Nel Noddings' Critical Lessons

I've had mixed results keeping my new year's resolution to stop thinking so much about stuff and focus my reading on genre fiction. I've enjoyed The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway; The Hunger Games series (very violent, but I appreciated the author making it clear that the violence the characters were involved in had long-term consequences for them); Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear (I have loved generation ship stories ever since I read Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy as a child); Jack Finney's Time and Again, which was recommended to me in the comments on my blog; and Feast of Souls and Wings of Wrath, by C. S. Friedman, the first two books in a trilogy about magic users who pay the cost of their magic use in lost moments of life.

That's SFF. In mysteries, I liked In The Woods a lot; I thought at first it was a bit over-written but then I got sucked in. I was wary because I don't like books in which children get hurt, but she never dwells on what happens to the children, so I was able to cope with it. I can't say what else I liked about it without spoilers, but I will say that it's a great example of an unreliable narrator--it's told in the first person by someone who isn't trustworthy. He tells you right up front that he lies, but more subtly he is also wrong about a lot of things, and so you have the challenge of reading between the lines of his interactions with people (this is where he is most often wrong about things) to try to figure out what is really going on.

I also liked the Liam Campbell series of mysteries by Dana Stabenow. I will not make any claims of greatness for these books (and when I tried to read another of Stabenow's series I was unimpressed). But they are competent mysteries that work for me because they hit what I am coming to understand is my mystery-series sweet spot: the mysteries are not necessarily easy to figure out, but they're easy to understand. At the end of the book, I know what happened. And there is a tortured, unfulfilled romance that stretches through more than one book (cf. Clare/Russ). Perhaps I should just cave in and start reading romance novels, but I choose instead to skirt around the edges of that genre, re-reading Jane Austen and Jane Eyre, and mysteries with a romance component.

But that's not what I came here to talk about. As with most resolutions, I have sometimes failed in keeping mine. Since January 1, for instance, I've read four books on economics, nine about education, and two on child development and children's issues, as well as a few on miscellaneous other topics. So, really, I've failed pretty spectacularly at the "stop thinking so much" part of the resolution, while doing pretty well at the "read more fun genre fiction" piece of it. A mixed bag.

Right now, I'm reading Nel Noddings' Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach, and am liking it. She wants us to encourage young people to apply critical thinking--which she defines very broadly--to all sorts of areas where we either don't attempt to educate them at all (parenting, homemaking), or where we want them to just listen to us and do what we say (the value of homework, the idea that everyone should always try to do their best).

The bulk of the book is chapters that take up specific topics: Learning and Self-Understanding; The Psychology of War; House and Home; Other People; Parenting; Animals and Nature; and so on. In her introduction, she identifies some of the kinds of questions we might encourage young people to ask, and I like her questions:

When and under what conditions do I do my best work? Is it possible that a problem, topic, or potential product might "speak" to us or somehow reveal itself? Is it sometimes morally acceptable and creatively productive to do less than my best work? What does it mean, anyway, to be educated? (pp 2-3)

and:

Today we insist that everyone (almost without exception) must study academic mathematics. Yet relatively few students will actually use this material in their adult lives. In contrast, all of us will make a home of some sort. Why, then, does homemaking not appear as a serious and sustained subject in our schools? Among the questions we [might] consider are these: What is a home? What does our house, room, or corner say about us? What attitude might we take toward our possessions? What organic habits do we acquire in our childhood homes? Is it possible (or desirable) to enjoy household tasks? What role does conversation play in contributing to the growth of partners or children? What does ignorance or ineptitude on these topics contribute to present societal conditions? Are there people who want to maintain these conditions? Can it be that your ignorance might serve my purpose? (p. 6)

I think I'm drawn to her approach because of my own experiences with gradually coming to think critically about received wisdom from my family and the schools I attended. Also because I hear parents and educators talk about wanting their children to have "critical thinking" skills, but having either a very narrow view of what that might mean (Noddings wants a very broad and deep definition of it), or assuming that it means that the children will come to agree with them.

I see this in some liberals I know, who believe that they have reached their political position through critical thinking, and so their efforts to practice critical thinking with young people look more like leading them down a path to a foregone conclusion. If that makes sense. I have had some teachers of my acquaintance describe things they've done in the classroom as "introducing critical thinking" that sounded more to me like "introducing a liberal point-of-view," and I think it's important for adults to make the distinction. Especially for those of us who see ourselves positioned in opposition to the mainstream or to the status quo, who might have to be extra-vigilant in remembering that not everyone who thinks deeply about a subject will reach the same conclusions.

I could go into a whole digression here about how I see us ("us" being me and my liberal friends; me and my fellow Quakers) engaging in persuasion and socialization that we fail to recognize as such. For instance, in my monthly meeting we regularly reinforce the idea that young people should go to college; that "name" colleges are important; that the kind of professional accomplishments that win awards and garner articles in the paper are worth celebrating publicly; and so on. I'd like to see us thinking more critically about how we engage with these things, and I'd like our young people to see us doing it. End of digression.

Noddings says, "Students need to believe that they should reflect, evaluate, and make authentic decisions. That means perhaps rejecting some of what the adult community advises them to do" (p. 99). I think that's hard for even the best-intentioned grown-ups to grasp.

Noddings goes on to say, "There are risks in conducting these discussions with teenagers.... The risk may be worth taking" (pp 100-101). Even though the thesis of her book is clearly that we should be raising these questions and having these conversations with young people, she invites us to consider: What are the risks? What are the trade-offs? Are they worth it?

