Jiaozi

Welcome to the blackboard jungle

Last month a friend who is an adoptive parent posted on her Facebook wall that she was worried about her child on his first day of first grade. Another parent commented, "I feel the same way...I want to give all his classmates and teachers the back story so they will accept him." And I understood exactly what she meant.

I always want to give the back story. I want to say, "This child is not like other children in your elementary school class. This child did not have Mozart played for her in the womb. She didn't come home to a nursery decorated out of the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. Nobody sang her to sleep and laid her gently in a cozy bassinet. She wasn't fed or held on demand or given love or intellectual stimulation until much later. So maybe she doesn't stay on task very well, but be gentle with her. She has come so far."

Or I want to say, "I know you see this child as just one of the mass of Asian kids in junior high who get straight As, but you don't know the effort it costs her. She has only been speaking English for five years, and she is still catching up. She works very hard for those As. Acknowledge that effort."

I want to give the back story. But I can't. They're too old for that now, and those details are nobody's business, least of all their classmates'. I can only advocate for them behind the scenes.

When they were younger, I could write notes on the school admission forms, talk about institutionalization and developmental delays, and the officials would nod as if they understood. But I don't think they really did. All kids have challenges, they probably thought. And maybe they do, but this is my child, and I want them to know there's more to her than what they see through the filter of performance goals and required curriculum.

And beyond the challenges, I want them to know that this child, my child, is amazing. This child may never do well on standardized testing -- may, in fact, never even pass the standardized testing. (Will they hold her diploma over that? Not while I'm around.) Certainly I want my child to be able to, at minimum, read a newspaper and write a letter and balance a checkbook (or whatever electronic forms those basic skills will take in the future). But standardized tests don't measure creativity, or humor, or kindness. They do a very poor job of gauging the worth of a square peg.

So when a teacher asks my child, as one did today, "What's the setting for Because of Winn-Dixie? When does it take place?" and my child answers straight-faced, "In alien space-time" and pauses a beat before saying, "Just kidding," my heart swells with pride. Boom! It's the wrong answer -- or is it? Because for a kid who watches Doctor Who, it's a perfectly reasonable answer. And that's just the way she rolls.

Everyone has a back story. But some are more complicated than others.

An open letter to my children's teachers, school administrators, coaches, and activity directors

Dear folks:

I appreciate all you do for my kids. I really do. And I know it's not your fault that we have three children attending three different schools, or that between them the kids participate in two competitive soccer teams, three types of dance classes, martial arts, choir, and miscellaneous activities. (And I'm leaving out the college student, who is mostly managing her own affairs, except for the tuition bill.) It's not your fault that both of us work, or that we have five pets, two of whom are passive-aggressively housebroken. I know that.

But I want you to know how overwhelmed I am at this time of year. Every September I feel like I'm being buried under an avalanche of papers and requests. Every day my children hand me a stack of documents to fill out and sign: contact information, vaccination records, field trip permission slips, health education permission slips, performance agreements, behavior "contracts." I'm not the student; why do I have to sign contracts? It's worse than buying a house.

I apologize for snapping. I'm a little stressed. I'm afraid that somewhere in that four-inch stack of paperwork on my desk is something important, like the electric bill.

Then there are the requests for money. Tuition, lunch accounts, athletic fees, coaches' expenses, costume fees, uniform costs, tournament expenses -- okay, we signed up for those things. And I'm accustomed to the annual trip to the office-supply store to buy binders (three-ring), notebook paper (college-ruled), and markers (washable). But I'm having a hard time getting used to the idea of paying out of pocket for public-school field trips, books, and classroom supplies -- including tissues.

I'm sure I'm dating myself here.  We used to bring 50 cents to school for My Weekly Reader and that was about it. Times have changed.

And that's not all. After the bills are paid, we start receiving the solicitations for annual gifts, both "voluntary" donations and "mandatory" donations (an oxymoron for certain). The children are sent home with piles of paperwork demanding their participation in magazine subscription drives, cookie-dough sales, wreath sales, and raffle ticket sales. I do not have any desire to turn my children into door-to-door salesmen, nor do I want to burden our friends and family who, frankly, have their own children's fund-raising efforts to deal with. I do not understand why your tuition and fees or our property taxes are not sufficient to pay your expenses. Perhaps you need a new accountant. And why do all of you do auctions now? If I'm going to pay $75 per person for dinner, I want it to be a quiet candlelit dinner with my husband. No offense, but I'd rather just send money.

See, my parents had seven children. I don't think they could have afforded all of us under the current system. We can barely afford the four we have. What do people who are unemployed do?

But there's more. Piled on my desk are numerous requests for our time. First are the open houses, orientation sessions, parent meetings, planning conferences, ice-cream socials, and potlucks. Then come the urgent requests for us to volunteer our time. I realize you could probably use some help here and there. But I want you to consider that, statistically speaking, more than half of the children you work with come from two-career homes, and many of the stay-at-home parents are caring for infants or small children. We're already a bit pressed for time.

As it is, my husband and I spend most of our nonworking hours helping with homework. Between our fourth-grader, eighth-grader, and tenth-grader, we actively help with about 8 hours of homework every day, including weekends. It's like a second job. Seriously, I just had to stop writing this post -- at 10 p.m. -- so I could answer the question "When do you use a discrete graph and when do you use a continuous graph?" which I had to Google anyhow because this is the new new new math and I have never heard these terms.

