Continuing the dialogue

I read a thought provoking post about perceptions and City Schools. I posted a few comments, but it seemed that the discussion was becoming about a specific school (Margret Brent, picture to the left), as opposed to something more general about City Schools. I don't know enough about Margret Brent to keep that discussion going, so I stopped commenting there.

The discussion I'd like to hit on with this post is more general. How do you balance the fact that City Schools have some very real problems with an exaggerated perception by many that sending your kids to Baltimore's public schools is child abuse, at least if you can find any alternative? The schools have faltered and made progress, but that perception has remained. Look at this post from the City Paper from 2000 that sounds like it could be from today.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I personally try to spread the word about the educational experiences my kids have had and are having. I talk about my own education - 100% BCPSS K-12. I really do feel like there are some incredible stories to be told.

On the other hand, the things that I see in statewide competitions, that point out the financial disparity between Baltimore City and say Montgomery County, make me feel ill. It takes money to support a robotics team, or a science fair project, or even a chess team. You can make up for a certain lack of money with passion, but passion won't buy bus transportation or a set of tools.

I feel that there needs to be equity on school funding, but I don't want people to think my decision to send my kids to under-funded schools is deluded or some sort of sacrifice to a political goal. It's a choice we've made for the last 13 years, and I think it's the right one.

I'd love to spark a discussion in the comment section to this post. How can we demand better funding without looking pitiful?

Hosting holidays at home

yum... cheese doodles

On yesterday's Thanksgiving post I mentioned that we always do Thanksgiving at our home. This isn't because I have Martha Stewart ambitions, although I do enjoy hanging with the relatively small group that comes over for Thanksgiving (9 this year, never more then 12). Msk's stress level is the main motivation for keeping Thanksgiving at our house, as well as Christmas, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and whatever other party comes up.

Both my husband and I come from Baltimore and the majority of our siblings and parents remain in the area, so we always have a good size group come over. There are other houses close by, but we always volunteer, and after a few years, others stopped offering to host the parties. I'm not complaining; it's become part of our family's definition of home. I've come to love getting the house together the day before and being able to enjoy company without worrying about msk.

When msk was little, and we were still making the party circuit, it was incredibly hard to keep him out of areas he should stay out of. I'm not sure he was exploring as much as he was trying to get a little time on his own. I had all sorts of toys that I brought with us and didn't mind that it turned out that 75% of my time was spent focused on msk instead of socializing at the party. Even so, msk ended up being very grumpy and ready to go home much before the end of the event. Honestly, I was pretty grumpy by that point myself.

It's been a continuing evolution to come up with what is our formula for a successful and sociable party even though msk is anything but a party animal. Here's what we do:

• The second floor is always open to msk (and our family) alone and gives him a place to escape to
• Eating schedules are fluid with trays of snacks as well as meals with no rules about what to eat or when
• The sit-down meal (if we have one, since Christmas is always a continuous buffet) is focused on adults, and no one from the younger generation has to stay at the table or listen to the politics and endless yacking. Too many words can really rub msk the wrong way.
• We minimize mandatory social interactions - I ask msk to come down and say hi when people who really want to see him arrive, but after hello, how long he wants to chit-chat is up to him. Fielding two questions is about as much has he can handle. 
• If it works out, b-d tries to either come to the party or take msk out for a couple of hours before or during the party
• Parties can go to the wee hours of the night, but msk's bedtime schedule remains about the same. This can mean that he's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way before I'm up for much, but it makes him happy to know that he can count on at least that part of his routine

now there's a Christmas sweater!

So stuffed...

I would write something thoughtful about Thanksgiving and gratitude, but I'm too stuffed.

How about some pictures instead?

The table set for 9 - Thanksgiving at our place, as always.

before

a pie with paintings

after

Flan & pomegranate

 Tomorrow, when I have digested all these calories, I'll be capable of posting something more substantial.

Thankful for...

Google says Happy Thanksgiving!

