Spring Broken

It's spring break here.
Saying that, though, I'm not sure if it has any meaning left.

Let's look at it like this:
You have some "typical" corporate job, and it's a drag, and you have vacation time so you decide to use it. You go to your boss and tell the management asshole that you want to use some of your vacation days to take a week off of work. Your boss gives you that "boss" look and says, "Sure, that's fine. You can skip coming into work next week but, while you're at home, I want you to work on a couple of special projects and bring them back to me complete after your vacation."

"But I wasn't going to stay home..."

"Well, you better just plan to take them with you, then. And make sure you do a good job. Your next raise will depend on it."

What do you do, right? All you want is some time off, a vacation, but you're given even more work to do and there's no real way to get out of it even if it's wrong and, if that kind of thing actually happened to someone, probably illegal.

I don't actually know if that kind of thing happens or not, but I do know that the United States has more unused vacation days than any other country in the world. Why? Fear.
People are scared to use their time off because they worry that taking the time off will reflect poorly on them... in some way or other.
Which is not the point of this post.

It's spring break here.
Spring break is like vacation for kids. Or that's the idea, right? They're kids, and they need a break from school every once in a while. A vacation.
I remember when it was like that. When I was a kid, it was like that. School was out, and there was nothing to worry about for a solid week. Unless you were one of those kids who had put off normal school work and had to use spring break to catch up on that work, but, then, that was on you.

I remember the first time I got a significant assignment over break. It was over summer break between middle school and high school, and I was assigned books to read over summer break. Three or four of them. One of the books assigned was a book I already loved, and I never minded reading assignments; still, I remember feeling like it wasn't okay for them to do that. BUT! I excused it because I was going to be going to a different kind of high school... It was one of the first magnet schools in the country, not that you can turn around anymore without bumping into some kind of magnet or charter school, but, at the time, it was still this kind of experiment, and we didn't know the kinds of changes it would bring... like homework during summer breaks.

And, damn, my daughter is on spring break, and she has a shit-ton of homework. Her English teacher assigned a major project which is due on Monday after break. No, this is not one of those things where my daughter put it off and, now, has to do it over spring break (she never does that); the teacher scheduled a test for the Friday before break, then took 20 minutes of their test-taking time to explain their 200 point spring break assignment. That's just bullshit.

And she has a buttload of chemistry homework. Her teacher assigned them, basically, a homework assignment for each day of break, including the two weekends, as if they were still going to be in school. My daughter already spends two to three hours a night doing chemistry homework, so she's going to be spending that same time on chemistry over her vacation, too.

Not mention that she got homework in history and Spanish, also. Including watching a movie for history class that most of the students will have to pay to rent, another thing I don't find to be okay.

Oh! And she has softball practice and a game during spring break, too.

Excuse me, but what the fuck? Seriously, what the fuck?

My daughter already spends basically all of her time being stressed about school and had been looking forward to a little time off from that; now, she gets to spend all of spring break being even more stressed about school. Why? Because we actually planned (months ago) a small trip during break, the first time we've done that in something like four years (and only the second time we've ever done it), and, now, my daughter has to balance the trip against all of the fucking schoolwork she has to do.

And that's just wrong.
Inherently wrong.

Not that I blame the teachers. Not exactly. They're just part of a system that no longer works, as has become abundantly clear in the news in the last couple of weeks (and, yes, it's all related), and doing the best they can, which includes burying their students in homework and waiting to see who can rise above it all.

Perform monkey! Perform!

No, I don't have any ideas on how to fix it.
Yeah, I'm lying, but what does it matter if I have ideas about what's wrong with the education system in our country? I'm sure you have ideas, too, and those ideas are probably not the same ideas.
Mine are just better. 😏
[Oh, look! My first post emoji!]
So, no, I don't have ideas on how to fix it; I'm just pointing out an issue. Bringing it up. Not that I expect anything to come of bringing it up; sometimes, you just want to put it out there.
Of course, this isn't the first time I've brought up the crushing amount of homework my kids get, and it probably won't be the last time, either.

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.

The Point of Dissent

When I was young, my mom used to tell me things like, "Don't rock the boat," and, "Don't speak up; it won't do any good," and, "Just go along; it's easier that way." This was never an idea I was able to buy into, even at a young age, probably because I had a string of really great teachers from 4th through 6th grades, teachers who taught me that it was not just okay but good to question authority.