When I was a kid, it was enough for our parents to send us to school adequately fed, able to sit still, and ready to learn. That was their contribution. And most mothers didn't even work. Why isn't that enough anymore?

So I try to help out where I can, but just because I work at home doesn't mean I can drop everything to come to every open house, orientation, game, performance, concert, awards ceremony, field trip, assembly, or costume and uniform fitting. I do have work deadlines. I will try to put my time where I feel it will do the most good in helping you provide kids with opportunities to learn and grow. And, frankly, if we all have a Friday evening free, we're going to spend it doing something as a family, not going to yet another potluck.

I'm sorry. I'm a little cranky. Not enough sleep, too much to do. You should see the massive pile of sewing waiting for me. We'll all outgrow the clothes before I get them hemmed. And I've been working on this blog post for a month.

I know all of you, as organizations, are just doing what you feel you need to do to look out for your interests. But please be aware that the volume of requests for attention, money, or time you send us is multiplied by, let's say, 10 on our end, because you're all sending us this stuff at once. Could you maybe try staggering the requests? January is pretty slow. How about January?

Well, that's it for now. Appreciate your efforts, but if I don't respond immediately to your requests, and if I don't attend every single event, this is why. It's because every September -- It's still September, right? No? -- Rats. I'm more behind than I thought.

Love,

Sister Carrie

p.s. Oh, and PTA? You and the alpha moms will get your own letter. Yeah. Just as soon as I find the time.

Educating May

We were prepared for May to be behind her American peers academically. She was 8 when we met her and had been attending third grade for two months. She was not in the orphanage school, but attended what was described to us as a private school near her foster family’s apartment. Our home school district recommended placing her according to age, but I knew from talking to other adoptive parents that it might be necessary to place her a year behind.

I could see right away that she was very bright. She could write the English alphabet and knew what sounds the letters made. (Most likely she learned the alphabet in preparation for writing pinyin, not English.) She had studied Chinese reading and writing, a bit of art and music, and mathematics.

Watching her over the first couple of weeks, I didn’t see any signs that she was immature compared to a typical third-grader. She was well-behaved, related well to people, and was interested in learning. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to go ahead and enroll her in third grade, with English language learner (ELL) support. (The Chinese grades do not directly correlate to ours, but third grade is pretty close.)

May got right into the school routine. Obviously, language was a challenge. She was pulled out of class for ELL instruction for an hour every day. She completed reams of language arts worksheets while the other kids did their spelling and reading lessons. A couple of older students who spoke both Mandarin and English were assigned to help her find her way around, which was invaluable. Several girls in class took her under their wings, and I’ll be forever grateful for their kindness.

She was ahead in math, at least in computational skills, because the American students were just starting to talk about multiplication, and she already knew multiplication and long division. But American schools’ highly verbal approach to teaching math was a disadvantage to her. I’m not just talking about the ubiquitous story problems. She brought home worksheets asking her to identify place numbers – ones, tens, hundreds, thousands. This was in preparation for learning the more advanced computational operations, which she already knew. In most of her homework, she was expected not just to get the correct answer, but also to explain how she arrived at her answer. It wasn’t enough to do math; she had to be able to talk about math.

She finished third grade speaking conversational English, beginning to understand American-style math, reading first-grade books, and playing and chatting with new friends at recess. We spent her first summer building on that foundation. I read more challenging books to her while she followed along, to give her a better “feel” for English. She did some language arts workbooks. She watched American TV and Chinese movies.

Mostly, we talked, all of us, and she learned proper English, and colloquialisms and slang as well. For a while, it was like having a 2-year-old again; she clung to my side all the time, constantly asking questions. It was intense and exhausting but necessary, because she had a lot of catching up to do emotionally, socially, and intellectually.

Third grade is about basics. In fourth grade, we got a better sense of her educational gaps. Social studies and science were completely new subjects to her. She had no sense of world geography or history or cultures outside of China and the United States. She wasn’t familiar with art or literature, Chinese or Western. She didn’t know how many planets are in our solar system or that Earth circles the sun or that the sun is a star. She didn’t know how plants grow or where baby animals come from.

This I was not prepared for. May had skills, but she had no foundation of knowledge on which to build her broader education. Partly this was because of the Chinese educational system. The Chinese language is so complex that students spend many years learning to read and write characters properly, and language is the most important subject in school. Math comes in second.

There were also cultural reasons; China is still quite closed off, and information about the rest of the world is closely guarded. (Ethnocentrism is certainly not absent in our country – we study the history and culture of the Americas and Europe, but learn little about Asia or Africa, for example.)

But her gaps had to do with more than schooling. Most American third-graders have never studied world history or science either. But they’ve been surrounded by the general concepts since birth, through popular culture. They’ve watched Ratatouille and have a sketchy idea what France looks like and how the people speak and what they eat. They’ve recited nursery rhymes about London Bridge. They’ve seen ancient Egyptian mummies on Scooby-Doo. They’ve watched Bugs Bunny rocket through the solar system with Marvin the Martian in hot pursuit. I’m not kidding about this. You don’t realize how much our daily lives are saturated with information, trivial and important, until you spend time with someone who missed that exposure.

May learned quickly. She received minimal ELL support in fourth grade. By the end of fifth grade, she was reading English at grade level. She soon tested out of ELL. Today, having just finished seventh grade, she has a straight-A average. She writes amazing poetry and creates beautifully executed school projects. She works very hard, and complains equally hard. She is absolutely on track with her peers socially, physically, and academically, even ahead of them in some ways. Despite the challenges, placing May in third grade when she arrived was absolutely the right choice for this particular child.

