Tag: school

The trouble with being smart…

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Some of us thinkers were branded as smart when we were young. This is a devastating label for many of us. Here’s why…

I’m going to tell you a story to demonstrate. I was a second grade teacher for many years. I was lucky to have an amazing teaching partner who wanted to collaborate with me to find ways to transfer the ownership of our students’ learning away from us and onto them.

We created a rather brilliant approach to spelling that was really more about students learning how to use data to set and accomplish realistic goals than it was about learning spelling patterns. This was when I got a real sense of the damage done to those kids we laud praise upon for being smart.

The system worked like this:

We’d start each week with a pre-test of spelling words. All the words on the test contained a particular spelling pattern or 2-3 related patterns. We’d then correct the test together in class and the students would then use that information to create their own spelling list to study for the week. Any words missed on the pretest had to go on the student’s list, but beyond that they were free to pick from a curated list of words with the focus spelling pattern(s).

The words were presented in three columns, and I explained that the words in the first column were the simplest words and the easiest to master. As you moved across the columns, the words became more complex, likely becoming more difficult to remember. There was no additional guidance and the students had the freedom to pick whichever words they wanted (beyond those they’d missed on the pretest) to create their unique list.

They had several activities they could use to practice their words and at the end of the week, the students would pair up and test each other on their customized lists. We’d then graph the results of that test and analyze the data.

If you missed one or two words, you’d probably created a “just right” list for your level, with enough challenge to learn something but not so much that it was overwhelming and more than you could master. If you missed three or more words, you’d probably chosen words that were too difficult for you and next time you might consider choosing simpler words. If you consistently missed zero words then your list was probably too easy, and next time, you may want to challenge yourself with more difficult words.

(The graphs were also great to show trends over time, and we could use this data to adjust the student’s approach accordingly. Truly, this system was brilliant. I credit my teaching partner who was amazing to work with though she eventually wanted to move away from this because she felt it took too much focus away from spelling. I was more like, “fuck the spelling! This is real learning.”)

Now of course, there were always two to three smart kids in class that consistently chose the most difficult words and still aced the test every time. How to differentiate for these kids and make it more challenging? Well, they were encouraged to pull out the dictionary and find even more complex words that still contained the spelling pattern.

The first week these smart kids got to strut over to the bookshelf and pull out the dictionary, they were always so excited! They really had a great time finding longer, more challenging words and I loved seeing them so engaged rather than bored. Often, on this first go around, they would choose words that were too difficult and would be devastated when they missed several on their test. The following week, they’d use the guidance the whole class had received and look for words that were a bit simpler. If they missed one or two of these, they’d usually be done with the dictionary.

These smart kids would go back to the words they knew they could ace every time (usually because they already knew the words.) The dictionary would remain on the bookshelf during spelling because it challenged their very identities and made them feel less smart. These kids had fixed mindsets and when learning was too difficult, they gave up because it meant they were no longer elevated above effort due to their intelligence.  

What an eye-opener! And I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the activities I avoided as a child—and as an adult if I wasn’t sure I’d be good at it right out of the gate. How I spent years not allowing myself to be a beginner at anything, or if it was at all challenging, I’d abandon it quickly. Being labeled smart makes you risk-averse and gives you a fixed mindset.

Here’s a simple explanation of fixed mindset vs. growth mindset:

People with a fixed mindset avoid challenges, because it makes them feel like they’re not talented or smart. They lose interest when the work gets hard, and they give up easily.

Those with growth mindset seek and thrive on challenge. They want to stretch themselves, because they know that they will grow and learn. “This is hard. This is fun.”

https://medium.com/leadership-motivation-and-impact/fixed-v-growth-mindset-902e7d0081b3

So which are you? The risk-averse smart person or the person invigorated by challenge? Can you see how most classrooms create and reinforce this damaging identity?

If only I could write like her…

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I’ve been pretty good about working ahead and scheduling for Sunday so I could remain unplugged one day of the week. Unfortunately, this week got away from me and here I am, Sunday morning, hooked up to the internet, breaking one promise to myself so as to keep another and publish something every day for sixty days.

So I’m going to share an essay from Carol Black. Oh, if I only could write like her! I reread this essay this morning trying to pull the most profound quote to share with you, so you’d be compelled to click the link and read the whole thing. I got caught up again in her beautiful prose that wrenches at my emotions.

