Reluctant Writer

That would be Hank. One of the biggest problems we face as we do this homeschool thing together is writing. Well, getting him to write. Anything.

So strange to me that a kid as verbal as my firstborn should hate to write. This is a child from whose mouth issue long accounts of imaginary epic battles, buried treasure, fantastic creatures--here's part of a story that I heard him tell Shorty (with the help of Lego props):

A single fighter steps into the fray.

But. He fails to notice a single helicopter that fires…three laser cannons…straight into the windshield.

Before they go out, the canyon is so long, that no one is able to get past. They send fighter jets, but they run out of fuel before they can even enter the cavern because….[I lost track here]…before they can even access the ancient temple. Shutting down their main upper wings into landing gear mode, they disappear inside.

The planes then switch, shoot down, and pull into this huge cavern here with crystals and gold and silver and gems and diamonds, and dragon eggs hang with their colors swirling. When the eggs explode, the [baby dragons] hit onto the ropes, climb the ropes to the top and onto these little hatches. Behind the hatches is a little raised spot. The dragon mother sits there... When the baby dragon shed [sic] its skin, the dragon mother picks it up, and--shoop!--throws it into the wastebasket. We take the skins to the market and sell them…as magic…they go into a treasure chest…filled the [something] with six thousand of them.

The tunnel goes right into a volcano. It's been hollowed out so there's no lava anywhere. And there's lava tubes with torches..they go into the lava tubes and discuss plans and things. The volcano becomes a place where they can plan…there's a huge chasm...

So it's not a lack of imagination. Or lack of anything to say, or trouble verbalizing his thoughts, or limited vocabulary. He claims that his brain shuts down once he's faced with a blank piece of paper. So, writer's block?

Most online resources recommend not making a reluctant writer write. So, okay. I take dictation for 95% of what goes on his blog.


What it comes down to is that he hates the act of writing. Typing isn't much better. It's a grapho-motor skills issue. But he has to write--physically write stuff--if he's going to learn to write on his own. It's one of those things that you have to do to do. But where to start?

There's an exercise that I read about that's supposed to be great for kids who have handwriting issues and left-brain/right-brain issue (Hank is left-handed but right-everything-elsed), but it is incredibly tedious--basically trace a large infinity symbol three times, and write each letter of the alphabet over different parts of the infinity symbol, alternating each letter with three more repetitions of the infinity symbol. Do this every day for six months, and the child will improve a hundred percent.

Right. Unless he kills himself or his mother first.

But thanks to this great website, a part of the Northern Nevada Writing Project (an offshoot, I assume, of the Bay Area Writing Project and the National Writing Project), and which I am totally going to steal from again in the future, I tried something that worked.

Haiku.

I told him what a haiku was (5-7-5 syllables--or words, I said I didn't care) and we looked at a couple of examples online. The initial plan was to use this as way to practice summarizing, but thankfully I realized that we needed to practice the form first. Fun. We're supposed to have fun.

Let's try making it like a riddle, like this one about the frog.

No, about Star Wars!

Of course. Sure, why not? Okay, I'll go first. Um...okay:

Small and green I am. (Yoda! It's Yoda!)
But size matters not, I say. (Yoda! Yoda!)
Jedi master, yes.

Yoda! Yoda! Mom, that was way too easy.

Okay, you try.

And we alternated turns until he had three haiku. Fifteen sentences. Short sentences, but fifteen of them. And not a single complaint.

School at home

School at home is going well, all things considered. We're only doing about 90 minutes of actual academic work, and most of that is arithmetic drills and cursive patterns. I alternate reading books about Hawaii to get ready for our trip next week, and taking dictation for Dan's blog. I figure all the time he spends reading on his own counts, as well, so if we add that in, it's about three hours or more every day.

