I should be writing . . . . .

Shortly after my son’s birth, we found the perfect house in an up-and-coming part of town. The neighborhood elementary school apparently did not get the memo about the up-an-coming bit; it was generally considered to be poor. We knew that, bought the house anyway, and prepared to pay for a private school.

We chose a Lutheran school. After all I was Lutheran, and Lutheran schools were usually considered top-notch. We agreed with the school’s educational policy: Pre-K and Kindergarten for socializing; Grades 1-3 Learn to read; Grades 4-8: Read to learn. Plus, there were two music teachers and one art teacher on staff. Both of those were high on the “desirable” list.

Starting in Kindergarten, students had music 3 days a week; art twice a week. Starting in 4th grade, music went to 2 days a week (with an option for after school chorus or band), art twice a week; and art history on Fridays. The art history class covered a lot of the same things as my two-semester Art Appreciation class in college. My son once remarked rather wryly at an exhibit of Picasso’s early drawings, “I don’t know if I like them or not, but I sure know why I’m supposed to.”

The first grade teacher was STRICT. She told the wide-eyed parents that there could be two class parties for the year, no more, because, well, those kids needed to learn to read.  (She devoted ample time to math as well.) Moreover, as parents, we were expected to read to our child each night, because “A print rich home where parents show they believe in the importance of reading leads to better readers.”

We read in our house. We had always read. In fact, I continued reading to my children every night until my daughter entered 7th grade. We progressed from Goodnight Moon to the Canterbury Tales and The Odyssey.  I could face Ms. First Grade teacher with a clear conscience.  By Fourth Grade, all the kids at school read very well, indeed. Standardized tests pegged them all “gifted and talented.” (They weren’t.) My son read at the level of a High School Senior, something I could judge not by tests, but by the books he bought with his allowance.

History, science, and writing started weighing in heavily in Fourth Grade, although in the learning to read phase they read in those areas. My critical, rhetorically-trained mind found nothing wrong with the writing curriculum. The students wrote a 5 page book report (typed, either on a computer or typewriter, thank you very much) every month. The teacher used the same rhetorical format that I learned in college.

Then, there was the homework. We were required to make sure that homework was done, but told NOT TO HELP. If your child had problems, you arranged special tutoring time with the teacher. There were two sure ways to get your child expelled: 1) Failure to turn in homework. 2) Doing any part of your child’s homework.  If a book report or even an art project had the faintest whiff of Mom-a-rama, you received a stern warning from the teacher. After two warnings, YOU were called into the principal’s office and warned of expulsion. Did I read those book reports? You bet. Did I point out problems? Yes, I did. What I had to bite my tongue about was what he had to do to fix them. (Very hard on the editor in me.)

By the time my daughter started Kindergarten, I was divorced. We had a new house in a neighborhood that had a National Blue Ribbon elementary school. It seemed fiscally irresponsible to continue spending thousands of dollars on tuition, so both kids enrolled in public school.

Self-esteem was the buzz word at their new school. If we had played that game where you toss back a shot every time you hear a certain word, I would have been in AA on self-esteem alone. Many things were done in the name of self-esteem. At the end of the year, everyone received an award, and no one seemed to notice that some of those awards were patronizing, if not belittling. Seriously, I can’t  imagine some 23 year-old (or for that matter, any 6 year-old) staring misty-eyed at their  Best hand washer award. Awards were handed out for every occasion, such as Geography Day and School Olympics, for not much more than attendance. The school had no Honor Roll, because the children who didn’t make A’s and B’s might lose their self-esteem. Did they seriously believe that those kids didn’t know who made A’s and B’s? And why did that rule not apply to giving out sports awards?

My son moved on to a magnet school and then later to a private high-school. I should mention that he took a job and paid for half of his tuition.

My daughter liked the new school. I should mention, she is not a rules kind of girl and never met one that could not be improved by a little stretching. She also thoroughly understood the culture of self-esteem and how to make it work for her.

I started noticing some problems in Second Grade. She had A’s and B’s in spelling and reading. Yet, the week following the spelling test, she could not spell OR read those same words. Books that she had read a few weeks earlier, she had trouble rereading. I talked to the teachers. They were reassuring. NOTHING was wrong. I kept nagging, nagging, nagging.

She had a busy life outside of school. She was in plays, sang well, and apparently had a photographic memory. We could go to a musical in the Broadway Across America series or attend the opera, and she left singing the libretto in perfect pitch. Given a choice, she chose singing over reading. That perfect memory came in handy for spelling tests, but since spelling words were never that important to her, she flushed them about 10 seconds after the test.

