Rivka
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Posts posted by Rivka
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At my homeschool community center yesterday, well before the violence erupted, I heard one of the directors, a black woman my age, dressing down a black teenage boy. He was heading to Starbucks with some of his friends and made a stupid joke about robbing a store. There was PANIC in her voice. It was the voice you might use on a kid who ran blithely out in front of a semi truck.
It's a conversation I will never have to have with my middle-class white son.
Why is that?
Evidence tells us that my fair-skinned and standard-English-speaking son is unlikely to be perceived as a criminal and a threat just for existing in public spaces. He is vanishingly unlikely to be shot or beaten by the police when he is unarmed. I don't need to tell him how to act so that he won't get arrested or shot on a trip to Starbucks with his homeschooled friends. That's not a risk he faces. The burly black kid at my homeschool center? Nowhere near as safe. He has to be a lot more careful.
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At my homeschool community center yesterday, well before the violence erupted, I heard one of the directors, a black woman my age, dressing down a black teenage boy. He was heading to Starbucks with some of his friends and made a stupid joke about robbing a store. There was PANIC in her voice. It was the voice you might use on a kid who ran blithely out in front of a semi truck.
It's a conversation I will never have to have with my middle-class white son.
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I live in Baltimore.
There have been peaceful protests, larger and larger, every day since Freddie Gray was killed. Saturday night a small fraction of protestors became violent and damaged property. Yesterday afternoon, teens getting out of school arrived at a major bus transit junction to find hundreds of riot police and the buses shut down. There are no school buses in Baltimore, so kids take public transit to school - sometimes two or three buses, across the city. They were scared and mad about Freddie Gray, had no way to leave where they were, and were surrounded by threatening authorities. Not surprising to me that it spiraled out of control.
Last night's violence and property damage didn't come out of protests, though. The looters were opportunists responding to a perceived breakdown in social order. They're people who are disconnected from the society they live in and a total lack of expectation that they will ever "make it" through traditional/legal means.
For those who are baffled at why violence, why not work peacefully within the system, please read this Baltimore Sun report about police brutality: http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/
"Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.
Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.
And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims — if charges were filed at all."
Over the years there have been countless public meetings, peaceful demonstrations, political efforts, nonviolent protests, and court actions to stem police brutality in Baltimore. Nothing has worked. More than 100 people WON THEIR COURT CASES - how many more didn't even go to court? - and even with that acknowledgement by the legal system of the problems, nothing has changed. It's easy for you to say "they should be patient, they're only hurting themselves" when you're not the 87-year-old lady whose shoulder was broken because the cops handcuffed her so roughly.
Freddie Gray was healthy and completely subdued, in shackles, when he was placed in that police van. When the paramedics eventually got to him, his spine was almost severed. Imagine the brutality that must have taken.
No, I don't think that looting is okay. But if the only wrong thing that's happened in Baltimore lately that you feel the need to post about is broken windows at a CVS and people loading themselves up with stolen shoes, I think you have to ask yourself why.
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I let my 9yo (now 10) paint her nails, but no makeup. Nail painting seems more like an accessory, like barettes or temporary tattoos. It's done as decoration, not as allure.
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I take the same approach as Laura Corin - I expect my kids to put in an age-appropriate amount of time on schoolwork, regardless of how far above level they are. In my family, advanced math ability has not come with advanced patience, advanced frustration tolerance, or advanced ability to sit still.
In general, gifted kids need less review and less practice. If they can do 10 practice problems perfectly, I don't see an advantage to doing 30.
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Psychologist certainly may be extremely helpful but a psychologist and a neuropsychologist are not the same thing. A neuropsych can do a full battery of cognitive tests to determine any underlying learning challenges/disabilities. She really, really needs a full work up through a neuropsychologist.
Not necessarily true. I'm a psychologist, not a neuropsychologist, and I can do a full battery of cognitive tests to diagnose learning disabilities. Most of the people I know who do LD testing are psychologists. I would definitely want to see a neuropsychologist involved for a case in which there's a known insult to the brain, like a head injury or a brain tumor, but for most other purposes a clinical or educational psychologist who specializes in assessment is able to do all of the necessary testing.