Premature Curriculum Review: Home Science Adventures

Last spring and this fall, the boys and I used a science curriculum from McRuffy Press. It's a scripted curriculum, meaning if you want you can just read off the page for the lessons, and comes with a kit that includes everything you need. We liked it pretty well; one of its weaknesses is that, like many elementary science curricula, it jumps around. One lesson you're doing bats, the next you're talking about electricity, and the one after that, classification. But the boys liked how hands-on it was, and I liked having everything in the box. The materials include games based on the lessons; the boys didn't care much for those and we mostly ended up skipping them.

When we finished the year's worth of McRuffy Press science we had, I considered buying another year's worth. But they only go through third grade in science, and the sample lessons looked both repetitive with what we'd already done, and kind of basic even for Carl, who's notionally a first-grader this year but who is a little advanced academically, I think.

I tried Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. I loved the idea of it--a comprehensive elementary science curriculum that focuses on the underlying practices and concepts of science. It seemed well-structured and like kids would really understand not just specific science facts and concepts but some things about how science works. And I liked the price: just $24 for the book.

In practice, I found it unusable. It's the kind of science curriculum that "just uses objects you have around the house!" But I never have the objects. When I ended up going to three stores to find a certain kind of balloon for one lesson, I was about ready to give up. I am learning to accept about myself that I don't want to have a long planning time for our homeschooling, so a curriculum that required me to think a week or more ahead about what supplies we'd need, plus take the information in the book and figure out how to make a lesson out of it, was just too labor-intensive for me.

In addition, the book is poorly laid-out; there are no chapter headings, for instance, so it can be difficult to navigate to the lesson you're looking for, or tell when you're there.

I've been on an e-mail list for families using BFSU, and so I know that some people have made it work for them and love it. And the lessons we did manage to do went well. But I now admit that I want something more packaged and more structured; with such an up-front commitment in prep time, I found with BFSU that we were ending up not doing science because I hadn't found time for the planning.

When I happened across Home Science Adventures, I knew the boys would love it. It's all hands-on science activities, organized into six topics: light, insects, microscope explorations, astronomy, birds, and magnetism. You can buy individual topics or sets of three. It's designed to be used with multi-age groups of kids.

I wasn't sure, from the website, whether it would provide the kind of information about scientific methodologies or topic-spanning concepts that I also wanted the kids to be exposed to. But I decided to try it, on the strength of the boys' enthusiasm, with the thought that I could supplement it with additional readings if needed.

We bought a three-topic set: Light, Insects, and Microscope Adventures. It comes with one pocket microscope; I paid for two extras, because I am wise.

So far, we've done 3-5 lessons in each topic, and the boys are loving it. The lessons are brief and very much focus on the kids experimenting and thinking about what they find. They're encouraged to record and analyze data; Eric and I did a lesson in the Light topic today that asked him to analyze the chart of data he'd made and predict what would happen next. The Insect Lessons have been less "here is the life cycle of the honeybee" and more, "How do you classify these bugs? Which characteristics define an insect?" I loved that the first couple of lessons in Microscope Explorations taught about using the microscopes not by giving instructions but through experimentation: "OK, now do this. What happens?" The kids were invited to learn through experimentation that the image in the microscope is both reversed and upside-down, and to figure out that, although it says on the side that they magnify 30x, they really magnify about 22x.

So, the stuff I was hoping to expose the boys to, about how science is practiced, and about concepts like classification that transcend a single topic, seem to be worked in.

And, I must say, when they say everything you need is in the box, they mean it. They don't assume you have scotch tape; it's in the box. If you're going to need paper cups for a lesson, the paper cups are in the box. There's a packet of honey, a paper clip, and a spoon in there. The only things you're going to need that aren't included are an onion and a slice of bread, and I'm pretty sure if they could have figured out how to include those, they would have.

The website claims that the 43 lessons in our box will constitute a whole year's science if done once a week. While that's technically true, I suppose, we find that the individual lessons (contained on one double-sided piece of paper) are so short and engaging that we usually do 2-4 at a sitting. In addition, my boys love science, and are enjoying these kits, so much that I expect we'll do science more like 2-4 days a week. So this isn't a year's curriculum for us, I don't think. But I think it's going to be a very fun few months.

Belatedly Snow-Bound with John Greenleaf Whittier

Last week, right before the big snowstorm, I wrote a blog post and posted it. While I was then proofing and editing it, I lost most of it in one of those computer things that happens, and I thought it was gone forever. But it turns out that the people who get e-mail notifications when I post something get the entire post as an e-mail message, so my friend Joann was able to send it to me. It's about ten days late, but here it is:

Everybody's getting all hunkered down for the blizzard, though we seem to still be on the first trailing edge of it; nothing too dramatic seems to have happened outside, snow-wise. I have kind of a holiday feeling, knowing we're going to be snugged into the house tomorrow. I don't know why this feels different from any ordinary day; the kids and I spent the day at home today, after all, for no good reason but that we had nowhere to go. But it does feel different.

I can't help thinking about John Greenleaf Whittier's poem Snow-Bound, which you might have heard of in school but probably haven't read. Does anybody read Whittier anymore? I recently did a little reading project on him in preparation to teach some of his poetry in Adult Religious Education at my Quaker meeting (Whittier was a Quaker), and was amused that even scholars who were interested enough to write a whole book about him don't claim he was a great poet. In fact, they are inclined to say, "Whittier was by no means a great poet," in so many words. Often more than once. They claim "competence," instead, or cultural significance, since he was such a popular poet in his day. Time was every schoolchild could recite "Blessings on thee, little man / barefoot boy with cheek of tan." Not so much anymore.

