Yet another Reason I choose to Homeschool.......WOW-This guy gets it-and hes a TEACHER in the Public Schools...Hmmmm....some points are RIGHT ON.....
Interesting web site from a long time educator.
http://teachers.net/gazette/JUN09/page/
The author's vitae has an interesting thought at the end.
Bill Page, a farm boy, graduated from a one-room school. He forged a career in the classroom teaching middle school “troublemakers.” For the past 26 years, in addition to his classroom duties, he has taught teachers across the nation to teach the lowest achieving students successfully with his proven premise,
“Failure is the choice and fault of schools, not the students.”
Parents Are Recruits, Teachers Are Responsible, Kids Are Victims, and Schools Are Culpable For At-Risk Problems
Troubled students cause troubled parents and vice-versa. If kids have a bad year, parents have a bad year. If parents contributed to the problem, they are not likely to resolve it. Teachers deal with at-risk kids’ problems daily. Teachers hope for help from parents but can’t expect it. The problems are theirs.
by Bill Page
www.teacherteacher.com
Visit: www.At-RiskStudents.com for Bill’s free monthly newsletter
Regular contributor to the Gazette
June 1, 2009
Bill Page, author of “At-Risk Students: Feeling Their Pain” www.At-RiskStudents.com has just published a newly revised second edition, 2009. This article written for The Gazette, is excerpted and adapted from the newly added chapter for “at-risk parents.”
My many decades of teaching “the kids who have trouble in school” (I never labeled them, I just taught them) have convinced me of four important facts that should help parents and empathetic educators as they suffer the collateral effects from children at risk of failing.
Failure insures students being embarrassed, demoralized, and stigmatized. Unfortunately, failure also insures strained relations, bad attitudes, defeatism, and enough blame and finger-pointing to go around-and-around.
Misunderstanding of the unique roles of students, parents, teachers, and schools in the educative process is natural and predictable in the frustration and dissatisfaction wrought by bad grades and bad behavior. I received so many letters from parents of kids at-risk complaining about teachers, I added an entire chapter titled Insights, Strategies, and Rules for Parents of At-Risk Kids to remind readers of the separate roles. Following are some excerpts and explanations of some of the material in the new chapter of my newly revised, 2009 second edition book, At-Risk Students.
Some Beliefs and Thoughts I Want to Share with Parents
First, I have never seen a kid who wanted to fail. No kid, given a legitimate choice, would choose to fail. Failure hurts all over and keeps on hurting. If students actually make such a choice, it means that the alternatives to failure are far worse. People who say of failing kids, “They could do it if they tried,” “He just doesn’t care,” or “She won’t pay attention” could not possibly understand the anguish of failure and students’ loss of motivation, morale, dignity, and self-respect.
Consider adults afraid to speak in front of a group or to sing or dance in public because someone might disapprove, ridicule, or reject them. For many people, performing in front of a group has been considered “a fate worse than death.” Is it any wonder that kids who feel inadequate, insecure, or incompetent would fear performing in a classroom of successful peers where they are judged, graded, and compared continuously day-after-day? Each classroom is a society, where kids judge one another. Success, failure, and weakness in every daily activity from manners, skills, and abilities to following directions, behaving, and understanding becomes a matter of common knowledge and interest. Failure might be the lesser of two evils or maybe the better of two choices for kids already at-risk of failure.
Second, failure is school’s ultimate rejection. Suspension, expulsion, truancy, and dropping out attest to kids’ failure but kids would never admit to failing, if they could avoid it. When failure becomes unavoidable or undeniable, kids go to extremes far beyond what any adult or successful student might understand or see as reasonable to cope with the pain, embarrassment, and stigma. School and peer rejection can lead to psychosis and neurosis to suicide and even homicide, but it usually doesn’t. Rejection leads mostly to compensation tactics, withdrawal, and defensive ploys and mechanisms.
