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Anti-Greed Resolutions
December 30, 2008 12:00 PM Filed in: All Levels
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Dear Dr. Fournier: What can I do with my children while they are out of school for the holidays? I want to keep them in the mood to learn so it’s not a Battle Royale when school resumes in January, that is, if we still have school and a country come January. |
The Assessment: Your comment, “If we still have school and a country come January” leads me to believe you are concerned about not only your future but your children’s as well. Many of us are concerned about the future of this country. While it is appalling that our voices seem to be falling on the deaf ears of our elected “leaders (?),” it is equally appalling that our country’s business and industry “titans” cannot manage their companies properly in good times so they will not have to run to the American taxpayer for money undo their personal greed and atrocious mis-management in bad times. With Financial Institutions wanting bailouts and the American Automakers now standing with their hands out while their personal pockets are full of corporate bonus dollars for being failures at their jobs, one can see clearly the horrors of greed. Sadly, it is you and I, the “little” people who suffer from this greed the most. There are lessons to be learned here but I fear the ones who need to learn these lessons possess too much hubris.
First, we must keep things in perspective. Concern is one thing; worry only makes things worse. If we stop for a moment and think about things clearly, we’ll see that our problems are not insurmountable. When you have angst over things you cannot control, your children pick up on it and in turn, they will begin to share your anxiety. It may sound cliché, but if you look around you, you’ll see people right here in this country who are in much worse shape than you or I.
And, you are right that it can be a battle to get children refocused on school and back on a schedule in January after parents have allowed them for two (in some cases three) weeks to do totally mindless activities during the holiday break.
What To Do: Use the holiday break constructively and put my Better Solution for a New Year’s Resolution™ strategy in place with your children as well as yourself.
New Year’s Resolutions are usually selfish or at least about some type of self-improvement. While self-improvement is good, now is the time to teach your children that it’s not all about them. I can’t think of a better moment in history to teach them that they can make a difference in the world through caring for others. Your children are in the generation that will be accountable and responsible for changing the culture of greed in this country to a culture of cooperation and caring. If we do not teach our children to do this, we deserve the demise that will follow.
Start the holiday with a periodic family “soup” night as the only meal of the day and sit in an unheated car for an hour with just your coats as you write your New Year’s Resolutions. Start with what you can give away to someone less fortunate than you. On New Year’s Day post all their solutions for giving on the dining room wall. Discuss the ones that can be accomplished immediately and those that the family commits to be done throughout the coming year.
Add to the list commitments to care for each other such as helping clean up the kitchen after meals, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, and calling sick family and friends to offer “hope you feel better” wishes.
Above all, care for others, keep up hope and your children will see that caring is the road to a happiness that will thrive within them.
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Good or Bad?
December 23, 2008 12:00 PM Filed in: All Levels
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Dear Dr. Fournier: Our children are in public school because we cannot afford private school. They come home almost every day having learned a new curse word or disrespectful action. My husband and I are trying to teach them morals, ethics and Christian principles, as it should be, but I need some encouragement, especially this time of year. |
The Assessment: It is a shame yet also a blessing that people think about acting and teaching “good” at this time of the year. The shame is many people are unfazed about how immoral and unethical they act all year long.
There is no shame in parents not being able to afford private school for their children. Private school as it related to this is not an advantage. Why? Because children come home from exclusive private schools, even religious ones, hearing, seeing, repeating and modeling as much immorality and unethical behavior as public school students do.
From an education perspective, it matters little because both public and private schools teach from the outdated curriculum of the agricultural and industrial era.
At one point in time, schools taught ethics and manners – saying please and thank you, listening carefully to others, waiting for your turn to speak, and shaking hands when introduced to someone, among other things.
Today, these schools are so focused on test results that force all students to answer a question with the same answer that they don’t have time to correct all the wrong behaviors and bad habits that are being imposed on your child by classmates whose parents have not taken the opportunity to teach their children ethics and morals, good manners and behaviors, and caring for others.
You are right to say, “as it should be.” I laud the fact you and your husband understand it is your responsibility to teach good behavior, morals and ethics to your children.
What To Do: Use my Picture of You™ strategy to teach your children how to act with etiquette, morals and ethics toward people.
