I guess I should clarify that in addition to double blocked classes those sports/arts still require time outside of class. For instance the highest level of band meets every day for and hour and fifteen minutes and then during marching season, the band practices for 8 hours per week outside of class, goes to the football game on Friday and competitions on Saturday.
IMO, one source of stress in districts like WWP is that the preparation for success is so daily, so intense, so comprehensive, and starts so very young. Drive by the tennis courts at our high school very early in the morning on weekends and you will see parents hitting ball after ball to little 4 and 5 year olds-- not playing with them, drilling them. The same pattern applies to music, and of course academics. Kids are managed and made to cycle through one “training session” after another. Practice piano for an hour, then violin for an hour, then math workbooks for an hour, then…
Also, there is an excessive emphasis on not just working hard and doing well, but on being the best and on winning. Everything is a competition–a deadly serious competition–and I say that as a competitive person who is a big fan of competition. Kids get the message they are only valuable if they are THE one winning. There are no hugs and no love for second place, or for a 770 instead of an 800. A 95 earns the question, “but who got a 100?”. This is one aspect of the dynamic that drives the escalation. My kid had better take calculus in 9th grade now, because too many kids are taking it as freshmen and he won’t win.
Though some on this thread suspect my kids and me of being sore losers, in truth my kids did their share of winning. A lot of people would say they did more than their fair share! But it was very stressful for them to have classmates and teammates come up to them and express sadness or bitterness that their parents wanted these classmates to be “more like you” and said mom or dad wanted to know why it was S or D who had won rather than them. One boy kept telling my S he hated him because he would get in trouble at home whenever S got a higher score than he did and that happened too often. When at 4th grade graduation S won the math award, I was mobbed by moms who wanted to know how we had done it and what tutoring center S attended for math. That would have been “none” lol, but when I said that, they didn’t believe me and were angry that I wouldn’t tell them where. These moms didn’t even say hello, they ran up and started anxiously interrogating me.
Winning, whether authentically or not, doesn’t insulate students from the stress, because in this environment everyone is the competition and a potential enemy.
A large part of that is that what we’d consider high school or even college level course material tends to be taught much earlier in the educational systems of some Asian countries. For instance, in the Asian society my parents* and older relatives came of age in, calculus and bio/chem/physics with lab…courses normally taught in US high schools and/or first-year of college were taught to all students in middle school.
And if one wanted to be viable for admission to academic-track or some higher-level vocational high schools, all those courses need to be completed successfully by the end of 8-9th grade at the latest.
- My mother is still somewhat sore at being considered a "remedial" student for not completing calculus until sophomore year of HS at a special private remedial high school while all of her siblings and most neighbors** completed calculus by the end of 8th grade in neighborhood public middle schools.
** The ones who didn’t complete it by then were placed on lower-level vocational tracks or expected to leave school and start working at the end of middle school unless their families were inclined to spend the money to send their “remedial” children to remedial schools which were all private after 8-9th grade back then.
“When at 4th grade graduation S won the math award” OK, first of all, why is a school district that claims it is trying to reduce stress putting fuel on the fire by publicly announcing a math award in grade 4? Our schools don’t hand out any awards until a few days before high school graduation, except for recognizing the honor roll students as a group at 8th grade graduation, and also the physical fitness Presidential award winners or whatever it’s called…
And secondly, how could your son possibly win a math award when he wasn’t in the crowd that was studying BC calculus in 4th grade after spending so many summers in tutoring?
Please show a curriculum that teaches calculus in middle school in the present Asia.
40+ years ago, China HS curriculum was a lot lighter.
This document presents some math problems from modern China junior HS graduation exam (15 years old). No college math in there:
My district is not the one claiming to be reducing the pressure, and this was many years ago since he graduated college in 2010. I would suspect S won the math award for earning the highest grades on the classroom tests, which was entirely possible for an “authentically” smart kid when being tested on the actual 4th grade curriculum before tracking. He would not have won it if it had been based on placement test scores, since that would have required knowledge of higher level topics. He was like the little first grader I wrote about earning stars and 100’s.
