Parenting #7: Crappy Curriculum Continued
notes from a meeting of the tiger moms
Crying in fairy tales is like one gigantic tear, hardened into a swing for all human sadness to rise and fall. Back and forth. Back and forth. A glistening swing pulled back by all the mothers who let go, and send their children into the air. A whooshing sob made out of the place where abandonment and liberation overlap, and punctuated by a mother fading backward into the distance. - from Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily
After Olive’s SST I was connected with another parent from school who advocates for better literacy through the SF Parents Coalition. We got in touch and she encouraged me to join a meeting, saying that I was in good company and that many parents were having an issue with the system and the way it undeserved kids' educational needs. The meeting was on zoom at 8pm and it was not well attended. There were maybe eight of us there outside of the organizer, a sharp but soft spoken person and we all introduced ourselves giving a little bit of our stories and backgrounds as we did.
One person was a parent and a pediatrician and she had taught her daughter how to read during the pandemic, while also caring for another younger child. This boggles my mind. Another woman had three kids in Mandarin immersion school, despite there being no Mandarin speakers in the home, and after that path all four had become staunch advocates of the public school system so much as to say that they hated private school. Another woman had 3 kids under 6 years old and was able to discuss the various complex rubrics used to evaluate curriculum like she might have been explaining how to roast a chicken. There was a preschool teacher who taught Spanish speaking students and her camera was off. One guy called in from the gym.
I muddled through a story about Olive which seemed more personal than it needed to be and felt mostly out of place. Somehow we all had our reasons for being there but the purpose of our being collected didn’t seem clear. What were we trying to achieve? Were we just warding off our own insanity? Were any of us able to just be good enough parents even at all?
The organizer of the meeting reported that while the district had evaluated the current curriculum and come up with a new one for the pilot program next year, the families who had initially been underserved had not been consulted about either their concerns or feedback on the new curriculum. In fact, we all learned, the new curriculum failed to pass the standards of the board of experts who had advised the process to begin with.
It did not surprise me that the process of selecting a new literacy program was messed up from the start. As my friend Bob, veteran New York City public school English teacher so clearly put it - there’s a shitload of money to be made in curriculum changes and besides teaching is so much more than that anyway. Connection is not something you can put a price on and you know you’re in trouble when that’s where your train’s going. But when kids are underperforming, a big question seems to be, who is to blame? And is it so wrong to at least try to come up with a systematic way of teaching basic skills so that teachers, who also were not incidentally not getting paychecks because of some technology glitch, aren’t left trying to make up their own strategies from scratch? I don’t have the answers.
I did learn that good literacy programs that integrate reading into thematic learning are out there to buy, but San Francisco won’t buy them - either because they have to buy TOO many of them (some of them aren’t offered in dual languages) or because it feels out of control to have different curriculum offered to different programs even though the programs are already vastly different. It does seem complicated. But the end result of this round of changes is that the new program rates no better than the one the district already has.
It’s hard not to get disillusioned.
Is it any wonder, then, that the people that I met with during Olive’s SST looked exhausted?
What I’m trying to tell you is that the program that teaches kids how to read is teaching them instead to feel shame, is what I said and all the moms there looked at me with that vacant look; the one that showed that they too had been driving around in circles, looking for a way out of “mother,” out of solving all the problems by themselves, out of figuring everything out with a shoestring, out of over protecting or under protecting their kids, their students or even themselves.
We had a safety person come to school, Olive announced, while we were showering off in the pool bathroom after a swim lesson on Wednesday.
Oh, I said, which is my way of acting disinterested but wanting to know more.
We talked about gun safety and body safety, she said as she pulled back her hair.
Body safety, it seems, is still being taught the same exact way as it has since the 80s. It’s just you and your doctor who are allowed to touch you, she said, and there are rules for your doctor: a parent must be in the room, your doctor must be clothed and it must take a short amount of time.
It occurred to me that there is no mention of consent, no mention of welcome touch, no discussion of what happens when peers want to touch each other, which already happens on the regular during playdates with friends.
What are the rules around guns, I asked?
Do not touch a gun unless a grown up is in the room, she said.
Do not touch a gun, I want to say, and have that be the end of that all together.