Not my best parenting moment

Here's a blog posting by Scott Dannemiller, "The one question every parent should stop asking."


He goes on to say, "As parents, we focus 100 percent of our energy asking the wrong question...Bottom line: we parents need to chill out and change our questions. Here are two (questions) that can help us all gain some perspective and start finding more genuine joy in our lives."

Want to know the two questions Dannemiller suggests we ask?  Follow the link.  It's a good read.

Excellent Sheep?

Here's a reference from NAIS' "Education in the News:"

Colleges Make It Easier for Students to Show, Not Tell, in Their Applications
By Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times (from September 27, 2014)
    (TOWSON, MD) – “Under the policy announced this month by Goucher, a 1,400-student liberal arts college near Baltimore, a prospective student may apply by submitting two pieces of work (at least one of them a graded high school writing assignment) and a two-minute video, rather than a high school transcript. José A. Bowen, Goucher’s new president, readily admits that he has no idea how many applicants will go that route, how many will be accepted or whether they will work out.
    Students, parents and academics have long complained that competition for admission to highly selective colleges has become an overwhelming ordeal that favors bright but conventional, privileged worker bees over peers whose trials or quirks have gotten in the way of school. That is one of the criticisms in a much-discussed new book, “Excellent Sheep,” by William Deresiewicz, and a growing number of colleges have tried to address it.”

Googling "Excellent Sheep" led me to Nathan Heller's intelligent rebuttal of Deresiewicz in his New Yorker article "Poison Ivy?"  ("I went to college early in this century when the drug of choice on campus was sleep deprivation.")

This is not the same argument as Denise Pope's 2003 book Doing School, whose subtitle is: How we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic and miseducated students., though all three works would be on the syllabus of the same Graduate-level M.Ed. course at a top-tier university. (Pope is a prof at Stanford; Deresiewicz graduated from Columbia and taught at Yale; Heller graduated from Harvard.) 

Connect the dots and their dialog is all about the pressure and the presumed value of entrance to elite colleges in the early 21st century, and the impact that has on individual students and ultimately, our culture.

All of this leaves me looking for an antidote. 

I went first to Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak.  Listen to your inner voice, he says, and find your vocation.  I suppose my own elite education in the last century encouraged me to seek meaning in my life; to contribute to the culture, to advance it, and in so doing to be of service.

That is my aspiration for our students at The Post Oak School.

Rewards

"My Biggest Regret as a Teacher."  Check out David Ginsburg's blog.  We sometimes hear from parents who think we should "push" their kids.  Or who wonder why we don't give grades.  Or who believe that Montessori education is against competition and that competition is a good thing:  it is the way the world works.  All of these are forms of manipulation--and can work in the short run with certain children--but only until the reward is withdrawn.

And by the way, Montessori children are competitive.  We just don't using grading, class ranking and rewards as a means to "motivate" (ie, manipulate) them.  We don't have to.  They are already motivated.  Self-motivated.

Or as one of our 8th grade students said several years ago, "We motivate each other to be self-motivated."

Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

Diane Ravitch reports about educational reform in Finland in her New York Review of Books article, "Schools we can envy."

"Pasi Sahlberg (author of the Finnish Lessons book) recognizes that Finland stands outside what he refers to as the “Global Education Reform Movement,” to which he appends the apt acronym “GERM.” GERM, he notes, is a virus that has infected not only the United States, but the United Kingdom, Australia, and many other nations. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program are examples of the global education reform movement. Both promote standardized testing as the most reliable measure of success for students, teachers, and schools; privatization in the form of schools being transferred to private management; standardization of curriculum; and test-based accountability such as merit pay for high scores, closing schools with low scores, and firing educators for low scores."

"In contrast, the central aim of Finnish education is the development of each child as a thinking, active, creative person, not the attainment of higher test scores, and the primary strategy of Finnish education is cooperation, not competition."

(Thanks to Post Oak School parent Joey Hayles for forwarding this article to me.)