Here is an account of his first day up to the moment he sat down (lifted from an email because I'm too lazy to write another one):

Dan was a little discombobulated on Wednesday morning—at least, that’s the only thing I can think of to explain how unbelievably crabby he was. I took the boys to the Pancake House for breakfast to sort of celebrate not having to rush off to school, and Dan complained almost the entire time about the most ridiculous things: Johnny has new shoes and I don’t; you never let me ride in the front seat; I didn’t get a straw for my hot chocolate; the butter is melting on the pancakes; there aren’t enough chocolate chips; the sausage is the wrong texture;Johnny ’s superball is better than mine; (after throwing his superball under the seat in the car) I can’t find my superball.

Once we got home, he said, “Homeschool?” and I replied with some trepidation, “Okay, are you ready?” He cheered and gave me a hug. What a relief. We’re taking it very slowly—just a couple of hours each day of math, writing, and reading so far, and it’s going well. We’ll see what it’s like when the novelty wears off…

He was so cute that first day—he set everything up on the table (see photo): pencil, pen, markers, paper, ruler, scissors, pencil sharpener, highlighter pen, stapler, Scotch tape, and a little silver bell: “We can ring it when it’s time for recess and lunch.”

Dan's first day of school. Note the array of supplies on his left.

Today we went to a Welcome Back to School after-school park day for the boys who would have been in Dan's grade. Two of his best friends were going to be there, but I didn't know how comfortable he would be, sort of barging in on a big group of kids he doesn't see regularly anymore. In fact, he did spend the first few minutes just playing with me instead of joining his friends. He looked like the poster child for The Society of Socially Awkward Homeschooled Children, and I worried what all the other mothers would think--maybe I'm overly self-conscious, but I had a feeling that they were keeping an eye on him to see how well he'd mix back in with the old school crowd.

Exercising superhuman self-control, I asked him gently only twice, "Do you want to go play with your friend? He came right over to say hi to you, so I'm sure he wants to play with you." And I didn't say another word as my insides tied themselves in little knots of anxiety.

Thankfully, he eventually wandered over (or maybe one of them wandered back, I can't remember) and became once more a part of his favorite group of friends. Huge sigh of relief. Two of them even went with him at his invitation to a distant part of the park to climb a more challenging piece of equipment.


What's also fun is Johnny. He was sitting on my lap last week wondering what to have for his after dinner treat. He asked, "How many chocolate squares do I have left?"
"You have three, sweetie."
"Wait a sec," he murmured, and his brow knitted itself into a frown of concentration. You could just hear his little brain whirring away.
After a few seconds, he looked up. "I want two," he announced, "Then will I have one left?"
My little baby just did algebra! I thought.  3 - x = 1. I was so proud.

T minus 1

Tomorrow is it. The first official day of homeschooling. Because it’s the first day of Dan’s former school, so why not?

So tomorrow morning, instead of dashing around packing his lunch and snack; instead of pushing him to hurry up and get dressed/eat breakfast/brush his teeth/make his bed/get in the car or we’ll be late; instead of fighting traffic, searching for a parking spot, dragging Johhny  along to Dan's classroom and then to the PTA Coffee after the first few minutes of school,

I will wait until the town has safely parked its cars in the school parking lots and then mosey out the door with my two boys. And we’ll have pancakes and sausage at the Pancake House to celebrate not going back to school.

I didn’t realize how weird this day would seem. How wrenching it was going to be to send my “letter of resignation” to the school, officially withdrawing him. How terrified I would feel, how unmoored when I thought about his name being deleted from the roll sheet. How sad to think that his desk will be empty tomorrow, and that his friends will look at each other and wonder why he is not there.

And yet. His desk, in fact, will not be empty. There will be an un-waitlisted student sitting at it (I know, right?), with her name neatly printed on a strip taped to the top of his (well, her) desk, so each of his friends will simply assume that he is in another class.  Four families know he is homeschooling, and by the time the PTA Coffee is over tomorrow, all of his friends’ mothers will know. In three days, everyone will know.

Which is scary in a different way.