Don't get me wrong; I don't mean questioning authority just for the sake of questioning authority. I mean that you don't accept something just because it's being told to you by someone "in authority." Of course, the fact that I grew up in a house where my father expected to be believed "because he said so" didn't leave me very inclined to think anyone in authority knew what they were talking about.

By high school, I was quite adept at "asking questions" when I thought the person in authority was wrong. That translates into, "I was very good at pointing out when the person in authority was wrong and asking for the data." This was something that especially happened at church where I found out that in most circumstances, because I did my own studying and research, I was the authority on whatever subject we were studying. More so than any of the Sunday school teachers, more so than the youth pastor, and more so than even the pastor in many instances. It was very common for both my pastor and my youth pastor to say to me, "I'm not going to tell you you're right, but you're not wrong."

I felt good about bringing these things up, about dissenting with what was being said, because, frequently, it led to a redaction of false information and/or a correction of what was being taught.

Which brings me to the point of dissent...

It brings me to the point of dissent and, more specifically, why you should bother.
(And I'm not going to elaborate much here; I'm just going to go through the points I want to make.)

1. Dissenting can cause people to take a second look at the information being offered and catch errors that might not otherwise come to light.

2. Dissenting in a matter of a position (such as a political or moral position) [see this series of posts] clearly states which side you are on, which can be incredibly important [just ask all of the Republicans in a couple of years when they lose their spots in the House for not standing up to Trump].

3. Dissenting can give others who agree with you but who are staying quiet the courage to stand up along with you. Sometimes, it takes only one person to stand up and do the right thing to give other people the strength to also stand.

Look, folks, we're at a crux in history. It's not a dissimilar crux to that of the one that caused the American Revolution. There are a few corrupt but rich and seemingly powerful people in control, but there aren't really that many who agree with them, even among those who supposedly agree with them. It's time to dissent.
Rebel.
Resist.

"The map is wrong" and Why It's Time To Ignore Trump

Living with an autocrat is never easy, not least of which because they can be erratic and unpredictable. Some of that unpredictableness comes from the fact that they warp reality around their assertions that their view of the world is the one and only correct view of the world. Let me give you an example:

When I was no more than seven or eight, I was having a discussion with my mom about a geography thing I learned at school that day. It was one of those "what did you learn today" moments. As I was telling her, my dad butted in with, "That's wrong."

Now, when I was a kid, I never held that typical belief that my parents were the ultimate authority on things. That was a view I held for teachers. Teachers were infallible. At least, at that point in my life, they were. So, of course, my response to my dad was something along the lines of, "But my teacher said..."

To which he responded, "Your teacher is wrong."

Some of you may have realized that I can be pretty... forceful... about the things I believe, and that has always been true, even when I was a kid, so an argument ensued. An argument which ended with the purchase of a map of the state, upon my insistence, because I was determined to prove that I was correct. We opened the map up, found the landmark, and...

I was right. It was just as I said from what we learned in class.

And my dad said, immediately, "The map is wrong."

I tried to argue. An argument which was cut short by my dad saying, "I'm right because I say I am."

I was, needless to say, flabbergasted. I just could not understand his insistence that he was right when, clearly, reality said otherwise.

It was also the very last time I ever argued anything with my dad. What was the point?

Also, that's a difficult lesson to learn when you're only seven or eight.

My dad also had that infuriating thing that you've probably seen in movies where he would ask me a question then yell at me not to "talk back" to him when I tried to answer. So, yeah, reality warping.

My tactic for dealing with him by the time I was in middle school was to just walk away. Literally. (And I have to say that it was actually quite satisfying, because it would leave him flustered and yelling, spittle flying out of his mouth as he did so. Seriously. (You didn't want to be close to him when he was yelling about something because there was always spittle.)) I refused to engage with him because you could never tell where you stood or what kind of crazy -- I hesitate to call them lies, because he was never "lying." -- untruth was going to come out of him. And you couldn't argue because facts didn't matter. He was right because he said he was. So, yeah, maybe it was disrespectful, but I would walk away, usually to my room but, sometimes, to outside.

And you know what? It would shut him up. I mean, after the "don't walk away from me while I'm talking to you!" part, that was the end of it. He never resumed anything later and there were never any consequences. Well, okay, there was the occasional "you're grounded!" that followed the bit about not walking away, but he never paid enough attention to ever enforce that; it just made him feel good to say it. Like he was actually doing something, I suppose.

Now, here's the punch line:
Trump is just like my dad. Or like my dad would have been if he'd had someone to give him a "small loan of a million dollars" to get him started off in life.

