COLUMN: Marking Time
The beans are picked and pickled, the county fairs are over and department stores have replaced tank tops with overcoats.
It’s that time of year — to paraphrase a line from “You’ve Got Mail” — when you feel the urge to buy school supplies and give someone a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils.
The older I get (There you have it. The first time I have every used that phrase!), the more I believe reading and writing and arithmetic are just minor elements of what a student should receive in school. This might evern be stuff on the fringe of education. I’ve even decided these topics might be easier to teach than what makes people work right inside.
Stuff in the core.
I’ve said many times that next to singing at a funeral, teaching school is the toughest job in town, and I believe that. But there are a couple of things that I wish every teacher in Utah would promise to feed — hand-feed one at a time, if necessary — to each of their students.
The first thing is hard to put a name on, hard to define exactly. Spouse and I were comparing the lives-to-this-point of some young adults we know. It was noted that some were doing “better” than others, or so it appeared, and we wondered what the denominator was that pushed some higher up the hill than their peers, though they all struggled with similar issues and environment during their growing-up years.
I said it was self-esteem.
My mind was on that subject because I had just heard a report on National Public Radio regarding a program tested in the Seattle area. Researcher David Hawkins came up the plan in 1981. Twenty years ago, 800 first graders from 18 elementary schools were selected. Not all first grade classes participated, by design. The researchers wanted to track the success of the selected groups or classes against those who received no input from the program.
For lack of a better term, the program was based on what teachers and trainers called “bonding.” One principal said, as an example, her school committed to greet positively each student a minimum of four times before they got to their first classroom. Students were greeted coming off of busses, out of their parents’ cars, coming up the sidewalk. Also, all feedback began with a positive stroke and the emphasis was on, well, bonding with the child. Children were taught specific skills, such as waiting their turn and recognizing the feelings of others. Everyone knew self-esteem was more important than test scores.
A decade later the students were surveyed and it was found that delinquent behaviors, gang participation, drop out rates and substance abuse were all lower. Fine. That might be expected. But the real bonus for the participants and researchers came when they asked even more personal questions. Published results show that the project’s children were also significantly less likely to have engaged in risky sexual behavior, and births from unmarried youth in the subject group were half as high as the control group.
Sex and self-esteem. The plot thickens.
Will helping a young child feel comfortable in their own skin — ooh, there’s a fair definition — really lead to more appropriate sexual behavior, not to mention academic success? Is early sexual activity just compensation for a sagging self-image?
Now, I suspect that the majority of elementary teachers do a wonderful job with self-esteem stroking. I think the concept of showing appreciation and bonding is well-entrenched in the elementary ranks. But I’ll be honest — it is so-called junior high level that worries me. I have seen with my own eyes a child whose esteem was so shaken and shattered on the first day of junior high — the first day, mind you, the first day this child stepped in the building — that more than a half dozen years later she is still dealing with it. Her education experience and her life was altered that day in so-called “middle school.”
When I got married, I didn’t know a dang thing. I didn’t know about listening skills, about minimizing, about the dangers of sarcastic humor, about all this Venus and Mars stuff. When I had kids, I even got dumber. Thus, my second choice of topic: Parenting. I know some districts teach quasi-parenting classes as part of a health class or lifeskills course. But we need honest-to-life parenting classes, with values and morals and stability out on the table, not just a doll that looks real and pees. Let those who will howl about values being taught howl, but we aren’t talking religion here; we are talking common sense. If we don’t do a better job of teaching teens the skills to raise a family, we will continue to see families suffer. And since the second-biggest “we” in that equation is the school system, someone needs to step up to the plate.
At the end of the day, teachers should note on their rolls those students whose self-esteem did not drop a notch and those students who need extra attention if they ever have a hope to be successful parents.
See, arithmetic is a lot easier.