I never thought that I would be scared. I’ve been dreaming of curriculum all summer, thinking of fun things to do, interesting things to study together. I’ve been looking at math curricula, writing curricula, reading websites about whether or not and how to teach cursive. I've written up lists of what I hope to "cover" this year--course of study, what, what? I’ve been collecting science experiment stuff, binders, paper, notebooks. I’ve been reading volumes and volumes of books about homeschooling. But it began to dawn on me yesterday that despite all of this, I am totally, completely unprepared and I am just going to have to wing it. A lot. I am not comfortable with winging it.

I’ve also been realizing lately that there is so much, so much that I want to do with Dan that I can’t start it all at once, no matter how exciting it seems to me. And also that a lot of what I want to do with Dan may not necessarily be what he wants to do with me. And I’m nervous about that, too. It’s hard for me not to drive the car all by myself.

But in honor of my former teacher self, I made a little list of what I want to do this week (in a strictly academic sense). I printed out a couple of little math worksheets because I know he’ll enjoy doing them. I have a tiny little seed of a plan for the very first tiny baby step and I’m not married to it, and I feel a little teeny bit better, even though--not to scare anyone else, but--I really, really don't know what I'm doing.

Back from Summer Vacation (sort of)

First day of school is this Wednesday--day after tomorrow!

And I'm off to the school right now to withdraw Dan and declare my intention to (ulp) homeschool. Wish me luck.

Civil Disobedience III: The Universe is Laughing Up Its Sleeve

All of that agonizing over what to do about testing, how it would go over, how Dan would feel about it. And then this:

Dan sailed blithely through Days 2 and 3 of testing (Tuesday and Wednesday), sitting at his desk and reading the Boxcar Children series. On Wednesday afternoon, the carpool mom called to see if she could take the boys out for ice cream, since it was so hot. Okay, sure.

A few minutes later,  I got a text saying that Dan had a headache and wasn't feeling well--had even refused ice cream, a sure sign of illness--and that she'd be bringing him right home.

By the time he walked in the door, he was in tears; he had a full-blown migraine with fever, upset stomach, everything. He didn't even make it up the stairs. Just curled up on the big chair in the dark, cool downstairs room and cried.

He was still quite sick on Thursday, and on Friday he was about 85% so I kept him at home and he missed Testing Days 4 and 5. Then on Sunday afternoon, Mother's Day, just after RT left for a 5-day work trip, I found nits in Dan's hair. So Dan missed Days 6 and 7 (Monday and Tuesday) as well.

On Wednesday, he returned to school for the eighth and final day of testing.

So in all, Dan participated in testing for one day, abstained for two days, didn't even make it to school for four days, and abstained the final day. Whew! So the effect of the conscientious objection was somewhat diminished--not enough consecutive days for it to make an impression big enough for kids to go home and tell their parents. But who am I kidding--chances are they wouldn't have anyway. And I need to stop taking myself so seriously.

At least he didn't have to do the make-up tests.

Civil Disobedience II

And on Monday evening, after the first day of testing (actually, it was a day of bubbling in name, school, etc., and doing a bunch of sample questions together), Dan said, "I think I don't want to do the tests, after all." He asked a couple of questions along the lines of "It's not like at Hogwart's, where you have to pass the test in order to move on to third year? You don't have to pass the tests to go to third year?"

So I wrote the note to the principal, emailed his teacher, and dropped him off at school with Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke.

Dan ended up forgoing Dragon Rider in favor of the Dragon Slayer's Academy series and the Boxcar Children series, which his teacher has in the classroom. His friends asked why he wasn't taking the tests, and he replied that his mom said he didn't have to. The standard response was apparently, "Oh."

Civil Disobedience

To demonstrate his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay poll taxes for six years, and when the tax collector demanded payment, Thoreau went to jail for his principles. But his aunt ended up paying the money for him, and he went free the very next day. He was a little disgruntled.

My great act of civil disobedience this year was going to be to write a letter to exempt Dan from the STAR Tests in May. The STAR tests are California's answer to No Child Left Behind (now repackaged as Race To The Top). In my opinion (as well as those of many respected others such as Alfie Kohn and Diane Ravitch) they are useless and wrong and a waste of money and time. They are administered to all California public school students in 2nd grade and up, and at Loyola, the tests and the associated paperwork will take one hour every day, for eight days, first thing in the morning.