I find I could say a lot about Whittier, and Snow-Bound. I was just going to pop in to say that the poem is a nostalgic remembrance of being snowed-in with his family at Haverhill, the farm the Whittiers had lived on since at least 1647. He wrote Snow-Bound in 1866, when he was almost 60 years old, and as well as being about nostalgia for a lost boyhood, it also takes its place in a culture that was very conscious of the past slipping away. Technological changes were affecting the way people lived, their mobility, their family relations, and it was frightening. The central images of Snow-Bound are about the family gathered around the hearth:

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.

One of the technological changes taking place in the 19th Century was that stoves were replacing hearths as the primary way of heating homes. They were more efficient and more effective, but commentators feared the decay of family life, which had so often centered around the hearth in the evenings. Who can gather around a stove? And why would they have to, if the stove can make the whole room warm? Their homes heated by stoves, what could there be to keep families together? It's all sort of quaint and hilarious, but also familiar, if you read excerpts from some of these writings (and I'm sorry I don't have some for you; it's in my brain from some old piece of criticism I read a long time ago). It seems there is always something threatening to atomize the nuclear family. A few years ago I read a book about the Schoolroom Poets of the 19th and early 20th century (appropriately enough, the book is called Schoolroom Poets). One of the arguments of the book is that the notion that an educated child ought to be able to recite poetry by heart is one of the things that paved the way for free verse to become the dominant poetic form in the 20th century. Whittier was a prominent Schoolroom Poet, along with Lowell, Longfellow, and some other guys I don't remember right now. Their poetry was perfect for memorization: strongly rhythmical and tightly rhymed. No assonance for these boys, by golly! Here's Longfellow. Listen to the absolutely inflexible marching rhythm here; and is there any rhyme more pure than the single syllables he ends all these lines with?

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
with large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
are strong as iron bands.

(Why do I know that? Does Laura's little sister Carrie Ingalls recite it at the school exhibition in whichever Little House book that is? Some book I read over and over as a child featured a character saying those first four lines nervously over and over. In any case, can't you just see some cute little 8-year-old standing by her desk reciting that?)

Anyway, I have often seen the rise of free verse attributed to Whitman, who pretty much invented it and showed what it could do (free verse does not have to have either rhyme or meter, though our former poet laureate Robert Pinsky argues in The Sounds of Poetry that the iambic pentameter is so fundamental to the poetic line in English that it permeates even free verse in unexpected ways. Still: free verse, no set rhyme or meter). But the author of Schoolroom Poets argues that the imposition of memorization on children created in the generation that came of age in the 20th century an association of strong rhyme and meter with immaturity. So poets and readers turned away from childish-seeming metrical verse, to something that seemed more mature, and more modern. Again, we get the theme of a time and a culture passing away, though this time it's a deliberate turning forward and away from the past, away from a poet like Whittier who is associated with childhood schoolrooms and who is a bridge to an even earlier time that looks ever more benighted to the modern sensibility. Hence, free verse.

Ten years ago, I wrote a good paper on Walt Whitman and thought about turning it into a master's thesis. But then I had a baby, and got kind of busy and didn't do that. Another reason I didn't do it is my advisor wanted me to do Whittier, too, and I just never loved Whittier. I should have listened to my advisor, though, because when I did some reading on Whittier for this ARE program, a kind of interesting guy emerged. The poetry is still pedestrian; the word "doggerel" wants to force itself upon one's consciousness as one reads. But Whittier the man: very interesting. His biographers believe he was celibate his whole life and died a virgin. And yet he had many flirtations with women, and was known for stringing them along and taking gifts from them, leading them to believe something might happen which never did. One biographer kept saying, "If he were a woman, they'd have called him a coquette." Look at this face: a flirt, really? A coquette? So hard to believe. And yet so they say. Whittier was also tirelessly politically active. He was an ardent abolitionist (in this, we modern Quakers can embrace him, whereas we have to bear our disappointment in our beloved Walt Whitman, he of the so-very-superior poetry and the distressingly retrograde opinions on abolition and equality between the races). Whittier was deeply involved in politics, often exerting a great deal of influence from behind the scenes; he worked tirelessly to elect abolitionist candidates and served in the legislature himself. Here's a broadside he wrote for the cause: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

This is all probably much more than you ever wanted to know about John Greenleaf Whittier (though if you come to ARE at Red Cedar Friends Meeting on February 27 you will learn more! Or maybe you'll just hear all this again. But we'll read more of his poetry). But I will end by saying that sometimes, in his poems about Quakerism, he gets at something that rises above doggerel and feels like he is saying something I recognize, putting an experience into words. His poem The Meeting is about bringing a friend to Quaker worship; I like the friend's palpable relief when the silent worship ends, and his incredulous questions. "What part have you," his friend asks, "in these dull rites of drowsy-head?" "Dull rites of drowsy-head" indeed; who has not dozed during Quaker meeting?

I like Whittier's answer. It's long, but listen to this little excerpt. This is the very essence of Quaker worship, I think:

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

(note: I was being hyperbolic when I said "no assonance for these guys." The not-quite-rhyme of "come" and "room" is an example of slant, or half, rhyme. Which is not assonance, per se, since assonance depends on the vowel sounds, but is still not perfect rhyme, either.)