Every essay she writes is heartbreaking and beautiful. Every paragraph is so elegantly persuasive; it feels impossible to choose just one passage to pull out and highlight, so know as you read this teaser know that the entire piece is equally compelling:

When we first take children from the world and put them in an institution, they cry.  It used to be on the first day of kindergarten, but now it’s at an ever earlier age, sometimes when they are only a few weeks old.  “Don’t worry,” the nice teacher says sweetly, “As soon as you’re gone she’ll be fine.  It won’t take more than a few days.  She’ll adjust.” And she does.  She adjusts to an indoor world of cinderblock and plastic, of fluorescent light and half-closed blinds (never mind that studies show that children don’t grow as well in fluorescent light as they do in sunlight; did we really need to be told that?)  Some children grieve longer than others, gazing through the slats of the blinds at the bright world outside; some resist longer than others, tuning out the nice teacher, thwarting her when they can, refusing to sit still when she tells them to (this resistance, we are told, is a “disorder.”)  But gradually, over the many years of confinement, they adjust.  The cinderblock world becomes their world.  They don’t know the names of the trees outside the classroom window. They don’t know the names of the birds in the trees.  They don’t know if the moon is waxing or waning, if that berry is edible or poisonous, if that song is for mating or warning.

Here’s the entire article: On the Wildness of Children.

Educating Freedom

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Some good friends of mine, a tight-knit family with parents in human support fields, both working with adults who are struggling to function (imagine that) were telling me how difficult it is to drop their 5-year-old daughter off at kindergarten. She screams and resists and they pretty much have to drag her into school.

Red flag? I think it should be. Yet, we’re brainwashed into believing there are no other options. This is what kids are supposed to do. They go to school where they’ll learn everything they need to know to function as human adults in our society, right? So what is it they need to know?

Historical facts and dates? They’ll forget those. How the world works? I learned everything I know about physics when I became a second grade teacher because I’d forgotten every little bit of science I learned in school. How to read? When I was a third grader, I sat silently terrified, surrounded by “big kids” in a sixth grade reading class because I had already discovered a way to escape my life in highly engaging chapter books and devoured them voraciously. That’s all I remember about “learning to read” in school—oh, and that I was “smarter” than my classmates because of how quickly I sped through the colors of the SRA reading program. Algebra and geometry? What I learned in my high school algebra class was that I hated math; in geometry, I developed my social skills by convincing the kid behind me to let me cheat off his work so I could avoid my creepy perv of a teacher’s hand on my waste when I went up to his desk to get help.  What do you remember learning in school?

I’ll bet you remember learning how to sit still and raise your hand when you wanted to speak. I’ll bet you remember paying careful attention to the bathroom policy so you’d know how long you’d have to hold it. Or maybe, you remember coming up with clever ways to convince your mom you were sick so you could stay home. I remember thinking if I took the thermometer out of my mouth when my mom was out of the room, the reading would be off enough that she’d have to keep me home—clearly all that science was paying off!

I remember getting antsy when someone else turned a test in ahead of me because it meant I’d lost the race and someone else might be “smarter” than me. I learned that there’s only one right answer and not to ask too many questions. In high school, I learned really well how to fly under the radar, how to be invisible, how to cram for tests the night before so I could get away with ignoring my homework. I learned exactly how little I could do to still graduate, so I guess I learned efficiency?

I also figured out the best time of day to leave campus and walk across town to my boyfriend’s house. (Though there was that one day my dad randomly drove by and I was busted!) I learned that my hair and make-up mattered and that my wardrobe was insufficient. In fact, once when a boy was picking me up for our first date after I had agonized for hours about what I could wear, he looked me up and down and asked if I could change. I learned that the best way to get through high school was to be in the popular crowd, yet I never seemed able to quite break into that. The next best way was to always have a boyfriend, whether I really liked the boy or not.

So what did I really learn? I learned that using my resources was cheating, my worth was determined by how well my teachers liked me, needing others was bad, my thoughts and feelings held no weight, attractive people did better in life than nice people, that my gut was not to be trusted. I learned to please the adults who were always right and that authority figures had total control over my life.

