Horrendous Day Yesterday

This back to school transition sure has been tough.

Monday, the start of the second week and the first day with homework, Sunny did fairly well. He earned stars for both Doing Homework Nicely and Reading Nicely.

Yesterday, at 4pm, I got a panicked call from Guy. Sunny was screaming in the background. He'd been asked to write just one sentence, and was having a total meltdown. I tried talking to him on the phone but he just kept repeating that his feelings were hurt because dad called him a three-year-old, cry, scream, cry, cry, cry. I tried to talk Guy down, then I called my mother, who was able to come over.

Guy managed to calm both of them down a little bit. Then, once my mom was there, they tried the homework again. More crying and screaming. He eventually did it after about an hour and a half of emotional storming. At least there wasn't any hitting, although he did call Guy a bad name.

He was allowed to go out and play for a bit afterwords. Then his friend came and told us that Sunny had just called him a bad name. His friend is a LOT more honest than Sunny, so Guy believed him. Sunny was grounded from playing outside for the rest of the day, and more screaming of course resulted.

When I got home, things were better for a while. I had some quiet time with Sunny, just lying together with him in the bedroom with the lights low, and that calmed him down a lot. I cooked us dinner, and then Sunny watched a video. I carefully outlined what we would be reading tonight, and reminded him that he had lost almost all his stars for today, but he still had a chance to earn his Reading Nicely star.

It was not to be. We ended up with more crying, screaming and holding down in the hallway. I was prepared to draw the line with reading. Last week he had five out of six stars for Reading Nicely, so I know he can do it. At one point he said he was done... if I let him hold the book, he would read it. I gave it to him. He bashed me in the face with it (I'm OK). I had to hold him down for a while longer. Finally, once he was all raged out, he read the book. It took just a few minutes. Then I put him to bed.

Guy was doing well for a while with the fits, but he seems to have reverted, and did not keep control of his temper when it came to yelling. He's very depressed and demoralized.

Homework was a big issue last school year, especially anything having to do with writing. If he actually sits down and does his weekly homework packet, he would do the whole thing in fifteen minutes, but there's always some kind of emotional problem. A bad homework session goes like this: half an hour of we're not helping him enough, it's too hard, cry, we're helping him too much, he knows how to do it already, scream, cry, crawl around banging his head on the carpet, throw the pencil, scream, cry, attempt to bargain, cry some more, then three minutes of actually doing the homework, finished.

I totally gave up doing homework with Sunny because he reacted very badly to my help. Guy was able to help him through it with much less storming. But if that's changed, "holding the line" on homework will not be tenable anymore. It would make all of us too miserable and hurt our relationships.

I'm planning on holding the line on reading before bedtime. But I came up with a better solution for homework.

One potential solution would be just not doing it and letting him take the consequence. Another would be to try having "no homework" written into his 504 plan. I decided to just throw money at the problem instead. Thank goodness for our generous adoption subsidy! So I've added extra time to his weekly tutoring session, and starting next week, he's going to do all his homework during that time. His tutor charges $35 an hour, but she's an ADHD specialist and boy is she worth every penny. She can get him to do anything learning related using a magical combination of positive feedback, distraction, small food bribes and firmness. She asked me yesterday if I had any special requests about anything that she shouldn't give him during a session, and I told her, "at this point, I don't care if you give him a pink pony!"

There will definitely be a lot to talk about at therapy tomorrow.

Dekalb School Blog Charges Black Racism

I just read an interesting post at the Dekalb County School Watch: SPLOST Spending for High Schools is Racially Imbalanced. The racial imbalance is supposedly black people denying money to whites and Hispanics.

