Those Who Can, Don't Teach

My personal credo is: "Why take something at face value when it can be overanalyzed to the point of unrecognizability?"

I apply this belief to all aspects of my life. And, truthfully, there are very few facets of every day living that couldn't benefit from a thorough and methodical rethinking of its basic tenets.

Except when it comes to elementary school.

Let me back up. I come from an era where I don't think we were actually taught to do very much. I have no memory of anything academic ever being "explained" to me. Either teachers were lazy or just assumed we could figure it out eventually. For my early grammar school years, I attended a very 1970s progressive school where grades were mixed together and we "learned at our own pace." I recall sitting at my desk with stacks of index cards with various lessons on them, and flipping them over to see whether I got the answer right. I usually did. I was one of those kids who always liked school and, for a variety of reasons, attended quite a few different schools, so I have some basis for comparison. If you got the answer right, it was a good thing. I don't know what happened if you didn't because, frankly, I almost always got the answer right. I aced elementary school.

In school, I loved math. I liked to do calculations in my head and got a big kick out of numbers in every day life. I always loved baseball at the beginning of the season to see how a batter's average would go from 1.000 to .250 in the course of one game. A bummer for him, but awesome for me. This love of statistics was thwarted during graduate school, however, when the manipulation of digits stopped representing anything interesting or useful.

So when I became a parent to a school-aged child who also had an affinity for numbers, I assumed that I would be the best homework-helping mom ever. What I may lack as a moral compass or role model for my child I can make up for as an adjunct math helper. My role as parent would be redeemed through long division.

First and second grade were a piece of cake, cementing, in my mind, my reputation as a leader among tutoring moms. I demonstrated unparalleled excellence in quizzing my son on his addition tables. He was a natural, of course. Subtraction. No problem. Multiplication tables? Score! My son, the offspring of two Ph.D.s, clearly had the math gene.

Things took a precarious turn in third grade. Not for my son, but for me. He continued to solve long-division and other equations. But there was a new wrinkle added to the mix by the public school system: Students had to show how they got their answers. My son proved adept at getting the correct answers, but was not as great at showing his work. We are a family of head-calculators. I can quickly tabulate the tip on a 5-course meal in my head, but frankly would be lost if I had to note how I came up with the answer. When the task fell to me to model for him how to show the process, my answer was always: "I don't know how to explain why that is the answer. It just is." Tragically, elementary school teachers are not big fans of this explanation.

The situation further deteriorated with word problems. As a psychologist (and avowed over-thinker), I try to take the context into account when solving such problems: Why is Beth selling seven cupcakes at the school bake sale? Did she make 12, but ate five of them? What is the school raising money for? Did Charles make the oatmeal cookies or did his parent buy them at the supermarket? So perhaps you can understand why my poor son has resorted to slogging through these problems solo.

This inability to conceptualize grade school work is not limited to just math. Although I love math, I was actually an English major and if there is anything I am more obsessive about than numbers it is deconstructing sentences. One day my son came home with a reading comprehension passage for which he had missed one of the answers. There were four options, and he chose "B." So that left A,C,D. To me, the passage did not provide an adequate foundation from which to make any of the selected assumptions. However, being a veteran of many, many standardized tests, I dumbed down my thought process and selected "C." My husband, also a master of analysis, looked at the passage and selected "D."  We then spent a good 15 minutes justifying our answers to each other, but we all remained unconvinced not only about the others' selections, but about our own. This was the one instance where I put aside my "no providing homework excuses" policy to pen a note to the teacher that I apologize, but three intelligent minds, including a savvy 8-year-old, two Ph.D.s and an Ivy League English major could not come to a meeting of the minds.

A Sense of Entitlement

When my son was less than a year old, I signed up for a slew of Mommy-and-Me "enrichment" classes through the community center of my former West Side Los Angeles city. For those of you who know about "The West Side," you may already see where this is going. These activities were meant to promote parent-child bonding in a way that is superior to merely spending time and interacting with your child in your own home or in the park. Incidentally, these classes met at the very same park where I could have played with my son for free; however, this was the West Side of Los Angeles, so clearly it was far better to pay money to be able to coo at your child inside the recreation building that was undoubtedly built with an endowment by someone "in the industry." Also, if I recall correclty, to have the privilege of your 6-month-old child participaing in this higher learning, required one (presumably a parent, not the child) to provide proof of residency and submit an application at a precise time on a precise day, lest one ran the risk of being relegated to the "waiting list." What? And have my child wait until he is 8 months to be enriched?? The horror!

