Educational Paradox

As a parent, I see this:

Schools encourage parents to get involved with their kids’ education, to make sure homework gets done, to encourage them to study for tests, etc.

The minute we, as parents, get involved by having a question on a grade or an assignment, we’re labeled as helicopter parents and troublemakers.

As I read more about helicopter parenting, it’s clear we don’t fall into that category. We allow our children to fail. They face repercussions for their actions. And we don’t do everything for them.

But we do check on things.

Our schools send us weekly reports on grades. My wife goes over them with each child, noting any low grades or missing assignments (we have one child on the autism spectrum, so doing this is imperative, as he has a knack for completing homework but forgetting to turn it in). If we notice there’s a problem, we’re not immediately on the phone with teachers. We make it clear it’s our kids’ jobs to find out about late or missing work, and to make arrangement s with their teachers to get it done or suffer the consequences.

However – there are times we have to step in. And this is where the helicopter parenting label seems to get slapped on, and quickly.

We’ve pulled our oldest kid out of classes and got him with a different teacher when we could see the teacher’s style wasn’t going to mix with his cognitive limitations. And we let our youngest take a class from the same teacher, and thusfar, things have gone well.

We’re right now butting heads with a teacher/student teacher combination over rather vague language used in grading one of our daughter’s essays. The message we’ve received is that the teachers will cover this in class, and that since the discussion takes place in class, we, as parents, don’t need to be involved. Except that our daughter isn’t understanding the discussion in this advanced class. We’ve just asked for the definition of one concept – but we can’t get it. Because it was discussed. In class.

If seeking clarification over a bit of classroom jargon is helicopter parenting, I guess we’re guilty.

We’ve also had to fight to get our kids credit for dual enrollment and advanced placement classes. The school district and state have rather byzantine systems to get the students this credit, with only one person in the district trained clearly on the ins and outs. My wife ran up against roadblock after roadblock earlier this semester with this system, including secretaries who would never let her talk with the person in the know. She finally got his direct number and got things fixed within minutes.

(Thanks to one teacher, at least, who noticed for our oldest that the final button hadn’t been pushed the day before the deadline so we could get two classes taken care of.)

If penetrating the bureaucracy is helicopter parenting, I guess we’re guilty.

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The First Teeny Step

Hey, remember this post, in which I wrote a draft of a letter to send to the powers that be in the English graduate department at Utah State University to see if they’d consider letting me pursue doctorate classes while working as an instructor at Brigham Young University-Idaho?

Well, I finally did talk to Michelle about it and yesterday I sent it off, via email, to the university.

Today, I got this brief reply:

Hi, Brian,

Thanks for your thoughtful message. I've passed it on to my colleague, Prof. Keith Gibson, to see what he thinks about what you propose. We'll get back to you.

Regards,

Keith Grant-Davie

Significantly, not a no outright. At least they’re (possibly) open to thinking about the idea. I take that as a good sign.

Of course, this is only the first of many, many steps that will have to be taken if this is to come to pass. I’ll have to apply to school at USU again – I may not have to take the GRE again; then again, I may have to, so I’ll see how that goes. And we’ll have to figure out where the money is going to come from. Michelle will finish her masters program in the spring of 2012, so if the stars align it’s quite possible I (or we, she’s also interested in going on in the program, if we can make the financial arrangements) could begin classes, if I’m accepted, that fall. Lots of ifs, but at least we’re on our way down If Road at the moment.

About That Doctorate . . .

So Michelle and I went on a walk Sunday, and had a conversation revolving around maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and get into the technical communication doctorate program at Utah State.

Her premise (always a sound one) is this: Hopefully, she’ll be done with her masters program in a year. That gives us a little time to plan, a little more time for the economy to try to right itself and, perhaps, a little time for us to consider employment options in the Logan area or to explore, perhaps, some kind of agreement that would allow me to teach classes at BYU-Idaho in conjunction with taking classes either at Logan or via their online offerings in order to get started in the program.

Taken on its own, the program seems very daunting. Then again, back in 2006 when I was starting the masters program, that seemed daunting as well. A doctorate – and we might even enroll concurrently, which would add to the insanity – would be more daunting still, but less daunting now than it might have appeared in 2006.

This is a four-year program with a teaching component. I’d be in my mid-40s by the time I was done. And would that be bad? Aren’t we supposed to engage in a lifetime of learning anyway? Yes, we are.

So age isn’t a factor. Keeping a roof over our heads while raising three kids and not going crazy in the process is the biggest factor. But noting ventured, nothing gained, I say.

Thing is, this might be the ticket to better employment opportunities. Or it might not, given the state of the economy at the moment. But it feels better than doing nothing, since earning my masters degree back in 2009 has resulted in not much of an ado at all at my current workplace – I knew what that reaction would be before I signed up for the program, so no surprises there.

Yes, I could become, well, a professor of technical communication. Or a consultant. Or an unemployed bum living in a box hoping that one day I misdial my bookie and end up buying Cisco stock at the IPO. Either way, I’m golden.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary and educational purposes.

So that leads to the golden question: What could possibly be my dissertation topic? I’d have to come up with one, you know. This is one that’s been fomenting in my head since our Uncharted retreat this weekend:

Instead of trying to shoehorn an old economic model onto the Internet, why not create a new economic model that rewards efficient knowledge workers without economically penalizing those who need knowledge work performed?