For example, let’s say your child hands in his homework to his teacher on a crumpled piece of notebook paper with mark outs and chocolate smudges on it. The first thing the teacher sees is his name on the homework and then immediately associates characteristics to your child based on the state of the homework paper. The teacher is now developing a picture of your child based on these characteristics: disorganized, dirty, and/or trashy. That same teacher may be writing on the board moments later and lecturing to the class when your child talks out of turn, adding the characteristic of disrespect to the picture of your child.
Make sure you are teaching the most important ethic to your children, that we should care for each other, each and every day of the year, and not just at the holidays. God has given us all the same gift of caring to make the world a better place. It does not matter your faith, Muslim, Jew, or Christian and it does not matter the time of year, as we should care for each other the year ‘round.
Each group will undoubtedly celebrate this time of year according to the principles of these respective faiths; however, each of these faiths has as its central core, the teaching to care for one another. I recently read a holiday ornament that said “Santa, Define Bad!” Teach your children that the answer does not come from Santa. The answer is already written in their hearts. “Bad” is anything that does not result in doing good for others and for the world. When does your child know they have done the good thing? When it brings joy to their hearts. Happy holidays.
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Home rules, not school rules
December 16, 2008 12:00 PM Filed in: All Levels
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Dear Dr. Fournier: I’ve been saving your columns as resources for when my sons start school. What do you offer parents that will help prepare children for school? I wish I would have known about your columns when I was a fifth grade teacher. |
The Assessment: I’m assuming you have been around your children during the day and observed them closely. One son may watch television programs aimed at children such as Sesame Street. The other may pull out Legos® and play for a while. Becoming bored, this son may stop in the middle of building something and go to his room for other toys. He may even yell out for you to come see something in his room. The other son may hop up in the middle of his show and go to the bathroom, without approval or permission or head for the kitchen to get a snack or even ask for his lunch outside of the “normal” lunch hour. Why? Because you use my Live Like a Family™ rules at home regarding these activities.
First, let your children be children for as long as they can be. School comes soon enough and once they enter, they will be slammed with the outdated teachings of our agricultural and industrial era school system along with the pushed-down acceleration of data, which is developmentally inappropriate and, for too many children, damaging.
What To Do: Many parents use my Red Light/Green Light™ strategy to explain my Live Like a Student™ rules to children. Have a pretend school day in your home once or twice a week to begin showing them how school will be different from home because of school rules.
As you have these dress rehearsals for school, call out “red light” when your child does not follow a Rule of School™ and have him explain the rule so you are confident he understands it. If he does, call out “green light” and resume “play” school. Soon, your children will become used to school rules they will have to abide by.
For example, explain they cannot jump up in school any time they want and run to the bathroom. Explain they must raise their hands, be recognized and receive permission. Likewise, explain they cannot simply shout out in class as they are allowed to do at home and that they cannot stop doing something simply because they become bored with it.
Purchase a backpack, notebook and pencils. As their pretend teacher, give them a “class” assignment. Have them use the pencils and paper, even if only to draw. Explain to your sons that they will be bringing schoolwork home for you to review and sign, as well as homework they will have to complete at home.
Show them how to place their papers and pencils in their backpacks in a neat and arranged fashion. This teaches organizational skills. Have your sons place their backpacks in the same location each day after packed and ready for school then explain to them that mornings will be hectic and they will need to have everything in one place, ready to go as soon as they are dressed and have finished breakfast.
Explain to them that rules, at home or school, are to keep them safe. Make sure you add my When Kids Get Home Rule of School™ for your children. The first thing they do the minute they get home is seek out Mom, give her a hug and say, “Hi, Mom, I’m home from school and I can’t wait to finish my homework so I can stop being a student and be your son again!” The moment they are finished and everything for the next day is in the same place, announce they are now free to go to the Live Like a Family™ rules and celebrate the rest of the day.
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Rhee's Sisyphean Rock
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Dear Dr. Fournier: I’m reading a lot about Washington, D.C. School Chancellor, Michelle Rhee, especially since Obama won the election. What do you think about her and what she is doing (or not doing)? I live in Hagerstown, Maryland, which is close to Washington. |
The Assessment: We’re in an economic period that three generations – Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y – have never experienced. Only those left from the Greatest and Silent Generations know the despair and demise that came after a lavish, freewheeling, greedy period in this nation’s history called the Roaring Twenties. It was a time characterized by over-indebtedness and institutional malfeasance among other things. I’m of course referring to the ’29 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. Apparently, we have we learned nothing from history.
