For My Daughter

Did you ever have a teacher you loved? No, I don't mean like had a crush on; I mean one of those teachers who changed your life in some fundamental way. It's like...
It's like you're staring at a wall -- we'll call it the blackboard -- and all of the teachers you've had so far keep encouraging you to stare at that wall and nothing else. Just stare at the wall, don't question, don't cause problems, and, most of all, don't question. Then you have a teacher who comes along and opens the blinds on the windows and tells everyone to come look outside, and it's amazing! You didn't even know the world was out there.

For me, that teacher was Mike Abbiatti, my 6th grade science teacher. He introduced science to me. Science not as something you read about in a book (because I had been doing that since I was four) but science as something you do and as something you live. He taught me that life should be science: the search for new knowledge, testing that knowledge against the old knowledge, adapting your life to fit the outcome. Life is about always questioning. Always questing. He taught me principles I still use in my life more than 30 years later.

I loved him in a way that only a child can love and, when 6th grade was over, I was devastated. On the last day of school during our last-day-of-school party, I threw my arms around him and cried, cried deep, wracking sobs that have only ever been worse for me when my grandfather died.

I could write a lot more about Mr. A. and learning the difference between a hypothesis and a theory and doing actual experiments and using a computer for the first time, but this isn't about me. This is just to show the depth of connection we can come to have with people who open our eyes and our worlds.

These people aren't always teachers; sometimes, they're coaches.

My daughter fell in love with softball the first time she "played" it, just playing catch with the neighbor girls as they were practicing for the team they were on. She had to join, too. So we signed her up. All was good.

For a while

Kids' sports leagues are a mixed bag. You have to pay for your kid to be able to play, of course, but, for that money, you get someone who is volunteering to coach. In softball, this was inevitably the pitcher's dad, because, inevitably, the pitcher's dad was forcing his daughter to play and wanted to be the coach of the team so that he could make sure his daughter got to pitch. Even if there was someone better at it on the team. Mostly, these guys were not very good coaches.

In fact, most of the were pretty shitty coaches, at least as far as the team was concerned. The problem was that most of them were also pretty shitty people. You can be a bad coach (as in not being very good at coaching), but it takes a special person to be a shitty coach. The shitty coaches were all what we call "yellers," which means pretty much what it sounds like: Their method of coaching was to spend their time yelling at the girls when they made mistakes.

And this:
When the team would win a game, even if they played terribly, they got only praise. If they lost a game, even if they played fantastically, they got yelled at. A lot. There is so much wrong with that paradigm of coaching, but that's what we dealt with for years.

It got to where my daughter was not enjoying softball anymore, this thing that she loved.

One of the only things we were able to tell her through all of that was that it would be better when she got to high school because:
1. The coach would not be someone coaching because his daughter was on the team. It would be someone coaching because he was being paid to do a job. No more nepotism.
2. Being on the team and getting to play would be because of your skill rather than who your dad was. Again, no more nepotism.

And, hey! My daughter is in high school, now. A freshman. She did try out for softball, and she made the varsity team. The only freshman on the team. Not just did she make the team; she's a starter.

Of course, she could have still gotten bad coaches. Shitty coaches. We've come across a few of those in the games this year. Or, even, shitty people as coaches.
But she didn't.
She got a pair of great coaches who coach through encouragement. They let them know what they're doing well and what they need to work on. Neither of them has yelled at any of the girls during a game all season. The same cannot be said of coaches on other teams.

My daughter loves softball again. This year has been a world-changing experience for her. I have to think it's been for her like 6th grade science was for me. It's a whole new world. Softball with a genuinely positive environment, even when they lose.

And, due to circumstances, it so happens that both coaches are having to leave at the end of this year.

She's devastated.

And, well, so am I. For her. Because I know how that feels.

Worse, I know that there's nothing I can do to make any of it better.

Yeah, yeah, sure, it will get better. She'll get over it. I got over 6th grade ending. And I could tell her that, but it wouldn't help. And I know it wouldn't help, because people saying that kind of thing to me doesn't help. In fact, it's kind of anger-causing. It doesn't matter if it will get better. That doesn't help now.

So my hope is that she will hold onto this moment and take what she's learned from this experience and carry it forward with her as she goes on in life, whether that be in softball or not. I mean, I wouldn't trade my 6th grade science experience away for anything, even though it hurt when it was over. That pain was more than worth the experience of the whole, so I hope she will be able to cherish this freshman year of softball and look back on it as a fundamental moment of growing up. I suppose it's that whole better to have loved and lost thing.

I guess that's all any of us can hope for.

If you look to the right center in this picture; you can see the ball coming in.