I realize what I'm about to say is more than impractical, but the way we need to be dealing with Trump, as a society, when he starts spouting nonsense is to "walk away." Ignore it. Deal with the actual business at hand and not pay any attention to his untruths. Because I'm pretty sure that Trump, also, isn't "lying." He's just saying stupid shit because
1. He's not very smart. and
2. He's right because he says he is; therefore, to him, anything he says is reality.

So here we are, two weeks later (as I write this and, probably, three weeks later as you read this), and we're still talking about Trump's completely unsupported and demonstrably false statement that he was wiretapped by Obama. Why are we still talking about it? Because we have allowed Trump to warp or reality. Rather than talking about him and his ties to Russia or any number of other things, we are now focused on whether Obama, the least scandalous President ever, had Trump under surveillance. With the British! Because Trump has to continue to warp reality to keep us focused on the wrong things. On non-things.

All of that to say this:
It's time to move the conversation back to where it should be, on Trump and the evil of his cohorts and how they are trying to ruin the world for everyone except the very wealthy. Because, actually, some of Trump's untruths are lies and, certainly, the people around him are lying all the time, just look at Flynn and Sessions for starters.

What we need to learn, as a society, especially the press, is that when Trump offers up something that comes without proof, something like "I was wiretapped," we need to not even acknowledge it. You stay focused on the actual story (in this case, it was the story about Sessions and how he lied under oath, but we haven't heard anymore about that since Trump made his completely fallacious claim) and resist chasing the squirrels that Trump is tossing into the room.

Personally, I think it would be great if we really could just walk away from him, just like I did with my dad. I bet Trump spittles, too, when he yells.

Education: The One Step To Improvement

If there's one thing everyone agrees with, it's that education in the United States is not what it once was. That, however, is probably not true. The truth is that education in the United States is precisely what it once was, mostly stuck in a 50s era mindset of how education ought to work.

Sure, things have been tried, but the basic model hasn't changed.

And, certainly, Betsy DeVos doesn't want to change that model. In fact, she wants to reinforce it by funneling the "right" kids into the Right kinds of schools so that we can get back to schools full of wealthy white kids to bring back excellence. With her model, that's what will work, too, because it will be select schools which are well funded by affluent white people, and everyone else... Well, everyone else can go to hell because, if you're not white and not rich, you don't deserve an education anyway.

So, while DeVos pushes vouchers and school "choice" (which, by the way, is just a code for affluent whites to get to put all of their kids in schools together in places where minorities can't afford to get their kids to (just in case you didn't get that from the previous paragraph)) and everyone else pays administrators huge salaries and experiments with programs, the education system is still missing the mark on how to fix itself. And so is everyone else. Except, maybe, teachers.

After all, there is only one real problem with education: teacher pay. That and the fact that we don't pay them. Well, pay for them to be teachers.

See, teacher pay is also, really, stuck in the 50s, so what we have now are babysitters. That's what we pay for, so that, on the whole, is what we get. A big, national system, state by state, of babysitters.

Before anyone starts taking umbrage, I don't mean any disrespect toward teachers. This is not a statement about "bad teachers." I've known some really great ones. But, having been involved in teaching, I also know the general state of teachers, which, actually, is most often tired. It is, beyond doubt, the most over worked, under paid "profession" out there. And, yes, the quotation marks are to indicate the lack of being paid to do the job they are hypothetically being paid to do.

I'm not going to try and break all of this down and make it into a numbers game to show just how little teachers are being paid per hour (and don't start yelling "summer" at me, either, because that doesn't balance anything, especially when many teachers have to pick up some kind of summer job to make it through the summer). What I'm going to say is this:
If teachers were paid more, there would be more teachers in the teaching profession. By that I mean that many people, especially men, who would be good teachers (and might have been a teacher at some point) don't teach (or quit teaching) because they can make more money somewhere else for far less headache and less time on the job. More money, fewer hours: Who wouldn't take that, right? Only those extremely highly dedicated to teaching.

I actually hate having to bring up men specifically, because that's part of the problem. Men are more likely to leave teaching because men are paid more than women just in general and men are more likely to find higher level jobs that pay more in and of themselves. All of that while teaching is seen as a woman's job so is inherently less likely to receive wage hikes. All of this is wrong and plays into why teaching suffers.

