One advantage is the fresh perspective they bring on the growth and development of my children.

My wife and I often worry that my son isn’t eating enough and grow concerned that is STILL weighs only 50 pounds (for what seems like 18 months now). Watching him play hockey three times a week, we often lose sight of how much better he gotten since last March. Similarly, my daughter’s progress at the drums is much more noticeable to those who see her monthly than to those of us who attend every lesson and hear her practice daily.

As much as I wish we could be together more often, I appreciate the attention our infrequent visitors bring upon the progress and accomplishments of my children. They are great kids and are deserving of recognition and praise. While I would like to give them their due, I sometimes lose sight of just how hard they work and how well they do.

So, this Christmas, I got the extra gift of a fresh perspective… and it was one of the best gifts I got.

This being pre-NCLB-centered education, what went on in the various classrooms was not as coordinated as it is today. Some teachers regularly covered more material than others, and the work load and expectations were certainly not standard within the school. Ms. Miller pushed her students harder than nearly any other teacher in the school and her popularity suffered as a result. As I remember, she didn’t really care – she was very confident she was doing the right thing.

For many of the honors students in her class, this was the first time we were challenged. Our “excellence” had allowed us to coast through classes with high floors for a long time, but here we were challenged. Sentences had to have context clues showing you knew the meaning of the work. Books used for book reports had to be above grade level. Spelling and handwriting had to be reflective of the bright students we were.

I hated it, and I rebelled in the most passive way possible. Nearly every day, about 10 minutes before English class, I would go to the nurse and complain of feeling “fluish”. This went on for several months. Sometimes I’d just rest in the nurses office, sometimes I’d go home. But I wasn’t going to English class.

Go me. Good job earning my first D! I really showed Ms. Miller, huh?

In hindsight, someone should have intervened. I should have been challenged by the nurse or a guidance counselor. Ms. Miller did have an “I know what you’re doing here” conversation with me once, but being enemy #1, I just dismissed what she said. But I never forgot it.

Nor, did I forget the things she taught me.

My son has never had a “Ms. Miller.” Some of his previous teachers have shown flashes of Ms. Miller’s values, but the heterogeneous grouping of students in his classes, overly generous classification of “honors students”, emphasis on high-stakes test scores, standards based reports cards, and grade-level wide uniform lesson planning have inhibited their efforts to emphasize spelling and hold high expectations.

So it has fallen to me to impart the lessons I learned (despite my best efforts to ignore them) from Ms. Miller. I stress the importance of good spelling in assignments where spelling mistakes will not be penalized. I encourage the construction of vocabulary sentences which allow the reader to discern the meaning of the word from context clues. I recommend reading accelerated reading choices which have been around since the 70s over the latest Judy Moody book. And I encourage my son to always do his best, even when a lazy effort will be considered among the top showings.

Like Ms. Miller’s lessons, these messages are not always popular with my son. And, like Ms. Miller I’m content with that. I do wish that he was hearing it in school and I could be in the role of reinforcing the ideas instead of seeming to add to the workload, but I’m confident it’s the right thing.

I never thanked Ms. Miller for what she did. I never apologized either… I was too young and immature to realize how wrong I was and how right she was. But she WAS right, and I’m happy to be in a position where I can help my son excel by sharing the things she taught me.

Her father and I did all we could to prepare her: clothes, school supplies, some summer “school work”, a number of talks about boys, peer pressure, “mean girls” and more. We made it a point to watch some of the classic coming of age films with her and discuss the fact and fiction components of it all, but one thing we couldn’t really prepare her for was the expectations that would be put upon her by her new teachers.

My husband and I lamented the hand-holding and low expectations we saw in elementary school and have long worried about our daughter’s ability to adjust to the higher expectations she’d face in Grade 7. I’m not simply talking about more homework and a faster pace, I am referring to the changing of classes, the start of note taking, and the like.

This week we have found that our fears were well founded. After only 2 days of school, my daughter is already feeling overwhelmed and unprepared. She has yet to come up with a notebook/folder system that will accommodate her schedule. Half of the school supplies we bought are the “wrong ones” (although they are very mainstream items). And, I can’t help but wonder if this could have been avoided by two things.

1) An orientation day for new students. Our district does not bring the Grade 7 students into the middle school until the first day of school. Aside from a schedule and bus information, we received no “heads up” about what would be needed or expected during the first week of school. My understanding is that many other towns hold orientations. And our local high school does too. But, the middle school is treated as just another grade.