A Surprisingly Good Day

It's really easy when you blog, or are posting on Facebook, to only mention the glorious moments. So in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to mention that at 10:00 this morning, the boys and I were having such a dismal time that 1) I was ready to give up on homeschooling, and 2) we had retreated to three different rooms, where we were each weeping in solitary splendor.

I could not think how to salvage the situation. But after awhile I wandered into the hallway and said to the closed doors, "Um, guys, *sniff*, I'm going to go ahead and graph our Mystery Class data so we don't fall behind. Anybody who wants to come help, *snuffle*, can come help."

The boys wandered out to the living room, wiping their noses on their sleeves, and we transferred our sunrise/sunset data to the data sheets, calculated the photoperiods for each of the mystery sites, and charted them on our graph. We found and fixed a couple of our mistakes--calculating photoperiods is surprisingly tricky math--and were astonished that the site that got 24 hours of sunlight just a week ago got only a little more than 18 hours a week later! We checked and double-checked the numbers and that's what they said. I'll be curious to see where it is--the South Pole is still in full-time daylight this week. So it's someplace north of there.

Then we did an activity where you find other locations that are at your latitude and check their photoperiod. We did Sapporo, Japan; Florence, Italy; and Changchun, China; all of which we found by using the globe we got for Christmas. They all had photoperiods within a few minutes of ours. It was fun to see the boys figure out that photoperiod is all about latitude; they had previously thought that places with similar photoperiods must be close to us but now they get that they could be very far away.

Then we worked on this week's Lego Quest challenge. The challenge was to build something using 30 specific bricks, and we made a set for Yehva, so when she got home from preschool, she did it, too. I'd post pictures but the boys are excited that their creations might be on the website next week so I'll save it for then.

Doing fun stuff together got us feeling much less horrible, and the rest of the day went pretty well. Yehva and I had to run to the store at one point to buy eggs so we could make cupcakes, and I was reminded of why I am always running out of things: I simply cannot do the grocery shopping with Yehva. This is what it was like just running into a convenience store for one item:

Me: OK, Yev, just so you know, we're only buying eggs. We're not buying anything else.

Yehva: OK.

We enter the store.

Yehva: Mama, they have candy!

Me: I see.

Yehva: Can I have some?

Me: Not today. Today we are just buying eggs.

Yehva: But I'm hungry.

Me: We'll have lunch when we get home. And we're making cupcakes.

Yehva: Can we get donuts?

Me: No. We're just buying eggs. Another day we can get donuts.

Yehva: I want donuts.

Me: Donuts are certainly tasty.

Yehva, escalating: I want donuts!

Me: No donuts. We're just getting eggs.

Yehva: I see cookies.

Me: I see the cookies, too.

Yehva: I want some cookies.

Me: Sorry, we're just here for eggs.

Yehva stomps her foot: I want cookies!

Me: Not today.

Yehva picks up a package of bakery cupcakes: Can we get cupcakes?

Me: Yehva! We are buying eggs--and only eggs--so we can *make* cupcakes! We are not buying cupcakes!

Yehva: Then can I have some candy?

Public School Mom: It's a Whole New Skillset

So, Yehva loves her 3-morning-a-week preschool so much that next year I'm thinking of sending her to one that meets five mornings a week, and I tend to assume we'll send her to kindergarten the year after that. Because she's just that extroverted! I've spent the last four years of my life as a homeschooling mom (and I'm only just starting to figure it out), and it has been a relief not to have to deal with schools. My friends have had to wrestle with teachers who wouldn't give their disabled kids reasonable accommodations, with math curricula that were poorly-designed and leaving their very bright children high and dry, with pointless homework that doesn't make sense. I have been happy not to have do these things. For one thing, I'm not very assertive with authority figures (David jokes that I'm "ruly," which is of course the opposite of "unruly"). I've been reading the blog at Coalition for Kid-Friendly Schools, and one of the moms there has been engaged in a protracted conversation with her kids' principal about the math curriculum the school uses--her daughters are at a Quaker elementary school that routinely feeds its graduates into the remedial math program at the local middle school.

I am following this mom's saga with the principal with great interest, because I simply can't see myself in that role. I'm much more the type to suck it up and then bitch to my friends. I have often thought that one reason we homeschool is that I am not assertive enough to be a good advocate for my children in the public schools.

And yet, there I was at 9:30 this morning, taking a tour of the public Montessori school a mile down the road, because one option for Yehva next year is to enter the pre-school there. It's close to our house, it might be a good option if she ends up in the public schools (likely because even the very reasonable tuition at the private Montessori schools around here would be a stretch for us), and their preschool program, while fee-based, is cheaper than the other Montessori schools near us.

The tour was very interesting. As you'd expect in an affluent suburb, the school itself is in good shape, clean and shiny and freshly painted. Every classroom we visited had computers in it; there's also a large computer lab. Instead of blackboards or whiteboards, the classrooms have "smartboards," which can display material from the teachers' computers or be worked at directly; apparently they're touch screens and also have special markers they can be written on with, though we didn't see one in action.

I appreciated the principal's honesty about the extent to which the school is "compromised" Montessori. "We're as Montessori as we can be given that, as a public school, we are not exempt from standardized testing or from meeting state curriculum guidelines." In other words, they're pretty darn Montessori for the 3-year-olds, but less and less so as the kids get older.