The state requires that parents be allowed to exempt their children from taking these tests. They anticipate that the most likely candidates will be parents of students with learning disabilities, and what the education folks call English Language Learners. Because it's not fair to quietly shepherd the low-scorers out and artificially boost a school's scores, if more than 15% of students at any school opt out of the STAR test, the school's overall scores become invalid. Also, schools may not encourage students to opt out.

Dan's school, with its highly educated parents, high student test scores, and correspondingly high neighborhood real estate prices, is gunning for the top. No one knows that they can opt their kid out; in fact, no one even wants to. Why forgo an opportunity to excel? Why risk invalid scores and possibly lower property values?

In a post last June, I agonized over what I would do come STAR test season 2011. I talked with two other Loyola mothers who, along with me, attended a lecture by Alfie Kohn on testing, homework, and grades (bad, mostly bad, and bad). One, whose son is in Dan's class, seemed determined to write her letter; the other was still on the fence as of yesterday.

I took two big steps towards making my little political statement:
1) Last month, I decided that I would write a letter to opt Dan out.
2) Today, I emailed the class list and told them they were allowed to opt their kids out if they so chose.

Second step first: I chose today because it's the end of the week-before-the-week-before. This should give parents the weekend to talk about it and a few days to act, and not give the administration a lot of time to react. Although as I mentioned earlier, I think most parents are pro-testing, not protesting, ha-ha. Dan's teacher even said that parents have been calling her and asking what they should do to help their child prepare for and/or do well on the test.

And now, a tangential rant: Excuse me, but WTF? A useless, no-stakes test that has no impact whatsoever on the child's education except that he or she loses eight hours of classroom time, and a huge negative impact on the education of thousands of underprivileged kids, and they're worried about how their second-grader can get a top score? For what reason? To what end? I'm flummoxed.

And back to the program: The first step, which was the reason I began to write this very long post.
I sat down with Dan a few days ago and said, "In a couple of weeks, your class is going to take something called the STAR tests. It's one of those ones where you fill in the little circles, you know?"
"Uh-huh."
"It's going to take about an hour every day for eight days, from 9:00 to 10:10, and it doesn't count for school."
"Mm."
"But I can write a letter to Principal A and get you out of it, and you can just sit and read a book instead of taking the test...what do you think?"
He thought for about two seconds. Then, "I think I'd like to take the test."
And went back to reading his book.

What?

Completely taken aback, I thought of Thoreau and his law-abiding aunty. Where's the fun in getting all pumped up to civilly disobey on behalf of your child--on behalf of All the Children in California, even--if your child goes all establishment on you? I mean, talk about the air going out of the balloon.

More to the point, now what? I checked carefully, trying not to ask leading questions, and his reason for wanting to take the test seems to be curiosity and competitiveness rather than self-consciousness about being the only one not taking the test.

So do I educate my child? Give him a little lecture on The Evils of Standardized Testing, Especially for Young Children? Is that brainwashing, or is it brain...um, clarifying?

Do I let him take the stupid tests, despite my ethical, philosophical, and political objections, thus supporting an institution that I really don't support?

Whose pawn will he be? Mine or the school's?

I'm inclined to let him take the darn things, but I'm not letting him do it without a little more information.


On a totally different note, it was Superhero Day at school today, in honor of Earth Day. The tenuous connection: Save the Earth. Dan, of course, agonized over whether and how much to dress up, and then subjected the rest of us to several tantrums this morning as a result of his anxiety. He eventually settled on a Batman shirt under a sweatshirt and a few other items in a bag, to be extracted if lots of kids were wearing costumes. His somewhat less neurotic friend S arrived at school as Captain Underpants, complete with a red cape around over his shoulders and a pair of white briefs over his jeans.

College, schmollege

A link sent to me: 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Send Your Kids to College

And seven things they can do instead.

Food for thought.