I learned that anything I studied could be forgotten after the test, mistakes were punished and there were no do-overs, failing was to be avoided at all costs. I learned to study my teachers so I knew exactly what they wanted and just how little I could do to keep their favor or at least not attract their contempt.

And I learned what freedom means. It means giving up control over the majority of your time so you can have the freedom to buy a house and toys. It means busting your ass to build someone else’s dream so one day when you are old, you can stop working and be free to finally figure out what your dream is. It means sacrificing your childhood and your sense of self so you can appreciate living in a free country where you get to watch other people live their lives on reality TV.

There’s a powerful reason that five year old girl screams when she’s dragged into that classroom. Children know what true freedom is…and what it isn’t. Alarm bells are ringing in her head and heart; she recognizes that environment has no real interest in who she is and its sole purpose is to suck away her one and only childhood and educate her how to be in this free world of ours.   

I’ll take a shit sandwich, please.

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Do you still have nightmares about school? Last night, I dreamt I was sitting in a classroom as an adult, and I was supposed to be there as some kind of support staff, maybe a speech therapist? Anyway, the teacher was assigning some reading passages with comprehension questions, and I busted out, chanting, “This is dumb, this is dumb, this is dumb,” or something equally silly. In the dream, it seemed much more intelligent, yet also clearly petulant and ineffective. The teacher and students looked at me with disgust, clearly annoyed at the disruption, but other than that, my protest fell on deaf ears.

I woke up and wrote another scathing post about education. I realized that’s all I’m producing right now and may be portraying myself as just angry and cynical. So I thought I’d schedule that one for a later date and try to write about something a little less depressing.

Let’s talk a moment about the culture of Strengthsfinder 2.0. I love this assessment, mostly because I love how individualized it is and I love what I call “labels for good.” Most personality tests have 16 possible boxes to place people in and anyone who follows my blog knows how I feel about boxes. Is there such a thing as a box phobia?

Whoa!! I just realized a weird contradiction in myself. I always claim to hate metaphorical boxes, yet I am an obsessive collector of actual boxes. I have the strangest aversion to getting rid of any type of potentially reusable container, be it square or otherwise. There are numerous shelves in my house storing unsightly stacks (though nested whenever possible!) of empty boxes of various sizes. Hmm, what does it mean?!

Okay, climbing back up out of that rabbit hole. Maybe that’s an analysis for another day.

First things, first. When you ask someone what is meant by strengths and weaknesses, typically that person will say “strengths are what you do well and weaknesses are what you’re not good at.” If we broaden the definition of “strengths” we can start imagining a very different world. In Strengthsfinder culture, strengths are those activities that make you feel strong, they energize you, and have the capacity to put you in flow—that creative state where you lose yourself and all track of time in the doing. And the opposite, your weaknesses, are those things that drain you, that suck the life out of you, those things you desperately wish others would just do for you.

Now we may or may not be talking about your talents. Typically your strengths are also your talents, but you’ve probably engaged in activities you were naturally good at and had them drain you. When this is the case, I encourage people to really explore the context of the activity. Why, where, when, and with whom you do the activity often matter and can totally destroy something that could actually bring you much joy and energy.

And on the flipside, there can be things you are obsessed with that you’re not at all good at. If you’re energized by the learning and driven to push through the tough times (or willing to eat the “shit sandwich” that goes with learning that particular skill as Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in her book, Big Magic,) then consider it a strength!

I’m not going to get into the details of the Strengthsfinder 2.0 assessment and all the many reasons I love it, and I think it’s important to share than I am not affiliated with Gallup and thereby not incentivized by them to promote this personality assessment, but I consider myself an evangelist because I am passionate about the culture around it.

I am passionate because I can imagine this world where more people have spent their childhood free to discover and engage in their strengths. Using these discoveries to guide and motivate their activity choices and explore possibilities for lifestyles that keep them in their strengths zone. How different would this world look if more people figured out how to make meaningful contributions that kept them in this zone? A world where when we met anyone new, we were looking for the unique contribution that person is here to make (instead of what’s wrong with them that needs fixing?)

What if we were energized by and valued for our work purely because we discovered our zone? Would we care as much about keeping up with the Jones’s? Would we have the same levels of anxiety and depression? What about lifestyle diseases? Or even cancer?