Still, I liked the 3rd and 4th grade classroom we visited. There were no desks in rows, though there were tables available for kids to work at. Kids were moving around freely, and engaged in a variety of activities around the room. I liked the atmosphere in the room much better than most classrooms I've been in.

While I know a couple of moms who have kids in the school and are very happy with it, I also know a couple who've had serious problems, in both cases with a teacher refusing accommodation for a disabled child. One of the families left the school because of it. So my anecdotal impression of the school is very mixed.

I'd be fretful about the overwhelming whiteness of the student body in any case, but this is Yehva we're talking about--she's the only AA kid in her preschool class, and if this keeps up, at some point she's going to notice. Is that a problem? I don't honestly know. I have a friend who is black and who lives in a predominately white area where her kids are often the only black kids in their classes and activities, and she's really shruggo about it; she sees it as just a fact of her kids' lives. But I think it's probably different if your parents and extended family are also black--Yehva's the only black kid at home, too. So one of the questions I have, if I'm going to be a School Mom as well as a homeschooling mom, is: Should I consider putting Yehva in one of the Lansing charter schools, or into Lansing Public Schools as a schools of choice student? Is that important enough to choose a half-hour commute over the one-mile stroll? Or to choose a struggling school district over one with a 97% graduation rate, that sends most graduates to college? Which does Yehva need more: half the kids in her classes to be black, or half the kids in her high school to be taking AP classes?

I don't know.

On the one hand, I've been pretty in touch lately with what we give up by homeschooling, things the schools offer that are a challenge to get at home, or in the homeschool community (somebody else to teach Eric Mindstorms would be very welcome, for instance. Both boys could use a bigger peer group, I think, despite their introversion. And it recently came to my attention that neither of my sons--who are almost 7 and almost 10--knows the alphabet song, a deficiency that can only be laid at my door). On the other hand: at this morning's tour, one of the moms asked how the school handled it if a kindergartner, say, was ready to move beyond kindergarten-level work. The principal threw around a lot of glittering phrases about "stretching" and "exploring," but the upshot of her response was that a kindergartner could not be allowed to do first-grade work, because then in first grade they'd have to do second-grade work, and in second grade they'd have to do third-grade work...and so on. And this would be just a big pain in the butt for everybody. "Of course, we do have a gifted education consultant available through the district," she said, but then she back-pedaled to make it clear that they'd only call on the consultant in extraordinary circumstances, if a kid was "really above...I mean really, really above...." In other words: probably not for your kid. This is just by way of saying that I am aware of the gaps and deficiencies of schools, as well.

I also came away not sure Montessori preschool is for Yehva. I love Montessori classrooms, with their orderly shelves of interesting things, and the kids sitting around at their little rugs doing their "works." But the PPK classroom we saw today didn't have what most preschools do: a texture table, an art area, a dress-up/pretend play area. I've read Maria Montessori, so I have a pretty good idea why this is (it's all about the purposeful work!). But I think those are some of the things Yehva likes best about preschool. I think she'd like the Montessori "works"--she loves manipulating things--but I also think she'd miss those other things.

Maybe school isn't the right thing for her at all. She's extroverted; she's also high energy. She rarely sits down. It may be that she will turn out to be a very bad fit for the classroom. Maybe we'd be better off homeschooling her and using our money to hire an athletic college student to spend a couple hours a day taking her snowboarding and waterskiing and rappelling, and teaching her to play baseball, basketball, soccer, and football (she wants to play football. She wants to play every sport she has ever seen anyone play, in person or on TV).

I wanted to love the public Montessori, because it's the path of least resistance for us: it's close, it's probably better than the traditional public schools in some ways that matter to me, if she goes there for preschool she's guaranteed a kindergarten slot, we'd have to pay for one more year of preschool but then it would be free. I liked it, at least some things about it. Enough to send Yehva there? I don't know. How much more would I have to love a different school to pay $6500/year in tuition? I don't know.

I might find out, though. I sent off an e-mail asking to set up a tour at one of the local private Montessori schools. (I also know parents of kids in this school. Some of them love it. Some of them don't. One pulled her daughter because she thought the school was pigeon-holing her daughter as a "troublemaker." Her daughter was 2. I talk to too many parents. It muddies the waters.) Anyway, I sent off the e-mail. "Practically any weekday morning is fine for me," I said, "except that we'll be out of town from February 16-22." I got a very prompt e-mail back saying that I'd been pencilled in for a tour on the morning of the 16th. *sigh*

One of my friends pulled her son out of elementary school last year and tried homeschooling. "There are too many choices," she complained to me not long after. "When he was in school, they made all these choices for me!" As someone who has spent hours reading up on math curricula on the internet, and hours reading up on science curricula, and hours reading up on Language Arts curricula--and this only after spending years going back and forth about whether to use curricula at all--I could sympathize. But I find that the decisions involved in sending a kid to school are just as hairy. I'm lucky, I suppose, to live in a place where there are really very few choices, or my head would explode. As it is, I think I'll go take half a Xanax and lie down with a cold cloth on my head until the palpitations stop.

Let Me Spell That Out For You

So, when people talk to each other, there are at least two levels of communication going on. One is very direct: the words you're saying. But the other is implicit, and has to do with what the words imply, non-literal meanings that accrue because of cultural conventions or long usage. Linguists call this latter meaning "pragmatics," though I'm sure I've done a poor job of describing it.