If teachers were paid competitive salaries, you'd find people, both men and women, competing for teaching positions, which would weed out those people who go into teaching because "anyone can teach." Come on, I know you believe that. That's what everyone thinks. "Well, if I can't get a job doing [X], I can always teach." And that is not what we want from our teachers, people who opted into it because they weren't qualified or smart enough or ambitious enough for anything else. We want people who want to be there even if that desire is spurred by a good salary. People who know they have to do good work because there is someone else waiting at least as qualified as they are will do better work, will be more invested in the job, than someone who knows they're not going to lose their job because there's no one else waiting to take it.

And, seriously, if you have good, motivated teachers, you don't need to focus on programs because one good teacher in a room with nothing more than a chalkboard will motivate even poor students to do well; while, one bad teacher, no matter what kind of programs you have in place, will kill the desire to learn in all but the best students (because they're already doing it on their own, anyway).

Look, I'm not saying anything new here. We've been, as a society, talking about teacher pay for... decades? Since I was in high school, at least. However, instead of just paying teachers more, we've been funneling money into programs and to administrators and, as a result, other countries, countries in which teachers are held in higher esteem, have continued to outpace the US in education. And that gap keeps getting bigger. So, if we're going to be serious about educating the next generation, and if we really want to "make America great" again, it starts with education, and that starts with paying teachers to be more than babysitters.

And all of that means we, as a society, have to start looking at education and being educated as something worthwhile again. We have to start looking at science as something more than just an opinion. It's time to quit with the whole Right wing/Conservative/Republican view of education and science as the enemy. We live in an information age where facts, real facts, are right at our fingertips. It's amazing, actually, and it's time to start making the most of it by grasping what is real and true and dumping disinformation and lies, and all of that starts with education.

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.

How the System Failed My Son: Part Four -- A Moment of Hope

No recap. Just go back and read the previous posts here, here, and here.

4th grade was better. He had a good teacher that year, a teacher we had been looking forward to him having because of what we knew about him from when his older brother had had the same teacher. He began to enjoy school and quit asking if he didn't have to go. Not that he was being challenged, but it was at least interesting. He also started 6th grade math that year, which was still too easy, but at least it wasn't depressingly easy.

Well, it wasn't depressingly easy at school, at any rate. At home was another story. See, going into middle school math meant a certain amount of homework to go along with it. Unnecessary homework. It's not that he hadn't already been having unnecessary homework (and I would argue that nearly all homework is unnecessary (in fact, I have)), but it had been relatively small amounts of unnecessary homework. 6th grade math stepped that up to levels that became depressing, because, again, it amounted to busy work for him, and he hated doing it. Because he hated doing it, it became a huge ordeal every fucking day. Every fucking day that has lasted for years. That year to this one, in fact.

This homework thing is part of the system that has failed not just my son but is failing pretty much all students in the United States, right now, and we refuse to give it up because, well, it's how we do things. If there's one thing Americans are good at it's taking something that is failing and doing it harder and more intensely and hoping for a better outcome. Homework is a system that has proven to be a failure and, yet, we just continue to give students more and more of it.

As an aside, my kids' school, many years ago, now, did actually take a look at homework and considered doing away with it. That's what the research shows: Homework should be so minimal as to be almost non-existent. Except reading. Reading should be assigned and promoted, because kids need to be reading. However, when it came down to it, the teachers couldn't agree to drop it. Why? Because assigning homework is what they knew.

So... He did better at school, but the homework he was having cancelled all of that out and, rather than his level of dislike for school going down, it just sort of simmered there at the same level. But, other than spending hours on homework every night, the year went well.

About a week before school started the next year, the year he would have been in 5th grade, we got a call: The school had just received back the results from the STAR test from his 4th grade year and he had, essentially, scored a 100% on it (like a 99.5% or something). He had always had high STAR test results, scores in the high 90s, which is why they had done an academic review in 3rd grade, but they couldn't ignore the 100, and they wanted to skip him to 6th grade. Of course, we said "yes."

>sigh<

I mean, of course, we said "yes." Along with the request to skip 5th grade was also an apology for not having listened to me about him for the last several years. Yeah, the principal said something to the effect of, "We should have listened to you. We're sorry. But we'd like to move him up to 6th grade this year." And, actually, they had to know right then because school was going to start in a week.

In hindsight, that was probably the wrong year to have done that. Not because he wasn't ready but because we had finally found a teacher he enjoyed, and he would have had the same teacher in 5th grade as he'd had in 4th grade. We did, briefly, consider that, that he would have to leave that teacher's class, but we figured it would be better to get him more closely aligned to where he was academically.