We know that stress is the culprit in most illnesses of all types. Wouldn’t a culture where we have meaningful work (that I would argue can be found in any field) that calls on our strengths and keeps us highly engaged, lead to reduced cortisol levels, increased empathy, increased intuition, increased creativity and innovation? How could it not?

There’s a movie coming out soon, Self-Taught: Life Stories from Self-Directed Learners, (the Kickstarter Campaign) that I cannot wait to see. In it we’ll meet adults who spent their childhoods outside of the mainstream schooling complex, adults who weren’t reprogrammed through years of “education.” I’ve been a member of the Alliance for Self-directed Education for awhile now and I finally have hope that such a world can exist—if only we have the courage to step away from what we know to try a different way.

It’s a huge cultural shift to imagine and we’re nowhere near the tipping point, but there’s still rapidly growing communities who can see this world also. They’re out there. And thanks to modern technology, if you’re truly ready to free your children and your family, you can find one–or create one. Are you ready?

I see dead people.

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Truly, I think we’re in the Zombie Apocalypse. It’s a perfect metaphor for our current society of people reduced to mindless producer/consumer states. There’s a general sense of discontent along with ridiculous rates of anxiety, depression, and chronic disease conditions and yet people accept this fate with little resistance, moving unquestioningly through the prescribed path to becoming one of the living dead: go to school, get good grades so you can get into a good college so you can get a good job so you can attract a mate, get married and have children, buy a house, fantasize about vacations and retirement, spend evenings numbing out in front of a screen, live for the weekends, you know the recipe.  

If you read my post, You’ve Been Schooled, you’ll find a list of ways that our school system prepares us for this bleak, depressing consumerist future. Children are reprogrammed to suppress their intuition and deny their own needs for play and self-discovery, never developing the strong sense of self needed to create satisfying and meaningful lives. They graduate from a system that directed nearly every minute of 10,000 hours (and this is without college) of their lives up to this point, disabling their own internal compass and ensuring compliance with our consumerist culture.

I believe humans come wired for contribution, each with unique strengths that support the whole. We’re driven to create and innovate, with bodies that reward us with feel-good chemicals when we’re engaged in those behaviors that call on our natural talents and when we lock arms with our fellow humans to maximize our resources. Ongoing movement throughout the day, generosity, and a sense of purpose are all natural parts of being human, so why aren’t most of us living a lifestyle that reflects this?

Because we’ve all been schooled. Broken like wild stallions. The human spirit is much stronger than it would appear these days, but how is one to resist the slow, steady reprogramming toward external drivers? Rewards and punishments, baby! Mandatory coercive schooling over a long period of time will break just about anyone. Soon a body wants to do nothing if there’s no external reward. We seek the “juice” through other means when our grades fail to provide dopamine hits; social media and video games become the drugs of choice for those who don’t conform well to the authoritarian paradigm of school.  

Most five and six and twelve year olds want that damned gold star. They want to please their teachers and be seen as competent. In fact, according to self-determination theory, along with autonomy and relatedness, a sense of competence is imperative to our psychological well-being. What happens when you don’t get these needs met? Depression, anxiety, addiction.  We end up creating an attachment void that gets filled with virtual or chemical substitutes for authentic connection.

This is nothing new. I’m just one more outraged voice among many who see the wreckage and fear the future of a world filled with sheeple. Why hasn’t there been a revolution?! To demand change requires courage to leave the mainstream, imagination and innovation to create new ways of doing things, risk-tolerance to try those new ways knowing we’ll fail many times before we get it right and others might mock us. Courage, imagination, innovation, resilience: all natural human traits that we’ve sacrificed to our “education.”

Four Powerful Reasons

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I am writing this ahead of time and scheduling it for Sunday, June 23. The blog challenge’s single rule is that I must publish something each day of the challenge. My family has agreed to go almost unplugged every other Sunday (hubby and I conceded to the texting of friends and listening of music in favor of willing buy-in.) So, I’m going to forgo the writing of an original post again and share one of my favorite articles (relevant to my content) from one of my favorite people.

Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist and frequent contributor to Psychology Today, is a champion of self-directed education and an expert on the importance of free play. Here’s his article on Why Our Coercive System of Schooling Should Topple. If you like this, consider reading his highly persuasive book, Free to Learn.

