There’s a whole subgenre in the Education section of behind-the-scenes-of-an-American-high-school books. These books have probably always been there, but three current examples are:
Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students by Denise Clark Pope (which is about “Faircrest High,” which this Palo Alto Weekly article intimates is a Palo Alto high school; Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School: A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation by Meredith Maran, a look at a year at Berkeley High (which contains the priceless suggestion, among others, that all of America’s private schools should be abolished in order to promote diversity); and the one I currently am reading, School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School by Edward Humes.
School of Dreams is the story of kids at Whitney High School in Cerritos, California (a suburb near Los Angeles) and their struggles to not only be high achievers but ridiculously high over-achievers so that they can get into the “right” college (Harvard, Stanford, Princeton) and then get the “right” job, et cetera. I’m only one chapter in and already I’m depressed out of my mind: is this what my kids have to look forward to? The title of Part I says it all: “Four is the Magic Number: Four Hours Sleep, Four Caffè Lattes, 4.0.”
Before you say, Well, it’s always been like this… permit me to cut you off with No it hasn’t. Thanks. I went to a top prep school in San Francisco, where I was ranked #1 in the class (though I wasn’t valedictorian for some reason I can’t figure out), took four or five AP tests and got 5 on all of them, and attended Stanford University. I know about being a high-achieving student. And there was no question of my sleeping only four hours a night.
I think about education and school a lot these days. It’s a huge part of my children’s future: how could I not?
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I was discussing preschools with another woman who has kids a little older than mine. She said, “There are two kinds of preschools: the academic ones, and the ones that are just babysitting.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard such a sentiment. Back in Los Angeles I was discussing preschools with the mother of one of Sophia’s buds and I mentioned how I was a big proponent of Sophia’s preschool’s developmental philosophy: learn by doing, no academics.
And she said that her daughter had spent time with a babysitter who had chickens in her yard, she was done with her daughter playing with chickens, it was time for a little structure.
Would it have been worth it for me in either case to attempt to explain that “developmental” does not mean “babysitting” or “playing with chickens”? That academics for the very young is not only mostly a waste of time, it may be counterproductive and turn the kids off of academic learning when it actually comes time for them to handle it?
In neither case did I say, “Your opinions on this matter are completely full of crap,” though I wanted to.
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I invited Kate and her family over for a Labor Day Monday grilling party Darin and I were having. More specifically, I left the invitation on her voicemail Saturday night. Darin and I have a tendency to leave things until the last minute: we didn’t even buy the grill (or the patio furniture) until Sunday.
Anyhow, Kate couldn’t attend (because she’d made “plans” or something ahead of time) and I asked if she wanted to get together for a playdate with our daughters. She had to pass for right now. Her daughter Becky is a little older than Sophia—five, in fact, and I’d forgotten that five-year-olds have this tendency to enter kindergarten in the fall.
Kate lives in Palo Alto, and when you think of great public schools what you are thinking of is Palo Alto. When Darin and I were first thinking about moving back to the Bay Area, Sophia was a few months old. I wanted to move to Palo Alto…and I abandoned that idea pretty quickly. The median price for a home in Palo Alto is $1.1m. (this might be hearsay, but given the prices I read in the real estate sections, I don’t think so) for two main reasons: Palo Alto is right in the heart of the Peninsula, so it’s easy to get to anywhere from San Francisco to San Jose, and the schools are among the top-rated in the state. Yes, that still means something, even in California. (Cupertino’s housing prices are outrageously high for the same reason.) Palo Alto is home of the high-achieving. I didn’t quite realize how much so until I got Kate’s response:
That sounds like a good plan, but we’ll need to pass in the short-term because Becky’s still adjusting to a new schedule.
School, tap/ballet classes, and regular playdates each week are keeping her busy. Plus, I’m finding some new variables tricky to gauge. The first month, school lets out at noon, in a few weeks she’ll be out at 1:15 on Wednesdays, and then a few weeks after that she’ll be getting out at 1:45 two other days a week. She’s already tired now; they only allow one 20 minute snack/recess break per day. You went to Palo Alto schools, right? [I didn’t, actually, unless you count “Stanford” as a Palo Alto school. But I know all about the schools’ reputation. — Diane] So you know how serious they are. They’ve already started handing out homework; this week it’s correctly written upper and lower case alphabet & proper sentence structure (correct use of case, spacing, periods, etc.). Getting up at 7am every day is making all of us tired (we used to get up at 9)!
My exact reply to her was: This is NUTS. A school day from 9:00 to 1:45 with one 20 minute break? For a five year old? Homework? Is this typical? If a five year old needs to bring work home, what are they covering in class?
(I happen to be against homework for the most part—I certainly remember most of it before high school as being little more than busy work, and quite a bit of the high school homework was busy work too. And if you want to read more on this topic, check out The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Etta Kralovec and John Buell.
(Not to mention that if Sophia ever starts sleeping until 9, I am going to let sleeping babies lie. I think Darin and I would pay money to have her sleep until 7. Or at least Darin would: he gets up with the kids at 6 while I stay in bed for another hour.)