We continue to build her general fund of knowledge. She is very expressive in English, but some of the more irregular aspects – helper verbs, prepositions – still trip her up. Building vocabulary is difficult because she does not have an innate sense of the language. She doesn’t automatically recognize prefixes, suffixes, and root words as a native speaker might; for example, she would not be able to figure out what monophonic means despite knowing the words telephone and monotone. She can’t figure out words from context while reading because so much of the context is meaningless.

She has little sense of historical time. I try to explain ancient Greek or Roman mythology and she can’t place their ancient civilizations in time. I try to use Jesus as a milepost, but she can’t quite grasp the magnitude of events that can occur over the course of 2,000 years. Classical music means nothing to her. She can’t associate a musical style with a particular era. The same goes for art. She wouldn’t know a Michelangelo from a Picasso. (I suppose not all American 13-year-olds would, but this is a household where art and music are valued and available.)

Literary references are lost on May. Even the nursery rhymes that every American child knows are strange to her. If she jumps away from a spider and I joke, “You’re like Little Miss Muffet,” she gives me a blank look. So many of the cultural touchpoints that we take for granted are missing. She enjoys reading young adult fiction, the more angst-ridden the better, because the language is contemporary and familiar, and she can understand modern teens’ challenges. But the language in classic works of children’s literature – Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables – is too antiquated for her to get anything out of them. She quits in frustration after a couple of pages.

In the world of science, I keep explaining that Earth is the third planet from the sun, and there are nine planets (or eight, it keeps changing) in our solar system, and our solar system is one of many in our galaxy, which is one of many in the universe, but it doesn’t seem to stick. I know she just doesn’t have the picture in her brain that we all have because we once made a model of the solar system with Styrofoam balls or a teacher took us out on the playground and used a marble to represent Earth and a basketball to represent the sun.

She learns facts, but she doesn’t know them in her bones yet. This year she learned to identify all the countries in Europe and Asia on a blank map. But she still isn’t exactly sure where Europe is on the globe. She isn’t dense; she lacks the benefit of repetition. How many times did you study the solar system in school? She is hearing this stuff for the first time. I explain as much as I can, but there’s no point of reference on which to pin the bits of information.

Helping her with schoolwork is like stitching together a tablecloth that is filled with holes. She will get it eventually, but we both feel frustrated in the meantime. She is a good enough student that several of her teachers were encouraging her to sign up for honors courses next year, and we said no. Part of her wants to do it – she says, “Mom! I’m the only Asian kid who isn’t in honors math or learning an instrument!” – but she also understands our reasoning, that she needs to get a really solid grounding in the basics before moving on to more challenging work.

So we patch the holes and make connections wherever we can. Summer is a great time for this. Movies work just fine. For literature, we can watch Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the Katharine Hepburn version of Little Women. Amadeus should help with music history. I’ll let her watch Scooby-Doo (shudder), and then I’ll unroll the big Wall Chart of World History on the family room floor and point to where those ridiculous mummies came from. We’ll get there one way or another.
   

The tyranny of the reading log

I have been working on a long rant about the kids' homework, and how it's slowly draining my life force, but -- ha ha -- I've been too busy helping with homework to write a coherent post. And I didn't want to think about it during the holidays. So I'm going to break this subject down into bite-sized pieces and rant about one of my educational pet peeves: the reading log.

We've had one child or another keeping a daily reading log since Bess was in first grade. The instructions to the students are to read 15 to 20 minutes a day and record what they've read (title of the book and page numbers) in a log. This is always on top of whatever other homework they have.

It sounds innocuous enough. They ought to be reading at least that much anyway, so where's the harm in recording it? And for most students, I suppose the reading log isn't a problem. Bess learned to read in kindergarten and was a good reader in grade school, though not an enthusiastic one. She read enough to meet the requirements of the reading log, and not much more. It wasn't until she was in fifth or sixth grade that she began to enjoy reading, starting with the Harry Potter books. That was around the same time she stopped being asked to do a daily reading log. She now reads one or two books a week and sometimes stays up all night reading a particularly engaging book. In her junior-high English classes, she has had to do quarterly reading logs, and students are expected to read, say, 500 pages per quarter, but they don't 't have to record it daily, which has relieved a lot of the pressure.

I don't recall May having reading logs, but she didn't know English when she started school, so perhaps we dodged that bullet. She learned to read English at the same time she learned to speak it, which I find remarkable, and I read to her a lot at home to help build her vocabulary and feeling for the language. She does read books for pleasure now.

Where I have really resented the tyranny of the reading log is in Ella's case. Ella is my child who does not like to read. When she was a baby, she would not sit still long enough to be read to; by the time she was able to sit and hear a story, she was in first grade and was supposed to be reading for herself. But she has some learning differences, and reading has always been difficult for her. The books that are at her reading level are boring (she told me, "I don't want any more books about a kitten up a tree!"), but the more interesting books are too much work for her to decode. She would rather look at the pictures and guess what is happening.

This means that responsibility for the reading log falls on me. The only way I can be sure she is reading, and not just goofing off, is to have her read aloud to me, which she does not like. Thus the daily 15 minutes of reading can take up to an hour, between the arguing and stalling and actual reading. Just recording the pages on the log is a huge exercise because her spelling and penmanship are so poor that I have to supervise every character she writes. Add to that her regular homework, and we end up exhausted every night.

