It’s Their Fault!

by

What’s Wrong With Our Schools?

Are you concerned about the quality of our schools? Improving education is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY, whether you are a parent, teacher, student or an elected official. A felt sense of personal responsibility is the key to educational improvement.

placing Blame vs. taking Responsibility

When a player starts blaming the referee, does he begin to play worse? When the coach starts in on the blaming, does the whole team play worse? Test the theory for yourself while you watch college basketball on television or Little League baseball in the neighborhood. When you perceive that an uncontrollable outside force is in control, you not only feel helpless to effect change, you also have a ready-made excuse for not giving it your all.

Does this idea apply to the efforts made to educate our children? It has been well publicized that on most measures of achievement, American students seriously lag behind their foreign peers. Equally well documented is the assignment of blame in all directions for this “failing grade”.

“It’s the teacher’s unions”

“It’s the parents”

“It’s the poverty and drugs”

“It’s the kids who no longer care”

“It’s the culture (of video games, tv, and Internet) that doesn’t value education.”

How many variations and directions can blame take when it comes to failing schools and low academic achievement? We need to recognize that the act of blaming is an excuse for not having taken personal responsibility for the outcome. Regardless of who is reading this next sentence, I firmly believe it applies to you: “Education is your responsibility”.

Are you a parent?

A parent who blames his child’s poor progress on bad teachers and teacher’s unions that prevent the firing of bad teachers fails to recognize that children are capable of learning despite the quality of the teacher. It is a parent’s responsibility to know what a child needs to learn and if necessary help them learn it themselves. Even if your child is taking Calculus, sit down at the kitchen table every night and learn it together, example-by-example. If the child can learn it, you can as well. If you are working two jobs, find somebody who can tutor. (Ask to see course goals and assessments. If the teacher is as bad as advertised, be relentless at getting your child switched to another class. Eventually, administrators give in just to shut you up.) After-the-fact-finger-pointing and blaming is merely assuaging your own guilt. Just like a good parent knows where their child is, who they are with and what they are doing – so does she know what subjects her child is taking, what she needs to learn and how well she is learning it.

Take math for example. Do you know what math operations your child has mastered? Can your child apply those math skills to everyday problems, not just problems on a worksheet? “How would I assess these skills? I’m not a trained teacher,” you argue? (start the Calypso music) “Google it, dear Henry, dear Henry … just Google it!” Let me give you a head start with math. Go to jumpmath.org and explore the site. You can order workbooks and teaching aids for math through the eighth grade. Every single math operation is laid out in detail. Success in math is not a function of good genes. It is the result of systematically mastering each building block skill before moving to the next. Done in this fashion, math need not be a difficult subject, for anyone. Not convinced? Check out A Better Way To Teach Math from the New York Times. In his book, The Myth of Ability: Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child, John Mighton makes a convincing argument for why every child can learn math. But what is probably the most convincing part of the book is the second half where he takes you step by step through the process of teaching fractions, multiplication and division, ratios and percents, and coordinate systems, as well as logic and systematic search.

(more Calypso music) “It ends with eighth grade, Dear Liza, Dear Liza … It ends with eighth grade!” “Then go to Khan Academy, Dear Henry, Dear Henry …” Have you ever heard of Khan Academy? Check it out. It’s a completely new way to view education. At this site, you have access to lectures on EVERY math course you can imagine, from the most basic principles of grade school math, to Calculus and Linear Algebra. Each necessary building block is presented in order. “Just math?” you ask. GO to the site. Courses in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, Finance … and SAT preparation. Khanacademy.org

My message is simple. You have a wealth of resources available to you to assess your child’s mastery of math and science, as well as the tools to help learn those skills. You truly can take personal responsibility for your child’s education.

Are you a teacher?

The teacher who blames the parents for their students’ failings does not belong in teaching. The idea that parents just don’t care about their children’s education is an urban myth at best, a lame excuse for sure. Find me a parent who does not want what is best for their child. Find me a parent who does not want their child to succeed in school. Feel free to canvas the prisons and the crack houses. ALL parents want their children to succeed. Another myth is that students don’t care. If they are in your classroom, they still care and they still have hope for succeeding. Otherwise, they would be elsewhere. Forced to be there you say? Try forcing a teenager to do anything they don’t want to do.