This was a nice hit but, unfortunately, it was caught.

How the System Failed My Son: Part Seven -- The System Is Broken

[If you're not caught up, go back and read. Just do it.]

We thought we had everything taken care of. Or, at least, we hoped we had. We had good systems in place and they had worked well during Phillip's freshman year. Or, at least, we thought they had. But, basically, his sophomore year began much as his freshman year had, an email from his English teacher (honors English) telling me that Phillip lacked the requisite intelligence and skills to be in her class and that I should move him to the academic class where nothing would be required of him. [You also have to admire the disdain that the teachers of the honors classes have for the academic classes. (Yes, that's sarcasm, because how is it okay ever for a teacher to have that kind of attitude?)]

Look, I get that there is some burden on my son in all of this. I'm not ignoring that. But the burden on my son was this: "Get with the system and do what you're supposed to do. Quit being difficult." And, well, that's the problem. Get with the system, the only system. The system that was not designed for you and, actually, cares nothing for you other than that you comply.

It's bullshit.

I say that as someone who flowed fairly easily through the system until I got to the part when I was in college working on an Education degree and realized that I couldn't stomach it. That I would never be able to work within that system because the system is shit and cares nothing about the students individually but only about them as a collective that is able to score well on standardized tests.

The system was built for people like my daughter, people who are very achievement oriented and competitive. And, for her specifically, someone who wants to accomplish her tasks quickly so that she can go on to other things. [That's a mindset that makes sense to me, because that's how I was. My goal was always to have as little homework as possible to do at home, so I worked hard during the school day (and on the bus) to get all of my homework finished before I got home; that way, I could do whatever I wanted once I was home. (Of course, my homework load was nothing like what any of my kids have had.) That's exactly how my daughter works. It's also how I wanted my son to be, and I spent years trying to convert him to that approach, pressuring him to work in a system that didn't work for him. It's just not the way he works. It's about like putting a fish on land and trying to talk it into breathing air instead of water.] For instance, her 2nd grade teacher, the same teacher my son had in 2nd grade, loved her. Because she was fast. Even though my daughter made mistakes from working too fast, the teacher thought she was brilliant. The teacher thought she was the "smart one."

[Now, I don't want to make it sound like I have boxed my kids into labels, because that's not the case. My daughter is exceedingly smart, quite above average, but she is not as academically talented asher older brother. If you want to call it that, he is the "smart one;" she is the "sporty one." Those things are just objectively true. Labeling is really for ease of reference, but we don't consider our daughter not smart just because she's into sports. My son, however, is completely un-sporty.]

Anyway...

Our initial reaction to the email was to set up another conference with his counselor and this teacher... only to find out that he had a new counselor, too, and she was also questioning whether he ought to be where he was, not just in that class but math and even the school. I just wanted to scream. I mean, don't these people look at anything other than what's right in front of them? Could they not see that he'd made honor roll the previous year and see his standardized test scores and see everything or anything that came before that one moment? To accomplish anything, we were going to have to start completely over again with everything we'd done the year before.

Was it even worth it?

School, regular school, was clearly hell for my kid. It wasn't getting better. There was no routine that was working for him that involved him getting up and sitting through classes all day, classes he couldn't see any point to (or me, for that matter (but that's a different topic)), and doing hours of homework every night. And, honestly, it had worn us out.

It was time for other alternatives. If the system doesn't work or, more specifically, work for you, you should get out of it. It's like that what I've said about tradition in the past: If it's not working for you, change it. And, face it, school is mostly about tradition at this point. That's why we keep increasing the homework load on kids despite the fact that study after study shows that homework (other than reading) is counterproductive.

But change is hard and stepping outside of the system is, um, more hard. More harder. Look, it's difficult to look at this thing that is the way everyone does it (not counting homeschool (which we were NOT going to do), because homeschool is still within the system even though it might not look like it) and to decide to go some other way. But that's what it's come down to, finding another path because, honestly, there's not anything else he's going to learn at school, anyway, and he's already farther along, by far, in pretty much every subject than most high school graduates.

See, this is the part where you quit trying to do the same thing over and over and failing every time but doing it again anyway in the vain hope of a different result.

How the System Failed My Son: Part Six -- Get with the System

[Just go back and read the other posts if you haven't done so already and you want to know what's going on.]

High school didn't get better. It almost did, but, then, it just didn't.

The first problem was that taking drama as a class was not like working on a production. Working on a production, while fun, had a purpose. There was a goal, something everyone was working toward and, while there were production aspects of drama class (they had to perform short one-acts at the end of the school year), mostly it was just playing games. So it was fun, but it had no purpose. It got boring.

