two extra minutes of study time.  They had a quiz to take.