This started kicking around in my head after a weekend discussion on the merits (and costs) between PHP and the Ruby on Rails computer languages. Ruby programmers are able to perform in a day what a PHP programmer can take weeks to accomplish. But unless a Ruby programmer charges outlandish fees – upwards of $100 to $150 an hour – he or she is going to fall behind the economic curve of the plodders writing in PHP. At the same time, those who need programming done are going to have to balance opportunity costs of having work done in Rails quickly but costing a higher per-hour fee when inevitable site maintenance comes up, versus having work done a bit more slowly by PHP workers who charge significantly less for their services (PHP workers in India, for example, can program for $3 an hour).

How can I apply this to technical communication? Still working on that part. But I’ve got an economic model in mind. It’ll never work, but at least I’ve got a model in mind.

More School?

I should definitely be worried.

Just about a half hour ago, I finished reading a paper my wife is writing for one of her masters classes. She's now in her second semester in the technical writing program that I finished in 2009.

I'm worried not because she's smarter than I am -- I've always known that -- but because, in reading her paper and considering the subject (how technical writing and creative writing aren't really all that different, since technical writing like, poetry, for example, is a form that wants to use the right words, just the right amount of words, and not use words or word forms that interfere with the flow of information) I get to thinking, "You know, maybe I ought to go for that doctorate."

Right. More school. More money. More stress. Do I really want that?

Maybe.

But for it to happen, things have gotta change. We'd have to move to Logan, Utah, for one, since that's where I'd go for the doctorate, and they don't offer the doctorate online as they do their masters. And that would mean not simply moving there to become a grad student -- I've got a family to support; I can't do that on a grad student's salary.

But if I get the public relations job I've applied for at Utah State, maybe that'll help. Especially that'll help if I get laid off from my current job next year (about 600 of us are going to get the pink slip).

But if the stars align, I think I'm ready for more schooling.

Trumpeter Swans

We've been heavily into movie production the past few days. Liam read E.B. White's "The Trumpet of the Swan" -- a book I've never read, incidentally -- for school, and had to do a "project" centered on the book. He chose to make a movie about trumpeter swans. Finally got the thing done tonight. Good thing, as it's due in the morning. Nothing feels as good as finishing a project. Especially when your son did the lion's share of the work and all you had to do was basically help him find some music, make a few editing suggestions and burn the thing to disk. That's the kind of school assignment I like.

School Lunch

Decided on a whim last night that I needed to go have lunch with Liam at school today. Michelle has done so with the other kids, but as a modern, groovy, late 2010s quality Dad, I wanted to get involved too.

So I packed a sandwich, some carrots and SUn chips in a leftover Spider-Man lunch box and walked over to the school. Checked in at the office, then sat like the lonely child I am in the foyer waiting for his class to wander by. They did eventually, and we sat and had our lunch.

Like father, like son, I've noticed. More and more as time goes on.

Neither one of us talked much. We sat next to each other, ate our food, and occasionally glanced in each other's direction. I made a few attempts at small talk -- you shouldn't have to do that with your kids, but being the socially inhibited person I am, that's what you do, especially when your kids is socially inhibited as well. Then we left the cafeteria and he went off to recess, after an awkward hug -- again, neither one of us are comfortable in such situations.

I watched him wander off as I walked home. Just mooning around the playground. That's what I did when I was a kid. I remember it vividly. I never liked recess all that much because there wasn't anything to do and certainly nobody to do it with. Oh, I had the occasional friend, but in that odd kind of way that you see a lot with kids who are shy and socially backward -- we'd hang around through happenstance -- my most common denominator with friends in elementary school was that we were mutually part of one single bully's corral of victims. So we became friends out of mutual self-defense. They were vivid enough that even now thinking about them, decades later, the thought of encountering some of these bullies still makes my skin crawl and wants to make me hide. I actually ran into one of them several years ago at Sears and, though we had a nice little chat as will any adults, the "flee" part of my midbrain was still firing actively.

I survived, obviously. And so will Liam. We'll be meeting with a group at school next week to get him some counseling in social skills -- something I wish I had had at his age -- under the Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973 -- something else Richard Nixon did but never got the credit for, speaking of socially-inept individuals. I hope with us workign with him at home and the school folks working with him there, we can help him find better coping strategies for social situations than I found.

I shouldn't be gloomy. By midway through junior high, I developed coping strategies of my own that served me well through high school, college, and nearly a decade of working as a newspaper journalist. I have noted, however, that in the five years I've spent now as a tech writer, those skills and the desire to exercise them have atrophied. I'm not as willing to go outside of my own little comfortable world as I once was, because the job and social situation now don't call for exiting that box as much as it used to. Better re-learn them.

Urgh. Just read this. Despite the stupid nickname for kids with asperger's syndrome -- which Liam has and I suspect I had the more I read about it -- it's good info, certainly the bits under "classroom solutions:"

Many children with Asperger Syndrome are very bright, and may even excel academically in one or more subjects. However, they often need protection from other students who bully or take advantage of them. Aspies do not know which students to avoid. For example, if an Aspie makes a friend, that "friend" may make him do assignments for him, break rules, take the blame and otherwise put the Aspie in jeopardy.

Aspies usually do not understand the "hidden rules" of school but take all rules at face value. They may memorize the rule "Don't swear in middle school." Yet they don't know that all middle students swear, but you don't swear in front of adults, and you don't swear in front of a certain prissy teacher in particular. Aspies also do not understand "hidden social agendas." If an Aspie participates on a high school debate team that meets in a coffee house, she comes prepared like a little professor to talk about the subject at hand. She does not understand that the other students are there to socialize as well as practice for the team.