Concerted Cultivation Arrogance

Here’s something I’ve wanted to discuss for quite some time, but just never got around to it.  Thinking back to reading Annette Lareau’s book “Unequal Childhoods” I couldn’t help but be convicted of an unknown area of arrogance that I have been holding onto.  It has to do with Lareau’s distinction between Concerted Cultivation (the active, typically suburban involvement by parents in their children’s lives and activities, occasionally bordering on micromanagement) and the Accomplishment of Natural Growth (the typically working- and middle- class philosophy on child rearing that gives greater autonomy  to children).  Now, in my way of thinking, even as I began reading Lareau’s work, Concerted Cultivation was much more difficult and draining for parents, but it gave their children the best preparation for engaging with their world and authority structures later in life.  This is all true, but what struck me is that when I reflected on it, I realized that I had been considering alternate child rearing strategies as inferior and irrelevant.  I had failed to remember the rule that they taught us in Computer Science: there are pros and cons to EVERYTHING!  So I was kind of blown away when I realized that children raised in a natural growth framework tended to be more imaginative, better able to occupy themselves, and better able to socialize with their peers than did those raised under the concerted cultivation framework.  Well, I hereby stand corrected, natural growth is certainly an acceptable method of raising children.  That being said, I still fully plan on utilizing more of a concerted cultivation framework in raising my own children, but what can I say?  At the end of the day, it always seems to be that we do what we’re comfortable with, which tends to be the way that we were raised.  C’est la vie.

The Spectacular Way of Avoiding the Pedagogy of Poverty

I recently finished reading Brian Shultz’s interesting book “Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way,” during which two big things really jumped out at me.  The first is that Brian Shultz REALLY needs to learn that brevity truly is the soul of wit.  I think that his 157 page exposition could have been as fully fleshed out in about 70 pages.  Seriously, this man truly knows how to repeat himself and bore an audience.  The second thing that struck me was that this guy, as a new teacher, is one amazing educator.  Just looking at the hours that this man put in for his class, both in extra time before and after school, and in time invested at home during evenings and weekends, his dedication and drive is clearly evident.  And I honestly must confess that as a future educator, I can’t imagine undertaking a project anywhere near the scope of Project Citizen that Shultz  was willing to tackle with his class.  Allow me to correct myself and thereby move into what I would like to discuss here.  You see, it wasn’t really Shultz tackling Project Citizen with his students, it was really him giving the authority over to his students, and allowing them to tackle Project Citizen in the way that seemed best to them. This is truly a revolutionary (if not exactly new) teaching strategy, and I applaud the success that Shultz and his students had with it.  There is a caveat, however.  This sort of teaching takes a huge investment of time on the part of the educator to pull off, and a willingness to seemingly lose control, at which point actually losing control of the classroom seems a little more likely to occur.  What struck me is the great way that Shultz came up with an alternative to the Pedagogy of Poverty, as outlined by Martin Haberman.  Haberman speaks of the model for education in poor areas as very authoritative, giving information, collecting it back at some point in the future, while telling students what to do and how to do it.  Nothing could be further from the way that Shultz organized his classroom.  He allowed his students to guide their own learning, and when he wanted to steer them in certain directions, as often as not he made suggestions instead of demands.  I respect Shultz much for his novel approach.  That being said, I am not sure that I can match such an approach with his level of success, but he can certainly stand in my mind as inspiration.

Collaging is Fun!!

I Reflecting back on collaging (which, fyi, Pages in iWork does not think is a valid verb - silly Pages....)- ok, so it’s been a few weeks, but better late than never, right?  I’ve been trying to figure out what lessons I can take from this assignment and the ensuing discussion over the following weeks, and it’s a bit hard for me.  Personally, I always hated school projects growing up - they always seemed like a lot of work to me, and usually pointless work at that.  In my mindset, why do I need to go through the effort of creating a physical object when I can just have a test on whatever was supposed to be learned, and do just fine on said test? (I can’t honestly remember having more than a dozen or two difficult tests in all my schooling until I got to college, where they got so hard the word test just wasn’t sufficient any more.)  Projects were just always sooo hard for me.  So one thing I learned in this assignment is that 6th grade work (collaging, in my mind, fits in this category) is a heck of a lot easier in 18th or 19th grade.  I mean, let’s go back to vocabulary tests every friday and geometry quizzes, and life would just be a whole lot easier.  But seriously, how do I apply what I’ve taken away from this to my teaching?  I think for one thing, I can realize that everyone has an intricate set of life experiences that shape who and what they are in this moment.  Somehow, taking the time to appreciate this fact, be it with a future student or coworker, or anyone for that matter, seems to allow me to appreciate that person more, even if I can’t relate to any of their particular disparate life experiences.  Another thing that strikes me is that this project was pretty easy to do because it dealt with just about all of the things that I am interested in.  I know it doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary, but one of the things that I’ll be working on is trying to figure out how to make math seem interesting and/or important to my students.  Another thing I might try - although I’m not certain about this yet, as I haven’t yet been in a classroom - is to get my students to share a little about themselves (probably not to the extent of our project, but something) with the hope that learning about one another will build a bond of mutual respect or appreciation, and maybe this can translate in caring about class?  I don’t know, it’s a stretch, but maybe worth a try.  This is all for now.