Boys and nonfiction

They say that boys and men respond better to nonfiction than to fiction. Probably true, overall. As a volunteer at Dan's school library, I've seen far more boys than girls in the nonfiction section. On the other hand, it's not like they're a bunch of history buffs or science nerds. They're checking out books from exactly one category: Legos. And sometimes Lego Star Wars, that insanely popular combination of two already insanely popular brands. Sports, cars, wars, and drawing tie for a very distant 3rd place. If Star Wars counted as nonfiction--and judging by the number of Star Wars encyclopedias out there, it might as well be--it would be right up there with Legos. So maybe there are some latent nerds in the bunch.

And then there's my boy, who enjoys nothing better than a good story. I do love that about him.

Still, he also devours those Lego and Star Wars reference books. What is it about boys and men and their fanatic trivia-hungry little brains? I suppose there must be girls who are checking out horse books and real-life princess books (I hate to stereotype, but I haven't seen a single second-grade girl check out a sports book or a Lego book). Somehow, though, it's just not the same.

Read a discussion of this issue here, at an online teacher forum.

STAR tests and kids as pawns

I met with Ms. A, the school principal, about STAR tests (taken in every grade above 1st) and their significance at our little school. What I learned:

• No one gets any money from anyone except for the schools who fail to meet their API benchmarks; they get money from the state earmarked for special programs, etc. 
• No one loses anything, per se, for poor performance or poor attendance. If fewer than 85% of a school's students take the test, the school's API is considered invalid, and is published with an asterisk or whatever that denotes its, uh, invalidity due to low numbers of test takers.
• Our school district has, indeed, analyzed some STAR test results (well, probably only because the scores fell, now that I think about it), and changed the math curricula as a result. Drill-based to conceptual. If 8th grade math scores hadn't been lower than expected, I wonder if the district would have taken the time to analyze anything.
• Ms. A takes those tests pretty seriously, and I don't think she'd be on board for a mass boycott.

The entire test series takes about 10 hours to complete--our school breaks it up into 70 minute segments 4 to 5 days a week for two weeks. So if I have TZ opt out next year, what will he do for those 70 minutes? Read? Do busy work? I need to find out what the alternatives at school are. Or we could just take a two-week vacation. In that case, do I announce my motives or just "coincidentally" schedule a trip? Do I recruit people to the cause? What is the cause?

The other big question is this: Is it fair to TZ to "make" him not take the tests because of my convictions about them (though I doubt he'll object)? Will it make us the "bad" family, and will TZ (and later, K) have to pay for it somehow? Like, if there's an issue with a teacher or a kid or whatever, will Ms. A be less helpful to the boys because I'm a troublemaker?

What do you think, dear readers?

Seating chart

New characters:
Walker: the best reader, writer, and mathematician in TZ's first-grade class, by far--leagues ahead of the rest of them. He's tall for his age, too--and probably outweighs TZ by 10 pounds. But he's dragging around the social skills of a four-year-old, which means he's disruptive and loud.
Steven: a boy in TZ's class and on his baseball team--energetic, funny, good-hearted, and easily distracted.
Sally: a girl in TZ's class--totally cute, with a wonderful, charming smile--sparkling eyes, the works. She "loves" TZ and spends a lot of time chasing him around the playground, which he finds, predictably, "really annoying." He tries to stay as far away from her as he can. More on this in another post.

So:
TZ's teacher, Mrs. H, re-arranges the seating arrangement in the classroom every once in a while. At one point, TZ was seated next to Walker for a couple of weeks, most likely because he's a "good" boy--quiet, focused, obedient--whom Walker would be unable to recruit in his classroom shenanigans. Again, W is not a bad kid, just really bored and still working on self-control and the concept of personal space. But combine this with TZ's um, still-developing assertiveness, and you have a miserable day in school for TZ.

Apparently, TZ endured a couple of weeks of W bonking him repeatedly on the head, poking him, wagging his own face in TZ's face and going, "WAAAAAGH! Hi, TZ! WAAAAGH!" Finally, Mrs. H asked me if TZ was okay sitting next to W. I didn't know, not having heard a word about it yet. When I asked him, TZ said no, he was not okay with it. It just hadn't occurred to him to ask for a change.

