moominmolly | (no subject)

Entry tags:

language,
natalie

(no subject)

A neat article on parents who encourage their kids to learn lots, early. Let's hear it for just hanging the fuck out.

Yesterday, she helped me pick out birthday cards for her cousin Christopher, who's almost a month older than she is. But then she suggested a better way to wish him a happy birthday: "Send a email Kissafer? Send Kissafer birthday a email Kissafer?" Dude, I know she likes typing on the computer, but I didn't know she knew what email did.

Also, when I asked her in the parking lot of the store what she wanted to do when she get home, she told me "Natalie read in couch? Natalie read and snuggle in Mommy and Natalie's couch?" READ AND SNUGGLE. Yes, little girl, we can go home and read and snuggle in our couch.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

My friend Lisa calls it "flashcard abuse". I'm with you - I vote for more read and snuggle and run around the house and hanging the fuck out.

Apparently when I was a wee starkeymonster, I demanded flash cards. My brother had them for learning something in school, and I said I wanted them. Also, they had to be "mouse cards". My mom made some kind of age appropriate mouse cards for me.

Mouse cards! That's cute!

I should give context to the phrase actually. Her three year old son is weirdly precocious at mathematical and physical things, from doing puzzles that should be far beyond his abilities to an interest and understanding of basic math concepts. All of it is self-directed, but she said to me that when he is idly doing multiplication out loud she wonders if some of her friends think she's guilty of flashcard abuse.

He idly does multiplication out loud? Adorable. And I can see what you mean about looking like flash card abuse even when to the kidlet it is probably super fun.

I had a problem with math in school which was that I woudl get irritated when the teacher asked me questions because the teacher already knew the answer. I would also get annoyed at what was, to me, stupid nitpicking. I figured if 2x2=4, then 3 is close enough. This led to me briefly being considered slow when it came to math. I'm not sure how my parents convinced me that I should answer the questions even if the teacher knew the answer. I should ask.

I would love to hear their answer. Yikes and I were discussing the 5 year old equivalent last night. She was doing her homework and it was typically unchallenging for her (draw 4 things that start with A and write their names under the picture) so she wanted to do something more interesting to her on the worksheet. I hated insisting that she do the homework correctly before doing something more interesting on her own, especially since I think the homework is total BS. But I do want her to figure out when it makes sense to buck the bs and when it makes sense to play along even though it's bs.

Can you still estimate to a reasonably correct answer, or did school beat that out of you?

when it makes sense to play along even though it's bs.

I never really got that one.

Neither did Spike, and it caused him a lot of mental anguish and struggle that really, in my opinion, had nothing but really bad long term consequences for him. If I can help Yikes avoid that experience without insisting she turn off her mind while in school I'd like to.

Oh, trust me, I'm not bragging. :)

The answer I went with was "play along with the BS insofar as it supports future goals I care about." So I tended to do my work because I wanted to go to a top college and I knew I'd need fairly excellent grades for that. On the other hand, my work was almost uniformly non-time-consuming; I'm not sure how the calculus would have changed if it had been hard. (Well, er, *calculus* technically was time-consuming, but also worth doing. Uh. You know what I mean. ;)

Your case sounds like talk to the teacher time. As a teacher I can tell you that it's really hard and time-consuming to differentiate assignments for a wide variety of students, and also that there are a lot of irritating parents who think their kid is a genius in the absence of real evidence and want their kid to be in honors everything for status reasons, so you want to be sensitive to the first and avoid coming off as the second. But also presumably you and the teacher have the same goals -- kid should learn, kid should like learning -- and you can go from there. I certainly had teachers who were willing to let me basically ignore the work in favor of more challenging and/or self-chosen activities if they were confident I was keeping up. (For instance, I had a Spanish class where I didn't have to do any of the homework as long as I kept acing the tests, freeing me to study ahead and cover two years to the class's one. No extra work for the teacher (less, actually), everybody wins.)