Here we are again. Over-indebtedness and government, institutional and business malfeasance have caused today’s economic crisis. Companies now must downsize if they are to survive. The repercussions of this new reality? Plenty of Americans are unemployed; more are soon-to-be unemployed. These people have lost or are about to lose their jobs, life savings, homes, plasma TVs, cars and everything else they worked so hard for, as we face this generation’s Great Depression.
What I think about Michelle Rhee is that with a looming Great Depression 2 on our hands, politicians are likely to not listen to the need to take a wrecking ball to the current education model. That means Ms. Rhee faces a near impossible battle to win, that of “fixing” the DC public school system.
What To Do: What worked at one time in this country’s history is an education model that not only transformed the United States, but it also brought about a completely different world. That model was created for the agricultural and industrial eras, ones we are far removed from yet we continue to educate our children based on the horse-and-buggy and the Model T mentality. This is the system Ms. Rhee is trying to fix and I want to bury it.
There are few of us in the battle for our children’s minds and hearts in hopes of educating them with new paradigms of thought. Instead, our children are growing up to become adults that shortly will end up at parents’ or someone’s doorstep cloaked in a pink slip.
Society is happy educating our children in these bling schools. I am not. Children educated in these schools will live a life of thin pockets carrying deadly plastic aplenty. Bling schools cannot fulfill parents’ and children’s hopes for an education that will make them competitive in the coming synergistic era.
This current economic meltdown has driven home one basic fact: greed and the bling life is a virus sapping at the economic foundation of this country. And our children come out of schools not knowing how to make change for a dollar without a machine’s help or an understanding of the value of that money, which, by the way, doesn’t buy happiness and can’t be earned by old paradigm educated children.
Ms. Rhee will not get far trying to fix bling schools. Instead, she must be bold and demand that we take the wrecking ball to our outdated education model, which is turning us into a nation of people with bankrupt minds, a bleak prospect for our future.
We must build a new education model, not try and resuscitate the dinosaur.
President-Elect Barack Obama has a mandate, if he desires to use it, to reinvent education in America so that we are assured of developing successful adults for 2020 and beyond. Ms. Rhee should demand he do so. Until she does, she will be no more than Sisyphus with her vouchers, charter schools and other band-aids.
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Bling is no solution
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Dear Dr. Fournier: My seventh grader started this year in a brand-new school. As parents we felt, finally, that the school system had done something to better her education. Yet it took five weeks for her to receive worn-out textbooks. The teachers made do by assigning projects. Some did close to nothing because they don’t know the subject matter. The computers are not all set up yet. The science lab teacher has asked parents to pitch in with money. Only those with means, even modest, can comply. This leaves the rest to wonder if their children will receive a seventh grade education. Now school budgets are being cut! My daughter had all As and Bs on her first report card, which is meaningless. As a concerned parent, I know she learned almost nothing. I cannot afford a private school. Will my child be left out of the American dream because the public school she attends doesn’t have the money to educate her? |
The Assessment: There was a time when our public schools were a source of pride – the bedrock of American democracy. What has happened? Most Americans are right now wondering if their dream is vanishing before their eyes.
Approximately 23% of public school parents ask themselves if their children will be left out of an education, without which the American Dream is unattainable. It is not fair to surmise that the other 77 % are all that satisfied. The current economic decline has now refocused our attention on education yet I have been saying for years that we have a pointless attachment to an old model of teaching and until we are willing to let go of this attachment, the sad truth is that American education will continue to decline, even past the current crisis it is in. Yet, the mere idea of brand-new buildings enhances our expectations – just because they are new.
What To Do: Somehow, somewhere, someone decided that the shiny shell was more important than making sure – before it was built – that staffing the school with knowledgeable teachers was more important than the bling. We are in desperate need in this country of first having teachers who actually know what children need to learn without hamstringing them to textbooks. We should curtail construction spending while allotting precious budgeted monies to purchasing what is needed to educate children in a way that prepares them for the roles they will be playing fifteen years from now. What would that require? It would require reinventing school from the inside out.
Granted, your brand-new school is a disappointment, yet even if it came with all the bells and whistles money could buy, you would still be giving your daughter an education that will make her fit for employment in 1980 or thereabouts. Michelle Rhee, take notice.
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