Another Blog Entry

Here’s a thought that just occurred to me - I’ll throw it out there to see what you think.  I just got back from work - I had a short 3-hour day before I came back home with an unusual amount of free time with which to do homework before I have to get ready to go to class tonight. (That is, about 2 1/2 hours)  Well, here I am, blogging, trying to get caught up from all of those days when I finished work with no time left to take care of school work (this honestly seems like every working day) and I’m reflecting on how easy I actually have it.  By this I mean to say that, while my job is by no means always easy mentally or physically, I can survive with my one job.  An 8- or 10- hour day may for me, four to six days a week assures that I won’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from or how I will make rent this month.  I have never in my life had to take a night shift job to supplement my income from my day shift employment.  I am extremely lucky.  So I sit here and remember a conversation we had a few months ago about educators who judge some of their students’ parents who don’t seem very involved in their children’s academic lives.  Why?  Because they don’t show up to things like parent-teacher conferences.  But while I might otherwise have been one of those educators out of ignorance, I know that I will never be one now.  How could I, who finds it so hard to find time to do my own schoolwork right now, while working no more than 50 hours a week and taking only two classes, ever be so arrogant as to pass judgement on parents, most of whom are doing the very best they can - some of which will be working 12-hour days or even as many as 16 hours, to make ends meet.  I guarantee you my school production would be seriously inhibited under these circumstances, and if I had children, I can’t imagine that I’d be able to make it to rigidly- timed conferences during work hours or immediately after.  (We’ll leave out for the moment some of the other issues mentioned in class about lack of transportation et. al.)  Maybe knowing some of these hardships, I can now try to take steps to try to involve parents who would like to know how their children are doing, but cannot adjust to my school’s schedule.  Sometimes I feel like half our job as urban educators will simply be thinking creatively outside the box.

The Pedegogy of Procrastination

Greetings, fellow future-teacher procrastinators!  So I was just here reflecting about how, like the good college student that I was, and now the good grad student that I am, I have picked up and perfected the art of “putting off for tomorrow what should be done today,” of squeezing every last second out of a loose deadline, so long as I got the work in before an automatic F would result from turning it in later.  I then started thinking about how, going into teaching, at least in my experience, not much will change.  Come on, we can all remember teachers we’ve had throughout the years who put off deadlines, handed assignments and other materials late, and took 2 extra weeks getting those tests and papers back to us (for some of us, this was torture, for others, a blessing in disguise).  So relax, sit back, and keep procrastinating, because our fellow teachers 2 years from now will be doing the same things, right?  Well, maybe.  But something about this seems wrong to me.  How will we, as educators, expect homework to be turned in, papers to be written, projects to be presented and exams to be studied for in a timely manner, if we ourselves aren’t performing our educational administrative duties in a timely manner?  If there’s one thing I know about kids, it’s that they can absolutely smell hypocrisy from a mile away.  “Do as I say, not as I do” never works well for anyone, let alone young students.  So I propose we (or maybe just me, if I am honestly the only one) get our acts together, and start training to lead by example in the punctuality department.  I think this might just be one of our most important demonstrative jobs as educators.

To Ramble or Not to Ramble (honestly, tell me, I can't tell)

So yeah, I just read the the NJ Real Cost of Living Index (NJRCL).  Forgive me, but somehow I didn’t make it to the endnotes - oops.  But that was fun, in a really sobering, unfun sort of way.  And as I was keeping this in mind, while reflecting on some of the poor and working class families from Annette Lareau’s book “Unequal Childhoods,” I think it might have hit me a little more just the sheer impact that poverty has on people, and families in particular.  I mean, honestly, the closest i’ve ever come to poverty is a couple year stretch when my brother and I were living with our dad in a small apartment, and sometimes no idea where the money was going to come from for rent or food.  But even so, I don’t think we ever approached even as low as 200-300% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), which, by the way, if you’d like my opinion, and that of any other intelligent being on the planet, needs to be scrapped, and now.  Honestly, when you have state government agencies in New Jersey (such as WIC (Women, Infants, and Children), Food Stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), the list goes on) defining who can participate in these poverty-assistance programs based on multiples of the FPL - 200, 300, even 350% FPL, I think that it’s time that maybe the Federal Poverty Level could MAYBE be updated to, oh, I don’t know, actually reflect the level below which a person can be considered to be living in poverty in this country.  As it is, I think it maybe might be accurate to measure the poverty level of like Somolia or some other third-world country.