I kept pushing the teachers. Something was wrong. They kept reassuring me. One teacher went so far as to ask me, “What are you worried about? She’s a beautiful little girl. And so talented.” Well, yes, I thought so, too, but even beautiful little girls should be able to read and spell. I finally had her tested  (at my own expense and against the advice of her teachers), and it turned out that she had some rather rare learning disabilities. When she read, everything was like Jabberwocky to her; she interpreted meaning from sound. There was a kink in that, though, because she did not really hear vowel sounds. If asked to spell run, her first response was rn. When told the word had a vowel, she dutifully worked her way down the list of vowels: ran, ren, rin, until she got the nod of approval.

The solution was relatively simple: remedial work in phonetics. Something her teachers adamantly opposed as an affront to her self-esteem. So, we spent a lot of time after school with a private phonetics teacher. The other thing that helped her a lot was voice lessons. If you have never taken voice lessons, you might not know that literally weeks/months are spent learning how to sing each vowel sound and how to shape your mouth around them.

Let me be clear, her school did require something of parents. The mother of Emma’s god-sister (they had the same god-mother and went to the same school) and I called it   The Amazing Mom-a-Rama. (We weren’t sexist. It just sounded cooler than Dad-a-Rama.) Every book report had an art project that counted equally with the written report. Science projects were de rigueur from Kindergarten on.  They made scale models of our neighborhood, replicas of the Alamo, and other things too numerous to mention. All very creative.

My daughter actually likes doing things like that and is pretty good at them. I didn’t object, but to be honest, my idea of (and talent for) a great project consists of spray paint, some styrofoam balls, and a neatly printed index card that says Solar System. The rub, and there’s always a rub. . . there was NO WAY most of those projects were done by the children. The scale buildings of our neighborhood would have made an architect proud. Judging by the caliber of the Kindergarten science projects, a veritable classroom of Einsteins lived in central Austin. Woe be to the child whose project wasn’t up to snuff. As a parent, if you didn’t contribute heavily, you were called on the carpet. I helped her some, although I think I was generally known as a slacker-parent in this particular area.

Sixth Grade was the year self-esteem became a really nasty word in our house. In February, the teachers got around to mentioning my daughter had yet to turn in a book report for the year. Really, the girl with A’s and B’s on her report card in Reading and Language hadn’t turned in one frigging book report? And the teachers that I met with every quarter (more than that actually) hadn’t thought to mention it? I should point out, books were read at home; the Mom-A-Ramas were done at home; the book reports were done at school so the children could learn to use the computer and word-processing.

They wrung their hands. Well, they had made her (and her friend who also had done no book reports) sit on the swings while the other kids ran the track. Not much of a hardship for the  girl who hated to sweat. I suggested that perhaps some consequences were in order. As it happened, the annual Sixth Grade Shakespeare Festival was in rehearsal. A certain daughter had the much coveted role of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, complete with the most wonderful dress and wings in the world. IF said book reports were not completed, then the role went to the next chiffon-crazy Sixth Grade girl.

Oh, no. Her self-esteem would be ruined! Simply ruined. I insisted. The principal was called in. There was much discussion of self-esteem and my daughter’s future well-being. I still insisted, finally saying, “She is my daughter, and if I don’t see graded book reports; she’s not in the play.” Predicting the direst of fates for my abused child, they finally agreed. Oddly enough the book reports were finished within the week. It wasn’t that she hadn’t read the books; she had. She knew that she had a pass on actually turning in the book reports. As for her self-esteem, I bet not many people today consider lack of self-esteem an issue for her. Oh, and I was really proud that she had the plumb part. I still love the photos I took that night.

I think I have an interesting perspective on both schools. At the private school, I was a PTO officer and later a member of the school board. In public school, I was a PTA officer for 5 of the 6 years my daughter attended. I have been a room mother longer than I worked at any company. I learned a lot of things. Perhaps the most important was how much education can cost, and how little actually gets spent on it.

Although tuition was hefty at the private school, it only covered about half the cost of my children’s education. The church heavily subsidized the school. (Unlike another church school in central Austin, where the school is a profit center for the church.) The teachers were paid well, better than public school teachers; perhaps they didn’t mind those extra tutoring sessions. I know many of them felt they had a calling, but it was only partly based on faith/religion. The church emphatically believed in and supported education. (After all, one of Luther’s big peeves was that people did not read and interpret the Bible for themselves.) They put money behind their belief and made sacrifices. The church postponed finishing out the basement for the women’s guild for several years to build the school’s library. This was a real sacrifice, because like many congregations at the time, the elderly parishioners (particularly of the female persuasion) seriously outnumbered families with school age children. In the years before the library was built, books were budgeted for, purchased, and held in various classrooms until they could be shelved in the new library. Some of those books had been banned in public schools. There was joint fund-raising by parents and church members to build a computer center. Science coexisted with religion, both considered equally important. Evolution was taught for the scientific fact it is. Our pastor often pointed out fallacies in the Bible. I know all church schools do not follow this model.

