I love living in the country. While I was raised within the city limits of a small town, our environment was still fairly rural and my grandparents lived on a farm so I have always considered myself a country girl. I am beginning to suspect, however, that the years of city-living I've had over the past twenty years have softened me up too much.
Yesterday at the pre-dawn hour of 5:30, I took my dogs out for their morning potty break and sniff session. Our biggest one, Buster (who has the personality to match his name), took off after something in the dark. Buster is an 8-lb. Chihuahua who thinks he's a pit bull. There was a huge ruckus and I decided to go investigate thinking he'd maybe actually caught one of the wild cats that hangs around our bird feeders. Wrong. It was not a nice kitty. It must have looked kind of like a kitty to bird-brained Buster in the dark, but it was the devil in disguise. It was Pepe LePeue on steroids.
Oh heavens. I got close enough for my nose to tell me the story and I turned tail and beat it back to the house. The other two dogs (who have more than 3 brain cells) followed right along. They didn't want any part of this dust-up. Buster was on his own as far as they were concerned. There's fraternal loyalty and then there's stupidity.
I got them in and finally Buster comes dragging back to the porch looking shocked and appalled. His expression said it all - "What the heck WAS that thing? And how did it arm itself with pepper spray? Cats are supposed to run and then you get a nice chase in but this thing zapped me!" Poor Buster looked like a police academy cadet who had just undergone the pepper spray training exercise. His eyes were red and swollen, his chest and ears were cherry red.
My sympathy was only half-hearted, though, because I knew now I had to clean up this eight-pound mass of stink. Then I committed a cardinal sin - I brought him inside. Big, big mistake. Not only did I then have a contaminated dog but the house was soon an EPA Supersite, too. The husband comes downstairs clutching a wash rag over his face, gagging and saying "what are you doing???"
I guess my old vet-tech mindset had kicked in and I wasn't thinking that skunk smell permeates EVERYTHING. Those molecules are relentless. I had cleaned up enough skunked dogs when working for the vet as a teenager and I wasn't thinking "house" but rather "what was that deskunkifier recipe??" It had been twenty-five years since I'd last made a batch.
The rest of the story is a lesson in hazardous material handling. The house was unlivable for the rest of the day. Lucky for me, I had to drive 200 miles yesterday to pick up my son from grandma's house so I was out until afternoon. I stuck Buster in the basement, turned on the big house fan (1948 a/c) and left. Of course, those molecules were everywhere - in my hair, my clothes, my nose, and my purse. I finally stopped at a McDonalds and transferred the contents of my new leather purse to a Wal-mart bag and tossed the purse in the dumpster. It was a total loss. I rolled down all the windows in the Denali and put the seat heater on so I could see to drive without the fumes tearing my eyes too much. Ever drive 78 mph in 42-degree weather with all the windows down? Not fun.
When we got back to the house yesterday afternoon, it was possible to be in the house but we were all dripping Visine every fifteen minutes like dope heads and burning every candle we can find. Everything made of cloth has to be washed now. I want to kiss whoever decided to put Febreeze in Tide and Downy.
And to top off this lovely Red Letter Day in our household - Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Good God.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Home Work a Hassle?
I was reading a blog posting this morning in our local large city newspaper concerning homework and how kids these days are bogged down with it. Read it here. A Wall Street Journal article (read it here) and the general consensus of parents seems to be that homework is just a time-consuming hassle. It interferes with life and stresses out kids.
I'm a former middle school teacher and the mother of a 14-year old so I have some exposure to this situation from both sides of the fence. When I taught in the public school system, I taught in a rural middle school where the majority of the students came from impoverished backgrounds. Today that would be called an at-risk school but at the time (twenty years ago) we weren't sweating over test scores so the term never arose. I would say we had a good school. We had dedicated teachers, a great administration, and average students. We had an exceptional program for the gifted and talented and for the "educationally challenged" students, too. Some parents were involved but most weren't (not any different than today).