Does this really sound nuts? Perhaps my poorly written description was confusing? To be clear, they do not expect the students to be ‘correct’ by the end of the week, the assignment is to practice writing the letters correctly (they have a numbered ‘formula’ for forming the letters and they specify a proper pencil grip). And, proper sentence structure is understanding that you start with a capital letter, have a space between words, and (can) end with a period.
Okay, admittedly I don’t know what Becky’s homework is like. And evidently beginning to write is not that unusual: apparently at Sophia’s preschool they start next year, in pre-K.
But I assume the kids are practicing writing at school…and then going home to practice it more… They’re on the go all day long (with one break???). Where does it stop?
And is studying proper sentence structure that normal for kindergarten? Maybe it is and I can’t get away from imagining three-year-old Sophia trying to do that sort of thing. Maybe five is the proper time for that.
The idea of homework for kindergarten affected me extremely strongly. Much more so than I would have predicted, actually. I told Kate that one of the reasons I reacted so strongly to what she’d said was that Becky’s kindergarten sounded like the “‘must push them so they can be ahead of everyone else’ mentality that is so widespread.”
She replied:
Despite a parent’s best intentions, I can see how ‘the push’ happens. How can you not encourage your child to complete their homework when everyone else in the class is? And you know next week’s assignment will build on the last.
It will be an interesting challenge for us to find the right balance for Becky. For now, as soon as Becky looks a little tired when doing the homework, we stop.
I understand the Push Mentality. Believe me, I understand it.
Okay, how demented am I about achievement?
- Both Darin and I could read before we were three, and for a long time—right up until her third birthday, probably—I wondered why Sophia wasn’t reading yet. Is there something wrong with her? I thought. Am I not reading to her enough?
- Whenever baby Sophia picked up a book, she invariably picked it up right-side-up. Whenever Simon picks up a book, he invariably picks it up upside-down. Am I not reading to him enough? What’s wrong with his visual system? Should I start practicing the alphabet with him so he knows which way the letters go? (In case you’re wondering, I don’t.)
- I wonder, sometimes, if we should be donating a whole bunch more money to Stanford every year, so they will look upon my children’s applications (should the kids decide to apply there) with more favor.
- For the longest time I told Darin that we could not let the kids know he dropped out of college, or if we did, we had to add, “And if you’re a genius like Daddy, you can drop out too.” I’ve since softened my stand on that a little. But only a little. Besides which, I’m hardly the model for what having a Stanford degree gets you.
Oh yeah. I’m hardcore.
So much so that I work extra hard at separating me and my history from who the kids are right now.
With all the reading about education I’ve been doing, I find myself getting more and more worked up about what the kids are going to do. Do I send them to school? True, I have another two years before it’s time to decide about Sophia, but still. What’s my ultimate objective for them? What will be their ultimate objectives for themselves? Do I want them to pursue their own interests? Do I want them to get on the high-pressure high-achieving train early, thereby ensuring their “success”? (Our school district, while not rated as amazingly over-the-top wonderful as Palo Alto’s or Cupertino’s, is still way up there, which is partially why the house cost so damn much.)
I’ve investigated lots of educational methodologies, and I waver between unschooling—let them be free to pursue their interests!—and the rigid classical program of The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer—crush the other kids with the depth and breadth of your knowledge! (Lisa Russell, homeschooling mom, appears to believe you can do both unschooling and classical, which sounds…tricky.)
Or maybe I should let ease up a bit and take advantage of the elementary, middle, and high schools that are less than a mile from our house.
It’s a wonder I can see the computer screen with all this smoke pouring out of my ears.
Not that sending the kids to school appears to be the “easy” way out. I told Kate that I was adjusting to life in Northern California much better than I was when she last saw me (which was right after we moved up and I was on the verge of hysteria having both kids with me all day long, no breaks).
I’m glad to hear you’re adjusting to your new life up here. You made some major changes! I’m always in awe of full-time mothers with multiple children. I’m barely able to keep up with one. I’ve got PTA meetings, volunteer training (so that I can help out in Becky’s classroom), I also help drive for field trips, and there are always activities to help with (back-to-school night, new families get-togethers, ice skating parties, etc.) fund raising, silent auction, etc.—-on top of all the regular stuff…..preparing lunches, baths, getting her outfits ready every day, helping her with homework, driving her everywhere, etc.
When I read this I thought, I am so homeschooling the kids. I mean, if I’m going to be that involved in my kids’ education, I might as well do it myself. (Imagine what handling all of those activities must be like for all the mothers who work full-time!) But I know how I am when I get tired or stressed—I can’t imagine the kids would enjoy that very much. And I worry about pushing them, trying to accelerate them, making sure that they’re accomplishing much more than anyone else.
I guess this isn’t an easy decision for anyone. Otherwise, why would there be endless debate about the schools? But there are just a few questions in my mind about what to do. I keep hoping that I’ll know what to do when the time comes. After all, it’s pretty much worked out that way so far.