Diary of a mothering worker. July 6, 2022.

Post 470.

IF YOU are sensible, you didn’t call up the parents of children, whose SEA results came out last week, to ask about what school they were assigned. Results tell us there was real disappointment in nearly 10,000 households, requiring compassion and sensitivity. 

Many parents and children waited up to midnight to find out what perhaps should have been available from 8 am the next day, for finding out about passing for a third or fourth-choice school at that time can be overwhelming. There is just so much we don’t think about in terms of our emotional lives as we walk children through their academic journey. 

Successful children focused on the achievement of getting their first choice, rather than getting into a good school or doing well in terms of their exam marks. Children who didn’t get into their first choice, but still passed for a great school, would have been disappointed and perhaps ashamed. 

As the ministry is trying to move away from hierarchy and stigma, keep this in mind. A few marks could impact first and second-choice placement, which is also determined by the competition for places in the school. 

I knew two students whose overall marks differed by one per cent. One got into his first choice the other was placed in her second. Imagine the difference in emotions they felt because “first choice” has become such a marker of status instead of how well they did on the exam, or even how settled they could feel about the quality of their school. 

Parents of children with third or fourth-choice placements need a day when a school guidance counsellor or principal can help them to identify the best options for their child. Send him or her to a fourth-choice option, resit the exam or seek lessons? Were the challenges academic, related to undiagnosed learning difficulties or a child’s emotional challenges? 

It is excellent to provide remedial mathematics and English language classes to the thousands of students who scored less than 50 per cent this year.

According to press reports, 27.81 per cent (5,305 pupils), of the 19,079 pupils who wrote the exam, scored 30 per cent or below. The number of those who scored above 50 per cent totalled to 37.06 per cent. Only 0.47 per cent of pupils (89 pupils) scored above 90 per cent. The majority of students are therefore incapable of managing Form 1 next year, whether academically or emotionally (and they are connected), given these results. Beyond remedial classes over the holidays, it simply cannot be school as usual in September. 

We continue to underestimate four key things. The impact of domestic violence on children given that, among Caribbean countries, Trinidad and Tobago recorded one of the highest percentage increases in domestic violence during the pandemic. The impact of unreported child abuse including child sexual abuse which all data would suggest increased as children were kept home for two years (reports to the Children’s Authority tend to be highest in May and October when children return from school vacation). The impact of increased poverty as, in July 2021, UNICEF reported a projected increase in severe poverty for children from two per cent pre-pandemic to 18 per cent as a result of the pandemic. And, undiagnosed learning challenges related to neurodiversity, disability and trauma. 

Added to remedial teaching, could these children be assessed to find out how much of their results are related to a need for more school, taught in the same neurotypical way, or a need for something else that early intervention can better tackle?

Zi was completing SEA practice tests at school and attending lessons twice a week, but her math marks were simply not improving though both her teachers were very good. We pulled out a giant whiteboard and started to teach her in extremely specific, visual ways. Her marks doubled in two months. Regardless of how many practice tests she did or how often her teachers went over the material in the same ways, that would just not have happened. 

If we provide remedial education to students who are being failed by current teaching approaches, we may still be setting them up to think they are not capable in subjects at which they could excel, because we didn’t recognise their learning or emotional issues. 

Covid19 and online learning (and its lack) made a huge difference on children’s marks, but we will be missing children’s other realities if we reduced their results, and our response, to just that.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 23, 2022.

Post 458.

IN HIS March 19 commentary on CAPE 2021 scholarship winners, Dr Terrence Farrell called for efforts to “restore iconic secondary schools, but also to restore male achievement, restore excellence as an aspirational value, and indeed restore TT.”

Instead, we should unpack what are considered “iconic” secondary schools, their implicit association with masculinity, and the assumption that men best symbolise the status of the nation. 

The success of Lakshmi Girls’ Hindu College, Naparima Girls’ High School, St Augustine Girls’ High School and St Joseph’s Convent, St Joseph, among others, points to continuing transformations of an historic gendered hierarchy. This democratisation of success is an opportunity for schools that are neither male-dominated nor Port of Spain-dominated also to be iconic.

Dr Farrell, like other commentators, also called for restoration of male achievement. 