So I'll give some examples. I have many to hand, because one of Raider's favorite things is to tease me by pretending he has no notion of pragmatics. So, for 17 years, I have almost-daily been subjected to little conversations like these:

Me: Raider, have you seen my shoes?

Raider: Many a time!

or

Me: Raider, I'd like a cup of tea.

Raider: And no wonder! Tea is both delicious and soothingly warm!

He likes to pretend he can only hear what I have literally said, so he doesn't know that "have you seen my shoes?" is a perfectly conventional construction meaning, "I cannot find my shoes. Do you know where they are right now?" Or that "I'd like a cup of tea" is more than a declarative statement about my appetite.

I'm thinking about this for a couple of reasons. One is that Eric is learning the difference between "statements" and "commands" in his Language Arts curriculum, and it's interesting to think about how often a statement can actually be a command ("I'm cold" can mean "turn the heat up," or "hand me that blanket"; "I'd like a cup of tea" can actually mean, "get me a cup of tea, please"; "I'm getting hungry" can mean, "please start cooking dinner.")

The other is that I've had several occasions recently to reflect on how very often people think they've said something, but they haven't. A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from an acquaintance about a conversation we'd had a few months ago. In the e-mail, she described herself as having been "very direct" in asking me to do something, and said that she felt I had just "blown her off." I apologized, because I am sorry I made her uncomfortable. But I remember the conversation, too, and at the time, I honestly did not realize she was asking me to take action. Why not? Because she phrased her request in the form of a factual statement. She didn't say, "Su, would you please?" or "Su, I'd like you to," or "Su, I wish you would..." Maybe I was a little too clueless ("Yes, I have seen your shoes many times! And admired their tasteful elegance!") but I was struck by her sense that she had been "very direct" with me when in fact she had not said a word about what she wanted me to do.

Another friend was telling me the other day about how hurt and offended she was by someone's failure to act in the face of her need. She had sent this person an e-mail saying that she was ill, and expected that the response would be an offer of help. But the offer of help did not come. Again, I noticed that she thought she had made a request, and that her request had been ignored, but she never said she needed help during her illness. Only that she was ill. And her friend took the information at face value: she was sorry to hear about the illness, but didn't realize she was being asked to help.

I wonder if that indirect form of making a request is partly cultural? Is it a form of Midwestern politeness and conflict-avoidance, or is it something that happens everywhere people talk to each other? Awhile ago, somebody on AskMetafilter described the difference between Ask vs. Guess Culture, and it resonated with a lot of people. I come from Guess Culture, for sure, but I think I've become an Ask Culture person because I like the clarity, and because, as the AskMetafilter comment said, Guess Culture behavior can seem passive-aggressive to me: you're mad at me because I didn't do something you didn't actually ask me to do? Really? It can feel like a set-up. (And realizing that you're disappointed because someone didn't do something they didn't know you wanted them to do can be both humbling and liberating.)

I wonder if another way to think about Ask vs. Guess is that people may have preferences about who they want to be mad: some people would rather be mad, and some people would rather somebody else be mad. If you'd rather be mad than have someone mad at you, you're going to make indirect statements instead of direct requests; you risk not getting what you want and need, but on the other hand, it's much less likely that the person will be upset with you. On the other hand, if you ask someone very directly, especially if your request might make them embarrassed or self-conscious or feel hurtful ("Can you please stop chewing with your mouth open?") they might be angry with you. I suppose there's a balance, a calculation people make, weighing how likely they are to end up in explicit conflict against how likely they are to get what they want.

That's all I've got. I've just been musing about this lately. I wonder if Raider found my shoes and made my tea yet?

January Reading: Three Book Reports

So, when the new year started, I was in a reading lull. I didn't have many books home from the library, and hardly any in my hold queue. I felt sort of tired of all the kinds of things I usually read, and like I'd just been thinking too much about too many things and needed to give my brain a break. So, I decided, I would devote my reading in the new year to genre fiction, and avoid reading anything else on certain worn-out topics, like politics, education, and parenting.

I have been half-successful. I've read some science fiction, including Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, which I just finished this morning and was very impressed by. It's one of those books that seems only OK--good in the gonzo, perfect-action-man tradition of Spider Robinson's Callahan books, John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and certain Heinlein. But then, about halfway in, the pieces start coming together in a very satisfying way, and it becomes a really good book, and you admire the author for having the patience to create a set-up 250 pages long. I was completely surprised by the twist around page 400, even though the twist suddenly made all these things that had nagged at me ("Why does he never talk about his parents?") make perfect sense. I picked up that something was off; I didn't figure out what it was. That's a good twist.

I have set aside The Gone-Away World for David, instead of putting it right into the library bag to be returned. Though, as I told him this morning, I'm not sure I want him to read it even though I am sure he'll like it. Because he is smarter than me in certain ways and he will figure out the twist in about 100 pages, and then I'll feel stupid.

Of course, I've forewarned him: he knows there's a twist. So he has an unfair advantage. In addition to the one where he's just smarter than me in certain ways, I mean.

But I have not been fully successful at focusing on genre fiction, because I have this reflex: if someone mentions a book in my hearing, or on a website or something, I order it from the library and read it. I think I have said before that it's a wonder my friends don't exploit this habit for their own amusement, sending me on wild goose chases after terrible novels and unreadable literary criticism and Tea Party memoirs and distasteful porn.