Imposter Syndrome: My Story, Part Two

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I was one of the original teachers at that shiny new International Baccalaureate charter. The school became a quick success despite the ongoing tension in the culture, and it grew much faster than originally planned. Year two, they added an additional class for each grade that only had one the first year, including second grade. My good friend, another OG, became my second grade teaching partner and we worked exceptionally well together, designing a really fun Programme of Inquiry for our 7-8 year old students. She was a gifted educator and I was so lucky to get to work with and learn from her.

Despite getting to collaborate with one of my best friends, being in philosophical alignment with the school model (at the time and on the surface anyway,) being recognized by many of my families and students as their “favorite” teacher, being well-liked by my immediate administrator (the ED was a nightmare. I could have a whole separate blog about the abuse the faculty endured under his leadership,) and being chosen to be on the team that researched, developed, and delivered professional development for the faculty, I managed to find intermittent enthusiasm but mostly I was a miserable wreck who was neglecting her family.

I was always depleted at the end of my 10-11 hour days of “performing” for children who, for the most part, had already lost interest in “learning.” This was also the 5th job in a row that I was certain I was underqualified for. Remember, I didn’t have a teaching degree, just that stupid test that said I knew what I was doing. I had chronic imposter syndrome.

Rather than recognizing that I must present as capable and intelligent to pull off these longshot hires, I would beat myself up for not being a “legitimate” expert in my field since I hadn’t completed the required education for any position in this string of employment: wilderness therapy instructor (a clue- and degree-less city girl,) field medic (remember the EMT test? I did the rushed version—two weeks instead of a full semester—of that training also) speech language pathologist (ha! I was SO underqualified for this one, it was considered unethical,) then two elementary teaching positions (just those stupid tests for the latter.)

In each of these positions I’d received recognition for excelling, but I still blamed my lack of qualifications for my chronic stress. Cortisol was my constant companion. I was always seeking to better “educate” myself and worked stupid long hours so I could feel like I was worthy of the meager paychecks these jobs paid. I still have to laugh ironically about how I left a cushy credit union job with excellent benefits because I was seeking “more meaningful work,” only to take on far too much student loan debt (that continues to haunt me) for an exhausting career that paid less than what I was making at the financial institution.  

Midway through year four, as the level of stress crescendoed at the charter school along with my sense of impotence to improve my working conditions, my mother asked a pivotal question on the phone one day in response to my chronic complaints, “What would you do if you were to leave teaching?” I spent that night into the wee morning hours researching this very question. Joel Hammon, in his TED talk on liberating teachers, jokes about his own online search for “What kinds of jobs are there for teachers who hate teaching?”

My search turned up life/executive coaching among other things. I signed up for an online certification course that I couldn’t afford (and would be another “alternate route” to expertise—seems I never learn!,) decided I was starting my own coaching business, and let the school know I wouldn’t be renewing my contract for the fall. What I couldn’t have articulated at the time was the real reasons I had to leave the teaching profession. I claimed too much self-respect to tolerate a persistent toxic environment as my reason, and while I’m certain and extremely grateful that expedited my departure, it was really that square box that would never accommodate my not-square nature that I was running from.

I have so much more to say about that box—if you’ve been following my blog, you probably know I’m just getting started. Oh, the reprogramming, self-worth stealing box that we call school…   

Accidental Teacher: My Story, Part One

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I was an accidental teacher. I don’t have an education degree. In the state of Idaho, one does not need a teaching certificate to have a classroom in a private school. My family was in a rough patch financially since my husband had been laid off and needed to retrain to enter the workforce. My degree was in Speech Language Pathology and I had just started the masters program (required along with a 36 month clinical fellowship to practice) when we received the news that my husband’s employer was eliminating his position.

Our second child was 2 months old when this happened. After dropping out of grad school and a brutal year of me drowning at a Title One school as an interim SLP, I took a job teaching second grade at a conservative elementary school. I suspected there would be a philosophical mismatch but my family needed me to bring in an income, and this position had the added benefit of free preschool tuition for our oldest child who was 4 at the time.