While there is concern about boys’ falling dominance in education, men are still ascendant in all spheres of power in our society; in business, politics, religion, land ownership, the security forces and the labour market, and on both public- and private-sector boards. 

This still occurs despite women graduating in higher numbers from UWI for 30 years. The hullabaloo about the “crisis facing boys” should be as loud in regard to the world beyond education, where there is less meritocracy, for which women pay the costs. This is precisely why girls know they have to work twice as hard to do just as well in the world today. 

The results suggest that excellence remains an aspirational value, though perhaps QRC and CIC have adjustments to make, which is what Dr Farrell is really referring to. In that sense, it’s a little dramatic to speak of needing to “restore TT,” as if these boys’ schools are the most legitimate symbols of the nation. 

Indeed, and someone needs to say it to an old boys’ club, what is wrong if Indian girls, dougla girls, south girls, Hindu girls, Presbyterian girls or African girls from the East-West Corridor occupy what seems to still be considered a fraternal right? Traditional inequalities in TT are being challenged, rather than reproduced, with good reason.

I understand those worried by the idea that, as one bredren put it, “Jus’ now we’re all gonna be pumping these SAGHS girls gas!” We are used to women’s subordination as shop clerks, domestic workers, informal sector workers, sex workers, caterers, cashiers, cleaners and housewives, even when they have a secondary-school education. 

We get worried when it seems that men may be moving downward in comparison to women, though women remain at the very bottom. The problem is when boys and men can no longer assume they will be on top. 

I also understand that there are real tribulations facing boys. These have been brewed through practices such as political patronage (which fed gangs), decades of judicial and prison system failure, economic contractions and neoliberal policies since the 1980s (which made the male-breadwinner model even harder to achieve), the crisis in social reproduction (as safety, trust and cohesion have fallen apart), intergenerational family violence, poor employment opportunities for university graduates (making education appear less relevant to economic power), and resilient ideals of manhood that have led boys to turn to leisure, crime, sports and entertainment in their flight from the feminine (which has meant that reading and studying are now seen as what girls do). 

Scholars such as Barbara Bailey, David Plummer and Mark Figueroa have also pointed to male privilege, or boys’ and men’s unearned advantage as a core catch-22. Figueroa writes, “Early childhood socialisation prepares girls much better than boys for the type of schooling common in the Caribbean. Girls are more confined to the house, more under adult supervision, given more responsibility, expected to be disciplined, taught to please others, and involved in doing uninteresting and repetitive tasks…In contrast, the mismatch between male gender identities and the educational system has grown. The old male chauvinist values are still inculcated in boys.” 

Competition is alive and well, and not just between girls’ schools, but between girls’ and boys’ schools, as they have always been. Increasingly, qualities associated with femininity are assets. Boys are caught in a gendered and generally misdiagnosed conundrum about what to do. 

We need well-educated men.

I’m also for addressing class inequalities in education, and widespread need for diverse learning approaches and inclusive (non-violent and non-homophobic) schools. We can continually remake rather than just restore ourselves as a republic. How depends on the analysis we choose.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 5, 2022.

Post 448.

SCHOOLS, which restarted on Monday, are the big story in parents’ lives this week. 

For children online, it can still be challenging to stay focused, and avoid chatting in a separate zoom or Google chat, or the temptation of video games. Some parents are not able or prepared to provide sufficient oversight. Maybe they are grieving from a covid19 death or depressed from job loss. It was also always a mystery how people were expected to go back to work while their children are home, or expected to both work well and parent well simultaneously.

So we can expect that there are those children with continuing periods of unsupervised internet access who are searching for pornography, answering questions they have about sex, and posting images of themselves inappropriate for adolescents. 

Teenagers are on their devices and phones all the time, whether gaming, messaging, surfing or watching videos. The algorithms are an adolescent dopamine addiction we’ve normalised after all this isolation. We can expect that many lost out on extracurricular activities, including physical exercise, and that’s reinforced screen dependence at a crucial time in social, communication, emotional and brain development. 

Some are still attending school from their beds, rather than a desk, or don’t have a proper quiet space to work, and are probably checking social media throughout classes, particularly when their cameras are not expected to be on. For tens of thousands of others, who are not consistently online or don’t have devices, there’s the well-documented and class-divisive effects on their school marks and future income. Will a nation of adults just accept that they will get left behind?