What we DIDN'T have were students whose lives were scheduled down to the last second. If a student played a sport, it was a school sport. There were no community soccer associations or karate schools or other such things. If a student played an instrument, it was in the band. No violin lessons or trumpet lessons after school. A student went home, did homework, and hung out. Parents came home, fixed supper and hung out. There was no "living in the mini-van" as mom carted kids from one activity to the other all afternoon, every afternoon.
The writer of the WSJ blog probably doesn't realize it but his child has just caught his and his wife's anxiety disease. The parents have communicated that the child must get As and Bs and makes it such a priority that they are constantly in the kid's face with flashcards and lists of spelling words, even in restaurants. The school work isn't stressing the kid out - it's the parents! Give the kid a break! Let him do it on his own. How is he going to learn to study on his own if his parents are constantly there pushing this stuff down his throat? He's not anxious because he's getting Ds - he's anxious because his parents are getting Ds! They need to back off.
Home work has it's place. It provides additional practice for new concepts learned at school that day. It can provide supporting learning opportunities for concepts with which the student struggles. Should a parent be involved in all home work activities? NO! Let the child do the work! A parent should be there if the child has a question but the parent should butt out otherwise. Be encouraging and help when needed but let the kid do the work and shoulder the responsibility. The child isn't going to have the parent there by his or her side when they are away at college and then what will happen?
As to the amount of home work. I suggest the parents cut out all after-school activities and just have the child come home and do homework and see what that does to the pace of their lives. I bet they will discover that the home work wasn't the problem after all - it was the million and one activities they had the child doing after school that was sucking up time and creating stress.
It's a documented fact that American children are over-scheduled. Parents use after-school activities as a baby-sitting service. When people my age (41) and older were in school, most moms didn't work so you came home, ate a Twinkie, did your home work and then got to watch an hour of Gomer Pyle and Bewitched before going outside to play with your friends until it was too dark to see. If you had trouble with your home work, you asked mom but otherwise she was probably busy making supper or doing laundry. If it was a math problem, you waited for dad to come home.
Now, moms work so they have to put the kids somewhere until they get off work so they enroll them in after-school programs that are glorified day cares (or even real day cares). To assuage their guilty feelings, parent put pressure on their children to perform in school so they can prove that the lifestyle they've chosen is not detrimental to the child and that they can produce "super kids". Remember, those test scores are all important and now the fever that has infected our educational professionals has spread to the parents. Johnny has to score high on those tests in the spring or he'll be an outcast, won't get into a good college, blah, blah, blah.
What a load of crap. I'm sorry, but there are some children that should just be left behind. It's a good wake up call that no one uses anymore. It was embarrassing as heck to fail a grade when I was a kid and usually it took just once to wake you up. No one is left behind now. It would be too detrimental to the child's self-esteem. (read heavy sarcasm there)
But that's another soapbox for another day. Back to the home work issue. Did I assign home work as a teacher? Yes, when I thought it was necessary which was often. Many of my students didn't have a home life that was conducive to sitting down and studying (as in their parents were drug addicts, etc) so I kept it to a minimum but I did assign it when I felt it was called for. I often provided opportunities to work on it in class simply because I knew what their home lives were like. We also had study hall (something else that is disappearing from the educational landscape) where the student had a chance to work on home work.
Home work teaches a lot of things, but primarily it teaches responsibility. When a parent takes over the responsibility for homework, one of the main purposes of homework is nullified. Do I welcome homework for my own son? Absolutely. In fact, I don't think he gets enough home work assigned.
Bottom line is parents need to stop blaming teachers for trying to teach something to their children and instead cut out all the extra-curricular activities that they've laid on their children in the effort to produce super-kids. Give the kids a break. Moms - get your butts home by 3:00 so your kid can have a normal life if you are so concerned about the kids' stress level.
Beaver Cleaver didn't seem stressed out much. Wonder why?
I'm a former middle school teacher and the mother of a 14-year old so I have some exposure to this situation from both sides of the fence. When I taught in the public school system, I taught in a rural middle school where the majority of the students came from impoverished backgrounds. Today that would be called an at-risk school but at the time (twenty years ago) we weren't sweating over test scores so the term never arose. I would say we had a good school. We had dedicated teachers, a great administration, and average students. We had an exceptional program for the gifted and talented and for the "educationally challenged" students, too. Some parents were involved but most weren't (not any different than today).