I wonder what was involved in the school's decision that she didn't have an LD. Was there an assessment, or just a determination that no adequate education had been provided? If there wasn't a full and thorough assessment, I think finding a psychologist who can do that is a priority.
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Repelled.
...But totally fantasizing about a week's vacation by myself. That sounds like heaven.
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I am too old and too busy to do flamewars anymore. I am likely to unfriend or unfollow someone who posts really provocative stuff to stir up argument or who wants to get in big FB battles.
That said, I don't use FB just for trivial stuff, either. I have really good, really long conversations on my FB page, and I appreciate them.
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I thought this was a really good article about these issues of parenting surveillance and judgment:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-13/seven-reasons-we-hate-free-range-parenting
This part seems particularly apt:
When it comes to safety, overprotective parents are in effect taking out a sort of regret insurance. Every community has what you might call "generally accepted child-rearing practices," the parenting equivalent of "generally accepted accounting principles." These principles define what is good parenting and provide a sort of mental safe harbor in the event of an accident. If you do those things and your kid gets hurt -- well, you'll still wish that you'd asked them to stay home and help bake cookies, or lingered a little longer at the drugstore, or something so that they weren't around when the Bad Thing happened. But if you break them and your kid gets hurt, you -- and a lot of other people -- will feel that it happened because you were a bad parent. So you follow the GACP.
Over time, these rules get set by the most risk-averse parent in your social group, because if anything happens, you'll wish you had acted like them. This does not mean that the kids are actually safer: Parents in most places "shelter" their kids from risk by strapping them into cars and driving them to supervised activities, which is more dangerous than almost anything those kids could have gotten up to at home.
I live in a neighborhood where the GACP is that children play outside without a parent at young ages. I actually have no fear or guilt about deciding, this summer, that my six-year-old is old enough to ride his scooter around the block without his big sister or a parent, because I know it's a generally accepted practice. I know there will be other kids out and about. I know that it will raise zero eyebrows in the neighborhood and will absolutely not result in a CPS call. Colin knows - as all the neighborhood kids do - that he's not to go inside anyone's house or car without explicit parental permission. That's part of the GACP too.
I am well aware, though, that there are other neighborhoods in which a six-year-old riding his scooter alone would freak people out. I know there are people on this forum who would never let their six-year-old do what I let Colin do, and who are thinking right now about all the terrible things that could happen to him and how guilty I would feel if one of them occurred. Are those neighborhoods actually more dangerous? Or is it just a difference in neighborhood culture?
I can see this from the other side, too. There are apparently a lot of cultures and communities in America in which, when a kid gets hold of a parent's gun and shoots himself or someone else, it's considered a tragic accident that's nobody's fault. No one is charged with a crime or with child neglect. It's something awful that just happens, like a car accident. In those communities, having guns accessible to little kids is part of GACP. To me, that's insane. In those communities, it isn't.
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I'll be there exhibiting for my practice. Look for me in Building 13 near Rainbow Resources!
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I do think that for anyone doing this period with fourth or fifth graders, that the best thing might be to let historical fiction be the entry point and focus over a text. Historical fiction gets sort of a bum rap on this board occasionally, but I have found it worthwhile for this first pass of history - it's not like we're reading many primary source documents anyway. There's plenty of more gentle books for WWII like The Winged Watchman. And tons of great stuff for the 60's like The Watsons Go to Birmingham. Of course, there are still meaty issues in there and some kids don't feel ready for meaty issues that were in living memory or just outside it.
She read Watsons Go To Birmingham this year and really enjoyed it. Funnily enough, she also completely devoured Number the Stars. My mistake was giving her The Upstairs Room when she finished that one. There's a brief couple of lines in that one about gas chambers and ovens, and she was completely devastated.
Winged Watchman looks really good, maybe as a family read-aloud. I am also thinking of assigning Ellen Klages' Green Glass Sea, which is about the Manhattan Project.
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We just gave up and admitted all around that no one is enjoying SOTW4. It seems dry and disjointed, and it's just one war and political takeover after another. Plus, Alex is nervous about World War II coming up. In a novel, she hit a brief description of the Holocaust that was more than she was ready to know about. She's an extremely sensitive kid.