For those who have returned to school already, or just this week, did the Ministry of Education gather pre-opening data to understand how schools should respond to their surreal range of home realities and needs? 

If we don’t ask these questions and don’t have an education response beyond back-to-academics, to what extent will the return to physical school be a stereotypical example of what and who is lost by business as usual? When it comes to schools, it’s key to think about the profile of the learner whom we picture either having returned to school or about to return in the next months. Is it the one who can best or least cope? What does transitioning such vulnerable students require?

Is this a student with family members killed by the pandemic? Is it one more vulnerable to witnessing or experiencing family conflict or household instability? We know that domestic violence reports rose in 2020 and remained high through 2021. Should students be told that these are expected issues and they can turn to teachers or guidance counsellors? Is initiating these conversations part of pandemic ministry policy? 

Increased rates of grief, anxiety and depression among children are being reported by local psychologists. In the US, schools saw this in crying and disruptive behaviour, increased violence and bullying, and sadness and fear. We are better at paying attention to poverty and hunger, but our education system is poor at social-emotional skill-building, which is why our society is so poor at it as well. US schools also experienced a “river of referrals” for mental health services.

Globally, educators suggest making time to listen to students’ concerns, offering opportunities to reconnect one-to-one with educators. Before opening books and preparing for tests, recognise that some may have difficulty concentrating or returning to routine. That’s normal. Buffing or embarrassment won’t help. Maybe this student was being neglected or sexually abused at home. 

Rather than just lecturing about covid19 protocols, also respond to fears and grief, providing age-appropriate tips for recognising and reducing trauma and anxiety. Reports are that children recover from the isolation better when schools take time to create connection, empathy and community. Finally, provide opportunities for playfulness and fun physical activity, which help students cope with life and stress, enabling them to actually learn. 

Schools are the critical access point to children. The pandemic may have affected their attention, decision-making, how they learn and how they relate to others. It would have been great to see the ministry present a “return to school” social-emotional learning plan, explained with a proper communication strategy, and putting teachers and parents on the same page. Remember, the pandemic is not over and the world feels like a bizarre war zone where anyone could unintentionally kill anyone else in days or weeks. The school transition should recognise children as survivors of an unprecedented disaster who learn best when first guided to emotional well-being.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 22, 2019.

Post 347.

For a long time, I wasn’t into school work. Ziya was barely seven or eight years old. My own expectations didn’t fit the overly academic approach of Caribbean education. I disagreed with the teaching philosophy and psychology that gave children homework at ages five and six, required revising for tests, and substituted chalk and talk for learning through play.

I disagreed for many reasons. Primary schooling undervalues emotional development and social skills. It often leaves children bored and stressed, and emphasizes competition and hierarchy, rather than compassion and collectivity. A fear of making mistakes or doing anything other than what you are told sets in, leaving children less inclined to ask questions than to reproduce established answers. Children are being trained for a single, ultimate survival of the fittest that could determine their life chances. Dreaminess has no real place and certainly no rewards. There’s a formula they must learn to fit in.

I also disagreed because I teach bright university students who are worried and intimidated by everything: getting in ‘trouble’, what others will say, being seen as ‘weird’, and the risks of challenging power, injustice and hierarchy of all kinds. What’s the point of being smart, but passive or high achieving, but individualistic or imaginative, but afraid?

Finally, I disagreed because I remember being good enough in primary and secondary school, but not particularly high-achieving. I remember feeling less smart and less of a success because of it. None of that was necessary. I began to love my classes and naturally excelled at university. I was determined not to reproduce pressure, that at best is pointless and at worst causes harm, from a failure to recognize that children don’t have to always do well to do well eventually.

So, Zi and I would trek to coasts and rivers, and spend hours adventuring on weekends. I didn’t pay attention to her school marks because she’s a child and, frankly, they do not matter. I admired homeschooling, but as a working mother and breadwinner, couldn’t manage. Our compromise was a brief, blissful period of being in the school system, without being bullied by its demands. Providing a bohemian break from regimented reality during our time together was my personal priority.