It was soon painfully clear that the values of this establishment were not representative of my own values, and I was expected to teach these values to the children in my class. I felt certain that if anyone discovered my political views, my job would be threatened. So this seemed like a very valid reason why I wouldn’t just be in love with my new teaching career. Well, that and the fact that I wasn’t trained to be teacher and felt in over my head. (Even though my classes were very small. I never had more than 8 students in my classes at this school.) I certainly enjoyed working with the children in my care, I just needed to be in an environment that aligned with my values and have the proper training, right?

Halfway through my second year at the school, one dark winter morning on my way to work, I heard an advertisement on the radio about a new International Baccalaureate charter school inviting families to enter their children into the lottery.  I jumped on it. I reached out to the director and asked if they were allowed to hire non-certified teachers, and he responded that they could not, but if I would promise to complete the testing for the alternate route to certification before school started in the fall, he would consider an interview.

He ended up offering me the job based on my assurance I would get the testing under my belt before school started. I researched the process and obtained the materials to study for the exams. It wasn’t long before I realized the necessary content was, well, everything. It felt like I needed to know every detail about every subject taught in school, and it was an insurmountable mountain of knowledge. There was no way I would be able to cram that much content in such a short amount of time. Even studying for the GRE was easier than this!

I decided to just schedule the tests. If I failed them, I would have just enough time to squeeze in another attempt after the required delay and I’d have to pay the testing fee again, but at least I’d have a better idea of where to focus my attention—or so I thought. Come testing day, I was pretty nervous, but I’d always been a good test taker. The adrenaline rush that would come at the beginning of a high stakes test had always served me well, unlike the devastating opposite effect it has on so many.

While I was completing the multiple choice tests, I had no idea how I was doing. I took this as a bad sign. The one other time in my life where I couldn’t tell whether I was doing well (on an EMT test that was also high stakes for me at the time) I’d barely passed. Frankly, while I’m not a fan of using testing as a way to determine competency at anything, I believe this is the sign of a really poor test. Any test taker who’s not just swimming in adrenaline and cortisol because of test anxiety should have some idea of how they’re doing.

I was sweating and I felt a little sick as I left the secure testing room to obtain my results. I was shocked at how I did. Distinguished. Are you f-ing kidding me?! That was supposed to prepare me for what I faced in the classroom? What a joke!

To be continued…

Restoring Justis

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Restoring Justis

Yeah. The title is meant to be ironic. It’s ironic that my last name is Justis. I’m certainly not justice-oriented. The world has never been fair and it never will be. By trying to make it fair, we just cripple everyone.

No, I’m not trying to restore justice. I’m trying to restore curiosity. I’m trying to restore creativity. I’m trying to restore human nature. It is not our nature to be caged. It is not our nature to follow orders and deny our bodies movement, or to hold our waste until the bell rings. It is not our nature to only learn what we’re forced to learn, to do as little as we can get away with, to only look out for ourselves, to be apathetic.

We’ve been reprogrammed. Humans are social creatures, wired to contribute to a community. Our bodies reward us with feel-good hormones when we behave in a way that supports the greater good. It should feel good to parent. It should feel good to learn. It should feel good to contribute. It does when we haven’t been reprogrammed with external drivers, rewards and punishments, prestige and shame.

I don’t believe in good and evil, I only believe that we are social creatures by nature. When someone is acting in a way that is not socially acceptable, it’s because they have a need that is not being met. What do we do in our culture when that happens? Typically, we punish the behavior. What would happen if we attempted to find out what was going on for that person and tried to meet their needs rather than impose consequences? Can you imagine what a different world that would be?

But instead, we’ve become a culture of control. We lack the skills to effectively communicate, so we forcefully impose our will on others. And children get the worst of it. They have less freedom during the school day than prisoners. Many of our schools even resemble prisons with guards and weapon detectors. It’s no wonder we’re suspicious of children when we treat them like criminals.

Then we expect them to suddenly be able to direct their own lives at 18?! Is this logical? It seems so obvious to me that childhood these days does not support self-directed, functioning adults that know how to create satisfying and meaningful lives. Satisfying and meaningful lives. Is that really too much to hope for? What a different world it would be if more of us were living satisfying and meaningful lives.