Because he got into the arts program through drama, he was required to take two periods of it a day, and he couldn't drop it without dropping the whole program and leaving the school. Not that there were any thoughts of that, because we didn't know drama was an issue.

No, the thing that came up first was English. I got an email from his freshman English teacher telling me that they had had an in-class essay to write as part of a test and that Phillip had sat and stared at his blank paper through the whole class and not written anything. She went on to tell me that she should have contacted me sooner because Phillip had been having some issues for a while, mostly that he seemed disinterested in the class and, therefore, was not participating. He was not passing, especially with the blank essay. This was an honors class, and her suggestion was that we move him into the "academic" class because, obviously, he was not capable of performing in the honors class.

The problem here was that she also had never addressed the issue with my son. She had not ever once said to him, "Hey, what's up? I'm noticing that you're not turning in any work. Is there anything going on or anything I can help you with?" No, her first response, her belated response to the situation, was to contact me and tell me that my son was not cut out for her class. (More on that in a moment.)

Now, we already knew that Phillip was having an issue with timed writing assignments. That had been something that had started during 7th grade. It's just not the way he works. (It's also not the way I work, either, but, then, I never had to write any timed essays when I was in middle school. Or, for that matter, much in high school, either. Essay questions are one thing, but the idea of sitting down and writing an essay on a topic in 45 minutes is something else entirely.) I mentioned previously that he's a perfectionist, so he has to work out the whole paper in his head beforehand. I have literally watched him stare at blank paper for six hours then write the entire three-page assignment in less than 30 minutes. Asking him to sit down and write an essay RIGHT NOW is about the same as throwing him off of a building and telling him to fly. The same kind of panic takes over his mind and, rather than being to figure out what to write, he's consumed by the ground rushing at his face.

When this started happening in middle school, he had a teacher who cared about his success as a person, not about the success of her class; and she worked with him to find alternate solutions for timed essays.
[I want to point out here that the idea of timed essays as preparing you for life or your career is bullshit. There is no time in your life after you get out of school that you will be asked to sit down and write an essay, timed or not. Sure, there are some careers that require writing at a high level, but it's not essay writing. The essay is a very specific form of writing that is almost exclusively used within the boundaries of school. And, while there are deadlines for the things you may need to write, none of those are SIT DOWN AND WRITE THIS RIGHT NOW kind of things.]
His freshman English teacher was not interested in working with him to find any solution other than him sitting down and writing the in-class essay. "Get with the system."

We had a conference -- the teacher, my son, his counselor, my wife and I -- wherein we worked out some strategies, within the system, for my son to use to find some success in his English class. And in his Algebra 2 class, as it turned out, which wasn't going as poorly as his English class, but it wasn't going at the level of his ability, either (the math issue was completely around the issue of homework (have I mentioned how much I hate homework? (but you can't pass a class with As on all of your tests if you aren't turning in the homework (which is RIDICULOUS)))).

I learned some things about his teacher during that conference including why she had never spoken to my son about the fact that he wasn't participating in the class or turning in his work. During the conference, his English teacher never once looked at anyone, either when she spoke or when anyone else spoke. She kept her eyes focused off at the floor to her left. Every once in a while, she would flick her eyes up at the group, but she was completely unable to make actual eye contact with anyone. It was disconcerting, to say the least. And off putting. Her level of introversion made me wonder how she was able to teach at all, but, also, made it obvious as to why she had never spoken to my son one-on-one. She was incapable of it. In effect, he was being punished for her inability.

The other thing that became obvious was that his teacher still didn't believe he belonged in her class. She expressed some vague belief that he couldn't write and that he should be in a class, i.e., the "academic" class, where writing wasn't required. I told her that she only thought that because she hadn't read anything that he'd written. She, basically, blew me off when I said that. It wasn't quite a "yeah, whatever," but it was close enough.

However, the next unit they were doing was fiction writing, and they were required to write a short story for that. That's my son's area of expertise, so to speak. I got an email from his teacher after she read his story, read it during class while the students were doing something else, letting me know that she had burst out into laughter during class while reading it, something that never happens with her. She apologized to me and told me that I was correct in my assessment of my son and his abilities. Not so amazingly, the relationship between my son and his teacher got better after that.

I think, in the end, that that is what made the difference, her view of him. Once she offered him some amount of respect and appreciation, he was able to come around and perform in the class, and that affected all of his school life. Of course, he was also following all of the strategies he had been given, so I missed the importance of what happened with the teacher. I think we all did, including my son. We chalked it up to him doing the things he was supposed to be doing. Not only did he make it through his freshman year, but he made honor roll. We thought we had it all figured out...