You have to know your child in a way that no one else will, and commit to her developmental needs, her need for free time and outdoor openness, her obliviousness to scores and rank, and her dreaminess in a way no one else may value.

Then, last week, after her school’s achievement day commemoration, she came home with her certificates, and said she wanted to do well enough for a trophy. I wondered if all this time I had prevented her from being as proud of herself as she could be, but knew it was best that I waited for her to be motivated on her own and ready.

So, this weekend we began. We by-passed the beach and spent the day on math and grammar. It was long, but she had a goal, and my role was not to push, but to support her. On Monday, when tests began, I could see her greater confidence and certainty. She had grown up a little while I wasn’t quite looking, in her time and in her own way.

She came home, proud of her test results and prepared for more revision. I started to think about what it would mean for my time, my career and my sacrifices to be with her every step of the way, not because marks matter, but because feeling good about the results of aspiration and hard work lights a spark which lasts a lifetime.

How remarkable to catch when your child enters a new stage, requiring reflection on how you must grow too. My dream is to enable her to avoid the pitfalls of subordination to school, to empower her to excel but also to know how to escape, to emerge with fearlessness, kindness and dreaminess intact, and to nurture her instinct to learn from Orisha festivals, feminist marches, waterfalls, museums, and groups as diverse as market vendors, Jab masters, URP workers, and LBGT activists.

While Trinidad and Tobago stumbles through its myriad inequalities and failures, there’s one small person that most needs what I can uniquely contribute. This seems unimportant to write about in the face of national headlines. Yet it matters, for so many mothers like me lie awake at night thinking about what we can get right one child at a time.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 18, 2018.

Post 301.

It’s only week three of school. Last Friday, Ziya forgot her science books at home even though school bag packing was supervised. We learned to double check until her seven -year-old self gets it right. On Monday, I packed an award-winning healthy meal, but forgot her water on the kitchen counter. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than forgetting to pack her lunch cutlery a few days earlier. Next week, I’ll be happy just to get her to school in the right sneakers on P.E. days.

As a working parent, I might not perfectly manage the challenges of keeping track of multiple minuscule moving parts. Still, I’m deeply committed to a bigger picture: paying attention to what Zi learns and how, and nurturing her curiosity and interest in learning

There’s a purpose to learning that involves being organized, focused and high-achieving, but there’s also a purpose that aims at courage, problem-solving, cooperativeness and creativity.

Invest in education. It’s a simple idea. It’s what enables children to grow up to solve national problems. It enables men and boys wishing to meet breadwinner ideals to access higher, stable and legal incomes. Made a priority for women and girls, it’s the best way to both create a chance for greater gender justice and tackle family poverty. Finally, it’s the best way for a country to be a player, and to create citizens who are also path-breaking leaders, in the global economy.

Yet, it’s not simply about investing in education. The national budget for education is one of the highest sectors. Most parents invest in extra lessons for their children. Still, something is missing.

We know this from the failure rates, both at SEA and CSEC levels. We know this from the paucity of a powerful youth movement able to hold adults accountable for our crimes against their generation. We know this from the early ages at which boys become engaged by criminality, gangs, and the court and prison system, and from their far lower rates in tertiary education.

We know this from teen girls continued higher rates of vulnerability to HIV, sexual violence and unemployment. We know this from the hesitance of incoming university students to think independently, their difficulties writing well, and their limited sense of their degree as a public good that comes, not for free, but with civic responsibilities to a wider region.

Children don’t all learn by sitting and writing, which is the predominant way that we teach, leaving those needing different learning approaches cast as troublesome or incapable. We think of schools as teaching discipline before we think of them as our best chance for teaching youth empowerment, and the skills necessary to transform authoritarian power in politics, patriarchal ideals in families, and insecurity in communities.

The last time conscious youth rose up was 1970 and, we should ask ourselves, how can schooling both create another generation of inventors and entrepreneurs as well as activists and agitators? How can we rethink schooling entirely so that school is the one place that students are fighting to go, especially when family or community hardship are part of their realities?

