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Warrior vs Worrier

Sep 26th, 2013 by

I’ve just finished reading Brian Epstein’s book, The Sports Gene, which I recommend highly. Among the most interesting parts for me were the discussions concerning the physical traits required to become an elite athlete in a given sport. Distance runners need long, skinny legs and some exposure to moderate altitude. Think Colorado or Kenya as opposed to Nepal or Bolivia. Major League Baseball hitters have eyesight at the outer limits of human capability, swimmers possess crazy long torsos, basketball players are equipped with crazy long arms, and chess players rely on crazy long memories. OK, that last one isn’t technically a sport, but it’s still an interesting part of the book.

My takeaway from these discussions is that my arms really are long for my height—not NBA long, but certainly longer than standard for someone of European descent—all my Dinka friends need to get their kids on the running track STAT (hello college scholarships!), and that my poor eyesight and flat feet are the alpha and omega of the countless physical traits that contribute to my poor athletic abilities.

All of the discussions of body types, altitude adjustments, maximum aerobic capabilities and the like were easy to follow and made sense if you’ve watched much in the way of sports. But there was another component of the book that represents scientific inquiry at a more nascent level: the head stuff. Some people simply want to be more active than others. Some people are more competitive than others. And some people are more sensitive to pain than others. It would seem that humanity is divided into Warriors and Worriers.

Is there any doubt which I am? No. There is certainly not. Or Matt? No again.

But what about Simon? As it turns out, he’s harder to pin down. On the one hand, he is certainly a worrier. In fact, he teeters on the edge of clinical worrying. The thought of his class being yelled at during math centers is enough to bring on morning tears. He’s not thrilled by the idea of substitute teachers. Concern over perfect behavior will prevent him from fully participating in class. And at any given time, his ankles are killing him, his neck is a wreck, his stomach hurts, he’s suffering from a groin strain, and he’s pretty sure he has a hernia. If we or someone on TV has had a given injury, Simon is likely to claim it for himself.*

He’s also a little timid on the soccer pitch. He’s much happier to outrun or out-maneuver a player on the opposing side than out-muscle him, and his usual MO is to back away from a scrum.

And yet, he will regularly run or play through pain. On one of our first runs, his foot hurt for a day after. When I asked him about it, he told me that it hurt for much of our run but “I didn’t want to stop.” I’ve watched him battle a stomach ache during tennis, playing his heart out and then clutching his belly between rallies. And just last week, he hobbled on a gimpy ankle into soccer practice, was in tears for much of the hour, but refused to come out for the scrimmage and ended up scoring three goals.

At which point the ankle problems returned. We chatted about the ankle on the way home, and he explained that it still hurt when he was playing, but that “the game looked like too much fun,” “I tried real hard to not think about it,” and “It hurts a lot now, but I got my hat-trick.”

It’s impossible to say at almost 7 where this is going. But one thing is already clear: Simon’s love of the game—any game—is enough to get him to fight his worrier tendencies.

*If he ends up going to medical school, he will have the most epic case of medical school syndrome ever.

Coda: Hours after writing this, I went to pick Simon up. The minute he saw me, he lifted up his hands to show me his newest injury. He has callouses from the monkey bars, four of which had partially ripped off from his palm, leaving a flap of skin and blood trail behind. Honestly, they were disgusting. So what does he want to do after school? Hit the monkey bars. And despite his admitting that his hands hurt “really bad”, he tried to convince me that they did not hurt on the monkey bars. “They just feel wet.”

 

Posted in First Grader, Jessica, Simon says... | 1 Comment »

Birthday Conundrum

Sep 20th, 2013 by

It’s Simon’s birthday in a few weeks. Last year, owing to his being at a new school, we skipped the class birthday party and stuck with a family one. Having now gone to at least a dozen class parties in the last year, it’s Simon’s turn to host his school friends. So I booked a party at Mockingbird Valley, a local indoor soccer complex, because much as I loved our farm party and our Nature Center party, soccer is Simon’s greatest passion.