This is what we need to restore. And I think it’s human nature to create satisfying and meaningful lives, if only we allow our children to develop as they naturally would. Unfortunately, it may be too much to hope for. The adults that would be modeling such lives are few and far between. Most adults think they’re supposed to control kids. Make them “get in line.” Teach them to sit still and raise their hands when they want to contribute. Teach them to tolerate tedium. Teach them mistakes are bad.

If you want to change a culture, you take the kids. It’s what they did with our modern day school system. We like to call it “education” but really it’s “schooling.” We’ve been schooled into believing we’re providing our children with the knowledge they need to be “successful” but really we’re just programming them to be mindless consumers.

But maybe if we stopped schooling our kids and were just there as supportive adults, resources and models of stewardship, we could restore human nature. Maybe if we let them learn instead of coerce them to cram content, we’d restore their natural tendencies to explore, discover, create, and contribute.

Who knows? Maybe those kids could even save the world.

Forcing the Read

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During my years of teaching second grade, I had many parents who were extremely stressed by their child’s reading progress (or lack of.) While our school had a no homework policy, many of the teachers ignored this policy and sent home reading practice. If you haven’t read my post, The Making of Mediocrity, I’d encourage you to read that before continuing  as it gives background to the information I share in this post. If you have read it, you’ll have some idea of what this reading practice might look like at home:

For the precocious readers, there was certainly no need for assigned reading practice, since these children were already fluent readers. In fact, getting their noses out of books and outside moving their bodies was probably much more of a challenge for these families. Any assigned reading practice for these kids would just be a hoop to jump through. The rule-followers would do it to check the box, the pleasers would do it to keep their teacher’s affection, the kids whose identities relied on being one of the “smart ones” would do it for the evidence that they were superior to their classmates, and those that had other interests would recognize it as the busy work it was and insist on doing their own thing.

For the kids resisting reading and who spent the day struggling to control their bodies in the classroom, forcing reading practice at home, in my opinion, was just plain cruel. Unless you’re a super savvy and creative parent with the excess energy to somehow make decodables fun, this situation is likely to set you up for an ongoing battle with your child. We’ll talk more about this when we look at why homework has strong potential to damage familial relationships. And in the end, what exactly is your child learning by being forced to practice reading? They may make small gains in their reading fluency, but what they’re likely learning is that they hate reading and their desires don’t matter.

For the invested kids who have sophisticated thinking skills but their brains aren’t ready to learn reading, consider how painful this practice must be. Maybe they suffer through the practice then spend time ruminating on how inadequate they are. Or they start finding reasons to opt out of any activity that involves reading so they don’t have to feel stupid. They start to hide emotionally to avoid feeling vulnerable to judgment. I’m sure you can already start to imagine dangerous outcomes to this path.

In all of these situations, the requisite reading practice reinforces emerging and damaging identities. What seems like a fairly benign practice that is intended to strengthen reading skills takes on an insidious undercurrent of psychological shaping. Rarely do the educational “experts” consider the delicate egos that are taking such blows when they recommend that parents force their kids to read for a certain amount of time each evening after school.

The one situation where assigned reading practice may not be harmful is those invested emerging readers whose time has come to learn to read. Yet, even still, boring decodables are not going to foster a love of reading. These children should be choosing materials that inspire them to persevere through challenging passages and reading at home for pleasure, not for the gold star or to check the box.  By offering recognition and rewards, we risk obliterating the child’s internal locus of control.  So I take it back, I don’t believe there is any assigned reading practice that is not potentially harmful to the child.

For those parents who came to me stressed about their child’s reading progress, I encouraged them NOT to force it. Your stress causes your child to stress and be fearful, and there’s no need. Your child will learn to read when his brain is ready for it. If you need some reassurance that it’s okay to relax and let reading happen when it’s meant to for your unique child, please read this article.

Forget about his test scores and the school’s rating. Forget about the teacher’s evaluation. Foster your child’s love of literature and your relationship with your child by reading TO him stories that he finds riveting. Stories that are rich in content that you can use to teach about life and how to be human in a way that fosters stewardship of his health, his relationships, his communities, etc., but mostly help him discover things that light him up and encourage him to engage in life—even if it means not reading. He can suffer reading instruction in the classroom; keep your home a judgment-free place where he can leave all that behind and just be himself.