When I found myself scolding, threatening, cajoling, and giving deadlines about reading, an activity that should be pleasurable, I knew something was wrong. We have been at this for four years, and Ella still doesn't like to read.

In the last six months, I have made some changes. I consulted with a learning specialist who confirmed my suspicion that getting Ella to enjoy reading is half the battle. The specialist gave me permission to let her just look at the pictures if that's what she wants to do. She said it was okay to let her read comic books (which, to tell the truth, I was already doing). During the fall quarter, I read to her out of interesting books of her choosing instead of forcing her to do it, and I let her record that reading time on her reading log. She was doing enough on-demand reading at school. This has reduced our battles over reading, and  occasionally I find Ella curled up in one of the nests she has set up around the house reading silently to herself.

I understand the reasons behind the reading log. Reading daily is a good habit to get into. The more kids read, the easier it gets for them. Kids are easily distracted by toys, television, and video games. The assumption is that they won't read unless they are held accountable for their reading. I get that.

But here's the deal. The reading log turns reading into a chore. It is something that must be done, whether you feel like it or not. It must be quantified and recorded. The 15-minute requirement, though it is theoretically a minimum, tends to be seen as a limit, and kids are apt to quit reading once the time is up simply because they have accomplished the assignment. The log is rigid and unforgiving. It doesn't count casual reading activities like perusing trivia on the back of the cereal box while you're eating breakfast. It doesn't allow for getting lost in a book and reading under the covers until 1 a.m. and then taking a break the next day to reflect on what you've read.

I don't know whether Bess would have taken to reading sooner if it hadn't been a school requirement. Certainly we would have expected her to read at home. One reason I dislike the reading log is that the assumption that if kids weren't required to read, and if parents weren't required to hound kids to read, all children would grow up illiterate. But we already limit TV viewing and video games, and the kids see us reading. One way or another, reading was going to happen at our house. I resent being told how that was supposed to happen.

With Ella, I have to wonder. If I had let her choose her own books and enjoy looking at the pictures as long as she wanted, if I had continued to read to her and let her develop reading skills at her own pace, perhaps she would have learned to love books. Instead, books are symbols of toil and frustration to her. She eventually learned to read, but she did not read according to the school's timetable, and the effort cost her the chance to learn to see books as her friends instead of her tormenters. I don't know whether we will ever be able to turn that around.

I hope I don't sound like too much of a curmudgeon. I am a good little soldier. I expect my children to do their work and not make excuses. I don't usually complain to the teachers, nor do I hold them responsible for the curriculum. But I have been involved with schools as a parent for 15 years, and I have doubts about the direction the public schools have taken. Grave doubts.

That's what I have to say about reading. Next up: I complain about writing and arithmetic. (Especially arithmetic.)

The business of summer fun

The tulips are blooming, and to me that means one thing: It's time to work on my summer activity spreadsheet. Though I know it borders on insane to set up a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to plan summer activities, the project is truly complex enough to warrant this level of detail.

I have a row set up for each child, and a column for each week of summer. (We used to have 12 weeks, but now it's down to nine.)  I enter the "must haves" like swimming lessons and soccer tournaments. Then I look for openings for dance classes and drama camp and, maybe, vacation. It takes me weeks to run through the various scenarios.

Here's the fly in the ointment: The groups hosting these activities have vastly different organizational abilities. Facilities plan months, even years in advance. Tournaments have a long lead time because the location must be booked. If you don't have lodgings reserved for your summer vacation yet, it may be too late. On the other hand, local sports groups, being run by volunteers, tend to wait until the last minute to announce their schedules. We have known since January the dates and location of a big soccer tournament that will be held in August, and motels in that town are completely booked for those dates -- but we don't yet know where or when practice will be held next Monday. Schools are even less well organized, and they are terrible at communication, so we sometimes have less than two days' notice of an evening band concert or play practice.

And everything is "subject to change without notice." More than once I have carefully built my summer schedule and then learned during the last week of school that a program has changed, knocking down my house of cards. I don't know how the people who run these programs can live this way. Don't they need to plan their own summer schedules?

And it's not as if we schedule that much during the summer. The kids have plenty of time to loll around. We go to the library and the swimming pool. But summer is a good time to learn new skills and try things there isn't time for during the school year.

It's hard to make family members understand why we can't plan very far in advance. My dad, who is retired and doesn't have enough to do, starts planning Christmas in September. He doesn't know why I can't give him a head count at that time; things weren't this complicated when we were young.

But those of you with children, you'll understand.

Blackboard jungle

Playing school now is a lot different from when I was a kid. This is the exchange I overheard this morning while the girls were playing pretend school:

May (officiously): Austin did not do well on his math test.

Ella: Why?

May: He's an only child and his dad is in jail.

Ella (examining math test with pencil in hand): Why did he do that to his math paper?

May: I just told you.

Me (interrupting): What did he do to his math paper?

Ella: See? (Math paper has many errors that are X'd through.)

Me: Oh. Are you both teachers?

Ella: She's sick and I'm the sub. She's telling me about the students.

Me: Maybe Austin needs more help with math.

Ella: He doesn't have a mom.

Me: Who takes care of him? You just said his dad was in jail.

Ella: Well, he has a mom, but she doesn't know math.

May: We're going to work with him.

Ella: Why are his mom and dad so bad?

May: I don't know. He doesn't like to talk about it.

