Thoughts on responses
Oct. 13th, 2003 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseSince the comments on my last piece were so thought provoking, I'm responding to everyone at once with a new posting. I'd like to thank Tibicen for sitting down over good garlicy italian food on Saturday and helping me to refine and define.
First of all, I'd like to acknowledge that some teenagers are making these choices for reasons other than "they don't understand the consequences." Whether it's the girl who thinks a baby has to love her (or that her boyfriend will marry her) or someone who thinks death or jail is a better option than his current life and brings a gun to school, many of these actions that adults deem incomprehensible are fully thought out and embraced because the consequences are understood.
Secondly, especially in the neighborhood I'm working in, apathy is a huge issue. The idea that "there's a whole big world out there, but it's not for me" is one that I don't understand on a fundamental level. But these kids do. Long before I started formally tutoring people, I sat out on my front porch in my new neighborhood and talked to the kids. One of the housemates had started it, but as the day went on (I was out there for 8 hours) the housemates trickled in and out. We played Aggravation, and I introduced them to the herbs in the pots. When a snack was demanded I produced artichoke vinaigrette and watermelon. The kids enjoyed it.
Late in the afternoon one of the teenagers came and sat beside me. She asked if I'd been to college, and we talked about colleges and possibilities and how she could get out of here if she got the grades. Two days later she told me that she'd spoken to her parents who said that "College isn't for people like us." A week later she had a boyfriend. I see her next door looking after the neighbor's kids. She's a beautiful girl. She's now a smoker, a drinker, and has dropped out of school. She'll be 18 soon.
But I think the vast majority still fall into the "I'm a teenager and therefore immortal" group, and these are the ones that I think need to have consequences demonstrated. Having said that, Tibicen's point that gravity is all around us is true. However, I think that gravity is too big. It's easier to see things in small bits. Rainbows are beautiful, but show a kid a prism and she's more likely to grasp the spectrum.
Still, it's true that having an experiment on what happens to a ball bearing when you drop it in water is probably not the straight line "actions have consequences" solution to our moral issues that I may have implied. *g*
What these experiments need to show, and what needs to have more emphasis in schools, are odds and results distribution.
(Thank you, Tibicen both for the revelation and the example below.)
If it's known that a condom is 95% effective, then the assumption is that "I" won't be in the five percent. But if you turn it on its head so that the teenager sees that if she sleeps with her boyfriend one hundred times they were unprotected for five of them, it's a completely different picture.
As silly as it may sound, let's teach our kids poker, backgammon, and Aggravation. Let's design experiments that show cause and effect and then alter the controlled variables so that a distribution range is created. I think I'm on to something here.
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eanja and jerminating both mention that morality comes out of other sources. I agree. However, as more Catholics take their kids to Father Timothy's speed mass (30 minutes including communion to the whole congregation and homily) and fewer Protestants attend church (or Jews, synagogue) at all, I'm not certain that morality is being covered.
Please don't get me wrong; I don't think that anyone has to go somewhere special to learn about morals. But how many parents are home today? This isn't knocking the parents, we live in an economy where two incomes are expected in a two adult household. In a single parent household, it's all about getting by. These are good parents working hard for their families.
Schools aren't teaching morality. They can't. However (heaven knows there are far too many howevers in this essay), I find myself angry to know that the kids aren't getting Aesop's Fables or the Greek Myths -- indeed any myths. These are tremendous morality stories, and I remember being read Aesop in kindergarten and reading them on my own in first grade. The Greek Myths were taught several times in different ways. As we got older we heard more about the sex and the violence, but Hercules cleaning the Augean stables or fighting the hydra is something that any action-adventure nine year old can relate to.
This is one that makes me wonder if it's the books, or the left pushing for inclusion or the right pushing for biblical stories. Blandness has become the hallmark, and the blander the stories become the less obvious the morals of the stories are.
I think what I want is to run an old-fashioned Dame school. I pick the kids, the curriculum, and the books. For those of you who read Pratchett, I want to be Susan Death. I don't think I have her natural tendency towards schoolmarm, but I love her approach.