I was looking forward to doing the Progressive Era, the Dust Bowl/Great Depression, and the Civil Rights movement, and DH was very excited about studying WWII, but I'm also feeling like if we were going to cover those things the way we'd like to see them covered we would need to put the resources together ourselves... and I just don't have the time. Plus, if the kid tells us she's not ready for Hitler, she's not ready for Hitler... or Stalin, or trench warfare in WWI, and on and on.
Is anyone going to come around and take our homeschooling license away if we stop now and go back to Ancients? Everyone is excited about that idea. Colin will start SOTW 1 using Build Your Library and Alex will do a combination of K12 Human Odyssey and Story of Science.
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A psychiatrist can and should order blood work to check potential medical contributors to anxiety. Mine checked my thyroid, vitamin D, etc. at my first visit. No need to wait for two completely separate doctors.
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What are the signs we should look for that tell us testing would be recommended? What age range should we really start to worry? What difference, if any, should be considered between boys and girls? What I was trying to say in my earlier post is where is the line drawn between giving them time to develop and testing?
Many of us just want to be supportive of each other. I read The Truth About Being A Mom With A Speech Delayed Child last night and it just made me so sad. I'm sure many don't mean to be hurtful and have no idea what someone else is going through. When you are already sensitive to the issue, any comment can be taken badly no matter how constructive or benign it is intended to be.
I think that what you said in your previous post, "Sometimes you just don't know until you've given them some time and tried different things," is very reasonable.
Honestly, a lot of the answers for homeschoolers turn out to be "it depends." For example, an unschooled 8-year-old who can't read is a different story from a public school student of the same age who hasn't responded to 3 1/2 years of reading instruction. As I said earlier, a kid who can't read but has rock-solid phonological skills worries me less than a kid who can't read OR rhyme.
I don't think we all need to become LD experts and know what to look for in other people's kids or when another mom should seek professional advice. All I really ask is that people keep the existence of LDs in mind before telling a worried mom not to worry because "they all get it eventually."
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It's time to get help. Anxiety is debilitating, but very treatable.
Usually the best medications to try first are antidepressants, most of which also have an anti-anxiety effect without being "tranquilizers" or sedating you. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor.) Cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety is about as effective as medications for most people. Are you in Maryland? Feel free to PM me. I'm a psychologist in the Baltimore suburbs.
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Firstly, do you actually talk to 6 different people about a child's important issue? Seems to be bordering on gossip at this point, and certainly not respecting the privacy of your child.
Secondly, look at the source and circumstances of the "advice." How well informed are they about the topic? Are they a professionally trained expert on this issue? If you are just discussing an issue to see if it's something common in other children, then fine. For areas of major concern, seek advice of a trained expert.
I would be quite distressed to hear that a random comment I may have made in passing about reading to a fellow homeschool mom became the source of her blaming me for not seeking professional advice. A casual chat (in person or on-line) is NOT a professional consultation.
I'm very sorry about the stress that this issue has been for you and your famiily, but it's not anyone else's responsibility to seek professional advice for your child.
I think you must have misunderstood my original post.
I was describing a common pattern I have seen across multiple homeschooling discussion groups, email lists, facebook groups, forums (although not this one), etc. I wasn't speaking about my own children or a specific encounter I personally had. That's why the post is titled "Things homeschoolers say that drive me crazy," rather than "My fellow homeschoolers are not solving my children's problems for me." So while I'm sure your chiding was well-meant, it was also off the mark.
I do think it's unfair to characterize parents who are seeking advice on a learning issue as "gossiping." Homeschooling has been a peer-supported enterprise from its earliest days. I think it's entirely natural to make other parents your first stop for advice when you're facing a nonemergency problem with learning, behavior, or health.
Of course it is also the case, as you say, that a casual chat is not a professional consultation. My concern is that too many homeschoolers hurry to reassure each other that professional consultation is never needed, because children will figure out everything on their own. That drives me crazy.
...Although I acknowledge that it may sound self-serving of me to say so, given that I'm a licensed psychologist who specializes in children with learning issues.
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I have certainly seen kids who were young enough that I thought it was too early to tell whether they were just a little slower to mature, cognitively, or whether there was likely to be a persistent reading problem. I often recommend that parents put the reading curriculum aside for six months or so and focus on phonological awareness games, working on identifying and manipulating sounds in different ways.