What we DIDN'T have were students whose lives were scheduled down to the last second. If a student played a sport, it was a school sport. There were no community soccer associations or karate schools or other such things. If a student played an instrument, it was in the band. No violin lessons or trumpet lessons after school. A student went home, did homework, and hung out. Parents came home, fixed supper and hung out. There was no "living in the mini-van" as mom carted kids from one activity to the other all afternoon, every afternoon.
The writer of the WSJ blog probably doesn't realize it but his child has just caught his and his wife's anxiety disease. The parents have communicated that the child must get As and Bs and makes it such a priority that they are constantly in the kid's face with flashcards and lists of spelling words, even in restaurants. The school work isn't stressing the kid out - it's the parents! Give the kid a break! Let him do it on his own. How is he going to learn to study on his own if his parents are constantly there pushing this stuff down his throat? He's not anxious because he's getting Ds - he's anxious because his parents are getting Ds! They need to back off.
Home work has it's place. It provides additional practice for new concepts learned at school that day. It can provide supporting learning opportunities for concepts with which the student struggles. Should a parent be involved in all home work activities? NO! Let the child do the work! A parent should be there if the child has a question but the parent should butt out otherwise. Be encouraging and help when needed but let the kid do the work and shoulder the responsibility. The child isn't going to have the parent there by his or her side when they are away at college and then what will happen?
As to the amount of home work. I suggest the parents cut out all after-school activities and just have the child come home and do homework and see what that does to the pace of their lives. I bet they will discover that the home work wasn't the problem after all - it was the million and one activities they had the child doing after school that was sucking up time and creating stress.
It's a documented fact that American children are over-scheduled. Parents use after-school activities as a baby-sitting service. When people my age (41) and older were in school, most moms didn't work so you came home, ate a Twinkie, did your home work and then got to watch an hour of Gomer Pyle and Bewitched before going outside to play with your friends until it was too dark to see. If you had trouble with your home work, you asked mom but otherwise she was probably busy making supper or doing laundry. If it was a math problem, you waited for dad to come home.
Now, moms work so they have to put the kids somewhere until they get off work so they enroll them in after-school programs that are glorified day cares (or even real day cares). To assuage their guilty feelings, parent put pressure on their children to perform in school so they can prove that the lifestyle they've chosen is not detrimental to the child and that they can produce "super kids". Remember, those test scores are all important and now the fever that has infected our educational professionals has spread to the parents. Johnny has to score high on those tests in the spring or he'll be an outcast, won't get into a good college, blah, blah, blah.
What a load of crap. I'm sorry, but there are some children that should just be left behind. It's a good wake up call that no one uses anymore. It was embarrassing as heck to fail a grade when I was a kid and usually it took just once to wake you up. No one is left behind now. It would be too detrimental to the child's self-esteem. (read heavy sarcasm there)
But that's another soapbox for another day. Back to the home work issue. Did I assign home work as a teacher? Yes, when I thought it was necessary which was often. Many of my students didn't have a home life that was conducive to sitting down and studying (as in their parents were drug addicts, etc) so I kept it to a minimum but I did assign it when I felt it was called for. I often provided opportunities to work on it in class simply because I knew what their home lives were like. We also had study hall (something else that is disappearing from the educational landscape) where the student had a chance to work on home work.
Home work teaches a lot of things, but primarily it teaches responsibility. When a parent takes over the responsibility for homework, one of the main purposes of homework is nullified. Do I welcome homework for my own son? Absolutely. In fact, I don't think he gets enough home work assigned.
Bottom line is parents need to stop blaming teachers for trying to teach something to their children and instead cut out all the extra-curricular activities that they've laid on their children in the effort to produce super-kids. Give the kids a break. Moms - get your butts home by 3:00 so your kid can have a normal life if you are so concerned about the kids' stress level.
Beaver Cleaver didn't seem stressed out much. Wonder why?
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