First of all, I'd like to acknowledge that some teenagers are making these choices for reasons other than "they don't understand the consequences." Whether it's the girl who thinks a baby has to love her (or that her boyfriend will marry her) or someone who thinks death or jail is a better option than his current life and brings a gun to school, many of these actions that adults deem incomprehensible are fully thought out and embraced because the consequences are understood.
Secondly, especially in the neighborhood I'm working in, apathy is a huge issue. The idea that "there's a whole big world out there, but it's not for me" is one that I don't understand on a fundamental level. But these kids do. Long before I started formally tutoring people, I sat out on my front porch in my new neighborhood and talked to the kids. One of the housemates had started it, but as the day went on (I was out there for 8 hours) the housemates trickled in and out. We played Aggravation, and I introduced them to the herbs in the pots. When a snack was demanded I produced artichoke vinaigrette and watermelon. The kids enjoyed it.
Late in the afternoon one of the teenagers came and sat beside me. She asked if I'd been to college, and we talked about colleges and possibilities and how she could get out of here if she got the grades. Two days later she told me that she'd spoken to her parents who said that "College isn't for people like us." A week later she had a boyfriend. I see her next door looking after the neighbor's kids. She's a beautiful girl. She's now a smoker, a drinker, and has dropped out of school. She'll be 18 soon.
But I think the vast majority still fall into the "I'm a teenager and therefore immortal" group, and these are the ones that I think need to have consequences demonstrated. Having said that, Tibicen's point that gravity is all around us is true. However, I think that gravity is too big. It's easier to see things in small bits. Rainbows are beautiful, but show a kid a prism and she's more likely to grasp the spectrum.
Still, it's true that having an experiment on what happens to a ball bearing when you drop it in water is probably not the straight line "actions have consequences" solution to our moral issues that I may have implied. *g*
What these experiments need to show, and what needs to have more emphasis in schools, are odds and results distribution.
(Thank you, Tibicen both for the revelation and the example below.)
If it's known that a condom is 95% effective, then the assumption is that "I" won't be in the five percent. But if you turn it on its head so that the teenager sees that if she sleeps with her boyfriend one hundred times they were unprotected for five of them, it's a completely different picture.
As silly as it may sound, let's teach our kids poker, backgammon, and Aggravation. Let's design experiments that show cause and effect and then alter the controlled variables so that a distribution range is created. I think I'm on to something here.
eanja and jerminating both mention that morality comes out of other sources. I agree. However, as more Catholics take their kids to Father Timothy's speed mass (30 minutes including communion to the whole congregation and homily) and fewer Protestants attend church (or Jews, synagogue) at all, I'm not certain that morality is being covered.Please don't get me wrong; I don't think that anyone has to go somewhere special to learn about morals. But how many parents are home today? This isn't knocking the parents, we live in an economy where two incomes are expected in a two adult household. In a single parent household, it's all about getting by. These are good parents working hard for their families.
Schools aren't teaching morality. They can't. However (heaven knows there are far too many howevers in this essay), I find myself angry to know that the kids aren't getting Aesop's Fables or the Greek Myths -- indeed any myths. These are tremendous morality stories, and I remember being read Aesop in kindergarten and reading them on my own in first grade. The Greek Myths were taught several times in different ways. As we got older we heard more about the sex and the violence, but Hercules cleaning the Augean stables or fighting the hydra is something that any action-adventure nine year old can relate to.
This is one that makes me wonder if it's the books, or the left pushing for inclusion or the right pushing for biblical stories. Blandness has become the hallmark, and the blander the stories become the less obvious the morals of the stories are.
I think what I want is to run an old-fashioned Dame school. I pick the kids, the curriculum, and the books. For those of you who read Pratchett, I want to be Susan Death. I don't think I have her natural tendency towards schoolmarm, but I love her approach.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 01:18 pm (UTC)I know that I'd want to keep it small, and that I wouldn't want it to be too age or grade segregated with lots of field trips, a friendly library, a games room, and chores.
Tempt me not so far, lass.*g*
no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 01:21 pm (UTC)Tibicen here, on quantifying this
Date: 2003-10-14 01:23 pm (UTC)That doesn't cover any of the expenses of actually running a school, the greatest of which is rent.