I don’t know if people in south DeKalb know or realize this, but schools in north DeKalb are totally integrated and highly diverse. Conversely, schools in south DeKalb are almost completely homogenous as they are nearly 100% African-American. Ironically, north-end schools that are integrated have been ignored as far as repairs, additions and remodeling with SPLOST dollars, except Druid Hills - which has received some remodeling to their nearly 100 year old facility - and Tucker High School, which is being torn down and completely rebuilt - but then again, Tucker is 72% African-American. That is the only school in the north end of the county to be given attention beyond the standard auditorium/career tech packages promised, some even drawn, but not yet built. Chamblee, Lakeside, Cross Keys and Dunwoody still wait for their share of SPLOST construction. Lakeside at least has architectural drawings, but those have taken years to develop. Dunwoody and Chamblee have heard rumblings, but seen no action whatsoever. Cross Keys, built in 1958, is a disaster of a building and was apparently given all of the equipment and students from the torn down HS of Technology North - but no guidance or program director. Ironically, when we voted for SPLOST 3, Cross Keys was #2 on the list of priorities - just after SPLOST 2 carry over - and well before Tucker HS.

Yes, this post is interesting, but also chock-full of racist resentment. I've been subscribing to this blog for a few months in the hope that it would actually cover real issues over ALL Dekalb's schools, but I guess not. It's another "let South Dekalb rot" person. I've unsubscribed.

I agree on one point. Cross Keys High, which I think is the only predominantly Hispanic high school in Dekalb, has been royally screwed. Most of the Latino population in Atlanta are very new arrivals and need extra language services and supports that are just not being provided. For example, I met one woman, a Mexican immigrant, who was totally unaware that her son with a learning disability had the right to an IEP.

The educational power structure in Atlanta consists of entrenched elite white minority interests contending with newer-to-power elite black majority interests. Latinos are not even at the table yet.

Beyond the Cross Keys point, which I'll grant, all the statistics and SPLOST funding breakdowns simply obscure the fact that those high schools in South Dekalb are TERRIBLE, and the African-American parents are very, very unhappy with them.

So what if the whiter North Dekalb schools don't have a newer pool? Most South Dekalb parents would LOVE to be able get their kids into Dunwoody or Druid Hills. In fact, one of the main reasons those schools are so overcrowded is that people move to those areas in order to enroll their kids in school there.

Last year the (black) superintendent eliminated paid busing to charter, magnet, theme or out-of-neighborhood schools, as a cost-saving measure, so South Dekalb parents now have even less options for their kids to receive a quality education.

If real reform was carried out, and South Dekalb schools improved, there would be no imbalance. However, I doubt that the blogger wants to see that happen.

The serious problems in the Dekalb County School System are not rooted in reverse racism. It's an easy direction to point the finger, though. "Those minorities -- they take and take and just keep asking for more!" And if Latinos didn't happen to be convenient to the argument, they would probably be lumped in with African-Americans.

If these people are not willing to pull together with everyone else in the county, I wish they would just leave Dekalb and move to South Carolina or Cobb County or something.

I also really hate the way they appropriate the word "diversity". South Dekalb schools would be a lot more diverse if it wasn't for white flight. And Clarkston High School, one of the schools on the blog's hit list, is probably the most diverse school in the system. It's listed as 80% black, but because of its location at the center of the refugee community, that figure covers an wide array of African countries as well as native U.S. African-Americans. The other 20% is also incredibly diverse. Clarkston is an underfunded, dangerous school with substandard education known for warehousing refugee kids and graduating functionally illiterate students. I would definitely not want my son going there. But according to the blog, Clarkston gets more money than its benighted students deserve... how dare they have a new pool!

Educational Frustration

I bought some educational games for Sunny, but I've run into some difficulties. He gets frustrated very easily with me.

We were playing a game yesterday where you had to combine a blend and a word ending. Things were going great for a while. Then, he got stuck creating a certain word. Creating a word lets you move ahead one square on the board, and since he's so competitive it's a great motivation. He had to combine SP and AN and then SP and OT. He kept on saying "splan" and "splot". If I tried to help him he got frustrated and if I didn't try to help him he got frustrated. After a couple minutes he started getting too emotionally upset to continue so we had to put the game away and calm down for a bit. He was absolutely fine for the rest of the day. Later that night we all went to a great Ethiopian restaurant and had an excellent meal.