This would be fine if it weren’t for the disappointingly low expectations of the Grade 5 and Grade 6 teachers in our district. After watching my daughter breeze through Grades 1 – 6, I can’t help but lament the time wasted and opportunities missed to better prepare her for middle school and to have taught her more.

2) Being a student in Grades 5 and 6 should be treated less like a significant accomplishment deserving of reward and special treatment, and more like a transition period with high standards and a curriculum more like what students will see in Grades 7 – 12.

My daughter will adjust as she always does. But it pains me to see her struggle and frustrates me to know it’s an unnecessary headache for her. She should have been better prepared by her school, but the sad thing is that her elementary school and middle school won’t even compare notes so her fate is destined to be suffered by many future classes of students, just as it has been for many in the past.

My kids laughed and became excited for the new Chipmunks movie, but I had to wonder – did the studio really expect fans of the Chipmunks to be familiar with Titanic?

It turns out that my 9 year-old daughter HAS seen Titanic (she saw it a few days later), but she’s one of the few preteens I know who have seen the movie. Her older brother has not (heck, it’s a long film).

Obviously the “I’m the Kind of the World” scene is iconic, but I wonder what other pop culture scenes and references should kids be expected to know? As a fan of Family Guy and Robot Chicken I see many of the things I grew up with regularly referenced, but those shows are aimed more at my generation. What are kids expected to know?

In trying to think of some “must know” characters, catchphrases, and bits of dialogue I found that most my first thoughts are probably past their period of relevance:

• Dr. McCoy’s “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a ________”
• The Terminator’s “I’ll be back”
• The classic Shatner-speech-pattern parodies
• The haunting music from Jaws
• Bond’s “Shaken, not stirred”

I haven’t seen Cars 2, but I understand it has a Bond-type character. How Bond-y is it? Does Pixar expect most kids under 10 to know the Bond-isms, or are they there for the adults (in which case, I don’t consider it to be what I’m talking about)?

The Fairly OddParents cartoon regularly drew upon other pop-culture characters: Dark Laser is clearly a Darth Vader reference, the April Fool is very Seinfeld-ian, Catman is played by Adam West in a clear reference to the original Batman TV show, and many more. Are those for the kids or the adults?

I’ve started giving my son some classic literature to read: Gulliver’s Travels, The Time Machine, Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth. He loves it and it will help him better pick up on the many references in current movies, books, and TV.

He’s been exposed to Godzilla, Star Wars, and Star Trek. I will try to bring in the first 2 Terminator films later this year.  We watch old game shows on GSN and lots of old TV through Netflix, Antenna TV, and TVLand. Overall though, I’m not sure where else to turn.  He’ll get some Edgar Allen Poe in school (I hope).

How important is it that he see Ferris Beuller and Better Off Dead? They’re great films, and he’s going to see them before he sees Titanic.  Maybe in Chip-Wrecked they’ll have a scene where Simon stands and stares at a painting whlie a Smiths song (covered by the Chipmunks, of course) plays in the background.

• 5 of the 7 parents said their children were assinged summer work by their local school district.
• 4 of  those 5 said they felt the schoosl’ assignments were poorly designed.
• 3 of the 5 called the schools’ assignments “not worthwhile”.
• Only 1 of the 7 parents said they planned to have their students do any formal academic work beyond the summer assignments given by their local school district.

Apparently families are not buying into the “use it or lose it” mantra when it comes to academics.

Unfortunately, there is little consequence for taking the summer “off” or not coming into school at your peak form. Most schools spend quite a bit of time shaking the rust off, and all it takes is a small group of unprepared students to hold the whole class back.

Educators we spoke to mentioned concerns about trying to enforce summer work, and several said they were required by their districts to provide an adequate amount of September time for students to complete any required summer work.  Still others say they are told not to grade the quality of the work, only whether it is completed or not.

We wrote earlier about the wasted time at the end of the school year. Here too, we are seeing a chance to improve student understanding and achievement that is not being well utilized.

There has to be a better way.

What were your experiences with summer work?  Please share your thoughts below.

Next year’s class lists are all set, pending the results of state examinations. Barring any surprises, I could tell you who will be in my classroom, who will be in the accelerated pull out, and who has been tagged as a risk to our district’s funding. Not surprisingly, the groupings are the same as they were last year. In fact, we began the process of dividing the student body into groups for the 2011-2012 school year as early as February.