But I digress.  So I was trying to think of families encountered in Lareau’s book that were either working class or in poverty - the families of Tyrec Taylor, Katie Brindle, Harold McAllister, Wendy Driver, and Billy Yanelli.  And so while I was reading the book, for the most part, I was able to maintain a sense of clinical detachment.  Not to say that I didn’t sympathize with the plight of some of these families, but I must admit that sometimes, I am just dense, and it takes a while for things to fully sink in.  When I then perused (ok, so I perused the charts - skimmed was more what I did with some of the redundant text) the NJRCL, however, it sorta clicked for me.  Especially when I consider the single-parent (or at least adult) families (the Taylors & Brindles) that we have read about, I can only imagine how they could manage to skimp by in a place like Essex county, New Jersey, where with only 2 children, an annual income of about $40,000 is needed just to reach self-sufficiency status.  The Taylor household includes three children.  These families are not bringing in anywhere near that number with a single parent supporting the family.  Granted, there is some semblance of child support for these families, but still, there is absolutely no way for families such as these to survive without public support in the regions around us.  Indeed, many of these families are, as the NJRCL points out, living at a mere fraction of a self-sufficiency wage.  Those poor and working class families with two working adults are obviously going to be better off, but then they run the risk, as in the Driver household, of no longer qualifying for public assistance despite not earning quite enough for self-sufficiency.  The NJRCL actually points out that at a certain income level, a family actually makes less of the fraction of a living wage than does a family with less income coming in.  This is due to the fact that many public assistance programs have a distinct cutoff point, where assistance simply stops.  This is, of course, retarded.

This leads me to LSNJ's reports Not Enough to Live On and A Desperate and Widening Divide, the latter of which suggests that these public assistance programs are very harmful in that respect, and instead should be such that these benefits are provided in a tapering off manner, such that assistance decreases, but does not completely drop off a cliff as family income rises.  This makes good sense to me, because, if you think about it, with the current system, what incentive is there for adult workers making the top amount possible to still be eligible for state and federal assistance to try to move up the pay scale only to be actually hurt for making an extra dollar an hour?  Not Enough to Live On also points out that inequality and discrimination in employment is still alive and well.  Specifically, for our families from Lareau who are headed by single women (that is, Taylor & Brindle again) would be even further hurt economically than would their single father counterparts. (for those of you wondering if such a thing actually exists, I assure you that there are single fathers raising children alone - they are just few and far between)  So these women tend to make less money for doing the same jobs simply because of their gender.  Likewise, minorities also make less than their white counterparts.  If this is news to anyone, I applaud you for having found a rock that large to hide under all these years.  But my point is that this double-standard is just one more thing to make the lives of working class and poor families that much harder.  Furthermore, for the whole of our lower income families from Lareau, looking at the Widening Divide report, had these families had the misfortune to live in Essex County, NJ, they’d be even worse off, because about half - that’s 50% - of those living in poverty in NJ are living in extreme poverty.  So the moral of the story I guess is that if you’re going to be poor, don’t be poor in New Jersey, with an extremely high cost of living and an incredible amount of severe poverty.

So bringing this all back home, what does this mean for me?  As a future urban educator, I know that a good portion of my future students will be coming from poorer families, and with New Jersey’s high cost of living, I think I’ll need to be cognizant of that fact.  I need to realize that, according to Lareau, many of these students will know full well that there are financial pressures at home, and so very likely they will be bringing some of these stresses with them into the classroom, whether this is obvious or not.  I need to keep in mind as I assign things that some of my students will be from families that struggle to buy groceries, so I need to make sure that I am not assigning things that require the students to buy supplies that they might not be able to afford.  And more than anything, I think that I will need to file these sort of economic issues away in my brain, and add them to my lens through which I see the school world.  This so that I will be able to effectively and sympathetically deal with those situations that I cannot even foresee at this moment.  Oh well, I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Is Entitlement Really Wrong?

So i'm not going to argue that it exists.  I'll assume that it does and work from there.  I'm referring, of course, to the sense of entitlement that Annette Lareau describes as being a part of "middle class" existence. (We'll leave out the part where she uses the term middle class loosely enough to include some obviously upper class families - unless someone can tell me how $200k household income can even possibly be considered to be average...)  Moving right along - this sense of entitlement is held by middle class working people and passed on to their kids as just another part of the child-rearing process.  It looks something like this: I exist, therefore i have the right to be listened to, i have the right to expect a good education, i have the right to challenge authority when i see fit - basically, i have the right to be catered to by society, and i have the right to be outraged when that doesn't happen.  So my question to you: is this a bad thing?  It sounds wrong, sure - maybe a little conceited.  But....i mean, what's the big deal?  I'm trying to wrap my head around this and i come up with the thought that, well, if it works, why change it.  I'm sure i'm showing my Suburban roots right now, because some of you might be saying that it doesn't work in the projects, it doesn't work in the hood.  Fair enough, i conceid that my experience does not allow me to speak to that point.  But it does work where i come from, and let me tell you - sometimes having that sort of attitude allows you to go a lot further than by just having what Lareau calls a "sense of constraint" exhibited by lower and working class inhabitants, characterized by more of a do-as-your-told, complain-about-yet-feel- powerless-to-change-things attitudes when it comes to big organizations.  Maybe having an i-can-do-anything attitude is a real positive thing, that can stem directly from an i-deserve-anything attitude.  I don't know, maybe i'm just trying to be contrarian.  Maybe what's really wrong with society is entitlement.  I shall ponder this further and let you know what i decide.