I mentioned in a comment to this post that "I’m continually amazed at the number of extraordinary teachers that we've had in very difficult situations." 

So, on this day before Thanksgiving, I thought I'd post a bullet list of some of those extraordinary teachers and the things they've done that stand out in my mind.

In no particular order these are some teachers that I'm thankful for:

• The preschool teacher who helped us get started towards a diagnosis so gently that we didn't flip out and who never considered asking us to find a different place for msk even though he required lots of extra support
• The math teacher who immediately recognized genius in different thinking patterns and let a quirky and previously bullied kid immediately start to bloom with strategically placed praise
• The AP teacher who taught an incredibly challenging course with such enthusiasm that even when getting a C in the class there was no discouragement and in the end there was a 5 on the test and a lesson about hard work paying off that will never be forgotten
• The teacher who was skeptical about inclusion of severely disabled, but open minded enough to really try, and by the middle of the year, brave enough to admit a change of heart and start to proselytize about how all students in an inclusion class benefit
• The teacher who emailed me as soon as a student's grades started showing the effects of disorganization vs what they were capable of and took the time to support the student and keep me posted. When I said how grateful I was the response was that it was nothing special, just what teachers do

I could go on, but I'm taking Personal Time Off (PTO) today to try to do massive house cleaning, along with attending a meeting at one school and drop-off/pick-up at another.

In the credit where credit is due department - this post was written in response to the question of Thankful on the SPSOC blog.

Finances

A while back I said I'd post about what I found out from the online financial aid seminar that I attended.  Being totally honest, the main thing I figured out was that, even though I know it's important, I find finances and all the terminology of college aid bewildering and incredibly boring. I suppose your mind needs to be cut out for one type of task or another. My mind is good with quantitative stuff, but you add in business mumbo-jumbo and I start to tune out.

Nonetheless, I know I bear the responsibility for this part of the college application process. HSS really has had no experience with money, so although we will be talking about financial aid awards when they come through, I'm in charge of filling in these forms, finding scholarship info, and presenting it all in a form that HSS can understand in order to be able to compare different schools.

a straight-forward flowchart

I like this figure. It all seems pretty understandable with some icons, terminology and steps laid out as a simple flow chart. So far, all I've done is an estimated FAFSA and applied for a PIN to allow me to enter the real data once I get 2011's W2 form.

But all the terminology... take a look at all the terms on the right that go with the flowchart.

Some take-aways that were news to me:

1. Loans programs are different if they are loans for the student vs. loans for the parent. I plan on supporting a lot (maybe most) of HSS's college expenses, but some part will be student loan and earnings from summer/co-op jobs.
2. The relative book costs between two colleges has little to do with what the final EFC (if I'm going to learn new vocabulary, I need to start using it - look at the list to the right again). More expensive colleges might have more money for aid; less selective schools might be more motivated to draw in high performing students.
3. The massive number of scholarships around take lots of research to find. Most are pretty small chunks of money, but taken as a whole they should help out a fair amount. This task might be something to start over winter break.
4. Government college loans programs for parents are going to look at your credit rating. The advantage of borrowing against your savings (401K or home equity etc), is mainly qualification and ease. The advantage of the government loans is better rates, since they are subsidized.

I see work in my future, but I'm putting it off for a while.

Here are some links that I think might be helpful:

• Educational Resource Organization Directory
• FAFSA
• Maryland Prepaid College Savings plan
• Scholarship workshops
• Financial aid search

And another thing...

My fellow Bmore Ed NaBloPoMo blogger, @BmoreSchools, posted the same video I'm showing below on  this post on her blog. I wrote one comment, and was about to fire off another, when I thought that maybe I could get a post out of the comment, and at day 21 of NaBloPoMo, I'm looking for post topics to keep me going.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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This post is going to focus on a short part of this 8 minute video - from about the 7 minute mark to just shy of the 8 minute mark. John Stewart makes a joke about how it's wrong to pick on bad teachers when the working world is filled with crappy employees (he cites how incompetent fast food restaurant workers can be) and Diane Ravitch responds with an anecdote about how a principal stated that in her 15 years supervising 300 teachers, she only had one bad teacher, who she fired. Her point being that the number of bad teachers is so minuscule that it has nothing to do with education problems.