Mockingbird provides field time with games and coaches, a party room, and invitations. This should be the easiest birthday party ever. Except we’re too weird to have anything be easy and straight-forward. To wit:

  1. Simon does not want a cake. He doesn’t like cake and has even begun refusing it at other people’s parties. After the last class bash, Matt treated him to a smoothie afterwards. I figured I’d order or (heaven forbid) attempt to bake soccer decorated cookies. Except . . .
  2. It’s traditional to bring cookies or cupcakes to school on the actual day, too. And as Simon likes cake in neither its original nor diminutive form, that sort of leaves cookies as the logical choice to bring to school. Except . . .
  3. Truth be told, he’d rather have extra PE for his birthday, something that was an option last year but might not be this year. For the record, Simon was one of only two students out of a class of 25 who opted for extra PE over sugar last year. Absent a PE option, he’d rather just go on and not have his precious math and science time interrupted by “another party with disgusting cake”.
  4. Then there’s the toy issue: Simon doesn’t really play with toys. He likes tennis, running, soccer, board games, card games, Putt Putt, hiking, drumming, reading, maps, math, and punk rock. I’d love it if he loved Lego, but it’s not his thing. Nor are most other items found in the toy aisle at Target. I can’t think of ONE present we’ve gotten for a friend that Simon would want for himself.* So I feel like we should do a no-presents party. Except . . .
  5. No one has done one of those, either! We went to one no-presents party hosted by a KIP friend during the preschool era, one party with a book exchange, and one party where the birthday girl was collecting items to donate to an orphanage. But no one has gone this route at Brandeis. I’d be tempted to a donation drive for something like the One World Futbol Project, except . . .
  6. I don’t want to presume that everyone has the interest or cash to take such specific instructions. More to the point, well intentioned or not, I’d feel rude telling people what they are supposed to be getting Simon. Therefore, I feel like our options are to say nothing and figure out what to do with the presents later or just bite the bullet and have a no-presents party.

If you are keeping score at home, I’ve just described a birthday celebration that ideally features no cake, no class cupcakes, likely no presents, and possibly extra PE. And while this is all fine and dandy for us, I’m wondering if it’s going to look like we are punishing our child to others. I mean, why not take Simon on a forced march for his birthday? Actually, he might like that . . .

*I’m struggling with suggestions for family. Most of what I can think of is too small (an Aerobie frisbee; a compass; Ten Days in the Americas board game) or too big (a US Map rug for his room, a Stephen Gerrard jersey, a soccer rebounder, a play tee-pee). I think what he’d most like would be for Grandma and Papaw to play tennis and golf with him, for Bubbie to keep on going to Putt Putt with him, for Uncle Steve to take him on a run and then to a batting cage, for Uncle Perry to take him to the driving range, etc. My present to him, if you’re wondering, is a basketball court behind the house and a session of pilates. He wants to learn more of the good groin stretches to use after a long run.

Posted in First Grader, Friends, Jessica | 1 Comment »

Altruism

Sep 16th, 2013 by

At the start. Behind me, in the blue, is the new operator of Fleet Feet Sports and the guy who won the race, running the 3.1 miles in 17 minutes. Or, as Simon put it, “the guy who beat us more than twice.” On the far left, in the orange cap, is another awesome Fleet Feet runner who also probably lapped us but cheered from the side lines while we finished. Runners are awesome.

If you’re on Facebook, you know that Simon ran a 5K yesterday. You also know that the event was a charity run for Dare to Care, and that Simon raised $510 for Louisvillians in need of food assistance. And you may have noticed that I was completely shameless in my shilling.

Completely, utterly shameless, for which I offer no apology. Here’s how the whole thing went down.

Last spring, Simon asked to go running with me. I said OK and took him out for a slow jog, curious to see how far he’d go. At the two mile mark I made him stop, but he didn’t need to. A week later, we went 2.5. I made him stop again, and again he didn’t need to. So the next time I threw in hills. Same deal.

Meanwhile, I noticed something. Runners are, on the whole, a friendly and supportive group. I was trained by Jeff Wells at Fleet Feet Sports to always smile and wave when you pass a runner in the opposite direction. Some smile and wave back, some just nod. Some don’t see you. And a very small number pretend not to see you. This cohort is overwhelmingly composed of young-ish males who could lap me in any race. It’s OK: I get it. If I had any real chance of doing a full marathon in 3 hours, I wouldn’t have the time or energy for smiles and waves either.