He does much better with his tutor! Ideally, I want to be working on reading stuff at home (games, flashcards) for 15 minutes a day. But I don't know how well that's going to work. We've got two problems: 1) he takes things more personally when he's with me and he gets frustrated. If I push him on something, I'm not just pushing him, I'm "not being nice to him." 2) I'm probably a bad teacher for a six-year-old with a really short attention span. My favorite student group is over the age of 30. I'm confident I'm a good teacher in that range, but otherwise, I'm really just treading water.

I may have to give up. Instead of doing work together, I could increase his tutoring from one hour a week to two. It's expensive, but that's why we get subsidy checks every month. We'll see.

Uncertainty and Preparation

I wish I knew when Sunny's final placement was going to be. We're really hoping for within a month.

The great thing about having visited Sunny is that we know he's in a nice home with great foster parents. We don't have to worry about him!

We're calling him every two or three days and talking to him for a minute or so. Mainly "what did you do today" conversations. Today, I told him I bought him a piggy bank (he'd asked me for one at his last visit). He yelled at his foster mom, "GUESS WHAT! MOM GOT ME A PIGGYBANK!" He was so excited. A simple thing, but it really made me happy.

We're in the middle of school choice issues right now. Our first choice doesn't look as certain as it did before. We'll need backups, and backups to the backups. There are a lot of options and we're starting to narrow them down bit by bit. Some factors are: academics, student-teacher ratio, classroom style conducive to a kid with short attention span, close to us so he can make friends with kids who don't live too far away, public (charter/magnet) versus private, cost, diversity.

Diversity is not our number one concern since a) Sunny is black b) we live close to the center of a majority-black city. We're looking at a range of schools from 40-100% black. In this context, I think of diversity as a balance that goes beyond black/white to include Asian and Latino kids, and with a mix of several different cultures and languages. I think this kind of diversity will be more important as he gets older, but right now it's not on the top of my list of priorities. The one thing I'm a little concerned about is his cute Midwest accent picked up from Polish/Irish-Americans. How much will it make him stand out? In first grade, I don't think it matters that much yet.

Sunny is extroverted, talkative and confident. His ADHD diagnosis doesn't hamper him much in social skills. If he's not getting attention, he does get frustrated very quickly. But he likes to share. I'm guessing that he'll be happy in a wide variety of social situations with other kids.

NYTimes Loves the ICS

This is the school where my husband and my mother volunteer as tutors. I know some of the kids mentioned in the article. The school is also the home of the Fugees soccer team.

NY Times

By WARREN ST. JOHN
Published: December 24, 2007

DECATUR, Ga. — Parents at an elementary school here gathered last Thursday afternoon with a holiday mission: to prepare boxes of food for needy families fleeing some of the world’s most horrific civil wars.

The community effort to help refugees resembled countless others at this time of year, with an exception: the recipients were not many thousands of miles away. They were students in the school and their families.

More than half the 380 students at this unusual school outside Atlanta are refugees from some 40 countries, many torn by war. The other students come from low-income families in the community, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the surrounding area who want to expose their children to other cultures. Together they form an eclectic community of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, well-off and poor, of established local families and new arrivals who collectively speak about 50 languages.

[...]

Check out the slideshow. The saddest part was seeing the refugee camp family photo, and hearing that the parents thought of their lives as absolutely finished... now, they're just living for their children.

Overall the article is very optimistic, though.

Praise, Asian-American Parenting, Self-Esteem, Behavior Change

This will be a rambling post that touches on Asian-American approaches to education, then takes a turn into foster care adoption world.

Following a link from the Process blog, I read this article about the negative effects of too much praise of innate ability. This excerpt sums up the argument:

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

The article doesn't make any mention of Asian-American parents. I know this isn't true of all Asian parents, but the general tendency, especially among first-generation immigrant parents, is to give little to no praise. In fact, insults are common.

I think my dad was extreme even for a Japanese father. The best compliment he's ever given me is "I guess you're not hopelessly stupid". My mother was the complete opposite. She also maintained high standards, but gave me unconditional support and constant praise.