Most of the economic 99% is expected to take as a given that we won’t be able to do “as well” as our parents. We will spend more of our income on housing, work longer hours, and so forth.
The academic 99% in large part realizes this too - schools that were “safeties” in the 1980s simply are not, anymore. Parents who went to MIT send their kids to JHU, while those who went to JHU send theirs to state flagships. (Those are not meant to be exhaustive or perfect examples.)
But woe betide anyone who gets in the path of an economic 1%-er who doesn’t happen to fall in the academic 1%, and doesn’t have an unusually broad worldview. (Reluctance to cede unearned privilege! As in, “we thought our economic winning meant we’d get all the toys!”) Enter the plague of whiny articles about “stress”.
The rules against kids taking too many APs exactly parallel sumptuary laws from the Elizabethan era. “Those nouveau riche merchants aren’t really rich; it’s not as good a kind of rich as our old kind!” “Those minority kids aren’t really smart; it’s not as good a kind of smart as our old kind!”
There would probably be room in the elite colleges for both the academic 1%-ers and the economic 1%-ers, but the top dozen schools want no part of it (except for legacies and super development cases). Other colleges are eager to gorge at the trough, however, with need-aware admissions and ED2 programs.
Except that no one is saying “the minority kids” aren’t smart. Plenty of people have pointed out the intelligence and high educational attainment of their parents. ( I have said I don’t think they’re ALL so smart that this rat race is entirely about meeting some exceptional need for challenge.) Parents are questioning what level of achievement is high enough for those kids to attain WITHIN THE PUBLIC school system, and at what point the race to the top has become excessive and harmful to the community. Is it good enough to reach the mutlivariable level of calculus by senior year in high school, or is this no longer high enough? My friend who used to live in WWP didn;t think it was enough, so she saw to it that her son was prepared to take multivariable as a sophomore.
Let’s not forget that one aspect of this problem is not that a few parents believe their kids need to go above and beyond, and then find ways to make it happen on their own. It’s that these parents demand the school accommodate them with ever more advanced classes (which by high school leads them to need to study at Princeton U). The first graders who have already learned first grade math as pre-schoolers at Kumon, now need to be provided with an advanced math track in the public school in which they learn 4th grade math or whatever in 1st grade. Why else would districts like ours needs to start tracking in 1st grade rather than in 4th as they used to? It explains how this rat race begins and why once the curriculum starts expanding to keep pace with the outside preparation a large number of kids are receiving, then the higher level for this group starts to become the expected norm for any high achiever. And while these kids may be smart, the reason the vast majority of them “need” an accelerated math track in first grade is not because they were born geniuses who independently spent their toddler years solving math problems while their peers played with Star Wars figures.
Interesting, GFG.
Perhaps not all the kids who need the accelerated work in the early primer grades displayed natural, organic “genius” level of independent absorption and engagement in any content area. And how do we distinguish?
It is dismissive, demoralizing and insulting when a school system intimates that your kid shows the level of acuity and aptitude he/she does due to precisely the type of “tinkering” you impute to parents and deride. When a school system makes promises that they can indeed meet your child’s needs, having been given a heads-up before your kid gets there, and then doe no more than provide enrichment busy work, or have your Harry Potter-reading kindergartner act as a TA to the other kids who are learning to form the letter A.
School systems must provide and accommodate its demographic, its students, and many do a poor job at providing instruction for the student at the accelerated level in a way that allows that student’s family to take advantage of the free and open public school system that one’s taxes support. When even the district’s tests demonstrate that the expected and normative level of instruction is inadequate for one’s child, the response cannot continue to be, “Oh, your kid is simply advanced because he is the first-born; because your spouse is an educator; because you avoided mercury-laden fish and did gestational-appropriate yoga…” or whatever inanity they wish to use to support their inaction.
Quantitative measurements that the local school district can ignore for one child, and then for the next and then the many, are quantitative measurements that then have no meaning and no impact or influence on student instruction.
We cannot simply keep having families flee the public school system. We cannot have the public school system decry and then decide that the need for gifted, or accelerated, instruction is the unfortunate result of parents stuffing the alphabet and algebra down their kids’ throats.