But the minute I got out the door with Simon, everything changed. Moms running with strollers stopped to wave and cheer him on. Old guys smiled and gave him high fives. Couples would stop their conversation to turn and greet him. And those super fast jocks? They nearly unanimously smiled at Simon and offered thumbs up and greetings like, “See you in Boston in 12 years” or “Way to go, little buddy.”

Shortly after our running habit began, two things happened: (1) Simon began asking about when he could run a real race; and (2) I became involved in the Dare to Care Hunger Walk, a 5K charity event. The light bulb went off immediately. On my own, I could raise a little bit of money. But ifSimon were the runner, I had a hunch I could raise a lot more.

To work out as I had planned, I needed a great August and September to train and a kid who could get on board with and really understand the cause. The latter happened in spades. Simon knew what Dare to Care was, watched the thermometer on his fundraising page go up, and did the math on how many meals his run would pay for. He was fully engaged with the cause.

The former, however, was a disaster, as summer finally decided to arrive in Louisville in mid August. We ran a couple of easy miles when we were in Asheville on vacation in mid-August, and then never again had the chance until yesterday owing to our schedule of school, holidays, family events, and hot and humid weather.

Fortunately, the combination of Simon’s love of running and base level of fitness, the thrill of having a number pinned to his shirt, and the determination to follow through with his fundraising plan carried the day. He was pooped at the end, but he did manage to jog a nice and steady 2.6 miles and then go all out for the final half mile. He chatted nicely with the director of Dare of Care, had his picture taken a lot, and even popped up in a crowd shot on the local news.

Charity runs might be the most perfect confluence of activities I can imagine for Simon, seeing as they involve sports, helping others, and math. Which is to say, expect some more shamelessness in the future. Shamelessness works. And in this case, Shamelessness put 2,040 meals in front of hungry people. Yay, Shamelessness.

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Dear Diary

Sep 11th, 2013 by

I learned a little about how Simon thinks at his school open house last night. The children all keep regular writing journals, math journals, and science and social studies journals. Which means they write a lot, and at open house the parents were invited to rifle through the children’s’ desks and peek into their journals.

In Simon’s math journal, I learned that “I love math because I get a lot of the questions rite [sic].” Hee. He does, and we all enjoy things we’re good at. I also learned the boy still can’t draw. Every story problem was illustrated with balls. Every one!

In his main journal, I learned that he loves the story of accidentally taking a sip of beer in Hilton Head last year (mostly because it makes his parents look bad, I suspect), that body surfing in the ocean made a lasting impression, and that he’s still bragging about a sliding goal-line save he made in a soccer game last winter. Then again, so are Matt and I. It really was a spectacular save.

Then I learned what Simon thinks of as mean. In his social studies notebook, he was supposed to write about a time that he wasn’t nice and/or did something that wasn’t right. Here was what Simon had to say:

“One time I was mean to my friend because she was a better dancer than I am.”

This had to be Caroline, but for the life of me I couldn’t picture him being actively mean to her. So I asked about it. This is what he had to say for himself:

“Yeah, one time when I was with Caroline she was dancing and I was angry that she was so much better than I am. I was thinking, ‘Hey, why is she so much better than I am at this?’ I guess I got a little jealous.”

“Did you say anything mean to her? Or do anything mean?”

“No, I just felt jealous.”

I was charmed by that answer, and pleased to have a natural opening to discuss jealousy and how it’s a feeling we all have sometimes. I was able to explain that he wasn’t being mean or bad to feel jealous, but that he’s right that it’s not a very nice way to feel. (According to happiness research, jealousy is the arch enemy of happiness and will eat you from the inside out if you let it go unchecked.)

Then we were able to discuss strategies for banishing jealousy. How if you tell yourself that you are happy and/or proud of someone’s accomplishments, and then tell the person directly, you often find that your heart comes around, the jealous feelings are gone, and you end up much happier for it. He agreed that this was a good idea, and knowing Simon, he will try this out the next time the green monster is an unwelcome guest in his head.

Having conversations like this makes me feel sorry that the clock is ticking on Simon’s willingness to confess deep thoughts in a semi-public journal.

 

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Distant Echo

Sep 7th, 2013 by

If the whole Simon messy desk incident from last week was shades of young Matthew, on Friday I heard a report that took me straight back to my own school years.