Money was an integral part of public school as well. It was an upper-middle class neighborhood, and there was some concern about the Robin Hood distribution of school funds. Some parents wrote checks for computers for the computer lab; several of the poorer of us pooled our money to buy one. The PTA bought several computers and contributed a lot of money for buying things that the budget did not allow. We tried to be generous with teachers. At the beginning of the year, the PTA gave each teacher $1000 to buy materials for the classroom. They could spend the money as they chose.  There were several book fairs, and it was expected that at each fair, you would buy at least one book for the library for each of your children who attended the school. The year both kids were there, I bought 10 books; that was typical. Room mothers were expected to donate money as well as time. We,  the parents, subsidized what the state would not spend. In some ways, this might have worked against us.

Years after my children were out of elementary school, I worked briefly with one of the teachers from the public school; she had left teaching. We talked a lot about my self-esteem hot button. It frustrated her as well, but she blamed all that generosity on the part of the parents. Apparently, there was some pressure by parents who were concerned about their children’s “educational career,” as opposed to what they actually learned. There were lots of ticky-boxes  in the land of educational careers, and self-esteem was all important in landing a real career. Awards were important in the educational career. So was doing well  at the Science Fair and  participation in things like a Shakespeare Festival that could be put on applications for magnet schools and later college.

Can the teachers be blamed for not wanting to offend the parents who gave so much to the school? I think not. Were we were those parents that I wrote about in my first post on this subject? The ones who wanted to remove their children from an English class taught by a teacher who complained  that her students were “frightfully dim” and “disengaged, lazy whiners.” Sometimes, I think we were. As often as not, I was as guilty as the worst ones. (Maybe I  sugar-coated my role in this account, but it’s my blog.) And just what is the role of parents in our educational process?

And my kids? Neither went to college, which makes me sad. I enjoyed college. I didn’t push. I knew too many kids who didn’t want to go, didn’t do much after they were forced to go, and probably wasted everyone’s time and money by going. I don’t think my children are any less educated than their peers who did go. I’m sure that they have read at least as much and are as culturally aware as most college graduates I know.

My son still reads to learn.  Some of it purely for pleasure, like his recent kindle download of Assyrian and Babylonian literature. Some far more practical, like when I needed a milking stand for my goats. He found the plans, used his math skills to convert the measurements from standard to pygmy goat, and built it. He knows computers inside out, all on his own. He recently wrote a set of instructions for people in the company for which he performs IT tasks and asked me to edit it. It required less editing for grammar errors than the stuff I receive on a daily basis from so-called technical writers, and it was infinitely more logical and well-organized. (Shout out to Ms. Fourth Grade Teacher.)

My daughter also still reads; although because she’s on the road a lot of the time, she also listens to books. We last talked about Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which she loved; she knew something about all the gods to which he alluded. She is an organizational genius with calendars, lists, and spreadsheets that make me go pale; it was a skill she developed to coordinate her acting and singing activities. She is the technical director for a game show company, and she’s had to learn how to run lights and music from a computer. That self-esteem thing seems to work well for her when she does trade shows.

The most important thing that I can say is that I like them. I like what they’re doing. I like talking with them, because they always have something to say, usually sprinkled with wit and humor.

I have long maintained that we are not an illiterate country, but we’re an ignorant one. I think that we can read, but we mostly don’t. By not reading (books, newspapers, magazines), we know very little about where we came from and even less about where we are going. We are losing our capacity to be great. From Christopher Hedge’s article, America the Illiterate,

Even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into an image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

A friend and I exchanged some witty emails on a recent article about parents wanting to remove their children from an English class taught by a teacher who complained  that her students were “frightfully dim” and “disengaged, lazy whiners.” My friend said he hoped for teachers like that in his son’s school. In response to a joking accusation, he responded:

I am pretty elitist. When X graduates high school I’m going to expect him to be able to both fill out an application at a fast food restaurant and make change in his head. That’s how I was raised and I expect no less from my son!