Children, regardless of age, invest in school when there is a goal they want and they believe it is achievable. The formula is simple:

INVESTMENT = (I CAN) x (I WANT)

Regardless of what is going on outside the classroom, a teacher can create or discover goals that every child wants and can achieve. If you cannot find desirable, achievable goals, then you are not adequately invested in teaching.

Discipline is out of control and prevents learning? Discipline is not a problem when a child truly believes that a teacher cares about him, respects him, and is offering him a way to succeed. This process starts by sitting down, one-on-one, and listening with genuine interest to the child. The formula for this is also simple: “You join him in his world and gradually draw him into your world.” If you care about your kids, they will respect you. If you are passionate about your subject, they will begin to share your passion.

Take a look at the website for Teaching As Leadership by Steve Farr if you have held some of these beliefs about the difficulty of overcoming family and community barriers to achievement. Convinced you have unmanageable students? Check out Teach Like A Champion by Doug Lemov or take a look at the You Tube video examples of this technique. The data from Teach For America classrooms is demonstrating that careful attention to skill assessment, ongoing monitoring of progress, high expectations, and mastery based instruction can produce rapid narrowing of the achievement gap for low income students at all levels in reading, math and science achievement.

Are you a student?

Students say, “School sucks”, “Teachers don’t care”, “Nobody even knows if I am there”, and “Friends are more important than school”. Look around. How many people have succeeded in life without being a serious student? So, names come to mind of those who never got degrees? Athletes? Musicians? Small business owners? Each of them has succeeded by virtue of being a serious student of their chosen profession. They succeed because they knew what they wanted and went after it with a passion. The most successful ones go after it because they want it, not because someone told them to want it or that they needed to learn it. It is your responsibility, as a student, to figure out what you are passionate about and then learn everything you can about it. School and teachers do not stand in the way of you doing that. If you are passively waiting for a good teacher to motivate you or teach you, then your future is only as good as the good people in your life who pull you along. They are good to have, but ambition comes from inside you.

Your friends devalue school and shame you if you take it seriously? It is hard to go your own way? Friends do come first. But if they are true friends, they will respect what is important for you. If you can’t tell them that, or they will not accept that, then you have some stuff to figure out, because that road is leading to a set of very unsatisfying relationships and some missed opportunities – ones you will remember while sitting in a bar when you are forty something, remembering the “good time”. Do you know one or two guys headed that way?

Are you an elected official?

What is your responsibility? Don’t blame the teacher’s union for looking out for its members. Don’t blame voters for not wanting higher taxes. Don’t blame poverty, crime and drugs. Good schools can spring up and flourish in the poorest of neighborhoods. Honoring and rewarding excellence, providing for choice and competition, and raising the status and rewards for good teaching are all factors under your control. There are many examples of success in our country and abroad. The wheel does not need reinventing – but it may need replacing. Creating an atmosphere where innovation and personal development are encouraged; allowing for incompetence and failure to be exchanged for something better; inspiring eager young college graduates to enter teaching and making it worthwhile to stay; as well as making education accessible to all ages and incomes are all conditions that have been successfully created in communities. Great teachers can produce great results. How do you attract them and retain them? Take a look at what works right in Finland, a country where “teaching is considered one of the most highly esteemed professions”. Check out, Finland, what’s the secret to its success? at the PBS site on Where We Stand, America’s Schools in the 21st Century.

Link to resources:

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore is an interesting book about the two paths taken by two boys from impoverished, crime ridden communities. Structure, responsibilities, close monitoring, high expectations, and a strong and determined mother are some of the factors that contributed to the author’s success as a military officer, business leader and youth advocate. Whereas the absence of these factors contributed to the other Wes Moore’s eventual incarceration.

Link to the website for Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. All parents and teachers should read this book before passing GO. Expectations that all children are capable of growth, regardless of where they begin is essential first step to then taking responsibility for promoting that growth.

My apologies. This essay is more of a sermon than a thought piece. When it comes to the importance of taking Personal Responsibility, my evangelism reveals itself. Many years ago, I conducted research related to father involvement with their first born children. If I could make one simple recommendation regarding father involvement, it would be this: make sure there are regular times when the father is solely responsible for the child. There is no better source of motivation than sole responsibility for someone else. Ask any mother.