When I was in elementary school, I was a good student. By middle school, I was a very good student. And by the time high school rolled around, I was often tops in my class. I tried to be low-key about it, as the only person I was really competing with was myself. Which is to say, I didn’t care if 10 others in my class aced the same class or test I did, so long as I did well. Still, word got out. Which resulted in many, many late nights caused by the twin circumstances of my own heavy homework load and the near constant phone ringing of friends calling for help.*

Simon’s work load is, as one would expect for a first-grader, pretty light. And yet, the pattern has begun. He told me that when his class breaks up into math workshops, his friend Katie is the one who remembers the teacher’s instructions and reminds Simon of what they are supposed to be doing. Then Simon sits down and does all the computation for the group.That’s more of a Matt story than a Jessica one. I would have remembered the instructions. **

But the next one? All me. Friday is math catch-up day. The students grab their unfinished assignments from the week and take time to complete them and put them in the finished assignment basket. Except Simon has always already completed his math. (Or at least he thinks he has. I suspect he’s not explaining his reasoning as he’s supposed to, as he’s already explained to me that word problems are stupid. “Just give me the numbers! I don’t need a story about them!”)

Anyway, during math catch-up time those who do not have catching up to do are to choose a math reader and continue working. Simon grabbed a math reader today, sat down to his desk to plug away at it, and immediately came up against distractions from three sides. One friend wanted to goof off with him. One friend wanted Simon to read math problems for him/her. And a third friend wanted Simon to solve math problems for him/her. Simon’s actual complaint was, “With M– not taking it seriously and everyone else always asking me for help, I couldn’t concentrate on my own work!”

Boy do I feel his pain on that one. And though the stakes are currently low, this is a problem I plan to nip in the bud straight away. I told him next Friday to shush his friends and tell them that since it wasn’t group work time, he needed to be quiet and focus on his own reader. And if/when they continue to ask, I’ll then write his teacher and find out how she wants him to respond. But they key is that he has to be the one to tell his friends to back down or ask his teacher for help doing the same. Otherwise he’ll never learn to say no (I had problems with this), and he’ll be up ’til midnight doing other people’s homework in eleventh grade, too.

*This problem completely disappeared in college for three compelling reasons: (1) at a large state university, it was harder for word to get out; (2) my college was attended by LOTS of really great students (yay bigger pond!); and (3) the few times fellow students asked to borrow my notes, they were faced with handwriting so bad that a professional epigrapher would struggle with it. Heck, I could barely read it!

**One day, Katie will have a fine career ahead of her as a technical project manager. Simon can then be the hapless programmer/engineer who can’t remember what day it is but crunches numbers or produces code like mad. Seriously, I’ve been watching this dynamic at Wells Fargo for over 12 years now!

 

Posted in First Grader, Jessica, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

5774

Sep 5th, 2013 by

Happy New Year! I took a picture of Simon on the front porch today, all cleaned up and ready for services. For Yom Kippur, we’re going to get fancy and debut a tie, which I am somewhat ashamed to admit the boy has never worn. As for the shoes . . . I’ll give you two explanations and you can decide which one is the truth:

  1. I was trying for a boy-band, Boden catalog cool look, and bright sneakers were the way to go!
  2. I spent the better part of a day looking for dress shoes and found none (not one!) that would fit his skinny foot. My last hope is Zappos.

Appropriate shoes or no, I was somewhat shocked at how grown up he looked out of his regular casual play clothes. Can’t wait to see how the tie adds to the effect.

 

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More First Grade Chronicles

Aug 30th, 2013 by

This one is short and sweet. First grade has offered four amusing bits so far.

1. Simon’s school is doing Spanish this year, and his new teacher is Colombian and is taking an immersive approach. Which is to say that on the first day of Spanish, Simon’s teacher chatted away to his class in Spanish, and Simon had no idea what she was saying. Neither did anyone else, mind you, but this reduced Simon to tears at home, so afraid was he that he was somehow getting something wrong. In an effort to calm him, I asked if anyone else knew what she was saying. “Oh no, Mommy. When it was over, Dakoda stood up and said to everyone, ‘I have no idea of even one word that woman was saying to us!'”