Failing kids may develop bravado, a swagger, an attitude, or a failure identity. There are three predictable choices of compensation familiar to educators: deceit, defense, or defiance. Deceit involves cheating, lying, and manipulating. If you can’t make the grade, baffle them with boloney. It means conning, sucking-up, using flattery, phony friendship and attitudes to get acceptable passing grades. Defense involves being lazy, apathetic, or having an “I couldn’t care less” attitude. If you don’t play the game, you can’t lose. Defiance shows hostility, resentment, and disrespect. Kids skip class, sass the teachers, and refuse administrators’ demands. They get kicked out of school--all to show the world, “I could do the work if I tried, but you can’t make me try.”
Third, kids are human and they act like humans. Being human is a fact parents and educators often misunderstand or ignore about kids. What do failing students or those at risk of failing need? They need precisely what every human being needs—love, acceptance, respect, friends, belonging, appreciation, satisfaction, competence, enjoyment, and fun. When their needs go unmet, kids resort to aberrant behavior, however incomprehensible, illogical, and self-deprecating.
Kids rejected by the school need even more acceptance at home. Such students most often deal with outright rejection in ways that are counterproductive, that invite further rejection, isolation, marginalization, and respond with even more unlovable and undesirable traits and behavior. Positive feelings about school, teachers, learning, and other kids are learned from positive experiences—not threats, negative feedback, and failure. Feelings of belonging, competence, and security are an integral part of school for successful kids, but not for those who fail; they rarely “have a good day.”
Fourth, kids cannot change their lives. With help they might begin to make some choices that can redirect their behavior. But by the time kids are labeled at-risk, they are frequently far too engaged in a defensive mode to consider alternative behavior. Changes must begin with acceptance of the at-risk students’ survival behavior. Intervention requires acknowledging student defenses while offering safe alternatives by someone who cares and who earns their respect. Kids are living the only life they have in the only way they know. Unable to find success by way of belonging and self-concept, they will seek it by delinquent or defiant behavior. A failure or troublemaker identity is better than no identity.
Parents must use their own skills and resources to compensate for the school’s miseducation by making sure the home becomes a safe haven. Because children are mistreated by failure at school, they must not receive punitive treatment at home. Parents can help salvage the imperiled, beleaguered lives of failing kids, if schools will refrain from encouraging parents to intimidate kids as an extension of school threats and intimidation.
Rather than add to the school’s condemnation, parents can use positive comments and encouragement rather than increasing pressure as a way of relating to kids failure:
* “I trust you to make some choices that will make school better for you.”
* “I am confident that you can do better. I know you can learn the work.”
* “I hope you will ask for my help. I want you to succeed.”
* “Together we will work on this situation.”
* “I’ll call or go talk to your teacher with you to see how I can help.”
Selected Insights, Strategies and Rules to Ponder
The entire educational institution I refer to as “school” is obsessed with control. School rules, policies, and procedures are primarily for the school, not for the good of students. Some of what is good for schools is also good for kids, but that is coincidental. Having a strict dress code is a control measure; it does not “teach” kids appropriate dress. Marching classes to lunch, seating them in the auditorium, not letting them in the building before a pre-set time, and monitoring the halls and bathrooms are all used for the purpose of control. The “sameness” in classrooms—same textbooks, class rules, assignments, schedules, time limits, testing, grading, even movement—is because it is easer to control the kids, not the best way to teach or learn.
School is a narrow structure into which all children are expected to fit. That restrictive structure is an attempt to eradicate individual differences for the convenience of teaching. Kids who do not fit the structure are forced to fit by carrot-and-stick tactics—Ritalin, group socialization, humiliation, denied privileges, and an ordinate-subordinate relationship. School then creates “special structures” for those who don’t fit the basic structure. Fortunately, in spite of school’s efforts, kids come out with their differences intact.
An Insight from the Six Offered in the Chapter
Insight 1: If your child is struggling in school, s/he cannot be learning. The brain cannot learn or retain nonsense, information that is confusing, or knowledge that doesn’t fit existing knowledge. Struggling with school subjects normally indicates a lack of prerequisite knowledge. Kids’ entire brain processes focus on the struggle, not on the material. Parents need to refocus the child’s effort and reduce the struggle by any means they can. Homework and current assignments do not permit time for backing up to the prerequisite material, so students are lost.