To an extent, this makes sense. Students who perform at a particular level relative to the peers tend to do so month to month and year to year, with little deviation. But, I’ve spent the last two months wondering if that’s a direct result of the expectations we have for them.

The sad truth is that the students who are identified as low achievers in our district, will carry that tag regardless of the grades on their report cards or test scores. High classroom grades are informally perceived as the result of low expectations or soft grading on the part of the teacher. Possibly the student will receive credit for being the best of a sorry lot. But, even if the student were to earn a perfect score on the state test, she won’t be moved into an honors class. She was tagged back in Grade 2, and this will be her label thoughout her schooling. The best she can do is move up to “college prep”.

On the other hand, honors students with the parents who pushed to get them into the gifted program had better watch out. Our guidance team will comb over each of their report cards and test scores, looking for an excuse to drop them into the mainstream track. This strengthens the middle and culls the weak from the advanced class. As it is, 28% of our sixth grade students were in what are considered advanced classes. That’s four sections of Mathematics and five of Language Arts. I guarantee you that there will only be 3 sections of each by the time they reach eighth grade.

Weighing most heavily on my mind this summer are some of the comments made about student placement in our second to last staff meeting. Our lead guidance counselor spoke openly of his resentment of parent pressures on scheduling decisions, effectively saying that the parents should stay out of the process. In this era of rubrics and selection indices, the teachers in my district believe more in a less transparent, more subjective system. We know who the good (and not-so-good) kids are, and from what I hear and see, it looks like we go with our guts over the rubrics more often than we should.

There’s something wrong about hoping your low achievers don’t score too highly on the state test and disrupt the schedules made mid-year. There’s something equally troubling about giving unequal attention to the performance of the student body.

I would call for you all to be more involved in and aware of you children’s placement processes, but I know too well the repercussions you’ll face: increased scrutiny of your chlid’s work and a negative label for your whole family. I’m certainly no saint, and I’ve resented the input of involved parents on more than one occasion, but that’s nothing compared to what I’ve seen go on behind closed doors.

So what’s the answer? Probably to take your lumps and advocate for your child. You just need to ensure that from that point on you and your child follow through. If you ask for extra opportunities, you had best seize them. If you request support, you had best make full use of it. There are countless eyes looking to use you as a means of deflecting all criticism leveled at the process.

Educator x has been teaching related arts classes at a mid-size, suburban middle school since 2002.

No parent wants to see their child get rejected or fail, and nobody wants to be left out of something they really like. As parents we encourage our kids to try things which they may be interested in. We even encourage them in things they may not be so keen on but through it all we hope they will be able to grow through the experience. What parents sometimes forget is that failure is a lesson our children must learn in order to grow.

It’s sometimes difficult (and heartbreaking) to teach our kids about failure or rejection. I remember when I was young I fell off my horse and did not want to get back on. I cried, protested, and begged not to get back on the horse. However, my father did not give up and eventually I got back on the horse. The lesson was that if I dwelled on my failure, I would have never ridden again. Rather, I learned from the fall and became a better rider.

Failure is part of life. Our kids will not succeed at everything and therefore they will experience rejection throughout their lives. As parents we need to be there for them when they fail and gently encourage them to overcome their own personal obstacles rather than to dwell on them. It is through this encouragement that our children will learn to find their inner strength.

I don’t know if my daughter will make the team but I do know that she will grow from the experience whatever the outcome may be.

The reality is not only can’t your kids be anything they want; there are a lot of things they won’t even be kind of good at. If you’re 5’2”, your kid’s aspirations to be a point guard in the NBA are probably ill founded. Mascot maybe, inside a gorilla suit, dunking from a trampoline. For all of your child’s dreams, there should also be a basis in realistic expectations.

The joke I tell among adults is that you should teach your kids that they are probably going to be terrible at most things. They should try lots of things; find out what they are terrible at, and whatever is left, that’s your job. Of course that’s just a joke, you shouldn’t actually tell your kid that, yet it’s still kind of true. What we should be doing is encouraging effort, regardless of the end game.

In school we rightly focus on grades, an indicator of how well a student is doing. Sometimes though, we miss the bigger picture by focusing only on the final result. Giving a child a reward for getting an ‘A’ isn’t bad, but it may have consequences you didn’t consider. Studies have shown that if you only praise the result, children will tend to only work on things they are good at easily. So if your kid takes to math, they’ll work at it. If they struggle with grammar, they’ll tire of it, and just might give up on something they could have learned to love.