Anyway, I was on a website where some people were recommending books, and as a result I ended up reading two books about education and one about parenting this month. And now I will say a few things about these books.

School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School by Edward Humes.

Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, is one of the highest-ranked public high schools in America. 100% of its graduates go on to college, many of them in the Ivy League or at flagship schools in the California state university system. Edward Humes spent a year at the school interviewing teachers, parents, and students, in the interest of painting a picture of what high school is like at the kind of school that has a reputation so wide-spread that families move into the district from India and Japan in the hopes of enrolling their kids there.

I liked this book better than I expected to. Humes was less interested in an expose than in a description, so the book gives you a picture of what works in the school as well as what might make most of us cringe, like seventh graders pulling highly-caffeinated all-nighters before major tests, and parents who push kids into a very narrow range of options (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, conveniently abbreviated "HYP"; medicine, business, hard sciences) no matter what the kids' interests and aptitudes. Humes doesn't seem too interested in the big questions, but his book shows us what it takes to produce that student body, and invites us to wonder whether it's worth it. A pretty quick read; worth it if you're interested in that kind of thing. Not something I'd put on a list of "10 Books About Education You Must Read," were someone to ask me for such a list.

How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance by Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland.

This book is about the transformation of a failing Chicago public elementary school into a model school, and it is written by one of the mothers who drove the transformation, and the principal of the school. One of the book's flaws is that is is annoyingly self-congratulatory; the group of mothers who joined together to try to improve their neighborhood school is referred to throughout as the "supermoms," for instance. It's a bit grating.

There is no doubt that these moms worked hard. They conceived of their plan while hanging out at the playground with their preschoolers; overwhelmed by the process of trying to find places for their kids in one of the decent public elementary schools (which might get 600 applications for 57 places), or in one of the private elementary schools in Chicago (which might also get an overwhelming number of applications, and then cost $20,000 per year to boot), they decided to see if they could do something about their neighborhood school. It was failing academically; the physical plant was dingy and in need of repair; the building itself was so posted over with KEEP OUT signs that it was intimidating just to approach it.

But they did. The met with the principal and got her permission to transform the place. They set a timeline of one year, just long enough to figure out if they could make it decent enough for their kids to start kindergarten in, and to show enough progress to get other parents to choose it over the magnet-school/private-school lottery. In the second half of one summer, they collected nearly a half-million dollars worth of donated materials and labor, with which they improved the building's exterior, painted the interior, made much-needed repairs, and transformed an unused room into the school's first-ever library.

Yay for them! They certainly deserve some kudos for their vision and hard work, these "supermoms," and I would offer them some except that they are so busy kudos-ing themselves that it would be redundant.

Well, and I won't offer them too many kudos because their story has a much deeper problem than a little too much self-satisfaction: a shocking level of cluelessness about social class issues.

These women achieve something that goes so far beyond ordinary class-cluelessness that I was staggered. I have a friend who is very passionately concerned about social class issues; I kept thinking to myself, "Jeanne must never read this book. You could practically murder Jeanne with this book, just slip it into her bedside to-be-read pile and wait for the inevitable aneurysm..." I honestly did not want to believe that people this unaware existed, but here they are, damned by their own words. No wonder people like Jeanne are so passionate about social class issues.

It starts when they conceive the project, and deliberately decide to proceed without seeking input from anyone outside their group. Their reasons are pragmatic, and make sense to a point: they want to hit the ground running and accomplish a lot very fast, and they're concerned that if they start convening neighborhood meetings and listening to other people's concerns, they'll get bogged down in discussion and controversy and accomplish nothing. I don't think they're necessarily wrong about that; I've been in community meetings myself where action was stalled by nay-sayers, or by competing and incompatible aspirations.

But that decision speaks to a kind of persistent assumption that the Supermoms know best. Unfortunately, they have a very narrow vision: they want to create a school that their kids, and the kids of other people like them, can attend. They are not asking questions about how to best serve a diverse neighborhood, for instance. They are self-congratulatory about things that would have troubled me, such as the high number of professional degrees among their group. It's not that professional degrees are bad; I'd just have been concerned about the insularity of the group. They don't seem to be. The authors crow about a moment when, needing a special permit for something, they are able to get it quickly because one of the group members, an urban planner, has contacts at the city. I'm having trouble making my point. I mean to say that they don't seem to notice that they're not a very representative group. If anything, they revel in the very things that privilege them. They describe what they did as a "blueprint," but don't seem to notice that they have a formidable array of resources that may not be easy for another group to come by. Their driving force is not, "This school is failing the neighborhood children; what can we do to make it better serve its community?"; rather, it's "I want to opt out of this insane magnet school/private school race; how can I make this school good enough for my child?"

Two more examples: At one point, the group is accused of "elitism" for wanting to hold an expensive fundraiser at what they describe as a "posh wine bar." It is very telling that the authors' response is a combination of befuddlement and missing the point: "How can we be elitist?" they ask. "We're working so hard on this fundraiser, working into the night!" And then they smugly claim that the complaints disappeared once the money started rolling in, $17,000 in one night. Yet again, the Supermoms know best! Astonishing.

The most telling moment, though, comes when the authors discuss the decline in enrollment among poor children and African-American children, once the school's turnaround begins to succeed. They are very troubled by this, and the long, introspective passage where they consider the moral and ethical issues involved in "fixing" a school and in the process turning it into a magnet for the upper-middle-class, and where they consider soberly whether there are things they could have done to improve the school while retaining and serving the kids who used to be its core population, is one of the highlights of the book.