Two Rules (of eight) offered for Parents
Rule 1: Never support the school, the teacher or their policies. Parents must support their child. What could be worse for kids than to have every authority they know banding together against them? If ganging up on the kid helped, it might be acceptable, but additional pressure causes more resistance. Who will advocate for the kids being abused by inappropriate education? Home should be a refuge, not an extension of school domination. If kids can’t come home to a safe, accepting place, where can they go? I hope that most of the time a parent’s support of their child will be what is best for school; but don’t count on it.
Schools are run for the convenience of schools. Some of what is good for schools is also good for kids. But parents should not take that for granted. If your kid makes bad decisions or violates rules at school, you can be dissatisfied with his/her choice but still show your unconditional love. Kids need to be taught, not punished. Extending school’s coercive and punitive actions into the home can lead to a downward spiral toward misbehavior and failure. Nowhere and at no time is it more important to the well-being of a child than for parents to show love, compassion, and help than when s/he is in trouble at school.
Rule 8: Don’t let the school retain your child. Fight retention tooth, claw, and lawyer. Here’s why: Robert Hauser, the Chair of the National Research Council Study, recently stated: “We should know that a policy works before we try it out on a large scale. Is holding students back a grade—flunking them—good for students? The research evidence shows that it is not. Students who have been held back typically do not catch up; in fact, low-performing students learn more if they are promoted—even without remedial help—than if they are held back.”
A Position Paper of the American Association of Psychologists reports: “Evidence of the psychosocial effects of grade retention is apparent in studies examining children’s perceptions of twenty stressful life events. Initial research two decades ago indicated that, by the time students were in 6th grade, they feared retention most after the loss of a parent and going blind. In 2001, 6th grade students rated grade retention as the most stressful life event, followed by the loss of a parent and going blind.”
Finally, the At-Risk Dilemma
And now, good news for parents: It is never too late to salvage your child’s dignity, worth, and self-confidence. Today is the first day of the rest of his/her life (of sixty or seventy years by the longevity tables). And today is the first opportunity you will ever have to begin to help him/her head in a new direction. Each successive day will be another chance to improve your relationship and show your love, value, and acceptance. You can’t begin any sooner than right now, but you can begin. Think of how happy a word, a smile, or a gesture can make him or her after fighting school all day. And think what kind of long-term response might follow such simple acts.
Policy makers need to eliminate, or significantly reduce, the inappropriate and deleterious, lockstep, one-size-fits-all, grade level, punishment-based, age-grouped, fixed-schedule, tradition-laden, antiquated, negative-evaluation, mandated curriculum. So long as there is an unreasonable mismatch between the predetermined school curriculum and student preparedness, there will always be students who are unable to achieve, who are embarrassed, who struggle, who fail, and who are forced to defend their dignity, psyche, and worth instead of to learn.
Unfortunately, for parents and classroom teachers and, tragically, for at-risk students, there is only one solution to the At-Risk Problem: Fit the curriculum to the learner instead of compelling the learner to fit an inappropriate curriculum. While the educational mismatch is an integral part of every school day and schooling is compulsory, parents must vigorously support their children. And teachers must find way to reduce shameful failure and find wiggle room for circumventing and defying the hurtful failure policy.
I made my choice, years ago, and sought every way possible to eliminate failure and offer success within my own little closed-door corner of the world.
I found that I couldn’t change the policies, the school, or the teacher next door, but I could change me. I became a student advocate, challenging the deleterious mandates and policies that caused my kids discouragement, pain, and embarrassment. You as parents can’t change the tradition-laden bureaucracy of school, but you can begin to make your concerns known at every opportunity. As you use your parental powers the effect will be cumulative and will begin to make a difference. Most of all, you can let your child know, every day in every way, that you understand. Your child needs to know and feel that “help is here and I love you unconditionally, come pass or come fail.” Schooling demands will end but your relationship lasts a lifetime.
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WOW-Now that is one GOOD teacher.......
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