Key terms: personal responsibility; internal discipline; ambition

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling

by

Closeness by way of supporting growth rather than maintaining dependence

A young and helpless child is dependent upon his parent(s) for care and protection. If love and closeness remain equated with dependence, then the child is inevitably caught in a bind between his wish to grow up and his wish to stay connected with his parent. Parental attunement to and support for autonomous growth is a source of closeness that allows self-development and relatedness to be compatible.

 

“Do you know what he called me yesterday? A bitch! And when I asked him to apologize, he said he hated me,” related Jennifer, as she began to sob uncontrollably.

Ben doesn’t know what to do for her. All he can do is seethe with thoughts of , “What an ungrateful little p… ,” as he contemplates confronting their thirteen-year-old son.

Does this sound familiar? This change in Mathew has completely blindsided Jennifer. She and Matty were always so close. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him and he was such a loving child. It just doesn’t seem fair. If she didn’t know better, she would say a Death Eater from Harry Potter’s world had transformed her son into something awful: a rude, ungrateful, disrespectful man-child.

Can you figure out what the problem is from the dialogue above? She calls him “ungrateful” and “disrespectful”. Does that give you any hint as to what is going on? Here’s another hint: “They used to be so close … she would do anything for him.” Are you guessing this is just the dark tunnel of adolescence and she has to close her eyes and wait for him to come out the other end? Perhaps that works for some people, but that is really painful.

Jennifer and Mathew were very close. And Mathew was very loving as a little child. But as he became older, his expectations changed and what used to feel loving and close eventually felt smothering and controlling. Jennifer equated love with helping and caring. When her children were young and helpless, they depended upon her for their care. She loved the role of mother and care taker. Unfortunately, remaining focused on that role led her to overlook another important role: promoting her son’s growth as an autonomous young man.

Mathew loves his parents. But he also has a drive to grow into a strong independent adult. In a relationship with his mother, where his dependence on her is how they feel close, Mathew is in an impossible bind, at times feeling like he must choose between his close but dependent relationship to his mother and his own self-development. Like almost any other kid, Mathew starts to focus on becoming separate and “grown-up”. In the midst of this tumultuous transition, neither Jennifer nor Mathew could tell you that the closeness they had was based on dependency and that Mathew is now facing a developmental bind where either he or his relationship with his mother is going to suffer.

If parents honor this natural drive toward independence or self-reliance, attunement and support provide a means of closeness that does not result in a developmental bind between self and relatedness. Helping a child with his quest for mastery and self-reliance allows the child to feel loved as he grows into his own separate person, without fearing that his need for autonomy threatens his relationship with his parents. Therefore, attunement to developmental growth rather than a focus on caring for a dependent child is an essential transition parents must make early in childhood if they hope to avoid that inevitable conflict and hurt that will come with the child’s need to separate and become more independent. This represents an understanding of how the parent-child relationship must evolve with developmental changes. It also represents an awareness of how growth occurs and can be promoted or inhibited as opposed to development being a bi-product of fixed course of biological changes and maturation.

Is there any hope for Jennifer and Mathew? Of course, there is. Once Jennifer works through my handy-dandy adolescent operating manual* and recognizes the developmental process underway with Mathew, she will find ways to honor and support his moves toward greater self-reliance. And they will live happily ever after, with nary a swear word ever again exchanged. You say you don’t believe in instant self-help cures? Then perhaps what will evolve will be a more compassionate view of Mathew’s behavior as well as an effort on Jennifer’s part to search for and support his efforts to become more “grown-up”.

An awareness of the potential binds between self-development and relatedness within the parent-child relationship is essential to understanding potential areas of conflict or developmental roadblocks. Successfully negotiating these binds with parents prepares a child for negotiating these binds that will inevitably arise in their relationships outside the family.

How will this occur? Can you think of ways that children or teenagers can feel caught in a bind between what is good for them and what others want them to do (think or believe)? I thought so. A parent can feel connected in the navigation of those difficult straights. Doing so is much easier if the child has learned to trust that her relationship with her parents remains secure as she pursues what is right for her and if she knows she will always be loved, no matter what happens in the outside world. How’s that for happily ever after possibilities?

key terms: Dependence vs. Attunement; self-development; autonomy;

* sorry, no handy-dandy manual. But I can recommend a great book for parents of adolescents: Getting to Calm: Cool Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens, by Laura Kastner and Jennifer Wyatt.