The exchange occurred on the same day I read an article in the Austin-American Statesman discussing the burden placed on colleges and universities due to a high percentage of students who need extreme remedial coursework in reading, writing, and arithmetic (the so-called three R’s.) More interesting than the article itself, however, were the responses. The right-wing pointed fingers at the liberals for thinking money could buy an education and forcing “feel good” policies into the class room. The left pointed fingers at Texas’ cut, cut, cut record when it came to education.  No fight about education is ever complete without a few  comments about useless degrees (mostly in the liberal arts) that do not prepare people for REAL jobs.

Another friend once told me: Be careful when you point fingers. Two are directed toward someone else, but three are pointing back at you. I felt the force of that adage as I read these articles. One question kept recurring. Where are the parents in all this?

I consider myself fairly well-educated. I received a mostly public education. The school district in my home town was considered first rate. The university I attended accepted only people from the top 10% of their graduating class; the average grade point of entering freshmen was 4.95 on a scale of 5.

Standardized testing indicates my IQ is on the high side, but that had little to do with why I did well in school. The assumption in my family was that I’d damn well better get A’s with the occasional B in subjects at which I was really bad, like Math. Too many B’s, or heaven forbid a C, and my a$$ was grass. Failure was not an option.

I did not come from an upper-middle class, well-educated, Leave-it-to-Beaver ideal family. I was the first member of my family to go to university and among the first generation to graduate high school. My relatives were farmers, day laborers, nurses’ aides, factory workers, contractors, house painters, and three ex-convicts. On our best days, we were only mildly dysfunctional.

Nonetheless, my family had expectations. My mother attended PTA meetings and talked to my teachers. She never helped with my homework, but she made sure I did it.  It probably helped that I liked school, but I had cousins who didn’t. They labored under the same parental expectations as I did. My grades earned me free tuition through the Illinois State Scholarship program, but tuition at state schools wasn’t much of an issue in those days. Less than $500 a semester, as I dimly recall.

I’m sure my so-called academic career baffled my family. I have a degree in Rhetoric and minors in Philosophy and Classics.  I’m fairly certain those disciplines qualify for the current definition of “useless liberal art” degrees.  Even then, my family probably held their breath and hoped my education would prepare me for a nice teaching job. By then, I had a sister-in-law who was a teacher, and she was one of my staunchest supporters. There was a great deal of jubilation when my brother discovered that 90% of Rhetoric majors went on to law school. (What else would you do with a degree in Rhetoric?)

I recall very little pressure to change my major. The only restriction ever placed on me was that I could NOT go into journalism. In my family’s eyes, it was a fairly dicey pursuit. Oh, and BTW, if I was going to major in Rhetoric and minor in those two other things (none of which they had ever heard), I’d better do VERY well, or I was coming home.

As it turned out, my choices served me well. I have always had a job related to them, and those jobs have always paid well. Fresh out of school, I landed my first job writing copy for the local television station (BORING). I progressed to grants writing and fund-raising for a Catholic college.  My writing must have been pretty persuasive. Upon meeting me, a priest on the board of a Catholic foundation who had funded one of my grants expressed surprise. He  had assumed I was a nun. I was Lutheran and married at the time, but Rhetoric coursework teaches you how to adopt “a voice.” And I did understand Mass in Latin

When we moved to Texas, my degree led me to the career that I have pursued most of my life: technical writing. A friend wrangled an interview for me with a software company. The personal computer was in its infancy. The company created accounting software, and they really wanted someone with either an accounting or programming degree to write their documentation. They were interviewing people like me because of a new contract with Apple Computer, which insisted they needed to improve the user-friendliness of their documentation.

I took a test where I sat at a Sanyo III personal computer and wrote how to install software on it. I wrote those instructions on a legal pad, because Microsoft Word and WYSIWYG desktop publishing weren’t even in the rumor stage yet. I did what I was educated to do: research, write logically, and prove my point (in this case by testing). I was one of five people they hired. Not one of them had an accounting or programming degree. I was the only Rhetoric major (I’m always the ONLY Rhetoric major); the rest had degrees in English and Journalism.  So much for that useless liberal arts degree!

My family was proud. They didn’t know then (and never really figured out) what it was I did all day to make a living. If I tried to explain, eyes rolled back in heads; some fell asleep. I gave a relative a tour of the company where I documented a product called selective laser sintering. At the end of the tour, she asked, “Do you understand any of this? And do you  find it even remotely interesting?” They did understand that I was making a living, and it was very comfortable one.

Right before she died, my mother told me how proud she was that I had done so well. She confessed she had doubted my college choices, but she now knew that without my education I would have had a much harder time raising my children as a divorced mother. I told her that I knew I could not have done it without that family foot on my backside.