That is until he started his sophomore year, the school year that is, as I write this, just now drawing to a close.

For an example of my son's writing, you can visit this post. He wrote the short story "Into the Trench" when he was 10, and it was that story that initially alerted me to his ability. At the end of this series, if my son is agreeable, I will post the story he wrote for his freshman English class.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5a)

I was 15 when I started working at my church. It started out with small tasks, I suppose you'd say. I'd help in the kitchen, which was an easy job to get because, well, my mom was the cook, so, if they were shorthanded and needed someone to do the dishes or something, I'd get drafted. I mowed lawns for the building superintendent. Sometimes, I got the oh-so-fun job of cleaning the bathrooms. Things like that.

But I was good with kids so, somewhere in there, I transitioned to working in the various children's programs, and I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school (when I was 16) working in the gym assisting the recreation director with all of the summer programs, including the ones for teenagers, which meant I was in charge of my friends. It wasn't a big deal. I mean, I never had to go get someone higher up to enforce the rules because people wouldn't listen to me. Not even when I was in charge of adults during the evening programs. And, as time went on, I was left in charge more and more often.

During my junior year of high school, the recreation director left to go somewhere else. The church didn't hire a new one; they just put me in charge of the recreation programs. Nominally, I was under the auspices of the youth director, but, really, it was just me. Basically, he just had to sign off on whatever it was I wanted to do, but he never said no. [This was a good deal for the church, by the way. We were in a decline, at the time, and they replaced a salaried staff member with an hourly worker. A minimum wage hourly worker, at that. I'm sure they pocketed at least $25,000 off of the deal.]

During my senior year of high school, I started teaching Sunday school. Not to little kids, to my own age group. Sometimes, I also taught on Wednesday nights, too, to the whole youth group. And, sometimes, I taught the college group on Sunday nights. These teaching gigs were not because they didn't have anyone else to do it. They were because the youth director acknowledged that I was the most qualified. To put this in context, any time there was a disagreement about anything in the Bible between my youth director (who also taught Latin, so a smart guy) and myself, when we got into it and did the research, he always had to come tell me that I was right. [This is not me bragging. This is me giving you the necessary contextual background to understand what's coming up.] The only thing he didn't fully concede to me was our disagreement on Revelation to which he said, "I'm not saying that you're right, but I am saying that I was wrong."

All of that to say that I was fairly integral to the running of things "downstairs" (where the youth stuff was located) well before I graduated from high school. But, then, I graduated from high school, and, then, I went away to college. During the summer after my graduation before I left, the youth pastor quit. It was very sudden, but he got a (much) better offer from another church in the city and, basically, just walked out the door. Sure, he gave, like, the standard two weeks notice, but that doesn't mean much in church work. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed at him for bailing, and we didn't exactly part on the best of terms.

Now, let's jump ahead a couple of years.

Where I went to college, although in another state, was only about an hour away from home. My mom didn't much like having me out of the house, but freshmen were required to live on campus, so that's what I did. As soon as I became a sophomore, though, she started urging me to move back home and commute to school. The thing that decided me to do that was that opportunity to become the acting youth director at my church, the church I had mostly not been to for the past couple of years (other than the summer between my freshman and sophomore years). Hmm... maybe "acting" is not quite the word I want. Technically, there was a youth director, but they had rolled a whole bunch of stuff up into one position, so he was about six different things: youth, recreation, college/career, education, and... well, I can't remember what else. At any rate, he wasn't much interested in teaching the youth, so he offered me a spot under him in which I would be over the youth (and, mostly, the recreation) program. I was still not on staff, though, and still being paid by the hour. [Yes, it's like the crummy deals that authors take from traditional publishers when they are first starting out because 1. they don't know any better and 2. they are just happy to be being published.]

Just to make this point clear, when I left to go away to college not quite two years prior to that first Wednesday night I walked down into the youth room to teach, we had been running 40-50 teens on a Wednesday night. But I and the youth pastor had both left at the same time, and he had been replaced with a guy who felt like the teenagers were a burden and didn't really want to have anything to do with them. I knew there had been deterioration, but, still, I wasn't expecting the sight I was greeted with: two kids. Two. Both of them middle schoolers. I didn't even know who they were.
Well, then.

[So, yeah, I know that this doesn't seem to fit into this series, but, trust me, it does. Just come back next week.]