Waldorf Day

TZ spent Sunday night in the bathroom "upchucking" (new vocab courtesy of his 2nd grade friends), so Monday was a recovery day. I've been feeling a little disgruntled with the school system lately and fantasizing about sending the boys to the Waldorf school down the street, or homeschooling them, so we had a quasi-Waldorf-inspired-homeschool day: a little watercolor painting, a little gardening (domestic and renegade--relevant post to come soon), a little baking. TZ read the cookie recipe and did some measuring math (how many half cups in 2-1/2 cups of flour?), and we took a few cookies to school yesterday for his "real" teacher.

More on testing, boys, and race

The Center on Education Policy published a report this week on standardized test score trends in every state from the early 2000's through the 2008 school year. Their big takeaway: an achievement gap between girls and boys (the girls being the winners). Anyone who's read recent boy-literature (Raising Cain; Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson; The Trouble With Boys; a Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do, by Newsweek writer Peg Tyre, about which more later; and stacks of other similar books) knows about this somewhat unexpected, and yet somehow unsurprising trend. Everyone knows that boys hate school and girls, well, don't hate it.

What the CEP found was that across the board, boys are trailing girls in reading, and girls are catching up to boys in math. Oddly enough, they describe this as "good news for girls, but troubling news for boys."

Testing, testing. And vegetables.

Yes, it's that time of year again. The CA Department of Ed is rolling out the CAHSEE (that's California High School Exit Exam, pronounced caysee) and teenagers across the state are sitting down with their number two pencils and their Scantron sheets and bubbling in their tickets out of high school. One of them, anyway.

The English/Language Arts is a big part of the exam, and I remember spending class time every year getting my sophomores ready to take the test. We'd go over sample questions, review test-taking strategies, respond to sample prompts. I hated it, and so did they.

Diane Ravitch, an education scholar who served both the Bush I and Clinton administrations, was once a vocal proponent of No Child Left Behind. The author of the recently published The Death and Life of the American School System: How Accountability and Choice are Undermining Education, Ravitch has since rejected NCLB’s testing-and-accountability model, saying that it “turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else.” I heartily agree.

Oh, come on. II

A couple of items from the NYTimes.

First, about families who are hiring occupational therapists to teach their children how to hold pencils and crayons:

"One father on the Upper East Side said anxiety about his son’s grip — his 3-year-old holds crayons in his fist — propelled him to seek therapy.

“The nursery admission people tell you they want your child to be ready to learn how to write,” said the father, who spoke anonymously so his son wouldn’t run afoul of nursery school administrators. “And I knew they would take one look at the way my son held a crayon and he’d be out of the running.”"

I mean, really. How pathetic have we become? I say "we," but I really mean those fancy-schmancy private school families in New York and, well, Los Altos, maybe. TZ doesn't hold his pencil properly, but his handwriting is fairly neat, for a 6-year-old boy. Although to be perfectly honest, it would solve a problem if I could just hire someone to teach him (his teacher is clearly not doing it) because he won't listen to me about it and I'm sick of nagging.

Speaking of sick, then there's the House Republicans' and conservative Dems' refusal to pass the health care bill. It's not fair of me to say just pass the damn thing because I don't even really know what's in it exactly. I'm just going on blind faith in Obama and the Democrats in Congress that it's sort of what I want--a tentative, half-assed but better than nothing move toward universal coverage (as if I understood the complexities involved in making that a success and a reality), and deletion of the anti-abortion language that was in House Version 1.0. Just effing cooperate, just do what's right and not what's politically expedient. Hah.

I said that RT ordered satellite service for the Olympics, but as it turns out, I've watched about half of it on my laptop anyway. Watching it on TV, even with Tivo, turns out to be an enormous time sink. I love Shaun White--how does a person get to be that much better than everyone else in the world? And he's only, what, 23? He's just a baby. Really.