But if we don’t trust the vehicles for quantitative measures which help us to gauge where the children are, and what they need, then we simply don’t offer it to anyone. Or to everyone. Depends on the day of the week.
Waiting2exhale, with respect, public school accommodations for the gifted are not the issue under discussion.
There is no evidence the children committing suicide in these districts are not gifted and advanced. This is not a case of those who “can’t keep up” despairing. This is a case of those who are keeping up despairing.
When the culture leads to clusters of teenage suicides, it’s time to examine the culture. Alone one family can’t change the culture. Public education is not monolithic; a move a few miles to a different school district brings an entirely new peer group.
Look, the parents concerned about the pressure on this thread by and large no longer have children in the public system, and do not seem to have sour grapes about their own children’s college outcome. It is ludicrous to talk of multivariable calculus as a necessity for admission to selective colleges. The ever-mounting performance pressure on children is demonstrably harmful.
I plan to listen to this podcast, originally broadcast on KCRW: http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/to-the-point/students-and-the-pressure-to-perform.
This is not a plea to overlook smart kids. It is a plea to recognize that smart kids also deserve a childhood.
In my opinion, much of this over-the-top competition culture (overall, not in any one district) is driven by a misperception on the parents’ part of what colleges want to see on an application, and by school administrations not managing the overall process of applying to college well.
It is not helpful to set up a ridiculously restrictive honors track based on criteria which can be gamed by extra instruction outside of school. (This is analogous to the over-the-top culture of NYC public gifted program testing, in which it’s been quite obvious parents are paying tutors to teach their children how to ace IQ tests.)
Yes, there are many good colleges in the country. The better option is not to select the top 1 or 5% in early elementary school, but to defend the students from family pressure by explaining that early tracking does more harm than good. Set and enforce reasonable placement procedures. Do not rank students. Colleges receive more than enough data in each application to rank the students who apply both in comparison to their classmates and to each overall admissions pool.
@TheGFG, I do understand what you are talking about. I don’t think there is anything a school can do to change parental attitudes and practices–if they want to force their preschoolers into doing endless academic drills, what can the school do about it? But it is remarkable to me the extent to which your school system will change things to accommodate these students. I think it’s far, far more common for parents to encounter school systems that are very rigid in their education and simply refuse to give kids who are more advanced than their peers an appropriate education (despite claiming that they are in order to fulfill legal mandates). My kids would have loved to have the opportunities available in your school system. I hate the hypercompetitive environment you describe, but I do believe it’s possible for schools to appropriately educate high-achieving students while minimizing that kind of community attitude (eg, don’t give out math awards to elementary students, place stress on developing the whole child and if a kid is so physically unfit that they can’t even play minigolf, pull them out of math for remedial PE). How wonderful it would have been to have a public elementary school which would teach her new things instead of what she’d learned two years ago. We ended up paying for a private school which was willing to do this and was not obsessively competitive.
II don’t know how to solve this, but something has to change. Most likely the work needs to be made more challenging for everyone from the start in K. It’s easy to adopt the “run your own race” philosophy when it’s just Johnny and Susie who are super smart, so the teacher gives them different work to do while you and the other kids do grade level math. But when little first grade you are getting all A+'s in your grade level math, but then come to find out you are 1 of only 5 kids in the class who aren’t good enough for “special math,” then what used to be above average (straight A’s) becomes remedial, whether it actually is or not. This is a shock to people and I don’t think it should happen this way. The whole curriculum needs to be adjusted upward then, not just for those who pay for outside classes.