2. Speaking of Dakoda, she might be turning into Simon’s girl Friday. Today he informed me that his drawer at school was a wreck, with papers stuffed in every which a way. According to him, he had a hard time even finding his science notebook. (Shades of his father I’m sorry to say.) Anyway, Dakoda watched him struggling to find anything and took matters into her own hands. Literally. She organized his desk for him. Simon thought that was really sweet of her, but I think Dakoda was just being an enabler. OK, a sweet enabler . . .

3. Speaking of sweet, I think Simon might be sweet on someone. Her name is Katie, she’s in his class, and they like to talk to each other when they do laps at PE. Simon thinks she’s a really nice girl, and he was careful to point out that her behavior chart was almost as perfect as his. (Purple, pink, pink, purple this week. Pink is one rung down from purple.) Today he was very concerned that he track Katie down before we left school so he could wish her a happy birthday one more time.

4. And speaking of school, he loves it thus far. So much that after a wonderful summer he told me today that he didn’t like summer break that much. It’s too much time away from school. Then he hit me with this zinger:

“I wish I were Chinese. Then I could go to school for 220 days a year instead of just 175.”

That’s my boy—putting a number on everything in sight.

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Purple is the New Green

Aug 22nd, 2013 by

At the bus stop with a friend on the first day of first grade

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Simon’s life is beginning to remind me of the movie Groundhog Day with its endless repetitive looping. Tuesday the kiddos within Jefferson County Public Schools all returned to school. Just like last year, I went to help sort the buses and arrange and/or verify afternoon transportation at school on the first day, a herculean job that left me too drained to post any first-day photos that day. [Hey non-ESL parents: fill out your d**n paperwork, will you?]

Yesterday was closer to normal, and Simon and I had our regular car-ride chat on the way home from school. Last year, Simon’s self identity largely revolved around being the greenest kid in class, with green being the color code for no behavioral issues. You could give up one class dollar and stay on green during the day, but not two. Simon gave up two dollars the entire year, literally ran out of room on his “star chart” (a star was given for each day a child ended with all the class cash he or she started with), and was widely regarded by his peers as being the best behaved boy in the entire class. He tied with a girl for best behaved all-round.

This year’s system is more complicated. So complicated that I can’t fully describe it here. It seems to involve clothes pins traveling up and down a chart, beginning with “ready to learn” and either moving down to “make better decisions” or moving up—way up—to “you rock!” Each step along the way also has a color associated with it, with purple coinciding with the “you rock!” level of silent, obedient perfection.

Guess who got to “you rock!” first on Tuesday? Yup. Guess who got there first yesterday? Right again. Guess who has now set the goal to not only get to purple every day, but to also be the first student to get to purple every day. You rock!

Also the same as last year? The competition with James M. over Lexia Reading supremacy. At the end of last year, James M. had reached Lexia Primary Reading level 5 while Simon remained on 4. This bothered Simon. Two weeks before school started, I let Simon log back in to get some reading practice. He, too, finished level 4, at which point two questions immediately came into his feverish mind:

  1. Was he now tied with James M.?
  2. Could he start level 5 to see what it was like?

My immediate answer was “no”, but I have been thwarted by a first-grader. You see, James M. logged in as Simon from his home computer last week and now knows that Simon has leveled. So he’s now fired up to finish level 5 and regain the lead. Which means that now Simon is equally fired up to begin level 5 to prevent James M. from building on his lead.

My only hope is for their accounts to expire—which surely must happen very soon—to end this madness. Because Simon is now working at a level where he can read the words just find but doesn’t always understand what they mean or how different words relate to one another. Partly this is owing to his working two grade levels ahead of himself, and partly this is owing to the association questions in Lexia being badly written. (And they are. Lexia is generally great, but their association games are consistently random and misleading.)

Also the same as least year? He’s bummed about the math. Last year’s report was “we don’t do math in math class” because it wasn’t double-digit addition. This year’s crushing blow was the discovery that first grade does not include multiplication, or “timeses” as Simon calls them.

Happily, there is one more similarity to last year. Simon immediately liked Mr. Sowder, and he took a quick shine to this year’s teacher, Ms. Thomas, as well. So much so that after first meeting her he told me this:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if one day 24 kids all got sick and stayed home on the same day, and I got to be the only student in Ms. Thomas’s class.”

A bit sociopathic, but charming in its own way. And now, if you will forgive me, I’m off to find colorful multiplication charts to hang in someone’s bedroom.