In sports and academics we have to find a way to praise the effort first, the result is the result. Your child may never be very good at sports, but they will make friends, and have a lot of fun, if they know the effort they put in matters. Likewise, if your child says to you that a particular math problem is hard, confirm that truth. Yes, it’s hard, and I appreciate how hard you are working to understand it. Isn’t it amazing what you are capable of when you try?

Your child is going to be amazing at something. When it happens, of course you are going to beam with pride, and you should. You should be just as proud, and just as lit up from the inside, when you see a valiant effort where the result isn’t as amazing. If your son struggles with reading, that progress, however small, was earned through effort. Praise that effort, and you’ll see that progress grow.

Hear more from Jim on The Paul Goebel Show podcast and at his Conspiracy Nut blog, http://theconspiracynut.blogspot.com/. You can also follow Jim on Twitter @ComicJimBruce.

So many of the choices he makes stand out to my wife and I as having “what would Dad do?” in them. We try to encourage him to be his own person, and I want nothing other than for him to make choices that will bring him happiness. I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t admit that I find it flattering how highly he regards me.

So, I was touched two years ago when Jay asked me if he could put a championship trophy I earned playing street hockey on the shelf with the two runner-up trophies he earned in his street hockey league. I still have the text he sent me the night my team won the championship stored on my phone:

Wow Dad thats great. Can I have your trophy please? :O

He placed my trophy on his shelf, and proudly showed it to his friends when they came into his room. He shared his own trophies as well, but the pride in his voice was always evident when showing off my trophy.

This year we each played street hockey once again. My season ended first, with my team winning a second championship. We received another trophy, and I was surprised (but flattered) when my son asked me if he could have that one as well. “You can come and visit them anytime,” he told me.  For three months his shelf featured five nice sized trophies… his two runner up trophies, my two championship trophies, and a participation he earned for a roller hockey exhibition.

Well, Wednesday night was the awards ceremony for my son’s most recent street hockey season. The team had done better than expected but still finished in fourth place overall out of 7 teams. Unlike the runner-up trophies he’d earned in previous years, this consolation prize was the same trophy given to bottom five teams. It was a fraction of the size of the other trophies, had almost no detail… I expected to have to convince him to keep it.

On the way home from the awards ceremony, before I could address the topic, my son informed me “You can have your trophies back, Dad. I’m going to need room for this one and it’s getting crowded up there.”

I was so pleased that he valued his own accomplishment over mine. One of the (many) fears my wife and I have as we watch our kids grow up is that they will try too hard to please other people and lose their own identities and sense of self-worth in the process. I thanked my boy for having taken such good care of the trophies and asked him to help me find a good spot for them in my office.

“Make sure you leave room in case you win another next year!” he told me as we made the switch.

My boy is growing up, and if this is the kind of young man he’s growing into – I can’t complain at all.

The surveys each consisted of 30 seemingly unrelated questions about preferred foods, favorite television shows, and opinons about various current events. 5 of the 30 questions were common to both tests.

1. Do you consider your mother or father a role model?
2. If you saw someone cheating on a test would you confront them about it?
3. Would you rather eat dinner at home than at a restaurant?
4. Do you read front page of the newspaper at least 4 times  week?
5. Do you think video games are a bad influence on children?

We saw a noticeable difference in the responses to these questions depending on whether or not the surveys were answered anonymously.

1. Named Surveys: 85% said “Yes”; Anonymous Surveys: 45% said “Yes”
2. Names Surveys: 75% said “Yes”; Anonymous Surveys: 25% said “Yes”
3. Names Surveys: 60% said “Yes”; Anonymous Surveys: 35% said “Yes”
4. Names Surveys: 60% said “Yes”; Anonymous Surveys: 25% said “Yes”
5. Names Surveys: 65% said “Yes”; Anonymous Surveys: 15% said “Yes”

It seems unlikely that so many of the students changed their perspectives in the 7 days between the administration of the surveys. Our theory is that the students sought to give the “correct” response when their names were linked to the surveys. When answering anonymously, the students gave a more “honest” answer, or at least a less guarded response.

With all the attention given to peer pressure, we wonder if there shouldn’t be more attention given to the pressure students feel to please their parents, teachers, and other authority figures. The importance of being yourself and holding true to your own values and desires is no less important. We also wonder how many adults fail to realize theya re often simply being told what they want to hear.

What are your experiences children trying too hard to give the “right” answer instead of an honest one? Please share your thoughts below.