Parents matter too, being 'that parent' is ok

Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that parents don't matter, that teachers and schools are responsible for raising children.  This simply isn't true.  Parents have a huge impact on their children's education.  I want to offer an example of what it means to be a parent who is willing to go to bat for their child, to be ok with being 'that Mom' if it is in the best interest of the child.

There are many options for childcare, and it was difficult to find one that we were happy with.  Our son began at the school he currently attends, but we removed him from the school when my husband had to travel more.  We decided it would be best if our child was closer to me, in a Christian environment.  The school had a curriculum, and the teachers were very nice.  However, it became apparent over time that they weren't challenging him enough.  Television was on 85% of the time, with only moderate educational activities offered throughout the day.  So, the next year we put him in a new center that was only about three miles away from my job.  That was an amazing place, where I'd pop in unannounced and see my child helping with mixing a cookie batter, or playing baseball, or bird-watching.  He'd be coloring, or doing  a puzzle, playing in a puppet show, or imagining he was a scuba-diver.  I realize how lucky I was to have him there.  I was upset when they had to shut down after only one year because of low enrollment. 

This year, I had to go back to option A, the school he was at when he was only a year old.  I knew that he was reasonably safe, but some of their operating practices have bothered me in the past.  Little things like variety of food for breakfast, lack of a lead teacher, or issues with potty training.  Nothing that bothered me enough to decide not to put him back there, but enough that I'm constantly vigilant to make sure everything goes well this time around.  When he first began, they put him in a class with a teacher whose strength lay in getting the children to be obedient.  This is, of course, an admirable quality for a teacher whose students are petulant three year olds.  In order to succeed in school, obedience is a necessary skill.  But, she wasn't the warmest with the children, and my son reacted badly to this.  Where he was potty trained by me over the summer, he couldn't seem to do it in class.  My theory is that he was scared of the teacher, and didn't want to ask to go.  The school discussed the situation with my husband and I, asking if they could move him to the younger 2 year old class, despite the fact that he was three.  Although I didn't love the idea of him being there (knowing his knowledge level in language and number skills), I recognized that this was a developmental goal that needed to be met.  Within a week of him being in the younger class, he was back on track with his potty training.  He was moved into the other 3 year old class with a different teacher.  This teacher is warm and clear.  She challenges him, but does it in a loving way.  He responded positively toward her, having few problems for the next few months.  Of course, he is a normal 3 year old boy. He has meltdowns occassionally.  Occassionally he doesn't listen.  But then, so do the teenagers I teach.  A time-out usually does the trick with my little guy.  His teacher understands that.  She also motivates the kids with red, yellow, and green days. He joyfully tells me when he gets a green day, because he's so proud of himself. The best part is that this teacher actively teaches.  My child has sight words and letter recognition, he knows his numbers.  Basically, he has completed all the skills he would need prior to entering kindergarten, even though it is a year away.

When I received a letter from the school telling me they were planning on reorganizing the rosters, moving my son back to the classroom he had been in when he had potty training issues, I was upset.  I struggled with how to approach the school.  I was angry, because I felt they should have remembered that he didn't do well in this other class.  But then, I also thought about my role as a teacher.  I needed to keep my cool and approach this with the right attitude. Maybe there was a reason for their decision.  The letter said it was to put kids who had the same skill sets together.  I found out later that this meant they had arranged the children by birthday, and that my son was the oldest in the younger group.  He was a borderline placement anyway.  I called to speak on the phone with the director, but she was unavailable.  I wrote an email that night detailing my reasons that I didn't want my son moved.  They returned my email the next morning, and followed up with a phone call that went to voicemail.  I stopped in to the office to try to talk to them when I picked my son up, but again, the director was in a meeting.  I didn't give up.  Friday, I called again and got the assistant director on the phone.  She spoke with the director and they rearranged the roster so my child could stay where he had been successful.

Had I ignored the letter informing me of the decision, and allowed the change to happen, my son would have been taken from his friends and a teacher that he has grown to trust.  I made the effort to make sure my son had the best opportunity for success.  I've been his greatest advocate because he's three and can't do it for himself.  I know that I won't always get my way with who teaches him.  But I won't be passive about decisions that I disagree with.  I'll be 'that parent' if I need to be.  Not because I don't think the school has good intentions, because I do think they wanted something that made sense.  They wanted kids to be together that were at about the same developmental level.  It was my job to point out that he was doing well in his current placement.  It was my job to fight for him.  I did it, and my son won because of it.

Some parents reactions are that the school always know best, or the teacher always know best.  They don't always.  Likewise, the parents don't always know best, because they don't see what happens in the classroom.  Parents need to realize that too.  If we don't calmly and quickly open a dialogue with each other if there is a disagreement, then we aren't doing service to the child.  In this situation, the school thought they were making a decision that would benefit everyone.  On paper, they were right.  But, sometimes what is logical isn't always the right thing, especially when young children are involved.  My son needs the social stability, because he has been moved to a new school each year.  He has a relationship with his current teacher, and that is a great thing.  I'm just glad I was able to help him preserve it.

What's a white girl know about being black?

I grew up in a ethnically homogenous town in Western New York, where we operated on the assumption that racism simply didn't exist anymore.  We didn't talk about it.  We didn't think about it.  We would never dream of being mean to someone who had a different skin color than us, but we also didn't live mixed in with many people who were not white.  Not intentionally.  It was defacto segregation.  Of course, we knew intellectually about the concept of racism, and we knew that somewhere else people were violent and vicious and hateful.  But, not us.

My town was (and still is) full of good people.  But, these people are not exposed to other cultures as much as inner city folk.  Honestly, if people in my hometown thought about what their culture was, most would likely say that they weren't really sure.  This is the norm in many white American homes, that they don't even think of themselves as having a culture.  But, they do.  Of course they do.  Everyone has culture.  And everyone has notions of what other cultures are like.  There's nothing malicious in this perception of culture and the other.  If anything, it is lack of experience with the other.