Just kidding! Ha ha ha ha ha. They are, in fact, troubled by the decline in enrollment of Black and poor kids...because it becomes a fund-raising challenge. It turns out that both government entities and private foundations prefer to give money where it can help the underprivileged. The authors note without irony that nobody seems to want to give money to help kids who already have everything they need, so once the population of the school reaches a certain percentage of white and middle-class kids, it becomes much harder to get outside money. The lesson they learn: how to find corporate partners.

These moms really are dedicated, hard-working, and high-energy, and they forged a very productive partnership with their local failing school. I just wish they'd done it without making privileged white people look so completely clueless and self-involved.

[Full disclosure: By about halfway through the book, I found the authors so insufferably smug that I started skimming. So it is possible that somewhere in the second half is a section I missed in which they make all this right. If you read it, and find that part, send me an e-mail with the page numbers and I'll post a sheepish and apologetic update.]

Finally, I read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (though not the updated version linked there, the original one). The original was published in 1998, though I thought it was more recent than that--I remember some book whose premise was "parents actually have very little influence over their kids" making a big splash a few years ago. Whatever book that was, I ignored it, as I had ignored this one, until someone called it a must-read and I decided to give it a look.

Harris's premise is indeed that parents have very little influence over their children. She is a big fan of genetics, and she also believes that peers have more influence than parents. Some pieces of her argument are quite persuasive, and I'll talk about some of the points I found worthwhile in a minute. But I didn't trust her. Aristotle identified something called the "ethical appeal" in argument, which is the ways that a person signals that they can be trusted: carrying oneself with authority, for instance, or speaking calmly. I didn't buy Harris's ethical appeal. For one thing, she is too self-consciously radical. She likes to say, "Nobody else is brave enough to say this, but I am," as if early childhood researchers are going to form a mob, storm her house, and burn her at the stake as a heretic.

She also recycles the same examples over and over. Certain pairs of identical twins reared apart show up in chapter after chapter. It's tiresome to read; somebody should really have helped her edit this thing more effectively. But it also made me wonder to what extent she was relying on a handful of studies that supported her claims, and what she was ignoring. I found myself suspecting that if I were to check her sources, I might find that they didn't say what she said they did. I'm not invested enough to do that, but I just didn't trust her. Too axe-grindy.

An aside on the identical twins: she is especially enamored of these twins, reared apart, who, when they met as adults for the first time, had similar haircuts, glasses with rectangular frames, and sons named James. They were also both wearing blue shirts. This is all supposed to point to the mysterious genetic component of behavior, but I was skeptical. I found myself thinking about how similar men's haircuts are in general; how little variation there is in eyeglass fashion (practically everybody I know is wearing rectangular frames right now--because they're the only thing you can get). How common a name was "James" when their sons were born? I remember getting all excited one time because David and I met another couple named Dave and Sue; David laughed at me. He reminded me that "David" and "Susan" were the #1 baby names when we were born; there must be thousands and thousands of couples our age with our names. And, finally, blue has got to be one of the two most popular colors for men's shirts.

I'd have been more impressed if the raised-apart identical twins had shown up for their first meeting wearing Hawaiian shirts, with fresh Mohawks, John Lennon glasses, and sons named Hubert. You see what I mean? I don't think "blue shirt, son named James" rises much beyond coincidence.

Anyway.

What did I find convincing about Harris's argument? Well, she points out that cause and effect can be hard to untangle. A study finds that children who are spanked are more aggressive; does the spanking cause the aggression, or is it true that aggressive children are more likely to be spanked? She says that our pre-existing assumption that parents create their children's behavior leads us to assume the cause-effect arrow goes spanking----> aggression. But she doesn't think the research that has been done establishes that very well.

She also disputes the idea that parents have a character that can be summed up once for all their children: "She's a permissive parent," or, "He's very strict." Most parenting studies look at a cohort of children--a first-grade class, say--and correlate the kids' characteristics with how their parents treat them. But, Harris points out, most people have more than one child, and they are often different with different children. This is certainly true in my experience; I recently blogged about how different I am with Yehva than with the boys. But I was already learning from Eric, when he was my only child, how children create their parents. Harris suggests that if researchers looked at complete families they would find parents' behaviors and attitudes varying depending on their kids' temperaments and challenges.

Here, while I agree with her, I also feel a caution she doesn't seem to. If other researchers are guilty of making "the nurture assumption" and interpreting all their findings in that light, it seems to me that Harris sees children's inborn tendencies as extremely robust; she gives tremendous weight to "child-parent effects." She forgets to be as careful about cause and effect as she wants researchers to be.

I do think she is right that it is very difficult to separate parenting effects from the effects of peers (which she sees as extremely influential, though she says children self-select peers who reinforce their inborn tendencies: a child who tends toward delinquent behavior might be more likely to choose a peer group with similar tendencies) and the wider community. She says that parents do their parenting while embedded in the effects of the genes they have passed down, and in the community of people mostly like them they have chosen. Given all that, she thinks that there is little evidence that the very modest differences between what happens in two houses--an hour of TV vs. two hours per day; a slightly-higher tendency toward harsh discipline in one house, and so on--has much influence on what kids do or how they turn out. And thus, she says, out cultural tendency to praise or blame parents is unfair and misplaced.

Harris has some thought-provoking arguments; the book could have been better.