 

 

 

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Elite Me

Aug 18th, 2013 by

Back from vacation, with thoughts about the visit from my Israeli house-guest, whom I will now refer to as Daphna so as to avoid awkward Internet searches in the future.

My main takeaway from hosting Daphna was the sometimes disorienting feeling that resulted from being on an unfamiliar side of a class divide.

You see, I grew up middle, middle class. My dad was a pharmacist, a profession that did not bring in the kind of salary in the ’70s that it began to when shortages hit in the mid 80s. If you were a wealthy or upper-middle-class pharmacist, it’s because you owned your own business, something that rarely happens these days, but was more common when I was little. We never went without and my parents saved money for college, but our house was small and located in an unfashionable neighborhood, vacations were close to home, our cars were old, our clothes came from discount places and sales racks, and our meals were home cooked.

Had I been gentile, I probably wouldn’t have been that class conscious. But I wasn’t: I was a Jewish kid in a city with a small Jewish population that skewed heavily to the upper-middle-class. Surrounded by the sons and daughters of accountants, doctors, business owners, and lawyers who drove nice cars and lived in either big old houses in the Highlands or big new houses in the East End, I was low ranking and made to feel it at the synagogue, at school, and within the Jewish social clubs I joined in middle and high school.

My awareness of class started when I was around 11 and was a source of discomfort until I was 18 and left home for college. At UNC, I was surrounded by plenty of bright, scrappy kids from backgrounds a lot like mine. During my year at Oxford, I was an alien who could not be placed in the local class system other than as an outsider. At the University of Michigan, I was too busy to notice or care.

And then there was San Francisco, another place where, for the most part, no one cares where you are from. No one that matters, anyway. Half the city is there to escape from some aspect of their past or to reinvent themselves one way or another. And compared to gay runaways, kids that grew up in various sub-cultures, and the children of immigrants, my little story of sale-rack woe would have rightfully invited all kinds of scorn.

So after seven years of intense class consciousness, I haven’t given much consideration to my own position on the class hierarchy for the last 25. Then Daphna arrived and turned all my assumptions on their head. Daphna is a Sephardi Jew, the granddaughter of Turkish and Egyptian immigrants. That makes her second generation, like me, except that all my grandparents are European. In America, we don’t think much about the Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi ethnic split. Heck, we might not even be aware of it! The vast majority of American Jews are Ashkenazi, and the few Sephardi Jews that crop up are regarded as slightly exotic creatures.

It could not be more different in Israel. In Israel, the Jews of Middle Eastern descent arrived with a very different educational background than their Ashkenazi brethren, a discrepancy that put the Ashkenazi population at the top of the socio-economic ladder.  The head rabbis in Israel are also all Ashkenazi, creating a situation in which Sephardi religious practices are often considered second class illegitimate. Add in the darker skin of many Sephardi Jews and some lingering racism among (some) lighter-skinned Ashkenazi, and you end up with a class divide in which the Ashkenazi are the elite and the Sephardi disproportionately make up the working class.

You would think that in the 65 years since Israel became a state, these class distinctions would have evaporated. You would be wrong. Even today, every single Israeli prime minister has been Ashkenazi. The Ashkenazim are more likely to attend university than Sephardim, they hold more high paying jobs, they are more likely to live in nice neighborhoods, they are more often elected to high political office, and they are disproportionately promoted into high ranking offices in the IDF (Israeli army).

In Israel, the divide is very real and very serious. I got my first hint of this back in 1995, on the eve of my first ever trip to Israel. A friend advised me before I left:

“For God’s sake, Jessica, don’t use any Yiddish when you are there. It will call you out as Ashkenazi and immediately make a bunch of people think you are a snob and hate you.”

Really? I obeyed, but didn’t delve deeply into the source of this advice. I was in grad school and only had time to think about dead languages and cultures.

As I got to know Daphna during her stay, I became increasingly aware of all the hallmarks of elite status in my background. They include:

  • The fact that my forebearers all immigrated from Europe.
  • The fact that 3 of my 4 grandparents were Yiddish speaking and Orthodox.
  • That my father is a college graduate.
  • That my siblings and I all went to university, two of us away from home.
  • That one of my brothers and I hold graduate degrees.
  • That every member of my family has traveled out of the US (not when I was little, but from my late teen years on)
  • That I grew up in a house with a yard.
  • That I learned to drive when I was 16.