First, I understand that John Stewart was making a joke, and I do in fact have a sense of humor. I realize that a serious rebuttal to a joking statement can make you seem like an ass, but I'm going to try anyway. If I go to a fast food restaurant and have a totally incompetent server, I have lots of options, most of which I can do right away and have very little negative impact beyond the cost of the meal in question, and my blood pressure rise if I really get steamy about it. I can talk to the manager. I can avoid this specific server if I ever see them again. I can avoid a specific location of the chain. I can boycott the whole chain. I can write a letter to corporate management. Again, there are no big long-term problems with any of these approaches.

I'm going to say here in BIG LETTERS - this is a theoretical discussion based on years of different schools and talking to different parents. THIS IS NOT about a specific situation that I am going through in a school we are now attending.

Let's contrast the fast food problem with a horrible situation with one teacher. A parent probably won't figure this out for a while in the school year. At that point, there are most likely other teachers and classes that are going well. Pulling a kid out of a school for bullying might be able to be done quickly, but for a poor teacher? Not so much. You're lucky if it can happen in a year, and at that point the teacher is in your kid's past, so why bother? In a fast food restaurant, the management is often willing to come up with something to make the customer happy, not so much the administration in schools. If several parents come together and cite a problem, it seems to make administrators more defensive. I think the political ramifications of throwing a fit while leaving your kid in the same classroom is pretty obvious. These are worst case situations, but even  scaled down you can see why, for parents, a bad teacher has bigger ramifications then a bad fast food server.

The idea of 1 in 300 sounds nice. It's not my experience. I'm not saying that training and support couldn't bring the numbers down to that level, but as a customer, that's not my concern or business. In my job we have performance reviews, counseling, moving people to positions where they can do less harm, pushing people to quit, out and out firing as options, and I've seen all happen. It's scary and unpleasant, but some people need to go, or at least be isolated so they don't screw everything up.

I'm not saying that poor teachers are the biggest problem in education. Compared with collapsing buildings, kids living in poverty, and underfunded school systems, it's probably a distant fourth. On the other hand, it's the one direct interaction with the system that happens every school day. With a job as important as teaching, that impacts kids so directly, we need to acknowledge that bad teachers do exist and cause real problems.

A rough start

While I was playing with robots yesterday, msk had a long and very fun day with b-d. That was great, but long, exciting days, followed by late bedtimes seem to lead to rough mornings. Today was no exception.

Rough days are obsessive and tend towards explosions when I try to redirect. Today's grocery trip was tense with lots of echolalic speech. Then it was computer games that msk couldn't win, but couldn't walk away from. General grumpiness and fussing with his siblings...we were stuck.

Thankfully, the weather was beautiful and we were able to take the dog for a decent length walk in the park. The park just beyond our backyard is always a place for finding peace for msk, even though it smells of sewage and has trash on the banks of the stream from gutters and storm drains.

A sonnet from a different day's hike.

I

White racket, roiling water draws my mind

Transported neither here nor now, attend

Past images – choice, chance – that lie behind

See future paths achieve idyllic end

Though envied, simple lives are not our way

While focus on the now, fruition decrees

To worry, ruefulness, hold vigor at bay

Then sewage’s tang conveys, awakens, frees

Must watch my step ‘round trash on wobbling stone

He splashes, I observe, removed, on guard

Nudge sand, a glim’ring gem – drift glass is shown

Blue essence, stream has polished from a shard

By focus on detritus, treasures reveal’

Unseen when sight is drawn to dreams’ appeal

Saturday

I'd like to say "Wordless Wednesday", but it's Saturday and I'm writing at least a few words. After waking up at 0-dark hundred hours and having a "hurry up and wait" type day, I am just too tired for much more than a picture/video posting today.

