Could you condense everything a mother says in a 24-hour period into a song just shy of 3-minutes sung to the tune of the William Tell Overture? This is so funny! Whether you've been the one saying all this or on the receiving end (or both), this will bring you a smile. Promise!
It's the 1930s and young girls, particularly poor ones, have few options. Adele, raised in the dust of granite that her father cuts, can barely think beyond her beloved town of Stony Creek although she rebels at the idea of an arranged marriage her parents are sure to make for her. Then her older brother dies unexpectedly and suddenly Adele has a choice. She cuts her hair, binds her breasts and puts on pants to attend Yale University under her brother's identity.
As we're entering the fire season here in southern California, I remember the first time we lived through it about four years ago. This photo shows the view from our back yard. By nightfall, the flames glowed through the smoke.
We joined our church group for a camping trip in the mountains this weekend. Thanks to a borrowed tent and stove, we made it. The boys enjoyed running through the trees with their friends, and Jack and I enjoyed the luxury of their prolonged entertainment so we could chat with our friends. And, of course, being in nature always makes me feel rejuvenated--like I can breathe deeply again and not worry about things in the normal hustle and bustle of life. So, even though the air mattress we slept on made me feel as if I was on a boat about to capsize in the waves, and even though it was so cold at night that when Jack returned from the bathroom and wrapped his frozen self around me I was thinking about mutiny, we will definately go camping again. 
From kindergarten through sixth grade, a boy spends more than a thousand hours a year in school, and his experiences and the attitudes of the teachers and other adults he encounters there are profoundly shaping. The average boy faces a special struggle to meet the developmental and academic expectations of an elementary school curriculum that emphasizes reading, writing, and verbal ability--cognitive skills that normally develop more slowly in boys than in girls. Some boys are ahead of the others on that developmental curve, and some girls lag behind, but when we compare the average boy with the average girl, the average boy is developmentally disadvantaged in the early school environment.
We are not suggesting that boys are good and schools are bad, or that teachers don't care about boys. Quite to the contrary, much of what we know about boys' difficulties in school is confirmed by the many caring, creative teachers we know who struggle with the challenge of working with boys in the school setting. We know, too, that there are boys whose talents or temperments make them exceptions, but if we're going to talk about the ways in which boys' life experiences complicate their emotional development or compromise it, we have to talk about the hidden hurt that the early school years inflict on so many boys.
Studies that track children's development through the school years suggest that, by the third grade, a child has established a pattern of learning that shapes the course of his or her entire school career. We see this clearly with boys: the first two years in school are a critical moment of entry into that world of learning, but boys' relative immaturity and the lack of fit they so often experience in school set them up to fail. Many boys who are turned off to school at a young age never refind the motivation to become successful learners.
The average boy's gifts are wrapped in high activity, impulsivity, and physicality--boy power--and the value of these gifts depends on the teacher, the boy, and the moment. These qualities serve boys beautifully on the playground, where there is room and respect for bold strokes of action and impulse. In the classroom, however, alongside girls--who are typically more organized, cooperative, and accomplished school learners--those "boy qualities" quickly turn from assets to liabilities. Even among those who aren't considered problem boys, many teachers identifiy the ordinary boy pattern of activity, attitudes, and behaviors as something that must be overcome for a boy to succeed in school.
When school is not a good fit for a boy, when his normal expressions of energy and action routinely meet with negative responses from teachers and classmates, he stews in feeling of failure--feelings of sadness, shame, and anger, which can be very hard to detect beneath that brash exterior. Unable to "talk out" the emotional pressure, boys typically act out though verbal or physical aggression that walls them off emotionally from others, straining or severing emotional connections to the people and circumstances they find painful.
The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self-esteem intact while he is in school. That is the real risk to his success and to his mental health. Once he's out of school, the world will be different. He'll find a niche where the fact that he's can't spell well, or didn't read until he was eight, won't matter. But if he starts to hate himself because he isn't good at schoolwork, he'll fall into a hole that he'll be digging himself out of for the rest of his life.
When normal boy activity levels and developmental patterns are accommodated in the design of schools, curricula, classrooms, and instructional styles, an entire stratum of "boy problems" drops from sight. When a boy's experience of belonging at school is greater than his sense of differentness, then the burden of shame, inadequacy, and anger drops away, and he is free to learn.
Let children be children
Is your 5-year-old stressed out because so much is expected?
by Penelope H. Beven
published in the San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, June 3, 2007I was watching one of my second-grade girls try unsuccessfully to tie her shoes the other day, and I thought, "This is a person who is supposed to be learning plural possessives?" I think not.
We've just finished test time again in the schools of California. The mad frenzy of testing infects everyone from second grade through high school. Because of the rigors and threats of No Child Left Behind, schools are desperate to increase their scores. As the requirements become more stringent, we have completely lost sight of the children taking these tests.