How can we make sure that the poorest really do have the same chances as the rich, such that it doesn’t matter what school a student attends, for there is equality of opportunity regardless of the conditions and place of one’s birth?  And, when youth fall through the cracks, ending up in prisons, how can prisons become another site for education, in which those who enter are never going to return unless it is to transform, teach, mentor, and inspire?

Schools that excite and embolden rather than bore and alienate. Prisons that mirror universities rather than cages. An end to a system that has institutionalized extra lessons for those who can pay. Learning through active engagement with the culture, creativity, landscape and ecosystem around us. Education that creates children who can challenge us on our hypocrisies, greed, waste and carelessness, and grade us on meeting their generation’s needs.

If any of this seems unrealistic, it’s because we have to imagine a more inclusive vision as both possible and necessary.

We want girls and boys across the nation to feel loved and safe, welcome learning and want us to be proud. Therefore, our investments in their excellence and empowerment need to recognise what our own improvements must look like. Some days, they might be in the wrong shoes, but there’s a purpose to learning which we can still get right.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 19, 2017.

Post 244.

Back to school.

Ziya’s teachers have started suggesting that I invest more in her focus on school work and a routine of revision. She’ll need this in order to not experience Junior 1, next year, as an overwhelming leap in demands, pressure and material to be covered.

The girl is dreamy, drifting away from whatever she is assigned to doodle on her notebook pages, wanting to fall asleep on afternoons, more interested in chatting, drawing and play, and sometimes outright inattentive. So, I’m appreciative of her teachers’ insights and advice.

I’m also committed to developing her motivation and concentration, and guiding her to write more quickly and neatly, and take more initiative to complete homework. I’d like her to feel confident and capable of tackling learning and responsibility challenges, and to begin to develop the habits and skills to do so.

Another part of me is protective of her dreaminess and distraction. I think dreaminess and imagination are wonders and rights of childhood. I think her brain transitions to doodling when she gets bored, and that school shouldn’t consist of years of mostly boredom, which it was for the majority of us. Children get bored because of how they are taught so the challenge to adapt is for us, not them.

Does homework systematically nurture children’s creativity, courage, caring or love for learning, especially when it often consists of tired and frustrated parents buffing up tired and frustrated children? I’m unconvinced that ‘alternative’ assignments that require parents to search the internet or spend nights helping to put together projects really present displays of independent effort. I’d rather Zi spend her evenings drumming or dancing than doing more writing at this stage. I think we should go to the river or waterfalls every weekend rather than sacrifice them for revision. And, I think these sentiments are appropriate for the mother of a child just six years old.

I have many reasons for these priorities. First, I’d like Zi to learn to love learning more than I’m concerned with how much content she learns. I spent twenty-eight years in school and did my best learning when I loved my subjects, and that didn’t start to happen until university.

Second, I think that children grow into school practices at different rates and our homogenizing system misses this fact of childhood development. Maybe at six she doesn’t care about school for more than half of the allotted time for a subject, maybe some teaching styles are sheer tedium, maybe she won’t begin to reach her peak or potential for another couple of years. None of that speaks to her capacity for self-determination in adult life, but it could compromise that defining moment of childhood, SEA, which unfortunately establishes the overarching rationale for parents’ schooling decisions.

Third, I teach university students. Many come afraid of experimenting or getting things wrong, asking for example essays rather than trying to find their own voice, wanting instructions for every step of assignments rather than figuring it out, terrified or passive about communicating confusions or critiques with lecturers, pessimistic rather than utopian, disengaged from social transformation rather than demanding it, expecting good grades for mediocre work, and unclear about their responsibility to improve not only their lives, but the world. Marley called it ‘head-decay-shun’. Our courses have to pull out passion, political will, purpose, creativity, empowerment and a sense of care and humanity. It’s in the students already, just hardly still prioritized. When rewarded, I’ve seen so many of them spark.

I’m also most likely to hire young women and men who bring unusual ideas and angles, who aim beyond the status quo, can devise solutions and strategies, and are ethical, fearless and self-motivated. Passed tests matter, but not really. I’d rather a hunger for new experiences, lessons and opportunities to contribute.

As a mother, I see Ziya starting a schooling path that many have gone through, and survived just fine, some better than others. As an educator and employer, I also see the end results and its myriad costs.