The effective part of the general Asian approach to parenting is the focus on effort. The idea is that children start off stupid by default... but if they work really, really, hard, they might become a little less stupid. If you get a 99% on a test, it's because you didn't work hard enough to get 100%. That's the amazingly simple secret to why Asians tend to score higher on tests than other American ethnicities. There's no biological component whatsoever. It's just hard work from the parents and hard work from the kids. And if Asian families lack resources to do this hard work because of extreme poverty or family breakdown, then the model falls apart.

In adulthood, someone raised by this method doesn't need a lot of praise to stay motivated. I notice this a little bit in myself. When other people praise me it often feels weird and insincere. I'll expect it after I accomplish something really major, but otherwise, I'm thinking to myself, "I'm not two years old, I was just doing my job because it's my job, I'm not looking for a freaking cookie and a pat on the head." I have to remind myself that other people often expect this kind of praise and find it much more meaningful than I do.

The dark side is obvious: issues with self-esteem and identity. Someone raised by a hardcore version of this method often doesn't know why they're do so well in school, they just have to. It's like someone reached inside them and wound a spring very tightly then released it. Work, work, work. If they deviate from the course of hard work and excellence, they'll start to break down. They don't know what they really want to do in life or what they really enjoy.

Thank goodness my mother ameliorated most of the aftershocks of my dad's approach to education. Otherwise I'd probably be completely nuts by now. I don't want to go into any details, but I've accomplished a lot of things in my education and done very well in some competitive efforts, especially when I was in my teens. I've also been through some fairly spectacular failures. No one really taught me how to deal with failure when was a kid (my mother just minimized it, then redirected) and I consider that lesson the most important one I taught myself.

Getting to adoption, the article mirrors a lot of things we've been reading about in older child and foster care adoption. Some of our classes touched on it as well. The goal is not to create excellence, but to try and compensate for earlier trauma by building self-esteem. We might be adopting children who blame themselves for being taken into foster care; children who've been through years of emotional abuse and neglect.

From everything we've read, you cannot build self-esteem just by telling the child "you're good". Like "you're smart", it relies too much on innate qualities. It doesn't encourage the child to take action or change behavior. When the child does something they know is not good, the failure is all the worse. The child may even stop believing "you're good" statements.

Instead, we're supposed to concentrate on more sophisticated behavior change techniques. At Baggage's blog she has some great examples of those at work. Of course they're not magic, but I totally trust in the logic behind this kind of advice. I just hope I can follow through on it when we get a placement.

We're also supposed to make sure children don't associate love and belonging 100% with good behavior. Love should be unconditional, and we need to reinforce that even if they behave badly, we still love them, we just don't like the behavior and we believe they have the power and responsibility to improve that behavior.

The goal is wildly optimistic. Children build back damaged self-esteem if we can encourage them to work hard enough? I've always hated the saying "failure is not an option" but in this case, it might be appropriate.

Thinking Ahead to School

I found a great resource today: an organization called LEAD (Learners & Educators of Atlanta & Decatur). I haven't made any decisions yet about school for our future children, but I like knowing what's out there. LEAD is an association of secular homeschooling parents that teach classes for each other's kids.

I would probably start them out in public school, but if they don't thrive there I would pull them out in a heartbeat. One argument I often hear is that if children have social problems in school, you need to support them so they work their way through it, because they'll gain valuable life experience in dealing with adversity. Whenever I hear that argument I usually keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to attack another person's parenting choice. But I violently disagree with it. I had a lot of social problems at school, especially in junior high, and I didn't learn any valuable coping skills. It just made me feel more angry, depressed, shy, fearful, bitter and resentful. It prepared me for absolutely nothing, since I never faced as many problems later on in life; the older I got, the more civilized other people behaved towards me. I'm just glad I went into that very trying time with enough self-confidence that I could build myself back up again afterwards. The only useful lesson I learned is that I don't want any other child to suffer through the same problems.