But the 6th grade teacher, as nice as she was and as much as he liked her, was not engaging in the way his 4th grade teacher had been, and it wasn't long before he'd moved back to being bored with school because nothing interesting was happening, and they weren't doing anything that he didn't already know. Not in the core classes, at any rate. There was some history he wasn't familiar with, but there was nothing in math, science, or English that he didn't already know.

There were two saving graces for him in 6th grade:
1. He was in the middle school musical production of Alice in Wonderland, and he discovered a love of musical theater.
2. I went in once a week to teach creative writing, which he loved. [I discovered that my son is a brilliant writer, which was a surprise. Not that it was a surprise, but just how brilliant was a surprise. At 10, his writing had a fullness to it that most high school students never achieve. It was way beyond what I was doing at 10, that's for sure.]

The problem with all of this is that once the perception becomes a belief, it's really hard to shake. My son's perception of school was that it was a waste of time, and, by the end of 6th grade, that had become a belief. A solid belief. He couldn't see a point in it and found nearly all of the work beneath him. But, still, he had a successful year in 6th grade and, probably, other parents would have been unconcerned with what was going on. People tend not to worry about their kids' performance at school when they're bringing in A's.

How the System Failed My Son: Part Three -- Experts

Having already been to the administration in an attempt to have my son promoted when he was in 1st grade, I knew not to try that again; there was no way his 2nd grade teacher would recommend him to be skipped to 3rd grade. Not that that would have mattered, because he would have had the same teacher. I did go talk to them about having him switched to the other 2nd/3rd grade class. That the woman, his teacher, could tell me that my son was "slow" because he did things at his own pace showed a complete lack of perception on her part (see last post). And, to be honest, she had already demonstrated (and would go on to demonstrate repeatedly) her own lack of actual intelligence. I didn't want my son in her class.

What I found out was that there was no place to move him to. The other 2nd/3rd grade class was the lower level class; he was already in the advanced group. Sure, I could move him to that class if I wanted to, but it would have made the issue of him already knowing all of the material even worse.

And there was no way to advance his progress beyond where he was without support from the teacher. It always came down to teacher recommendation. From the school's perspective, that's what they had to go with, and I get that. I would have had the same kind of standard had I been in their place. Most people have unreasonable and irrational expectations.

I'm just not most people. And neither is my son.

It's like this:
When my wife was pregnant with him, we got up one morning, and her water broke. We were about two weeks away from his due date. We, of course, went to the hospital. The admitting nurse was, shall we say, skeptical that my wife was correct in her assessment of her condition, including asking my wife if possibly she had just peed on herself. My wife, having actually worked in health care for a while, was understandably insulted. The nurse was not at all contrite when it turned out that we were correct and that my wife's water had, indeed, broken.

The thing here is that the nurse was right to be skeptical. She wouldn't have asked my wife about urinating if there was not a proven need to ask women in the same condition about urinating.

So, you know, I understand that the school needed to be skeptical with parents proclaiming the brilliance of their kids. I'm sure it was something they had to deal with all the time. The problem here was the refusal to even really listen or to look at the evidence. They just dismissed me out of hand because, you know, the teacher was the "expert" and surely she would take the appropriate action if it was called for.

It's a good thing the hospital actually checked our claims and didn't resort to the same "the nurse is the expert" way of operating.

In retrospect, it probably would have been better for us, for him, if we'd put him in some other school, maybe even any other school, but he had an older brother and a younger sister in this school, and we liked the school. We figured we could tough it out. It was only 2nd grade, right?

Right?

At the beginning of his 3rd grade year, I put in another request for him to be promoted. I think that one didn't even get a response.

Things got worse, and my son started asking to not have to go to school.

After a few months, I put in another request. At some point, they actually did a review of my kid's performance, including his standardized test scores, and they wavered, but, in the end, the principal told me it was policy to go with the teacher's recommendation, and that is what they were going to have to do. He stayed in 3rd grade, and he stayed in that horrible woman's class. By the end of that year, he hated, really and truly hated, school.

[Many years later, the school would actually "invite that teacher to leave," which, while satisfying, was much, much too late to make any kind of difference for my kid.]

[I just want to add in here because I forgot to mention it earlier:
My son taught himself how to use a computer... at the age of two. In fact, we couldn't keep him off of it. His older brother, who is five years older, had a bunch of educational games, and Phillip wanted to play them, too, especially the Sesame Street one with Elmo. It's not that we had something against him using the computer; we just hadn't even considered the possibility that he could use the computer. So he figured it out on his own. At two.]