If the games are easy and the kid has solid phonological skills, then yeah, keep reading aloud a lot, build pre-reading skills, wait for a little more developmental maturation to happen, and don't worry too much. If the kid doesn't have good phonological skills, you don't need to wait until they're old enough for a diagnosis of dyslexia to start working on those things. And if there are warning signs, even if you aren't sure, I think it makes a lot of sense to proceed with a good Orton-Gillingham curriculum without waiting to be positive that your kid "needs" it.
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OneStepAtATime, which program did you wind up using? I am always looking for recommendations, especially for programs that won't seem babyish to preteens/teens.
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Person 1: "My child is really resisting learning to read, and we have dyslexia on both sides of our family, so I'm worried."
Person 2: "You just need to stop pushing him."
Person 3: "Reading is like a light coming on, they seem to struggle and then one day they can just do it! Don't worry!"
Person 4: "He will want to learn how himself when he's ready."
Person 5: "When he's motivated to do it for himself, it will click."
Person 6: "It's not developmentally appropriate for children to read before eight."
Person 7: "One day it will just happen. Don't worry about it."
Yes, obviously there is a wide age range for developmental readiness to read. Yes, there are parents who are pushing too hard and worrying too much about a very young child who is not reading. Yes, there are kids who seem to learn to read overnight. On the other hand, there are kids who won't learn to read fluently without a great deal of step-by-step instruction and remediation. There are teens and adults who can't read. The light doesn't always come on by itself, and it seems to me that it takes willful ignorance to deny that.
"We have dyslexia on both sides of our family" is a warning sign. It's not evidence of anything, but it's a reason to monitor reading progress and be ready to have a proactive response. We don't serve our fellow homeschoolers well by trotting out "relax, don't worry" in every situation.
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I put my nine-year-old into Jousting Armadillos pre-algebra, and it was wonderful. It's written to the student and it's full of the kind of whimsy that she still needs. It's definitely not a full year of pre-algebra, although I agree with Gil that a gifted math learner probably doesn't need a year of pre-algebra. We skipped the negative numbers chapter entirely because we did MEP, which is very strong in negative numbers.
Now we are in the first algebra book in that series, Crocodiles and Coconuts. I continue to be very impressed. The introduction to the coordinate plane is outstanding in the way that it builds a very deep understanding of how data tables, equations, and graphs relate. I'm planning to finish C&C, do the third book in the series (The Life and Times of Chuckles the Rocket Dog), and then switch to AoPS Introduction to Algebra. My understanding is that AoPS is deep and broad enough that it will work well as a second pass through algebra.
We are also supplementing with Creative Problem Solving in School Mathematics and with math contest problems.
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My daughter enjoyed D&P for the story, but I found that she wasn't retaining very much.
Then I came across a problem that went, "Darlene decided to lose weight so she would look nice for Joe. She started out at 118 pounds and lost 10% of her body weight. How much did she weigh afterward?"
Uh, NO. I wrote to the author expressing my belief that it's hard enough to raise a daughter with a healthy body image without getting negative messages from MATH BOOKS. He wrote back explaining that Darlene is not someone that children are supposed to approve of, so there's no negative message in the problem. That didn't satisfy me.
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Alright Rivka, you have shamed me into it. I'm doing the dang math test right now while I cook dinner.
Hmph.
Look at the ages of my kids... I only had to do grades 1&2 and 3&4. So, you know. Easy for me to say.
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It might take a while for scores to be "officially" available, but since the kids are allowed to bring home their test booklets, can't you figure out the scores yourself? We knew how our kids did the same day. :tongue_smilie: Of course, I suppose that depends on your kids marking their answers in the booklet as well as on the scantron form.
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I can't say enough good things about Creative Problem Solving in School Mathematics. I LOVE that book.
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/item/moems-problemsolving
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The riots - I just don't understand
in The Chat Board
Posted
Okay, I realize that I had better bow out of this conversation. This is my home, not an abstraction. I can't do this right now.
Not trying to flounce, just clarifying that I will no longer be engaging or (if I can prevent myself) reading.