Do Parents Care Enough About Schools?

The NYTimes has an interesting discussion here on whether or not parents care enough about school.  Personally, I think even asking that question is patronizing.   In all of my years of teaching, I never found parents who didn't care.  Many parents were frustrated, for various reasons, but they all cared.

Helping your Child Avoid the Self-Pity Trap

The New York Times has a Motherlode column here about the difficulty of raising an adopted daughter in a divorced family. The mother goes into great detail about how difficult this family situation is for her daughter.  This is the note I left for her:

So, yes, it’s too bad that your daughter has these added stresses of growing-up to deal with.  But you can’t change any of that now.  The important thing now is to make sure that your daughter doesn’t feel sorry for herself, since self-pity is the fastest road to unhappiness.

I would concentrate on helping her build a self-image of someone smart and independent and capable:  then she’ll attract and keep friends.  She won’t worry so much about family issues if she has a strong, supportive peer group.

You do this in the usual ways:  help her be involved in activities;  coach her to be interested in her friends’ problems and lives, rather than just her own;  help her develop a love of reading, so she starts to understand the way other people live.

I think sending her to a camp for adopted children might play too much into a “poor you” narrative.  Remember that as kids grow older, they don’t just need to feel loved, they need to be lovable.  It’s very hard to warm up to someone who feels sorry for herself much of the time—even if she has reason to feel sorry for herself.

How to Make Students Want to Work Hard

The New York Times Motherlode has a column here today with different viewpoints on how to make students care about working hard.

I raised three children, and taught high school English for 37 years.  Here is what I saw:

Almost always, the more pressure you put on a child to do well, the less effective that pressure becomes over the years.  I had high school students who did almost nothing, but told me that their parents were successful getting them to work in the early grades.  But by high school that oversight and pressure had so sapped any internal motivation that the kids stopped working almost completely.  The only exception I saw to this were kids with serious learning disabilities who really did need day to day help in coping with academic demands.

The only solution I ever saw work for a child whose own motivation had been so eviscerated by parental control was to make sure that child was in as nurturing and interesting an academic situation as possible, and then stand back. 

While it’s true your child will not, then, have the grades to get into a competitive college, unless he develops internal motivation he won’t succeed in college anyway.  And it’s much cheaper to have a child fail high school courses than to fail college courses.  I’ve known kids whose parents pulled them through high school with pressure and punishments and tutors, and then had to watch them fail out of college—often after paying twenty or thirty thousand for that first college year.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/how-can-you-make-a-student-care-enough-to-work-harder/

Nursing Home Care

The New York Times has a column here discussing the increasing presence of video cameras in the rooms of nursing home patients.  The cameras have caught some shocking instances of abuse.  But I think the problem is much wider and deeper than a few instances of severe abuse (horrible as they are).

My mother was in a nursing home for over two years before she died.  I visited her every day.  These are my impressions:

I’m guessing that in her nursing home over seventy-five percent of the patients had some form of dementia.  While these patients could still walk around, they were in a locked ward.  But as soon as they were wheel-chair bound, they were moved down to the regular wards.  I’m sure at least half—probably many more—of the residents on my mother’s ward had severe dementia.  

While I know there are occasional horror stories, that these videos show, another huge problem is just the general level of care.  When you have so many patients who can’t complain because of dementia the care is likely to become careless and slapdash.  When you add in the low wages and difficult working conditions for the aides, I think it becomes a certainty that the care will be substandard.  For example, it was an everyday thing that when my mother would turn on her buzzer for some needed help--as she was almost completely helpless--an aide would come in, turn off the buzzer (so the timer would show it was answered right away), and then immediately leave without helping her.

A huge problem.  I don’t know the solution.

When an Autistic Child Wanders Off

The New York Times has a column here on the problem of autistic children who wander off.  Apparently as many as 49 percent of autistic children wander at some point.  An Amber alert can only be used for a child who is abducted.  The column calls for a national program on how to prevent wandering in autistic children.

Yesterday in a mall I saw a man, hunched over, talking loudly to himself.  The talk didn't seem to make any sense.  I didn't do anything, feeling that I had no right to intrude on him.

But now I'm thinking I was wrong.  He probably was disabled in some way, and perhaps had wandered off from a caretaker.

So here's my suggestion:  how about a public awareness campaign with instructions on what to do when seeing a clearly disabled child or adult wandering on their own.  Perhaps we could be instructed to call 911--I almost did that.  But I'm always afraid of overloading the 911 centers with non-serious calls.

I think all of the other suggestions are valuable, but giving the public an easy way to alert authorities when seeing a wandering disabled person might be very helpful.  Of course there would be false alarm calls, but surely these are less harmful than the dangers an autistic child or adult might encounter on their own.

Letter-Writing Vrs. E-mail

The New York Times has an op-ed piece here lamenting “The Death of Letter-Writing.”  Apparently, according to the column, famous writers set aside a portion of every day to write letters.

As a high school English teacher for almost 40 years, I have to say I think e-mail is a fabulous invention.  Just as the top readers I taught were kids who early fell in love with reading, and read everything they could find, my top writers were kids who did a lot of writing just for fun.  They wrote poems in chemistry class, and notes to their friends in all of their classes.

E-mail is this kind of daily bread-and-butter writing, just as reading newspapers or John Grisham is daily bread-and-butter reading.  People who are avid e-mail writers develop a fluency and voice and style that spills over to their more formal writing. 

And practically, it’s wonderful to have so much information (reservations, directions, times to meet, etc.) in an easily searchable e-mail database rather than in an overflowing file cabinet or hastily scribbled notes.