And the sad thing is that this could be the story of a number of kids in their classes.

Kindergarten Lost, addendum

Apparently the New York Times covered the subject of kindergarten more recently than the 2006 article I linked to in my previous post. (Thanks to several bloggers who are more alert than I and wrote about this subject months ago.) I'm pleased to see the article covers a lot of the points I made, and it just reinforces my sense that things are not right. It's a long article, but worth reading.

Most of you are still a few years away from kindergarten, and I'm sure your children will do fine anyway (because you read to them, right?). But forewarned is forearmed.

I know that private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling may be options, but I still believe in the importance of public schools and want to support them as much as possible. Certainly there are school districts that are hopelessly inadequate, and in those cases parents must look at alternatives. However, our prior and current districts are among the top school districts in the state. Plus (1) I am a lousy teacher and would be terrible at homeschooling and (2) private schools are unlikely to accept a student with a current IEP.

I have been thinking more about school contracts. We got another contract to sign agreeing to our responsibilites as parents. I hesitated a moment, signed it, and sent it back. It doesn't make sense to me to ruffle feathers just because my pride is hurt. All my kid needs is a note in her file that says, "Mom is a troublemaker." (Remember the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine catches a glimpse of her medical chart and sees a note saying she's "difficult"?) I need to save my energy for the important battles. Anyway, I believe it is easier to bring about change from within, and after I've built relationships with the staff I will reconsider bringing up my issues with the contract.

It may be a lost cause. Apparently these things are ubiquitous, not just in special services but throughout the educational system. I did a search and found a very informative page on school contracts from the UK. Watch out.

Big A thinks the contracts were designed by lawyers trying to protect the schools from lawsuits in the event that a child fails in school. My theory is that the school administrators all went to a conference where some consultant talked to them about "partnering with parents" and "helping parents feel invested in their child's education." I mentioned it to a woman who works as a therapist and she laughed and said, "Oh, they got it from some workshop." She agreed that I was right to ignore the contract and reassured me that I'm not the target audience. There really are parents who let their kids stay up all night watching television and then send them to school the next morning with a bag of Lucky Charms for breakfast. It wouldn't be fair for the schools to pick and choose who gets the contract. That would be grounds for a lawsuit.

However, if school staff suspect that parents are not doing enough to support their child's education, I would hope that they would talk with the parents personally rather than letting a piece of paper do it for them.

Kindergarten Lost

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
--Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

I wasn't especially impressed with kindergarten while I was in it myself. To tell the truth, I complained to my parents that it was boring. But my memory of kindergarten has gained a certain luster over time, and now I feel nostalgic for those simple days.

When I was in kindergarten, there was no all-day option. Parents could choose between a morning and afternoon session. Or none at all -- kindergarten was purely optional. My next-younger brother didn't attend kindergarten; my mom essentially homeschooled him, though the term "homeschool" didn't exist yet.

Kindergarten functioned as School 101 in those days. It was a child's orientation to school behavior. We learned to stand in line, raise our hands before speaking, take turns, wash before eating -- all the good things Robert Fulghum mentions in his essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Preschool and daycare were almost unheard of, so for most kids kindergarten was their first exposure to formal education, and first extended absence from their parents.

The only "academic" tasks were learning to write our names and memorizing our phone numbers. Mostly, we played. There was a play kitchen, there were colorful wooden blocks, and there were rubber animals and figures of people we might see around the neighborhood -- a postman and a policeman and a mom in an apron. We did fingerpainting and papier-mâché and made things out of clay. We sat in a circle with our legs crossed and listened quietly while the teacher read a story. We took a nap and ate a snack.

There weren't any grades, or tests, or parent-teacher conferences. We got a couple of progress reports during the year that noted how we were adjusting to school. Mine said I was too quiet, but I don't think my parents or I lay awake at night worrying about my kindergarten performance.

When we went to first grade, most of us were ready to spend a whole day in school. We sat at our desks and learned to read and write and do addition and subtraction. (We did arithmetic then, not mathematics.) That was what we did in first grade. It was pretty simple.

Why did this change? There has been concern that American high-schoolers are lagging behind students in other countries, particularly in math and science. Employers have complained that prospective employees lack both basic skills and technical knowledge. (I do not even want to get into No Child Left Behind right now. But you know I'm thinking about it.) Somehow the burden for this deficiency has been pushed back 12 years, so that now kindergarten is functioning as College Prep 101 instead of School 101. In fact, even kindergarten is getting pushed back, with many school districts offering both pre-K and kindergarten or two-year kindergarten 1 and 2 classes. And preschool is practically de rigueur.

But I do not see any evidence that children today are more mature academically or behaviorally than they were in the past. If 5-year-olds used to need a nap and a snack to get through a 4-hour class, why are they now expected to get through a 9-hour day with just a lunch break and recess? And these are kids who are used to the fast-changing, visually stimulating world of children's television. No wonder they're fidgety. I would be too.

When I was in kindergarten, I could read. My mom taught me. This doesn't sound noteworthy now, but back then it was huge. A big fuss was made. I was referred for testing. There were conferences. I suppose there may have been more to it than being able to read, but that's the only way I remember being different from other kids. At the beginning of the school year, I was taken out of first grade and placed directly into second grade.

This was absolutely the wrong placement for me for many reasons, none of them academic. But my point is that now kids are expected to read in kindergarten. An ability that used to be considered exceptional is now standard. Is there any evidence that kids are smarter or more intellectually mature today? Sure, they've watched Baby Einstein and Sesame Street, but there's some evidence to suggest that educational videos do more harm than good.