Racism exists.  Prejudice exists.  It is more subtle than it used to be, but it is every bit a part of society today as it was before the Civil Rights Movement.  I don't know what can be done to fix the problem, but a step in the right direction is to recognize that it is there and stop pretending to be color-blind.  I'm not color-blind.  I see the difference in skin tone.  Sometimes I celebrate it.  Sometimes I fear it.  But I won't pretend that I don't notice it.


I suppose my idea of what a black person is would have never changed much if I hadn't met the wide variety of people that my life journey exposed me to.  SUNY Geneseo introduced me to some extraordinarily intelligent black people.  One was a witty and interesting girl who was half Puerto Rican and half black.  She was fun to talk to because she had an entirely different set of experiences from me.  I loved hanging out with her.  The next person of color I met (within the first week of school), was an ebony colored young man who was truly the most dedicated person I knew of in all three years of my undergraduate.  He was destined to fulfill his dream of being an attorney.  Both of them were so interesting, I decided to enroll in a Black Literature course.  During this class, I learned that I was racist.  Everything that came out of my mouth seemed to offend the black girls in the class.  I didn't understand.  I wasn't trying to be racist.  So, I took more classes about black culture.  Even after four classes, I still didn't see where they were coming from.  I didn't hate, so how was I racist?  Just because I didn't believe that everything was about race?  Surely, that couldn't make me 'racist'.  My final semester of classes at the college were during a summer session.  Because there are few people that stay on campus during the summer, I was randomly placed with a group of roommates.  That was quite the experience.  I'll write about it in more detail in another post, but for now I'll just describe the two black girls.  One girl was literally a princess from Ghana.  She taught us all how to do a tribal dance.  It was so cool.  But, she didn't act like a heathen (which is what I thought of Africans before getting to know her).  Far from it.  Even though she was from Africa, she was.... normal.  She read fashion magazines and listened to pop music.  She loved game shows on television.  Across the hall, there was another girl who was from New York City.  She was what I affectionately call a big black Momma.  She wanted to take care of everyone, bringing us cookies and making us mac-n-cheese.  She had the loudest laugh, and loved to tell stories.  Both of these girls were so unlike anyone I had ever met, and I'm blessed to have met them.

When I left Geneseo and moved to Florida, I had a culture shock experience.  I felt pretty good about myself, for pushing beyond my comfort level and getting to know people who were unlike me.  But then, I moved South.  I was shocked to hear that people were still in the KKK.  I cringed to learn that people still said the n-word (I still don't feel comfortable even typing it here).  I was appalled to think that anyone was still as racist as I had read in books.  But then, I saw some violent behavior.  I kept hearing about blacks perpetrating crime on the news.  It was the opposite end of the spectrum.  I started to be nervous around black people.  I'd notice that I felt uneasy around them.  I'd hold my purse a little tighter in the elevator with them.  I didn't try to defend them as much.  What was happening to me?

Then I went to work for a Texas call center where I was the minority.  Most people I worked with were black.  I didn't like it.  Not at all.  I didn't understand their clothes, their speech patterns, nothing.  But then I started to talk to them.  These weren't the highly educated black people from Geneseo.  Nor were they the people I saw in the streets in Tampa.  No, these Dallas call center blacks were normal people just trying to make a living.  They had the same dreams as me.  They had the same love for their families.  But, they didn't have as much hope as I did.  I knew that I was in a temporary situation.  I knew I was better than taking sales calls.  They didn't.

As a PhD student, I'm learning more about race.  I'm learning about Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist theory.  I'm learning that sharing these experiences is a good thing.  I shouldn't shy away from my memories or pretend my feelings don't exist.  I should recognize that just as there is a wide range of white people, there is also a range of black people.  There isn't just one black identity any more than there is just one white identity.  I've met some observant black people who pointed out the media portrayal of black people is unfair.  I've heard their commentary that takes me to places I hadn't considered before.  I love that we can talk about these things openly.  I'm growing in my knowledge of the fact that oppression still exists through the work of people like bell hooks, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Patricia Collins, Shirley Brice Heath, and Jonathon Kozol.  I am not an expert in what it means to be black and I never will be.  That isn't my lived experience.  But what I have lived has been a journey that I think is worth sharing.

Malcolm Gladwell- The Tipping Point

Gladwell's book was so well written and offered such compelling ideas, that I immediately decided I needed to teach the contents to my Speech Communications class. If you are interested, you can find it here http://prezi.com/mc0vtvu_-kdj/gladwel.... The basic argument? Change isn't dependent on a massive movement. Instead, ideas that catch on begins with individuals who are especially connected, informed, or enthusiastic within a certain context that is presented in a compelling way. This dynamic view about how change happens and how ideas spread is useful for many different fields. Understanding the power that certain individuals have and being able to target them as customers or as advocates can make the difference in spreading ideas. Being aware that the way an idea is presented matters, that the issue itself needs to be important enough to people, and that human beings like certain things is important to targeting the ideas that matter. But then, the knowledge that context makes a difference can let us know that even something doesn't work in one situation doesn't mean that it won't work elsewhere (or another time), and that something that worked before may not work now. This one will have a prominent place on my shelf as a book that I'll return to when I'm writing my own research. Thanks for the great book, Gladwell.

He also did an interesting interview about his book, which you can find at http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/

And, if you want to hear him talk, he did a TED Talk (I love TED talks) about Choice, happiness, and spaghetti sauce, which you can view here http://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y

Or, you can also view his TED Talk where he Explains Why Human Potential is Being Squandered here http://youtu.be/kspphGOjApk. 

Happy reading and watching!