Come Monday, when school starts back, I’ll still be wondering how to negotiate my own learning philosophy with that of the system of which we are also a part.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. July 7, 2016

Post 230.

Our school children marked a milestone this week. Some survived the experience of SEA. Some became the ones about to enter their time of preparation and pressure. Some, like my sapodilla, finished just her first year of primary school.

Up to December, she would cling on with both arms and both legs when I tried to leave her at assembly, and her tears would follow me to my desk at work. I’d rue all the constraints faced by mothering workers, and sit staring at my computer screen, bereft even though I knew Zi was likely to be onto a different emotion moments after I left.

Children are resilient. They both can and have to figure out on their own how to be all right, but that doesn’t mean that the desire to be there all the while doesn’t persistently tug on your heart.

I spent the year hearing about the seemingly daily making, breaking and making back up of best-friendships, and which boys got into trouble with Miss. Over this time, Zi came home talking about honesty, hygiene, hydroponics, homophones and much more. She learned those hand-clapping, sing-song games that generations of school children have taught each other, away from parental socialization, constituting a peer culture that crosses the region. Shy in front of strangers, she came third in her school calypso competition. She didn’t even blink about going up on stage. In the end, we underestimated her capacity to be brave.

A little person grew up just a little. Might other parents feel this way at the end of a school year? Nothing profound about it, just that milestones were crossed, while we’ve watched, trying to figure out that balance between being there and letting go.

Both Stone and I met Zi at the end of her final day of this first year. Ten years ago, when we were young, I was a poet and he was a DJ. I wrote him a song whose lyrics were plain and certain: ‘We are on every quest together. Our nest can withstand any weather. We live best with love as our shelter. Two little birds of a feather, who are blessed. I love you so endless. Endless’. Now, we are three.  We make up her nest, and these chances for togetherness don’t come again.

We walked over to the field where I played when I was exactly Ziya’s age. She climbed on the metal jungle gym, and swung upside down, as I had climbed on thirty-seven years ago, with scars to prove it. The saman tree still stood overhead, and I wondered if Zi would have the same childhood fantasies I did, imagining that fairies lived at the mysterious, unreachable top of the trunk.

A few weeks ago, she started talking about how she wished her toys would come to life. For me, it was Enid Blyton and the Faraway Tree series. Today, it’s Doc McStuffins. As I stood under the saman’s shade with her, I felt like I was in a strange time loop; the same age, same space, same metal jungle gym, same uniform, and the same galaxy of branches overhead.

Four decades separated our crossing of childhood milestones. There was no way I could have predicted the circuitous path that led me back here, and looking at the time between us, I cannot begin to fathom the twisty route that she will travel over her own forty years.

Our children’s test marks signal how well they did that day, not how hard they worked or where their passions and skills will lie, nor the extent to which they are truly blossoming, but at their own pace. We should be proud of them for trying, following through, and learning the myriad minutia that children have to.

These little persons navigate untold complications of adults’ world, grow up a little along their own circuitous routes, and enter and complete new challenges we all know are not easy. That last day, I made sure to be there because endless love and pride is all that I think one such little sapodilla wanted from me.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 23, 2016

Post 229.

I don’t remember being much of a good student in primary school. I was rarely in the top five, maybe once in a while in the top ten. I remember Common Entrance as terrifying. All I have in my head is a picture of sitting at a desk in a room full of wooden desks, with the bright light from a large window to my right and a ‘lucky’ stuffed toy we were allowed to bring with us in those days, perhaps mine was a white unicorn, in front of me, watching me writing, writing, writing until my hand hurt.

I passed for Bishops Anstey High School, while girls who usually had better marks than me, but didn’t survive that one exam as well as I had, cried and cried when results came out. It’s painful to think about even today, that pressure and those immense feelings of relief and failure, when we were so young. Nonetheless, I never attended high school in Trinidad, instead becoming a Queens College student in Barbados, and later attending three additional high schools in Canada. In all of these, I was undeniably, unremarkably average.

I don’t remember any passion for my subjects or any particular drive to do well.  I barely passed physics and chemistry. I feel I like was on automatic, doing school because that’s what adolescents do, not necessarily connecting to a compelling reason, plan or future. I was a reader, and I liked writing poetry, but I had no real hobbies or areas of excellence. My mother most likely despaired, wondering if I’d turn into a delinquent, while I got through reality from shifting locations in my own teenage dream world.