It's telling that more and more parents, especially parents of sons, are holding their children back a year before enrolling them in kindergarten because of concerns that they are too immature to deal with the greater academic demands. This is often called redshirting, after the collegiate practice of postponing a young athlete's participation on the team for a year to give him time to develop. As a result, a typical kindergarten class today may include a number of physically mature 6-year-olds. So instead of teaching reading to a group of 6-year-olds in first grade, we are teaching reading to ... a group of 6-year-olds in kindergarten. Does this sort of suggest that 6 is the age at which most children are ready to learn to read? So why push it?

It breaks my heart when I see that my little girl reads about as well as kids her age used to read when I was young, and yet she is considered to be behind enough to receive special services (and not just her, but a half-dozen other kids in her class as well). Yes, most of the kids in class are meeting the standards. Some of them probably would have done so anyway, as Bess and my brother and I did, because they really are interested in reading and enjoy academic challenges. Others just do the work because they are supposed to, though they don't especially enjoy it. Is this an effective way to create "lifelong learners," something many schools list among their goals? I guess we'll find out in a few years.

But it's not what's being taught in kindergarten that bothers me as much as what isn't being taught. That year we spent in kindergarten learning to follow rules and get along with others gave us a foundation that we could build on throughout our lives. Kids still need that kind of instruction -- maybe now more than ever. We may not have attended preschool, but we came to kindergarten having already learned to stay in our chair in a restaurant and sit quietly in a church pew and address adults in a respectful tone of voice. Kindergarten helped refine those skills.

For whatever reason, many kids today seem to have no concept of how to behave in school. I have been utterly shocked by the behavior I have seen in the classroom, and it has become markedly worse since Abbey was a child. I'm not talking about ADHD types of behaviors, though they have certainly affected the classroom environment. I'm referring to learned social skills. The idea of respect for authority is completely alien to many children. They will look at a teacher or parent who has just given them an instruction and either ignore them or openly defy them. "Please," "Thank you," and "Excuse me" are foreign words. They have no sense of when it's okay to talk out loud. They whine and interrupt and talk back while the teacher is giving a lesson. They have little sense of personal space, pushing and shoving to get what they want. Not all of them -- but enough of them to greatly disturb what should be a calm, peaceful learning environment. And because teachers must begin the kindergarten year administering assessments and implementing lesson plans, they have no time to handle these behavior problems except on the fly.

How odd this must seem to kindergarten teachers who have taught for several decades! Where once their biggest crisis was a bit of spilled milk, now they must try to impart sophisticated language arts and math concepts while keep children from assaulting one another (or the teacher). Ella's kindergarten teacher was a 30-year veteran; maybe she didn't dislike Ella so much as she was burned out and had no patience left anymore. Maybe it was teaching she disliked.

Kindergarten translates from German as "children's garden" -- a pleasant image that's a far cry from today's high-pressure learning labs. I fear we are doing our children a terrible disservice. They need to get back the year they have lost.

And that's not going to happen as long as standardized testing is the only yardstick we use to measure learning.

How we learned that kindergarten isn't all milk and cookies anymore, part 2

When Abbey was learning to read in first grade, the schools were enamored with a reading method called whole language. Whole language instruction is based on the assumption that children learn language organically and holistically rather than in small, discrete chunks. When Abbey read aloud, we were not to correct words she misread as long as they made sense in the context of the story. When she wrote, it was okay for her to use "invented spelling," because it was considered to be more important at this stage for her to focus on meaning; the mechanics of spelling would come later.

We, and many other parents, thought this was a lot of nonsense. What about phonics? Were we going to raise a generation of illiterates? Of course, we forgot that those of us who learned to read in the Dick and Jane era were taught using the "whole word" or sight-reading method. I can recall studying phonics in second grade, but it was associated with spelling and writing, not reading. Phonics became a reading tool later. But somehow we had all gotten the idea that phonics was the traditional way to teach reading.

So I was happy to learn that Ella's special reading class relied on phonics. They used a program called Zoo-phonics. In Zoo-phonics, each letter of the alphabet is assigned an animal, and children learn phonics by making a motion and sound associated with that animal. Children practice these using flashcards in school and at home.

Engaging the children's kinesthetic sense sounds like a great idea; Chinese schools have long used music and movement as teaching aids. But I have to say that I came to hate Zoo-phonics. Some of the animal characters are obvious -- for A, the children hold their arms out in front like an alligator's jaws and say a short A sound: "A...a...a." Others are counterintuitive -- the N card is Nigel Nightowl, and he doesn't say, "Hoooo," he says "Nnnnn." Every time Ella saw that card she said "N is for Owl." It confused even me. And she spent far more time and effort remembering the names and motions associated with each animal -- "No, it's not Amy Alligator, it's Allie Alligator" -- than she did understanding the letters and the sounds they make.

I learned recently that Ella has a fantastic visual memory but has a very difficult time following spoken instructions. In fact, children who have difficulty in school are very often visual, right-brained learners who do poorly in the typical verbal, left-brained instruction system.

I've been haunted by the thought that when the kids who were behind in reading were pulled out of the classroom for special instruction in phonics, while the rest of the class used a modified whole-language and sight-reading method, they may actually have been dragged even further behind.

Ella and her classmate from the neighborhood didn't test out of the reading class by winter break. They didn't test out by the end of the year. In fact, Ella wasn't much closer to reading in June than she was the previous September.