Falling in love with failing

by

Fostering openness to learning and growth

Taking on challenges, struggling, failing, analyzing mistakes, and reengaging is the route to growth, competence and self-esteem. Therefore children must learn to tolerate this process, including the failures. False praise and unrealistic labels create a focus on judgment that undermines a child’s willingness to risk failures.

Striking out in baseball is a mini failure and to some of us, quite painful. So how can I avoid this pain? If I don’t go up to bat, I will never strike out and therefore, never have to feel the pain of humiliation and frustration.Or … I can only hit against pitchers I am sure I can handle – therefore staying free of another dreaded strikeout. Two elegant solutions if I don’t say so. There is only one problem, however, with this elegant plan. If I never bat against challenging pitching, I will never improve. I have to meet the challenge of better pitching so that I can master it and grow.

The act of striking out represents engagement in a challenging zone I have yet to master. If I want to get better, I need to risk striking out. In fact, if I analyze why I missed the pitch, I will get better – whether that analysis takes place behind a video screen or at bat having missed the first two strikes. This is a longwinded way of saying that to become a good baseball player, I must learn to tolerate failures, because they become the sources of learning.

So how do we convince our children that they need to welcome failure as a means of learning and growing? Listen to this praise from a proud baseball dad:

“You are such a good hitter.”

“Wow, you are so good. You hit the ball every time.”

“Three hits today! What a great hitter you are!”

What do you think of the praise Dad has handed out? He’s pretty proud of his son, isn’t he? Does anything worry you about what you just heard?

This is a loving, well-intentioned father. He believes he is heaping well-deserved praise on his son. What he is also heaping on his son is some unnecessary pressure. He has labeled him a “good hitter”, even a “great hitter”. That is a tough standard to live up to. There is added pressure if the child thinks Dad’s interest and caring is dependent upon continuing to be “good” or “great”. Unfortunately, Dad has also attached an unintended standard for what it means to be good or great. He observed, “You hit the ball every time” and “(You got) three hits today” in the process of labeling his son “good” and “great”. So what happens if the boy goes 0 for 4 in the next game? What if he strikes out more often than he gets hits? Is his status as “good” or “great” at risk? Will he worry about disappointing his dad? Will he view himself as a failure?

What do you think of these comments?

After striking out to end the game, his father consoles him,

“Don’t worry. You played great.”

“You guys will win next time.”

So what is a boy to make of that? He certainly knows that striking out is not playing “great”. And what if they don’t win next time? Now do you understand why a kid would only want to go to bat against easy competition? That would certainly eliminate this confusion and potential for disappointment. Or, how about this as a solution? Blame the umpire for a bad third strike call. And find a good excuse why the other team won, such as cheating or unfair home field advantage. These are “great” ideas because they allow the child to preserve the label or expectation that he is “special” or “great”, as his dad called him, and can go on playing.

Can you think what would have been more helpful?

“So, how was it?”

“What did you think of that pitcher today?”

“Did you have fun?” “Why not?” “Is that something you want to work on?”

If this boy is to grow as a ball player and not let the game get the best of him, he needs to tolerate losses and failures, like striking out. He also needs to know that failures or attempts are how he gets better. Perhaps they need to be labeled something other than failures. Something like trials or attempts? Linking trials with analysis, learning and improvement is the preferable route rather than linking success and failure with ratings of the person. Judgment is ultimately what steers boys away from activities such as sports, academics or talking to girls. Sometimes avoidance and a good set of excuses are better than multiple wounds to lick and explain.

Perhaps the best way to promote this openness to failure and learning is for the father or coach to model it himself. When the child sees that the adult welcomes and learns from failures, it clearly becomes something acceptable for the child as well.

Key words: tolerating failure; failure as learning; resilience; labeling;

Our assumptions about natural ability and the capacity for change profoundly affect our approaches for working with children. Mindset by Carol Dweck is a must read for all teachers and parents. After reading the first chapter your “mindset” will be forever altered. You will begin to quickly recognize teaching strategies and parenting approaches as growth promoting or fixed and limiting.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address eloquently describes how he turned the three greatest “failures” in his life into sources of creativity and growth.