Adults are so different from children that we should reflect on whether they see the world, and our expectations of them, the way that we do. Their inability to connect to our standards and aspirations might not be a sign of present or future failing on their part. They are just growing at their idiosyncratic pace, and partially living in their own world.

Parental expectations can also be wholly unrealistic. We want our children to do well in all subjects as if it’s a national norm for adults to be great at eight separate things simultaneously. By the time we grow up, we accept that we might be better at art and math than biology or creative writing, but we scan report cards with that very measurement rule still in our minds.

Ziya’s only just started primary school, yet parents are already concerned about revising classwork in the afternoons and reviewing term material for assessments, producing a sit down and learn practice, and comparing the percentages that children get at the end of term. I believe in none of these. Afternoons are for self-directed learning, including play. Revising for assessments hides what was actually learned, or not, in class. Sitting still and memorizing book knowledge gives concepts that can be regurgitated without understanding of their applicability or meaning. Percentages are great for knowing how your child performs in assessments, but not whether she or he increasingly loves learning, which is a wide indicator of when students will do well.

Any time spent with our children will tell us how they best learn to think, question, apply and remember, and which skills they have mastered or are still developing. Parents’ job is not to follow the Ministry of Education curriculum, but to do whatever enjoyable activities help to strengthen our children’s’ capacities, without resorting to more school.

All this sounds like letting education slide, but I’m more concerned with our despair when children don’t excel early on. Not all can excel every year for their entire school lives. Not everyone’s academic performance will peak when they are children. They might finally find their feet in university, in a job or in a course that offers an alternative to traditional subjects. That was me.

I began to seriously excel at university, finally. A surprise to many, I ended up with three degrees, plus focus, discipline and ambition. My mother need not have been so worried, and perhaps as parents neither should we. That’s the lesson I now try to live with Zi.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 12, 2016.

Post 221.

The failure rate in my most effective first year course was the highest in ten years. There’s something going on in our education system, before students get to UWI, which has led them to check out of an investment in their own learning. I don’t think this deterioration is slowing down.

In 2006, students were assigned four readings per week, and mostly completed them in time for class. By this year, we were down to two readings per week, and even then, by mid-semester, the majority had stopped reading both or even one in entirety.

The course explicitly includes multiple learning opportunities, levels and styles. It asks students to do their own internet research and to present what they have learned about concepts and definitions to their peers to compare what I teach with their own findings. Assignments also require students to read newspapers or scan on-line media, and to present gendered analyses of its content based on articles or images they choose. These are also presented as a basis for peer learning, and tutors both facilitate discussion and provide feedback.

In addition to encouraging self-directed on-line research, analysis of media and peer-teaching, the course also provides students with an opportunity to undertake original historical research using sources in their midst. We teach them how to logically organize a short essay, define and apply key concepts, conduct an interview, and analyze their data. And, the end of term project is a group assignment that requires them to engage others on the campus in well-researched, creative and interactive ways in order to raise awareness about an issue of their choice. For six weeks, we lead students through the process of putting together this final project which is especially good for those who are better at discussion than essay writing.

Over the years, we have provided more and more detailed guidance. This year, I gave the students as close an approximation to the exam questions as ethical, along with rubric that identified how each question should be answered, and the list of three readings that provided core parts of the answer. There were four compulsory questions and no surprises or tricks. A depressing number of students failed, not just 19 out of 40 fail, but with marks ranging from 4 to 14 out of 40. We reviewed these exams three times and were unable to salvage any extra marks on students’ behalf.

I know this is a trend. Many other lecturers, and possibly also secondary school teachers and parents, will attest to this. In my own experience in university twenty years ago, I read books. In my second year Political Science class alone, I read Plato, Bentham, Rousseau, Mill and Marx. Whole books. There is no chance that could happen here today. Learning specialists suggest using more audio-visual materials and tech tools, but reading remains fundamental, and we see the limitations of students’ inability to deal with reading material when they enter both workplaces and graduate school.