For 30 years as a teacher of primary kids, I have operated on the Any Fool Can See principle. And any fool can see that the spread between what is developmentally appropriate for 7- and 8-year-old children and what is demanded of them on these tests is widening. A lot of what used to be in the first-grade curriculum is now taught in kindergarten. Is your 5-year-old stressed out? Perhaps this is why.
Primary-grade children have only the most tenuous grasp on how the world works. Having been alive only seven or eight years, they have not figured out that in California there is a definite wet and dry season. They live in high expectation that it will snow in the Bay Area in the winter. They reasonably conclude, based on their limited experience with words, that a thesaurus must be a dinosaur. When asked to name some of the planets after he heard the word Earth, one of my boys confidently replied, "Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter and Canada!" to which a girl replied, "No, no, no, you gotta go way far outer than that."
Research has shown that it takes approximately 24 repetitions of a new concept to imprint on a young brain. The aforementioned plural possessives come up twice in the curriculum, yet they are supposed to know it when they see it. This is folly.
Currently, 2 1/2 uninterrupted hours are supposed to be devoted to language arts and reading every morning. I ask you, what adult could sustain an interest in one subject for that long? Yet the two reading series adopted by the state for elementary education require that much time be devoted to reading in the expectation that the scores will shoot up eventually. Show me a 7-year-old who has that kind of concentration. Show me a 64-year-old teacher who has it. Not I. The result of this has been a decline in math scores at our school, because the emphasis is on getting them to read and there isn't enough time to fit in a proper curriculum. Early math education should rely heavily on messing about with concrete materials of measurements, mass, volume and length, and discovering basic principles through play.
There is no time for this. The teaching of art is all but a subversive activity. Teachers whisper, "I taught art today!" as if they would be reported to the Reading Police for stealing time from the reading curriculum, which is what they did.
It is also First Communion time in second grade. Yes, I teach in a public school, but First Communion happens in second grade, and it is a big deal, the subject of much discussion in the classroom. The children are excited.
A few months back one of my girls exclaimed, "Jeez, I have a lot to do after school today, Teacher. I gotta do my homework, go to baseball practice and get baptized." I laughed to myself at the priorities of this little to-do list, so symbolic of the life of one second-grader. But there was a much larger issue here. What is happening to their souls? You may ask, what business it is of the schools what is happening to the souls of these little children?
I will tell you. Any fool can see that those setting the standards for testing of primary-grade children haven't been around any actual children in a long time. The difference between what one can reasonably expect an 8-year-old to know and what is merely a party trick grows exponentially on these state tests.
Meanwhile, children who know they are bright and can read well are proved wrong time and again because of the structure of these tests. Teachers spend inordinate amounts of time trying to teach the children to be careful of the quirky tricks of the tests when they should be simply teaching how to get on in the world.
Twenty years ago, I had a conference with a parent, a Sikh, whose child was brilliant. I was prepared to show him all her academic work, but he brushed it aside and said, "Yes, yes, I know she is quite smart, but I want to know how her soul is developing."
The present emphasis on testing and test scores is sucking the soul out of the primary school experience for both teachers and children. So much time is spent on testing and measuring reading speed that the children are losing the joy that comes but once in their lifetime, the happy messiness of paint, clay, Tinkertoys and jumping rope, the quiet discovery of a shiny new book of interest to them, the wonders of a magnifying glass. The teachers around them, under constant pressure to raise those test scores, radiate urgency and pressure. Their smiles are grim. They are not enjoying their jobs.
Our children need parents and teachers who, like Hamlet, know a hawk from a hand saw, who know foolishness when they see it and are strong enough to defend these small souls from the onslaught of escalating developmentally inappropriate claptrap. The great unspoken secret of primary school is that a lot of what is going on is arrant nonsense, and it's getting worse. Any fool can see.
Flotsam is a cinematic unfolding of discovery. A vintage camera washed up on the beach provides a young boy with a surprising view of fantastical images from the bottom of the sea. From fish-eye to lens-eye, readers see a frame-by-frame narrative of lush marinescapes ebbing and flowing from the real to the surreal.
“Telling tales through imagery is what storytellers have done through the ages. Wiesner’s wordless tale resonates with visual images that tell his story with clever wit and lively humor,” said Caldecott Medal Committee Chair Janice Del Negro.
Here I am relaxing in a serene spot at the B&B we stayed at in the Okanagan Valley. Jack and I (That's right, just the two of us. It doesn't happen often and it was wonderful!) spent a lovely long weekend there to celebrate the wedding of some good friends. I'd rather post a photo of me immersed in a novel, something that I actually spent more time doing and actually preferred. But that photo was embarassingly ugly. So my vanity wins out and you see me painting my toenails rather than educating my mind. Sigh.
The view we soaked our souls in. The very same one I enjoyed from the wicker chair above. Now I know why the license plates advertise, "Beautiful British Columbia." 
