http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/12/one-wrong-move.html
About parent and student stress in a system that is perpetually trying to evaluate for flaw, not encourage for success.
This was sent to me by a teaching friend — it’s kinda long, but at the end this teacher describes talking to his students about their value and worth and I hope we all find teachers like this for,our students.
My H (who knows this guy online, and is friends with a bunch of the blogroll), says he’s given that same talk to his students. It really saddens him how stressed and afraid they are.
I really like a lot of this essay, but I think it conflates two very different things: the pressure and tension high-performing students feel as they compete with more and more people for what seems like a diminishing number of spots at top colleges, and the focus of education reformers on data that actually shows whether low-performing students are actually learning anything.
It’s not the ed reformers who are making 150-IQ kids into basket cases. And it’s not the sub-5% admission rate at Harvard and Stanford that’s keeping lots of un-affluent kids with normal intelligence from getting any benefit from school.
My kids split on this. The older one always knew what the teacher told his class. She was always willing to take a B+ in a class that didn’t engage her, and she had friends up and down the academic success ladder. She had very little anxiety. But her younger brother got captured by high-achieving kid syndrome. It was great for a while, because he was very successful and felt affirmed, and he was like a celebrity at his school. But as time went on he was nearly paralyzed by fear that he was going to be less than perfect, and thus lose face publicly. It was very hard to watch. He was challenging himself, which appropriately meant that he wasn’t going to succeed effortlessly at everything like he did in 9th or 10th grads. Having to be perfect was not a message we were giving him at all, at least not consciously. (To be honest, it was a message we couldn’t avoid giving to some extent: both parents were Ivy League summas, junior PBK, various post-college academic type honors, high achievement extended family, etc. But our other kid let it roll off her back more.)
My older son sailed through school and except for one blip freshman year when paralzyed by an assigment to write a poem he wrote no poems at all, he worked hard enough to get some sort of A in all his classes. We had a little talk about how a terrible poem would have been better than no poem at all from the standpoint of grades. I didn’t need him to get all A’s though I thought he was capable of it, but I didn’t want him blowing off assignments just because he didn’t want to do them. Younger son had some mild LDs that meant he’d spent a lot of years knowing that he might not be quite on the time table the school wanted him to be on, but actually by high school had mostly caught up. I was not into nagging either of them. My youngest once told a friend’s father he’d have been a better violinist if we’d made him practice more. Since he was the world’s most stubborn kid I am not sure how that would have worked out. He also told me after visiting his best friend at Yale was that I should have taken him to visit it early on in high school and he would have worked harder. Something I don’t think actually would have happened. Both kids did fine, but were less grade oriented than their parents. (though only magnas here JHS - I guess not quite twins!)
Our high school was not a super high pressured place, though I think some of the top students (and their parents) fell into the mostly ended up falling apart in college.
I have posted in other threads how my oldest is not very motivated to work hard in class. He has the potential to get As if he even just worked a little bit, but he doesn’t so he ends up with mostly Bs, occasional C. I struggle with that because it’s not what I was like in school so I just can’t relate to approaching school that way. But, on the other hand, I hear horror stories from my friends about how their kids become unravelled over the slightest dip in grades and are staying up until 1-2:00 am studying, about the use of Adderall to support their academic performance, etc. If that is my other option, I happily take my kid exactly the way he is.