I hated insisting that she do the homework correctly before doing something more interesting on her own, especially since I think the homework is total BS. But I do want her to figure out when it makes sense to buck the bs and when it makes sense to play along even though it's bs.

When Morgan was in, I think, second grade, and having a terrible time getting through his homework, I remember very clearly one frustrating evening when he demanded to know why the teachers even made them DO homework, anyway.

I had a very hard time coming up with an answer that I could stomach, but said something along the lines of "I think the teachers want you to do homework because they want to be sure that you're learning the stuff they teach you in class."

To this, he gave me such a withering look of scorn mixed with sad pity that I remember it to this day. I would not have believed that any seven-year-old would be capable of such a look (but it figures that it would be a child of mine). His attitude so closely matched my own opinion of homework that it very neatly shut me up for good on the subject.

To this, he gave me such a withering look of scorn mixed with sad pity that I remember it to this day.

Good for Morgan. If he's anything like me (and your stories about him frequently remind me of me), don't expect him to grasp that adults might be sincere on this subject until around age 12. And I'm not saying that to this day, when it comes to elementary school, I am admitting that any of them actually are. I'm just saying I can grasp the concept that sincerity could, in theory, be consistent with my experiences.

I think my parents gave me some line about learning techniques to help me learn hard things later. Even though it was TRUE, I still didn't believe them.

I called my parents to ask about this. My dad laughed because he vividly remembers this. My brother was a good kid who answered the questions and 2x2 was totally 4. I actually said to the teachers 3 was "close enough" and scowled when I was corrected.

What they did was explain to me that yes the teacher did know the answer, but they wanted to find out if I knew the answer. And that I needed to humor them when they didn't understand that 3 was close enough to 4.

I suspect they also explained that I needed to tell the teachers the correct answers to do things like stay in my advanced reading group and stuff.

I also found out about the mouse cards. My brother got fish shaped cards at school to help him learn non regular words. I could read many of them, and demanded mouse cards. My mom did simple words, and then realized I could already read somewhat (I was 3). I read a book out loud to my grandmother when I was almost 4 (Come out and play little mouse).

This is why I ask parents for help picking age appropriate books. I have no clue what the normal reading level is for any age.

!
!!
I have juniors in college who are like that.

When I was young my hobby was winning math competitions because, uh, nothing else to do, I guess. Apparently -- I didn't know this for years -- parents of one of the kids I kept beating approached my parents afterward and asked, "So, who's her tutor?" "Uh?" said my parents. These other parents insisted I had to have a tutor (whom of course they needed to hire for their kid) -- there was no way I could possibly be kicking ass at math just because it seemed like fun at the time.

Different worlds. (Mine's better.)

I've spent a huge chunk of my life (let's see -- '82-'87, '89-'99, then 2003-2006) working professionally with young children, almost entirely in schools where we had to learn to explain to parents who wanted their children to learn something how playing with blocks and sand is pre-math, how playing in the housekeeping area is pre-reading, and why learning to get angry without having to bite someone or kick their block tower over is necessary before one spends time on flash cards and learning to write lower-case "a" with the tail on the right, rather than the left.

But even within that, I've seen kids who are suddenly reading silently at 4, who totally get counting by 2s or 5s at 4, who sing harmony beautifully at 4, all without being taught. But they don't all. The ones who are pushed sometimes get it, but at a cost, the ones who are interested in being "taught" often get it, if it's not pushed, but they don't all want the same thing at the same time. It's like not all areas are ripe at the same time. I taught one kid whose grandmother requested that he not go to preschool because she was dying of cancer, and knew she only had a few months, and wanted to spend it around him, so the family agreed, and the grandma stayed home and took care of the kid. She spent a fair bit of time in bed, and they'd watch educational videos. The kid fell in love with his phonics video, and he and his grandma, over her few remaining months, totally taught him to read. He came back "a reader," and he was delighted with it. That was his way, and now his grandmother is dead and he remembers her with deep love. Other kids have different ways.

(I get so cranky about the use of young children's time.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only