This music class turned out to be the first of at least two consecutive classes taught by someone who really was not cut out for the task. The first class, when my son was about four months, was run by a veteran of such classes, Simonna*. Ah yes, Simonna. She came dressed to the nines for every Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. class: Prada heels, D&G cashmere wrap, long, manicured nails. Her specialty was playing the piano which, as you can imagine, is about the worst way to engage anyone in a group, let alone babies with no discernible attention spans. Simonna would somberly sit at the piano, with her back to the rest of us--yes, you heard right, her back to us--so the babies didn't even have the benefit of seeing her fingers move or her facial expressions as she made music. A few weeks into the class, I figured out the secret to her avoidance of children and parents alike. She pulled me aside, remembering that I had introduced myself as being in the mental health field, and proceeded to tell me how she feels depressed and has always found her own children to be annoying nuisances. I didn't expect to be making professional referrals while at Mommy-and-Me. And I was more than a little wary of the city's hiring practices that they selected a kid-hating, depressed mother to help transition infants and women into the joys of mother- and babyhood.

I thought my next foray into this city's Mommy-and-Me activities couldn't possibly get any worse than Simonna. I was wrong. The new instructor's own neuroses made me yearn for the reticent isolationism of Simonna. This instructor was a young, nervous woman named Teacher Elizabeth**. That was how she introduced ourselves to us, "Teacher Elizabeth." Now, it is quite possible that her given-name was indeed "Teacher," much like some boys are named "Dean" who may not ever pursue a career in academic administration. But Teacher Elizabeth insisted on referring to herself in the third person and with this dubious title attached to her name. I do not know why a bunch of over-educated, over-achieving moms, most of whom had credentials that had ceremonial titles connected with them, needed to refer to someone with a CD player and basket of tambourines with an honorific title. Perhaps she was trying to indoctrinate these infants of privilege into the hierarchical civil service bureaucracy system, in case their family fortunes dried up in the next 18 years?

Poor Teacher Elizabeth started the first class by telling us she had no children of her own, and that she liked order. We were schooled on the proper way to disinfect the mini bongo drums if our children were uncouth enough to successfully gum them. Mother and child got a joint repressed-evil-eye from Teacher Elizabeth** if an infant was not quite ready to relinquish said instrument at the conclusion of the appropriate song (for some reason, each melody had a different instrument to go with it, so the majority of the class was involved with selecting and returning items to various color-coded bins).  It was a lose-lose situation from the beginning.

Now, besides her obvious ineptitude, I think one reason I could not make eye-contact with Teacher Elizabeth without rolling my eyes is that I was raised to use ceremonial titles for adults, such as teachers or friends' parents, or professional titles if one of these people had a job where being identified by the profession had life-or-death consequences. For example, it's good for society to be able to identify doctors, firefighters and police officers, because these are professionals who can step in and assist in emergency situations. It is even useful, in the right context, to be able to identify principals and professors, because they can greatly impact one's future by failing or expelling someone. The same logic can be extended to include judges and members of Congress. And most definitely to Mother Nature and Sister Christian.

NOTE:
*This may or may not be her real name. I actually forgot what her real name was, so I can't use an alias since I don't know what name to not use.

**Yes, her real name, although not sure if the "Teacher" part is on her birth certificate or not. If you know her, please tell her my child continues to dislike music lessons of any kind.

Honor and Honor Students: A Bumpy Road Ahead

Let me be upfront about my belief: The sole purpose of a bumper sticker is to express one’s allegiance politically (national and statewide candidates only) and athletically (ideally, a team with a winning record in the season during which the sticker was purchased). Messages whizzing by in the carpool lane do not lend themselves to nuance or ambiguity. If people need to pull over and google on their iPhones what is on the bumper in front of them, it then becomes a public safety issue. The goal of a bumper sticker is to educate, not endanger, your four-wheeled friends.