I’ve followed this thread with a tiny bit of bafflement. As the parent of an IB student, I’ve simply never come across any of the kind of behavior that being discussed here. We have two, maybe three Indians that really stress about Ivies and take extra APs online to try to boost their resume (because of parents.) But they are the exception, not the rule. And at the risk of sounding braggy, my son outranks most of the Indians (despite never once taking any sort of extracurricular supplemental learning.) In general, his IB class while exceptionally driven and hard working are not the sad, depressed people that high achievers are too often described at. The majority of our cross country team is made of IB students. Our IB department has an active drama department. And yet, we had a 97% pass rate on the IB examinations last year so chances are that our program is not inferior. My son is not at all interested in Ivies as his goal is to be a teacher and such schools would serve no purpose for him but he has often been encouraged to apply based on his test scores, grades and ECs. It is very sad that the balance we achieve here is not the norm in other places. However, to say that limiting APs (which our IB often offers as electives Freshman and Sophomore year) is the solution ignores that they are not in and of themselves the problem.
" Most likely the work needs to be made more challenging for everyone from the start in K." I don’t know if this is the solution either. There’s plenty of common core backlash now from parents who are upset that their kids are being asked to do too much academically in kindergarten and more generally in elementary school. My kid went to a morning Montessori preschool, and she was fascinated by the math works. She could have chosen to do all kinds of things, but that is what she wanted to do. So, by the time she was old enough to enter kindergarten, she already knew most of the math facts and concepts taught in the early grades. And of course there are the early readers–I know several kids who were reading pretty well by kindergarten, which she wasn’t. Just depends on interests and aptitude. Any education that takes a one size fits all approach to kids, even as young as kindergarten, is going to end up boring some while stressing others. I think the best you can do is offer a self-paced differentiated kind of education or else track the kids. Tracking has such a bad connotation, but really it’s just a name for teaching kids at the level they are at rather than “teaching” them things they already know. Of course it has to be done with proper placement. The problem with tracking is that it becomes difficult to move from one track to another. This is not such a problem with a self-paced model or more fluidly differentiated model.
However, that does not prevent a substantial percentage of them from being angry about it:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40693/american-rage-nbc-survey/
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a40904/american-rage-the-quiz/
“Most likely the work needs fly one made more challenging for everyone from the start in K”
The most likely result of this would be even more parents holding their kids back a year so that they would be at the head of their class when they finally entered K. And of course the lower socio-economic kids will suffer most, because their parents can’t afford to hold them back and pay for another year of daycare or preschool.
It seems to me that the stress I’ve heard about in my local school districts is not about how advanced the material is, but how much of it there is and how much pressure the students feel not to make even the slightest mistake.
My parents and older relatives mostly came of age in the ROC(Taiwan) during the '50’s and early '60s. Among my mother and her siblings, she was the only one who didn’t complete calculus at the end of middle school and thus, was considered a “remedial student” by educators and her own siblings. Incidentally, everyone was on the same academic track in that society up until the end of 8th or the 9th grade at the absolute latest.
Also, an older HS classmate who left the ROC in 5th grade found he learned nothing new in math or science despite being placed on the highest academic track in US public schools until nearly the end of his first year at our STEM-centered public magnet. From his recollection, it wasn’t that he was smarter than most US students…but the STEM curriculum for average and even many above-average students went at a much slower pace than would have been expected at an average neighborhood public K-8 school in his society of origin.
If the child feels like a loser or a dummy because she/he isn’t winning at academics, it is a cultural problem for which I blame the parents. The school’s primary mission is to educate kids and help them realize their academic potential. The school simply cannot manipulate the curriculum to make every child feel like a winner. The pressure starts with the parents, and that’s where it has to end.
Look, I think my kids are special and “smart.” But I will admit there are millions of “smart” kids by my definition. I accept that the real distinction among “smart” kids is, more often than not, a passionate work ethic and dogged attitude about surviving setbacks and maximizing opportunities. I accept that my high-stats, affluent kids, may not possess the grit or enterprising work ethic necessary to succeed in the way high-income society measures success, even if their test scores say they are more naturally gifted. If I failed to teach them work ethic, I got no one to blame but myself. If I failed to teach them to define success on their own terms instead of their peers’, I got no one to blame but myself. If I failed to teach them that life is worth living, even after a bad grade, I got no one to blame but myself. The more parents, and society at large, come to grips with this reality, the better off we will all be.
No matter what school district you are in, you have the power and the responsibility to make your child feel like a winner if you so choose.