But she sure could recognize phonemes and rhymes.

Reading wasn't Ella's only challenge in kindergarten. The teacher started to complain about her behavior. Now, I knew she was a wiggly kid. But I had helped out in the classroom, and while she may have been one of the more fidgety children, there were kids with far more obvious behavior problems. They shouted inappropriate questions while the teacher was speaking, they poked each other and picked fights in circle time, they rolled around on the ground when they were supposed to be sitting criss-cross-applesauce. Ella may have been on her best behavior when I was around, but I don't think she could have maintained such an act for long. It's not her way.

Every time I saw the teacher or met her for a conference, she rushed to tell me about Ella's misdeeds. There was little praise for her efforts. She referred Ella to the speech and language pathologist for testing because she thought her speech was immature. (She tested within normal limits.) We received a letter from the nurse because Ella's hearing tests showed a possible hearing loss, though the tester noted that she had a cold at the time. (A followup test at her doctor's office showed normal hearing.) We received a disciplinary note because Ella and another girl had been late returning to class from recess.

After a while, I decided that the teacher just didn't like Ella. She seemed to enjoy telling us how bad she was. The progress reports from the reading specialist raved about how hard Ella worked and what a pleasure it was to have her in class; the report cards from the teacher focused on how far behind she was and how much trouble she was giving her. If you compared the two reports, you wouldn't know they were talking about the same child.

This seemed odd, because Ella is a cheerful, enthusiastic child. Everyone she meets is a friend. So I couldn't help but think about whether race was involved. When you've considered all possible explanations and a situation still doesn't make sense, race is what you're left with. Why did she come to the teacher's attention when there were so many kids in class with behavior issues? Was it possible that she stood out because she didn't fit the stereotype of the studious, quiet Asian child? The other Chinese kid in class (who was not adopted) started kindergarten already reading. He did extra-credit work at home. Maybe if Ella had arrived at school carrying a violin case she would have been left alone.

I continued to struggle with defensiveness. At one conference I found myself sitting at a table with the teacher, reading specialist, and speech and language pathologist (at that point we were still discussing whether to evaluate her speech). I remember saying that while I was grateful for the extra support, I was reluctant to do much more because I did not want her to be labeled in any way or to have a handful of flags in her file. Already she was beginning to feel "set apart" from other students because she and a half-dozen other kids had to leave to classroom to meet with the reading specialist.

Ultimately, we agreed to continue with the testing and extra help. Again, I did not want to be seen as the defensive parent who couldn't see her child's failings. But at the same time I felt protective of my child and unsure that we were doing the right thing.

We moved to a different school district between Ella's kindergarten and first-grade years. We sent her to a summer-school program designed to help kids who are lagging catch up to first-grade reading level. She seemed to do well. In the back of my mind was the hope that the previous year was an anomaly and once the school year started we'd see that she had caught up. It would be great to get a fresh start.

And a month after school started we received a note saying that Ella had qualified for extra help in reading. And math. And occupational therapy. Plus her behavior was a concern. She continued to receive extra services throughout first grade and into second grade this year. She is making steady but not extraordinary progress, and she has not yet caught up to her grade level.

I am wracked with regret over Ella's rocky start in the educational system. I know now that she does have some information processing issues with an organic cause, most likely attributable to spending her first 12 months in an institution. The teachers weren't imagining her academic difficulties. But I still don't know if we, or the schools, did the right thing by her.

It's common for people, especially other moms, to say, "Follow your instincts. You're her mother -- you know what's best for your child." But do I? Do I really have an accurate view of child's abilities? Do I have the knowledge to make informed choices? I'm not a teacher, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a doctor. I've never taken a psychology class in my life. I haven't studied the pedagogical literature. I'm not even really sure what "pedagogical" really means.

But I have a pretty good store of common sense, and I can see when things aren't working. I'm constantly second-guessing our decisions. Should we have forced Ella to sit and read with us for an extra 10 minutes even when she wanted to go play? Should we have known enough not to allow her placement in a special reading class that pushed phonics instead of the sight-reading that suits her learning style better? If the school district had informed us about their true (yet apparently secret) academic expectations for kindergarten, could we have made different choices for her, such as holding her back a year and/or placing her in the Montessori kindergarten class that worked so well for Bess?

Ella loved preschool, but now she becomes dejected on Sunday nights and says, "I hate school." A couple of times she has referred to herself as stupid. Did all the testing, special classes, and letters home change her view of herself so that now she is programmed for failure? If she had been left alone to learn at her own pace, or given another year to mature, would she have caught up eventually?

I wonder about that last one a lot. I hear people say that kindergarten is the new first grade. First grade is more like second grade, and so on. Ella is about one year behind in academic skills; if she had gone to school with me, when academic expectations were not as high, she would have been right on schedule.

Why the big push to introduce academic skills in kindergarten? The pressure to perform doesn't just hurt the children who are "behind." It hurts all of them. Old-school kindergarten taught skills that children sorely need today. And it gave them time to mature and develop -- time I wish my little girl had been given.

More to come.

How we learned that kindergarten isn't all milk and cookies anymore, part 1

You've probably heard that kindergarten is different from how you remember it. I want to share our most recent kindergarten experience in hopes that you'll be better prepared than we were. And also because I'm still a little angry and need to vent.

