your teaching mind. What’s more important to you—a job or your child? I would also say the same is true of the parent who is also a psychologist.
Parents who are teachers and psychologists need to hire tutors who are aligned with their thinking so the children can’t attack you professionally when they feel trapped. Remember, to them, your profession is something that takes you away from them. Even if you love your work, you have the added pressure of making sure you know how to show your children that your love for them is greater than your love for your work.
Another important distinction to make is the difference between “observation” and “labeling.” The vast majority of problems created for children is when they’re given a label. The label becomes a trap, something expected of them to exhibit. When a child is called “disruptive,” they believe that’s what they’re supposed to do and be.
Labeling becomes a trap by turning one person’s observation into a fact. This is a line too many people cross, blind to how it becomes arrogance. Observing is a way of getting to know the nature of someone or something. This is different from analyzing or labeling because when a person feels analyzed or labeled, they naturally feel like a target and quickly move to react to the arrogance: “Who are you to judge me?”
This becomes a point of contention. Observation gives us necessary information, providing space for first digesting those observations, then time for thought and forming the right question. We want to guide our children towards choices that bring them abundance rather than depletion. We want to ask them the right questions, channeling them to use their minds to solve problems. In this way we pass on the tools of accountability, responsibility and desirability.
The labeling trap isn’t limited to teachers. Think of how many observations about your child you’ve turned into facts. When you create a true partnership with your children, they’ll open up more to you than you can ever imagine today. They’ll expose parts of themselves that they’ve been hiding. Utilizing those moments for letting go of any rigid labels and allowing for the fluidity of observation is so much fun! Your children are different every day. If you don’t notice, they’ll make revealing their changes to you their work of the day.
Notice more. Judge less. Encourage more.
Definitions
I’ve seen so many labels, definitions and ideas that have been distorted far beyond what’s found in the traditional dictionary. Homework Sanity outlines problems facing parents, children, teachers, educators and tutors. Too often, people take things literally when there are other interpretations of rigid definitions.
Here is the way I view the common terms. I encourage you to create your own definitions from your unique experiences.
ADD - Smart child potentially bored by the monotony of a linear learning system that doesn’t match his/her nonlinear mind
ADHD - Same as above, just with more energy
Behind - Not meeting the expectations of one adult who might be a teacher
Bully - Person who doesn’t listen to children
Child - The little thing running around
Defuse/Diffuse - Getting rid of the bombs school systems and teachers can throw into a parent’s path (defuse), and/or taking the time to put out fires before they start by utilizing positive energy (diffuse)
Disruptive - Smart child who is bored
Fidgety - Smart child, bored, with a lot of energy
Friends - People who help you and your child without asking for anything in return
Goals - Something that are more likely not to be accomplished than accomplished (see Priorities)
Grades - Assessment that measures no more than a small percentage of the child’s growth and current capabilities
Oppositional - Same as ADD/ADHD, but with the ability to talk back
Parent - Superhero
Partner - The relationship you’re striving to develop with your child around education
Priorities - An ever-changing set of challenges that change daily. Tackle the most important one first whenever possible
Teacher - All types, ranging from awesome to toxic
Them/They - People setting rules, budgets and regulations. Aliens. Escapees from Area 51
Tutor - A person who emotionally connects with your child, shows them healthy choices, then allows the child to make the appropriate choices for their individual passion for learning, rather than just focusing on getting a higher grade
Success - Children who learn more at home and in the rest of the world than at school
Main Point
The main point section covers the three core areas of change explained throughout Homework Sanity.
We are going to utilize a simple, common sense and practical approach to cleaning up chaos; a basic, organic idea that if we teach our children to read, write, do math and verbally express themselves before testing them, they will do immeasurably better. I know this is a crazy approach that schools do not embrace. Schools are not doing this, and the truth is that basic skills now have to be taught inside the house and then applied at school.
I could share thousands of insane, inane, stupid, dumb, idiotic and damaging ideas that teachers and administrators conjure and try to implement. One of the top ten: A “learning support team” provides assistance to a group of children who have been given a learning disability label. These people are basically scribes who have worked with the children all year long, developed a relationship with them, come to understand their needs and helped to push them in the proper direction. As this relationship has developed over an entire school year, in essence, these people have spent more time with each child than anyone at the school. Then, about a month away from the end of the school year, the learning support team comes up with and embraces the idea to mix all of the assistants and assign them to different students, students with whom they have not worked during the year. I can only guess that their goal was to find out what the test scores would be if they passively-aggressively removed support. Not only does this approach hurt children who are more likely to go into excessive panic, anxiety and abandonment, but it also hurts the schools when test scores are lower.
A concept of consistency is then intentionally replaced by the approach of dropping a bomb into the situation.
Tell me, who really needs learning support at that school? Correct answer: the actual learning support staff. If swapping out support teams at year’s end is their thinking, then how can value be brought to the children they’re supposed to be helping?
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