 If you comment saying you like the cape below I'll blush. I made up the pattern and stitched it up myself : D

A question

If I write about how much I enjoyed talking to most of the people on my kids' CST/IEP/504 teams, with one exception, does that mean I'm teacher bashing? It seems as if saying anything bad about any teacher, labels me as one of those legions of bad people who don't understand how hard it is to be a teacher. From my perspective, I think that saying some small number of teachers are just not currently doing a very good job,  reinforces the idea that being a good teacher is hard work. Some people need more training, or more support, or maybe just aren't cut out for the job. I'm not talking about new teachers that are a little unsure. Maybe their first few years aren't their strongest, but you can see that they want to do better, and that they are trying. I'm OK with that. I'm talking about not listening, being inflexible, and thinking that the S in Child Support Team stands for something mysterious and has to do with someone else.

I try to focus on how helpful and understanding >95% of the people were. Even if they had issues or problems with a kid, they could listen and brainstorm about how we could change something to make things work better. I was willing to make a commitment for what I would do, where I could pitch in, and it felt like that was appreciated and reciprocated. And the student, too, was drawn in and contributing. With these folks, we really were forming a team. I truly am grateful for that, but I keep on getting drawn back to frustration with that <5%.

I am not a teacher hater or basher. I truly appreciate that that being a competent teacher is a hard job. I don't expect every teacher to be teacher of the year.  I just don't accept the idea that every teacher is succeeding at their job.

Shoshin

Open to the possibilities of a rainy day.

There seem to be times in my life when I get completely buried in the day to day. Then, as I as I shake free of the fog and look up, the same message appears everywhere. I'm not a spiritual person, I just think there are times when a part of you knows you need to learn something, and in case you try to ignore this need, you see the message wherever you look. I know I've posted on this synchronicity at least once.

The message of the moment is shoshin, of having a "beginner's mind", to feel a sense of openness, eagerness and lack of pre-conceptions.

I felt the first glimmer of needing to change when I was drawn to this ABC story about Gabriel Giffords' recovery from a trumatic brain injury. Even though I pretty much never watch these types of "News Specials", I was mesmerized by her efforts and triumphs, and most especially by how, though she acknowledged the pain of others' deaths, she had no bitterness about her own torturous journey.

Then, this morning, I was trying to think of a quick post, just to keep up with my daily post comitment. I was feeling tapped out. I opened twitter and followed the link to this post, and the idea of shoshin was dropped in my lap. I stared at the message of rejecting the concept of failure and instead of allowing yourself to be in a place where you are able to learn. Then I scanned my fellow Bmore bloggers and in Epiphany in Baltimore's post the Zen Koan, "when the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear" hit me. I need to be ready. Finally, this post from the Special Olymics, about about how we can learn, from both Giffords and special olympians, to focus on the need to get better, sealed it. I see a path opening before me. The challenges that are coming up (foremost in my mind is college for HSS, a high school transition for msk, a changing job definition and the continuing frustration of dealing with a brilliant kid who has no connection to the reality of mundane obligations like homework...oops - still too frustrated to talk about that) require an open mind.

This school year has felt like trudging through slowly thickening mud. There was the brief flicker of excitement with picking up school supplies, but that feeling vanished almost before it started. I had thought how relaxing it would be to have not a single child transitioning to a new school; instead it just made me feel jaded. I've been counting down years until my elder two kids were done with City Schools. I've been thinking that if msk transitions to an autism specific school that would mean that in a lot of ways he would be done as well. I've been focusing on a feeling of having served my time. Reviewing this, I know I am ready for a change, like a breath of fresh air.

So, starting today, I work to free my mind of cynicism. I open my eyes to the fact that I need to learn in order to better serve those who count on me, whether at home, in schools, or at work. I wash away resentments and start with a clean slate.