Peer Editing (or Teaching Kids To Fail) (an IWSG post)

Back around the beginning of December, my younger son had his first fiction writing assignment in his freshman English class. As I've mentioned before, my son is an excellent writer. He is so far beyond where I was at his age, there's no way to make a good comparison. The story he wrote is very good, and I will be making it available at some point. It was so good, in fact, that his teacher emailed me to let me know how good it is, so good that she caused a disruption during class while reading it. Because she was laughing her ass off.
[heh heh I said "ass."]

All of that is well and good. The issue came after they turned in the first draft. After the first draft came the peer editing process. I have never been fond of peer editing; my oldest had to do a lot of this when he was in high school, but he was the one that everyone wanted to edit their papers. [Do you see a trend here?] He would mention it every now and then, but it was never an issue for him. However, what happened with my younger son is an excellent example of why peer editing should never be used. Not in school and, well, not anywhere.

So my son wrote his story and turned it in, then it was passed through the hands of several of his classmates for editing. It came back with tons of corrections. I mean  the paper was all marked up. And this caused a problem.

See, my son was pretty sure he didn't have any errors, even though he hadn't given it to me to proof before he turned it in. His marked up paper filled him with doubt. It made him question what he knew.

He brought it home and gave it to me and told me, "I didn't think I had any mistakes but, now, I don't know."  He asked me some specific questions about punctuation, because more than one person had made the same comma "correction." One person accused him of using too many "run on" and "long" sentences, because, the person said, sentences should be short. I agreed to look the story over for him so that he would know which "corrections" to respond to.

As it turned out, the number of corrections he needed to respond to was... zero. ZERO. Every correction made to his story was incorrect. I told him to ignore them all and turn the final draft in exactly as it had been. His grade was 50/50 turning in the paper as it had been before his peers got a hold of it. His teacher wrote "flawless" along with the grade.

There are a few things here that need to be pointed out:
1. My son knew what he was doing. He knew he knew what he was doing. But, still, when his paper came back from his peers, it filled him with doubt about what he knew he knew. That's not a good thing. If my son, who is very competent, doubted himself, how do you think other students who are not very competent responded?
2. In relation to point 1, this kind of "editing" can cause students to unlearn things that are correct. It can convince them that they were incorrect about things which were actually correct and cause them to change to some incorrect method, like putting all the commas after the conjunction in a sentence rather than before it (a very common "correction" on my son's story).
3. Every time a student makes an incorrect "correction" on someone else's paper, it reinforces that incorrect behavior. Each time that student moves the comma to the wrong place, it ingrains that process just a little deeper. Kind of like muscle memory. It's much more difficult to re-learn something like that once you've been doing it a lot rather than just learning it correctly the first time. Don't give students a chance to reinforce bad grammar/punctuation habits; they make enough of those on their own.

The whole peer editing process being used in schools is a bad joke, and teachers should quit telling it.

I want to point out that the critique partner process is the same thing as peer editing. Almost always, the assertion, "I have great critique partners," means, "My peer editors add mistakes to my manuscript!" What makes me say this? Well, the fact that so many indie authors who use CPs to help them edit their books send their works out full of grammar and punctuation lice. Yeah, lice, because that's what it's like. One person's mistakes jumping over to some other person's manuscript because neither person is competent with grammar.

Sorry, it's just the truth.

More heads do NOT result in a better product. They result in a gradual degradation of your first product as you incorporate everyone else's mistakes into your manuscript. Basically, a grammar lice outbreak.

Look. I get it. Editing is tough. Good editing is even more tough, and it's difficult to find at a reasonable price. Beyond that, most of the editors out there aren't any better than having a CP. Too many of them are "editing" because they read a lot. Seriously. I have seen so many people (book bloggers, especially) who, because they find "mistakes" in the indie books they are reading, think that makes them qualified to be an editor. It does not.

So what do you do, then?

There's not really a good answer to that other than to find ONE person who is better at copy-editing than you and trust that one person with your manuscript. At least, that way, you only have the potential for one person's errors in your final product. Or, maybe, you'll find someone really good, and it will end up "flawless" like my son's short story. (If you want, I'll ask him if he's taking anyone, right now.)

Actually, ideally, you would set to work learning grammar and punctuation yourself and develop your own style with it that fits your writing. That's what's most important, especially if you're an indie author. Even if not all of the grammar and punctuation isn't technically correct, if the style fits you're writing, it doesn't matter.

can you imagine what it would be like if e e cummings had followed the rules?

his style was what defined him

however, i'm sure he knew the rules even though he didn't follow them

why do i know that?

because he broke the rule consistently in the same way

All of that to say:

Stop submitting your work to your "peers." By the definition of peers, these are people who are no more qualified than you to do the job that you are asking of them. Learn the rules for yourself, then you can know how and when to break them.