The change in kindergarten caught us by surprise. Ella was our first child in 11 years to attend kindergarten in conventional fashion. Abbey had attended all-day kindergarten, and except for a longer school day and greater emphasis on learning letter sounds, it wasn't much different from our kindergarten experience.

May attended school in China from kindergarten through the beginning of third grade, so we don't know what her early schooling was like.

Bess didn't attend standard kindergarten. She had one year of Montessori preschool and was then placed in the "transitional" class at the same school, which functioned as pre-K or kindergarten depending on the child's age and development. We assumed that she would spend a year there and then attend kindergarten at the public school. She turned 5 a few months after the public school's kindergarten cutoff, so the following year she would meet their age requirement.

Montessori is a "child-led" educational system, and the children in the transitional class were provided with reading workbooks that they completed at their own pace, with some in-class instruction. Bess got all the way through the reading program during the year. When I went to the kindergarten orientation at the public school, I could see that she was already even with or ahead of the kindergarten students -- not just in reading, but also in math, social skills, and physical ability. I knew that she would be bored in the kindergarten setting.

The district age policy had a loophole -- children who had completed an accredited kindergarten program could enter first grade despite their age, with the provision that the placement would be reviewed after two months' time. A and I discussed the situation at length and decided that it would be best to place Bess in first grade. One deciding factor was that we were afraid that if she were not challenged, she would slack off. She passed her probationary period and has continued to perform at the top of her class, social group, and sports teams.

Ella attended the same Montessori school. She started in the baby room and stayed through two years of preschool. She has a spring birthday, so we had decided to enroll her in the public school's all-day kindergarten the fall after she turned 5 rather than paying for private kindergarten.

She did well in preschool. She had never been a child who enjoyed sitting still and being read to, but we figured that would come with maturity. She was not a born student like Bess, but she was learning her letters and numbers according to the preschool's expectations, and she got good marks for behavior. Despite her small stature, she held her own on the playground. She was doing well enough for us to feel comfortable starting the process to adopt another child.

The spring Ella turned 5, I attended three separate kindergarten orientation sessions -- one at the district open house, one at the local school before Ella was registered, and one after she was registered. I read the brochures and flyers that were provided. I, like many parents, wanted to be sure my child met the district's expectations for kindergarten readiness. The brochure on school readiness said only that children should know their first and last names, be able to handle toileting on their own, and arrive at school well-rested and ready to learn.

Parents at one session asked about academic skills, and specifically whether children should be reading. The teacher said, "Some of the kids will be reading already" -- and here an audible gasp rose from the parents -- "and some will still be learning their ABCs. They will all be at different levels, and that's okay!" The tension in the room was palpable, but the teachers did their best to calm the parents down and assure them that each child would be able to progress at his or her level.

Ella started kindergarten. We diligently helped her with her math worksheets and filled in the reading log, reading to her (sometimes under protest) for 15 minutes each evening. I attended curriculum night, and on the walls were pictures the kids had made of trees on which they had written their letters, upper- and lowercase. Ella's wasn't the best picture or handwriting, but it was far from the worst. I felt reassured.

Then a month or two into the school year, she brought home an envelope containing a form letter. Testing had shown that she qualified for federally funded assistance in reading. She and the other children who qualified would be pulled out of class to work with a reading specialist.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought there must be some mistake. She had done fine in preschool. The school had assured us that children could progress at their own level and that was "okay." Now they were telling me she was already behind?

I called the reading specialist. She said that Ella was deficient in "phoneme awareness," and her "rhyming recognition skills" were lacking. I told the specialist that I had attended three orientation sessions and not once had anyone said, "Be sure your child is well versed in phoneme awareness before sending her to school."

"Oh, it's not something you could prepare for," she told me. "She isn't really behind. It's just that studies have found that children who have trouble with phoneme and rhyme awareness at this stage tend to have have difficulties with reading later. So we identify them for intervention early on." Now, she happens to be a very nice person, but there was just a hint of condescension in her voice.

Um, okay, so because she might have trouble later, you're going to pull my child out of class for extra help. And you didn't feel the need to let parents know this was a possibility? You couldn't have provided a checklist so we could at least be prepared that this might happen?

I struggled with my emotions. I felt defensive -- how could I, an academic champ, have a child who was deficient in school skills? I felt tricked -- why did the school lull us into complacency, only to pull this on us without warning? I felt ashamed -- why hadn't I forced her to read with us more, instead of trying not to turn reading into an obligation?

To make matters worse, we were expected to sign an agreement setting forth our "responsibilities"  in support of our child's education, promising to read to her every day, to get her to school on time and ready to learn, and to make sure her homework was completed every night. Because apparently her learning difficulties were all our fault, and obviously, despite having successfully raised two children, we didn't know that we were supposed to do these things. (Just a little bitter. Still.)   

We had a choice. Ella would not be placed in the reading assistance program if we refused to sign the agreement. But I didn't want to be that parent -- the one who denies that her child has a problem. I didn't want the school to think that I wasn't doing everything possible to ensure my child's school success. And besides, it would be crazy to turn down extra help. Maybe she could even get a little ahead of the class in reading skills.

At the bus stop, I talked with another mother who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class. We delicately approached one another. "How is the year going?" "Okay...not great." It emerged that her daughter had also been tagged for extra help. She was as surprised as I was. She had a daughter Bess's age, so she wasn't a newbie either. Her daughter had also done fine at preschool. We both assumed that our daughters would get a little extra help until winter break, perhaps, and that would be it.

We were wrong.