A bumper sticker has achieved its end if the person following the car has to squelch the urge either to wave at the driver in solidarity or rear-end the car in question by gunning the accelerator. Obama—not Bush. Red Sox—not Yankees. Hugging with Nuclear Arms—probably not a good idea. These moral decision trees are difficult enough to navigate at a hard stop, let alone while driving 75 miles an hour. And throw in the insistent voice of an automated GPS dominatrix and you can see how the average driver is being pushed to the limit.

When it comes to bumper sticker protocol, I’m referring to those stickers that adhere directly to a car’s back bumper (also called a rear fender). Not the transparent ones that go on the back window, which should abide by a different set of rules. Those should identify an accredited alma mater of either the car’s owner or a first-degree relative. The school must have an actual campus (not just a floor in a high-rise) and be legally permitted to confer degrees. If the person is still attending the school, they should be full-time enrollees, not part of any extension, visiting or evening program. Otherwise, the driver should be able to produce on demand (like at a red light or traffic stop) proof that someone in the family has an actual bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degree from the school identified on the window. Of course, stickers on the back window should not depict a family of 8 with stick-figure drawings (with or without pets) in descending order of height. They should not glorify characters from Calvin and Hobbes urinating. And, it goes without saying, they should never, ever pay homage to any sort of religious figure or so-called spiritual personal belief.

The subject of the bumper sticker must be one that has been recently debated on a national Cable Television Network. The message should leave no doubt as to the driver’s leanings. Of course, if this means that some car owners may be more vulnerable to auto theft or burglary than others, then that is the price one has to pay for expressing their First Amendment Rights. One should be able to look at a pimped ride and picture the driver perhaps having cocktails with Keith Olbermann, or watching SportsCenter in Packers pajamas. The freeway is not the time to challenge fellow drivers to translate your message from a foreign tongue, or to promote a regional cause that will be meaningless to the driver in back of you. If you absolutely never take the Ford outside of your suburban cul-de-sac, then I suppose, if you must, you can get away with a sticker that touts a local restaurant or bar, for example. And then it should be because you are a frequent patron, not because the bumper sticker was free or you thought putting it on your car makes you seem edgier than you actually are.

Another ilk where there is no gray area whatsoever is the “Proud Parent of an Honor Student at… ” bumper sticker. First of all, I have never seen one of these stickers proclaim there to be “Proud Parents” or “Proud Relative Caregiver” or “Kind of Embarrassed Kin.” So these bumper stickers in and of themselves are making some sort of statement that in order for a child to be the recipient of “pride,” s/he must have a singular parent who is also a car owner/lessee. And if we start with that assumption, the constellation of students with the aforementioned auto-owning caregiver who ALSO get above-average grades is even smaller. For example, I do not believe any of my relatives have ever attended a school that had such bumper stickers available. And, truthfully, stressed teachers do not need added pressure from the administrations of those few schools who have stockpiled these stickers to produce good students. From a business model standpoint, the production of these stickers hardly seems worth it.

I have taken an informal sample of the bumpers of neighbors who I suspect may have excellent students, and I have yet to see any statement about their child’s grades affixed to their car. But more to the point, with the length of time people keep cars nowadays, such bumper stickers are rife with ethical dilemmas. First of all, Honor Student Status is only as good as the last report card. I mean, getting an “A” in one semester does nothing to mitigate a “D” the next. So by gluing onto an automobile public evidence of a parent’s presumed “pride” over an offspring’s academic accomplishment, the parent is banking on the fact that the child will continue to achieve at the same rate. If not, the parent risks being the laughingstock of his/her school district. Just as I believe people with university stickers on their windows should produce a diploma on demand, parents with these “Honor Student” stickers should be required to have a current report card in the glove compartment at all times.

I wonder about what goes on in the homes of families with these stickers. Are children discouraged from taking challenging courses so as not to risk their A’s, lest mom or dad has to trade in the Honda before the lease is up? Does the child have to work at a fast-food establishment to pay for the fees incurred by turning in the car early? Are students who fall from Honor Roll punished by having to apply Goo-Gone to the back bumper until every trace of the sticker is gone? Will the children have to start walking to school so as not to be associated with the cars touting their former glory? Alas, there are no easy answers.