Folks like Minister Imbert and others with more opinion than understanding resort to quick explanations for such failure, which often rely on blaming lecturers. Yet, we get students whose writing skills are far below the starting point we need, who read superficially, haphazardly or not at all, and who seem not too bothered about the idea of being responsible for your own education. Against uninformed stereotypes, many of us at UWI are passionate teachers who aim for that place that encourages students to question everything, to think about their contribution to our society, and to grow intellectually and professionally, rather than being a certification mill.

My course was designed specifically to connect classroom learning to the outside world and to make sure that learning is relevant, passionate, personal and collective. Yet, increasingly, that is hard to accomplish. My high expectations of students, that they will aim to be the best in the world, that they will read what we assign and perhaps more, seem less and less shared.

As I plan for a semester of teaching that begins next week, I hope to both understand this trend and be able to better address it in the mere twelve weeks of undergraduate life that lie ahead.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. November 3, 2015

Post 213.

Is your child’s homework sparking greater creativity? Is it igniting her imagination? Is it encouraging her to ask and follow her own questions about the world? Is it teaching fearlessness as well as compassion and cooperativeness? Will it make her more passionate about learning? Is her homework fun?

I reflected on these questions while on a boat to Nelson Island this Saturday, thinking about how much learning should happen outside of classrooms, promising myself to create my own curriculum of subjects like math, geography, history, science and languages by roaming as much of the country as I can with Zi.

For example, she learned about her indentured Indian ancestors’ confinement on the island, Butler’s six year incarceration, the words “workers’ rights” and “capitalism”, and saw the prison cells where the grandfather of a boy she knows was held in the 1970s. She counted islands and observed ocean garbage. I know many parents who value just this approach, involving their children in cooking, growing food, stargazing, and know-your-country-trips to highlight the relevance of knowledge and skills to their lives.

I know fewer parents as opposed as I am to early induction into stress-producing test preparation, free-time-eliminating extra lessons, and strictness as the key to academic success. I also don’t believe that children, especially five year olds, should get homework. Nor do I think children’s other activities should be determined by how much homework they have.

With test culture and standardization, teachers are doing their best, and schools can’t do or be everything. I’m not against revision, but feel that homework should either include or leave evenings and weekends free for other possibilities for dreaming, making-believe, and making unique and unexpected meanings. Mostly it does neither, and is more likely to be associated with boredom and drudgery than inspire delight and curiosity.

I have my own philosophy about the purpose of education, and my own take on schooling’s approach to learning as well as its weight on how learning is experienced in and out of school. I’m open to the benefits of school, and the genuine love and efforts of teachers, but after the bell rings, other ways and kinds of learning should be given fair chance. When can that happen when children spend so much time on homework so many evenings each week, even on weekends? Is more time spent sitting still, being stressed by pressuring parents, and being taught to complete work to avoid trouble the best lessons we can provide?

Other activities, like music or gymnastics, where the body moves as part of learning, even if it’s just hands beating pan or fingers tapping piano keys, are necessary for growing minds to map themselves and for different learning styles to find their space in ways that P.E. classes cannot substitute. After-school play helps children’s brains to develop capacities and connections which schools may be able to give neither time nor priority. Self-directed time is crucial for cognitive and emotional development, which are inseparable. For me, adventure, beyond habitual routes and routines, is key for continually opening those boxes that my university students eventually think from within, without even noticing their passivity to the status quo.

Imagine asking children to do whatever makes them super-excited about the subject for homework. What would they choose? And, if we tried that, what might we discover about how children wish to learn and actually do? Perhaps then, there might be less quarreling about not staying focused or taking responsibility, not wanting to do well or taking an interest in school work, and not trying hard enough at an almost everyday activity which, let’s be real, isn’t meant to be interesting or likable. We would instead ask ourselves about our own responsibility, as adults, for reproducing a national system where a good portion of students opt out of learning or forget it’s something that they were hard-wired to pursue and enjoy.

Wise parents warn me about homework burdens in years just ahead, the pleasures it infrequently offers, and its narrowing rather than expanding of independent reasoning. I’m not sure how I’m going to negotiate it then, but there’s a good chance I’ll decide while Zi and I are somewhere on land or sea, dreevaying.