As it happens, I've looked into the numbers a bit, for the expenses of running a school; this comes up in the Holt, actually.
She would need an acceptible space in which to hold that school of ten students (and this is presuming that ten is a good number). That space, because it would be being used for a school would be held to higher inspection standards than most commercial use spaces are. [NOTE: in areas where private schools are considered a threat to public schools, inspection officials have used these inspections to keep private schools out of business. My stories are mostly from the 1970s or so, and one hopes that is no longer the case, but there you go. That's one of the things which got secular parents desperate enough to go into homeschooling back then -- the politics which shut them down when they tried to band together to make their own schools.] I invite you to price out spaces in Dorchester.
After the rent, heat and electricity (lights). Furnishings (chairs, desks) are mostly a one-time cost of setup, but the rest of this is on-going expenses, every month.
We haven't even gotten to actual educational materials, or costs. No books, no chalk, no art supplies, no field trips, no microscopes.
I think it is fair to say that if Fabrisse is willing to take starvation wages and no fewer than 10 students and got lucky on rent, she might possibly manage to break even at $4,000/student/year.
You know, the people who have $4,000/year to spend on their kids' educations... they already are.
Have I mentioned recently how strongly I support SCHOOL VOUCHERS? Fabrisse's problem is that the people she most want to help don't have $4,000/kid/year. But school vouchers would precisely solve this problem.
However, the way voucher programs have worked where they've been tried, as I understand it, they only can work with accredited institutions. Fabrisse would need all sorts of paperwork, and probably teacher credentials.
A few other things to think about when looking at these numbers: This budget is for Fabrisse as the sole laborer. It presumes she teaches, she does all administrative duties, she sweeps up, she does it all. Who covers for her when she's sick? Because not being open for the kids is not an option for working parents.
About 5 years ago, a bunch of companies thought that there was money to be made in running great schools, and started for-profit educational ventures. Apparently they were seriously wrong, and aren't managing to stay in the black. The margins are dreadful. Most parents simply don't have the money, and those that do are already well served with high-end private schools. Nobody has managed to get rich doing quality education.
An alternative to waiting around for school vouchers to become legal would be for Fabrisse to try to found a charter school. There are only a tiny number of slots, and a vast number of applicants, so the competition for that is steep. I'm not even sure it's still open. This would, I think, require some accreditation.
I don't mean to simply be discouraging. It might be possible to make work. But it is not trivial.
A read I highly recommend is: http://salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/13/bankrupt_parents/index.html
It documents something I've been saying for years: the US middle-class economic situation is much more desperate than anyone has been willing to believe, and the US middle-class basically can't afford their own children.
Re: Tibicen here, on quantifying this
Date: 2003-10-14 01:38 pm (UTC)but you are right, it is not an easy undertaking and it is not a thing to be taken lightly it is very hard, and a lot of work, and a lot of money to start up.
but i think there is a niche for it if doen right.
Re: Tibicen here, on quantifying this
Date: 2003-10-14 04:53 pm (UTC)As far as being qualified to teach your own kids, I think you sell yourself short. But quite aside from that, you might decide that rather than send your children to a school, you bring a tutor(s) in. While costly, I think you might find that has much to recommend it in some circumstances. If you're willing to pay the big bucks anyways, hiring in private instruction can be a way of guaranteeing your kids don't fall the the cracks of an institution -- something which can happen even in quality private schools, if your kid is in the least bit unusual. This is a route sometimes taken by the parents of child prodigies, where even private school isn't customized enough to keep up with the kid's aptitude, and they don't want to send a 12yo to college. This is also a form of homeschooling, but one not usually thought of when people use the term.
I'm a big fan of private instruction. Historically, it's how classical music is taught (I had it for most of my childhood) to very good effect. In addition to being more effective at reaching the student, it has a bunch of nice side effects, having to do with socializing with an adult who is not family.
The classroom model has all but colonized the modern consciousness; people forget there's alternatives.
Re: Tibicen here, on quantifying this
Date: 2003-10-14 06:53 pm (UTC)Thanks for the hard figures Tibicen. Once again, winning the lottery seems like the sensible solution.
bryt here
Date: 2003-11-26 08:05 am (UTC)