As the days went by, certain things started to make me feel self-conscious. All the doctors in my extended family? Awkward. How scattered my family is across the country? Ditto. The Yiddish that sprinkles my language without my even thinking about it? More of the same. Even my skin, hair, and eyes, marked me as different from Daphna, who informed me that I could pass as half-Sephardi, but no more. My mom, on the other hand, with her fair complexion, green eyes, and Germanic maiden name is Ashkenazi through and through.

Since Daphna’s visit, I’ve been reading more about the class divide in Israel. It’s uglier than I would have imagined or hoped. And what I keep coming back to is the utter strangeness that the same background that keeps me out of the social elite in the US is the same one that would open doors for me in Eretz Yisrael. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.

 

 

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Test Bias

Aug 13th, 2013 by

Any time I’ve read about testing disparities between socioeconomic classes, I’ve always assumed that it boiled down to educational support at home, enrichment opportunities, and the like. I had read that standardized exams were also culturally biased towards middle-class white kids, and while I didn’t dispute that fact, I couldn’t quite picture where culture came into the equation.

I sure can now. Simon has been back working on a reading computer program this past week in preparation to start first grade. I know he’s regressed a bit while we’ve been busy going on hikes and playing sports, but I thought it might be a good idea to blow off some of the rust before heading back to class.

He’s at the highest level of Lexia Reading that is realistic for him to work on, and he usually wanted me to sit beside him for moral support. We both got an education. In one game in particular, a game where students are to choose from among 3-4 diphthongs to create a word that best completes a given sentence, I mentally pulled up more than once. Here are a handful I can remember:

  • Coil the hose when you finish it.
  • Troy is a boy’s name.
  • The oak shaded the lawn.
  • Mom made a moist cake.
  • The hawk glides across the sky.
  • Roy put the clams in the pail.

The images I put in my head are of the ESL Somali kids who mostly live in apartment buildings and of pretty much any kid who lives in a densely populated, urban environment. Do these kids see people “coil” garden hoses? That seems pretty suburban middle class to me. Do they know the name “Troy”? Simon had never heard it. If you grow up in a high rise in the Bronx, your neighborhood may not have trees for shade, much less lawns, and I doubt the kids are naming them. Similarly, are those kids familiar with hawks? I’d bet not.

I can tell you right now that kindergarten-age Jessica–middle class, supported at home, and white–would have blown the “pail” sentence because (1) my family only used the word “bucket” and (2) I would have had no idea what a clam was. I didn’t live anywhere coastal enough for clams to be a big deal, and growing up kosher would have precluded my ever seeing one at home.

It’s not that I’m faulting the Lexia folks.* It’s not like they have sentences like, “Daddy likes to play golf at the country club” or “Caviar is delicious.” I didn’t see any sentences about summer homes, skiing at Jackson Hole, or boarding once you turn 12. It was all perfectly American middle class stuff. It’s just that not all kids are American middle class, and if you are not, you aren’t going to have the experiences or vocabulary to figure out words from context. I cited some statistics about this earlier this year:

“According to research, children from low-income homes know 600 fewer words as 3-year-olds than their better-off peers. By second grade, the gap widens to 4,000 words. This vocabulary gap in turn effects a huge gap in reading comprehension skills. Children can’t understand what they are reading if they have to look up very many words; they lose their flow. They need to know the word before they read it, and that takes repeated exposure beginning in early childhood.”

Bang! Simon was working on a level associated with second grade. How do you catch up kids in reading if their vocabulary is too small to support the reading material available? I don’t have any answers here, but I sure hope someone out there does!

* I’m not faulting them for culturally biased sentences. I am faulting them for these:

  • It is not safe to eat raw fish.
  • It is a joy not to have to go to work.

So. Given the state of food safety in the US, I would argue that it is safer to eat raw fish selected and prepared by a sushi chef than it is to eat a hamburger, melon, sprouts, or a salad. Remember that last outbreak of e coli infested hotate that sickened hundreds? Me neither.

The second sentence just made me laugh. Here we are in the 21st century, putting the words “career readiness” on every piece of educational material printed anywhere, and an educational company states baldly that working kinda sucks. Do we have to tell them that in the primary years?

Posted in First Grader, Jessica | 1 Comment »

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